The Scent of Murder--A Mystery

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  For David

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We have always had dogs in our lives. For those of you who’ve never let a furry critter share your home and your time, you’ll never understand the power they hold over us or the place they stake in our hearts and our memories. For the rest of you … well, of course you know how wonderful it is. And how maddening it can be. You remember the puppy years and the constant chorus of “No! Don’t touch that. Don’t eat that. Don’t jump on that.” You remember the sometimes sky-high vet bills and the times when your furry friend was sick and you slept on the kitchen floor next to him because … well, because you had to. You’ll always cherish the walks, the play time, the simple, wonderful friendship of a dog sitting at your side.

  And you know that every single minute of it is worthwhile.

  Around here, dogs have always been pets and companions, but there are so many who are even more than that. There are dogs who work alongside law enforcement, dogs who save lives, and of course, those dogs known as human remains detection dogs—cadaver dogs—whose job is to locate the dead.

  It is an awesome responsibility and the people who dedicate their time and their pets to it are some of the most admirable I’ve met. As part of doing research for The Scent of Murder, I was privileged to participate in cadaver dog training with the Ohio Search Dog Association, volunteers who give of their time and their talents in the name of helping their communities. Thank you to each and every one of them:

  Team leader Ellita and her dog, Tallon

  Chris and Forrest and Aspen

  Zach and Iggy

  Leigh and Pyro

  Jennifer and Annie and Big George (I borrowed that name to use in the book, too good not to!)

  Martha and Xena

  Dan and Forest

  I hope I haven’t left anyone—human or furry—out! I am grateful for your knowledge, your dedication, and the incredible lesson of loyalty shown by both dogs and owners.

  As always, my special thanks to my fabulous brainstorming partners, Shelley Costa, Serena Miller, and Emilie Richards; to my agent, Gail Fortune, who worked so hard to make this book a reality; and to my family and my own furry companions. When I was writing The Scent of Murder, Ernie and Lucy were in residence. Now it’s Lucy, a mixed breed with a shady past and a whole lot of fur, and Eliot, our Airedale puppy, who share our home and our hearts.

  CHAPTER 1

  It had rained that afternoon and the sidewalks were still wet. When the last of the evening light hit them, the slate squares reflected Jazz Ramsey’s neighborhood—streetlights, and the neon signs that flashed from the windows of the trendy pubs, and a watery rendering of St. John Cantius church, an urban Monet masterpiece, its tan brick walls and bell tower blurred.

  Even though it was officially spring, the wind off Lake Erie was wicked. Jazz bundled her shoulder-length brown hair into a loose ponytail and pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt, then hunched further into her North Face jacket. She stopped at a corner, waiting for the light to change, and was pleased when Luther sat down at her side even without a command.

  “Good dog,” she was sure to tell him at the same time she breathed in the combined smell of damp earth and the discarded bag from Taco Bell crumpled near the curb.

  To Luther’s credit, he ignored whatever bits and bites of Mexican cuisine might still be in the bag. But then, he’d been trained to follow different scents. When the light changed, he trotted along when Jazz crossed the street, his pace as brisk as hers, and the way he pricked his ears and cocked his head, she knew he sensed the exhilaration that vibrated from her hand through his leash. Luther knew it was almost time to get down to business.

  Here, College Avenue started its downhill trek into the Cleveland Flats, the city’s once-booming industrial heart. These days, Clevelanders were more likely to work in health care or IT than in foundries and factories, but one hundred years ago, this was the route thousands of workers took each day from their homes in blue-collar Tremont—it was simply called the South Side then—to the fiery furnaces that produced America’s steel.

  “We’re not going far,” Jazz assured Luther at the same time she noticed the couple who stumbled out of the Treehouse just up ahead made sure to give the massive German shepherd a wide berth. “Just over here,” she told him once they’d passed the open door to the bar and the blaring music that seeped onto the street wasn’t quite so loud. “Over to the new condos.”

  They stopped outside a sturdy brick building nearly ninety years old with solid walls and a slate roof. By the end of summer, Jazz imagined there would be gleaming glass in the window frames where there was plywood now, and window boxes, too, no doubt, and cars parked outside that reflected the status-conscious success of the young professionals she’d heard were already lined up to buy.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight the building was empty and dark and she had it all to herself.

  It was the perfect place to put Luther through his paces.

  Still hanging on to the dog’s leash with one hand, Jazz fished the key from her pocket with the other and silently thanked Ken Zelinsky, the site supervisor, who’d agreed to give her an hour’s time inside the building.

  It wasn’t easy to find urban training sites for a human remains detection dog.

  She swung open the door and slanted Luther a look. “So what do you think?”

