Ten Little Bloodhounds (22 page)

“Are you out of your mind? You don’t treat your friends this way just because you’re pissed at us!”

I waited.

He slapped the desk in anger. “The scent pads were gathered during two searches that are still open cases. You’re hindering ongoing investigations!”

“Arrest me.”

“You’re violating your contract with the county!”

“Sue me.”

Hank took a deep breath, and tried a different approach.

“Look, Jo Beth, I’m sorry I came in here yelling at you; I know you must feel lousy. Is your leg hurting? Can I get you some water? I’m also sorry that I talked Jasmine into going along with not telling you about the search; will you forgive me?”

Bluster and threats hadn’t worked, so now he was trying the soft soap.

“No.”

“No what?” He now sounded bewildered.

“No, my leg isn’t hurting. No, I don’t want water, and no, I won’t forgive you.”

He threw up his hands, exasperated. “When you’re ready to go, I’ll be in the car.” He headed toward the door.

I punched in the grooming room’s number.

“Donnie Ray, please bring the two frozen scent pads from the freezer and load Marjorie in the sheriff’s car. Don’t forget both leashes and deer jerky.”

“Jasmine picked up the scent pads about five minutes ago. She told me to load Caesar and I just got back. Did she change her mind?”

“No, forget Marjorie, Caesar is fine. I didn’t know she had already taken care of it. Tell Wayne I’ll be back around six or seven. If he needs me I can be reached at the Camden County sheriff’s office.”

“You’re going too? Jasmine told me to check on you often while she was gone. What gives?”

“Mixed signals. Hold down the fort, I’ll be back around seven.”

“Yes’m.”

Little Miss Hurt Feelings had been very sure that Hank would prevail, and I’d curl up in bed indisposed. She should have known better.

I reached for the crutches and made my way to Hank’s car and stood by his left rear door. Jasmine crawled out of the back seat to see what I wanted.

“Jasmine, I’d appreciate you staying here. I can handle a lineup. Chet will be calling this afternoon with material to fax, and one of us has to be here to give him the code word. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” she murmured smoothly. “Good luck.”

“Thanks.” I clambered aboard and slammed the door before she could reach for it. We were being so polite and considerate, it made my teeth ache.

Caesar had been leaning over the seat sniffing the deer jerky when I slid in the back. I bent over to pick up the Ziploc from the floorboard and Hank’s sudden acceleration would have broken my neck if I hadn’t been prepared for his childish display of bad temper. I had a death grip on back of the headrest of his contoured seat.

Caesar wasn’t as lucky. The thrust took him off his feet, and the economy Chevy that the county provided didn’t have a great deal of space in back. He had rebounded off the back of the seat, rolled forward, and was jammed in the narrow slot for knees and shoes, frantically fighting to regain his feet.

“Slow down!” I yelled angrily as I gripped Caesar’s harness to pull him back up on the plastic beside me. Hank’s quick use of his brakes gave me the momentum to pull him free and back up onto the seat. Caesar weighs right at one hundred thirty pounds. My right arm felt stretched out of shape.

“What’s going on back there?” he asked as he sought
to find my eyes in his rearview mirror. He had slowed to a crawl.

“Your asinine driving threw Caesar off his feet. This isn’t a pissing contest. Try and use some judgment!”

“Sorry, Caesar,” he said, raising his voice and turning to see if he was okay. “It’s your mistress’s fault, she’s driving me crazy!”

I didn’t bother to answer. Hank raised the speed to sixty and kept it there for almost two hours. I had lowered the glass over halfway on Caesar’s side, and he had his head out and his long ears were blown backward from the rushing wind.

As Hank approached small towns and sped up upon leaving them, he had no jerky stops and starts, just one continuing smooth movement. He was an excellent driver. I must have stung his pride on deriding his driving skills.

We didn’t speak again until he glided to the curb in the visitors’ row of parking spaces at the Camden County Court House in Woodbine.

“How are we gonna handle the next step?” Hank questioned, politely. “You have the crutches to contend with. Who handles the pooch?”

