“I won’t.”
Nate had gotten permission, Emily had told me in a long e-mail, to hold the exercise in a remote corner of sprawling Prince William Forest Park in Northern Virginia about thirty miles south of Washington. Not far, really, from my mother’s home. It was an easy drive, up Route 29 past Culpeper and into Fauquier County, then over back roads. I’d checked it out on Google maps, but still I followed Nate closely.
The training director led me past the park headquarters to a remote area. As I pulled my Jeep off the road in the place he indicated, I saw the unfamiliar woman get out of the back of his Tahoe and dash into the woods. Our search subject, no doubt.
Luke stood up in his crate, tail banging the sides, anticipating his release. But I held off, guessing Nate would want the woman’s scent to dissipate a bit before I let him out.
I slid out of my front seat, slipped on my parka, and stretched. “Did you take off school for this?” I asked Emily. My mentor was removing gear from Nate’s Tahoe.
Emily shook her head. “It’s Veterans Day.”
I’d forgotten. My eye caught Nate nearby, fixing his bootlaces. “Are you a vet, Nate?” I realized I hardly knew this guy and yet so much of my future with SAR was in his hands.
He nodded, turning those blue eyes toward me. “Three tours in Iraq, one and a half in Afghanistan.” He shrugged on a black backpack. As he did, his collar stretched open, and for the first time, I saw what looked like a burn scar on the side of his neck. “Let Luke out to relieve himself,” he said, “and then Emily will brief you.”
That burn scar told a story, I knew, and it triggered my curiosity. Still, it would have to wait. I released Luke from his crate. He jumped down, shook himself, then began watering every bush in the area. Soon he came back to me, his tail wagging, so beautiful he made me smile.
“You are such a good boy! Are you ready to work?” I tapped his left shoulder, then his right as he shifted his weight. It was a game we’d invented, a dance of sorts, and it never failed to lift my spirits. When I looked up, Nate was watching us.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Just about.” A little shimmer went through me. Fear? Anxiety?
Whatever. I shook it off and put Luke’s SAR vest on him. His golden-brown eyes lit up, and he barked twice. “Good dog.” I slid my hands into black-leather gloves, pulled a blue-knit hat down over my hair, and shrugged on my pack. “Ready,” I said to Nate.
“Let’s have our briefing over here.” I joined him and Emily in a cluster next to Nate’s car. I was the searcher, Nate would play a police officer accompanying me, and Emily was base commander.
“We believe,” Emily said, setting up the fictitious problem, “that a woman may be in these woods. She is forty-three, five feet nine, dark hair. She may be lost, and her family thinks she may be suicidal.”
I nodded. “Is she armed?” I knew that was a good question. Out of the corner of my eye, I checked for Nate’s approval. His face remained impassive.
“A handgun is missing from the home.” Emily gestured toward a non-existent dwelling. Then she handed me a portion of a topographic map. “Your sector is here,” she said, indicating an area marked off with green highlighter. “If you find the suspect, don’t approach. Let the officer call the shots. Got it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Where’s the next closest team?” A team nearby could distract my dog.
“You’re by yourself,” Emily responded. “When you’re ready, you can go.”
“Radio check?”
“Good call.”
We confirmed we had good radio contact, then I studied the map in my hand. I felt Nate’s eyes on me, or at least I thought I did.
I chose a target—a creek about a mile away. I circled some features of interest—an abandoned shack, a drainage ditch, a fence. Then I grabbed the small container of baby powder out of my pack, puffed it in the air, noted the wind direction, and set a back-and-forth course. Using my compass, I established my bearings and found a closer target toward which I would walk to keep myself on track.
What had I forgotten? Ah, to set a waypoint on the GPS in my pocket, a mark showing my starting location.
Emily whispered, “You’ll do fine!”
Was my anxiety so obvious?
I moved toward the woods, told Luke to sit, and checked my map and compass. “Good boy, good boy!” I said, rubbing his neck. I unhooked his leash and gestured. “Seek!” I told him. “Seek, seek!”
My handsome dog took off, his long stride swallowing the ten yards between us and the woods in a few swift moves. I ran after him, glancing down at my compass and trying to pay attention to my footing at the same time.
