The Lost Dogs (11 page)

“Does Larry Woodward know about it?” Poindexter inquired, referring to Vick’s lawyer. Knorr said that Woodward did not know.

“Does Gonzales know about it?” he asked, referring to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

“Tony Gonzalez?” Knorr responded, throwing out the name of the Pro Bowl tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.

“What are you gonna charge him with?” Poindexter said.

“Animal cruelty.”

“Does Bush know about it?” Poindexter asked, meaning President George W. Bush.

“Reggie Bush?” Knorr offered, this time bringing up the New Orleans Saints running back.

“This doesn’t prevent me from going forward with my case,” Poindexter said. Then he added, “So how many years do you want to give this boy?” He paused. “Thirty years? No, maybe thirty-five years?”

“I’m not a judge or a prosecutor,” Knorr responded. “I’m just an investigator attempting to obtain the facts.”

There was some more perfunctory conversation about Bill Brinkman before the commonwealth attorney said, “I guess I should thank you for calling me.”

After he did, Knorr hung up the phone, got in the car, and began the drive to Moonlight Road.

They could not find the dogs. They had been on the site for half an hour, digging in the spots Brownie had marked on a crude map he’d drawn for Knorr, but they were finding nothing. The vegetation was thick and the ground wet. Brownie had been very specific about where he had dug the holes. If those dogs weren’t where he said they were, the case was just about done.

Knorr got on the phone. He called Brownie and asked for more directions. Still nothing. He called Mike Gill and asked for permission to bring Brownie out to the site. Gill took the request to the magistrate judge who had approved the warrant, and the judge gave the okay. A short while later the Virginia State Police delivered Brownie to 1915 Moonlight Road, and he pointed out the exact spot where they should dig. Now, Knorr could see how the ground cover was different and the terrain varied from the area around it, but he never would have noticed it without Brownie to show the way.

The forensics team began digging anew. They started with spades, and after they got down a few feet, they moved to smaller trowels. About an inch and a half of rain had fallen in the previous three days, making the ground soggy and heavy. The digging was slow, and even after they’d cleared an area to a depth of about three feet, they found nothing.

Knorr paced. It was a party for the ticks, and Knorr had to continually pick them off his legs and arms as he talked on his cell phone. The heat was staggering: 89 degrees with 88 percent humidity and no breeze. The air felt heavier than the dirt, but the officers kept at it. Finally, there in the dank and crumbling soil was the unmistakable brush of fur.

Now the process slowed to a crawl. The officers moved even more deliberately so as not to damage the bodies, excavating around them with their hands. Knorr’s stomach turned. He stared at the sky as he walked through ferns and scrub. He saw the squirrels scampering through the trees, smelled the loam of the earth and felt the stillness and the heat. He checked back on the dig site. The bodies had begun to emerge, and with them arose a stench that turned Knorr back. It was the worst thing he’d ever smelled, a combination of rotting meat and an old blanket that had been left festering in a steamy basement.

He found other ways to stay busy. About two hours into the search Vick’s attorney, Larry Woodward, showed up requesting a copy of the warrant. Knorr was happy to oblige, and as he turned over the paperwork he asked Woodward how he had found out about the search. Woodward chuckled. “Someone in Surry County called me,” he said.

Otherwise, the day’s objectives included another look around all the buildings. In the big shed they recovered a few pieces of stained wood from the fighting pit. They picked up spent shell casings around the yard and more medical supplies and syringes. Brownie had said that the crew usually wore coveralls to kill the dogs because they didn’t want to get their clothes dirty, and in the garage Knorr and company found two pairs, splattered with what appeared to be blood.

At last the job was done. There in two holes lay eight dead dogs, four in each. Many of them were tangled together and overlapping, but there had been very little decomposition, so they appeared as if they had died only moments earlier. Some still wore collars. One had her legs curled up under her body, her eyes closed and her chin resting on the ground. She looked so peaceful that if he didn’t know better Knorr would have sworn she was sleeping.

They still had no place to take the bodies and really no means of removing them, so they decided on a new plan. They removed one tooth from each dog. These would serve as physical evidence and also potentially provide a DNA link to the bodies if needed. Afterward, they returned the bodies to the ground as nearly as possible to the way they had found them. Then they covered them with dirt and patted the ground flat.

It was after 7:00 P.M. and Knorr still had a three-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of him. He peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt and threw it into the trunk of his car, then pulled on a fresh one he had brought along. It wasn’t enough. When he arrived home his dog, BJ, freaked out. She barked madly and ran away from him, from the smell of death that clung to his clothes and body. She would not come near him until he had showered and changed.

This did not bother Knorr as much as one other thing. It ate at his mind for the long drive home and all through the night. Everything had been exactly as Brownie had described, except for one detail. He had told them about one dog that died in a way even more horrific than the rest. That body was not among the others. There was no sign of the little red dog.

“What is foreign to me is the federal government getting into a dogfighting case. I know it has been done, but what is driving this? Is it this boy’s celebrity? Would they have done this if it wasn’t Michael Vick?” Gerald Poindexter asked.

