efore joining the canine unit, Dave Sanabria had a thing for public transportation. First, there were his four-and-a-half years as a city bus driver — an experience that persuaded him to switch to a police uniform. Then there were his seven years with Transit — an experience that persuaded him to stick to dogs as partners after the 1995 merger with the NYPD.

So how did buses, subways and the other glories of the MTA add up to one of the most senior members of the dog squad?

The 46-year-old Sanabria sees no mystery. “In a lot of ways, the bus driving was frustrating. Hardly a week went by when somebody didn’t climb on with a knife or a gun. They weren’t always there to make trouble, but just the fact that they thought they could walk around armed to the teeth, get into a public situation like a bus where anything at all could have started even by accident, got me mad. You feel helpless one time too many and you ask yourself what you could be doing instead of calling out cross streets and making sure passengers are putting the right fare into the box.”

Given his almost prenatal disposition toward dogs, the married father of two daughters found it the most natural of segues when, two years after his June 1986 graduation from the Academy, he ended up on Transit canine patrol. “That seems like another age now,” he says. “They didn’t even have vehicles to get you to the sector you were patrolling. You had to make this long slog up to the 59th Street station and get to where you were going that way. The dogs were great, but it was really rough on them. For all the discipline they had, they still had to deal with crowded subway cars where people could misstep at any second or some motorman would take a curve too fast, spilling people around. You had to really be on your toes and make sure passengers didn’t step on the dog’s paws!”

With the merger of Transit into the NYPD came more than one change. “I’ll tell you,” he laughs, “the first thing we all noticed was that we were putting on weight! We didn’t have to take those long treks up to the subway stations anymore. Now we suddenly had transport vehicles to get anywhere we wanted to go.”

Another change was that regular dog patrols were gradually phased out of the subways. “The MTA itself has bomb dogs and you always have the special case, but you don’t have anything like the canine presence you had before the merger. What it really comes down to is dogpower. At one time, when Transit was a separate entity, you had as many as 53 dogs on the force while the NYPD only had about a dozen. But that’s not the way it is today, and there’s simply too much demand for the dogs we have, not just in the city but around the country for emergencies. You can spread 35 dogs just so far, then priorities start kicking in.”

Sanabria’s priorities, with his German Shepherd Storm II, are cadaver searching and FEMA search and rescue. The latter certification has led the team everywhere from Indiana and the state of Washington to the August-September disaster zones in Mississippi and Texas. In 2005 alone, it uncovered murder victims for the FBI who had been lying buried for 13 and 20 years. In fact, a jaunt with Sanabria through the record he has compiled with Storm II and his predecessor Storm is as grim an odyssey as can be imagined. “Obviously, some of the worst times were after 9/11. We were at the Twin Towers every day. We found a lot of the corpses — Police Officer Glen Pettit and Detective Joe Vigiano. You just had to keep going. The worst part was that, unlike most cases where you were looking for some specific cadaver, here you didn’t know who you were going to find and how many of them there would be. That was brutal.”

Before and after 9/11, however, there have been other cases that he recalls with an equal amount of black detail. “One time, we had a woman missing for three years. Turned out her landlord had another couple that wanted her rent-stabilized apartment so he killed her to get her out to collect bigger rents. Another time, a woman got pregnant because of a rape, so she gave birth, then threw the baby into the garbage.”

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Of course, the Manhattan native and Massapequa Park resident stresses, none of these recoveries would have been possible without Storm and his namesake successor. “My dog wouldn’t miss a thing even on a football field,” he declares proudly. “For example, the FBI case with the victim missing for 13 years, Storm found that body five-and-a-half feet down in the ground and inside cement.”

Sometimes, Sanabria admits, he himself has been slow to appreciate his animal’s scenting powers. “There was one case where we were pretty sure a body had been dumped in a very desolate area. You had this mesa-kind of ledge with a tree growing up from the foot. Storm started barking like hell when I brought him to the edge of the precipice, but we couldn’t see anything so we took him over to the other side. Nothing. He just wants to get back to the side where the tree is. Sure enough, we get down to the base of the tree and we take a better look at the moss. The corpse ended up caught inside the roots of the tree, so as the tree came up, the scent of the body fluids got inside the moss.”

Although he abides by regulations not to reward Storm with food treats for a successful mission, Sanabria does give him a toy. “Verbal praise and shows of approval are okay, I guess, but I think there’s got to be something on top of that.”

Sanabria is equally confident about his own role in the cadaver hunts. “Look, I know I do my job well,” he says without the slightest trace of boasting. “We’re a team. We’re detectives. I’m not there just to yell “sit” or “stay.” When I get to a likely cadaver scene, I have my own routines, too. For instance, I often light a cigarette to be sure of the wind direction. I’ve also got probes that I’ll stick into the ground to get a better idea of the terrain Storm will be dealing with.”

Neither does Sanabria hesitate when asked about his chief satisfactions on the job. “When I’m actually doing it, I love the control of the situation we have. You have brass all around you that outranks you, but you know you and your dog are there because you’re the specialists they’re depending on. But even more than that, you’ve got the twin satisfaction of knowing that at least the friends and family of the missing person will have that little consolation of knowing they can bury the victim and, more often than not, of knowing that the location of the body —where you uncovered it — will help lead to a quick arrest. Isn’t that what it’s all about, making sure the killer didn’t get away with it?”

And his relationship with Storm? “The same, I suppose, as every other cop with his dog. The more you work with them, the more you understand their language and they understand yours.” — Donald Dewey