“I wish you were running the IRS,” Miranda said.
Just then Thornton’s cell phone jangled loudly. “Sorry,” he said, snatching it from the holder clipped to his belt. He frowned at the display but answered anyway. “Hello? Who?” His frown deepened. “Yes,” he said. “Listen, I’m in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back?” He slumped — a dramatic gesture meant to telegraph his frustration to those of us watching him. It was the sort of gesture a man would make if his wife or girlfriend or teenager called him at an inopportune time. “You know, it really wasn’t that big a deal,” he said. “Anybody else would have done the same thing.” He paused, listening, shaking his head. “You’d have done the same thing, too,” he said, “in a heartbeat. Look, I really, really can’t talk right now. Gotta go. Sorry. Bye.” He snapped the phone shut with a wince, then looked apologetically at the group. “I am so sorry,” he said, and flashed us that damn Indiana Jones grin again.
“Okay,” said Roy, “if y’all are ready, I’ll go ahead and let Cherokee work the area.” He looked around, and everyone nodded. “If everybody would just stay down in this area, that’ll minimize the scents and the distractions for him.”
“Would it be okay if I took a few pictures,” I asked, “long as I stay back here?”
“Absolutely,” Roy said. “Long as you promise to shoot only my good side.” With that, he bent over and wiggled his butt.
“You Ph.D.s,” Emert grumbled. “Always showing off your brains.”
Roy reached into a pocket of his coat and pulled out a plastic water bottle. When he did, the dog’s demeanor changed instantly: his ears and tail stood up, and he began trotting back and forth almost like a Tennessee walking horse. “Cherokee, sit,” said Roy, and the dog sat, almost quivering with eagerness. Roy gave the bottle a squeeze, and a small stream of water shot out, which Cherokee lapped noisily from midair. Capping the bottle and putting it back in his coat, Roy made eye contact with the shepherd. “Zook mort,” he said, or at least that’s what it sounded like. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that “mort”—related to “mortal” and “mortality”—was a dog-handler term for “dead guy.” I remembered enough of my foreign-language studies to realize that “zook” was probably based on the German word for “seek.” I smiled at the thought that Roy was speaking German so that the dog — a German shepherd — could understand him.
Roy set off up the narrow dirt road, walking slowly. The dog ranged slightly ahead, ambling back and forth across the ruts, pausing occasionally to sniff at a tree or patch of moss. He reached the mammoth fallen trunk and stopped, looked back at Roy, and whined once. As Roy drew close to the trunk, he turned to his left, walking parallel to the trunk, and said quietly, “Get back to work.” The dog snuffled along the trunk toward the tree’s ragged base.
There, as Roy rounded the end and made to rejoin the dirt road, Cherokee did an abrupt U-turn, doubling back to the place where the tree’s roots had been ripped from the ground. Novak’s photos showed a raw crater torn in the ground, but in the intervening decades a fair-sized tulip poplar had taken root in the hollow. The dog circled the area slowly, his nose low to the ground, then sniffed his way toward the tree at the center. Once there, he simply sat, staring at the base of the tulip poplar. I waited for the dog to bark or whine or lie down, as I’d seen other cadaver dogs do to show they’d found something, but Cherokee simply sat and stared.
“Well, this is gripping,” muttered Emert. “I can’t stand the suspense. Will he pee, or won’t he?”
“Shh,” said Miranda.
Roy sidled closer and studied the dog for a moment. “Cherokee, show mort,” he said. The dog stood up, slowly sniffed his way around the tulip poplar, and then sat again, in almost the same spot as before. This time, he bent down and touched his nose to the ground at the base of the tree. “Good boy! What a good boy!” The dog leapt to his feet and whirled, just in time to catch a knotted-up towel Roy had pulled from a pocket and tossed in his direction. With the force of a bear trap snapping, the dog’s jaws closed around the fabric, and he began biting and thrashing his head, as if he were trying to dismember a rat. With one paw, he held the end of the bundled fabric on the ground and shredded it with meticulous savagery.
“Glad that’s not my throat he’s got ahold of,” commented Dewar.
After the towel was reduced to bits, Roy led the dog back to our waiting group. “It looks like maybe there’s something near the base of that tulip poplar,” he said.
“No kidding,” said Arpad. “I guess it’s my turn.”
He opened the back door of the Subaru and brought out the TopGun Freon detector. It squealed when he switched it on, then the noise died down to an occasional chirp as Arpad walked toward the base of the fallen oak. We followed, since the gadget — unlike the dog — wasn’t prone to distraction by people or extraneous smells.
Stopping midway between the dead tree and the live one, Arpad bent down and eased the tip of the wand through the leaves and into the soil. The detector continued to chirp at the same slow rate. Stepping closer to the tulip poplar, he repeated the maneuver, with no discernible change. Next he positioned himself right where the dog had indicated and took another reading. The chirping might have sped up slightly, or I might simply have imagined that it did. Arpad frowned, looking puzzled and slightly embarrassed. “As cold as it’s been, it could be that the Freon compounds just aren’t volatilizing,” he said. “Or maybe they’re long gone, if we’re looking for something sixty years old.”
“Or maybe the dog’s just smarter,” said Emert, earning a scowl from Arpad.
He took the Freon detector back to his car, swapping it for his prototype sniffer. As the gizmo fired up, I noticed how much I preferred its understated clicking to the Freon detector’s electronic squeal. As before, Arpad stopped short of the target area, gently working the instrument’s probe into the top of the soil. It continued to click quietly, almost like a clock ticking. Despite the chill of the day, I thought I saw glimmers of sweat on Arpad’s brow, and I realized that he had a lot riding on this field test. If the dog gave a positive alert but Arpad’s sophisticated instrument did not, should we excavate anyway? I thought we definitely should; after all, the dog had an impressive track record in other searches, and he seemed to show no hesitation or doubt once he started zeroing in on the tulip poplar. There was no guarantee we’d dig up anything, but it seemed only fair to give the dog the benefit of the doubt — after all, if we didn’t trust the dog, we shouldn’t have enlisted him in the search.
But would Arpad — a former student and now a valued colleague — take offense if we seemed to trust the dog more than the gizmo? I hoped not, but I knew scientists could be sensitive if it appeared their work was being questioned.
As I was turning over the alternatives in my mind, trying to settle on the most diplomatic way of handling the dilemma, I became aware of a quietly insistent sound. Arpad now stood at the center of the circle with the gizmo’s probe in the ground, and the slow, steady ticking had given way to a sound almost like muted machine-gun fire. A smile spread across Arpad’s face. “Eureka!”
“Cool,” said Miranda.
Thornton reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded handkerchief, which he knotted into a ball. I was puzzled, until he said “Good boy” and tossed the handkerchief onto the ground in the direction of the gadget’s probe. Suddenly I glimpsed a streak of movement at the edge of my vision. Moving at lightning speed, Cherokee swooped in, grabbed the handkerchief, and began ripping it to bits.