Unnatural Selection (13 page)

“Do you still have Heidi the Wonder Dog?” Clapper asked, getting out of his chair.

“Why, Mike, what a thing to say. Of course I still have her. I’d never give up Heidi. I’d never give up any of them.”

“Well, yes, I only wondered if-that is, I thought perhaps-”

“She’s alive and well,” Hicks said, “and no doubt eager to see you.”

When they left the room, the dogs started to scramble after them, but Hicks murmured, “Down. Stay,” over his shoulder, and down they went and down they stayed, after practically screeching to a halt.

“I just thought of something, Trus,” Clapper said. “The fog’s supposed to be worse tomorrow. Fog season, you know. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Dear me, no. For you and me, perhaps, but not for a dog. It’s smell they depend on, not sight. It might even make it easier, because moist conditions enhance scent. And then the dogs are happier when it’s cool.”

The three men walked through the kitchen and out the back door of the house, into an acre of grassy moorland that included an inviting pond and a couple of shady clumps of small elm and sycamore trees, all safely enclosed by a wire fence. Valhalla for dog heroes, Gideon thought.

There were four of them: a Doberman pinscher, two German shepherds, and a Border collie, and all of them came bounding over gracefully when Hicks made a clucking sound with his tongue. These were not like the yappers and yippers indoors, who had clamored for the attention of strangers. Three of the four had eyes only for Hicks. With their shapely heads turned adoringly up to him, they weren’t begging for food or even pleading for attention. All they wanted was the joy of his presence. The fourth, the Border collie, pranced around them, snapping gently at their feet to herd them together, as its genes demanded.

“This one’s Heidi, am I right?” Clapper said, bending to rub the ears of one of the German shepherds, which permitted the attention with the abstracted air of a pasha tolerating the devotion of a supplicant. “Hello, there, love,” Clapper said affectionately, and to Gideon: “It’s Heidi here that put an end to the biggest arson racket that Plymouth ever saw. What a nose on this old girl.”

“She did that, all right,” Hicks agreed. “It was Heidi that put us onto the lean-to where they’d stored their petrol-for setting their fires, you see, even though there’d been no petrol there for more than five months and it was completely open to the elements. Did it entirely on what vestiges of scent remained.”

“Amazing,” Gideon said. “Will we be using her tomorrow?”

Hicks stared at him. “What an idea. No, Heidi is an accelerant-detecting canine. No, no, we need a cadaver dog, or as we prefer to call it in these politically correct times, a human remains detection dog.”

“I didn’t realize they specialized to that extent.”

“Well, of course they specialize. How could a-” He was obviously shocked at Gideon’s ignorance, but polite-ness stopped him from expressing it. “For example, Kaiser here”-he kneaded the scruff of the other shepherd’s neck-“is strictly a water search dog. Keenest nose in existence for locating a body at the bottom of a pond, but wouldn’t know a cadaver in the open if he stumbled over it. And Trixie there-” At the mention of her name the Doberman shivered with pleasure and pushed her sleek muzzle into Hicks’s hand. “-well, this beauty has been known to hunt down an automobile with explosives in its boot after it had driven two miles through dense Torquay traffic.”

“Amazing,” Gideon murmured again.

“No, our expert tomorrow will be Tess.” He pointed at the midsized brown-and-white Border collie, which continued politely mock-nipping at their heels, presumably to keep them from wandering off and getting lost and thereby getting her in trouble. “Tess is a tried-and-true cadaver dog-pardon me, a human remains detection dog-inasmuch as she’s trained to find skeletons, and even single bones, as well as decomposing corpses. But she couldn’t track a lost hiker-a lost live hiker-to save her soul. Not her fault, of course; it’s the way she’s been schooled. She’s been taught to alert to nothing but human remains. She’ll even ignore animal remains.”

Gideon only barely caught himself before saying “Amazing” again. “Huh,” he said, “and I thought they were all just general-purpose tracking dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, with some specific training tacked on.”

