to one of the stones, the pain twisting in him so deeply that tears fell silently down his cheeks. I nuzzled his hand, concerned.
“It’s okay, Ellie. Good dog. Sit.”
I sat, grieving with Jakob.
He cleared his throat. “I miss you so much, honey. I just . . . sometimes I don’t think I can get through the day, knowing you’re not going to be there when I get home,” he whispered hoarsely.
I lifted my ears at the word “home.”
“I’m on K-9 patrol right now, search and rescue. They don’t want me on regular patrol because I’m still taking anti-depressants. I’ve got a dog, her name is Ellie, a one-year-old German shepherd.”
I wagged my tail.
“We just got certified, so we’ll be going out, now. I’ll be glad to get off the desk; I’ve gained about ten pounds from all the sitting.” Jakob laughed and the sound of it was so peculiar, such a sad, tortured laugh, with no happiness in it at all.
We remained there, nearly motionless, for about ten minutes, and gradually the feeling from Jakob shifted, became less raw pain and more like what I felt when Ethan and Hannah would say good-bye at the end of the summer—something similar to fear. “I love you,” Jakob whispered. Then he turned and walked away.
From that day forward, we spent a lot more time away from the kennel. Sometimes we would ride on airplanes or helicopters, both of which vibrated so much they made me sleepy despite the noise. “You’re a chopper dog, Ellie!” Jakob told me whenever we rode on the helicopters. One day we even went to the biggest pond I’d ever seen, a huge expanse of water full of exotic smells, and I tracked a little girl down the sand to a playground full of children who all called to me when I approached.
“Want to play in the ocean, Ellie?” Jakob asked me after I Showed him the little girl, and a mother and father took her away for a car ride. We went to the pond and I splashed and ran in the water, which was very salty when the spray came up into my nose. “This is the ocean, Ellie, the ocean!” Jakob laughed. Playing in the ocean, I felt the thing that had such a tight clench on his heart loosen just a little.
Running through the shallow water reminded me of chasing Ethan on his sled—I had to lunge upward to make any progress, exactly the same gait I’d used in the snow. It made me realize that though the sun’s cycles suggested a couple of years had passed, there was never any snow here. It didn’t bother the children, though—they had sleds they rode on the waves. I stood and watched them play, knowing Jakob would not want me to chase them. One boy looked something like Ethan when he was younger, and I marveled that I could remember my boy when he was little and also when he was a man. An ache overtook me then, a sharp stab of sadness that didn’t go away until Jakob whistled me back to his side.
When I did go to the kennel, Cammie was often there, but Gypsy almost never was. On one such day I was trying to interest Cammie in a glorious game of I’ve Got the Ball when Jakob came out to get me. “Ellie!” he called.
I’d never heard such urgency in his voice.
We drove very fast, the tires making screeches as we turned corners that I could hear above the wail of the siren. I lay down on the floor of my cage to keep from sliding around.
As usual, when we arrived at the place to work, there were a lot of people standing around. One of them, a woman, was so afraid she couldn’t stand up, and two people were holding her. The anxiety rippling off Jakob as he ran past me to talk to these people was so strong it made the fur on my back stand up.
It was a parking lot, big glass doors on a building swinging open for people carrying small bags. The woman who had collapsed reached into her bag and pulled out a toy.
“We’ve got the mall locked down,” someone said.
Jakob came to my door and opened it. He handed me a toy to sniff. “Ellie, okay? Got it? I need you to Find, Ellie!”
I leaped out of the truck and tried to sort through all the smells, to Find one that matched the toy. I was concentrating so hard I didn’t notice that I’d trotted out in front of a moving car, which rocked when the driver hit the brakes.
Okay, I had it. There was a scent, a scent that was oddly married to another, a strong male smell. I tracked them both, sure of myself.
The smell vanished at a car—rather, next to the car, telling me that the people we were working had driven away in a different vehicle and this one had pulled in to take its place. I alerted Jakob, cringing at his sense of frustration and disappointment.
“Okay, good girl, Ellie. Good girl.” His play was perfunctory, though, and I felt like a bad dog.
“We’ve tracked her to here—it looks like she got into a vehicle and left. Do we have surveillance on the parking lot?”
“We’re checking now. If it is who we think it is, though, the car’s stolen,” a man wearing a suit told Jakob.
“Where would he take her? If it’s him, where would he go?” Jakob asked.
The man in the suit turned his head, squinting at the green hills behind us. “The last two bodies we found were up in Topanga Canyon. The first one was in Will Rogers State Park.”
“We’ll head up that way,” Jakob said. “See if we can pick up anything.”
I was startled when Jakob put me in the front seat of the truck. He’d never let me be a front-seat dog before! His mood was still tense, though, so I stayed focused and didn’t bark when we passed some dogs who yipped at me with unrestrained jealousy. Jakob and I drove out of the parking lot, and he held the same toy out to me, which I dutifully sniffed. “Okay, girl, I know this is going to sound strange, but I want you to Find.”
At the command, I turned and stared at him in bewilderment. Find? In the truck?
The smells coming in the window lured my nose in that direction. “Good girl!” Jakob praised. “Find! Find the
