What the Dog Knows

by Cat Warren

  Next, we searched around a pond. Nothing. A trail to a deer blind. Nothing. A barn. A spot where hunters dump deer parts. A mattress covered with stains on the side of the road. Side roads with piles of trash at the end. Every white garbage bag, every black garbage bag. Hand sweep. Check here. Check here. Check, check. Time search started: 10:03 A.M. Time search ended 10:17 A.M. Time started: 10:42 A.M. Time ended: 11:22 A.M. I gave Solo a break with water and a full blast of air-conditioning until his tongue stopped dangling sideways off the shelf of his jaw.

  Down the road to the next pull-off to start the clock all over again. No interest. No alerts. Break for cold chicken sandwiches and soda. For coagulated greasy pizza and bottled water. Back to work off gravel roads. Checking drain pipes. Going down into the creek running parallel to the road. Over the deadfall along the tree line.

  This is the reality of searching: You cannot see the world in a grain of sand. It’s the opposite. The grain you are looking for is so infinitely small, so lost in the world, that it might never be found.

  And yet it wasn’t all mournful. Toward the end of one day, we watched Solo, who should have been exhausted, levitating through the high grass, clearing a final area before quitting time, bouncing like a black-and-red India rubber ball, backlit by an early-evening sunset. He made us smile. A happy shadow who goes out in front of me. I drove home so tired that even the tickle of a tick on my neck elicited only a flick from my finger. Solo, dried mud flaking off his guard hairs, was sacked out on the backseat, not a whine left in him.

  Later, when I learned that searchers had found human remains in an area that Solo and I hadn’t searched, I didn’t care that we weren’t the ones who had located them. All I felt was a gut-wrenching relief that remains had been found at all. It was a deeper, selfish, and utterly prosaic satisfaction to learn that I didn’t have to continue worrying about option three for this case any longer. I could cross it off my list of nightmares. We hadn’t skipped over anything. Solo’s big nose hadn’t gotten close enough to stand a chance. After I got off the phone with the kind investigator, I pulled to the side of the road. I just sat for a while, until I could breathe steadily again.

  • • •

  North Carolina doesn’t feel dangerous to me. It shouldn’t. It’s much safer here than it was in the 1970s. The murder rate, like all serious crime, has dropped precipitously since the 1970s and 1980s, when poverty and crack ruled—more than 60 percent. Poverty and addiction still take their toll, but their cut isn’t as deep. Statistically, I’m very safe. I don’t have an abusive partner or parent. I live in a decent neighborhood. We don’t have guns in the house. I don’t need to sell my body to feed a drug habit. We have a noisy Irish setter in our house who devilishly encourages the German shepherd to be noisy as well.

  Nonetheless, my relationship with my surroundings has changed since I started working with Solo. I no longer watch turkey vultures gliding in lazy circles, especially if more than three stack up in the same thermals, without wondering whether they’re smelling something more than a white-tailed deer carcass far below. We keep track of vultures on searches, although it doesn’t take much to attract them. One day I watched four on my urban street competing over one squashed squirrel, clumsily landing on a neighbor’s tarpaper rooftop before swooping down to squabble over a couple ounces of protein.

  It’s not just in the woods that my viewing habits have changed. I used to avoid and scorn the top of television news and web news, with their insistent focus on violence and crime—the cheapest, easiest thing to cover and get high ratings. Now I tune in quite purposefully if someone is missing. Then I obsess about whether I’ll get a callout on that case. Why bother training otherwise? But with a couple of rare exceptions, when they ask for volunteers, I don’t call the police. I wait for them to call me. That doesn’t keep me from wishing and hoping. When the burden of not acting becomes unbearable, I’ll call Nancy Hook, my equivalent of a twelve-step sponsor for this compulsion, so she can remind me what I might lose by calling law enforcement: my dignity and self-respect. “You’re not an ambulance chaser,” she’ll tell me sternly. “You’re a professional.” We’ll chat, she’ll make me laugh, she’ll tell me she has to go feed the horses, and I’ll remember that I’ve got a curriculum committee meeting I’m almost late for.

