by Doug Goodman
Cadaver Dog
Doug Goodman
Cadaver Dog Copyright © 2015 Doug Goodman
First Edition
ISBN-13: 978-1514605622
ISBN-10: 1514605627
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
The stories herein may seem real, but they are a work of fiction. All places, situations, and events are a product of the writer’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Over the years, I have gotten to know many members of the search and rescue community. They are incredible people who sacrifice long hours, paychecks, and vacation time just to train better so that they can one day help out their communities. This book is for them.
And this is for Mojo, who has been there every step of the journey.
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“Training a dog to track a zombie is like training a cadaver dog or a bomb dog. It takes patience, trust, and the right dog-and-handler team. And to not be afraid of zombies.”
-Angie Graves, The Zombie Dog’s Handbook
Chapter One
“I’m screwed.”
Waylon sat in front of Angie, panting and wagging his tail. He was a Labrador retriever. If nothing else, he was happy. It was like a default setting. Angie scratched him behind his ears.
“They will never call me out again, Waylon. Not even to find a lost doll.”
The body was gone.
Clearly, the body had been here. The grass was bent and lay flat, as if something heavy had been left there. Angie waved her flashlight across the foliage. If a body had been dumped here for a day or two, the grass would be discolored. It was the same as propping a tent in the backyard overnight. There was no discoloration, though, which meant the body had not lain here long enough to disrupt photosynthesis. Maybe an hour or less, she guessed. The one certainty: the body was gone—and in Angie’s world, bodies only moved because people moved them.
The only option was to send out her dog to find the new location of the body, assuming it was nearby and hadn’t been relocated by the killers. On her command, Waylon shot across the field like a little white rocket. In the dark, Waylon seemed to hover above the ground like a ghost, his legs moving so quickly as to disappear in the deep shadows of the night.
Waylon ran up and down the ditch in front of the line of patrol cars. Waylon was a gift from the gods. While many working dogs enjoyed doing their jobs, Waylon lived for his. There was nothing he would rather do when he woke up in the morning than cadaver dogging, and it showed. She had nationally certified Waylon only six months after she started working with him, which was unheard of. Since then, she had certified him through every association she could find, whether it was national, international, police working dog, or other.
Waylon ran back and forth in the ditch like he wanted to force the smell to be there. Angie looked to the line of officers watching Waylon work. If one of the officers had stepped where the cadaver was dropped, the officer could have inadvertently dragged the scent back to the ditch and the patrol cars.
Angie thought it was funny how using a different sense to “view” the world could change one’s perception of it. She knew there was no body in the ditch because none appeared to her; she was using her eyesight. To the Labrador retriever, who was using his nose, the problem was a bit more complicated. Just because Waylon could not visually see something did not mean it was not there. How many times had he been able to direct people to evidence inconspicuous to the human eye?
Angie knew the body wasn’t there, though, so she called Waylon back and sent him to a different side of the search area. Waylon ran to the barbed wire fence and began searching the area, sniffing up and down the posts and the tall grass.
From her back side pocket, Angie pulled a small orange flag and stuck it in the flattened grass where, a few minutes prior, Waylon had alerted.
Early in the afternoon, a concerned woman had called 911 saying that she had seen a body in the field. Upon their request, she texted the police department a photograph of what looked like a body lying in the grass and sent them the coordinates. But no way in hell was she going to go out there and verify the corpse.
Within two hours the police had volunteer searchers working grids across the field, which Angie theorized was how the scent was dragged out to the patrol cars. Problem was, no body was recovered. The police called the woman who left them the coordinates and convinced her to come back out and confirm the site. She came out and confirmed that this was the right place (she remembered the orange barn and the tree line) but could not remember where exactly she had seen the body. This made the police nervous. They sent the volunteer searchers home and discontinued the search until they could put on proper bite protection, just in case. Animal Control was called out, but as usual, they were flooded with calls. They would come when they could, and no sooner.
The field was searched again, this time by police who had already searched the adjacent fields. Since the barn was unlocked and the door partly open, two officers who would not admit they were nervous entered the dark and enclosed barn. No body was recovered, but a weapon was discharged on an old scarecrow from a harvest festival that stopped happening five years ago. The officer was sent back to the department to fill out paperwork for having fired his gun.
Then they began combing the woods. An officer was dispatched to the funeral home a quarter mile down the road. Finally, when nothing else worked, they called out Angie and Waylon.
A man in short-sleeves and a tie strode across the field toward Angie. Sweat had discolored his shirt. It was late May, after all, and they were at low altitudes, between mountain ranges. Angie stepped away from where Waylon alerted and called him to her. She squatted down and squirted water into the Lab’s eager mouth. From this angle, she could see the lieutenant’s cowboy boots clearly. They were black and rounded and covered in dust. A few pine needles clung to the space between the leather and the heel. She guessed he was a size 10. Neither pigeon-toed nor duck-footed.
