Another two miles into the valley and the dogs didn’t seem as confident about the direction Teddy had taken. Rather than tugging at their leashes, the dog sometimes halted and sat.
“Oh hey, I think they lost the scent,” said one of the dog handlers finally.
“Well, maybe…did you boy?” another asked his dog. It licked its lips and yawned.
The commander stopped the search team and used his binoculars to search the desert ahead. Scanning to his left and then to his right, he examined the terrain.
About a hundred yards distant, a figure sat under a palo verde tree with its back against the thin, lime-green trunk.
“Something’s there!” cried the commander.
“There he is!” shouted another police handler using his binoculars. He began running in that direction. “Good boy!” he said to his dog, who exploded forward.
“Hey, I don’t know,” said another dog handler who had good vision without binoculars. Something about the figure didn’t jive. Wasn’t this guy supposed to have a white beard and a baseball cap?
The pair sprinted. “Oh gee. I think it’s an immigrant. It’s not an old white guy; it’s a young man.”
“Fuckin’ hell!” shouted the second dog handler when he realized what was ahead.
“Shoot,” said the commander when caught up to the faster pair and recognized the situation was not what they had expected. He could see the bloated corpse of an immigrant sitting under the light green canopy of a palo verde tree.
The first dog handler stopped. The mass of dogs and men approached and then held back at the signal from the commander.
“Okay. This is not him. Clearly. This is an immigrant,” said the commander.
“Shit, shit, shit,” said one policeman. He put his hands on his waist and bent over wheezing at the ground.
“This isn’t what we needed,” said the original dog handler who had thought it was Teddy. “Not what we needed at all.”
“Some of us have got to stop everything and deal with this, I think. Well, the dogs seem to have lost the scent,” said the second handler.
“Yep. We have to stay with this guy. Miller and Poe. It’s gonna be you. I’ll send the ambulance as close as it can and they’ll bring a stretcher out. I’m sending a GPS to them now.” The commander frowned at the screen of his phone.
Miller and Poe huddled together with a certain degree of depressed resignation. They looked everywhere but at the body.
“Probably dropped his things around here,” continued the commander. “Look around for his pack. They always drop it right before they die. We’ve got to try to get an ID.”
Everyone fanned out searching the surrounding area. Within minutes, another dog located a backpack with information showing Guatemalan citizenship for a man named Josephino Armenta and a photo somewhat like the corpse.
“We’ll go back and start again. Probably tomorrow. Good thing we put down some markers on the computer GPS trail. I’m keeping a record of where the dogs took us. We’re gonna find him.”
The coroner’s assistant arrived thinking it was going to be the old man who had walked out into the desert. Instead he had a dead Guatemalan to deal with. At least this man had his identification near him before he died, and therefore the body could be sent back home.