Collecting the Dead (2 page)

The other track was in the dilapidated ruins of old Detroit. The PD thought the guy had been beaten to death, but it turned out he fell from the roof of an abandoned warehouse, hitting several obstructions on the way down and landing in the middle of the alley. It was a high price to pay for a couple dollars of stolen copper.

All in all it had been an easy week. No trees. No forests. No juggernaut of mosquitoes, ticks, flies, spiders, and gnats.

I won’t be so lucky this time around.

As we start off again, Sergeant Anderson says, “So …
Steps
, huh? How’d you get a nickname like that?”

A couple responses immediately come to mind, but Jimmy keeps telling me I get testy when we’re in the woods and that I need to relax and be nice. He says I need to think about what I’m saying before I say it … which is what I thought I was doing.

He got his master’s in psychology before joining the Bureau.

What the hell does he know?

“My real name is Magnus Craig,” I say to Anderson, “but everyone’s been calling me Steps since I was about fourteen, even Mom. That’s the summer I did my first Search and Rescue.”

“Missing hiker?”

“Worse. Two boys, aged five and eight. They wandered away from a campsite and it was already getting dark by the time I showed up. Someone said, ‘How you gonna track them in the dark?’ and I just said, ‘Step by step.’ Thirty minutes later I found the boys huddled in the hollow of a mossy old stump, scared to death but otherwise unharmed.”

I pause and crouch on the trail, bringing the whole caravan to a halt. My eyes dance over nonexistent evidence on the ground, feigning curiosity at imaginary signs of passage.
Appearances
, I remind myself,
must keep up appearances at all times.
It’s simple, really: a pause here and there, the occasional puzzled look, fingers working in the air as they help “read” the trail.
Appearances
. I learned that the hard way.

Standing, I start forward once more, the caravan lurching along behind. “By the time we reached the campground that night,” I tell Anderson, “everyone was saying it was like I could see the boys’ footsteps painted on the ground. Crazy, right? Then one of the deputies tossed me a bottle of water and said, ‘Step by step, huh? Well, here’s to steps.’ As you can imagine, with a group like that it wasn’t a huge leap before everyone was calling me Steps.”

I neglect to tell Sergeant Anderson that I wasn’t a member of Search and Rescue at the time and that my father brought me to the campground when he heard of the missing boys. He knew about my special ability, knew that I could help. Now, years later, there are three who know my secret: Dad, Jimmy, and FBI Director Robert Carlson.

“How long have you been with the FBI’s Special Tracking Unit?” Anderson asks.

“I’ve been with the STU for five years now, since it was founded.”

“I bet you help a lot of people,” he says, and I can tell there’s admiration in his words. But I don’t answer. I average about two and a half call-outs a week, and these days they don’t send me on the easy ones. There’s always something unusual, unexplained, or sinister involved, which means the bodies pile up pretty quickly.

A slideshow of dead faces begins to play in my mind, unbidden and unwelcome. I force it to stop and replace it with the smiles of the living … but they’re outnumbered and soon we’re back to dead faces and dead eyes and dead gaping mouths.

Help?
I think.
Not so much these days. I’m just the undertaker’s front man.

Bowman Summit is just as I pictured it: a high, dirty ridge lined by a gentle down-sloping of trees to the east, generously mingled with the crude upthrusting of sedimentary rock, and to the west a crescent-shaped cliff dropping to the forest floor two hundred feet below. It’s absolutely hideous!

“Now,
that
is a breathtaking view,” Jimmy says, coming up beside me.

Putz.

I love him like a brother, really; he’s quick to laugh and always the first to find the better half of a bad situation, but sometimes …

“Come on, Steps,” Jimmy says, fake-punching me in the kidney, “even you have to admit that that’s a gorgeous view. The way the mist hangs on the trees—”

I thrust the index finger of my right hand into the air, and Jimmy knows my meaning. We have one sacred rule: when in the woods, we don’t talk about the woods.

He denies that I have hylophobia, the unreasonable fear of forests. I argue that, of all people, I should know whether I have an unreasonable fear of forests. But, apparently, because I don’t go into a total meltdown on the trail, somehow that proves that I don’t have it.

Psych majors.

