Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle

by Tim Downs

  The dog moved quickly at first, darting back and forth just as Bosco had done—but after a few moments she began to slow down, and the area that seemed to interest her became smaller and smaller. The witch walked along beside the dog, circling her, studying her, bending down or squatting from time to time to get a better look at the dog’s face. Less than five minutes passed before the dog slowed to a standstill. She lowered her head and sniffed at an area no more than one square foot in size—and then lay down.

  The witch immediately called the dog away from the area and pointed again at the ground by her side. When the dog returned to its sitting position she waited a few seconds, then made that tossing motion again. The dog quickly retraced her steps, sniffed at the same area, and lay down again. The witch knelt down in front of the dog and studied her face. She held up both hands and made a shrugging motion, as if she were asking the dog for some sort of confirmation; the dog didn’t move. Then Alena broke into an ecstatic grin, as if she had just learned that she won the Virginia lottery—and she pulled the dog on top of her again and they again began to play.

  After a few minutes she stood up and looked across the field at Nick. “Are you expecting me to remember where they all are?”

  Bingo! “Hang on a minute—I’ll be right there.”

  Nick ran to the tech tent and grabbed a handful of wire flags, then hurried across the field to the witch and her dog. “Where?” he asked.

  “Where she was lying.”

  “Are you sure?”

  One dark eye glared at him from behind the curtain of hair.

  “Right.” Nick pushed a flag into the ground to mark the spot—it felt so good. “Good work—keep going.”

  “I will, as soon as you get out of the way.”

  “Sorry, I forgot—the distracting scent.”

  “You’re not distracting her,” she said. “You’re annoying me.”

  Nick continued to watch as the witch and her dog combed the field. They worked with remarkable speed and efficiency. Nick checked his watch; on average the dog was locating a new grave every ten minutes, and Nick kept trotting back and forth across the field to mark the spot with another red flag. She was finding so many graves that at first Nick wondered if the dog was making it all up—just picking up a general graveyard smell and sounding the alarm every few yards or so. But as Nick added each additional flag, he observed its position relative to the others, and there was no denying it—the flags were aligning in a definite grid pattern. The pattern was becoming so obvious that Nick could actually anticipate the location of some of the graves—and the dog did not disappoint. She found them all one by one, filling in the grid like a man working a complex crossword puzzle—and she did it all with three legs and a nose.

  Nick was beginning to understand now. What looked like meaningless hocus-pocus at first was slowly beginning to make sense to him; there was definite method to the witch’s madness. Whenever she snapped her fingers the dog seemed to come to attention. It seemed to be some sort of operant signal, as if to tell the dog, “Pay attention! What comes next is a command.” The commands themselves were remarkably subtle: The barest lift of a finger or flip of a wrist sent the dog racing off in a different direction or called it back again. Sometimes she communicated with just a tilt of her head or a slight change in facial expression—the sort of signals a man might easily miss, but the dog never missed a single cue. They communicated without a spoken word, and the effect was eerie. It was almost as if they could read each other’s minds—at least that’s the way it would appear to any casual observer. “The witch can talk to animals,” the deputy had told Nick, and he was right—almost. It reminded him of something he had read once from Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

  Nick shook his head. No wonder they think she’s a witch.

  He thought about Marge and Bosco again—the shouted commands, the constant piercing whistle—and he wondered if Bosco was a little slow or if this dog was just a genius. Maybe Bosco was like a confused child with an overbearing mother who kept screaming commands until the child just shut down in frustration. Maybe the difference was talent or maybe the difference was training, but the difference was obviously there—the two dogs didn’t belong in the same category. Bosco may have had all the right papers, but this three-legged mongrel seemed to have powers that bordered on the supernatural.

  Nick looked at the witch. Maybe it’s not the dog.

  By dawn the dog had found almost thirty graves, arranged in a neat geometric pattern with a straggler or two on each side—probably latecomers, Nick thought. The first rays of golden sunlight streamed down the valley from the east, illuminating the little red flags like licks of fire. The witch led the dog around the perimeter of the graveyard twice more, but the dog found nothing else.

  “What’s going on here?” a voice called out.

  Nick turned and looked. Marge was approaching from the parking lot with Bosco on a short leash. She was glaring angrily at the witch and her dog—and at the field of little red flags.

  “I requested a second dog team,” Nick called back.

  “May I ask why?”

  Nick rolled his eyes. “I was hoping that between two dogs I might get one nose.”

  “That isn’t funny, Dr. Polchak.”

  “Nobody thinks I’m funny,” Nick said. “Is it me or is it just women in general?”

  On the opposite side of the graveyard the witch heard the voices and turned. She immediately commanded her dog to take a sitting position beside her, then lowered her head until her eyes disappeared.

  “I was hired to do this job,” Marge said. “Who is that?”

  “That is a dog trainer,” Nick replied. “You can tell by the dog.”

  “What in the world is she dressed for? I assumed you wanted a professional.”

