Page 111 of Whistle
“I want to talk to you about dog whistles.”
“Dog whistles? What, you getting a dog? Training him?”
“No, nothing like that. I wanted to know what effect a high-pitched whistle could have on a dog.”
“Uh, well, as you know, people can hear sounds above twenty thousand hertz, but dogs hear in the range of forty-seven to sixty-five thousand hertz.”
“I’ve no idea what that means, John. Are you saying dogs hear way better than we do?”
“Yeah. At way higher frequencies. You know when a dog tilts its head when it looks at you, all cute? He’s probably hearing something you can’t hear and moving his head, trying to make it clearer. It’s got nothing to do with thinking you’re adorable.”
“Okay, so let’s say you could make a sound that was way up in that higher range. Something no person could hear. Would that hurt a dog?”
“Hurt him? Might make him a little uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t hurt him,” Garfield said. “Although, yeah, it’d be like if someone blew a regular whistle super-loud right by your ear. It would startle you, might damage your eardrum. So, yeah, high enough frequency, duration, it might damage a dog’s ability to hear. If you don’t mind my asking, Harry, the fuck is this about?”
“Ever see a dog lose his shit because of a whistle?”
“What do you mean, lose his shit?”
“Become violent. Like, a mad dog. Vicious, attacking. A dog that up to that moment had always been gentle, a dog you could trust with kids. But it was like a switch got flipped, the dog goes crazy.”
“Never seen anything like that. What the hell’s going on in Lucknow?”
Harry managed a chuckle. “I wish I knew. We had this—”
One of the other lines on his phone lit up. “I got another call I gotta take, John. Thanks for letting me bend your ear.”
He ended the one call and answered the other.
“Cook.”
“Hey,” said Melissa. “Sorry not to get back to you sooner.”
“I was just thinking about calling you.”
“I did a little checking. On victims with their bones removed. I was thinking there was something like that in Des Moines, but turns out it was Duluth. But it was a long time ago, Harry. We’re talking back in the seventies, nearly thirty years ago. One case. A homeless guy, early forties. Police believed some sort of satanic cult or something did it, but they never got anywhere with it. And at the time, they were aware of another case they’d got wind of, in Nashville, but that went all the way back to ’55. We’re talking close to half a century, Harry.”
“Huh,” he said, making some notes.
“This guy you found at the side of the road, I don’t see how it could have anything to do with those other homicides, so I’m sorry if I got your hopes up, thinking there was a pattern. For it to be the same perpetrator, you’re looking at someone who’s been active for nearly fifty years. Even if he—and we always assume it’s ahe—started off in his late teens or early twenties, we’re talking someonewho’d now be in his seventies. Doesn’t fit any pattern that I’m familiar with.”
“Look, I appreciate this. I really do.”
“If you had any other commonalities, I could see whether there was anything that jumped out.”
Commonalities, he thought.
Harry had been looking for commonalities between his one homicide and any others that might have happened. But maybe that wasn’t where he needed to be looking for things in common. They had been occurring elsewhere, in events that were in no way related to the death of Angus Tanner.
Unless they were.
“You there?” Melissa asked.
“Yeah, sorry. My mind was wandering there for a second.”
“How’s Janice?” she asked.
“She’s good, she’s great. And Dylan’s getting taller every day.”
