Burning Man

I was going it was worse. As I turned a corner I saw a house in flames.

Firefighters were running around, positioning their hoses. Winds were driving the flames high into the air, pushing the fire perilously close to neighboring houses. Fire trucks took up most of the street, and their played-out hoses made for hard speed bumps. An orange glow covered the area, and the shooting flames looked contagious enough to make me position my squad car for a quick getaway. Maglite in hand, I ran forward, scanning house numbers. Sirius stayed closer to my side than my own shadow.

There was shouting all around us. Some of the residents were grabbing hoses and filling buckets of water, ready to make a stand, while others were scrambling for prized possessions and in the process of evacuating. Everyone was looking for guidance, even the cops on the scene. Officers were being besieged for answers they didn’t have. The night showed a lot of white eyeballs. Fire gets everyone’s attention like nothing else.

Only one house on the street was on fire-so far. It was torching up like a bonfire, the flames licking high above the roof. The attack on the woman had taken place a few doors down from the house on fire, so I hurried past it. Squad cars and unmarked sedans were parked in front of the house I was looking for, and two officers were posted on the walkway outside. Their attention was more on the nearby fire than guard duty, but at our approach both of the uniforms stopped their eyeballing of the flames. One of them pointed to the front door and said, “The detectives are waiting for you inside.”

As we passed by, both men inched away from Sirius, allowing us a wide berth. Fellow officer or not, my partner was a close relative of the wolf, and he did have big, bad teeth.

At the entryway I told Sirius, “Setz!” His body language showed me his unhappiness with the command. Every week, handlers practiced exercises called long sits and long downs, training designed to try our charge’s patience. It was the dog’s job to assume the designated position and wait for hours if necessary. Sirius would stay put even if he didn’t like it. Inside, I could see that evidence techs were already working the scene, and from past experience I knew they preferred dog hair to not be a part of their trace evidence.

“Bleib!” I told Sirius, the German command to stay. He deflated and made a sound somewhere between an exasperated sigh and a moan that voiced doubts about my decision-making ability. The sound was familiar to me. I was known to make similar noises when given orders by superiors that didn’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. I liked to think I could make that distinction. My partner’s eyes tracked me, hoping for a reprieve, until I disappeared inside.

Crime scenes are normally handled in very deliberate fashion, but the nearby flames had everybody jumping. Two detectives from Homicide Special, along with a crime scene unit, were working the family room. Anything that might have a connection to the Santa Ana Strangler had the highest priority in town.

One of the suits recognized me and came over. I seemed to remember his last name was the same as some Ivy League school. Brown, I thought, or Yale.

“Cornell,” he said.

On a multiple-choice test I would have gotten it. “Gideon,” I said.

As he wrote down my name, Cornell said, “Where’s the mutt?”

At another time I might have told him it wasn’t my responsibility to know where his wife was, but not now. The room was already tense enough.

“Front door,” I said.

He gave a quick, preoccupied nod. “We’ve gathered some clothing and other items the suspect came in contact with. We want your dog to get a nose full of eau de bad guy and see if he can pick up on his scent. We’re pretty sure he’s still in the canyon. The SOB must have known we’d try to seal off the area. I’ll bet you dollars to cents he snuck out of the brush and set that house fire as a diversion.”

The family room had a view out to the canyon, but at night it was like looking at a sea of black. The nearby fire hinted at the expanse of foliage in the ravine, but the light from the flames didn’t penetrate far into the brush. A sudden flare of light in the darkness caught my eye; moments later there was a torching of undergrowth and shrubbery.

“I’ll pass on that bet,” I said. “Apparently one diversion wasn’t enough.”

Cornell turned to see what I was pointing at and then cursed. We watched the wind begin to whip up the flames. Both of us knew we were looking at a tinderbox. Under these conditions it was likely that dozens of homes would soon be in jeopardy.

“He must have brought some kind of accelerant with him,” I said.

In a wishful voice Cornell said, “Maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll burn up in his own hell.”

From what I knew of the Santa Ana Strangler, his crime scenes were very organized. If this was the Strangler, he would have planned for an escape route even under extreme conditions.

“He would have expected a call to go out for dog teams,” I said. “He set the fire to discourage pursuit and eliminate the possibility of being tracked.”

“That’s probably not the only escape plan in his bag of tricks,” Cornell said. “At one of his other crime scenes a fire was also set and a witness described a fireman that was never accounted for.”

It would be easy for a sooty firefighter to make his escape with all the chaos going on. Only seconds had passed since the canyon fire had been lit, but I could already see the orange glow spreading. The tracking conditions were already poor and would only get worse.

LA’s K-9 units have weekly field exercises where officers take turns wearing padded bite suits and acting out the role of bad guy. Whenever the chief trainer for Metropolitan Division puts on his bite suit and calls for a dog to be unleashed, he always shouts one particular line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

I voiced the same line: “Cry ‘Havoc!’” I said, “And let slip the dogs of war.”

Cornell gave me a look. “Huh?”

“If my partner is going to have any chance of picking up the scent, we have to act now.”

Sirius was on a thirty-foot lead. His nose was to the ground and his body language told me that he had the scent. Handlers like to describe the way a dog tracks in missile terms: Sirius had the target on his radar. Whether he’d be able to close on that target and stay on the scent was another matter. The air was smoky. A wet cloth covered my face, but Sirius didn’t have that luxury. He needed his nose fully functional, which meant he’d have to endure the smoky conditions without any buffers.

We entered the brush, following a trail into the canyon. The fire was about a hundred yards away, but it felt closer than that. The swirling winds were hotter now. I could hear the hunger of the fire as it feasted on the undergrowth. The snapping and crackling of the dry chaparral, and the gusting of the wind, filled the natural amphitheater with whistling and howling. Anyone sensible would have retreated from the chorus of hell. It’s not natural to walk toward fire, but that was where my partner was leading me, and he was doing that because I asked it of him.

The fire was unchecked; firefighters weren’t yet ready to take on the canyon’s blaze. With every step I remembered why I had never wanted to be a fireman. My wet mask wasn’t stopping my throat and nose from hurting, and the smoke was making my eyes tear. Most of the time I walked with my eyes shut, trusting to the senses of my partner. I was used to playing blindman’s bluff with Sirius. Part of our K-9 exercises involved blindfolding handlers and then ordering our dogs to track. The training gave the dog the confidence to lead and the handler to follow. We were a team forged over thousands of hours of working together, and the death of the woman we both loved.

I made encouraging sounds. Sirius was no bloodhound, but his sense of smell was still about a million times better than mine. LA police dogs do a lot of cross-training, and tracking was a frequent exercise.

“Such!” I encouraged, using the German pronunciation, tsuuk, and telling Sirius to track or find, but even more often than that I said “Good dog” or the German words of praise “So ist brav.”

In stops and starts, we continued into the canyon, the elusive scent drawing us forward. We traveled on anything but a straight line. Sirius tugged me one way and then the other. Most of the time his nose was to the ground, but sometimes he raised it up and sniffed the breeze, doing his best to pick up the scent over the smoke that filled the air. He seemed oblivious of the nearby fire; I was anything but.

We navigated our way through patches of laurel sumac, lemonade berry, and sagebrush. With the Maglite I tried to sweep the area to avoid yucca and patches of cactus and jumping cholla. Sirius forged his way through thick