Night Howl (17 page)

After he joined the junior police auxiliary in his hometown and began spending a great deal of time with policemen, even his closer school acquaintances became aloof. There was talk about his being a teenage “narc” and he was no longer trusted at parties. None of this dissuaded him, however. He had, by this time, developed a strong intellectual interest in the science of police work, and his ability to achieve in it reinforced his ego.

In fact, now that he thought about it, if he had to center in on one thing that had driven him to become what he was, he would have to admit to ego. He liked the feeling he got whenever he packaged a solution to a crime and brought a guilty person in to face justice. It made him feel superior to be able to defeat the criminal
mind. He believed that it had to take a certain arrogance for someone to commit a crime anyway, the arrogant belief that he or she could get away with it, could confuse and puzzle the authorities, men and women like Carlson.

If his admittedly wild theory was correct now, he wasn’t up against another human being; he was up against an animal. It wasn’t the same kind of challenge, and he debated whether or not he’d be better off turning the whole thing over to some animal experts. Let them go track down this dog—if it was indeed only a dog.

And then he thought, if this case did involve a killer animal, albeit a unique killer animal, he would have achieved something remarkable in proving it so. Surely this was strong enough motivation to want to continue and to want to succeed. After all, if it had happened to this old man the way he suspected it might have, it could happen to someone else, maybe even a small child.

Talk about headlines, talk about glamour, talk about movies and books, this could be one for the records. The only other person who had any idea what he might be thinking about was this small-town police chief, hardly a man of his vision, training, and experience. Who would expect him to solve such a crime?

No, this was important, he thought. He would proceed with vigor.

Barry Foster, one of his assistants, came around the corner of the house to approach him. He had put Foster on the dog tracks because he knew Foster was a hunter. He always put in for a day off on the first day of deer season. “You got to get your deer the first day,” he said when Carlson once questioned the man about it, “otherwise you’ll be traipsin’ forever through the woods. The mob of idiots drive the deer farther and farther in and you’re better off not bein’ out there
when some of those so-called big-game hunters from the city come up.”

“I picked up his tracks down the road aways. He went into the woods across the street and headed southwest.”

“Lose ‘em?”

“No, I don’t think so, Tom. I think he’s still pretty close by.”

“How close by?”

“Well, he seemed to be around that ranch house down the street. ‘Course, I saw a doghouse there, so I can’t be sure it’s not theirs.”

“The Kaufmans,” Carlson muttered to himself. “Yeah, I was down there,” he said. “They did have a dog, but they had trouble with it recently and it was killed. How fresh were the tracks you found?”

“Not too much more than a day, Tom.”

“Then that’s our dog. These people haven’t had their dog for a few days now. Okay, wrap it up with John and Stanley. I’m going to talk to some of the other people on this street and go to that ranch house later.”

“Right. Oh, one thing about this dog though, Tom.”

“What’s that?”

“I can’t be sure, but I think he’s big.”

“How big?”

“He’s heavy and his prints are larger than usual. German shepherds can run a little over a hundred pounds, but this one could run forty or maybe even fifty over, as hard as that is to believe.”

“What do you think?”

“Maybe it’s not a German shepherd; maybe it’s something else. Something
like
a German shepherd.”

“Wolf?”

“No, a wolf would be smaller.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know, Tom. You’re going to have to bring
in someone with more experience with animals. I’m just a country boy.”

“Thanks, Barry. I’ll probably do that.”

Carlson watched his men pack up and leave. Then he proceeded to visit the different houses along the street, leaving the Kaufmans until last, since the woman wasn’t there when he had gone there earlier. None of the people on the street had seen a German shepherd other than the one the Kaufmans had owned. They all told Carlson about Sid Kaufman’s contacting them earlier and asking the same question. This reinforced his theories.

Just as he pulled into the Kaufmans’ driveway again, Lenny Sidewater drove up. Carlson waved him over and showed him his identification.