“Don’t call him a pooch,” I uttered with dignity while I scrambled for an acceptable answer. Where was my brain when I informed Jasmine I wouldn’t need her services? Stupid move, but I had to live with it.

“Would you please take Caesar’s lead until we’re in front of the lineup?” I asked politely and hadn’t scrunched my face in disgust at my forgetfulness.

“I’d be delighted.” He walked around behind the car and opened the door.

“Come on, pooch, let’s take a walk.”

I
kept silent and made an awkward figure struggling out of the cramped back seat. Some of the swelling had gone down, but the color of the leg was still eggplant, black and blue. Jasmine had slit my jeans up to my knee so I could dress myself and then had wrapped adhesive tape around it to keep it together. If I made any kind of a fashion statement, it would be disheveled and windblown. My hair had suffered so Caesar could enjoy the wind. I decided to avoid looking in mirrors or reflecting glass. I wasn’t up to pulling myself together; all my energy was focused on pulling myself across the pavement.

Hank was letting Caesar smell the small plot of grass sloping up to the steps. I stood and counted the white marble risers. I wanted to whimper; there were twelve of the damn things.

“Why don’t we take the elevator?” Hank said, appearing at my elbow.

“Thank God,” I said with a grateful breath.

He led me around some shrubbery and into a tiny cage.

“You’re white as a sheet, Sidden,” he said, sounding gruff. “Didn’t Doc Sellers give you something to take?”

“I’m saving it for hard times,” I commented as the elevator rumbled open. Hank slowed his steps to match my snail’s pace down the hall and into the sheriff’s office.

Sheriff Beaman was sitting behind his desk and rose to greet us. He was dressed as I saw him last, like a sheriff of the ol’ frontier, and his slight paunch was evident in the tight-fitted Western-cut shirt. I wasn’t one who should be noticing such things, since I didn’t look too snazzy myself. They shook hands and Beaman nodded at me as I sank gracelessly into a metal side chair.

“Hear you had a tussle with a gator,” Beaman said, beaming at both of us.

“He won,” I commented, trying to prop up the crutches on the wall beside me. Both of them laughed and I kept an insipid smile in place. I know how to play the game, I just don’t do it often; it galls me.

“How do you conduct this experiment, Hank?” Beaman asked, while relaxing backward in his large executive chair.

I glanced humbly at Hank, like asking for his permission to speak. I was perched on the edge of my seat because my left leg was throbbing from the knee downward, not because I was anxious.

“Why don’t we let Jo Beth explain?” Hank said, being generous. He was pleased as punch with me. I wasn’t embarrassing him in front of a friend.

“Let’s hear it,” Beaman acknowledged with an expansive gesture.

“Well … we really need an outside source as a witness, someone like a newspaper reporter or a sitting judge, so we won’t look biased, and I think the accused should have a lawyer present, you know, to advise him. A lawyer could tell him how much the evidence could or couldn’t weigh in court. What do you think, Sheriff Beaman?”

I channeled all my attention on him, waiting nervously for his valued opinion.

“I can handle that,” Beaman said, including Hank and me with a satisfied smile. He picked up the phone. “After all, we want to
appear
unbiased, don’t we?”

I swallowed bile as I bathed both of them in my warm glow of approval and gratitude.

Thirty minutes later we were gathered in an unused courtroom. Sheriff Beaman, Hank, and I, with Caesar lying near my feet, sat at the prosecutor’s table, and two young men looking no older than the eight black teenagers presently ensconced in the jury box sat at the defense table.

One of the young men at the table was a cub reporter from the
Camden County Crier
; the other was a hastily recruited defense lawyer from the Georgia Defense League, who had been given five minutes to confer with his possible future client. We were waiting for an ADA from the District Attorney’s office.

I glanced around the room. There were several
policemen and deputies sitting in small cliques around the room. I decided it must be near a shift change, or they had an unusual amount of the hangers-on that populate small Southern courthouses.

A man, equally immature as the others, ran into the room, skidded to a stop, and proceeded decorously to Sheriff Beaman’s side and pulled up a chair. In the hushed silence of the room, we all heard his stage whisper.

“Has the suspect been read his rights?”