  After the meeting, if the itch returns, I can always channel Andy Rebmann’s stentorian voice: “You do not self-deploy,” he said, slowly emphasizing each syllable, glaring at search-and-rescue volunteers at a seminar. I’ve seen SAR-team self-deployment. It’s not pretty. Nancy and Andy are right: It has the same scuzzy feel as personal injury lawyers—the kind who advertise with 800 numbers on late-night television—showing up at the scene of a wreck.

  In my defense, the thinking I do about missing persons cases isn’t entirely wasted. Even the callouts that never come can add to my knowledge base: Google Mapping how to get to the area if I’m called, thinking about winds and temperatures and humidity over past days. If the area has been defined in the news, I stare at the satellite view, look at the dents in the vegetation, wonder if they represent a creek or a trail.

  One also has to be prepared for what a body might look like. Andy has a slide show that provides a whirlwind tour: There’s rigor mortis, putrefaction, skin slippage, and liquefaction. Jay damage. Crow damage. People tied up, burned up, pulled up from lakes, crushed in disasters. Scattered by bear and coyote. Handlers need to have a realistic notion of what bodies look like after a few days, weeks, or months out in the environment. A search is not an academic exercise. Bodies are never pretty in early stages; later, they can fade into their environment like camouflage. It’s critical to be able to recognize a spot where the soil has turned so acidic from a body lying there that plants die.

  Soon enough, the bodies deflate and fade into the North Carolina woody foliage, a slightly darker or sometimes yellowish leathery accent under the dark green. You would have to know where they are to see them. Or have a dog around who can tell you.

  On a recent search, the detective flanking me asked me whether cadaver dogs can miss or skip over a body. It depends. I looked around at the impenetrable woods on one side and the clear-cut mess on the other—logs lying crisscrossed, shrubby growth coming up in between. A swamp lay behind us; suspicious tire tracks were visible along the dirt road. We had punched in several places where slight deer paths, or even a break in the vines and undergrowth, provided a gap. The working presumption, not a stupid one, was that someone trying to carry a body wouldn’t have an easy time, either. If Solo hit scent, he would follow it if he weren’t too exhausted and panting to bring in scent. But his nose had to be in the proper place. Getting his body levitated over impenetrable brush isn’t that easy. Hasty searches over dozens of acres don’t give 100 percent coverage. People talk about grid searches or line searches in a casual way, but in many areas in North Carolina, doing that would take a phalanx of Bush Hogs running in front of you. This was triage. Everyone does his or her level best—a bit of whacking with a machete when it’s feasible, saving a bit of energy when you can see a spot for entry just ahead.

  You try to maximize the odds by knowing as much as you can. Before I tackle a new kind of search—say, an Alzheimer’s victim who wandered off, someone who was separated from a violent husband, or a drug user who was desperate for a fix—I will go back and hit the research.

  Take a person with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Her behavior differs from that of other lost people. If an unimpaired person is right-handed and gets lost, she tends to move to the right. Not someone with dementia. That person doesn’t behave logically, even at a subconscious level. She will walk straight into thick brush. Her brain can’t compute turning around and backing up. She will keep walking in place. The body of a man with Alzheimer’s was found in the woods two streets away from his suburban home, a month after he went missing. The police, I heard through the grapevine, had been given my name and number soon after he went missing. But the call never came.
There could be a hundred good reasons they never reached out. Or none. It was one of those times when I sat and waited.

  Most people with dementia or Alzheimer’s—nearly 90 percent—are found less than a mile from their point of departure and within thirty yards of a road. I know that because, when I was waiting for the call, I did the research. It wasn’t wasted effort. I’ve used that knowledge for other searches. I still think about that one man and his family. Perhaps even more than if I had gone on the search.

