Part 2
The deputy caught Evan under the arms before another pull could tip the table. He spoke into his radio, telling the units outside that the loose dog belonged to Cole and was to be caught alive. Evan stopped fighting him long enough to hear the instruction repeated back.
“He knows the road home,” Evan said. “He’ll head for the woods.”
The deputy wrote it down. Evan had nothing else to give him, and no way to go along.
Outside, Boone crossed the street below the courthouse and ran behind the hardware store. Snow shook from his back as he passed the diner where Lily had once carried a strip of bacon out to him. He cut across the church lot, reached the road out of Willow Bend, and kept to the ditch when headlights approached.
The route was one he had traveled beside Evan for years. He left the pavement at the damaged culvert, climbed through a deer crossing, and worked along the sheltered side of a pine stand. In the open fields the wind drove snow level with his shoulders.
He stopped often as the night wore on. Once he stood with a forepaw raised while coyotes called beyond the creek; later he curled beneath a fallen tree until the gusts eased. By the time he reached the house, his chest fur held small knots of ice.
No light came on above the porch.
Boone went to the side door, where an old strip of police tape beat against the frame. He sniffed the threshold and circled the house. Then he crossed the yard toward the woods, taking the narrow gap beside the fence where Evan used to follow him through.
At the creek he picked his way across the shallows. Beyond it, the north ridge rose through pine needles, brush and old logging debris. Boone moved along the familiar path, doubling back at branches and pushing his muzzle into sheltered hollows. The place where the hunters had found Lily lay below him; he continued beyond it.
The collapsed hunting blind stood among trees farther up the slope. A derelict hunting shack faced it across a small clearing, its porch sagging under a drift. In places the snow covered ruts; elsewhere wind had scoured the ground down to hard leaves and ice.
Boone stopped beneath a fallen limb, where an oily strip of black cloth had caught in the branches. He pushed his nose along it into the leaves and pawed until a capped plastic bottle shifted underneath them. The bottle rolled free, rattling; he mouthed its rounded side, lost his grip, and dropped it against a root. Greasy scraps clung to the damp leaves where it had rested.
He followed that same greasy litter toward the pine, nose down, until his claws struck plastic. The smell of old smoke rose from the disturbed leaves.
He dug around the pine roots, scraping at the frozen edge of the soil. Red marked the snow beneath one paw before a cracked, flat case came loose. A tiny black memory card lay beside the opened case, partly sheltered by the root; Boone nosed past it, closed his teeth on the larger piece, and lifted it as he had lifted the things Evan traded for biscuits. He turned down the path with it held crosswise in his jaws.
He carried the case back down the ridge. At the creek he paused to drink, keeping one paw clear of the water, then picked it up again. When he reached the house he did not settle there. He followed the road toward the brick buildings where he had last been with Evan.
Morning traffic was beginning by the time he reached the courthouse. A delivery driver slowed for him at the corner and watched him limp into the parking lot. Boone stopped beside an SUV, lowered his head, and waited while a man approached carrying a briefcase and coffee.
Judge Ames heard the low bark before he recognized the dog.
“Easy,” he said, stopping a few feet away. “Hold on.”
Boone’s coat was soaked along his belly, and he could hardly keep his injured paw on the ground. Ames set his coffee on the SUV’s roof and lowered an open hand. Boone dropped the case at his shoes; when the man bent for it, the dog took it up and backed away, the familiar invitation to follow. A deputy coming down the steps stopped when Ames held up his other hand.
“That’s Cole’s dog,” the deputy said. “We’ve been getting calls about him.”
Ames asked someone to bring water. Boone drank a little with the case against his forelegs, then picked it up and moved toward the road he had just traveled. He stopped and looked back; when Ames took two steps after him, his tail lifted and he went a little farther. He barked only when the man stopped following.
Detective Pike came out without his coat fastened. He looked at the bloody marks in the slush and told the deputy to call animal control. The case, he said, could be taken, photographed and logged when the dog was secured.
“Where did he spend the night?” Ames asked.
Pike said the reports put him on the road toward Cole’s property. He had searched that property himself. He spoke with the same clipped impatience he had used on the witness stand.
“The property,” Ames said. “How far beyond it?”
Pike looked toward the road. Boone had moved several more yards and was waiting again, one foreleg bent.
“A dog carrying trash doesn’t change a conviction.”
“We don’t know what he’s carrying.” Ames kept his hands at his sides. “And we don’t know where he got it. Get the people who can document both. I’m reporting something that ought to be checked, Aaron. You have to decide how to check it.”
The deputy with the water crouched without reaching for Boone. Ames asked Pike to get the crime-scene unit and notify Elena Ruiz, then turned to the clerk who had come down the steps. He wanted Ben Hartley told as well, including exactly what had passed between them outside. The clerk wrote on the back of an envelope while Ames pointed out the case, careful now to describe what the dog had done instead of what he hoped it might mean.
Pike pulled his coat closed. “You understand what people will make of this.”
Ames glanced at the courthouse steps, where two employees had stopped to watch. “Then write down what happened. Including what I said.” He looked back at the dog. “I signed the order yesterday’s papers were full of. That doesn’t make this something you can throw away.”
Pike walked back to his vehicle and took the radio microphone from its clip. He requested the van, a photographer, evidence supplies and an available deputy. Then he asked dispatch to reach Ruiz on her cell.
Boone stood at the mouth of the lot with the case held low in his jaws. Pike had told the jury where the search ended. Now he would have to follow the dog beyond that line.
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