Ninety-Seven Point Four

Jargus-9B's certification was the first conducted under the protocol Claire Morgenstern and Sergeant Marcus O'Sullivan had built for him over the preceding nine months. It replaced the patrol battery of crowd work and pursuit with tests of scent, evidence handling, sustained focus and long-range tracking, and it certified dogs to a detective support and rural operations track that had not existed at the start of the year. Jargus was the only dog on it.

The panel was Morgenstern, Deputy Handler Coordinator Marla Devine, and Detective Sergeant Charlie Claiborne of Organised Crime Division. Claiborne had watched Jargus during a joint exercise the month before and had recommended him for detective work. Morgenstern invited him to sit as external evaluator and confirm that the protocol met investigative standards. O'Sullivan handled the dog throughout.

The scent test was run in a disused vehicle shed on the centre's grounds, its floor deliberately fouled with diesel, rotting food and solvent. Twelve cloth samples were hidden in it, three carrying the reference scent. Jargus found two within minutes. He missed the third, which had been placed beneath a leaking fuel drum, and Devine recorded the miss.

The evidence test followed in the training house, where seventeen items had been laid through four rooms: blood, fibres, a knife, a spent cartridge and trace samples on hard surfaces. Jargus indicated every item by sitting 1.2 metres from it with his eyes on O'Sullivan. He crossed no marker and disturbed nothing. It was the only section of the day in which he scored full marks.

The focus test held him on a doorway for more than three-quarters of an hour while role-players walked other dogs past, dropped food, rolled balls across his line and played recorded screaming through a speaker. He was to alert only on one individual, identified by a scent applied that morning. He alerted on her when she came through, and on no one else.

The track had been laid the previous evening by a role-player walking 8.4 kilometres through scrub and dry eucalypt forest on the lower slopes of the Meehan Range behind Rokeby. O'Sullivan followed Jargus on a long line with Claiborne and Devine behind. The dog lost the trail once, at a creek crossing where the role-player had waded downstream, and found it again on the far bank after casting along the water's edge for several minutes. He ended the track at the tree where an evidence bag had been tied.

The graduated force section came last and cost him the only marks he lost in the field. In the fourth of six scenarios, against a decoy simulating an active assault, he took the protective sleeve as directed but held it for a beat past O'Sullivan's release command. Devine marked him down. The panel debated the deduction before accepting it. Claiborne argued that the delay was too short to matter operationally, and Devine argued that a release was either clean or it was not.

The scores were tallied in Morgenstern's office in the afternoon. His overall result was 97.4 per cent, the highest the centre had recorded. Morgenstern signed the certification and filed it the same afternoon. Claiborne added a note confirming the protocol's suitability for investigative deployment.

Late in the day O'Sullivan went to Morgenstern's office alone. He asked her to keep Jargus at Rokeby with himself as handler rather than pass the dog to a detective neither of them had worked with. Morgenstern refused. She told him the specialist track had been built so that the dog could work alongside an investigator, and that a training sergeant could not be one. O'Sullivan accepted the decision and returned Jargus to Kennel 9 himself.