Noah's Rainy Day (46 page)

“Nothing’s getting in Beulah’s way. Or mine. Come hell or high water, I’m finding Noah.”

“READY?” I ASKED.

Streeter nodded. Gates gave us a wave and leaned against my SUV with Knapp and Gregory at either side of him. Streeter called to him, “Keep the search teams in the campground or on the road, okay?”

Gates waved his hand in agreement.

“Stay right behind me the whole time, okay?” I said to Streeter, who nodded in response. “Oh no, Streeter.”

“What?”

“I gave Jack little Max’s beret. I don’t have a target scent for Beulah.”

“I kept the sock I found at Fletcher’s house. Will that help?” Streeter searched his coat pocket and pulled out the plastic bag.

“Let’s hope it’s little Max’s and not some other kid’s,” I said. I extracted the sock and knelt beside Beulah. I held it away from the dog’s nose and commanded, “Beulah, find.”

Beulah trotted around the packed snow of the parking lot and circled a small area several times. The lead was loose between the dog and me. I looked back at Gates. Gates nodded his encouragement.

Over the sound of the generators, I yelled to Streeter, “It’s definitely little Max’s sock.”

I could see the word form on his lips, “What?”

“His sock. This is most definitely little Max’s sock,” I shouted.

I jerked my head in Beulah’s direction to explain. Beulah had lowered her nose for an instant, and then she lifted it up in the air and was circling a small area repeatedly. She started pulling on the lead straight into the campground area.

Over the rumble of the generator, I shouted the command as support, “Find!”

The lead went taut. Beulah strained against the harness to follow the scent. I stepped through the deep snow as quickly as I could with my snowshoes. Beulah only went a few hundred yards, directly to the outhouse, and bayed excitedly. Her front legs were stiff and the hair on the scruff of her neck was standing on end.

Streeter looked at me. I gave him a beats-me look. “She only does that when she’s found the target.”

Streeter asked, “Let me look inside.”

“Go ahead,” I said, as I shortened the lead and knelt beside Beulah, encouraging her with long strokes and kind words.

Streeter slowly pushed the door of the outhouse open. His headlamp swept across the inside of the outhouse. He looked behind the door and peered cautiously down the black hole and up at the ceiling beams. He came out of the outhouse and shrugged his shoulders.

I suggested, “Look around.”

Streeter circled the outhouse twice. With his headlamp sweeping across the dark woods, he knocked the snow off each mound he encountered with his boot, only to find mostly rocks and a few pieces of wood. He climbed on top of the outhouse to look on the flat roof and found nothing.

When he returned to where I knelt, he asked, “Now what?”

“Well, it could mean little Max stopped to use the outhouse and then went right back to the car,” I explained. “But normally, Beulah would have backtracked on the same course, following from the oldest to the newest scent. And she wouldn’t bay like she did. She only does that when she finds the actual person. I’ve seen her do it several times before. I’ll restart Beulah. There may be several different trails. Or maybe the snow is bothering her.”

Or maybe it’s the mountain lion incident on Christmas Eve. Although
she did fine in the airport and with the garbage in the parking lot, Beulah’s confidence in the woods might be shaky.

We walked back to the parking lot with Beulah, where we were met with rumbles of chatter coming from Knapp and Gregory. I couldn’t hear them over the generator, but I could tell they were concerned about Beulah. Rumor at the field office of her downhill slide as the best search-and-rescue dog in the country started circulating the second I’d set foot in the office three weeks ago as a new agent and assigned handler for Beulah. My self-confidence waned. Ignoring them, I knelt in the middle of the parking lot beside Beulah again and scratched behind her long, droopy ears.

“Good girl, Beulah,” I encouraged her. “You’re a good dog. Now, let’s try again.”

I extracted the sock from the plastic bag in my pocket and held it several inches from Beulah’s nose. I ordered, “Beulah, find.”

The dog immediately trotted through the parking lot to the same area as she had before and circled the exact spot where she had paused only minutes earlier. She lowered her nose again and sniffed deeply.

Again, I commanded, “Find.”

Beulah took the direct route to the outhouse again, stopping short of the closed door and baying wildly.

I frowned and ordered, “Beulah, find.”

