“Has anyone done that?” Jimmy takes another drink from the CamelBak, a long one this time, and then secures it.
“Scott Johnson and Marty Horvath,” Anderson replies, wiping his forehead and neck with a soiled ivory handkerchief. Stuffing the damp rag into his back pocket, he turns and quickly scans the faces of those behind us, then points at two of the younger and more athletic SAR members toward the rear. “That’s them. Scott’s the skinny one on the right. They both know how to rappel and couldn’t wait to hook up. Fools wanted to start in the dark, but I made them wait until first light this morning. They had a pretty good look but didn’t see anything. Course, the summit covers a good quarter mile.”
“How high is it?” Jimmy asks, but he doesn’t look all that interested in the answer, nor is he watching the trail, me, or Sergeant Anderson; his eyes are wandering from the twisted trunk of a deformed tree, to a chattering squirrel calling out a warning from a nearby branch, to a red-tailed hawk circling overhead, silhouetted against a powder-blue sky with the sun ticking slowly toward noon.
Jimmy’s a hiker. He’s also a pretty good tracker in his own right. I don’t know what it is about him and the wildlands: the hills, the game trails, the isolated lakes in hard-to-reach valleys. I don’t think even he knows, not really, but you can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice every time we hit the trail: he loves the forest.
I hate it.
Every time we end up in the bush it seems a body is involved. It started off as missing hunters who succumbed to the elements, and out-of-shape hikers who put too many demands on their hearts. These days it’s mostly homicide victims and suspicious deaths. That’s not what bothers me, though. The forest and I have history. And not the good kind, either.
I’ve often wondered if I’m the butt of some cosmic joke. Why else would God take a kid whose favorite saying was, “Homey don’t camp,” and make him the world’s greatest tracker—and not even a real tracker, but someone who has to pretend?
Jimmy says he wouldn’t.
But we live by the lie, Jimmy and I. The truth is a deep secret kept only because it would be too hard for most to believe. It’s my life and even I have trouble with it.
God lovates me.
That’s the word I came up with when I was fifteen as I struggled to decide whether God loves me or hates me, and settled on both. Lovate. I like the word; it’s schizophrenic. As I grew older, however, I realized that God didn’t really hate me … much … and that my special tracking ability is really a gift, like when the Greeks left that nice horse for the Trojans.
So here I am, once again in the woods. It’s the third track this week. The other two were easy; in and out within hours. One was on the outskirts of Atlanta. The stabbed and beaten body of a twenty-three-year-old male was found in the bushes next to a playground. The trail was strong and led us to a gang house three blocks away. It was amazing how quickly the gang members turned on one another when detectives started talking about murder charges.
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.