  “I’m not looking for a cadaver dog with fashion sense,” Nick said, “I’m looking for a cadaver dog that can actually find cadavers.”

  “Which I was in the process of doing.” Her dog now spotted the witch’s dog; he began to emit a high-pitched whine and strain at the leash. “King—stay!”

  “Your dog failed to find anything,” Nick said. “You told me there might not be any more graves here. I can’t just take your word for that—it takes a second dog team to confirm a negative finding. C’mon, Marge, this is standard procedure and you know it.”

  “She is not ‘standard procedure.’ Where in the world did you find her?”

  “What difference does it make? She knows what she’s doing—and apparently so does her dog.” He made a sweeping gesture at the grid of red flags behind him.

  Suddenly the dog jerked harder, yanking the leash from Marge’s hand and racing across the field toward the witch. “King!” she shouted again, but the dog paid no attention to her. She squinted at Nick. “Anybody can stick a bunch of flags in the ground.”

  “Twenty-nine flags—that’s twenty-eight more than yesterday.”

  “And how many of them will turn out to be false positives?”

  “We’ll find out when we excavate,” Nick replied. “At least we have something to excavate now—that’s more than we got from Bosco.”

  “His name is not Bosco,” she growled, and brushed past Nick in the direction of the witch.

  Nick turned and followed her; the last thing he wanted was a confrontation between Marge and the Witch of Endor. Somebody was likely to get mauled—and based on his track record with these two women, it would probably be him.

  On the other side of the field the witch watched warily while Bosco came bounding playfully toward her. She held her right hand palm-down above her dog’s head, and the dog sat frozen beneath it. As Bosco approached she turned sideways and stepped between him and her own dog. He tried to go around her and she repeated the maneuver, blocking the dog’s way over and over until it finally gave up and stood motionless, staring up at her in confusion. She pulled the hair back from her face and
looked down at the dog, establishing eye contact; she snapped her fingers once and then placed an index finger on the dog’s haunches and gently pushed down.

  The dog sat.

  She stroked the dog’s head and scratched behind his ears. She roughed up his fur and examined it. She lifted his muzzle and looked into his eyes, then lifted one jowl with her thumb and looked at his teeth and gums.

  “You there!” Marge shouted as she charged across the field. “May I ask what you think you’re doing?”

  The witch stepped back from the dog and lowered her head again.

  “Take it easy, Marge,” Nick said. “She was only trying to—”

  “Never touch my dog!” she growled, looking the witch over in disdain. “Do I make myself clear?”

  The witch mumbled something under her breath.

  “Excuse me? What was that?”

  “I said, ‘Your dog is dehydrated.’”

  “My dog is in perfect health, thank you very much.”

  “Look for yourself. You can tell by his fur.”

  She glared at her. “I don’t recognize you—where did you get your training? Do you have your FEMA certification? May I see your credentials, please?”

  The witch said nothing.

  “Now hold on,” Nick said. “This is no time to start comparing pedigrees.”

  “Pedigree? Is that some kind of joke? That thing has no pedigree—it’s nothing but a mongrel. And why would anyone allow this pathetic creature to suffer this way? The humane thing would have been to put it down years ago. I can only hope it won’t be allowed to pollute the bloodlines further. Has she at least been spayed?”

  The witch raised her head and peered out with one burning eye. “Have you?”

  She snapped her fingers and ran toward the parking lot with the dog on her heels.

  “Alena, wait a minute!” Nick called after her—but she didn’t even slow down.

  “I plan to confirm each and every one of her supposed ‘findings,’” Marge said, frowning at the field of red flags.

  Nick turned on her. “Confirm anything you want,” he said, “but whatever you do, don’t touch those flags. I consider every one of them a positive identification until excavation proves otherwise—and we’ll start digging the minute the crew arrives.”

  She sniffed. “That will make my work difficult.”

  “Your work isn’t difficult, it’s impossible—but that’s your fault. You’d better get to work, Marge, because the minute my crew confirms Alena’s findings, you’re out of here—and it won’t be soon enough for me.”

  Nick looked across the field at the parking lot just in time to see the old red pickup with a white camper shell pull onto I-66 and speed off in the direction of Endor.

  As the pickup left the parking lot, a Warren County sheriff ’s car pulled in.

  11

  Donovan looked out over the group of reporters. “That concludes my prepared statement,” he said. “You’ve all received a copy of our briefing; it contains all the facts I just mentioned. I recognize some of you from the district; I see a few unfamiliar faces too. The FBI would like to thank all of you for making the drive out here today.”

  The reporters huddled together in a small, roped-off area situated on a rise overlooking the Patriot Center. The site for this press conference had been carefully selected by the FBI’s public liaison officer and approved by Donovan himself. This location afforded members of the media a clear view of the entire excavation, allowed their cameramen to shoot with the sun at their backs, and, most important, kept reporters from wandering off where they didn’t belong—which Donovan knew from experience reporters had a habit of doing.