  • • •

  How do you search properly along a roadside? How many yards back would your basic panicked or lazy murderer drag a victim? Not far. Twenty-five yards. Check farther back. Animals are more industrious: How much farther back might they drag something? Much farther, depending on the animal. Dogs have been known to carry parts of people up to a couple of miles. What kinds of animals inhabit the search area? Bears tend to go downhill to a clearing or creek; they can move a whole body, crack femurs, and bat heads around like soccer balls. Coyotes can go uphill to a den, carrying limbs. Possums and raccoons tend to dine on the spot, although they can drag material vertically. We have coyotes in every county in North Carolina. We have black bears in 60 percent of North Carolina, throughout the mountains of western Carolina, and down through the swamps and shrubby pocosins of what we call “Down East.”

  Then there are the obvious areas that need searching, as Brad Dennis pointed out: abandoned properties and outbuildings. Piles of wood and debris that can be used to conceal a body. Impromptu garbage dumps where someone can drag an old mattress over the body. For clandestine burials, natural holes made by roots and erosion that form ready-made graves, with only minimal additional digging needed. Did the suspect have easy access to a shovel? Wasn’t he homeless? Most clandestine burials are no deeper than two and a half feet, yet that’s enough for someone to disappear forever. Arpad Vass calls the clandestine burial his “nemesis.”

  There’s the time frame to consider. In North Carolina, areas can get overgrown in one season. Hunters tend to find skeletal remains more often than law enforcement officers do. Mostly skulls, as they are the easiest to identify. A turkey hunter found a skull more than a year and a half after a young girl disappeared. The search for her remains was one of the most thorough mounted in recent memory in North Carolina. Other bones tend to blend in with leaf litter like chameleons. But anyone who has searched in North Carolina woods knows that heart-stopping moment when you see a light brown or green-moss-covered turtle shell, a hump coming out of the surrounding humus or leaf fall, and momentarily mistake it for a skull.

  On one case, police jokingly—but with an underlying awareness of the neighborhood surrounding the woods—asked me to please find only the body they were looking for. On another case, searchers found skeletal remains, but not the victim they were looking for. One of the medical examiner’s investigators explained that this was simply part of the business. She and other forensic investigators, she said, can’t see a black garbage bag in a ditch along a road without wondering.

  Nonetheless, for all the cruel casualness of people and of nature, there’s something reassuring about working a cadaver dog. It’s true that finding someone or part of someone can give closure to a family or allow the police or prosecutors to move ahead with a case. That doesn’t entirely explain why it’s important to find remains, even if there’s little to nothing left. It’s partly to be able to acknowledge, even momentarily, the spot where someone was hidden or dumped. And to think on it. I like the fact that, animal predation aside, it can be hard to get rid of a body. I love the fact that when people die, they don’t completely disappear, despite their murderers’ efforts. Yes, they cease to exist. At the same time, they also stubbornly stick around.

  During one search, Solo went right to a spot in the woods, lay down, and looked at me expectantly. An investigator confirmed Solo had alerted on the exact spot where more than a year earlier, hunters had found the bones of a murder victim. The pine forest floor held on to her scent and would do so for years.

  • • •

  Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb.

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851

  Three main highways go in and out of the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts: Interstate 195, state Route 140, and U.S. Highway 6. During the late 1980s, the height of the crack cocaine and heroin epidemic, those were the highways used to ferry drugs in. Those were the highways where women’s bodies were dumped on the way out of town. During that same time, one reporter noted, a local clinic was treating four hundred heroin addicts a day. Only Boston beat that number in the state. Now, in New Bedford, as across the nation, crime is down, way down.

  But for six months during that epidemic, from April to September 1988, eleven women, most of them desperately selling sex in exchange for cocaine or heroin, disappeared from Weld Square, a dreary block of darkness in the center of town.

  One woman’s body was found while other women continued to disappear. No one connected the cases until it was too late. These were women whose lives had started to slip away before they were murdered.

