Collecting the Dead: A Novel

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  This book is dedicated to the rarest among us, the men and women who face constant threat, who are cursed at, spit upon, condemned and assaulted—and who willingly accept such consequences.

  They are the guardians of civilized society, who confront fear so that others don’t have to, who rush in when others rush out, and who too often make the ultimate sacrifice so that others may simply live.

  They protect property that is not theirs, seek the missing, console the grief-stricken, recover the bodies, shield the abused, and find justice for the slain and the violated.

  Their work takes them into the heart of misery, to walk among the wretched, yet somehow they find a smile for their spouse and children when they arrive home.

  To those who have dedicated the most.

  To those who protect and serve.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks first and foremost to the three gifted people who helped bring this book to life: my editor, Keith Kahla; my assistant editor, Hannah Braaten; and my amazing agent, Kimberley Cameron. Their talent and dedication is beyond measure and I am eternally grateful for all they’ve done.

  Special thanks to my unofficial team of editors and first readers at the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office: Cheryl Café, Kristin Lunderville, Nickee Norris-Oaks, Altavia Chatman, Al Cheesman, Wendy Jones, and Stephanie Sturlaugson.

  And to Detective Kevin Bowhay and Special Agent Thom LeCompte, who provided plenty of insight and an unlimited amount of fodder for my imagination. You know a friend is a keeper when you can call him on the weekend to get his opinion on how bad a body would smell after four months in the woods. Just saying.

  Finally, a special thank you to my wife, Lea, and my daughters, Mary, Katie, and Abby, who’ve been with me on this journey since the beginning.

  CHAPTER ONE

  June 15, 10:12 A.M.

  She had small feet.

  I say she had small feet because to say she has small feet would imply that she’s still alive. She isn’t. I know. I always know. It’s my special ability, my burden, my curse. The others think we’re searching for a missing jogger, perhaps hurt or lost but certainly alive. I can’t tell them we’re too late; how would I explain such knowledge?

  They wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  People are reluctant to give up the dead.

  I turn the shoe in my hand, looking at it from every angle. It’s a random selection from her closet made prior to my arrival, standard procedure for a track like this. I scrutinize the wear on the sole, the indentations on the leather, the signs of strain on the strap, as if to do so is to unfold and expose the mystery of her walking style, the way she carried herself, the way she sometimes dragged her left foot ever so slightly, almost undetectably.

  You get to know shoes in my line of work: women’s shoes, men’s shoes, and, sadly, kids’ shoes. This one is an ankle-strap pump with three-inch heel and leather upper. Not high-end, but nice nonetheless. I know that she last wore it about two weeks ago … but that part won’t be in my report.

  “Can you track her?” Sergeant Anderson asks.

  I nod, but say nothing, pretending to examine the shoe further for the sake of my audience, which now includes four deputies, a dozen Search and Rescue volunteers, and my partner, FBI Special Agent Jimmy Donovan. The truth is I don’t need to know how she walked, what her gait was, or whether she favored the ball of her foot or the heel. But illusions must be maintained.

  Newsweek once called me the Human Bloodhound. I’m sure it conjured up the image they were looking for, wrong as that image was. If only they knew. If only they could see what a fraud I am.

  “You said her husband reported her missing?” I say to the sergeant.

  “Last night,” Anderson replies. “Said she went for a run after work, as she always does, and never returned. That was sometime after five P.M.”

  “And there’s nowhere else she would have gone? No other trails she runs?”

  “None that the husband was aware of. She mostly stuck near home.”

  “Where is he? The husband?”

  “He’s in the house, resting.”

  “Resting?”

  “He walked the loop four times last night looking for her before he called it in.”

  “Four times, huh?”

  “Yep. And he walked it again this morning with us.”

  Taking off my glasses and securing them in their leather case, I stand for a moment and study the back of Ann Buerger’s modest two-story home. My eyes follow her footsteps out the back door, across the lawn, and to the dirt and gravel trail at my feet. The steps lead north, quickly widening from a walk to a steady jog within the first twenty yards.

  “The trail’s a three-mile loop,” Anderson says, “though you can turn off after the first mile and take the shortcut back just before the trail starts rising to Bowman Summit. SAR has walked the whole thing three times.” He lifts his chin toward the Search and Rescue team. “They also checked the shortcut. There’s no sign of her.”

  I nod. “Let’s do it, then, step by step.”

  The trail starts off level as it skirts the western edge of Crest View, a community of ninety-seven single-family homes thirty miles west of Portland and just northwest of Henry Hagg Lake. The houses are a random mix of ranches, colonials, and the occasional split-foyer. It’s considered an upscale neighborhood in this part of Oregon, and without exception the lawns are neatly cared for and the sidewalks are clean; a nice neighborhood by any standard.

  Jimmy and I lead the way and set a brisk pace. The gentle trail around Crest View soon morphs into a steady incline that surreptitiously sucks the breath from your lungs. After the first mile at a ten-degree incline, I’m breathing hard and getting pissed at Jimmy, who’s whistling the theme from Mission Impossible and looking like he’s having the time of his life. It’s not that I’m in bad shape, I can run ten miles with the best of them; I just prefer to do it a half mile at a time with twenty-four-hour breaks in between.

  Turning, I wave Sergeant Anderson up from the back of the caravan. He looks like he’s spent a fair amount of time donut-diving at the office, and right now I need an anchor to slow Jimmy. The sergeant’s huffing pretty hard when he reaches us and I stop to let him catch his breath. Mission Impossible falters and then stops.

  “What’s up?” Jimmy asks.

  “Just taking a breather,” I say casually, tilting my head ever so slightly toward Anderson’s sweaty face while trying to look unscathed by the hike.

  Jimmy nods and takes a pull of water from his CamelBak, then asks Anderson, “What’s the summit like?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the sergeant pants, nodding his head as if he’s been waiting for this question. “We looked over the side and couldn’t find any evidence of someone falling.” He gulps for breath from talking too fast. “It’s not a straight drop, either, so if she lost her footing an
d went over”—gulp—“she would have left gouges in the dirt, uprooted plants, that sort of thing.” Gulp, gulp, gasp. “Besides, the path is wide enough that she wouldn’t have had to get near the edge.”

  “So if it doesn’t drop straight off, I assume you can’t see the bottom very well from the summit?”

  “Not unless you tie off and rope out a bit.”

  “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.

  “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 i
t, 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.