“Okay, good. Questions while we wait for the go-ahead?”
“One scent or two?”
“This doesn’t matter.” Reaper held up the two separate bags. “Their clothes are washed in the same soap and put through the same machine. They play together and sleep in the same bed. Whichever scent I put under Whiskey’s nose, she’s going to smell both kids at the same time. Funny story: once Cerberus sent a female volunteer out into the woods to be our lost person during a nighttime training evolution. A search dog found her, leaped over her, dragging a happy tongue across her face, and disappeared. It happened over and over again. Then this lady heard the searchers in the woods. They couldn’t have been twenty yards away. She said they were having snacks and a rest. She was cold and tired and wanted the off-road vehicle to come pick her up so she could go back to the campfire and have her own snack. She was told not to have anything but water on her because she was alone in the woods and there were bears in the area and she’d been out there for hours.”
“Brave.”
“And hungry. There she lay as the dog came back again and again and again. And she didn’t understand why the dog hadn’t gone back to signal the find. She could hear that the dog wasn’t signaling the find because of what the handler was saying.”
“Finally, she called out?” Gabriel asked as a squad car pulled in and the security officer went over to talk through the guy’s window.
“Finally, the searchers crossed her path. The K9 trainer was upset that the dog hadn’t found the lady first. The woman explained how many times the dog had come by to check on her. So many times that she had time to figure it out. Her husband was on that search team, walking with the dog. Their clothes had the same water, same soap, same dryer smells. They used the same soap, same shampoo, and they’d hugged and kissed before she’d gone off in the woods.”
“The dog thought they were the same person?” Gabriel asked.
“Part of the team. I’m making an educated guess here, but when we go out as Cerberus, we’re in uniform. The men often prep at Headquarters, same laundry, same shower soap. The dogs recognize the team members and discount them. They’re not looking for a searcher. They’re looking for someone who’s lost.”
“Brilliant.”
“Sure enough, the team leader reported that the dog had gone back and sniffed the husband over not once but twice.” Reaper crossed his arms over his chest and looked around as the security officer approached. “That K9 showed a flaw that hadn’t been considered previously, and they developed a policy that a family member or roommate couldn’t go out with the dog teams. If they wanted to help on the search, they had to be on one of the walking teams.” Reaper nudged Gabriel. “That’s them giving us the thumbs up. Ready?”
“I think I should watch and learn.” Gabriel stretched the lead toward Reaper. “Kids’ lives on the line. This isn’t the time for me to mess things up.”
“Besides the poor choice of extra fragrant tick spray, you’ll do fine. Whiskey knows what she’s doing.” Reaper squatted with both bags in his hands, opened them one by one, and held them out together. “Whiskey, scent.”
Whiskey stuck her nose in each bag.
Her nose went up in the air, down to the ground, over to the door, up into the air, and that’s when something caught and shifted.
There was a time when he was in the pool swimming against his fellow recruits, hoping to earn a place in the Ranger lineup. Everything had been smooth and effortless. So effortless, in fact, that he stuck his head up to see how far back he’d fallen from the pack. There wasn’t a single swimmer visible. And he thought they’d all hit the wall, tucked and rolled, and had passed him going in the other direction, swimming the two lengths of the Olympic-sized pool. He was so far behind that he thought he’d bombed the trial. He wasn’t going to make it, but he decided to push a little harder anyway. He was cutting through the water with a sense of peace and the absolute perfection and ease of being there.
That swim was meditative, hypnotic, otherworldly.
This, Gabriel had thought, is what people might call bliss.
Only when he touched the wall did he realize that he’d swum the entire race. And he came in first by a long shot.
He set a record for that swim.
He’d never been able to replicate that feeling.
From Whiskey’s posture and the look in her eyes, Gabriel thought that Whiskey had mastered the ability to enter the Zen state of “search.”
Whiskey was off, her short legs moving faster than Gabriel had been ready for.
“Let the line loose,” Reaper said. “You don’t want to stop her. That line isn’t to keep her near you. It’s so you don’t lose sight of her. It’s on us to keep up.”
Reaper fell in with Gabriel as he picked up his pace to do his duty, keeping a slack line. “Even though Whiskey’s going to set the pace, you still need to pace yourself,” Reaper counseled. “She can go all day and night once her nose lights up that way. It’s on us to make sure that she takes breaks. Every forty-five minutes, we’ll rest for fifteen.”
“At this rate, do you think we’ll be out here for that long?” They were kids. How far off could they be?
Whiskey had stopped and was sniffing around a rusted tool shed.
“From the way she’s sniffing,” Reaper said. “She’s checking out the scents. Possibly the kids stopped here or played here recently. Some of the volunteers probably already cleared this point. I’m going to look over every nook and cranny. But she’s—”
Whiskey trotted to the back of the shed, then moved into the woods.
“—not looking like she’s very interested,” Reaper concluded. “I’m going to stop and check this out. I’ll catch up. I have her on my radio tracker. As long as she’s in line of sight, we’re good.”