“Hold it, Jimmy!” I bark, stopping dead in the path, my arms shooting up and out as if to block those coming up from behind.

The swath of trail ahead is little different from the rest of the summit, but etched forever upon it is the last paragraph of the last page of the last chapter of Ann Buerger’s life. I see it as clearly as I see Jimmy standing next to me, though there is scant physical evidence.

An exceptional tracker would see some of it.

I see it all.

A shiver trembles through my body as a warm breeze comes in from the south.

*   *   *

You don’t get lost on a three-mile trail that runs through your backyard, a trail you’ve walked or run hundreds of times. It just doesn’t happen. I didn’t know the details of the search when the call came in at 6:23 this morning, but by 7:30 we were wheels-up out of Hangar 7 at Bellingham International Airport and southbound to Portland on the STU’s Gulfstream G100 corporate jet.

Hangar 7 is both a home for the jet and an innocuous secure facility from which the Special Tracking Unit operates. The open bay is large enough for the Gulfstream’s almost fifty-five-foot wingspan, with room enough at the back for a two-story row of offices.

Downstairs is a comfortable break room on the left that includes a sixty-inch LCD TV on the wall, several chairs, and a couch suitable for sleeping, which I can personally vouch for. In the middle is a kitchen area with a full-sized fridge (ice and water dispenser included), a sink, a dishwasher, and plenty of counter space and cabinets. To the right is our conference room: a glass-enclosed, soundproof room with a long and no-doubt-expensive mahogany table running down the center. The table is surrounded by a retinue of overstuffed, overcomfortable chairs.

The room doesn’t get much use.

The chairs are well greased, though, and Jimmy and I like to spin around in them as fast as we can to see who gets sick first. We’re professionals.

The second story is less complicated: Jimmy’s office to the right, mine to the left, and Diane Parker’s right in the middle, poor woman.

Diane’s our “intelligence analyst,” which basically means she’s a walking encyclopedia of both useful and useless information, a secretary, a records specialist, a computer technician, a travel agent, and she’s the only one who can unclog the garbage disposal in the kitchen.

Diane’s the puzzle master, the one who digs through databases and finds the missing pieces and lines them up to tell a story. We won’t need her on this one. The story is easy to read.

“He hid over there,” I say, pointing to the right of the path, “in the outcropping, behind those bushes. He waited; bastard! Waited until she was almost past and then came at her. Maybe she saw him in her peripheral vision, maybe she didn’t. He knew she’d be wearing headphones, so she wouldn’t hear him coming until it was too late.” I stop in the trail. “Her footsteps end here.”

“Wha— Did he take her?” Sergeant Anderson breathes.

Jimmy knows. His eyes are already scanning the edge of the summit.

“He pushed her,” I say. “Hard enough that she flew at least seven or eight feet before coming down. By that time she was over the side.” I walk over to Jimmy and point. “Her left hand landed first and she tried to grab that root, but she had too much momentum.” I shake off a shiver and continue, now in a quiet voice. “She fought hard, grabbing, clawing, wedging her heels.…” My voice drifts off as my eyes follow Ann’s trail, until it disappears over the side and I gasp weakly, involuntarily, sadly. I didn’t know her, but she deserved better. Not this.

The base of Bowman Summit is a hardscrabble of debris sloughed off by the mountain over generations, centuries, and millennia, mostly the result of slides and erosion. The castoff is eight to ten feet deep about the base and inclines sharply from the valley floor beginning some twenty feet out from the cliff wall.

A legion of trees populates the valley, fed by a network of small streams and creeks that no doubt empty into Henry Hagg Lake several miles away. The largest of the streams passes within a hundred feet of the summit base, providing clear, cool water to splash upon sweating faces. The forest is quiet today. The birds are about, but there’s little singing and even the river’s murmur seems muted.

She’s waiting for us there, broken and quiet, sprawled upon the ground, empty eyes looking skyward, legs contorted unnaturally behind her: Ann Buerger. Two hours of hard trails, guided by GPS, and this is our trophy.

I’m tired of collecting the dead.

Their faces look back at me from the slideshow in my mind, as if to ask:
Why didn’t you save me?
Even though they were dead long before I knew their names.

