Death Scent Page 6

  The sheriff who was headed up the path to the house turned at the movement, his hand reflexively moving toward his holster. Then, just as quickly he relaxed and touched the brim of his Stetson®—the same shimmering silver-white one. “What can I help you with today, Sheriff Reid?” she called, forcing a smile she didn’t feel into her voice and onto her face.

  “Came to return some of your property,” he answered. Walking back to his vehicle, he grabbed an electronic clipboard and a bag from the passenger seat and walked over to her, handing her both as he sidled in to stand towering over her. Jessie resented that. She considered herself tall at five-foot-nine. As tall as her dad, he made her feel like a shrimp where her dad didn’t. She didn’t know why.

  “If you’ll sign for them …here and initial here.” His finger indicated the spots on the device.

  Checking in the bag, Jessie saw three of her four external drives with their connectors.

  “I’ll check them for damage, first,” she said, heading back to her office. Mitch, Milo, and Acer got up, Reid turning to eye them as they padded by. Milo and Mitch pushed through between them to lead while Acer went to her left knee and glued himself there. The dog looked up, his eyes steady on the man who was looking down at him. Jessie saw admiration in Reid’s face. Acer maintained his neutral, distant mien that was usual with those he didn’t know. “This way,” Jessie said to break the moment.

  In her office, the dogs sat themselves down on their rugs, except for Acer who stayed with her. Jessica plugged in the drives, checked the numbers, accessed a couple critical files, and nodded. “Okay,” she said, and got up. “They look like they’re in the same condition as when they left my possession. I’ll sign.”

  Reid handed her the electronic clipboard, but, this time, kept his distance.

  Signing on the spots indicated, Jessie handed the clipboard back and, uncomfortable being under his scrutiny, stepped away from him and headed for the door. All the dogs followed. “What about the rest of my property?” she asked once they were outside.

  “Still being held in evidence, I’m afraid.”

  He actually sounded apologetic, though Jessie doubted his sincerity. “For how long?” she asked.

  “I think you know the answer to that,” he said quietly.

  Yeah. She did. Probably forever. A sigh escaped her, and she saw him notice. “Well, thanks, at least, for returning these.”

  “You’re welcome. And I want to thank you for that enhancement you provided on the thumb drive you gave me.”

  So he’d finally noticed that she had tried to help. “You’re welcome.” She expected him to go, but he kept standing there, just staring at her. “Is that everything, Sheriff?”

  He took a step back and seemed oddly startled. “Yes, Ma’am.” He touched his hat brim again, said “Good day to you,” then turned and walked back to his SUV.

  Jessie waited till Reid’s rig disappeared down the drive before letting her guard down. Then, enervated, she went to the house, the dogs trailing in with her.

  Plopping down on the sofa, she watched them settle around her—her dogs, her team, her pack. Oso and Queenie came over and put their noses on her. She gave them strokes. Then came Milo and Mitch. Last came the GSDs. She gave them all strokes in return for their sympathy. They always knew when she was distressed. And Jessie wanted to cry. Out her drones and her laptop with its expensive software, her entire five-year business model was thrown out of whack, and she didn’t have a clue how to re-think it. All the work she’d done of securing individual permissions from local landowners to fly over their properties, of getting her FAA commercial licensing to fly the drones, of petitioning the State of Idaho, whose answer she was still awaiting—all that work down the tubes. Now she had to rethink everything. Or get another loan to buy more drones, which she didn’t want to do. She needed a better business plan, one like her grandfather had pushed that only involved dogs. But that meant selling them to others, and that’s what she didn’t want to do. She needed to come up with something, though. Somehow. And she knew no ‘somehow’.

  Grabbing a throw pillow and hugging it to her, she tipped sideways, landing her head on the bolster with practiced habit. The sun glinted through the big floor-to-ceiling picture windows, dust motes dancing. One of the family cats walked through, stopped to look at her, then changed direction, threading its way nonchalantly through the now snoozing dogs to join her. It jumped up, curling itself into the cove of her abdomen. Idly, Jessie gave it strokes, and it started to purr. The sound soothed her. She closed her eyes and tried to put her mind on what she needed to do—find a new way forward.