Ahead, I could hear Luke working. While tracking dogs are trained to sniff human scent on an object and then track that person, Luke was an air-scent dog. His task was to find any human, so he began by making wide sweeps across the search area.
Back and forth, back and forth through the woods we went. I knew Nate was behind me, but I remained focused ahead. A quarter mile in, I found the old hunting shack. Instinctively, I stayed back and asked Luke to search it.
The dog did not alert. Still, I approached the shed carefully and checked it myself. “Good boy!” I said, confirming his lack of interest. I thumped Luke’s side. “Now, seek!”
We pressed on until I saw the creek, the edge of our search sector. Luke happily lapped up creek water. I called him back to me and poured some water from my pack into his collapsible bowl. While he drank, I used the baby powder and set my next course, still crisscrossing against the wind. “Good boy. Seek!” I sent Luke off to the east.
I had to run through a swampy area that soaked my boots. Push through brambles that tore at my 5.11 cargo pants. Fight off cobwebs. But Luke was on to something, and when I saw him racing back, when he grabbed the tug on my belt, it was all worth it.
“Good boy!” My investigator brain kicked in. Follow the dog. Carefully. Who knows what a suicidal woman might do?
I walked forward, using trees for cover. Luke came back and tugged again. Hurry up, he seemed to say. But I wouldn’t hurry. I would not be caught by surprise. Not again.
Ahead, I saw Luke race toward a fallen log, then come back. This time, I made him stay. I turned to Nate.
“Go ahead.”
I shouted, “Carol! Carol Putnam!” A hand emerged from behind the log.
“Okay,” Nate said. “Follow me.”
We moved forward. Carol Putnam stood up, grinning.
“Good boy, good boy,” I said, clapping Luke on the side. I pulled his favorite toy, a small rubber ball, out of my pocket and threw it for him. “Good boy.” My heart was racing. Success!
“Five more minutes and I would have had to find another hiding place,” Carol said, trying to remove something from the back of her neck. “I feel like I’m covered in bugs. Nate, help me!”
He pulled her collar down a little and brushed away some leaf parts. “No bugs. Too cold for ‘em,” he reported.
Carol shivered. “I saw beetles working on that log. I was sure they’d crawled down my shirt.” She looked at me and stuck out her hand. “Hi, I’m Carol.”
“I’m Jess, Jessica Chamberlain. And that’s Luke.” I shook her hand and gestured toward my dog.
“Good job. If you’d just run up to me, I was ready to say, ‘Bang, I shot you,’ but you did it right. Nice!”
My heart pounded with pride. “How long were you lying there?”
“Fifteen or twenty minutes. I’ll tell you what, though—Luke is intimidating. No way was I going to take off running!”
“I’m mighty grateful for your help this morning, Carol.” Nate said. Then he turned those searchlight eyes on me. “Let’s debrief.”
Debrief?
I felt like a kid listening as her teacher started going over the correct answers to a test. My stomach tightened, and my back stiffened.
He started by asking me questions. Which way was the wind blowing? Why did I choose the in
termediate targets that I did? What did Luke’s behavior around the hunting cabin tell me?
On and on it went, until, after about ten minutes, he nodded and said, “You did good. Better’n I expected to be honest.” Then he glanced around. “Where’s the dog?”
The dog? I looked around. “He was just over there.” I pointed to some brush, then I whistled. “Luke!”
I expected to see his head bob up from behind some bush. Or hear leaves rustling as he raced toward me. “Luke! Luke! Here, boy!” Had he run off after something? I felt anxiety creeping up my back. I glanced at Nate. He was studying me. Great.
Suddenly hot, I unzipped my parka. Then I heard a bark, way off. A surge of relief flashed through me. “Luke!” I called and I followed it with my loudest whistle, but to no avail. “I’d better go get him,” I said to Nate, forcing a smile. “Maybe he got tangled up in something.”
Nate nodded. His silence fell on me like a judge’s gavel.
I jogged toward the bark I’d heard, pushing through the underbrush, stepping over logs. I tried to remember. Had the map shown a fence line? Barbed wire? What could Luke have gotten into? And after doing such a great job on the search. “Luke! Luke!”
