Too Soon Chapter 9: Hounds of Love

"It's in the trees! It's coming!"

When I was a child:
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be

Hiding in the dark, Hiding in the street,
And of what was coming after me...

Now hounds of love are hunting.
I've always been a coward,
And I don't know what's good for me.

Here I go!
It's coming for me through the trees.
Help me, someone! Help me, please!

Kate Bush, Hounds of Love

Betsy the Wonder Hound had burned her nose. She'd sniffed a hot ember in her enthusiasm to find Pillow Case Rick, let out a yelp, then sank into a funk. It wasn't too bad, but it had made her grumpy. Her devoted handler, Mohammed Atah, considered taking her home, but Wilbur was still on the job and raring to go. Mo decided to just pick up some extra food and a couple of dog toys at the local mini mall in East Hampton. Go to the park, take a break. Let Betsy find something.

Actually Betsy's funk was not about the blister on her nose, which she found a minor irritation. Betsy, like all great hounds, was actually a princess, and one of the Twice-Named (technically, Thrice-): She had started out as Elizabeth Regina of Eastern Star and the Tennessee King. Her handler's daughter, Nuwwar, called her Cutie-Patootie. She was a blue-tick bloodhound whose line went back three-hundred years. She and her ancestors were bred and born to round up the good, the bad, the delicately scented, and the very smelly: lost children, runaway slaves, escaped murderers, stolen horses, contraband, you name it. In this case, Betsy was puzzled. Betsy was perplexed. Betsy was frustrated, and she was curious. And she was very, very disappointed in herself.

We have words. Dogs have smells. And most of us – people and dogs - have standards to which we hold ourselves. Some higher than others, of course.

The average modern American can recognize and easily use 4,000 to 10,000 words on a regular basis, while a highly educated person might use upwards of 20-25,000 words. Unfortunately too many of those words tend to be "dude," "ok," and "motherfucker". Shakespeare actively used more than 30,000 words in his written works. (We can bet that if Scrabble had been invented at that time, he would have cheated a little bit.) By contrast, all talking dog videos aside, canines don't use their mouths to form words much, although they can be taught to understand over 150 human words.

The average human can distinguish about a trillion scents. But a bloodhound, bred and trained, can distinguish 1000 times as many different scents as a human. Bloodhounds have a hanky-sized area of smell distinction wrapped through sinuses and into the brain, creating a mental image of their quarry, a mental map of their behavior and movements. But even beyond that, Betsy was the Smelling Shakespeare of Bloodhounds.

Upon arriving at the crime scene (and she knew by the smells of anger hanging in the air that there had been a murder), Betsy learned a few things about the red-haired girl and the young Irish cop almost instantaneously. The cop was a new father who had changed his daughter's diaper recently, and very carefully washed his hands twice thereafter plus used hand sanitizer. There were a few spots of breast-milk-spitup on his sleeve cuff. He had punched a man wearing Old Spice Cologne. The baby's mother was ostensibly vegetarian but had sneaked a bite of someone else's linguica omelette for breakfast, and the garlic put the baby off a little. The young cop had cried within the last five hours and had exposed himself to a chemical soup from the burning car down below. Just yesterday he had made love to his wife for the first time since the baby's birth, and the shared orgasm had been spectacular. He was steeped in her pheromones and deeply in love.

The girl Alexis - really a young woman - was halfway through her menses. That day she had touched or embraced 43 other women, each of them wearing approximately 23 different beauty products, and she had touched or embraced 57 men, although none of them in a sexual way. She wasn't in love with anyone, but she had a few possibilities on the back burner. She had experienced a trauma in the recent past that made her constantly cover fear, and this trauma only compounded that buildup of tension in her young body. Alexis had eaten vegetarian bacon product (Betsy wondered what the hell was wrong with people) and scrambled eggs with toast for breakfast and nothing since except a glass of lemonade. She had a tiny cut on her right hand, which she had not bothered to bandage. Her dress had been made of threads boiled away from the pods of 3,227 silkworms.

