“My father disappeared when I was ten. There was a storm one night; he heard a noise in the woods and went to check on it. He never came back, and I never knew what happened to him—until last night. I found Trygg in an animal shelter in Nineveh—they were about to put her down. I walked up to her and said, ‘I need someone who can help me find my father.’ She looked at me and said, ‘I can learn to do that—that’s my gift.’ And she was right—she’s the best cadaver dog in the world.”

“It’s a good thing she wasn’t overly modest,” Nick said.

“Why should she be? If you’ve got a gift you should say so—you should put it to use. We’ve been over every square inch of our land together, and there’s a thousand acres of it. We did it at night when no one would see us. I always thought that one night—that I would be the one to—”

She stopped.

“She eats dogs too,” Nick said.

“What?”

“That’s another story I heard down in Endor. The woman in the mountains—she goes to animal shelters and feels all the puppies. She takes the fattest ones back to her lair and eats them—with their blood.”

“Who told you that?”

“Sorry—I have to protect my sources.”

“That’s disgusting. I check the puppies for congenital joint defects, that’s all. They told you I eat them?”

“That’s right.”

“With their blood?”

“I threw that part in. I thought the story needed something.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Those idiots don’t need your help.”

Nick watched while Alena and Trygg played together. Alena rolled back and forth and roughed up the fur on the back of the dog’s neck; she took off one of her bandannas and gave the dog the knotted end so they could play tug-of-war.

“Why do you do that?” Nick asked.

“What?”

“Wrestle around like that—you do it every time the dog finds a body. Why?”

“It’s her reward. It’s what she lives for.”

“Wrestling?”