Trail Cam

I received the email from the National Park Service two weeks before the end of my junior year at Vanderbilt. I had been dreading a repeat of last summer, when I spent five days a week working under the soul-sucking fluorescent lighting of a cubicle farm on the 23rd floor of a drab office building in downtown Nashville.

At least I had Ashleigh then, and she made everything worthwhile at the end of the day. But she was gone now, and I haven’t slept well since. So I was pretty stoked to land that summer job as an Assistant Park Ranger at Cumberland Gap National Park and as soon as I finished the last of my final exams for the semester I packed up my old Jeep Grand Cherokee and hit the road for the four-hour drive.

Cumberland Gap sits roughly at the intersection of Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia and I had been there many times when I was growing up. I knew the layout pretty well and I was looking forward to meeting the other college kids who I would be working with. When I arrived there I met my supervisor, Jordan, and he showed me to my cabin. Before leaving me to unpack, he told me that there would be an orientation session for all new summer employees in the morning. Don't be late.

During that 3-hour session after breakfast the following day, Jordan took all of the new summer hires through everything that we needed to know to perform our duties as Junior Rangers. Towards the end, he picked up a clipboard and read off the daily notices from the central ranger station at Middlesboro. I was tired from lack of sleep but I tried to pay attention.

There was an item about illegal deer hunting reported in the Claiborne County area of the park and there was another notice about three separate incidents of hikers being bit by copperhead snakes along the Cumberland River Basin. The biggest concern was the lack of rainfall over the last few weeks, so we were all on high-alert for fires. There would be periodic helicopter surveillance over the park lands until the threat of these forest fires died down, but we were all expected to keep an eye out for the dangerous conditions on the ground that could lead to an outbreak. Lastly, there was a bulletin announcing the go-live deployment of the new network of trail cams located all over the park.

This was a big initiative. Apparently, quite a bit of money had been spent and now each ranger station would be responsible for monitoring trail-cam footage in their location to identify any illegal activity, dangerous animals in populated areas or just interesting footage of the local wildlife that could be shared on social media to attract visitors to the park. Jordan finished up by announcing that each of the Junior Rangers would be responsible for monitoring at least two hours of trail-cam footage during the course of each day as their other work demands allowed.

The following day, I was doing gate duty at the Lewis Hollow entry to the park with my assigned partner Kenny and when the traffic slowed down around mid-morning I was able to sit down in the booth for a while to scroll through the previous day’s trail-cam footage. The software was fairly sophisticated and I was able to skip through the footage until the motion-detection sensors picked up something. Usually it was just a squirrel or a rabbit quickly passing through the frame, but I saw a notable image of a red fox pause directly in front of Cam-A21 for a few moments, sniffing the air around it before vaulting off into the darkness. Any notable segments like this could be tagged with a single mouse click for aggregation and further review by the administrators back at the main ranger station in Middlesboro. We just had to tag it and they decided what to do with it.

I managed to scan all of the motion-detected footage segments captured by 36 trail-cams for the previous day in just under two hours flat while Kenny handled the incoming visitors at the gate. The cameras were all equipped with night vision so we were required to scan 24 hours of footage on all of the cameras. Nighttime was generally more interesting than the day, but most of the time the trail cams were just sitting there idle. I just scanned through and tagged anything of potential interest. Except one thing.

At 12:52am the previous night, Cam-C17 captured the image of a man in filthy and tattered clothing with long salt and pepper hair and an unkempt gray beard, mounted with a large backpack and carrying a pop-up tent rolled up under one arm. He passed by the trail cam, but then a few seconds later he returned, knelt and looked at it, then he picked up a rock laying nearby and smashed it. The screen went blank. I assumed that he noticed the tiny red light on the upper right side of the camera that was activated during recording. That’s probably what caught his attention.

I didn’t tag this segment of video footage.

I replayed the portion where he knelt in front of the camera and paused it on a frame that showed his face in clear detail. He looked oddly familiar but I didn’t recognize him at first. I stared into the frozen image for a time and suddenly it came to me. He looked very different now, but I knew who he was.

Roger Alan Grady’s face had been all over the TV news in Tennessee and the surrounding states the previous summer. He was a drifter who was wanted by law enforcement in connection with the disappearance of six young women in the Nashville and Memphis areas. He was also a “person of interest” in two similar cases in Jackson, Mississippi and one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The long, matted hair and beard I saw in the trail cam footage rendered him almost indistinguishable from the old booking photos that were widely circulated in the news media, but his eyes gave him away. Those unfocused gray eyes were hard to forget.

Later that day I spoke with my supervisor, Jordan, and informed him that Cam-C17 was non-operational and I was going out there to install one of the replacement units. He welcomed my initiative and patted me on the back and about an hour later I was on an ATV driving out to the trail where the camera was located, in a fairly remote section of the park.

