Free Cadaver Dog by Doug Goodman Page A

director was looking at his watch.
    “How much time has passed?” Angie asked.
    “Twenty minutes.”
    She did the math in her head. Forty minutes to search eighty stores. That was half a minute for each store, with people in the way and a giant food court calling to her dog.
    “If you want to stop, you can,” Mark Summers said.
    “Hell, no. We’re just getting started.” She unclipped his leash and gave Murder the command. Murder looked to her for assurance. “Go,” she urged him, and he took a few steps forward. He then slid down to one side of the hallway, and put his nose in the corner. Took a big whiff like a vacuum cleaner.
    That’s when Angie suddenly realized the real obstacles to the test. It wasn’t the walkers or the strollers or the food court. She extended her hand into the sunlight that was streaming through the plaza sunroofs. It was the light. The walkways between the stores had giant sun roofs that were heating the walkways. Scent preferred shadows. Also, the walkways were edged with porous sandstone, which would soak up the scent.
    She pointed farther down the sandstone and said, “Check here.” Murder put his nose to where she pointed and took another whiff. She walked a few more feet down the sandstone and told him again to check for scent. By working down the walkway in this fashion, she was able to cover more ground, and more stores, in less time. But there was still a lot of ground to cover, and not much time.
    “I swear, if that dog comes anywhere near me, I will sue the pants off of you all,” the woman in the yoga pants said from behind Angie. Angie could hear her and her squeaky-wheeled stroller coming toward them. She held her hand up to Murder, who sat and waited for the woman in the stroller to pass.
    Angie pointed to another area. Murder stepped away from the edge and walked into the middle of the walkway. He just stood there, panting. She remembered seeing Waylon display the same behavior the night they first encountered a zombie. Waylon had been at a tree line then and was trying to figure out which direction to go. Angie had waited patiently then and she would wait patiently now. It was possible Murder was simply trying to work out in his head where to go next, but she was sure he was on top of the scent. He may have even been breathing heavily to place the scent on his Jacobson’s organ, a little-understood part of the dog’s brain that was potentially used in tracking. Cadaver dogs had a habit of tasting for scent in water and in buried training exercises. She wondered if Murder was showing a similar behavior.
    Murder woofed and ran back up the way they had come. As Angie followed, she thought about air circulation and currents in the mall, but she didn’t really have an answer to it. Murder disappeared around a corner.
    Angie tried to keep up. Her evaluators tried to keep up as well, which was no easy task. Angie was a pretty fit country girl. She didn’t run regularly or own a gym membership, but she had a lot of hard chores and dogs to work with every day.
    As she came around the corner, the woman in the yoga pants yelled. Murder was running up to them, wagging his tail.
    “Murder, stop it!” Angie roared.
    Murder ran a circle around the frightened woman, tail wagging, then ran back to Angie and sat.
    Angie looked back at the evaluators and said, “You sons of bitches.”
    She pulled the chicken out of her jacket pocket and gave it to Murder. He took her back to the stroller, this time leaping up against it. The woman tried to push Murder away, but Angie grabbed the woman’s hand.
    “Don’t you touch my dog.”
    Angie pulled back the stroller top and found a little stuffed dog.
    “That isn’t it,” Steve said. “But it is a decoy, set up to smell like the real wasp.”
    “What do you mean, ‘set up to smell like the real wasp?’”
    “I mean,” Mark said, “a crimson wasp was put in this stroller last night, then taken out today and placed somewhere in