“Not much point in looking there anyway,” Hicks said. “Anything buried there would have been washed away in the winter storms long ago, with new sand having been deposited to replace the old.”
Gideon nodded his agreement as he held out his cardboard cup for some of the hot, sweetened tea that Robb had thoughtfully brought along in a metal carafe. With the increase in the fog, along with a stiff breeze, the temperature had dropped six or seven degrees, and he was regretting not having taken Julie’s advice to put on a fleece under his Windbreaker. Clapper’s comb-over was standing straight up in the wind, but he seemed not to notice.
While the men sipped their tea, Tess tugged impatiently at the end of her leash, her head turned up, her tongue lolling, and her strange, warm yellow eyes trained eagerly on Hicks.
He laughed as he looked down at her. “Tell me she doesn’t know she’s going to have a chance to get some work in. Tell me she doesn’t love it.”
He crumpled his cup and placed it in the litter sack in the van. “Well, let’s get started, shall we? I’ll have her begin over there, at the north end, so that she can work into the wind. More effective that way, you see.”
As the four men trudged to the other end of the cove, Gideon used the time to study the dune grass. Burials had a way of changing the vegetation that grew above them, or rather a number of ways. Most obviously, and most often, they provided nutrients that made plant growth more luxuriant. On the other hand, they sometimes slowed growth by damaging or restricting roots. So one of the important things, when hunting a burial, was to look for an area of growth that was noticeably different from the surrounding area. But in this case, the grasses were so skimpy and scattered to begin with that they gave no clue.
Hicks hopped nimbly down the rocks to the sand, followed by the others, with Tess growing more excited by the second. They were a bit more protected from the wind here, and Gideon eased open the zipper of his Windbreaker.
When Hicks bent to unhook Tess’s leash, Gideon expected her to bound immediately down the beach, but, trembling with excitement though she was, she waited without moving for her master’s command. Hicks took his time, stuffing and lighting his pipe, which took three matches in the breeze.
“All right, Tess,” he said conversationally when he’d finally gotten it lit, “search.” And off she went, trotting diagonally toward the southern end of the cove. She hadn’t gone more than twenty yards before she came to an abrupt stop. Her nose, which had been an inch or two off the sand, now went right down to it.
“Well, that didn’t take long,” Hicks observed with quiet satisfaction. “The old girl hasn’t lost her touch.”
“Do you mean she’s found something already?” asked a delighted Robb. “As quickly as that?”
“She’s located a scent pool,” Hicks said, as they moved in a group toward her, “but don’t get your hopes up just yet. In sand, because of the porosity, the pool can be enormous. Moreover, it can linger after the object is no longer there. For years, sometimes. So right now, all we can say for certain is that some body’s remains have lain some where near here… at some time, present or past.”
“Might even be no more than a few old seal bones, or what’s left of a shrew, lad,” Clapper said, trying to keep Robb from getting carried away.
“Well, no, Mike, that it wouldn’t be,” Hicks said. “Remember, Tess is trained to respond only to human remains. She’d take no notice of a shrew, or a seal, or anything else. Only a dead human being.”
“Amazing,” Gideon said on cue.
By the time they reached Tess, she was moving rapidly and seemingly randomly over the beach, back and forth, head down, snuffling away noisily, so intent and focused that she took no notice even of Hicks. Gideon had the impression that if a meteor had crashed into the beach beside her at that moment, she wouldn’t have noticed.
“Sounds like a Hoover, doesn’t she?” Robb said admiringly.
“Certainly does,” Clapper said, and then for Gideon’s benefit: “A vacuum cleaner.”
Hicks stood there, chewing on his pipe, keenly watching her. “All right, then,” he said, “seems to me she’s defined the limits of the pool. Appears to run from this rock over here, halfway down to the water, and then over to those low dunes over there.” With the stem of the pipe he had outlined an area of about twenty by thirty yards. “Time now to get specific.”
The pipe was jammed back in his mouth. “Tess!” he said, more sharply than he’d spoken to her before. Reluctantly, she surfaced, coming to a stop and raising her head a little from a clump of dune grass. “Slow down, girl, calm down.” He tapped his thigh. “Come.”
She lifted her head a little more and looked doubtfully at him, obviously beset by warring instincts, and for a second it looked as if she might disobey, but with a soft whimper she came to his side, nuzzling his hand with her sandy nose to make amends.
“Now we’ll get a bit more businesslike,” he said to the others. “We’ll search the area in a grid pattern to make sure we cover every inch, instead of this frantic to-ing and fro-ing. If there’s something here, she should be able to pinpoint it.”
“ Should be able to,” Clapper muttered.
“They’re not infallible, Mike, you know that. No more than you or I. Well, you, anyway.”
Without benefit of a leash to connect them, dog and handler began to move slowly and systematically over the defined area. When it was time to shift directions, Hicks would murmur “Turn” or “This way” and the dog would turn with him, while Clapper, Robb, and Gideon watched from the perimeter.
“Like a dance, innit?” Clapper said, getting a cigarette going.
“It’s beautiful, really,” said Robb. “The way she follows.”
After about five minutes, the dog suddenly sat down and softly whined.
“She’s located something,” Clapper told them. “That’s the alert he trains them to give. Now he’ll ask her to show the exact spot.”
“She won’t actually dig it up, will she?” an anxious Gideon asked.
“No, no, she knows better than that.”
“Good girl,” Hicks said to the dog. “Now then. Touch.”
Tess immediately jumped up, placed a graceful forefoot on the sand, and pawed gently and elegantly away, like a high-strung horse.
Hicks knelt to plant a thin metal rod with an orange flag on it. “X marks the spot,” he said, pleased and smiling. “Who wants to do the honors?”
Robb and Clapper deferred to Gideon, who knelt and began clearing sand with his hands, spreading rather than digging. It was as soft as he’d hoped, if a bit colder, and it took less than a minute to uncover a smooth, spiraling, sea snail-shaped knob of bone, as clean of flesh and ligament as a specimen from a biological supply house. “That,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, “is the distal end of a human right humerus-the elbow. Thank you, Tess, well-done.”
The dog, her face on a level with his own, grinned at him and yawned prodigiously, her bright pink tongue curling back on itself into an almost-complete circle.
Robb immediately got out his pad, his camera, and a metal tape measure, and set about industriously drawing, photographing, and writing down the circumstances of the find.
With his fingers and the paintbrush Gideon began clearing sand from the rest of the bone. “If we’re right about it being a dismemberment-”
“So now we’re back to if we’re right?” Clapper growled predictably; not with any conviction, but from mere force of habit.
“-the chances are we’ll only find three-quarters of it or so. The top few inches will probably be missing, the same way… Ah, there we are, see?”
He ran his fingers down it. “Male,” he announced. “And adult, of course. As expected.”
“How did you know that?” Clapper asked, looking down from what seemed a great height. He was wearing a voluminous, calf-length topcoat, which gave him even more of a looming quality than usual.