The media had arrived within a half hour of the search’s beginning, and reporters had kept a vigil ever since. Some stood along the fence, peeking into the yard. Others parked their cars at the Ferguson Grove church and waited. Many of them called Poindexter, and he didn’t disappoint.

Poindexter told reporters he was “absolutely floored” by the latest developments. “Apparently these people want it. They want it, and I don’t believe they want it because of the serious criminal consequences involved. . . . They want it because Michael Vick may be involved.”

“If they’ve made a judgment that we’re not acting prudently and with dispatch based on what we have, they’re not acting very wisely.”

“There’s a larger thing here, and it has nothing to do with any breach of protocol. There’s something awful going on here. I don’t know if it’s racial. I don’t know what it is.”

Poindexter’s outburst, combined with the news that the feds had opened their own case, caused quite a stir. News outlets and opinion mongers from the sports world to the cable chat fests to the afternoon talk shows chimed in. Animal rights groups redoubled their efforts, appearing seemingly everywhere, staging protests, and ratcheting up the pressure even further. As always, Gill, Knorr, and anyone involved in the federal investigation remained silent.

Inside, though, Knorr churned. He paid little attention to Poindexter; he had a long career of evenhanded work to support him. What he had dreamed of—what he had asked his wife to pray for—was a dogfighting case, a chance to help animals, not a chance to persecute any particular subset of people. But what the media storm made clear was that this case was unlike so many of the others he’d handled before.

On one level it was simply another chance to catch bad guys, but it was becoming obvious that it would also mean more than that. Because of Vick’s celebrity, everyone was watching. If the case succeeded, it would shine a big bright light on dogfighting and encourage the investigation and prosecution of more dogfighters around the country. If it failed, it would devastate the animal rescue and welfare communities, scuttling cases, drying up funding and producing dire consequences for thousands of animals.

On top of that, he’d been having trouble with Brownie. The independent mindedness that made him a good witness also made him hard to protect. He got bored by himself in Virginia Beach and would regularly turn up around Surry, hanging out with his old buddies. Knorr would take him back and ask the manager of the latest sleazebag hotel to keep an eye on him—to call Knorr if he disappeared or if anyone came to see him. Knorr even gave Brownie a cell phone, but Brownie would sometimes go days without answering it. Other times he would call Knorr incessantly, and at any time of the day or night, asking for money.

More and more, Debbie Knorr would awake to find Jim lying next to her, staring at the ceiling. Over the previous few weeks he’d not quite been himself. He was a little more irritable, a little quieter. He’d put on weight. “What is it?” she said.

The search had been a success. They had more evidence than ever, and Brownie’s credibility was stronger than ever. Still, he wanted the smoking gun, the slam dunk, home run, no-doubt-about-it missing link. “If this thing doesn’t work out,” he said, “we’re going to let a lot of people down.”

Before she drifted back to sleep, Deb whispered, “I’ll say a prayer.”

ABOUT A WEEK AFTER
Jim Knorr’s team had dug up and documented the eight dead dogs at 1915 Moonlight Road, Mike Gill received a call from a woman named Melinda Merck. A forensic veterinarian for the ASPCA, Merck was the person who could examine crime scenes and recovered evidence and determine critical details about what had happened. She was, basically, CSI for animals, a field she had to a large degree invented.

When she was about nine years old, someone found a beagle that had been hit by a car on the side of the road in the small Ohio town where she lived. Most of the neighborhood gathered around, but no one knew whose dog it was or what to do to help it. So they left it.

Merck was shocked that none of the adults would do anything for the dog. She didn’t know what to do either, but she would not abandon the creature. Instead, she sat by its side, comforting it and keeping the flies off its face until it died. The experience fed what was already a deep love for animals, and she vowed that from then on she would always help. If there was need, and there was something that could be done, she would do it.

After graduating from Michigan State’s veterinary school in 1988, she opened the Cat Clinic of Roswell in Roswell, Georgia. Her private practice was doing well, but she rescued almost as many animals as she treated. She has eight cats and two dogs, but at one point she lived on a spacious farm with five dogs, twenty-seven cats, two horses, one goat, one cow, and one fawn.

In her work Merck encountered many troubling cases: abuse, neglect, hoarding. In 2000, Georgia passed a law making animal cruelty a felony, and a collection of law enforcement officers, lawyers, veterinarians, and animal welfare enthusiasts set up a group to figure out how to pursue such cases. Merck joined and was asked to compile all the known information about animal forensics and give a presentation to the others. Merck set off to do the research only to find that none existed. She would have to create it herself.

She attended workshops on crime scene investigation, human forensics, gunshot recognition, and bite mark analysis and began reading every book she could find on the topic. She also began sitting in with medical examiners at Fulton County Medical Center and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, figuring that if she could learn the basics of human forensics, she might be able to apply some of those techniques to animals and maybe even develop a few new ones. It was a gruesome business. Every time there was a murder that involved some sort of physical trauma, Merck’s phone would ring. She would drag herself down to the morgue and stand sentinel while human bodies were poked, prodded, cut open, pulled apart, and examined.