  The graveyard was now bustling with activity as forensic tech crews began the excavation of the newly located graves. Even in ordinary circumstances the relocation of an old grave was a delicate procedure, requiring the last foot of soil to be removed by hand to keep from collapsing the rotting casket below. Here every bit of soil had to be removed by hand because there was no telling what the next few inches might reveal—and if another double occupant did turn up, the soil above that body instantly became potentially valuable forensic evidence. That’s why the tech crews worked slowly and with extreme care, measuring and cataloging everything removed from each of the excavations under Nick’s careful direction.

  “I’ll take your questions now,” Donovan said. “As always, the FBI is happy to cooperate with the media and to tell you everything we want you to know.”

  The younger reporters glanced around the group; the older ones laughed. In the front row, one reporter didn’t change expression at all. Paul Decker worked as a stringer for WRTL, a struggling young affiliate trying to hang on to a thin sliver of viewership in the competitive top-ten market of Washington, D.C. WRTL couldn’t afford the top talent that stations like WRC-TV could—the really hot-looking anchors working their way up through the smaller markets along the East Coast—and they couldn’t afford their own helicopter like FOX 5. WRTL didn’t have the deep pockets or the power or the prestige to go toe-to-toe with the larger stations; what they did have was reporters like Decker, hungry and ambitious men working on a pay-per-piece basis who would kill for a regular salary and benefits. WRTL said they wanted local news, but Decker had been around long enough to know that nobody wanted a story about the new Smithsonian exhibit or the latest demonstration on the mall. The stories that sold were sensational— the more sensational the better—and Decker thought that a presidential candidate with his own personal graveyard had definite possibilities.

  Decker pressed closer and pointed his microphone in Donovan’s face. “Mr. Donovan—Paul Decker, WRTL. How many more of these double graves does the FBI expect to find here?”

  “There’s no way to tell, Mr. Decker, until we finish the excavations.”

  “But two of the first four graves contained additional bodies—doesn’t that suggest that you’ll find more?”

  “If you win the lottery, that doesn’t suggest you’ll win it again. As I said, there’s just no way to tell.”

  “Do you have any theories yet about why these people were murdered?”

  “We don’t know for certain that they were murdered.”

  “Can you offer any other explanation for the way they were buried?”

  Donovan paused. “No, I can’t.”

  “So are we talking about a serial killer here?”

  “Whoa, let’s slow down a minute. The FBI is involved here because of the discovery of two bodies buried in a similar way—and yes, that raises the possibility of a serial killer, but it’s only a possibility. The problem is, these bodies are old—we have no idea how old yet. We’ve brought in both a forensic entomologist and a forensic anthropologist to help us solve that problem, but we don’t have an answer yet.”

  “Can we interview them?” Decker asked.

  “They’ve been instructed to keep me apprised of any new developments, and I’ll be more than happy to pass that information on to you.”

  “In other words, no.”

  “In other words, no.”

  “How do they know where to dig?” a Washington Times reporter asked. “Is there a map of this place? A list of the people buried here? Can we get a copy of it?”

  “We’ve been unable to find any record of this graveyard,” Donovan said. “That made it a little difficult to locate the remaining graves.”

  “Then how was that accomplished?”

  “The FBI has several ways of searching for clandestine graves. Sometimes we find depressions created when the ground settles—these graves were too old for that. We can use thermal imaging to detect the heat from decomposing bodies—but again, these are too old. Sometimes we can use ground-penetrating radar, but the soil around here is just too rocky. In this case we sought the assistance of a forensic detection dog— sometimes referred to as a cadaver dog.”

  “They can detect graves this old?”

  “Fortunately for us, yes. Every little red fl
ag you see behind me marks a grave, and every one of them was found by a cadaver dog just last night.”

  Decker looked at the yellow crime scene tape that surrounded the entire graveyard. “Any chance of letting us in to get some close-up shots?”

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Decker? Can’t WRTL afford a telephoto lens? Sorry—the entire area is considered a crime scene until we determine otherwise. That means it’s off-limits to all unofficial personnel. We can’t have people trampling over possible forensic evidence.”

  “Just one quick shot?”

  Donovan looked at the group and smiled. “Perhaps I should remind you all that crossing our crime scene tape would be a violation of federal law. I’m sure none of you need that reminder, but you might want to pass it on to some of your less scrupulous colleagues.”

  “What does Senator Braden think about all this?” another reporter asked.

  “I have no idea. You’ll have to ask him that yourself.”

  “This land belongs to him. The Patriot Center is his project.”

  “Yes, and I’m sure he’s thinking what any other developer would be thinking right now: Where did I put that checkbook?”

  Decker waited for the laughter to die down. “This land has been in the senator’s family for generations—isn’t that true?”

  “That’s my understanding, yes.”

  “But you don’t believe there’s any connection between these bodies and the senator himself.”

  “None that I know of.”