to her, he thought.
“Anyway,” he continued, “it’s possible to train the dogs to hunt only for specific scents, too. Like explosives. Or drugs. Or cadavers.”
Her smile faded. “Dead tissue?”
“We train them to distinguish human tissue from animal tissue, and their success rate is about ninety-five percent. They can find buried bodies a century old. And they can smell them down to at least fifteen feet, and some say up to thirty.”
Her eyes had grown wider. “So they don’t get confused?”
“No.” But he didn’t want to get into the details. Some things just didn’t need to be talked about.
She looked down, then lifted her head and drank from her own bottle of orange soda. “How do they learn all this stuff? I mean, isn’t it hard to teach them?”
“A little patience and they pick it up pretty quickly. They’re remarkable, and they’re eager to please.” Dasher came over and laid his head on Cadell’s thigh. “I think he’s ready to go to work.”
Dory popped to her feet immediately. “I’m sorry, I’ve been holding you up.”
“Actually, no. I allowed some extra time.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper. “Feeding directions and all that. If you have any questions, call me. And if you don’t mind, I’ll drop by every day or so to see how you two are getting on.”
Holding the paper, she looked at him. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough, Cadell.”
He chuckled. “Tell me that again when you have fur all over the place. He doesn’t shed a lot, but he’s going to shed. See you tomorrow afternoon.”
He headed for the door with Dasher and heard Dory behind him telling Flash to stay. The dog needed to learn his new home. He figured Dory was going to make it easy on him.
As he climbed into his vehicle with Dasher in the cage behind him, he realized something. Betty unintentionally had painted Dory unfairly. She might not be prepared to trust people and allow them within her circle; she might be scared to death of her brother’s imminent release from prison; she might be haunted by terrible nightmares.
But Dory had grit. Real inner strength.
He liked her. He respected her. And he needed to watch his step, because he sure as hell didn’t ever want to make another woman miserable.
* * *
DORY AND FLASH regarded each other in the kitchen. She’d removed his leash, but he sat there staring up at her as if he were pleading.
She tapped the piece of paper Cadell had given her. “It says here you don’t get supper for another two hours.”
Flash lowered his head a bit.
Feeling like the wicked witch, Dory scanned the paper again. “But you can have your dental chew. What the heck is that?”
She looked at the heap of supplies in one corner of her kitchen, then rose to look through it. She discovered a plastic bag behind the huge bag of food. In it was a nubby nylon or plastic bone of some kind. Unzipping the bag, she pulled it out and turned to hold it out to Flash. “Is this what you want?”
He stared at it and licked his lips.
There could be a minor problem with a dog so well trained, she thought. Was he just going to sit there like a statue or let her know what he wanted? “Take it, Flash,” she said finally in desperation.
He apparently understood that. In one leap he reached the bone and took it from her hand with amazing delicacy before settling down to gnaw on it.
“Well, cool,” she said. “We have communication!”
Flash barely glanced at her. Almost grinning, she sat down at the table to read the directions from Cadell more carefully. From the other room she heard her email dinging, but she ignored it. Flash was more important.
She nearly giggled when she read what Cadell had typed at the top of the page: The care and feeding of your personal K-9. She wondered if he gave that to all his trainees.
Flash looked up at her, forgetting his bone for a few seconds as he wagged his tail at her. He seemed so happy right now, it was impossible not to feel the same.
* * *
LATER, AFTER SHE had caught up on email and reopened her participation in the project, she felt a nose gently prod her thigh. A glance at the clock told her it was after eleven...and she hadn’t walked Flash since he arrived.
She put her conference on hold, explaining she needed to walk her dog. Hoping she didn’t get the slew of jokes she half expected, she found Flash’s leash. The dog gave one joyful bark, then stood perfectly still while she hooked it to his collar.
That was when it struck her how late it was. Ordinarily she worked well into the night, but before she hadn’t been afraid of anything. Now she was afraid. Her brother might already be out of prison. They’d given her the exact date, but she’d run the letter through the shredder as soon as the shock had passed. She wanted nothing with his name on it.
So today. Maybe tomorrow, but most probably today. Betty knew for sure because Dory had told her, but it was too late to call and verify it.
Point was...she was suddenly frightened of the night and its secrets, a fear she hadn’t felt in a long time.
She looked at Flash and saw him watching her, not a muscle twitching. He must have felt her abrupt burst of dread.
“I shouldn’t be silly about this,” she said aloud, not entirely believing herself. “I have you, after all.”
The slightest wag of Flash’s tail. God, the dog seemed to be reading her like an open book. Could he do that?
“I promised to take good care of you. I’m sorry I didn’t walk you sooner, but do you think you could manage with just a short trip to the backyard?”
He looked agreeable, but he probably didn’t understand a word of her prattle. God, she had grown so completely unnerved for no good reason. George, even if he wanted to find her, couldn’t have located her yet. She hadn’t even needed to leave a forwarding address, because she paid all her bills online and the rest was junk. She’d established no real connections here yet except the broadband and that didn’t have her full name on it. She was truly off the grid as far as the world was concerned.
She would be very hard to find, she assured herself as she began to walk toward the back door. “Flash, heel,” she said quietly, and he walked right beside her.
Besides, she had a guard dog. Flash would make George’s life hell. So she was safe, yeah?
She just wished she could believe it.
The night beyond the door felt pregnant with threat. But it was the same backyard that had been there when she rented the place. With a locked six-foot wooden privacy fence around it. She’d know if anybody tried to get past that.
And there was Flash, of course. Oddly, however,
