Part 3
Traffic had started by the time he came down the hill past the feed store. A man in a delivery van slowed for him at the corner of Ash and Third and watched him cross in front of the bumper, favoring the right front leg, and said afterward he had assumed somebody’s dog had gotten out of a truck bed.
He turned in at the courthouse lot and went in among the parked vehicles until the wind quit reaching him, in the near row the judges and the clerks used, and set the case down in the slush beside a rear tire and lay down against the wheel with his head up. He was there eleven minutes. Then somebody came toward that row with a briefcase in one hand and a paper cup in the other, and the dog got up.
Alan Renner heard the bark before he understood what he was looking at. It was low and short and came from ground level between two vehicles, and he stopped where he was.
“Easy now,” he said, and did not come any closer.
The dog was soaked black along the belly and could barely keep the right front foot down. Renner set the coffee on the roof, because his hands felt like the wrong thing to be holding anything with, and lowered one open and palm up. The dog came two steps and put a cracked piece of plastic down on the toe of his shoe.
Renner bent for it. Before his fingers reached it the dog took it up again and backed off three feet, watching him, ears forward, and stood.
Renner’s other hand came up, and a deputy halfway down the courthouse steps stopped where he was.
“That animal belongs to Mercer,” the deputy said. “People have been phoning him in since before nine last night.”
Water, Renner said, and somebody went for it. The dog drank half a paper cup without letting the case out from between his forelegs, then took it up and started for the street. He got ten feet and looked back. Renner came two steps and the tail went up and he made another ten. It was Renner stopping that produced the bark.
Ray Sutter came out with his coat still open. He looked at the smear of blood in the slush by the tire, then at the dog, then back at the slush.
“Call animal control,” he told the deputy. “When they have him, somebody can photograph whatever that is, bag it and log it.”
“Then he has been somewhere all night,” Renner said. “Where?”
The calls, Sutter said, had him out on the Harlow road headed toward Mercer’s. He had been over that property himself with a warrant and nine people and found nothing. He delivered it the way he delivered things from the box, each sentence shutting the door behind the last.
“You were on the property,” Renner said. “What is above it?”
Twenty feet further out, one foreleg bent under him, the dog was waiting again. Sutter looked at the street instead.
“Twelve people sat through that trial, Judge. A dog with trash in his mouth doesn’t move them.”
“Neither of us knows what that is.” Renner’s hands stayed where they were. He had not touched it and did not mean to. “Neither of us knows what ground he brought it off. Get me the people whose job is to establish those two things. I am reporting a fact that ought to be looked into, Ray. What gets done about it is your office.”
Two women from the clerk’s office stopped on the steps to watch. Sutter pulled his coat closed.
“You know how this will get told.”
“Then put it in writing,” Renner said. “Every word of it, mine included.” He put his eyes back on the animal. “I put my name on the order that ran in every paper in this county. Signing that does not buy either of us the right to walk past this.”
Sutter was already turning for his vehicle to call the crime-scene unit and Dana Whitcomb. Renner told the clerk to reach Paul Lindahl before anything moved and tell him exactly what had been said in the lot, by whom, in what order. The clerk wrote it on the back of an envelope. Renner described only what the animal had done — came into the lot, set an object down, took it up, backed away, barked when I stopped following — and nothing of what he feared.
Sutter went to his vehicle for the mic and stood in the open door reading the list off: van, photographer, supplies, anybody not already spoken for. He keyed it again to have dispatch try Whitcomb’s cell, and then stood there with it in his hand.
In that same building he had told twelve people, under oath, how far his people had gone into that timber. Out at the entrance to the lot, the dog was still on his feet with the thing carried low, waiting to see whether anybody was coming.
Whitcomb came across from her office inside forty minutes, heard Sutter out standing in the slush, and asked for an evidence technician before anything else. She called Lindahl herself from the lot: whatever this turned out to be, his office would get the recovery records the same day they existed.
Then they went. The dog started down Ash Street and they followed at a walk, two vehicles and four people on foot, slow enough that he could stop and turn his head and find them still there. Where the houses gave out he let a deputy hold him for water and a dressing wound loose around the right forepaw. He took both with his head turned down the road, then pulled to go on.
Renner followed as far as the end of Mercer’s lane, where the vehicles had to stop anyway, and there Whitcomb came back to his window and asked him to go no farther. He agreed before she finished, gave his account to a deputy on a cruiser hood, signed it, and drove back to Harlow, and he did not see the ridge, the hole under the pine, or anything that came out of it.
The rest went in on foot behind the dog, up the lane and through the gap in the fence, into the timber Ray Sutter had told a jury he had already searched…
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