The Couple Next Door

“Baby reported missing from her crib sometime after midnight,” Rasbach says.

Temple nods, serious. Nobody likes missing-children cases.

“Only six months old, so not mobile.” This is not the case of a toddler who woke up in the middle of the night, wandered off down the street, got tired, and hid in a garden shed somewhere. If that were the case, they would use tracking dogs to follow the child’s scent. This baby was carried out of the house by someone.

Rasbach has asked for the cadaver dogs to see if they can determine whether the child was already dead inside the house or the car. Well-trained cadaver dogs can detect death—on surfaces, on clothing—as little as two or three hours after it has occurred. Body chemistry changes quickly upon death, but not instantly. If the baby was killed and moved immediately, the dogs won’t pick it up, but if she was killed and not moved right away—it’s worth a shot. Rasbach knows that the information that may be gained via the dogs is useless from an evidentiary standpoint without corroborating evidence, like a body. But he is desperate to get any information he can. Rasbach is one who will avail himself of every possible investigative tool. He is relentless in his pursuit of the truth. He must know what happened.

Temple nods. “Let’s get started.”

He goes to the back of the truck, opens the hatch. Two dogs jump down, matching black-and-white English springer spaniels. Temple uses his hands and voice to direct the dogs. They don’t wear leashes.

“Let’s start with the car,” Rasbach says. He leads them to the Contis’ Audi. The dogs heel by Temple’s side, perfectly obedient. The forensics team is already there. Seeing the dogs, they step silently back.

“Are we good here? Can I let the dogs have a look?” Rasbach asks.

“Yeah, we’re done. Go ahead,” the forensics officer says.

“Go,” Temple tells the two dogs.

The dogs go to work. They circle the car, sniffing intently. They jump into the trunk, into the backseat, then the front seat, and quickly jump out again. They come and sit by their handler and look up. He hands them a treat, shakes his head. “Nothing here.”

“Let’s try inside,” Rasbach says, relieved. He hopes that the missing baby is still alive. He wants to be wrong about her parents. He wants to find her. Then he reminds himself not to be hopeful. He must remain objective. He can’t afford to become emotionally invested in his cases. He would never survive.

The dogs test the air all the way up the front steps and enter the house. Once inside, the handler takes them upstairs and they start in the child’s bedroom.

SIX

Anne stirs when the dogs come in, shrugs out from underneath her mother’s arm, and stands up unsteadily. She watches the handler go upstairs with the two dogs without a word.

She feels Marco come up beside her. “They’ve brought in tracking dogs,” she says. “Thank God. Now maybe we’ll get somewhere.” She feels him reach for her arm, but she shrugs him off, too. “I want to see.”

Detective Rasbach holds up a hand in front of her. “Better that you stay down here and let the dogs do their work,” he tells her gently.

“Do you want me to get some of her clothing?” Anne asks. “Something that she wore recently, that hasn’t been washed yet? I can get something out of the laundry downstairs.”

“They’re not tracking dogs,” Marco says.

“What?” Anne says, turning to Marco.

“They’re not tracking dogs. They’re cadaver dogs,” Marco says.

And then she gets it. She turns back to the detective, her face white. “You think we killed her!”

Her outburst stuns everyone. They are all frozen in shock. Anne sees her mother put her hand to her mouth. Her father’s face looks stormy.

“That’s preposterous,” Richard Dries blurts out, his face a rough brick red. “You can’t honestly suspect my daughter would harm her own child!”

The detective says nothing.

Anne looks back at her father. He has always stood up for her, for as long as she can remember. But there isn’t much he can do to help her now. Someone has taken Cora. It is the first time in her life, Anne realizes, looking at him, that she has ever seen her father afraid. Is he afraid for Cora? Or is he afraid for her? Do the police really think she killed her own child? She does not dare look at her mother.

“You need to do your job and find my granddaughter!” her father says to the detective, his belligerence a transparent attempt to mask his fear.

For a long moment, no one says anything. The moment is so strange that no one can think of anything to say. They listen to the sound of the dogs’ toenails clicking on the hardwood floor as they move around overhead.

Rasbach says, “We are doing everything in our power to find your granddaughter.”

Anne is unbearably tense. She wants her baby back. She wants Cora back unharmed. She can’t bear the thought of her baby suffering, being hurt. Anne feels she might faint and sinks down again into the sofa. Immediately her mother puts a protective arm around her. Anne’s mother refuses to look at the detective anymore.

The dogs come scampering down the stairs. Anne looks up and turns her head to watch them descend. The handler shakes his head. The dogs move into the living room, and Anne, Marco, and Richard and Alice Dries all hold perfectly still, as if not to draw their attention. Anne sits petrified on the sofa while the two dogs, noses testing the air and running along the area carpets, investigate the living room. Then they approach and sniff her. There is a police officer standing behind her to see what the dogs will do, perhaps waiting to arrest her and Marco on the spot. What if the dogs start to bark? Anne thinks, dizzy with fear.

Everything is tilting sideways. Anne knows that she and Marco did not kill their baby. But she is powerless and afraid, and she knows that dogs can smell fear.

She remembers that now, as she looks into their almost-human eyes. The dogs sniff her and her clothes—she can feel their panting breath on her, warm and rank, and recoils. She tries not to breathe. Then they leave her and go to her parents, and then to Marco, who is standing by himself, near the fireplace. Anne shrinks back into the sofa, relieved when the dogs seem to draw a blank in the living room and dining room and then move toward the kitchen. She can hear their claws scuttling across the kitchen tile, and then they are loping down the back stairs and into the basement. Rasbach leaves the room to follow them.

The family sits in the living room waiting for this part to be over. Anne doesn’t want to look at anyone, so she stares at the clock on the mantelpiece. With every minute that goes by, she feels more hopeless. She feels her baby moving farther and farther away from her.

Anne hears the back door in the kitchen open. She imagines the dogs going through the backyard, the garden, the garage, and the lane. Her eyes are staring at the clock on the mantelpiece; what she sees is the dogs in the garage, rooting around the broken clay pots and rusted rakes. She sits rigid, waiting, listening for barking. She waits and worries. She thinks about the disabled motion detector.

Finally Rasbach returns. “The dogs drew a blank,” he says. “That’s good news.”

Anne can sense her mother’s relief beside her.

“So can we now get serious about finding her?” Richard Dries says.

The detective says, “We are serious about finding her, believe me.”

“So,” Marco says, with a touch of bitterness, “what happens next? What can we do?”

Rasbach says, “We will have to ask you both a lot of questions. You may know something you don’t realize you know, something that will be helpful.”

Anne looks doubtfully at Marco. What can they know?