Читать книгу A Killer's Touch - Michael Benson - Страница 9

CHAPTER 4

CANINE SEKOU

Tami Treadway was a SCSO Animal Services supervisor, a civilian employee, who trained dogs to conduct search-and-rescue missions. The dogs, once trained, could no longer live in a normal home, and they needed to be placed with a search-and-rescue specialist or a member of law enforcement. She made sure everyone was trained properly—humans and dogs alike—and safeguarded the dogs’ health.

She had her own dog, of course. Canine Sekou was his formal name; he was a golden retriever she’d handled for six years. Sekou was a South African word for “great warrior” or “learned one.”

“He was my husband’s dog,” Treadway later said. “He got him from his nephew in New Orleans, where my husband is from. We weren’t together at the time, although we were both members of the team. He got Sekou to be a search dog, and trained him initially in wilderness searches. We got together when Sekou was young.”

When her husband went to school to become a firefighter and a paramedic, Tami Treadway took over Sekou’s training. The dog was trained in human remains detection, and Treadway had been his handler since.

“He’s still my husband’s dog in the family sense, but I’m the one who has worked him,” she noted.

Treadway and Sekou were a team, she and that dog, two halves of a whole. She could read his body language like a book, and he “told” in a million ways just what he was doing and thinking. He was her partner. They lived together. They slept together.

Golden retrievers made great search dogs, but they were by no means the only breed capable of doing the work. German shepherds, Labs, Australian cattle dogs, and even mixed breeds were also suitable. Aptitude varied more from dog to dog than from breed to breed.

A dog trained in human remains detection followed the scent of decaying human body parts, so Sekou’s searches almost never had a happy ending. Most were just flat-out heartbreaking.

“The one that sticks out in my mind was a case in Tampa, to the north of us. They had some intelligence that a girl might have had something bad happen to her with a guy who lived in the house, and they wanted us to search this empty house. Stripped-to-the-walls empty. It had a concrete floor, and they thought he might have buried her under the concrete.” They never went in with just one dog, always with three or four, because a “dog will be a dog” and they don’t have 100 percent success. All three dogs in this case came up with nothing in the house. In fact, they didn’t even want to be in the house. They kept trying to go outside. So they moved the search to the backyard, and the dogs hit on a spot near a shed. There, about six feet down, they found the girl’s body.

The girl’s name? Treadway didn’t know. She might never know. “We try to be disconnected,” she said.

But there was no way to be disconnected in this case. She lived in North Port and the search for the missing Denise Lee was all over the local news, even before she and Sekou took up the search.

Even if you weren’t watching TV, you knew something was up, with so many roads closed by police. To make it even more personal, Denise was the same age as Treadway’s daughter; and her daughter had two little boys, just like Denise.

The dogs don’t know, of course. They are just happy that they got their toy or their reward for a successful search. Sekou had a clownish personality, and that didn’t change just because he was searching for a cadaver. He never picked up on the grimness of the task.

On January 18, 2008, Treadway and Sekou were called in to assist with the search for Denise Lee. She was given her orders by the sheriff, and they were one of six-to-eight canine teams involved in that day’s desperate activities.

The initial plan was to search a wide variety of areas, in the vicinity of the Lees’ house, around King’s house, and the area around Harold Muxlow’s home.

But Trooper Pope said their best bet was to search in the area of King’s arrest, and that was where Sekou and Treadway were happily doing their thing.