  *

  Reid gunned it, meaning to. What he’d really like to do was get out and run off his anger. Instead, he took it out on the Anderson’s private road, thankful for the luxury to do that—a mile-and-a-half of well-maintained road. Better than the county ones, he thought with both envy and discouragement.

  He’d embarrassed himself. Standing there staring at her like that, analyzing her. But he needed to analyze her. He needed to know how she figured in this whole case. Especially since she had been in law enforcement—considered a valuable asset by both her captain and the Blaine County undersheriff, the latter who was himself nationally recognized, one of the few recognized as the top CSIs west of the Mississippi.

  Remembering the girl of just a few days ago—cautious, but confident and composed—compared to the hollow-eyed, stiff, defiant hag he’d seen today, then comparing that to the girl he remembered from high school—every one of them completely different creatures—made him wonder if she was bipolar. Or maybe worse. Could PTSD cause schizophrenia? he wondered. Something was really, really off.

  “She’s not a girl,” he muttered, power-sliding on the gravel through a hard curve.

  The law enforcement choice for a career really threw him. Girls like Jessica Anderson didn’t go into crime fighting. They went into tech, maybe. Even law like he had tried to, but on the corporate end of things. Heck, he could even see her as a successful CEO for some big corporation, especially with her dad’s connections. But she was certainly not and never had been law enforcement material. That would have been her twin sister.

  The old psych studies held pretty true, in fact. Cops and criminals held very similar personality traits on the MMPI, the standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology used by most institutions. Jessica didn’t fit, but her twin sister did, and, true to type, Jennifer had flirted with law enforcement—literally—but had become a criminal, instead. Jessie? Never. Neither cop nor criminal. Just not the type. At all.

  “I don’t fit the profile, either, though,” he said aloud, steering his way out of trouble when the rig’s rear end lost traction. And he knew he didn’t. But he had other incentives for what he did. Law enforcement was a family heritage dating way, way back, and a continuing tradition for every male since then. It was expected.

  “No. Not true. Demanded.” Again, he gunned it, and, again, the rear-end tried to slide away on the gravel. “Oh, no you don’t,” he muttered, bringing it back under control.

  What he had wanted to do and what his dad and granddad expected weren’t actually that far apart. At least that’s what he’d thought. He’d thought wrong, though. Pursuing law wasn’t in the cards for him, not if he wanted to live up to the Reid legacy. That had been made perfectly clear when he’d won a three-year full ride scholarship to go on to U of Penn Law upon graduating from ISU. He’d been forced—coerced, actually—into turning it down. He still resented his folks for that, mostly his mom who, to this day, had a feverish passion about the prestige of ‘her men’ wearing a badge. “Perverted,” he muttered, thinking of her continued fawning over the family’s collection of all the badges previously worn by Reids, badges dating all the way back to 19th century Scotland. “Just plain sick.” But his anger was defused, and, inside, he simply felt sad—sad for himself, sad for Jessica Anderson, because, if he had to, he’d push the law to hold h
er feet to the fire. If he had to.

  He took his foot out of it and coasted as the pentagon-shaped arch and two giant stone dog statues that framed the entrance of the Anderson place came in sight. The county road was just beyond. No more fooling around allowed. No more anger.

  What bothered him most about Jessica, he realized as he headed toward civilization, was the change in her that had occurred in just the last few days. She’d gone from healthy-looking to haggard, like she’d aged ten years from doing hard labor in some third world prison camp. What had happened? And it crossed his mind that, maybe, somehow, it was his fault …which was ludicrous. She was the one who had failed to follow the law, and she would have known the law, because Colorado had the identical law and the same consequences for what she’d done, or, more accurately, not done.

  Her attempt to hedge had displayed that fact. So did her silence concerning that hedge—tacit affirmation. She had purposely failed to report a crime, something she knew could put her away for a full five years.