Betsy examined what Alexis and Ryan had in common. They were distantly related on her father's side and both his parents', going back about seven generations to a place in northern Europe where they were well-adapted for low levels of sunlight and moderate heat. They were frightened, exhausted, shocked, saddened, and they were looking for someone they loved. They both liked dogs. They both hoped beyond hope that Betsy would find the person they were looking for. They loved many people in common. They had both eaten salmon mousse sandwiches for dinner, but the girl had eschewed both the figs and the asparagus. Betsy liked broccoli ok, but she hated asparagus. Sometimes humans baffled her.

Atah handed her the pillowcase used by Rick Castle. Oh, this man. Oh. Alexis' father. Ryan's friend.

"That's Rick. Betsy, can you find Rick? Where's Rick?"

Mo let her and Wilbur familiarize themselves with the strongest scent on the pillow, ruling out the cross-scents of others who had handled it: a woman who'd slept on it with him, a maid who'd put it on the bed, and Alexis who had removed it.

Of her 172 human words, she knew the most important one among them was "love." Atah said it to her all the time, in her most favorite growly-lovey dog voice. "Good girl. Who love you, Betsy? Mo love you. Yeahhhh, good girl." And she knew it was true. She could smell it in Mo, and in Mo's family, she could smell love in Wilbur, the friendship-love that Mo felt for Freeze, the frustrated desire that Freeze felt for Mo. Overall she could smell about 27 different kinds of love, and several manifested in her triangulation between the girl, the young cop, and Pillow Case Rick.

The smells talked to one another, telling the story to Betsy's excited brain. "First the important thing: Alexis' father loves dogs but occasionally pets cats. So he is a good man," but in her opinion, "not a great one. Between the things he puts on his hair, in his mouth, and on his skin, he uses 12 different products in the course of a day. This pillow case is from a beach house approximately 5 miles away from here. He lives there sometimes, and sometimes in Manhattan in the upper west side; he enjoys coffee, red wine, milk chocolate, and single-malt whiskey. He seeks adrenaline to hide a depressive streak. He got very sick a few months ago and still has scarring on his liver, it was some kind of organic toxin..." She snuffed. It was a poison she didn't recognize, but its traits made her wonder how he had survived. "He likes to read paper books in bed, and he is in love with a woman who sometimes shares this pillow with him. And she loves him right back. She just ovulated."

Betsy's nose cast around; "Pillow-Woman's prints are on the ground, the scent of her perfume and tears still hang in the air. She was wearing something of her mother's, but it was old, about thirty years old, from the woman's childhood. The mother's scent is masked by dry clean chemicals and perfume and time, but still hangs about her like a protective ghost. Rick's mother wears too much perfume, and she loves her but she's worried. Her father was here, holding her. He cried too. She wears cherry-scented lip gloss, among many other things. The woman used to take hormones to prevent conception but the dose has worn away and not been renewed. She had sex three times over the last two days with Rick, this man she loves past bearing. An egg has been fertilized but is not yet implanted in her uterus, and may not be. She bites her lip a lot. Right now she is, like the girl and cop, full of fear and grief, and the beginning simmer of a terrible rage. But this woman also likes dogs and is therefore a Good Person." Betsy surmised "Pillow-Woman is also looking for Rick."

Betsy continued to survey the scene. She stepped up to the flag by footprints in the gravel at the roadside. She stopped a moment, smelling Rosie's prints. She snuffed in dislike and recognition, sweeping the ground with her ears, trying to pick up all the traces.

"This woman wears almost thirty cosmetic products including a rose oil component in her perfume. She has traces of several different drugs circulating through her system – antidepressants, stimulants, anesthetics, antipsychotics, caffeine, blood pressure regulators, nicotine... the woman smokes, and the beginnings of cancer have left traces on her breath. She'll be dead in five years if she doesn't stop, maybe even if she does. There are other chemical smells: Disinfectant. Alcohol. Formaldehyde. Death. Masked and masked and masked again but there. Deaths I know. People I've looked for but haven't found. She knows where they are." Betsy moaned to herself, torn between knowledge and duty. "But I'm looking for Pillow Case Rick now. Pillow Case Rick." Betsy was a well-trained detective. She didn't normally make leaps of logic. There was no reason to think that Rosie meant Rick himself any harm. But she felt uneasy.