  Luther sat, his tail thumping out a rhythm of excitement on the front stoop, and before she unhooked his leash, Jazz did a quick run-through of what she’d learned from his owner. Luther was a little over two years old, good-natured. He could be as playful as any pup, but he had a serious side, too. Like now, when he had to work.

  “He’s a smart dog,” Greg Johnson had insisted when he begged Jazz to help with the final stages of Luther’s training. “He just needs some reinforcement from a really good handler. That’s you, Jazz.”

  It was.

  Or at least it used to be.

  These days, Jazz was feeling a little rusty. She was out of practice, not in the mood. It was one of the reasons that, after hemming and hawing and finding excuse after excuse, she’d finally agreed to Greg’s request. She needed to shake herself out of her funk, and to her way of thinking, there was no better way to do that than with a dog.

  She stepped into the long, narrow entryway of the building with its rows of broken mailboxes along one wall, and shut the front door behind her. The eerie quiet of years of neglect closed around her along with the smell of dampness and decay, rotted wiring and musty tiles carried by an errant breeze. Feeling her way, she unsnapped the leash from Luther’s collar and gave him the command she’d devised for all the dogs she worked with because it was less ghoulish than saying “Find the dead guy!”

  “Find Henry!” she told him, and she stepped back and out of Luther’s way.

  Like all HRD dogs, Luther was that rare
combination—independent enough to go off on his own and loyal enough to owner and handler to need praise. But he didn’t know Jazz well, and smart dog that he was, he wanted to be certain. He glanced over his shoulder at her.

  “You know what to do, Luther. You don’t need Greg here to tell you.” She swept a hand along her side. “Find Henry!”

  In fact, what Jazz hoped the dog would do was clear both the first and second floors in record time and head up to the third floor where that afternoon she’d hidden a human tooth (a donation from her mother, Claire, who, at the age of fifty-two, had decided she wanted the kind of sparkling smile she’d seen on so many models and had begun to see an orthodontist). Human teeth contained enough scent to attract a properly trained dog’s attention. If Luther was on his game—and she hoped he was because she hated the thought of telling Greg his dog wasn’t ready for the grueling volunteer work done by dogs and handlers—he would locate the tooth, signal by barking three times, and chomp on the treat she would use as a reward while she secured the scene and made a simulated call to the cops, just as she would do if they made a real find.

  “You gonna get a move on or what?” she asked Luther, her voice falling flat against the pitted plaster. “Find Henry!”

  In a flash of black and sable, the dog took off down the darkened hallway.

  After nearly ten years training and handling cadaver dogs, Jazz knew the ropes. She couldn’t give Luther a hint about where to go or what he was looking for so she kept back, letting him work, refusing to influence him by her demeanor or her movements. She heard his claws scramble on the tile floor somewhere in the dark up ahead, flicked on her high-powered flashlight, and followed.

  Some dogs, like pointers, are air sniffers. Some, like bloodhounds, keep their noses to the ground. No matter their breed, cadaver dogs, by virtue of their work, have to be proficient at both. They are trained as trailing dogs to pick up the scent that has fallen from decomposing bodies onto the ground, and as air-scenting dogs as well, so they can detect any smell of decomposition that’s carried on the breeze. By the time she located him in a back room of what had once been a four-room working-class apartment, Luther was hard at work.

  His eyes focused and every inch of his muscular body at the ready, he drew in a breath then hurried back and forth, side to side, through what had once been a kitchen, in an attempt to catch the strongest scent.

  Not here. On the third floor.

  Jazz knew better than to say it. Part of an HRD dog’s gift was to eliminate one area so dog and handler could move on to the next. Luther was doing his job, and he was doing it well. She had to remember to compliment Greg on his training methods.

  Nose to the floor, his ears pricked, Luther cleared the kitchen and headed into the back bedrooms. Jazz kicked a piece of fallen tile out of the way, but she kept her place. She would wait quietly until the dog emerged from the back rooms and when he headed out into the hallway, she would follow.

  At least that was her plan.

  Until Luther barked.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  CHAPTER 2

  “As soon as I heard the word dog, I had a feeling I’d find you here.”

  Jazz had been staring into the cup of coffee one of the cops had put into her hands. Her head came up, and she swallowed the sudden tightness in her throat. She ignored the flash of awareness that zinged through her and pasted on a tiny smile. After all this time, it was the only way she could face Nick.

  She turned toward him and refused to let the blast of memory and that old, familiar tingle knock her for a loop. “Are you talking about my personality or my volunteer work, Detective Kolesov?”

  He was as cool, calm, and collected as ever. She wouldn’t expect him to be any other way. Nick tipped his head in the direction of the two cruisers with their light bars rolling. “How long have they been here?”

  She remembered every minute of what had happened since Luther signaled his find, but she checked the time on her phone, anyway. It gave her something to do. “I made the call at eight forty-two. They arrived at three minutes to nine.”

  “That’s a pretty quick response.”

