Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

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.

“Male because of the robusticity,” Gideon began, “and as for age, as you can see, the distal symphysis is-”

“No, how did you know the top part would be missing?”

“Oh, I didn’t know, I was just going with the averages. Dismemberments have a pretty typical pattern: upper arms cut from the torso just about where this one was, hands cut off above the wrist, legs severed a few inches down from the hips, head chopped off at about here-” He tapped his own neck. “Feet separated-”

It was all a little too graphic for the imaginative Robb. “A bone like this, it doesn’t look so bad, but when you think about someone actually doing it… what a horror it must be… a nightmare.” A shudder ran visibly down his back.

“It is. They do it in a bathtub when they can, to contain the gore,” Gideon said, continuing to brush sand. How did a peaceable, laughably squeamish guy like me, whose primary academic interest was early Pleistocene hominid locomotion, get to the point where I could so easily and knowledgeably discuss the methods of choice of homicidal monsters whose terrible minds and motives I couldn’t begin to comprehend? It was far from the first time he’d had such a thought, and no doubt far from the last.

“Actually, I’ve never dealt with a freshly dismembered body”- and let’s hope I never do -“but I’ve gone back to the scene of the crime a few days later-the bathroom where it was done, I mean. And gory is hardly the word for it. Blood everywhere-the walls, the ceiling…” At the memory, he couldn’t quite repress a shudder of his own.

Clapper noticed. “Grisly work,” he said sympathetically.