Praying for Sleep (35 page)

Heck stopped the truck and got Emil harnessed up, once again short-lined because of Heck's fear of the traps. He picked up the scent immediately and together man and dog crashed through brush, the hound in heaven — his coat glistening with misty rain, his lungs filling with great gulps of cool air, his familiar master beside him, his simple mind and solid body doing what God had created them for.

As they ran, Heck remembered another dog who love fields, Sally Dodgeson's St. Anne — Emil's predecessor.

Sal was a smarter dog than Emil and with a faster gait and lither step. Those last two qualities, however, had been her downfall; she developed the curse of large working dogs, hip dysplasia. Heck retired her early and spent the bulk of his — and Jill's — sparse savings on operations. The surgery was not successful and it was a terrible thing watch to Sal, a young invalid, staring at the fields she'd loved to run through. Often she made pathetic attempts to escape and Heck would have to go retrieve the struggling animal, carrying her in his arms, his heart as broken as hers. The condition and the pain that accompanied it grew worse.

On the last visit to the vet Heck himself took the syringe from the doctor and injected the lethal dosage. Oh, it is a hard thing to do, and he wept, but Trenton Heck would let no stranger put down a dog of his.

When he returned home, Jill asked, too improvidently for his taste, "Would you cry for me that way?"

Heck was stung but he told her the truth and said course he would. But the timing of his response was somehow off and Jill got huffy. She went out that night with her girlfriends, a batch of fun-loving waitresses, and he mourned alone, which was his preference anyway. The next morning at seven, Jill having returned just three hours fore, Heck arose by himself and went to the breeder to talk about bloodhound pups.

Heck had used a classic dog-handler's trick to pick Emil out of a litter of five mournful-looking, irresistibly adorable bloodhound puppies. The breeder set up a piece of quarter-inch plywood next to the pen where the young pups were playing. In the middle of the board was a tiny hole. Heck crept up to the wood sheet and, unseen by the litter, watched through the hole as they rolled and nipped and tried out their long legs. In a few minutes one of the puppies lifted his head with a spark of curiosity in his eyes — a glint clearly visible despite the folds of skin that nearly obscured them. He tilted his head back and looked around then stumbled toward the hole behind which was Trenton Heck's right eye. The dog sniffed the alien scent for two minutes before becoming bored and returning to romp with his sorrowful-faced brothers and sisters.

The next day Heck did the same thing and again the ungainly puppy, tripping over his huge ears and paws, was drawn to investigate — while his siblings slept or played, oblivious to the intruder. When, the next week, the dog passed the scent test three for three, Trenton Heck stood, scooped up the dog and, one-handed, wrote a very large check to the breeder.

When Emil was twelve months old, the training started, Heck used only inductive training — dispensing rewards, punishing. During the first six months of this work Heck's slacks stank of the meaty dog treats. Then he weaned the dog off food and onto praise as a reward tool. The training was a thousand times harder on Heck than on Emil, who had only to learn what commands to obey and to grasp how those words related to using his nose to do what it wanted to anyway.

Heck on the other hand had to make sure the training remained fun. Smart dogs like Emil get bored easily and Heck was forced to devise ways to keep the scenting interesting but feasible. Knowing when to stop for the day, figuring out when Emil was frustrated or horny or in a bad mood — those were his tasks. He had to pick scent articles that were challenging but not impossible (a scrap of leather was too easy; Bic pens and Jill's trashy romance novels too hard).

Heck, who at the time had a full-time trooper job and a wife who ate up much of his time, would rise at 4:00 a.m. to train his hound — a hardship for him but not for Emil, who woke immediately and joyously, knowing he was on his way to the fields. Oh, Trenton Heck worked. He knew the old tracking adage: "If you're not handling the dog right, it's your fault. If the dog's not tracking right, it's your fault."

But Emil did track right. He had a remarkable nose — one of the few, in his vet's estimation, that were two or three million times more sensitive than a human nose. He learned fast and the hound so exploited his nature that Heck, whose marriage was rocky and whose job was going nowhere, occasionally felt bad watching this astonishing dog and lamented that he himself had no consuming skill or drive to match Emil's.