“The chief had me parked over there looking for signs of a German shepherd,” he explained when Carlson asked him what he was doing.

“Oh he did, did he? See anything?”

“Naw. I almost fell asleep. Time for lunch, though, and the chief says I can come in.”

“Do you know if Mrs. Kaufman’s returned? I was here early this morning, but no one came to the door.”

“I didn’t see her pull in, no.”

“Oh.” Carlson turned and looked at the house and at the doghouse. “All right,” he said, “thanks.”

Sidewater drove off and Carlson stood in the driveway, debating whether or not to go somewhere for lunch or wait around for the woman to return.

Inside, Phantom rose up slowly from the living room couch. He had gone through the kitchen, leapt up on counters, and pulled open the cabinet doors until he found something appetizing. What he found was King’s dog food. The Kaufmans hadn’t gotten around to throwing out or giving away the large bag of dry dog food. Phantom tore it open quickly and spilled its
contents all over the kitchen floor. Then he proceeded to eat ravenously.

He had seen refrigerators in the laboratory and knew what they were. This one was even simpler to open. It took only a small amount of pressure on the handle to have the door swing out. Once it did so, he perused the contents, sniffing around the shelves, pulling out packages of cold cuts and a plate of leftover chicken. Everything dropped to the floor and was wolfed down quickly. Afterward, with his appetite sated, he sought out some comfort and settled on the couch in the living room. His sleep was interrupted when he heard Carlson’s car pull in and the car door open and close.

Now he peered out through the curtains over the bay window. He sat back on his haunches and studied the man and the police car that arrived soon after. When the police car began to pull away, he braced himself on a side table to get a better view of where it was going and what was happening outside. But he weighed too much for the small marble-topped side table and it tipped enough to send the ceramic vase lamp to the floor. It struck the electric heating unit against the wall and shattered.

Carlson had just turned toward his car, concluding that he would go into town for a quick bite and then return. He heard the sound of the lamp and stopped to listen. The silence that followed made him question whether or not he had really heard anything.

Phantom knew that the sound might have been heard. He placed his front paws on the top of the couch and leaned forward to press his snoot into the curtain and get a better view of the man. In doing so, he moved the curtain emphatically.

Carlson saw the movement in the window and stepped away from his car. Perhaps Mrs. Kaufman
was there after all; perhaps the policeman had done what he said he almost had done: fallen asleep and missed her return. It was certainly possible and worth investigating.

The state I.D. man headed determindly for the front door of the Kaufman house. He rang the buzzer and waited, but no one came to the door. He knocked and waited. Puzzled, he went to the garage door and peered in. A car was there; the woman had to be home. He went back to the door and tried the handle. He was surprised the front door was unlocked. He would have thought, with all that had been happening on this street, that a woman alone in a house outside a populated area would keep her front door locked. This, plus her not coming to the door at all, triggered the policeman in him. He unbuttoned his jacket so he could get to his revolver easily, and then he entered the Kaufmans’ house.

“Tell me more about him,” Qwen said as he walked along. Ann was at his side. Among the three from the institute, she seemed to have the most physical endurance and kept right up with his pace. About half a mile upstream, they had found the dog’s tracks on the south side of the water. Maggie, once again with a strong lead, forged ahead, yapping continually. Her bark was like the puttering of a small gasoline engine. Qwen could see that the noise aggravated the big security man. Qwen felt the man’s tension and moved faster and farther ahead of him just to keep more distance between them. He could see that Kevin Longfellow had difficulty with the pace, but he felt he couldn’t be concerned about that. After all, they had gotten themselves into this situation, not he.

“What do you want to know?” Ann asked.

“Why do you bother with animals if you want to do research and find ways to increase human intelligence?
There’s a big difference between animals and people, isn’t there?”

“Not really. You’d be surprised at the similarities. It would reinforce your belief in evolution.”

“Who said I believe in it?”