  ***

  14 – Motivation

  A hand shook her. “Jessie, wake up. It’s dinnertime,”—her dad.

  Jessie woke like a bolt of lightning had struck her. “Oh, no! I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

  Her dad chuckled. “Wash up, Jessie. Food’s on the table.”

  “I haven’t fed, yet.”

  “It’s all done,” her granddad, Darby, said. “Including those mutts you call dogs. That one big galoot,” he said, tipping his chin in Milo’s direction, “thinks he’s a lap dog, I swear.”

  Jessie gave him ‘the look’, as her dad called it. Then, when he winked, she grinned. With a groan, she got herself up and into the downstairs bathroom. In the mirror, she saw her hollow eyes, dark circles ringing them. She hadn’t been sleeping well since the sheriff confiscated her property—property that had taken the last bit of her savings and a loan from her dad.

  Her hair was a mess. With her fingers, she combed it back, but it didn’t help much. Then, after applying some cold water to her face and scrubbing her hands and arms, she headed to the table.

  “You’ve decided what you’re going to do,” her dad said, stating it like fact as he shoveled potatoes and gravy onto his plate, then helped himself to some chunks of pot-roast. “Toss me a roll and pass the veggies, would you, Dad?” he called to Jessie’s granddad.

  Jessie watched Darby toss two rolls simultaneously, and her dad catch them both. Then her granddad picked up the vegetable bowl and, with a grin, threatened to toss it like a game ball. She watched her gram smirk and shake her head. This is what she’d missed being away all those years wasted at school, then a year in the worse purgatory of working as a rookie deputy. This was her family, and she still ached from missing them.

  Jessie wondered, yet again, how her father always knew. “I think so. I think I dreamed it.”

  “Eat, Jessica Marie,” her grandmother urged, and Jessie served herself as the dishes came her way. It was the first time she actually felt like eating since they’d taken her drones and laptop.

  “Then it was a productive afternoon for you,” Darby put in. “What did the sheriff want?”

  So her granddad had reviewed the property surveillance. “To return three of my external drives.”

  “And the rest?” Oli asked.

  “No go.”

  “Right. And?”

  “I’m going to take Mitch, The Marvelous, and Milo, The Wonder Mutt, to California to meet Callen Parker at his place and give him a demonstration. I’m hoping to get him to certify them and my method, and to agree that a dog doesn’t have to be limited to just human remains detection.”

  “You’re not thinking of driving, are you?” Ana-Mari asked, concern saturating her grandmother’s face and voice.

  “Yes.”

  “No. Absolutely not, Jessica Marie.”

  Oli held up his hand. “I’ll fly her and the dogs,” he said. “That will solve that.”

  Both her grandparents nodded approval, and Jessie sighed in relief. They always worried …like flying was safer or something, which it wasn’t, not to Jessie’s way of thinking.

  “When do you plan on going?” Darby asked. “We’ve got the government boys coming in June to pick out their dogs.”

  “I’ll have to call Callen and see if he’ll even give me the time of day,” Jessica said.

  Her dad smiled. “He will. He knows you, and he knows our dogs.”

  While that was true, Callen had very high standards and his tests were tough. He was the authority for scent tracking dogs. He was even recognized for his expertise overseas, and, while she was now a budding somebody herself in the world of search and rescue, she was still a nobody, even a beggar, in the world of Human Remains Detection or HRD. It was Callen who had given her a leg up by putting his stamp of approval on her method just last year after testing Queenie and Oso, and she hoped he’d now be impressed by Mitch and Milo, too.

  A phone call later netted Jessie her answer. Yes, Callen would see her and agreed to test Mitch and Milo, both, and, most importantly, as a team, in HRD. That was huge. Jessie felt as if the shadow that had cloaked her since discovering the body up on Long Peak had finally lifted. “I look forward to seeing your dad, again, too,” Callen added. “You will stay here, of course. My wife and I would love to have you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. And tell your dad to bring me a pup as good as the last one, and I’ll even think about coming up there the next time you need to recertify.”

