Free Color Blind (Team Red) by T. Hammond Page B

correct desks. We figured if Teresa or David was trying to direct Red based on the desk name plates, we’d expose them right away.” Gil paused to laugh quietly to himself. “It was the craziest thing to see the dog moving the chairs around to the proper desks. There was no way for Red to have done that without him being cognizant of the instructions, and relying on his sense of smell to match the chairs with the proper desks.
     
    “Since that time, we have used Red to go through cold case evidence, as well as evidence on current investigations. Most significantly, he can distinguish one person’s blood from another’s - we had no idea his nose would be that fine-tuned. In a few cases, all he could tell us was that the same scent was on unrelated, separate crimes, helping us link them; this is important when we don’t have any forensic evidence at all. He’s able to tell us if there is more than one perpetrator, or the sex of the perp. It’s been amazing to learn what dogs are capable of, yet I also recognize that Red has a higher intelligence than a regular canine. It’s my guess his reasoning ability is closely tied to Teresa’s thought process, although, I have no way to prove that.”
     
    “Wow,” Lt. Mercer said. “This is amazing stuff. What I find remarkable, is that his success seems to be measurable. Have you had success solving any of those cold cases?”
     
    “Only one so far,” Gil admitted. “There’s not a whole lot of manpower to spend on ten-year-and-older cases, when we have so much current stuff to handle. But, we assign each person in the office one of the cold cases that Red has flagged. Each officer, or pair of officers in the instances where Red has linked two cases, work on their cases between current assignments. It involves a lot of reviewing old evidence, so its time consuming and often redundant. We are pretty hopeful about the two cases he’s managed to link up for us.”
     
    “Just before you arrived, Teresa was telling us Red has the ability to prioritize. How does that work?” Lt. Osborn asked. This was his first contribution to the conversation, I had almost forgotten that he was present. “And, how would you measure something like that?”
     
    “I can’t say it’s something we focused on measuring; although, it is very consistent in much of the work we have done already. One example would be when we asked Red about identifying a person in a line-up based on the scent off a bloody towel,” Gil explained. “We had picked up the towel at a crime scene a couple weeks earlier. During a breaking and entering, the perp sustained an injury on a glass window, then used a kitchen towel to clean up.
     
    “Oh!” Red said, scrambling to his feet and placing a paw on my lap . “I remember that one! That was the case last week.”
     
    “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s the one he’s talking about,” I agreed.
     
    “I am brilliant!”
     
    “I have to agree. That was actually one of your better ideas, Gil.” David said, and scratched Red’s ears.
     
    “Oh, yeah, David… right there. Ohhhh.” Geez, Red sounded like a cheap porno flick. I grinned, as I imagined David’s amusement when I told him about this doggie soundtrack later.
     
    “As I was saying,” Gil continued, “we brought in a suspect while Red was at the police department on an unrelated evidence review. When I saw Red in the processing area, I asked him if it were possible to determine from sniffing a towel, if it belonged to our suspect.” Gil paused for a moment to sip on his coffee.
     
    “Not only was Red able to tell us that it wasn’t our suspect’s blood, he was able to tell us the blood on the towel belonged to the guy’s wife. The wife was there to accompany her husband, only, she wasn’t a suspect. We had no way of holding her, or of getting a DNA sample.”
     
    I could hear Red dance in a circle as if chasing his tail, “This is the best part!”
     
    I chuckled at my dog’s