  In early July 1988, a woman stopped her car along state Route 140 to pee in the nearby scrubby brush. She discovered the first body. Debra Medeiros, twenty-eight, was spread-eagled, her bra wrapped around her neck. She had been missing since late May. Later that month, two motorcyclists also felt the call of nature and found Nancy Paiva, thirty-one. Paiva was on her back, her feet pointed toward the westbound traffic on Interstate 195. Next, a public works employee collecting cans on his lunch break found a third woman’s remains: Debbie DeMello’s body was just off an I-195 onramp.

  That was when the Bristol County district attorney’s office contacted Andy Rebmann’s supervisor at the Connecticut State Police. By that time, Andy was working Lady’s replacement, Josie—another Fidelco dog who wasn’t cut out for guide-dog work, just like Rufus and Lady. Too much drive. She was cute, light on her feet, intense. Not that big for a shepherd and as tightly articulated as a cat. Andy hadn’t been working her long, but that didn’t seem to matter. She was a natural, cross-trained to find both live people and dead ones. She didn’t care which as long as she got her reward. She was the kind of dog who would dash two or three times into and out of impenetrable brush to find Andy—to make sure he understood, hitting his pocket with her nose. The ball. The ball. The ball. Jeez. Get it out already. Her first callout, the day after she was certified, was for a suicidal person. It took her two minutes to find the guy. Still alive.

  “She was a lot of fun,” Andy said simply. “She was the easiest dog I had ever trained in my life.”

  The New Bedford highway search was not fun. It was dangerous and hard going. Dense traffic on one side. Claustrophobic thorns, brush, pine, and dead animals on the other. Josie worked for five hours that first day, searching the north side of Interstate 195. That may not sound like a lot of time to people who punch in and out and get to play on the web for part of the workday. But for a search dog spending all her time sniffing and quartering and leaping over obstacles and getting caught up in dense brush, it’s a brutal schedule.

  Josie was young, though, three years old. And while Andy wasn’t a spring chicken, he was fit and experienced. Andy set up half-mile sectors and worked the shoulder. Then he’d go in twenty-five yards and work inside the deer fence. Nothing. All that day.

  Nothing the next morning, either. By midafternoon, Josie and Andy had worked their way down to the ramp coming off Reed Road. The north side. They would have to do the south side, but all in good time.

  Like most operational air-scent dogs, Josie was off-lead so she could go where her nose led her. Suddenly, she was in the trees, not twenty-five feet off the ramp, tail wagging madly. She bounded out of the woods and hit Andy’s pocket. Give me the ball.

  It was the remains of Dawn Mendes, twenty-five, from New Bedford, last seen leaving
her home on September 4, 1988. Josie found her on November 29, 1988. After Mendes was identified, the New Bedford Standard-Times’s headline was blunt and offensive. The headline started with Mendes’s body, went to her sex work, and left her name out entirely: I-195 BODY IS CITY PROSTITUTE’S.

  Andy gave Josie a day’s break and then went back to searching on December 1, 1988. Back and forth. Debbie McConnell, from Newport, Rhode Island, disappeared sometime in June 1988. Josie and Andy found her in the midafternoon on December 1, 1988, down an embankment off Route 140 northbound, thirty feet from the road. McConnell was less than three miles from where the first victim was found.

  These were linear miles of demanding work, going twenty-five yards in, coming out, gridding the length, working the high spots, trying to keep the dog downwind, mostly avoiding dead deer and smaller mammals. Josie did manage one delightful break where she rolled in a dead skunk. At one point, a television truck crew distracted the sociable dog, and she started to dash across the highway to greet them. A semi barely missed her.

  Andy and Josie were back at it in late March 1989 when Josie found a third victim: Robin Rhodes, twenty-eight, off state Route 140 southbound, lodged within the trees, just twenty-five feet from the highway. After that, Andy organized a four-day search, pulling in six dogs and their handlers from four states. They found no more bodies. After several days without results, Andy called a halt to the search. “At least we know where the victims aren’t,” he told a newspaper reporter.