“Maybe we’re all wrong, Angie. Maybe there ain’t nothing out here. How many times have people photographed a water monster that ended up being a couple of plastic rings from a six pack floating in the water? I’m thinking this is what we got here,” Lieutenant Jasper Hankamer said.
“Give me some more time, Jasper.” Her eye was to the sky, where a purple haze was spreading on the horizon.
The lieutenant followed her gaze. “When that sun comes up, it’s gonna be hotter than a motherfucker.”
“Waylon and I will be done when the sun comes up. Just leave me alone until then.”
“You sure you don’t want some bite protection?” Angie wore a navy tank top, blue jeans, and a wide-brimmed hat to cover her never-combed chest-length black hair. The hat was never far from her head. She was better suited for lunch at an icehouse than chasing things that could kill.
“I’ve got just as much protection as you.” Her thin, raspy voice made her wince internally any time she spoke. She sounded like a person twice her age with a long history of Lucky Strikes and Jack Daniels.
“Yeah, but I’m staying with the patrol cars.”
“Just leave me alone and let me do my job.”
Jasper grumbled as he walked away. Angie turned back to the sky. She knew the sun was her enemy. Once it came up, it would drag all the fires of May up with it and rain a heat wave down on them, the kind that birthed thousand-acre fires. Worse for her, that heat would be like a vacuum sucking up every iota of scent. She and Waylon would be useless until
the next night. The search party would probably call out a robot.
“Jasper, you’re not calling out one of the robots are you?”
“I don’t know. Can you get the job done?”
His heels kicked up frustrated little dirt clouds in the field. She had worked with Lieutenant Hankamer for a long time. He was a special kind of asshole. Angie figured she was, too. She was a dog person, better acclimated to working with four-legged creatures than the two-legged kind, which was why she was so good at it.
“You ready to get on the road again, Waylon? Let’s clear this area.” At the mention of ready, the white Labrador’s ears rose and his chocolate black eyes smiled at her eagerly. They were the sweetest, friendliest eyes in the world, Angie often thought.
“Go Fish,” she commanded, with a sweeping motion toward the barn. Waylon ran across the field in the direction she had indicated. Suddenly, he turned away from the barn and, without pause, ran for the tree line. It was the clearest indication she had seen in a long time that Waylon had found scent – what was called a “head-turn” by dog handlers. She had found that as dogs became more experienced, that head-turn often became less exaggerated, but sometimes, like this morning, it appeared as obvious as a Miniature Pinscher in a Doberman lineup. Angie followed her dog.
Waylon stopped at the trees and paused, his mouth open. He glanced back at Angie. Angie was careful as she approached. Waylon could just be waiting for her, but the way his mouth was hanging, he may have been trying to taste scent in the air, or just trying to work out the problem in his mind.
Waylon dove into the underbrush.
“Waylon, no,” Angie moaned. When given a choice, a dog always chooses the thorniest, thickest, nastiest path through underbrush. Maybe she should have put on the bite gear like Jasper suggested. At least it would have protected her from the thorns better than her tank top.
The underbrush wasn’t the only thing bothering her, though. She was thinking of the photo. Like the officers, based on the photograph, she felt she had a pretty good idea where the body should have been. Between her and Waylon and the grid searches, if there had been a body in the field, they would have found it by now. That meant the body had moved. There were three reasons why a body would move. The perps who dumped it somehow knew the old woman called it in and decided to move it. That was the idea she was clinging to, though it also seemed the most unlikely. Murders are rarely well thought out, and criminals never stick around a crime scene, much less to move a body. However, sometimes animals or weather do. That was the second way it would get moved. It was rare that it happened, but it did happen. She didn’t want to think about the third reason. It made her shudder.
Ten minutes later Waylon led Angie out of the underbrush and into a section of densely packed conifers. She only counted a few small cuts on her arms and one red ribbon across her cheek. She guessed dating was out for a while, but then again, had it ever really been “in?”
To one side, the patrol cars’ lights beamed between the trees, like an alien spaceship of justice hovering on the far side of the forest.
Her radio beeped at her. Jasper’s nasally twang asked, “Team Waylon, what is your status?”
“Waylon headed into the woods. You can see me on the GPS, right?”
“Affirmative.”
“Then stop pestering me, Jasper. I don’t show up at your office asking you where you are, do I? I’m working.”
She turned the volume down. Waylon had disappeared on her. That was what happened when you stopped watching your dog and started answering to supervisors. She cast her light through the trees and listened for movement. A deep breathing, almost chuffing sound came back at her as the Labrador worked his way up to a long, high-pitched bark. It was the bark that said “Over here, Mama!” She found Waylon a little deeper in the woods. True to a super dog, he was alerting among the ferns and rocks.
She walked up to the Labrador and fed him a cut of hotdog. “Good boy.” Waylon sat panting next to a puddle of blood. She flagged a way point on the GPS, dropped a flag, and called it in.
“Team Waylon, we have epsilon,” she said into the radio. “I’m sending you a way point.”
