Lance came out of the office. “Afternoon, Sergeant,” he said, placing several sheets of acetate on the desk. “I have something that might be of use to you in your search. Do you have a current map of the island?”
“A very good one, showing all the houses,” Young replied. “I’ll get it out of my car.” He was back in a moment and spread the map on the desk. “This is the latest map available that shows all the occupied buildings. You can see, I’ve highlighted the ones already searched in green.”
“I see you’re better than half finished,” Lance said. He picked up a sheet of acetate and laid it next to the map. “This is a thermal image of the island taken from a satellite last night, or rather an image of the north end of the island. In order to get in close, we divided the island in half. This particular image was taken at nine P.M. last evening.”
Everybody crowded around. “As you can see, anything that radiates heat shows up in orange, to a greater or lesser degree.” He pointed at a house in the village. “Take this house, for example: There’s quite a lot of ambient light, and these concentrations are people,” he said, pointing to a group, “apparently gathered around the table, having dinner. Outside, you can see another orange object, which is the family car, its engine still warm.”
“That’s very sensitive,” Young said.
“Too sensitive, in fact,” Lance replied. “I’ve ordered other images for after midnight, on the next satellite pass. In those, we’ll find many fewer lights and TVs on in the houses, and the car engines will have cooled. What we’ll see then is people in their beds.”
“What’s this in the middle of the woods?” Young asked, pointing to a dark area with an orange spot near the north end of the island.
“Very likely a deer, maybe two,” Lance said. “The satellite can pick up heat sources as small as a dog.”
Daisy raised her head and made a noise.
“Good dog,” Ham said.
“I’m not sure exactly how this will be useful,” Young said. “I mean, we can go to every house, search it and count the folks. Maybe we could see if there’s somebody extra that we didn’t count.”
“Right,” Lance said. “The after-midnight images should be more useful. Then we can see if there’s a person where we don’t expect a person to be, in a garage or a woodshed, for instance.”
Ham spoke up. “I don’t suppose it will pick up a dead body?”
Everybody got quiet. Lance shook his head. “Not unless it’s still warm.
Chapter 46
THE AFTERNOON WORE ON until the shadows were long. Ham, who was asleep on the study sofa, suddenly sat up. “Daisy!” he said.
“What?” Stone asked.
“We’re not using Daisy!”
“For what?”
“To track Holly.”
Stone slapped his forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?” He ran upstairs to
the master bedroom and started going through Holly’s clothes, looking for something that had been worn and not laundered, which was tough, because Mabel laundered everything as soon as it hit the hamper. He found a spare pair of sneakers and ran back downstairs with one.
“Come on, Daisy!” he called to the dog. He grabbed her leash and ran for the door, with Ham and Dino right behind him. When they reached the end of the driveway, Stone rubbed the sneaker on Daisy’s face, and she sniffed it eagerly. “Has she been trained to track?” he asked Ham.
“She’s been trained to do just about everything,” Ham replied. “Daisy! Where’s Holly? Go find Holly!”
Daisy reacted at once, pacing around the area, then suddenly, she was moving at a brisk trot up the road, away from the village, on the left side, facing traffic, her nose to the ground. The three men hurried along, trying to keep up with her.
“We should have brought a car,” said Dino, who did not enjoy running.
“Why don’t you go back to the house and get the station wagon,” Stone said, handing him the keys. “Follow along, but don’t get close enough to spook Daisy.”
The sound of her name caused Daisy to jerk the leash almost out of Stone’s hand, and she resumed her tracking.
Stone and Ham jogged along after her, and a couple of minutes later Stone looked over his shoulder and saw Dino in the station wagon, moving slowly twenty yards behind them.
Daisy rounded a curve and started down half a mile of straight road. Then, after a couple of hundred yards, she stopped, seeming confused. She paced about, sniffing the road and the graveled shoulder, circling back and doing the same area again.