“Yes, I know,” Ben said. “Actually, this little greeting ceremony has another purpose.” He smiled. “I told the team that you and Bingle are old friends. I stretched the truth a bit and said that you had already worked with Bingle on a search and that I wanted you to search with us again.”
Frank felt a rush of gratitude so overwhelming, he couldn’t speak for a moment. He finally managed, “Thanks, Ben.”
“Before you thank me, make sure you want to do it. Aside from the fact that it’s dangerous to be crawling around in a structurally damaged building, this work can be grim — even for a homicide detective. We aren’t expecting many victims, thanks to the evacuation. But many is not zero, and we may not make any live finds. And a person found alive may not make it — it takes time to get them out and the injuries tend to be severe.”
Frank nodded.
“Allow me to be ruthless, Frank. Whether the people they find are dead, alive, crushed, or mutilated, these dogs do this work because it’s a game to them — so I’ll have to respond to Bingle’s finds in a positive way, praising him, playing with him — and you have to get the hell away from him if you think you might start to give him any other kind of response. I don’t want you to deck me if I’m playing Frisbee with my dog a few feet away from your wife’s body. That’s one reason we don’t usually bring relatives along for these searches — it’s asking a lot of you.”
“I understand.”
“Then understand this, too — you can’t just focus on three people. That might be the hardest part.”
“Let me help. Let me do something besides… imagining.”
“All right. We’ll have to hurry — we’re expecting the bomb squad to let us get to work any time now. I’ve brought equipment for you — hard hat, goggles, radio set, work gloves, that kind of thing. Let me see if I can get you a set of coveralls. Nothing we can do about the shoes, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll go barefoot, if that’s what it takes,” Frank said.
Anna, Ben’s girlfriend, was an easygoing, athletic blonde. Still, for all her affability, she had a mind of her own, and Frank wondered if she would be angry when he showed up posing as a SAR dog handler. Like all of the handlers in Ben’s group, she took her work with the dogs seriously. But when he approached the group, she completely backed up Ben’s story. At one point she glanced at him, looking worried, and he realized that he had not factored in her fondness for Irene.
Bingle knew his job so well, Frank had little doubt that his biggest task would be staying out of the dog’s way. Not so long ago, Ben and Bingle had lived with Frank and Irene — in the first months after Ben’s leg was amputated, he had stayed with them. Even after he moved out, they had seen Ben and Bingle often, so Frank’s familiarity with the dog now allowed him to fake his way along to some extent. The dog responded to commands in Spanish, a language Frank spoke fluently. Still, he was glad Ben would be nearby to “read” the dog — to pick up on all the subtleties of the dog’s behavior that were part and parcel of dog and handler communication.
Some members of the SAR team were going through the remains of the new wing of the courthouse, but Ben and Anna and Frank were focusing on the stairwell between the old and new courthouses. Each person had been assigned a specific area to search. Other means of locating the missing would be used as well — but the dogs on this team had a high rate of success, so Frank felt the burden of doing his best to help Bingle.
When Ben told him where they would be working, he had not been able to hide his own anticipation.
“Yes,” Ben said. “If she was up on the seventh floor and is alive now, she’s on that stairway. But remember—”
“There’s a big range covered in ‘alive,’” Frank said, thinking of some of the victims he had already seen.
“Right.”
They entered the darkened older courthouse through a doorway near an undamaged stairwell. This stairwell was some distance from the one they would be searching. They parted from Anna at the first floor. “You and Ben will start on the second floor,” she explained. “I’ll radio you if I need a confirmation.”
Ben explained to him that if a dog alerted — indicated a find — another dog and handler would be brought in to confirm the alert before the next expert team of rescuers was called in. “It’s dangerous and difficult to do the excavation work,” Ben said. “So we want to be fairly sure we’ve got a real find before they start all the work that goes into trying to move slabs of concrete.”
Ben reminded Frank of the basic commands and hand signals and of Bingle’s alerts. “He’ll bark on a live find. Otherwise he’ll howl.”
Frank remembered to speak to Bingle in excited tones, to ask him in Spanish, “¿Estás listo?” — “Are you ready?” The dog looked at him and cocked his head to the side, as if not quite convinced Frank knew what he was doing. Frank remembered the proverb that it is impossible to lie to a dog. But after a moment Bingle seemed to accept that commands were going to come from Frank.
During most of their walk through the empty building, they didn’t need to use flashlights or the lights on their safety helmets and could rely on the light coming in through the windows at the ends of the halls. There was no obvious damage in this part of the older courthouse, but the building would be thoroughly inspected before anyone was allowed to return to offices, chambers, and courtrooms. As they entered the corridor leading to the west stairwell, they were in darkness and turned their flashlights on.
The air here had an odd musty smell to it, and Ben explained that when older buildings suffered damage, this was not unusual. “I’ve heard it’s caused by all the accumulated dust up in ceilings and on pipes and on any other surface that hasn’t been mopped or vacuumed for fifty years.”
Bingle did not seem to be bothered by the dust or the darkness, but they hadn’t gone far down the corridor before Frank sensed a change in the dog. Bingle’s ears were up and pitched forward, he carried his tail erect and walked high on his toes. He seemed to be both focused on something and excited.
Suddenly he looked intently at first Frank, then Ben. Rascal, the dog Ben was handling — one of Anna’s Labradors — was reacting to something, too.
“He’s alerting, isn’t he?” Frank said. “¡Búscalos! Find ’em, Bingle!”
Bingle strained on the lead, now in the spirit of things. They reached the edge of a pile of rubble, and Bingle pushed his nose into a crevice between two pieces of concrete, then lifted his head back.
“Frank,” Ben said suddenly, but he was too late.
Bingle began to howl.
53
Friday, July 14, 1:31 P.M.
Courthouse Stairwell
It could be anyone, he told himself.
He braced himself as he took a closer look, while Ben called Bingle aside and praised the dog lavishly. He was grateful to Ben for taking over that responsibility for him.
Impossible to lie to a dog.
In among the jagged pieces of gray concrete that spilled down the older portion of the stairs, he saw a woman’s black dress shoe. He closed his eyes for a moment, then forced himself to keep looking, letting the light seek the owner of the shoe. It suddenly illuminated a length of dark hair, which he then saw was attached to a loose piece of scalp, which was lying a few inches from a crushed skull and a remarkably pale but unscathed hand.
He fought a wave of nausea. He heard a screaming inside his head and wondered for a brief moment if he had screamed aloud.
Ben was playing with Bingle but watching Frank. Frank heard Ben’s voice catch, even as he kept telling the dog he was handsome and smart. The shepherd paraded past Frank with a floppy toss-toy, then came back and nudged him with it.
“He’s just… he’s only trying to engage you in his game.”