She disguised her transmission in case reporters were listening in on the channel, hunting for tip-offs. Back when she used to work with teams, she’d seen too many tip-offs by handlers that didn’t know better and did that sort of thing a lot. Often before the family could be notified. It was unprofessional. So Alpha meant alive, Delta meant dead, and epsilon was evidence.
“Roger that,” Jasper said. “Officers on their way.”
Angie studied the pool of blood where Waylon alerted. This was not what they intended to find, but sometimes that was how searches worked. You went out looking for one body and found another. In this case, there was blood everywhere. It puddled in the pits of gray rocks and smoothed out the grooves of at least one conifer. Angie got that feeling that she should run. She reached for her side. Made sure her knife was still clipped to her belt. It was nothing that would stop a charging bear, but it would make a killer think twice about approaching her.
After she convinced herself not to run, she looked at Waylon and his deep eyes. Those eyes sparkled with anticipation, begging for permission to keep working, to keep playing the game. He was born to do this, and so was she.
She had to be careful. That eagerness to please that was so inherent in the breed could also be its downfall. Waylon would work himself to death if she asked him, and he would do it happily, like a character on a kid’s show, a Wiggle or a Teletubby or one of those happy little monsters on Sesame Street. It was Angie’s responsibility to make sure Waylon didn’t kill himself.
She said the magic words that were like sugar cookies to her Lab, and Waylon ran off into the woods, tail wagging. At first, Waylon wanted to trail back to the blood site, so she moved him farther away. Then he picked up something else with his nose and ran off into the woods. Waylon didn’t go far before he left the dark pines and came to the funeral home. Compared to the darkness of the forest, the yard and the home were white objects as bright as an epiphany and as radiant as the moon. Like basalt plains besmirching the moon’s white face, five or ten ravens perched on the funeral home’s shiny aluminum rooftop. The ravens acted like silent witnesses to what was about to happen. Angie had a thick, wet feeling in her gut, like a mass of curdled milk: the side door was broken off its hinges.
“No!” Angie reached for Waylon’s collar, but the dog jumped forward, barking. He ran full speed to the side door. He was like a heat-seeking missile racing toward its target.
“No! No! No! No!” she yelled. Angie had an idea of what was hiding in the funeral home, and the idea made her arms break out in gooseflesh. As her Labrador barked, the ravens cawed their displeasure and took flight, melting into the velvet sky.
From her side view, she saw movement and knew it was the officer stationed at the funeral home. He had heard them and come around the side. For a second, she criticized herself for not thinking to call in her new location to Jasper, who could have warned the officer that they were coming. She justified her lack of procedure because she was chasing her dog.
“Police! Freeze!” the officer shouted in that authoritative tone that makes most people react like they’ve touched a live wire on an electric fence. Angie didn’t stop, though. To begin with, she wasn’t that kind of person. Also, live wire or not, her baby was running to his death.
“Waylon, stop!” she shouted at the dog, trying to imitate the authority of the officer yelling at her. But Waylon was already inside the building structure. He was acting like a terrier in front of a rat or a hound behind a raccoon. Instinct had kicked in. All Angie could do was try to keep up and hope she was wrong.
She found the white Labrador on the other side of the door, waiting for her. Waylon had stopped. Will wonders never cease, she thought, then took him by his collar and started to drag her dog out of the funeral home.
Something moved in the corn
er.
Angie didn’t have her flashlight in hand anymore, so she could not see what it was, though she knew without a doubt.
Waylon barked at the shadow as she pulled him back.
This is it, she thought. This is how I die.
Two pale arms reached out of the darkness and grabbed Angie. She spun around as she half-shoved, half-threw Waylon out the back door. If this was her moment of death, she would not share it with Waylon. Thick arms closed around her like the reanimated tentacles of some dead octopus. Then she felt the inevitable bite, the teeth sinking into her shoulder blade. It was every bit as painful as she’d been told. Like being stung by a hundred bees.
“Goddamnit!” She wiggled her shoulders, but the zombie didn’t let go. The thing was strong, like wrestling with a statue. She tried kicking it off with her boot. Made contact with a cold leg that neither recoiled nor reacted in any way. The zombie, which was short and maybe only five feet tall, began pulling itself up her back, climbing her like a telephone pole. Angie realized the monster was maneuvering itself closer to her exposed neck.
A white blur of fur raced past Angie, and she knew Waylon had entered the fray. Without so much as a low growl, Waylon had latched onto some part of the zombie and began to shake his head violently. Angie used the distraction as an opportunity to reach down to her knife, pull it out, and stab the corpse walker in the side. She felt blood and bile spilling on her like the detritus of uncorked plumbing. The creature screamed and backed away.
“Stay down!” the officer yelled as his silhouette appeared in the door frame. Angie yelled “Waylon, down!” and tucked her head to her sternum. She heard the loud blast. Saw the room light up from the muzzle flash, then felt the zombie let go and fall over.
Angie rolled over and pulled Waylon in her arms. She hugged and kissed him and said, “You wonderful, stupid dog.” He looked at her with his big happy eyes and smiled. When she let go of him, he began to strut around her and the officer, his tail high.