Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel Read online

  We get none of these.

  Instead, from the blackness of the cabin issues a quiet, hysterical laugh, and the words, “He’s going to be so mad.” After a short pause, the words come again, louder: “He’s going to be so mad!”

  The eye has retreated to the back of the cabin now and I can see him pacing back and forth, his mantra growing louder and more desperate with each passing moment. As he moves, he alternates between clasping his hands together in front of him and pressing them to the top of his head. Whether this is to keep the demons out or trap them in, I cannot say. These actions would be irrelevant but for the fact that they show me he doesn’t have a gun in his hand, a fact I pass on to Jimmy with some relief.

  “He’s going to be so mad!”

  The wretched voice rises with each repetition until it’s almost a scream, the cry made hideous by its implicit despair. All the while, the suspect continues to pace a trench into the floor at the back of the cabin, back and forth, back and forth.

  Jimmy updates me on the plan, occasionally pausing to call out to the suspect, urging him to surrender. There’s little chance of this happening, but the FBI voice calling out from somewhere in the woods is simply to distract the suspect, keep his attention at the front of the cabin.

  On Detective Jason Sturman’s side of the forest, orders are already being executed.

  The search team moves forward and fans out, encircling the rear and sides of the cabin. The dogs move into position fifty feet to the left of the open doorway, ready to give chase if the suspect decides to run.

  A lot of suspects wisely surrender at the first sight or mention of police K-9. The jaws of a fully grown German shepherd can be persuasive that way.

  The key to this plan rests with Detective Nate Critchlow, who moves up behind the cabin, ducks low, and then moves forward along the side until he’s under an empty window frame. In his hand is something I can’t see, though I have a pretty good idea what it is.

  When everyone is in place, Jimmy runs through a mental checklist and, satisfied, keys his mic. He utters but a single word repeated three times: “Go, go, go!”

  The night turns to chaos.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I never asked to be the lead man-tracker of the FBI’s elite Special Tracking Unit, nor could I have envisioned the events that brought me to this point.

  Sometimes things just happen.

  Cosmic forces conspire, or perhaps God just decides to correct a mistake … or make a new one. A boy takes a wrong turn in the woods, which leads to a string of wrong turns. Soon he’s lost, and the forest grows tall around him, hovering above, menacing and impenetrable. The whole thing turns into one big gut punch from Mother Nature when a blizzard rolls in and the snow piles deep. The boy dies, taken by hypothermia, though he is only eight.

  I was only eight.

  It was my father and a team of searchers who found me and revived me. How long my heart had been still is hard to say. It was likely just minutes, but dead is dead, and no one comes back from such an experience unscathed. I was no exception.

  Jimmy says that Mother Nature doesn’t gut-punch little boys, but I’m not so sure. Regardless, something touched me that day, and in the aftermath there lingered … well, an aftermath: a blessing, a curse. Your guess is as good as mine.

  Jimmy says it’s a gift, but he doesn’t see what I see.

  He doesn’t see the neon glow of the blood. He doesn’t see where it landed, where it dripped, where it dried. He doesn’t see the hands on the throats.

  It’s been almost twenty years since that day in the woods when I was eight, when death took my hand and then reluctantly let me go. Despite the years, I’ve never fully come to terms with what came next.

  My “blessing” started the moment they revived me, and while it’s fair to say that everything is mysterious when you’re eight, this was different.

  At first I thought the cold had done something to my sight, perhaps casting a film over my eyes, because a slight haze had invaded my vision. I noticed the palest shades of color beginning to appear in blotches and smears on the walls, floors, cabinets, seats, and counters. I tried to blink it off, as any eight-year-old would, but to no avail.

  In the weeks and months that followed, the hints of color became more pronounced, taking on richer hues, each remarkably distinct. In time, the vivid forest of neon began to assault my senses, splitting my head with migraines that may as well have been brought on by an ice-pick massage directly to the brain, hammering, hammering, hammering.

  It was maddening.

  The glow was everywhere and on everything.

  More importantly, I could now see the cause. That pale grime of color that had first plagued me was now manifest in footsteps, handprints, and the smudge of color on the wall where someone leaned into it with their shoulder.

  Though young, I started to understand.

  There was nothing wrong with my eyes. That part should have been a relief, but the truth that came with it was perhaps more terrifying. What I was seeing was, in fact, some type of human residue. Like the glow of a lightbulb after the switch has been turned off, only this glow never completely dies. The intensity dims over time, but never disappears entirely.

  The colors I see are endless in tint and combination, and beautiful to behold if not for the fact that you can’t turn them off. Woven throughout is an equally endless variety of textures that lie over the color, merging with it, giving it dimension and luminosity. Some of these textures are like sandpaper or pebbles, while others might be pulled wool, beach wood, or the rough skin of an alligator.

  The combinations are singularly unique.

  At the time, I explained what I was seeing to my dad, fearing he’d think me crazy. He didn’t, of course, and it was he who helped me through those first difficult years. He helped me learn to control the flood of color, to dampen and suppress it, so that it wouldn’t overwhelm me.

