“How sensitive are they?”
“Let me see if I can quantify it for you. The nose of a bloodhound is perhaps one hundred million times more sensitive than that of a man.”
“That means nothing to me.”
“I’m not surprised, Lieutenant Wilson. It’s a very difficult number to grasp. Look at it this way.” He went outside and returned with a tiny pinch of oily-looking powder between his fingers. “This is about one milligram of brown paint pigment. Now visualize a hundred million cubic centimeters of air—about as much air as covers Manhattan. A good bloodhound could detect this amount of pigment in that amount of air.”
Becky felt as if she had been hit. They were that sensitive! She had never realized just what an animal’s sense of smell meant before now. She fought to stay calm, her eyes darting toward the windows that revealed only the reflection of the workroom itself. Wilson got his cigarette lit and drew on it, exhaling with a long sigh. “What if you neutralized the odor, if you covered it with ammonia, say?”
“Makes absolutely no difference. The dog won’t like it but it will still be able to distinguish the odor. People have tried everything to break track, but very little works. One thing—floating down a river, completely submerged, with the wind going in the same direction as the water. If you can make it half a mile without putting your head out of water you might break track. I say might because a single breath coming up through the water could be enough for a dog if the wind wasn’t too strong.”
“Breath?”
“We don’t know the exact mechanism of a dog’s scent, but we believe that they track by body oils and exhaled breath. They may also go by the odor of clothing.”
“There’s nothing you can do to yourself to nullify your odor?”
“Sure. Take a bath. You’ll be safe for a while as long as you don’t put on your clothes.”
Wilson raised his eyebrows. “How long?”
“A good three or four minutes. Until your skin oils start replacing themselves.”
“Wonderful! That’s very helpful.” There was a ragged edge in Wilson’s voice that Becky didn’t like.
“There must be something, something you haven’t mentioned that would help us. If we can’t get rid of our odor, what about neutralizing their sense of smell?”
“Good question. You can cause osmoanaesthesia with something like cocaine, although I’ve never heard of a dog that would inhale it willingly. Also, you could use a phenamine. You’d get a temporary paralysis of the olfactory sense with that, too, and administration would be a little easier. That stuff you could disguise in meat. It doesn’t have to be inhaled, just eaten.”
“Here doggie, have a little snacker!”
“Shut up, George. We might learn something if you’d just keep your trap shut!”
“Oh, Little Miss Muffet becomes Dragon Lady. So solly, missy!” He bowed, his hands folded across his belly, his eyes in a mocking squint. Then he froze. His hand dropped to the Colt he was carrying under his jacket
“What?” Becky was on her feet, her own pistol in her hand.
“Good heavens, put those things—”
“Shut up, Sonny! I saw something at that window, Becky.” The mocking tone was gone, the voice was grave and a little sad. “Something pressing against it, gray fur. Like something had banged against the glass and gone off into the night.”
“We would have heard it.”
“Maybe. How thick is the glass in those windows?”
“I have no idea. It’s just glass.”
Becky remembered back to their entry. “It’s thick,” she said, “about a quarter inch.”
Wilson suddenly holstered his gun. “Saw it again. It’s a bush blowing against the glass. Sorry for the false alarm.”
“Keep your shirt on, Detective,” Becky said “I can’t handle many more of those.”
“Sorry. Lucky I was wrong.”
Left unsaid was the fact that they had now been here a long time, longer than must be safe. The plan was to keep to the car, keep moving. That way at least they’d be harder to follow. In fact now that she thought of it, Becky didn’t know how they could be tracked at all if they were in a car. She asked the question.
“The tires. Each set of tires has a distinctive odor. Tracking dogs can follow bicycles, cars, even carriages with iron wheels. In fact it’s easier in some cases than following people on foot There’s more odor laid down.”
“But in the city—hundreds of thousands of cars I—It seems almost impossible.”
Ferguson shook his head. “It’s difficult but not out of the question. And if you two are right about being followed all the way from the Bronx our specimens are quite capable of doing it.”
“So let’s sum up. We can’t get rid of our odors. We can’t neutralize their noses without getting a hell of a lot closer than we want to be. Is there any other bad news?”
“Is he always this acerbic, Miss Neff?”
“It’s Mrs. And the answer is ‘yes.’ ”
Ferguson held his eyes on her a moment, as if to ask something more. She stared right back at him. In an instant he looked away, faintly confused by the challenge. Becky did not like men to strip her with their eyes, and when they did she stripped right back. Some it turned on, some it frightened, some it angered. She really didn’t care how they reacted, although from the way Ferguson both crossed his legs and brushed his hand along his cheek it looked as if he had been turned on and frightened at the same time. He was scared of a lot of things, this scientist. His face was powerful, only the eyes giving away the inner man. Yet there was also something else about him—a sort of buried competence that Becky felt was a positive factor in his makeup. He must be very professional and very smart. Too bad, it probably meant he was giving them the best information they were going to get
“I wonder what it’s like,” Wilson said, “to have a sense of smell like that.”
Ferguson brightened. “I’ve been extremely interested in that, Lieutenant. I think I can give you something of an idea. Canine intelligence is of intense interest to me. We’ve studied dogs here at the museum.”
“And cats.”
Becky winced. The Museum of Natural History had been embroiled in a violent controversy about some experiments using live cats, which Wilson naturally brought up.
“That’s irrelevant,” Ferguson said quickly, “another department. I’m in exhibits. My work on dogs ended in 1974 when the Federal money ran out. But up to then we were making great strides. I worked very closely with Tom Rilker.” He raised his eyebrows. “Rilker’s a hell of a dog man. We were trying to breed increased sensitivity to certain odors. Drugs, weapons—bred right in, no training needed.”
“Did you succeed?”
He smiled. “A secret. Classified information, compliments of Uncle Sam. Sadly enough, I cannot even publish a paper on it.”
“You were telling us about canine intelligence.”
“Right. Well, I think dogs know a lot more about the human world than we do about theirs. The reason is that their sensory input is so different. Smell, sound—those are their primary senses. Sight is a distant third. For example, if you put on a friend’s clothes your dog won’t recognize you until you speak. Then he’ll be confused. The same way if you take a bath and walk out naked without talking your dog won’t know who, or necessarily what, you are. He’ll see a shape moving, smell the water. He might attack. Then when he hears your voice he’ll be very relieved. Dogs can’t stand the unknown, the unfamiliar. They have a tremendous amount of information pouring in through their noses and ears. Under certain circumstances it’s more than they can handle. For example, a bloodhound will get completely exhausted on a track long before he would if he was just running free. It’s psychic exhaustion. Generally the more intelligent the dog, the more all this data coming through the nose means. To a wolf, for example, it all means much more than to a dog.”