Today's Reading
And the missing patriarch from the family picnic.
He sat in a patch of weeds, his head slouched forward, his back against a maple tree.
Motionless.
Deceased.
Stretch nodded as I slowed to a walk. Though I'd known my dog handler colleague for several years, I've only known him as Stretch. Never knew his first name and couldn't come up with a surname if you held a gun to my head. Just Stretch. It didn't help that he rarely, if ever, uttered a word, much less a complete sentence.
'Hey, Stretch,' I said, nodding back and letting one of his German shepherds sniff at my fingertips. My colleague tilted his smartphone my way and shrugged. I read his mind. At his height, you'd think Stretch would never have issues with phone reception. The guy's nearly seven feet tall, hence his moniker. He's also lanky and sports a tumbleweed of blond hair. Stretch pointed from where I'd just arrived and headed off in that direction in search of an elusive cell phone bar, his dogs following in his wake.
I once had Stretch fill in for me when I was out sick and couldn't teach one of my obedience classes. Boy did I get feed-back when the next class rolled around. One canine owner informed me Stretch may have mumbled all of eight words throughout the entirety of the two-hour session, mostly a whispered yes here or a hushed no over there. Another dog owner asked if the man was mute.
Needless to say I've not had Stretch fill in for me ever since.
And I can only imagine how lively his chat with Bourbonnais PD was going to be.
One of the benefits of handling cadaver dogs is I get to recede into the background as soon as a discovery is made and let the authorities and medical examiners take control of the scene. In fact, I get to take a powder not terribly long after a body is discovered. It's not that I don't have a strong stomach for this kind of stuff, but, well - certain things cannot be unseen.
The old man hadn't been dead long. He'd been missing less than twenty-four hours and I figured he'd passed away sometime during the night from either exhaustion or exertion or fright in conjunction with his advanced age and varied illnesses. I began walking away, checking my cell phone to see if my reception was any better than Stretch's - it wasn't - but I'd spotted something in the old man's hands, and I turned back to verify.
Sure enough, the old gent gripped a small piece of paper, a message of some kind, in a rigor-mortised right hand.
I tried to shake the notion from my head, but curiosity - cat killer that it is - got the better of me and I stepped behind the maple tree, leaned forward, and peered over the old man's shoulder as though I were inspecting his schoolwork. The light wasn't great, so I tapped the flashlight app on my iPhone, shined it down on the poor guy's note, and read.
Life's a trap of ER visits, doctor appointments, medications and side effects. Nothing works and I have no desire to cope with everyday actions.
I want to be with Ann.
I've prayed hard for release. Please forgive me.
I stood up and again headed away from the maple tree. Suddenly, I wanted to be anywhere but here. I checked my phone again to see if any bars had stealthily crept back into the picture. None had and I hoped Stretch had reached a location where he could call the number Bourbonnais PD had provided us.
Now I understood why the old man had made it this deep into the woodland, the miles he had hiked before sitting down a final time. He must have been beyond spent, completely drained. From the looks of him I imagined he'd staggered on through a heart attack or two... and I realized the old man was doing one last thing for his family.
He was making damn sure they weren't the ones that found him.
Alice barked, drawing me back to the here and now. My head snapped up. I had to squint as she was sitting maybe seventy yards away, staring back in my direction, and patting at the ground with a right paw. Rex circled nearby, sniffing at the soil.
'You've got to be kidding,' I said aloud, and began heading in their direction.
Tests indicate a cadaver dog's nose can alert to the scent of human remains as deep as forty feet underground, with ten to fifteen feet being child's play. Yup - it's freaking supernatural. And I've trained Alice and Rex to detect the scent not only in bodies but in blood, in teeth, in hair... and in bone.
...