The dog would not budge.

Streeter was watching along with everyone else. I gave him a shrug and he just shook his head.

“This is so odd, Streeter. I’m not sure what to make of it,” I said.

Streeter replied, “Well, there is no way he’s here, unless you see a mound that I’ve missed.”

“I sure don’t.”

After three more identical attempts, Chief Gates shouted to us, “The search teams are ready to head out, guys.”

Streeter nodded and waved. Turning back to me, he said, “What’s next? Your call.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it quite like this. The way Beulah is reacting I would swear she’s found her target. She only bays
like that when she finds what she’s looking for. Other than the mountain lion incident on Christmas Eve.”

“A mountain lion?” Gates asked, unfolding his arms.

“But that was because the mountain lion was between me and her,” I corrected.

Streeter asked, “What mountain lion?”

“Long story. But maybe that’s what has her spooked out here. That or the dark. I’ve never taken her on a night search. And she hasn’t been back in the woods since the mountain lion incident.”

Streeter said, “The scratches and sore ribs? A mountain lion, right?”

“A close call, let’s just put it that way,” I said. “I would swear little Max was in or around the outhouse.” I couldn’t even think about Noah. I had to stay focused on little Max. For my own sanity.

“But he’s not,” Streeter said.

“I know. The only thing I can figure is that Fletcher let little Max out to go to the bathroom, then took him by car to some other spot. But then she would have backtracked. I would bet money that these guys won’t find anything out in the wooded area. If Max was out there, Beulah would have picked up the scent of a different trail on one of those attempts and followed it.” I was convinced. I knew Beulah and she wasn’t a quitter.

Streeter warned, “The search teams will be starting any minute. Want to go with them?”

“I’ll kennel Beulah. I have a battery-heated blanket I’ll throw over the kennel to keep her warm and I’ll join you on the search.”

Gates said, “Maybe it’s the noise from the generator.”

I kicked some snow with the toe of my boot. “Maybe I’ll try again after the search.”

Streeter called out to the teams, “Remember. Based on the time of Fletcher’s departure from home and subsequent return, taking into consideration the driving time, and taking into account that he wasn’t in the best physical shape, Fletcher could not have wandered very far from the parking lot. He did not have snowshoes, only snow boots. And he had a five-year-old boy in tow and would be carrying the other boy strapped in a bright blue Styrofoam car seat. Turn back in an hour and a half for the
first sweep, and we’ll meet back here in three hours. Go slowly and be thorough.”

The teams took off in their respective directions, with Gates assigned to direct one, me the other, and Streeter the last. The searchers of each team linked arms to form a human chain and slowly kicked away the soft snow beneath our feet, looking beneath every tree, bush, and crevice we encountered. The chaotic sweep of headlamps was as mesmerizing as a well-orchestrated laser show. The mountainous, wooded terrain offered peculiar challenges to all the team members as we fanned our way through the woods.

Every time I kicked a clump of snow, I was praying I’d find nothing beneath.

A CHILL GRIPPED ME
.

Maybe it was the drop of melting snow that landed on the back of my neck. Maybe it was thoughts of little Max and Noah braving the elements all night. Cold. Alone. Scared.

I told Steve Knapp to take charge of my line, broke from the search party, and told him I had to stay back. I was thankful for the bright moonlight in the clear Colorado sky that would soon surrender to dawn. It was five o’clock. I noticed that our extensive search had eroded the hard snow in the campground, but revealed nothing but frozen earth beneath. The stubborn foliage and sparse rocks poking through the surface somehow gave me hope.

I lumbered back through the snow. Alone. Nearing the parking lot, the curving line of cars shimmered in the rays of the waning moonlight, like an eel. The imagery tugged somewhere dark in the recesses of my mind. Shallow waters. A fish or eel. Just below the surface. In the mountains where it shouldn’t be. Water everywhere. Forty days and forty nights. Lots of rain. Just like in the Bible. Noah. Where he shouldn’t be.

I pulled Beulah from her cage again. I slipped on her harness and attached the lead. I was going to try this one more time. Only this time,
I was going to search for Noah, not little Max. I don’t know why I didn’t think to try this before. I fished in the backseat for one of Noah’s stocking caps he’d left in my car this week. I knelt down beside Beulah, took a deep breath, and held out the stocking cap.

