Scent of Murder by James O. Born Read Free Book Online

nagging drive.
    Anything was better than just sitting still.
    *   *   *
    Hallett took the time to study each dog on almost every assignment. He learned something from watching the dogs work as well as watching how the dog handlers worked. These three dogs were as different as the deputies who worked with them. In a way, the K-9 and human on each team had similar personalities. Hallett didn’t think it could be a coincidence.
    Brutus had two speeds, play and all-out romp. Just like a lot of other Golden Retrievers, he didn’t have a mean bone in his body and needed to be in almost constant motion. Darren Mori had that same active gene.
    Smarty, like his handler, was serious. If any dog could be called serious. He also tended to keep to himself. He and Rocky had a special friendship. Sort of a dog romance. They respected each other, but the Shepherd was clearly the badass, bigger brother.
    Rocky had a freewheeling side, but, like many other Belgian Malinois, once he set his mind to a task he never backed down. It struck Hallett that he’d been described in much the same way. One of his early evaluations at the sheriff’s office said, “Has potential, if he just learns to let things go occasionally.”
    It was a curse. Once he got stuck on something, everything else fell to the side. He tried to get past it—God, he had tried—but the right case, the interesting assignment, just consumed him. And it cost him. Cost him more than he could ever calculate.
    The first thing that always popped into his head when he started to think about things like this was his relationship with Crystal. He’d had something special with her, and there was no one but himself to blame for why he now lived alone in the trailer behind the Christian school in Belle Glade.
    Maybe his family wouldn’t be so weird if he was around more. His mom, brother, and sister all went weeks without seeing him, but he was at least trying to do better with them. Even if his brother drove both him and Rocky to distraction. Rocky couldn’t be in the same room with his stoner brother without alerting on him every ten minutes.
    Now, in the field, each of the dogs had staked out his own area in his own style. Brutus kind of looked around, making a game out of sniffing even if he wasn’t sure what to seek.
    Smarty walked the perimeter like a guard at a prison making sure everyone was safe and occasionally checking for a scent.
    Rocky was just determined. He’d detected a scent earlier, and something told Hallett the dog knew what he was looking for. Rocky showed no interest in a rabbit he flushed from a bush, or a dead bird lying across his path. He had his nose just off the ground and seemed to sense the urgency Hallett felt.
    *   *   *
    The sedan bounced and rumbled over the uneven, unpaved shell-rock road, giving Junior a headache.
    â€œGod damn, it can get dark out here,” he muttered. There were no streetlights on either side of the road. There wasn’t even a streetlight in sight. Just the sinking rays of sunlight behind some clouds far to the west. The early evening seemed even darker with a thick clump of scrub pines and underbrush on the right side of the road.
    His annoyance and irritability were trumped by his urge. Or possibly caused by it. He lost all common sense when these moods came on him. He’d learned a long time ago not to fight them anymore. But this was the first time he had gone with the feeling so decisively. Maybe he was evolving.
    Junior realized he’d been lucky with the first two girls before today. They had gone smoothly. Maybe they had made him overconfident. He missed that feeling of competence. He needed it in at least one compartment of his life.
    It didn’t matter. Whatever the weird origin of his urge, he was doing something about it now. Junior slowed and shut off the headlights. He could barely see the white shell-rock road in front of