I picked up my pace as Luke barked again. Why wasn’t he coming? Was he hurt?
After pushing through a swampy area filled with brambles, I saw him lying down on a little rise, his tail sweeping the ground. Had he hurt his leg? “Luke, buddy, what’s up?” He remained where he was, tongue lolling, tail wagging.
The smell hit me about ten feet from my dog, sending shock waves through me. “Phew!” I blew air out of my nose, then covered it with my arm. Something really stunk— something dead. Was it a deer? Is that what he’d found?
My throat closed up. I forced myself forward because Luke wasn’t budging. “Hey, buddy!” I said, drawing near to my dog. “What’s going on?”
My hand reached out to grab Luke’s collar. My limbs felt like they were filled with concrete. My dread grew with every breath. I snapped on his leash, my eyes fixed on my dog, but as I straightened up, my gaze fell on an open area right behind him. A foot—a dusky-gray human foot in a pretty, gold sandal—lay on the leaves.
I gasped, involuntarily drawing in more death-saturated air, stale and nasty. I turned away, gagging, and squeezed my eyes shut. Then, putting my forearm over my mouth, I made myself turn back and look again.
There, in the little clearing, lay the partially decomposed body of a young woman, her body sinking into the earth, her eyes sightless, her hair spread like a halo on the ground. As I looked, wide-eyed, breathing in death, a yellow poplar leaf drifted down, down, down and landed on the young woman’s chest.
4
Stomach acid burned my throat. I yelled for Nate, then remembered my radio. Emily, still in base commander mode, could barely understand me when I said, “Send Nate.”
With Luke on leash, I moved away from the body to wait. I leaned against the rough bark of an oak tree, pressing my face against it as if it would anchor me in the storm swirling inside. Trying to calm down, I closed my eyes for a second, but that didn’t help at all. All I could see were the girl’s dead, empty eyes.
Already the questions tumbled through my brain. Who was the young woman? Who left her here? Was it a murder, a suicide, an accident? What?
Luke leaned against my legs. Poor guy. He’d not been rewarded at all. I dropped down and hugged him. “Good boy, good boy.” He licked my face, as if his slobber would heal my brokenness. I buried my face in his fur.
“What’s wrong?” Nate asked, breathless from his run through the woods.
I stood and motioned toward the clearing, my mind numb. “A body.”
Nate’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He moved toward where I pointed, then stopped and squatted down, resting his elbows on his knees, considering the scene.
I bit my lip against the tears that brimmed in my eyes. Part of me wanted to follow him. It would have been the professional thing to do.
Nate returned. I tried to read his face. I couldn’t. “He found this?” He gestured toward Luke.
“He was lying near the body, wagging his tail and barking. He didn’t move until I released him.”
“So he works both ways.” Nate shook his head. “Live finds and human remains. Well, I’ll be. That’s unusual.”
I started to take a deep breath, then stopped as a breeze blew the cadaver-laden air toward me. A tremor ran through me. The girl was so young. Not much older than my sister Brooke. Who cut her life short?
Nate seemed to read my thoughts. He took my elbow. “You come away now over here. Sit down on this here fallen oak, and I’ll call it in.” His voice was soft, calming, and I yielded to it.
I pulled off my pack and sat down. Luke moved close, nudging me with his big nose. I petted his head and neck, rubbing my hand through his thick coat, trying to lose myself in Luke’s golden-brown eyes. Then I leaned down and rested my head on his, inhaling the scent of his fur, feeling the guard hairs, his undercoat. He nuzzled my ear.
Nate walked back to the body, his cell phone to his ear. I saw him pull his GPS out of his pocket, and I knew he was reading off numbers, the latitude and longitude that defined our location.
Nate returned and sat down next to me, swinging his pack to the ground as he did. He unzipped a pocket and withdrew a small container of Vicks, uncapped it, and offered it to me. “It helps,” he said.
Yes, I know, I wanted to say. I know, I know! But I remained silent. I took a little and dabbed it under my nose.
I started to move Luke on the other side of me, but to my surprise, he sniffed Nate, then nudged his hand, begging for attention.