“Find, Beulah. Find!”

The persistent bloodhound circled the parking lot, hesitating at a spot about three feet from where she had in her search for little Max. I realized Noah had been in the backseat. That made sense. Fletcher would have put little Max beside him in the front and Noah in the rear to make a quick getaway. Beulah pulled me to the exact location as before, directly in front of the outhouse. Again. Not far behind the bloodhound, I stood rubbing my forehead. The hell of it was that all I could think about was Fletcher’s comments about forty days and forty nights and lots of rain. Crazy how the mind works. The all-nighters were beginning to take a toll.

“Stubborn,” Streeter grumbled as he walked across the trodden snow toward me.

I hadn’t heard him at first because the generators were so loud. The crunching of the hard-packed snow beneath his feet as he approached ripped me back to the previous night. Fletcher’s wet boots across the concrete floor in the dark garage. Why hadn’t I shot the son of a bitch when I’d had the chance? Made him die the slow, painful death he had deserved. My mind slid to the image of Fletcher dangling from his makeshift noose, his stained pants and underwear bunched around his ankles. The fury of my lost opportunity in that garage fueled my body despite my exhaustion.

“She’s not stubborn. She found her target. I just don’t understand what she’s telling me.”

“I wasn’t talking about the dog. I meant you.” He smiled.

“I knew you’d come back,” I said, staring at the outhouse as if it were a giant wooden tarot card.

“I told you to forget about this.”

I brushed a loose strand of my hair from my face. “I’m sorry about breaking ranks. But I just couldn’t let this damn thing go.”

“That’s when mistakes are made. People can die from mistakes.”

“It won’t happen again.”

And that’s all it took. He was back to helping me again.

“What’s your gut telling you?” he asked.

“Beulah’s not the rusty one. I am,” I answered.

“And?”

“Look at her.”

Beulah stood directly in front of the outhouse door, howling.

Streeter folded his arms as he watched the persistent hound.

“This time I used Noah’s cap, not little Max’s sock. Beulah tracked Noah to the exact same spot. Again.”

“Maybe it means something totally different.”

“Like?” I grabbed Beulah by her harness, crouched beside her, and rewarded my hound with strokes across her red coat. Her howling stopped and her tail thumped against the frozen ground.

“Well, we’ve looked all around this outhouse several times, right?”

I nodded again.

“And there are no boys.”

I shrugged.

He persisted. “Fletcher couldn’t have buried the boys’ bodies because the ground is frozen. What if Fletcher left the boys right here and someone else picked them up? Would Beulah still return to this spot?”

I shook my head, rubbing my chin. “She would track the scent to the car or snowmobile or whatever picked them up. There were no tracks, except in the parking lot. If they went back that way, so would Beulah. She’d follow right up to where the boys got into the car or whatever. That would be a more recent scent.”

“In the parking lot?”

I nodded.

“But it had snowed. Maybe the snow covered the tracks.”

“True.”

“Sorry, Liv, but I have to ask. What if Fletcher killed them right here, then carried them off somewhere. Would the scent stop when they died?”

I shook my head.

“If a wild animal got them, say a mountain lion or a coyote dragged them from this spot sometime before we got here? Is that possible?”

I shook my head again. “If a wild animal dragged them off somewhere, Beulah would have followed the boys’ scent.”

“Dead or alive?”

“Dead or alive.”

“Even if it was a mountain lion, considering her scary experience on Christmas? If she was spooked by the cat?”

“I think so.”

“And the scent of a mountain lion or some animal doesn’t overpower the boys’ scent?”

“Maybe if the animal ate them whole. Right here on the spot.” I turned my head and made my last meal public. It was all too much. I wiped my mouth and said, “Sorry.”

Streeter patted me on the back. “We would have seen some signs. Carnage of some sort. Blood. A shoe. Something.” Streeter paced the trodden snow.

I told Streeter the whole story about the mountain lion, how Michael and I had been out on a training exercise. I didn’t leave anything out. I explained that Beulah didn’t act upset or even seem to know what danger she or I was in.