“Good heavens, no,” Hicks exclaimed. “They’re not tracking dogs at all, never were. Tracking dogs require tracks, don’t you see. Either literal tracks or some specific scent article belonging to the person. And they generally require some specific starting point. But these ”-he used the stem of his pipe to jab at the animals-“are air-scent canines. They don’t look for an individual person or object but for a specific type of smell. They can start from anywhere, they don’t need scent articles, they-” His rosy cheeks turned a little redder. “Gentlemen, I beg your pardon. I’m boring you, I’m sure. It’s only that I don’t get a chance to talk about it very much anymore.”

“Ah, well, we’re bearing up,” Clapper said stoically.

“It’s extremely interesting,” Gideon said. “There’s a lot more to it than I thought.”

“Oh, that’s only the start,” Hicks said, recognizing Gideon as the curious scientist he was. “There’s a remarkable field of knowledge here. Come into the house for another cup of tea, or something stronger, if you like, and I will astound and edify you.”

“We’re for it now,” Clapper muttered crossly on the way back in.

Hicks began simply enough. What a dog had that a person didn’t was not only the ability to discriminate between extremely similar scents, but to locate the source of smells much more precisely than any human being could possibly hope to. It came naturally. What the dog was doing when he located a buried human bone was no different than what he did when he dug up a beef bone that he’d buried in the backyard months before. He doesn’t “know” where he buried it, he simply picks up the scent of a decaying bone on the air. Other animals, such as cats, actually have more scent receptors than dogs-was Gideon aware of that?-but of course the dog’s emotional and behavioral characteristics made it infinitely more amenable to training and working in the field.

Interesting enough, and so far so good, but when Hicks got into the chemistry of putrefactive olfaction (chemistry had never been Gideon’s strong suit) he rapidly left Gideon behind. (“Some say that the dog responds to the outgassing of volatile fatty acids and ionic compounds, but I maintain- have always maintained-that it is at the level of the major histocompatability complex, where unique protein markers form, that differentiation between these markers results in recognition.”)

“Ah,” said Gideon dully, while Clapper dozed peacefully, “amazing.”

Once Hicks had a full head of steam going, he was unstoppable, so it wasn’t until five-fifteen that Clapper and Gideon, dazed with canine lore, were let loose, and five forty-five by the time Gideon climbed Garrison Hill in the gathering mist and got back to Star Castle. In his room, on the table by the casement window, was a note from Julie:

Hi, Prof,

Hope your session with the sergeant-major went better than yesterday’s. Having put in a hard day’s work furthering human knowledge, a few of us have headed for the Bishop and Wolf for a relaxing pre-dinner pint or two.

Dinner’s not till seven, so come join us!

XXX, J

The Bishop and Wolf had been the consortium’s pub of choice during its first convening two years earlier, and Julie had pointed it out on their walk through Hugh Town when they’d arrived. The oldest building in the village, an attractive, mid-seventeenth-century stone inn with pansy-filled window boxes that added a whimsical and unlikely Bavarian air to the facade, and a hanging sign that showed a gigantic, slavering wolf crouching over a bishop’s mitre-topped light-house (the pub had been named for the Bishop and the Wolf, two of St. Mary’s earliest lighthouses). Situated in the center of the village, on the little square where the Strand and the Parade angled together, it was only a five-minute walk from Garrison Hill, so that it was a few minutes before six when Gideon pulled open the door and entered an old English pub, traditional in the extreme: cozy and plain, with nets, glass globes, and odds and ends on the walls; dark, old wooden tables; and a fitting, not-really-unpleasant fug of beer, wine, and cigarette smoke in the air.

They were at two pulled-together square tables near the back wall: Julie, Liz Petra, Rudy Walker, Victor Waldo, Donald Pinckney, and Donald’s man-eating wife, Cheryl, who looked bored, bony, and exotic in a flared white pantsuit that appeared to have come from the cleaners’ five minutes before. The barmaid was in the act of taking orders, probably for their second round. Only Joey and Kozlov weren’t there.

“Hi, all.” Gideon asked the barmaid for a pint of best bitter and pulled up a chair between Julie and Victor, well out of Cheryl’s range.

“Oh, Gideon, hi, sweetheart,” Julie said. “How did it go today? I was just telling everybody about the bone.”

“A human bone, I understand?” Donald said. “A tibia?” He was wearing another button on his shirt: I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables.

“Partial tibia of an adult male,” Gideon said, “with signs of dismembering at the distal end.”

“Signs of dismembering?” Victor echoed. “What would be the ‘signs’ of dismembering?”