After six months of training, Emil could follow a mile- and-a-half trail in record time, shaming the German shepherds that were the troop's unofficial trackers. By age two Emil had his American Kennel Club TD classification and a month later Heck took him up to Ontario, where he awarded his Tracking Dog Excellent certification by pursuing a stranger over a thousand-yard trail that was five hours old, never hesitating on the turns or the cross-tracks meant to confuse the hound. After the TDE rating Emil more or less joined Haversham's troop, to which Heck was assigned, though the state technically had no budget dogs. The troop did, however, spring for membership (dog and man) in the National Police Bloodhound Association which two years ago gave Emil the famed Cleopatra Award for finding a lost boy who'd fallen into the Marsden River and been swept downstream in a heavy current, after which he'd wandered deep into a state park. The trail, through water, marsh, cornfields and forest, was 158 hours old — record for the state.

Heck had taken to reading a lot about bloodhounds and believed that Emil was the descendant (spiritual, there being no true lineage) of the greatest of all tracking bloodhounds, Nick Carter, who was run by Captain Voli Mullikin down in Kentucky at the turn of the century, a dog credited with more than 650 finds resulting in criminal convictions.

Emil himself had put a fair number of people behind bars. Much tracking work involves trailing suspects from crime scenes or linking weapons or loot to defendants. Emil, because of his AKC papers and his solid history of tracking, was a permitted "witness," though he appeared on the stand through his spokesman, one Trenton Heck. Most of the dog's assignments, however, involved locating escapees like Michael Hrubek.

Tonight in fact it was the anticipated triumph in tracking down the psycho and earning Heck his reward that preoccupied him as they pushed through the brush. He should have had his mind on what he was doing though for he didn't see the spring trap until Emil stepped right onto it.

"No!" he cried, jerking back hard on the line, pulling the hound off balance. "Oh, no! What'd I do?" But Emil had already fallen sideways onto the large Ottawa Manufacturing trap. He yelped in pain.

"Oh, Jesus, Emil..." Heck dropped to his knees over the animal, thinking about splints and the emergency vet clinics, frighteningly aware that he had no bandages or tourniquets to staunch the flow of blood from a severed vein or artery. As he reached for his dog, however, his trooper instincts took over and realized that the trap might be a diversion.

He's waiting for me, it's a trick!

Heck flicked rain from his eyes, lifting the Walther, and spun about, wondering from which direction the madman would come charging at him. He paused momentarily, debated and when he heard nothing turned back to Emil. He'd have to risk an attack; he wasn't going to leave the dog unattended. Holstering the gun he reached for Emil, Heck's hands shaking and his heart only now beginning to pulse quickly in the aftermath of the fright. But the dog suddenly shook himself snootily and stood upright, unharmed.

What had happened? Heck gazed at the animal, who, as far as he could tell, had landed square on the burnished trigger plate of the trap.

Then he understood — the jaws had been sprung before Emil stepped on the trigger.

"Oh, Lord." He gripped the dog around his neck and hugged him hard. "Lord." The dog eased back and shook his head, embarrassment now piled on top of his indignation.

Heck crouched down and examined the trap. It was identical to those at the shop on Route 118. Hrubek obviously had set it. But how had it been sprung? There were two possibilities, Heck supposed. First, that a small animal, its head lower than the steel jaws, had bounded onto the trigger and set it off. The second possibility was that someone had come by, seen the trap and popped it with a stick or rock. This, Heck decided, was the likely explanation — because next to the trap he saw several bootprints in the mud. One set was Hrubek's, But someone else had been here as well. He looked closely at the prints and his heart plummeted.

"Oh, damn!" he whispered bitterly.

He recognized the sole. He'd seen these prints — of expensive L. L. Bean outdoorsman's boots — earlier in the evening, not far from the overhang where he and Emil had picked up Hrubek's westward trail, miles back.

So I've got some competition here.

Who is it? he wondered. A plainclothes trooper or cop maybe. Or more likely — and more troubling — a bounty hunter like Heck himself, seeking the reward money. Heck thought of Adler. Had he sent an orderly to find the patient? Was the hospital director playing a game of ends against the middle?

With the stake being Heck's reward money?

