“He’s got a longer pedigree than you do,” Nick said. “You’d better get yourself a couple more names or pretty soon he’ll be tossing biscuits to you.”

Nothing.

Nick was losing patience. “Look. Your dog is over there trying to sniff out a grave, but he’s apparently not having any luck—so you think I must be distracting him. Tell me something: Isn’t your dog able to distinguish between a living being and a decomposing body? Or is there something you’re trying to tell me? Because a friend would let me know.”

She took a slow, deep breath. “Mr. Polchak, I am trying to be patient with you, despite your adolescent attempts at humor. A forensic detection dog is a highly trained, highly sensitive animal, and you are posing a distraction to my dog. I’m sure you will agree that the first priority here is to identify the location of all remaining graves in this graveyard— a task which I will happily undertake just as soon as you—”

“Hey!” Nick shouted. He pointed at the dog, who was raising one leg and urinating on a small clump of grass.

The woman put her whistle to her lips and made two shrill blasts; the dog stopped and hung its head in apparent shame—but not before emptying its bladder.

“Tell your highly trained animal to stop peeing on my crime scene!” Nick said.

She waved off the comment like an annoying gnat. “That is an instinctive canine behavior. He probably detects the scent of a predator and he’s ‘overmarking’ the spot. It’s a normal territorial response.”

“You tell him this is my territory,” Nick said, “and that if he doesn’t stop, I’m going to ‘overmark’ him. I’m interested in predators too, lady. Some of them scavenge for human remains—they disarticulate bodies and carry off bones and other body parts. They sometimes leave markings behind—markings that might tell us what kind of predator it was and which season it would have been present here. That information might lead us to the time of year the victim died—unless your dog destroys the evidence first.”

“Mr. Polchak—” she began, but Nick cut her off.

“Look, Marge, I’m going to cut you some slack here—not because you deserve it, but because I’m a really nice guy once you get past my distracting scent. I’m going to back off and give you and Bosco a little space, because even though I hate to admit it I happen to agree with you on one point: The priority here is to locate all the remaining graves. So why don’t you and Mr. Sensitive there get started and I’ll just move off to the side?”

“Downwind,” she added.

Nick bit his lip. “Of course. We wouldn’t want Bosco to get distracted— he might wet his leg.”