“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.