Before I left, I took two replacement trail cams and I covered the red light lens with black electrical tape on both. When I was about a half mile away from my destination I killed the motor on my ATV and walked the rest of the way there. The summer sun was setting when I found the crushed remains of Cam-C17. I just left them where they were and quietly scouted the surrounding area for a little while to ensure that I was alone and then I installed the replacement for Cam-C17 in a discreet location, shaded beneath a leafy bush.

With that done, I followed the boot prints in the dirt near where Grady was walking when he first spotted Cam-C17 and then smashed it to pieces the day before. It was a somewhat worn footpath just off the main trail and you didn’t really need to be a trained tracker to spot it if you knew where to look, but this was a fairly remote location of the park that didn't see a lot of visitor traffic.

I proceeded with caution and in silence. Before long I spotted his campsite nestled in a wooded grove near a large boulder, and I discreetly positioned the additional replacement camera in the woods directly facing it. I brought my Smith & Wesson .38 with me just in case things went bad but I never had to reach for it. I never saw him and I was soon jogging back to my ATV and heading back to the ranger station, hoping that there would still be something left to eat for dinner at that time. It was getting late. I was mostly just hoping to get some sleep that night.

The next morning, Kenny was more than happy to work the gate when I volunteered to scan the trail-cam footage for both of us. In truth, I don’t think he even really knew how to operate the playback software. Kenny was just kind of there to party and have fun. I liked him and he was a nice guy, but I can't say that he was very bright. Anyway, I spent the next three or four hours reviewing footage from the previous night, with a particular focus on what was captured from the two new cameras I had placed the day before. I really couldn’t keep the thought of Ashleigh out of my head during that time but I just tried to focus on the task at hand.

At 11:43pm Grady was captured on video in the new CAM-C17 I had replaced the day before. He was carrying something slumped over his shoulder but the wind that night was blowing the leafy branches of the bushes back and forth before the camera’s lens and it was impossible to make out what it was. But when he reached his campsite in the secluded grove further down in the valley, the other camera that I had placed there captured everything.

He had an unconscious young girl with him and he brought her into his tent.

I deleted this video file immediately. Later that day, I called the central ranger station at Middlesboro to report the fire that I had just spotted on my mid-day patrol and they brought in the guys from the National Park Service to deal with it. Hell, I was just a college student. What did I know about fighting forest fires?

The video footage that I deleted tells the rest of the story. I quietly crept up to the tent in the wooded grove and subdued Roger Alan Grady with two blows to the side of his head with the steel grip of my Smith & Wesson. You can see me carrying out the unconscious young woman - a 20 year old undergrad from the University of Tennessee named Diana Vasquez - and carrying her up the hillside before we disappear from the camera's view. About ten minutes later, you can see me return with the two canisters of gasoline and then I begin to pour their contents all around the dry vegetation surrounding Grady’s campsite.

In the end I dumped all of the remaining fuel on top of the tent, and as it dripped through and covered him I suppose that is what woke him up from his concussion. He stumbled out of the tent with a half smile. I think he actually thought that I was there to help him, right before I set the flare alight and threw it down by his feet.

I tried to not stop and look back to watch him burn. I really tried. I had to pull up that second trail cam and dispose of it and then get the girl back to the ranger station where emergency services could come and provide her with the help she needed. I also had to get firefighters on the scene before the little fire I started turned into something bigger. Most importantly, I had to come up with a good story. I thought about all of these things as I carefully drove the ATV back to my ranger station near Lewis Hollow holding the unconscious young woman on the seat in front of me. I didn’t know what he did to sedate her or how much time she had, but in the end she was all right. I was happy when I heard that she was all right.

When the Tennessee State Police investigators came to interview me I told them everything.

I told them that I found Diane Vazquez laying unconscious on the Old Loop Trail around 6:45 that evening. I told them that I saw and smelled smoke coming from somewhere further down in that valley. I showed them the blurry and inconclusive footage captured by the new Cam-C17. That was all I knew, and they were content with that.

Oddly enough, we saw our first good rainfall in over a month that night so the fire didn’t spread very far, and no one was going to make any noise about the scorched human remains left down in that valley. It was all just water under the bridge and justice served as far as everyone was concerned. No one ever looked at me twice.

Anyway, I was able to sleep pretty well that night. It was the first time that I was able to sleep through the night since Ashleigh suddenly disappeared after going out with her friends on Lower Broadway in Nashville the previous summer. It was the first time since that dark night that I felt okay. Like I could move on with things. I'm not entirely sure, but I think Grady was the guy. I'm pretty sure he was the guy. If he wasn't, he was guilty of other sins.

Sometimes the universe gives you a chance to set things right. I believe that you just can't miss those rare opportunities when they arise. I am going back to school for the fall semester now and I am going to forget about all of this and go on and live my life.

At least I hope so.

Dear God, I hope so.

I should have never looked back. I just wish that I had never looked back.

THE END