  “It can get lively around here on a Saturday night. My guess is they were close.”

  “Is the site secured?”

  “It was when I walked out of the building.” There was no trash can nearby so she dumped her coffee on the postage stamp–sized bit of grass outside the soon-to-be-expensive-condos building and set the paper cup on the sidewalk. “Unless your guys messed it up, it should be just as I left it.”

  He nodded but didn’t speak. Instead, Nick glanced around, from the groups of curious people gathered beyond the yellow crime scene tape that had been strung from the stop sign at the corner all the way around to the bar next door to the padlock that hung from the door of the building where Jazz had done her search.

  “You had a key.”

  It wasn’t a question, but she answered anyway. “I had permission from the construction company people to come and use the building tonight.”

  Luther sat at Jazz’s side working over the tennis ball she’d given him as a reward for a job well done, and Nick gave him the briefest of looks. “Where’s Manny?”

  She managed to keep her voice level and her shoulders steady. “Luther’s training,” she told him.

  “I’m going to assume you’re not the one who put the body there for the dog to find as part of the exercise.”

  If he was going for funny, it didn’t work, and maybe Nick realized it because he had the good sense to at least make a stab at looking embarrassed. It was not something he’d ever done well. When one of the uniformed cops came out of the building and talked quietly to him, Jazz allowed herself a closer look at Nick. It had been a little more than a year since she’d seen him, and she wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that he hadn’t changed one iota.

  Crisply pressed khakis, a white shirt stained red and blue with the flashing colors of the roll-bar lights, a sport coat with a tiny checked pattern in it, brown and black, maybe, but it was hard to tell in this light. His sandy-colored hair needed to be cut. It was close to trim time when it curled behind his ears.

  Nick finished with the officer before he looked her way again. “I’m going to need a statement.”

  She had expected as much, though she hadn’t expected Nick. In fact, she’d been hoping someone else was on duty that night, that Nick was doing whatever it was Nick did on Saturday nights. With whoever he did it with.

  “Of course,” she told him.

  He studied the area the way he did everything else, slowly and thoroughly, like there was going to be a test, and his gaze stopped on the bright lights of a nearby pizza place. “We could sit down inside and talk. I haven’t had dinner. You hungry?”

  She wasn’t. She wasn’t forgetful, either, even though he must have been. They had gone to Edison’s on their first date, and they’d shared leftover cold pizza the next morning for breakfast.

  “I need to stick around. Luther’s owner is on his way to pick him up.”

  “The dog didn’t mess with anything at the scene, did he?”

  “You know I wouldn’t let one of my dogs do that.”

  “You wouldn’t let Manny mess with the scene. I don’t know this dog.” One hand out, Nick took a step closer to Luther, but when the shepherd swung his head around, Nick changed his mind about giving him a pat. “You want to start from the beginning?”

  She did, because once she started, she could get it over with. “Luther and I arrived at eight thirty. We had permission to be in the building. The site super and his wife are having dinner down the street. He said he’d come by for the key when they’re done.”

  “Good.” Nick nodded. “I’m going to want to talk to him. If the front door was locked—”

  “There was a breeze.” Though it had barely registered at the time, Jazz remembered now and a shiver skittered over her shoulders. �
�There was air movement inside the building. I noticed it when we walked in. And if the whole place was boarded up and locked tight, there shouldn’t have been, right? Maybe there was a piece of plywood missing from one of the windows. Or another door somewhere left open?”

  One corner of his mouth pulled tight. “Back door. It looked as if it had been pried open and it’s closed now, but not all the way. At least that’s what Officer Franklin just told me. You might have been in there with the perp.”

  It was something she hadn’t thought about, something she didn’t want to think about, so she refused to consider it. “Luther would have let me know. I let him have the run of the place and he found—”

  “What?”

  She made sure to turn away from Nick before she squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself against the memory.

  “I thought…” When her voice cracked, she swore under her breath, lifted her chin, and turned back to Nick. “When the beam of my flashlight first hit it, I thought it was a mannequin. But Luther wouldn’t have signaled if it was.”

  “And you took a closer look.”

  The image was burned in her brain, not as frightening as it was horrific. Maybe the way to deal with it was to talk it out.

  “Most of what we do is practice and preparation. You know that. I haven’t actually found a body in a couple years.”

  He’d been writing down everything she said in a small notebook he had taken out of his pocket, and his head came up. “A couple years ago? You never told me—”

  “You never had time to listen.” It was as much soul-baring as she was willing to do now. Maybe ever. “That time it was an old man named Henry. He’d wandered away from assisted living. It was February, cold. There was eight inches of snow on the ground. When we found him—”

  “You and Manny.”

  “When we found him, he looked peaceful. As if he’d just sat down and fallen asleep.”

  “This woman didn’t look like she was sleeping.”