At Jerry Tyson's footprints, her tail began to wag, and she moaned a little again, but did not bark or bay. Wrong scent. "Another man stood here. The man is clearly Rick's brother, on both sides, and they were about the same age. Not so many chemicals. He's sick. He's on antibiotics for a lung infection that just won't go away."

Wilbur disagreed. "This is Pillow Case Rick. They smell almost exactly the same."
"Almost. They're brothers. What's different?"
Wilbur's tail tucked between his legs. "I dunno, but I don't like it. Are they different?"

She smelled something she'd smelled before, on traces left by Jerry Tyson and Kelly Nieman. Most recently at a mass grave site on the beach, where serial killers – more than just them, there had been others - had been dumping bodies for years. Shallow graves and deep ones, revealed among the dunes by the smiting hand of the hurricane.

What she smelled? She had no word for it, but it made her tail tuck between her legs a moment, too. We would have called it evil. The smell of seeking, stalking, killing, and enjoyment of the suffering, a blank indifference – no – incapacity for the compassion we think is ingrained in us. Inability to process oxytocin, a bonding pheromone. Other problems with processing stimulus and response. But Betsy could smell a difference. Rick's brother had grown into it, been twisted through injury like one of those sad little trees that aren't even worth peeing on. There were chemicals his brain made too much of, and chemicals his brain had given up on. He was broken to it. Rosie had been born that way. Her father had been that way. The bundle of eggs in her ovaries held blueprints for killers.

Wilbur found Rick's brother intriguing all the same. "Here's where Brother walked down the embankment. Here's where he stopped to cough. Here's where Brother fired a gun." He nosed at a bullet casing the forensic techs had missed.

Freeze stroked his ears. "Good boy, Wilbur. Where's Rick?"

"I'm getting to that. Here's where Brother started back up again. Here's where he came back down. He stood here for a while..."

Betsy, meanwhile, found enough about Rick to bay about – down by the burned car, among the weeds and muddy ashes. "Here's where they fought, and here's where Brother died. And here's where Rick... ow."

Her nose had touched an ember, lurking just under the car. She bayed. Rick did not answer. "He's down there. He's still alive. Wilbur, come on. Show them he's still alive." She bayed again. She whined. She did the Excited Prancy Dance. Wilbur didn't get it.

Wilbur paused, apprehensive. "I smell flying monkeys."

"Wilbur, you are such a stupid fuck sometimes."

Atah had made Betsy go back to the SUV. He'd taken her over to the mini-mall and picked up food in case they'd be there all night, while Freeze and Wilbur futzed around. At the mini-mall, Betsy smelled Rosie, who had parked the Escalade somewhere nearby. She barked at Rosie, who was smoking a cigarette, listening to the police scanner in a nondescript salt-stained green Subaru Forester that smelled of death and garbage. Rosie was wearing headphones, sunglasses, and a long, curly auburn wig. Rosie wished she could tell Mo that the woman was a killer, that she was listening to a police scanner that rang plainly to her own ears but that Mo couldn't hear. The dog hesitated, pointing at her with an eager nose, but Mo thought she was just interested in the burger joint spewing grilled goodness into the air.

Rosie's sunglasses turned toward Betsy and Mo, and Betsy sensed a cold, killing threat. She feared for herself, and for Mo. She hung close to Mo's side as they went into the variety store. The owner glared at them disapprovingly until Mo pointed out Betsy's Service Dog insignia on her vest. Behind them, the Subaru pulled out of the lot, heading east on the Montauk highway, toward Rick's house. But Mo was tugging on her harness. "Come on, girl, let's get some liver treats." She was disappointed not to be getting a nice smoked pig's ear, but Mo wouldn't let her have them. She sniffed. Apparently it was all right to eat lobster when his wife wasn't around to nag him, but pig's ears? Not Halal.

She and her boys were put up in a motel for a much-needed nights' sleep, and Mo roused her again shortly before dawn. She loved this hour of the morning, when there was less noise and pollutant in the air, and she could smell the nocturnal activities of everyone around her. She loved it except when they were on the road, and Mo cheated on his diet. The lobster roll farts were a living hell. She suffered every time Mo ate one of those damn things.