“I meant anyone who did believe in it as an explanation for all this. Anyway, to get back to your first question. We use animals for two basic reasons. It’s possible to control their entire learning history. We know exactly what they’ve been exposed to, how much and what kind of training they’ve had, and we can keep accurate records of their achievements.”

“What’s the other reason?”

“Animals are simpler to observe and understand. The reactions they have and the mechanisms they use are obvious. There’s no deception, deliberate deception, that is.”

“Except for him, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s true, which is another reason why we can say he’s so advanced.”

“So lying and cheating make him more like us,” Qwen said and spit. Ann laughed. It was a strange kind of laugh, a thin sound, punctuated by a kind of gasping. Qwen looked at her; it was as if she didn’t know how to really laugh.

“Funny way to put it, Mr. Qwen, but you’re right.”

“There’s got to be more to it than that, more of a difference between us.”

“Well I am simplifying, but all higher mammals possess intricate nervous systems and can solve complex problems. There are some behaviorists who believe it is doubtful that man possesses any fundamental intellectual process, except true language, that is not also present in lower biological life.”

“I can’t believe that,” Qwen said. He gestured forward. “Maggie’s loyal. She’s done some pretty smart things for a dog, but I wouldn’t go around sayin’
she thinks like a man. Or a woman,” he added quickly.

“What do you think thinking is? It used to be that we thought Pavlovian conditioning and Skinner’s imprinting were too crude to be considered thinking, but the theory today is that trial and error and insight are but different phases of the same long, continuous process.”

“You lost me.”

“Sorry. I have a tendency to assume that everyone knows from where we come. You taught your dog to do something by using carrots and sticks. If it did well, you gave it a carrot, a dog biscuit or something, but if it did it wrong or did something wrong, you punished it, wacked it with newspaper or something, right?”

“So?”

“So it learned by trial and error. Say it urinated in the living room when it was a puppy and you wacked it and stuck its snoot in it. It didn’t have to urinate in the bedroom and have you wack it there to know it can’t urinate there, either. It formed what we call a learning set, an organized set of habits that enables the animal to effectively meet each new problem of similar kind. This second stage is insight, what we call thinking. Humans go through the same process, only faster.”

“So what the hell’s the difference between us?” he asked. He couldn’t help sounding the note of frustration. This asexual female who spoke with a little nasality and sounded like a talking computer was beginning to annoy him.

“Language, for one, and as I told you before, self-image.”

“All right. This son-of-a-bitch can’t talk, can he?”

“No, but he was making such progress with simple sign language.”

“How did you find out he understood sign language?”

“All dogs do to a certain extent, don’t they? If you had Maggie’s
attention and gestured for her to come to you, she probably would, right?”

“That’s nothin’.”

“Not much, no. We went further with him. Take the simple trial and error selection test.” Her voice rose in pitch. He detected an obvious note of pride and he realized that whatever happened here, they thought they were doing wonderful things. “I had three small containers, two shaped like a square, one like a triangle. In the triangle was a sweetmeat. If he chose that one, he got the meat. It didn’t take more than twice for him to select the correct shape all the time.”

“He formed a learning set.”

“Right. Now you’re getting it. I haven’t even discussed this with Kevin,” she added, looking back, “but I’m sure Phantom has gotten to the point where he could read us.”

“Read you?”

“Maggie knows when you’re happy with her and when you’re angry—by the sound of your voice, by a gesture, whatever. She might even have reached the point where she reacts to your simple smile, no words, no sounds. I think he read our most subtle gestures and knew when some test result pleased us or got us intellectually excited.”

“That doesn’t sound as fantastic as some of the other stuff you described.”

“No, not in and of itself, but he was taking it a step further. I think he reached the point where he was testing us.”

“What?” He paused and then started up quickly.

“He would deliberately fail tests to frustrate us, to see what we would do next. I’ve been keeping accurate track of things and some of the inconsistencies point to nothing else.”

“That’s the deception you were talking about before, huh?”

“Some of it.”