  Dad called it shine.

  He later suggested that the color was the essence of a person, unique to them, perhaps representative of their very soul—though my father wasn’t a particularly religious man.

  Unfiltered, the shine comes at me from a thousand directions, as if I have the eyes of a dragonfly and every one of them sees something different. You don’t realize how much we interact with our environment until you see it in bold colors. Imagine if, for a day, everything you touched, everywhere you sat, every spot you placed your foot, and even the spray of your sneeze was displayed in bright glowing red.

  Imagine this and you begin to understand shine.

  Now multiply that by every person you encounter, every person who’s walked the same path in the last hundred years or touched the same faucet in a public restroom. Even my own shine invades my sight, though, oddly, it’s less pronounced. Motel rooms are a particular nightmare, and I’ve taken to bringing my own sheets and pillowcase whenever I travel.

  With shine, the world is a billion-hued kaleidoscope—beautiful and horrifying in the same glance, an onslaught of color that gives me piercing headaches if I indulge it too long. It’s why, as a boy, I first learned to love reading. The pages of books, even used ones, are rarely touched except at the edge or corner. New books are a particular delight, their virgin pages filled with beautiful letters and words and not a hint of neon.

  To this day, books are a blessing, as are the sky, lakes, and oceans.

  It was a life-changing turn of events when I discovered, quite by accident, that lead crystal completely blocks the neon glow of shine. And it was my father who secretly ordered the manufacture of a special pair of lead-crystal glasses from a glassblower in Seattle. These days I keep at least two pairs of glasses handy at all times. They block the shine when I don’t want to gaze upon it, and I can take them off when I must.

  * * *

  We never told Mom.

  Not even a hint of it.

  I didn’t understand this as a child and took it as evidence that my father was embarrassed or afraid of
my special dilemma. As I grew older—perhaps a bit wiser—I came to realize that my dear, sweet, stern Norwegian mother would not have taken kindly to the news that her eldest son could see the subliminal leavings of humans as they went about their daily business.

  My mother clings to the superstitions of her upbringing.

  As a boy, I remember her loudly proclaiming, “Hallo! Hallo!” upon entering the house after an absence. This was usually after we’d been gone the better part of the day, and especially if we’d been on vacation. She’s a bit nuts—in the good way—so I always assumed she was just happy to see the house again, giving it a proper greeting and all that.

  As I grew older, I learned that she did this so our sudden reappearance wouldn’t upset any gnomes or dwarves who might have taken up residence during our absence, kind of like clapping your hands to shoo the rats away before walking into a dilapidated old building.

  Such are the superstitions of Norway.

  Whether she actually believes any of this is debatable, but she clings to the tradition nonetheless, much as an American might avoid walking under a ladder or opening an umbrella indoors, even while proclaiming the superstition preposterous.

  So, we didn’t tell Mom about shine.

  * * *

  Over the years, I’ve gained a certain mastery over my bane, much like the beekeeper who masters the hive but doesn’t yet know the purpose of the veil. It’s a painful learning process.

  I’ve often wondered what life would be like without shine—what it would be like to be normal, or at least the common perception of normal. In quiet times, when I indulge this fantasy, I imagine myself working in a bookstore, one that specializes in rare and collectible works. Such is my passion.

  But life isn’t fair, nor is it easy.

  I learned long ago that what we want for ourselves and what we get are often at odds. To some degree, I made peace with my curse long ago, though I suppose peace may be a misnomer, as it’s more akin to mutually assured destruction, a nuclear détente of sorts. Now I use the duality of the curse and the gift in the best way I know how: finding the missing, finding the dead, and finding their killers.

  Since shine is much like DNA or fingerprints in that no two combinations of essence and texture are alike, I’m in the unique position of being able to walk onto a crime scene and see every touch, every footfall, every drop of cast-off saliva, blood, or semen. If the suspect hid the murder weapon, his glowing footsteps lead me right to it. As to ferreting out the identity of the suspect, well, that’s another matter.

  Despite my unique position at the FBI’s Special Tracking Unit, my secret remains closely held. In addition to my dad, the only other people who know about shine are my partner, Jimmy, and the director of the FBI, Robert Carlson, who served with Dad in the Army during the Cold War.

  It’s fair to say that my dad was the architect of the Special Tracking Unit, but it was Robert Carlson who made it reality.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My morning had started as all mornings should, yet rarely do. I was lounging on my living room couch with a good book in my hands as horizontal rain pelted the row of bay windows. Indeed, a howling torrent blew outside, blurring the world into vague outlines of hills and horizons, of sky and sea. The perfect weather for reading.

  Straight out the windows to the west, the Puget Sound was heaving and churning, as if some great leviathan were just below the waves, wrestling in its slumber, throwing up immense whitecaps as it turned in fits and starts. Not a day for sailing. Not a day for any outdoor activity here in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a certain sense of inner peace on such days, when the storm is outside, and you are inside, comfortable and content.

  That was supposed to be my day.

  My entire day.