  And there it was—her only real ‘in’ was her family’s rep. Everything was always about Anderson Working Dogs. “I’ll be sure to tell him,” Jessie said, her eyes flicking to her father who was listening in on the other line. “And thank you.”

  “Let’s just see what you can do before thanking me, shall we? See you on Tuesday next.”

  When the connection closed, her dad chuckled. “Of course he wants another pup. And I’ve got two, one GSD and one Malinois. He likes them dumber than a post, and play-oriented. Well, these aren’t dumb, but they do have what Callen calls ‘prey drive’ and means ‘play drive’—a lot of motivation to just ‘go, go, go for fun’—too much for our training. They don’t stop and think first. Just jump in.”

  The words came out fast and furious, her dad spitting them out faster than bullets. Jessie started to chuckle, tried to smother it, couldn’t. She knew what he actually called them—brain-dead—though not really meaning it.

  Stormy brows met her laughter, and she swallowed in a hiccup and tried her best to sober up. Didn’t work, but his brow quirked. She took a breath, and that steadied her. “What will you charge him for them?”

  “Same as I charge pet buyers.”

  “So, these are culls?”

  Her dad gave her a scolding look. “None of our dogs are culls, Jessie. Even the ones that aren’t up to our standards are good, beautiful, smart dogs. Just not suitable for serious work. Too happy, so too dangerous once their prey drive or their defense drive is fully engaged.”

  “You’re talking about the one you call Chip?”

  “Yep. That one, and Boyd. Maybe a couple of others. Whatever he doesn’t want, the SAR group down there will.”

  Jessie shook her head. “I don’t know why SAR and HRD people prefer hyper.”

  “It’s because the dogs are easily fixed on one objective, Jessie. Lots of ‘go’. Easy to train to one goal and one goal only. Let’s be honest, not many people, even pros, are willing to go to the lengths we do, and especially not the lengths you do.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just disagree.”

  “I know you do. That’s why I support you in this. Smart, thinking dogs perform best. It’s why we breed the heritage lines. It’s something we all agree on, including your granddad.”

  Darby nodded in the ‘darned right’ way he had.

  Her grandfather and she didn’t agree on much when it came to dogs—neither she and him nor she and her dad. They were all about dogs as
working assets. For her, dogs were partners …teammates—part of her pack, and she part of theirs—and that’s where her dad and her granddad wouldn’t go. “Too dangerous,” was their reason. But that’s all they would ever say. No substantiation for their position, just grim looks and compressed lips.

  *

  Nobody had seen Debbie Ferris. She hadn’t shown up for work. Her coworkers hadn’t seen her. Neither had anyone in her contact list. There’d been no online activity, and her sister, who lived down near Boise, hadn’t heard from her. That wasn’t unusual, they were told. “Debbie kept pretty much to herself. We haven’t been on speaking terms for several years,” she’d told Red.

  Upon asking the girl about the whereabouts of their parents, she clammed up, and Landon thought that worth pursuing. They finally tracked them down over in Lemhi County, but they had no listed phone.

  Barry contacted the Lemhi County S.O. and asked them to do the interview, emailing over a list of Landon’s and Red’s questions.

  The source of the money was eluding them. With over twelve grand in play, it couldn’t just be from dance tips. The truck was also drawing a blank. Tracking down every red pickup built between 2007 and 2013 that was registered in the county proved tedious and time-consuming, but not difficult in a county whose population was barely sixteen thousand, most of those living in either the county seat, Northridge, or one of the other small towns and unincorporated villages. Unfortunately, not one of the vehicles they managed to find, all but about a dozen registered, matched the dents and paint scars seen in Jessie Anderson’s enhancement of the fleeing vehicle’s hood, driver’s side, top, back, front, and bed. Regardless, pictures of all of the trucks were catalogued, their owners interviewed.

  They moved on, engaging the departments of adjoining counties. Meanwhile, interviews with both Sue and Debbie’s friends and coworkers netted a list of activities and confirmation that both were, indeed, in a relationship with one another.