A very good question. I saw Beaman’s angry countenance, and knew this was something he hadn’t taken care of. I glanced quickly to my right, and one of the young men at the defense table had dismay prominently displayed on his face. I now knew which was which, even if we hadn’t been introduced. The lawyer had been secretly hoping that this obvious duty had been overlooked, so that anything the suspect blurted out here could be excluded from the teenager’s future trial. I don’t believe he had any doubt that the kid was guilty, so he had been counting on them screwing up before they tried him.

We all waited until the teenagers filed out, with the lawyer, then Sheriff Beaman bringing up the rear, so he could ream some asses, and after several minutes all reappeared.

Sheriff Beaman arose and addressed us.

“We have a lineup here that we want to conduct without bias, so no one can say it was handled incorrectly. I’m gonna let the dog handler explain the scent machine and the scent evidence she will be using.” He nodded my way.

I stood and turned, leaning my butt against the table to support me. I didn’t touch the crutches.

“My name is Jo Beth Sidden. I breed and train bloodhounds to mantrail, drug search, discover arson, and find cadavers. Each living person has an individual scent that is like no others. Just like fingerprints, a person’s individual scent is unique. It consists of dead skin we shed, body odor, fallen hair follicles, perspiration, and other bodily fluids that we excrete. This scent surrounds us like a fog, and sheds thousands of tiny invisible pieces with each step we take.

“Simply explained, the dog searches out the individual scent of the person he is seeking. This is called the bloodhound’s testimony in a court of law. Now I hear a few titters, and I can understand why. Everyone is picturing a large bloodhound with his hand on the Bible, baying and pointing a paw at the guilty party. This isn’t what happens. A bloodhound has a rigid test of ability, right to judge, and strict rules to follow before he can give testimony. He has to have been recognized as an expert, such as having several prior successes in court, being certified by the AKC, and successively trail from the point of the crime to the conclusion of the search.

“The only exception to this rule is the scent machine that gathers the air from the crime scene and stores it in a concentrated form on a sterile gauze pad; then the pad is frozen until a possible subject is found. If the chain of evidence is proven, the dog successfully picks the suspect out of an impartial lineup. Then and only then is his testimony accepted in a courtroom.

“I would now like to tell the defense that this dog is
highly qualified, the evidence chain unbroken, and the bloodhound’s testimony will be allowed into a trial.” I looked into space between the lawyer and the reporter, pretending I didn’t know which one was the lawyer. The young lawyer gave me a small nod, to say he would take my word until court time, and then beware, he’d challenge every minute detail. I nodded my acceptance to his implied challenge.

“Now, scent evidence is hard to prove from a scent pad when taken from a convenience store robbery that has maybe two hundred or more people passing in and out of the store each day. All those scents mingled together, no dog could pick out any one scent with any accuracy
unless
we know what the culprit touched while he was in the store, and the exact locations where he stood. If we have this information, we can contain the area, plug in the scent machine, and it draws the scent from certain areas that the suspect inhabited last.

“It’s nice that we have a bank bag with the suspect’s fingerprints and smell on the surface, as we do on the third robbery, but we only have scent from the first two robberies. I believe after this lineup, you’ll understand why law enforcement calls scent from the crime scene the ‘forgotten evidence.’

“Since this kind of lineup is new to this area, I want to prove wrong the people who will guess that I have trained a dog to do tricks. Or can give a certain hand signal to the dog that only he will see or understand. Or that I might tug his leash in a way to point out a suspect.

“I think we will let someone neutral handle the dog.”

I looked at the reporter. “Do you know me, sir?”

“Me?” He asked with surprise. “I’m not going near that dog!” A lot of laughter followed.

I smiled. “The dog is very gentle. It is trained only to trail a person’s scent. He’s not a catch dog or an attack dog. He’d happily greet you and lick your face if you were breaking into my home, and expect to be petted.”

More laughter and the bolder ones began calling out to the cub reporter, “Give it a try,” “You can sue if he bites,” and the one that convinced him, “I dare you!” He must have recognized a voice. He stared behind him and must have found the source of the taunt. He stood suddenly and boldly walked toward me.

“What do you want me to do?”