The dogs relieved themselves in the parking lot at the first scent of sunrise, and they had canned liver dog food, her favorite. Their handlers picked up a couple of fast food breakfasts. When they got back to the crash site at about 4 a.m., it was still quite dark. A backhoe had arrived at around 3, and it had taken nearly an hour for the crew to try maneuvering it to the bank, realize that no, it really was going to tip over, back it up, load it back onto the flatbed, and have the flatbed take it around to a side road then come along a meandering path through the woods.

Betsy's nose burn was feeling quite a lot better, and she was anxious to get back on the trail. Mo let the two dogs out and she was horrified to see so many people there.

Apparently a lot of people liked Pillow Case Rick. Of course Betsy had no comprehension of the internet beyond that smell of ozone and fascination when Mo played video games or his wife got on Skype with their many relatives. But As Gina had predicted, someone had announced Castle's disappearance, and the news had gotten out. There were nearly fifty people milling around in the hushed predawn, including a couple of news crews whose transmitters just refused to work, people holding candles and teddy bears, leaving flowers, people trying to get around the yellow crime scene tape to put yellow ribbons up on tree limbs, being herded away by frustrated, exhausted police. One person was dressed as a gray man with big black goggles; he carried a sign that said "Beam Me Up Too." Betsy could smell a whole cocktail party full of emotions amongst these people: genuine sadness and worry, curiosity, fear, skepticism, hope, guilt... Guilt?

A slight, sour man stood amongst the crowd. He smelled of death, guilt, and peppermints. He accompanied a dead plastic lady thing in a wheelchair. Maybe she was his squeaky toy, only he humped her instead of chewing on her. Whatever. He knew something. But Betsy, being a dog, didn't know people called him Perlmutter, and she didn't know what he knew.

Perlmutter was gazing past the crash scene into the preserve on the far side. He'd noticed something, a brief, cold-blue flash of light: someone with a flashlight or phone. He smiled down to the doll, and patted her shoulder. "You were right." He turned, and wheeled it back to his rental car.

Puzzled, Betsy leaned against Mo's leg and he scratched her ears. "You wanna look around again, Girl?" She followed his lead, and they edged back down the bank toward the car wreck site. This time she sniffed more cautiously. Pillow Case Rick was definitely down there. His left hand had clung for several seconds to this iron bar, his other hand had left a microscopic scrape but too much blood and a whiff of gunpowder – now burned away – on this chunk of concrete. She whined, wanting to dig for him. She needed the rest of the story. She bayed, not in the joy of discovery, but in frustration.

Esposito was feeling pretty damn thrashed. He went to Deputy Holst "I'm just gonna take a quick catnap so I'm fresh when the FBI comes. Anything changes..."

Holst nodded. "Backhoe should be here soon." He sighed. "I wish to hell we had ultrasound. They're booked solid, it's been crazy around here lately."

"Really?"

"Yeah, man. We've had three teen girls just up and disappear over the last three days, now this. Thursday we got an anonymous tip about a gravesite down at Cherrystone Beach... serial killer, maybe more than one. Body parts." He sighed. "We're all run ragged: officers, dogs, coroner, detection devices, forensics..."

Esposito shook his head in sympathy. "Perfect storm, huh?"

"Yeah. They say it comes in waves, but... man I could use a night's sleep. But you go crash for a while, I got someone relieving me at 6 am."

Espo slept through the backhoe's arrival, its near-tipping, its removal and relocation. And deep in sleep, he missed Kate's text at 4:23 am: "Meet me at end of tunnel in old foundation. I think I know where he is." She should have called him, but she'd been afraid someone might hear her voice. That was actually the least of her worries.

What finally awoke him was Betsy, barking.