And so he had to go through it again. His explanation was met with more interest than he might have expected, except from Cheryl, who, still nursing her earlier drink-a straight-up martini-was exchanging lingering, supposedly covert glances with a husky bodybuilder-type in a muscle shirt a couple of tables away. An olive on a toothpick slipped suggestively between her lips and out again.

“And do they have any idea to whom it might belong?” asked Donald, resolutely avoiding taking notice of his wife’s goings-on.

“As of now, no. No unsolved murders, no records of any missing people it could belong to. No theories as to whose it is. Still, it’s somebody’s. Mike introduced me to a dog-handler on St. Agnes, and tomorrow we’ll go up to Halangy Point and see if we can find any more pieces. If we do, Mike said he’d find me a place at the police station where I can go over them.”

“‘Mike’?” said Julie, her eyebrows going up. “My goodness, you did get along better with him today, didn’t you?”

“Robb was right,” Gideon said. “He’s actually a pretty decent guy.”

The barmaid came with their drinks: ginger beer for Victor; white wine for Julie, Liz, Rudy, and Donald; another martini (with three olives on the toothpick) for Cheryl; and Gideon’s ale in the time-honored dimpled glass tankard.

“Murdered and dismembered,” Liz said thoughtfully after taking her first sip. “You don’t suppose… I wonder… Well, no, never mind. It’s a silly idea.”

This naturally prompted interest all around, and she was prevailed upon-it didn’t take much prevailing-to continue. “Do you remember the last time we were all in this pub?” she asked. “Well, everybody but you and Gideon, Julie.” She waited, slowly rotating her wineglass on the scarred table, but no one came up with an answer.

“It was the final night, after Edgar gave that talk at Methodist Hall, remember? The one where he got into it with that Pete Williams guy, that writer who hung around all week.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Cheryl said, her first contribution. “Edgar was livid. Deservedly so, if you ask me. That reporter was vicious.”

Her attention seemed to have returned to the conversation, but she was paying no attention whatsoever to Gideon. She wasn’t even working at not paying him attention. It was simply as if he weren’t there. She’s written me off as a dud, he thought, not certain whether he ought to be relieved or offended. A moment’s consideration told him he was relieved. I am getting old, he thought.

“That reporter treated him in exactly the way he deserved,” Rudy said to Cheryl. “Edgar had it all coming to him, and then some.” He muttered on a little more, but all Gideon was able to hear was “… arrogant, condescending…”

Rudy and Villarreal had not gotten along, Gideon remembered Julie telling him. “If you think Donald and Joey get under each others’ skin, you should have seen Edgar and Rudy,” she’d said. Apparently their views on the American wilderness-“open it up to everyone and everything,” according to Rudy, and “shut it down to everyone and everything,” according to Villarreal-were too much at odds for them to stomach one another, and potshots and barbs had flown between them all week long, with Rudy doing most of the needling. But Villarreal had been possessed of a ready, caustic wit, Julie had said, and, generally speaking, Rudy had gotten the worst of it.

There had been a time, Gideon thought sadly, when Rudy had had a sharp and ready wit, too.

“Whether he had it coming to him or not is not the point,” Liz said now, gathering steam. “The point is that he said he wanted to kill him, do you remember? He said it right in front of us. Twice, if I remember right. Well, who’s to say…”

“Liz!” Julie exclaimed. “You’re not serious. You’re suggesting Edgar actually did kill him? I mean… murder?”

“That’s just what I’m suggesting.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Rudy said, but it was hard to tell if he was serious.

There followed a general chorus of doubt and incredulity. Gideon, silent, reflected that, as cheerful and kindly as Liz was, getting her back up was obviously not a good idea, even if you went out and got eaten by a bear afterward.

And she stuck to her guns. “I am serious. Hear me out now. Has anybody heard anything about Williams since that night?” She stared challengingly at each of them in turn, and everyone admitted that they hadn’t.

“Don’t look at me,” Gideon said. “I never heard of him at all until the day before yesterday.”

“All right,” Liz said. “Nobody’s heard of him since then. Has anyone heard anything about the book he was working on? Has it come out? We all keep up with the environmental literature, we’d certainly have read about it. A book like that, it would have made a splash.”