Edge

neighbors?”
    “Loving knows where you live now. He won’t bother with them. Get to the meadow. We’re going to hang up. I need you to concentrate.”
    I needed to as well, focusing on my driving. I was reflecting that if Loving had in fact tipped to Amanda’s blog, I knew he’d be pleased to learn her whereabouts. When it comes to edge, snatching a principal’s child is as good as it gets.

Chapter 27
    THIRTY-THREE MINUTES AFTER leaving the compound, I eased the Honda to a stop in a stand of bushes in front of Carter’s lakefront property and climbed out. I activated the silent alarm.
    I pulled a forest green jumpsuit out of my gear bag—one of two; the other was black—and tugged it on. I slung the bag over my shoulder and walked quickly along the road, examining the ground. I could see evidence that a car had pulled over here recently, paused and then started up again. Footsteps in the soft earth headed toward where I knew the house would be—about three hundred yards into the woods.
    I’d have to assume Loving was here.
    Surveying the ground, I decided the logical route he’d have taken. I hopped a low stone wall meant to deter only the most stupid or nervous of animals and moved quickly along Loving’s path, which would be invisible to many people but was evident to me—because of an interest I’ve pursued for years.
    In my twenties I was in Austin, Texas, finishing up yet another degree. I’d always loved hiking and, sick of the sedentary life of academia, I’d joined the orienteering club at the university. The sport, whichoriginated in Sweden, is a competition in which you use a special map and a compass to navigate through wilderness you’ve never seen before, stopping at checkpoints to have a control card physically or electronically stamped. The first competitor to hit the “double circle”—the end of the route on the orienteering map—is the winner.
    I fell in love with the sport—I still compete—and found it a welcome relief from the static hours in the classroom or in front of computers or poring through obscure texts.
    During one meet in Austin I became friends with a fellow competitor, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. He was a sign cutter—an expert at tracking people, mostly illegal immigrants and drug runners—and he got me interested in the subject. There’re no competitions in sign cutting, as with orienteering, but Border Patrol and DEA hold regular training sessions and he arranged for me to attend some.
    Sign cutting was to me like some huge board game that you played outside, with yourself as a game piece. I fell instantly in love with it and when I wasn’t at orienteering competitions I would head outside and practice, tracking animals and hikers, who never knew they were being pursued. I even made a little extra money from the DEA on weekends, during their training sessions—I pretended to be a drug mule and tried to escape from sign cutting agents. I was pretty good, since I’d studied the techniques and knew how to cover a trail as well as find one.
    The art had come in handy to me as a shepherd on a number of occasions.
    I was using the techniques now, carefully scanning the ground and branches for indications of where Loving had passed. The signs were subtle: a sun-bleached branch upside down, pebbles or deer shit out of place, leaves where leaves shouldn’t normally be.
    Sign cutting taught me that terrain determines the route the prey follows 90 percent of the time: you generally have only to follow the path of least resistance to be pretty sure of remaining on the trail of your target. Henry Loving was different. His route took him in directions that didn’t seem to make sense, less direct and more difficult.
    But his strategy became logical when I realized that he was pausing repeatedly and turning to his left and right, presumably to look for pursuers.
    Rational irrationality . . .
    Now that I knew his strategy of taking the high, difficult ground and pausing, prepared to engage, I moved more quickly, since he wouldn’t expect someone to follow his exact route through the dense foliage. His path wove through patches of forsythia, dense blankets of kudzu and ivy, vines, brambles and brush whose pedigree I was unfamiliar with.
    I paused to listen too. Dogs track by smell first, then sound and then sight. Humans are different but hearing comes second with them as well. Always listen and listen carefully. Your prey makes noise escaping and