  * * *

  I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never read The Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Hobbit. I was never much for the fantasy genre but having seen the movies repeatedly it seems a bit unfair to ignore the original material—unfair to both Tolkien and myself. So far, I haven’t been disappointed. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book in the trilogy, I’ve already discovered the mysterious and enchanting Tom Bombadil, who was completely ignored in the movies.

  It was just the book for such a day. The wind outside stirred my imagination as I turned the pages, and the violent rain against the windows set the mood, as if even from this world something lashed at the heels of our heroes, setting them to flee into darker and darker territory.

  When the phone rang, I gave a start.

  I glared at the rude device; my first impulse was to ignore it, and I did. My mind was fully bent around the pages of the secondhand, dog-eared paperback, and I wasn’t about to let the phone break me from the fantasy, at least not while Frodo and the hobbits were in peril.

  I didn’t answer.

  I refused.

  It was Sunday. It was stormy. I deserved a good book and the warmth of my living room and some rum eggnog in a hot mug. I didn’t really have a mug of rum eggnog, but that was beside the point.

  “No,” I said firmly to no one.

  The phone stopped … only to start up again thirty seconds later.

  Picking up the handset, I glanced at the caller ID and muttered, “Of course.” As if suddenly emboldened, the wind lashed ferociously at the wall of windows as I pushed the talk button. A harbinger, I supposed. It seemed fitting.

  “Yes, Diane,” I said in measured words upon hearing her heavy breathing on the other end. “What are you doing in the office on a Sunday?”

  “I’m not,” she replied shortly. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Diane Parker, the third member of the Special Tracking Unit, serves as our intelligence analyst, the puzzle master who tries to sort things out and dig up information as each case progresses. At fifty-four, she reminds me of an older version of Janine Melnitz from Ghostbusters, complete with the short hair and the glasses resting on the tip of her nose.

  She needs to work on the voice a bit.

  Diane is also our self-appointed janitor, receptionist, travel adviser, and den mother. She embraces these duties as if they were a badge of martyrdom.

  “We just got a call,” Diane explained. “You need to come in. Jimmy’s on his way, same with Les and Marty.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Olympic Peninsula,” she replied, grinding the words through her teeth like wheat through a mill. “You fly into Port Angeles and then drive south a half hour or so.”

  “What’s the case?”

  “Police pursuit gone bad. Driver crashed near Sequim and fled into the woods.”

  “How does that warrant our attention?”

  “I wondered the same thing, but it seems when they popped the trunk on the stolen car, they found a woman inside, bound, gagged, and unconscious. I’m not a crack tracking expert like you, but I’m guessing she didn’t get there by herself. To complicate things, she didn’t have any identification.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nothing that won’t wait—well, except a trooper was injured during the pursuit. He’s going to be fine, but the state patrol really wants this guy.”

  “Who’s lead, state or county?”

  “County. I’ll have more by the time you get to the hangar.”

  “No dead bodies?”

  “Not this time.”

  The no-dead-bodies pronouncement is always a good thing. Jimmy and I can’t seem to get away from bodies of one sort or another: dead bodies, ripe bodies, missing bodies, found bodies, parts of bodies, staged bodies. Most of our ops involve the dead and the dying.

  As we spoke, my eyes took in the blurred-out windows, and my ears absorbed the howl of the wind and the drum of the rain as it punished the glass. “What about this weather? What did Les and Marty say?” I asked, referring to the pilot and copilot of the unit’s Gulfstream G100 corporate jet. “Are they okay taking off under these conditions?”

  “Marty says it’s just fine.”

&
nbsp; “Yeah, well, I want a second opinion from the sane member of the flight crew.”

  Diane gave a chuckle, caught herself, and said, “You can ask Les when you get here.”

  Oddly, the phone went mysteriously dead. I spent a brief moment trying to delude myself into thinking the connection was bad, that somehow the weather took out the phone lines. The truth was, Diane hung up on me before I could ask more questions that she didn’t have the answers to.

  I imagine she got a chuckle out of that.

  As I stared at the dead phone, the whipped and flurried rain outside the windows took on a more ominous tone, a chipping sound, like a thousand chickens pecking grain from the same tin trough. Only one type of rain makes that sound, though, and it’s a rain that hurts.

  “Great,” I muttered, “sleet.”

  Perfect flying weather. I could already imagine the obituary. No doubt the words “crashed on takeoff” and “too stupid to come in out of the rain” would appear someplace above the paragraph telling people where to send flowers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It’s been just seven hours since I was relaxing on my couch with a good book, enjoying all the pomp and circumstance of a winter storm without the unpleasantries. It was supposed to be my morning, my afternoon, and my evening, an entire day of blissful reading.

  Seven hours.

  It seems like days.

  Time is funny that way. And while I’ve never been much of a believer in luck or fate, as I stand in this dark, frigid forest in the midst of the storm I thought I had avoided, and on the edge of a possible gunfight, one question keeps knock-knock-knocking at the hollow place at the back of my skull: Why does this keep happening to me?

  * * *

  The events at the cabin unfold in slow motion, traced out in striking neon.