He rose and, clutching his gun, examined the two men's tracks carefully. Hrubek had continued south along the private road. The other tracker was coming from that direction and heading back toward Route 236. He'd done so after Hrubek — some of his prints covered the madman's — and he'd been running, as if he'd learned where Hrubek was headed and was in pursuit. Heck followed the L. L. Bean prints to the highway and found where the man had stopped and studied a tread mark, left recently by a heavy car. The tracker had then sprinted to the shoulder of Route 236, where he'd climbed into a vehicle and hurried west, spinning his wheels furiously. From the tread marks it was clear that the man was driving a truck with four-wheel drive.

The scene told him that Michael Hrubek had got himself a vehicle and was probably just minutes ahead of this other pursuer.

Heck looked around the turbulent night sky and saw a distant flash of silent lightning. He wiped the rain from his face. He debated for a long moment and finally concluded he had no choice. Even Emil couldn't track prey inside a moving car. Heck would speed west down the highway, relying on luck to reveal some sign of the prey's whereabouts.

"I'll leave the belt off, Emil," Heck said, leading the dog into the pickup. "But you sit tight. We're gonna waste some fuel here."

The hound sank down on Heck's outstretched leg, and as the truck sped onto the highway with a gassy roar, closed his droopy eyelids and dozed off.

22

Seven miles outside of Cloverton, along Route 236, Owen spotted the car parked by the roadside near a stand of evergreens.

Oh, you smart son of a bitch!

He drove past the old Cadillac then abruptly slowed and turned off the road, parking the truck in a cluster of juniper and hemlock.

He'd gambled, and he'd won.

About time, he thought. I'm due for a little luck.

Walking over the grounds at the murder site in Cloverton, Owen had noticed that two of the small barns near the house contained antique autos. He'd slipped inside and looked under the blue Wolf car covers to find an old '50 Pontiac Chief, a Hudson, a purple Studebaker. In one building, a stall was empty, and the car cover was dropped in a heap on the floor — the only disorder in the entire barn. His inclination was to dismiss the possibility of Hrubek's stealing such an obvious getaway car. But, remembering the bicycle, Owen yielded to his instincts and, after a brief search of the ground, he found recent tread marks of a heavy auto leading from the barn, down the driveway and then west on Route 236. Without a word to the Cloverton police he'd left the house and sped not to Boyleston but after the old car.

Now he climbed from the truck and walked back toward the Cadillac, the sound of his passage obscured by the steady rain and sharp slashes of wind. He paused and squinted into the night. Sixty, seventy feet away a large form stood with his back to Owen, urinating on a bush. The man's bald head was tilted back as he looked up into the sky, staring at the rain. He seemed to be singing or chanting softly.

Owen crouched down, slipping his pistol from his belt. He considered what to do next. When it had seemed that Hrubek was heading for the house in Ridgeton, Owen had planned simply to follow him there and then slip into the house ahead of him. If the madman broke in, Owen would simply shoot him. Maybe he'd slip a knife or crowbar into the man's hand — to make a tidier scene for the prosecutor. But now Hrubek had a car and it occurred to Owen that maybe Ridgeton wasn't his destination after all. Maybe he really would turn south and make for Boyleston. Or simply keep going on 236 and drive to New York, or even further west.

Besides, here was his quarry, defenseless, unsuspecting, alone — an opportunity Owen might not have again, wherever Hrubek was ultimately headed.

He made his decision: better to take the man now.

But what about the Cadillac? He could leave his truck here, dump the body in the trunk of the old car then drive it to Ridgeton himself. Once there he'd lug the body inside the house and —

But, no, of course not. The blood. The .357 hollow points would cause a lot of damage. Some forensic technician was sure to examine the Cadillac's trunk.

After a moment of debate Owen concluded that he'd simply leave the car here. Hrubek was crazy. He'd become scared of driving and had abandoned it, continuing on foot to Ridgeton. It occurred to him too that he probably shouldn't kill Hrubek here — the coroner might be able to determine that he'd died an hour or so before Owen claimed he had.

He decided that he'd just immobilize Hrubek now — shoot him in the upper arm and in the leg. Owen would drag him into the back of the Cherokee and drive on to Ridgeton.