Bat guano supports an ecosystem all its own. Millions of different kinds of bacteria and fungi, and tiny bugs of all kinds who feed on the guano itself plus the fungi, further breaking it down. Then there are larger, predatory bugs who feed on the smaller: spiders, huntsmen, centipedes. Rick's right hand was nipped by a centipede as he dragged himself through, but he didn't even notice it, his hand being one big bundle of agony already. The centipede had just been defending itself, and scurried away. One of the bats above Rick (we'll call her Puff to avoid confusion) heard that tiny, alluring scurry, and feeling a bit peckish, swooped down on silent, lacy wings. She made short work of the centipede, Rick's blood still fresh on its tiny jaws. But Puff was still hungry. She continued down the tunnel toward the window opening, tilting at a 23º angle to slip through without banging her fingertips against the hard metal. Suddenly a bright, cold-blue light shone in her eyes, momentarily blinding them. She banked her wings, startled, but it was too late to stop; she closed her eyes and barreled through on echolocation, narrowly avoiding a young female human who jumped back, equally startled.

Puff continued on into the night sky, shaking the bright light out of her head. She noticed other bright lights over near the road, where a number of humans were milling about doing something incomprehensible. And there were dogs. Puff didn't like either humans or dogs, but the lights attracted mosquitos and tasty moths (she liked the fuzzy white ones best: big, fat, sweet, and easy to catch). In order to eat its weight in insects every night, a bat must have a very efficient metabolism. Puff flew about for twenty minutes, snapping fast food out of the air. The centipede was digested very quickly. But if you look at a centipede's exoskeleton in an electron micrograph, you'll see it's not perfectly smooth: millions of tiny pockets, claws, scaly shapes and hairs provide it protection and traction. In the remaining pieces of the centipede that traveled through Puff's body, a tiny trace – 3 parts per million – of Rick's dry blood passed unscathed in an air pocket.

Pursing a moth that was trying to hump a backhoe headlight, Puff dropped her tiny load of evidence a few feet from Betsy. Betsy, sniffing about, smelled Puff the Flying Monkey's droppings from a thousand nights, among those of many others. It's been mentioned that Betsy was the Shakespeare of Smell. She was also the Sherlock Holmes of Scent. Her new nickname was soon to become Little Canine Castle. Betsy homed in on Puff's bean-sized blob of fresh poo, sniffing delicately. She snuffed and wagged, inhaling. She groaned, then yipped, inviting Wilbur over.

Mo knew better than to distract Betsy, but gestured to Freeze: "Looks like Lassie found Timmy down the well again." Wilbur started to wag, searching, not yet too excited. Betsy woofed softly, her feet doing an eager dance. She felt the picture mapping out in her mind, infinitely fast and infinitely slow: "The guano, the bat, the centipede, Pillow Case Rick, the bite, the tunnel of ancient earth, old brick, layers of concrete, moss and algae..." She had it all, she just had to read the map... she sniffed around, hoping for more information. "Tunnel. Where? Where did the flying monkeys come from?" She turned in circles, barking at the sky.

Up the embankment in his car, Esposito awoke, shaking away nightmares of women in white and burning cars. He was tingling all over, and then he noticed the barking, and he was out the door and on his phone in a heartbeat. "Ryan. We got something. Move." He charged down toward the crash site. One of the dogs was excited, turning in circles. The other was still and looked like he was trying to remember where he'd left his squeaky toy.

Wilbur located Puff's poo, sniffed it. "Flying monkey. Bug. Hey, is that Pillow Case Rick?"

Wilber ate the poo. Betsy groaned in frustration, actually nipped at him. Mo held her back, concerned. She'd never done that before.

Wilbur tucked his tail, dejected. "Sorry I ate the poo. I just couldn't... am I in trouble?" He whined, uncertain. The bat guano turned to slime in Wilbur's mouth, the scent receptors at the back of his sinuses calculating the amount of Rick-ness. He considered the way a connoisseur does a fine wine. "Hey. I think it is Rick."

But Betsy didn't care about that tiny dot of evidence any more. The inside of her head, her very being, lit up with joy, with certainty, as the map completed itself. "THERE. HE'S THERE. I KNOW WHERE HE IS." She let out a bay that shook the trees, and took off running for the old foundation. To her surprise, she was nearly outrun by Esposito, who'd hurtled down the embankment and now sprinted toward the foundation, flashlight in hand. She'd smelled him around. She knew he was a good guy to have on her side.