“Must have been a shock, finding her,” Nate said as he rubbed Luke behind the ears. “You okay?”
“Yes.” The lie caught in my throat, and I had to clear it to speak again. “Who’d you call?”
“The park ranger. She’ll call 911.” Nate stroked Luke between the eyes. “This here’s federal property though. Eventually, it’ll be the FBI in charge.”
My dog was mesmerized. Nate seemed to know exactly how to touch him.
“This your first body?” he asked, turning toward me.
How was I supposed to answer that? I decided to simply shrug and hope it would end there. I really didn’t want to go into all of it. Not here, not now.
Thankfully, Nate didn’t pursue it. Instead, he tugged open the Velcro on the leg pocket of his cargo pants and pulled out a pipe. “Don’t you worry,” he said, reacting to my stare. “I don’t smoke it.”
Nate put the empty pipe in his mouth and drew on it. “Started this when I was seventeen. My girlfriend thought it was cool. This pipe,” he took it out of his mouth and gestured with it, “this pipe’s been all over the world with me. LeJeune. Iraq. Afghanistan. Germany. San An-tone.” He drew on it again. “It’s good company.”
“You were in the Marine Corps.”
“Yep. Quit smokin’ once I got to Iraq. Couldn’t get good pipe tobacco and didn’t need to add smoke to all the dust I was breathin’. Still, I like my pipe.”
As he spoke, he rubbed Luke’s neck. I caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his left forearm. It looked like it might be an anchor.
Nate turned toward me. “It’ll be a while afore they get here.”
“Okay.”
He stretched his legs out. The leaves on the ground before us were a tapestry of color—browns, yellow, orange, and an occasional red. “Where you from?” he asked me.
“New York.”
“What brought you down here?”
“My stepfather’s job, initially.”
“Where do you work?”
“I have my own business. I do legal work for lawyers around central Virginia.” I needed to change the focus before we went too far down that path. “Are you from around here?”
Nate drew on his pipe. “The mountains. Born and raised. So close to West Virginia if I rolled out of bed the wrong way I woulda been a hick.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
Nate started talking about growing up, and the dogs he’d had—bird dogs and beagles and feists—
“What’s a feist?” I asked, interrupting.
Nate grinned. “Yeah, you are a Yankee,” he teased. “A feist is a terrier-type dog, small, short-coated. We used ‘em for rats, squirrels, that kind of thing.”
“Like a Jack Russell?”
“More like a fox terrier, but sometimes a Jack Russell gets mixed in.” He looked at me. “In the mountains, you use what you got.” He knocked his empty pipe against his boot and put it back in his cargo pocket. “My favorite dog, though, was a black-and-white springer. That dog would retrieve until you made her quit. Slept in my bed, she did.” Then he turned to me. “Tell me about your Aussie.”
The sudden redirection made me pause, but I recovered quickly. “His name was Finn. I got him as a puppy when I was thirteen, a gift from my uncle.” Remembering that little ball of white, gray, and black fur put a smile on my face. “I was super excited. My mom insisted I take him to obedience classes, and I met a woman there who did agility. It looked like a lot of fun, so after we got through the basics, we started that.”
“Good fit, then.”
“I was competitive, and Finn was smart and fast.”
“So, this agility—what does the dog have to do?”
I started to explain about the jumps, the tunnel, the weaves, and in the middle of it, I realized what Nate had done—completely distracted me from the half-decayed body that lay just fifty feet away. He had eased my stress, gently and compassionately. A rush of gratitude closed my throat. Maybe I’d been wrong about him.
While we were talking, Luke raised his head, alerting to the sound of people coming through the woods. He sat up as sheriff’s deputies, a detective, and the park ranger, guided by Carol, arrived.
“The ME is on the way. I’ll go back and bring him here,” she said to Nate.
The men circled up. I hung back, using Luke as an excuse. Did I know any of these officers?
Nate explained what we’d been doing and how we’d found the body. One of the deputies stared at me like he was trying to place me. I noticed he was the only one of the group who didn’t move to take a closer look of the body.
All That I Dread Page 2