Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(33)
Now Twist was really straining at the leash, pulling Strawbridge along with him. Strawbridge was a small man and Twist a very big dog, so it made a ridiculous sight.
They moved quickly through the grasses, the breeze continuing to pick up. She could hear Sheldrake, an infamous cannoli eater, wheezing as he jogged behind her, trying to keep up. For the first time, Twist issued a deep baying cry, then another, the mournful sound echoing across the river.
“He really has something!” said Strawbridge breathlessly as he was dragged along by his own belt.
They came around the far side, skirting an indentation in the riverbank. A few hundred yards ahead, Delaplane could see the muddy embankment where crime scene investigators had flagged the body’s location.
The dog was now bounding forward in his eagerness, jerking Strawbridge like a marionette with each lunge. “Easy, Twist!” the handler said, but the dog paid no attention and bayed again: a long, powerful sound from deep within his chest.
“Twist! Heel! Heel!” Strawbridge grabbed the leash with both hands and pulled. But the dog was clearly in full chase mode, and it was almost comical to see Strawbridge stumbling along behind him, shouting and trying to keep up.
“Bad dog! Heel! What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Twist was frantic, baying loudly, slobber flying from his mouth, his footlong tongue swinging with each bark, straining and lunging—pulling Strawbridge toward the dense wall of vegetation just beyond where the body had been found.
“Come! Sit!”
No command worked—and a moment later, what Delaplane feared would happen indeed happened. Strawbridge lost his footing and fell in the tall grass, but still the dog struggled forward, dragging him along. Grabbing the leash in both hands once again, Strawbridge unclipped it from his belt and the dog took off like a shot toward the line of trees.
“Damn him,” Strawbridge spluttered, standing up and brushing himself off as the dog bounded away, baying like mad. “He’s never done that before.”
A moment later Twist dove into the bushes and then vanished into the woods, his baying becoming muffled.
“What now?” asked Delaplane, glancing back at Sheldrake huffing and puffing his way through the grass behind them.
“We follow. I think he’s due for a little refresher training, frankly.”
“I’ll say.” Delaplane could still hear the baying, fainter now, but at a higher pitch.
Strawbridge listened for a moment as the barking reached a hysterical timbre. “He’s definitely found something.”
They started walking and, as they did so, the baying abruptly stopped. Strawbridge paused to listen.
“Why the silence?”
Strawbridge shook his head. “I don’t know.”
A few more minutes of trudging through marsh grass brought them to the edge of the forest. Pushing through a screen of bushes, they entered a dense thicket, light filtering down, the heat suddenly rising along with the insects. Strawbridge took a moment to grab his cell phone.
“Think he’ll pick up?” Delaplane asked, irritated.
“Twist has a GPS unit on his collar. This just tells me where he is.” He fiddled with some app on the phone, then set off: naturally, toward the densest part of the forest.
“This way,” he said.
“I could sure use someone with a machete,” said Delaplane, pushing through a mass of palmettos. Sheldrake’s only comment was a muttered curse.
The forest was totally silent. Not even the birds were singing. Strangely, after a few minutes even the insects seemed to vanish as the palmettos gave way to a forest of live oaks, so ancient and draped in moss it was like walking through curtains.
A good ten minutes of struggle and then Delaplane could see, ahead, a shaft of sunlight penetrating the green gloom—a clearing. Strawbridge hastened his pace. “Twist!” he called, still glancing frequently at his phone. “Funny, it shows he’s right up ahead. Twist! Here, boy!”
Pushing aside an especially thick screen of moss, they stumbled abruptly out into a small, sandy clearing. Delaplane halted. There was something lying in the sun, almost at their feet. It took her a moment to recognize what it was: the dog’s head and long tongue.
The rest of it lay about twenty feet away, connected by a long coil of viscera from which a single french fry—rotten and undigested—could be seen protruding.
22
IT WAS QUARTER PAST ten that evening when Constance ascended the wide central staircase of the Chandler House. The hotel’s carpeting was attractive—intertwining gold acanthus on a field of deep scarlet—but even if the stairs had been bare wood, her steps, from long experience, would have made no noise.
She paused on the fourth-floor landing to glance around. To her right was a short hallway that ended past half a dozen guest rooms. To her left the hall stretched on for a long way before making a jog.
Although the hotel had a fifth floor, the stairway ended here, on the fourth. She stood motionless, wondering where the fifth-floor staircase might be found.
Constance had spent the last hour in the suite of rooms she shared with Pendergast—Coldmoon having been banished to the third floor when he refused to stop brewing his rank and no doubt carcinogenic camp coffee. Constance had taken an interest in the Savannah Vampire legend, and so she had gone in search of the hotel’s library. Although small, it had proven to be of interest. After noting the books they had on the subject, she had indulged in a second curiosity and made her way up the floors of the hotel, one by one, until she reached the fourth—and could go no farther.