I feel Jimmy’s hand on my shoulder as I kneel near the body. “We save the ones we can,” he says quietly.
Our words.
After years of doing this they’re almost a catchphrase. Their original intent was to remind us that we have a job to do, to get us back on task even under the most grisly of circumstances.

We save the ones we can
.

Then his hand is gone and it’s down to business. He begins to document the scene: photographs, GPS coordinates, measurements. It’s murder. Everything has to be in the report … or most everything. What won’t be in the official report are photographs of the places on her right forearm and right upper back where he shoved her. There’s no way of capturing that information, no camera or film that sees what I see. My head hurts as I look and my eyes feel tight and full, like grapes on a vine ready to split from too much rain.

The signs are there like a beacon, a light in the darkness, a neon billboard. So clear they might as well be words on a page. I can almost feel the force of the hit, Ann flying through the air, the emptiness of falling.

From the pocket of my Windbreaker I retrieve the leather case and the glasses within. Unfolding the earpieces, I slide them onto my face. The relief is instantaneous as the crushing tightness in my head lets go and washes away. I can almost feel it draining out the bottom of my feet as I wiggle my toes.

It’s a strange sensation. I’ve never gotten used to it.

My eyesight is twenty-twenty; the glasses have more to do with my sanity than my vision. They’re very special glasses with thin lead-crystal lenses. I had them custom-made in Seattle, which wasn’t cheap. I also have a pair with tinted lenses that pass for sunglasses, but I left them at home this trip.

The Canon PowerShot S95 is buried at the bottom of my backpack and I have to dig past an extra pair of socks, an Oregon map, some bottled water, a box of granola bars, a thermal blanket, and my toothbrush before I find it. Powering up the camera, I go through the ritual. This photo isn’t for the report. I click the button just once, and then check to make sure the image isn’t blurred or washed out by the sun. I stare at Ann for a moment.

She won’t leave me be
.

Like the others, she’ll haunt my memories. In one month I deal with more murders than most cops see in a decade. It’s starting to take its toll.

“We gotta find the guy who did this,” Sergeant Anderson says, breaking my trance. I didn’t hear him come up, but he’s standing next to me, just staring up the side of the cliff, his eyes searching for … what? A clue? An explanation?

I watch him a moment. I’ve seen that look before: anger, anguish, a sense of helplessness. I’ve seen it on thousands of faces at hundreds of crime scenes. I’ve seen it in the mirror.

My hand finds his shoulder; I don’t know why. “We save the ones we can,” I hear myself say. The words don’t mean a thing to him. How could they? I just don’t know what else to say.

I’m not good with people, not really.

Dropping my hand, I say, “Don’t worry, I already know who did it.” Stowing the camera, I take one last look at Ann Buerger and walk away.

*   *   *

The door is dandelion-yellow, with frosted glass inserts and a brushed-nickel handle. The doorbell chimes for the second time—a cheerful five-note chorus that’s out of sync with the dreadful news about to be delivered.

Footsteps pad to the front of the house and a blur pauses motionless on the other side of the frosted glass. A dead bolt slides open, a door handle turns, and then there’s a face pressed through the narrow door opening: red eyes, a red nose, a downcast, twitchy mouth—all the bitter qualities of sorrow. Seeing Sergeant Anderson, Jimmy, and myself, Matt Buerger opens the door wide and takes a step forward.

As I pull my glasses down an inch and peer over the top, my eyes consume Matt in an instant, telling me all I need to know. In the world of man-tracking the term
shine
refers to a hard-to-see impression left in vegetation or on a difficult surface, usually caused by crushing or pressing, such as a foot on a leaf. The only way to bring the track out is illumination. You can use sunlight, but most trackers pack a flashlight so they can get close and control the angle of the light.

That’s not me.

I don’t use man-tracking methods because I don’t have to. Though we’re in the shadow of the porch and I have no flashlight, I see the shine: it’s on the door, on the floor, everywhere Matt Buerger walks and on everything he touches.

The shine.

It’s the only track I need, and it’s abundant and everywhere; overpowering. It can’t be hidden or washed away. It can’t be disguised and it can’t be confused with another. It’s not the same shine used by man-trackers, though. This shine is exclusively mine, or at least I think it’s exclusive. Maybe God blessed someone else with this curse.