His first clue is the vultures: at least 12 of them, sitting on a rock ledge about 20 feet up from the desert sand. Not flying, not circling. Waiting.

His second clue is the smell: a sweet-acrid rot that fills the air when they drive through a wash. That’s not a cow carcass, Joe Adams thinks. He sends two of his team members back out to scout.

It doesn’t take them long to find the body. It’s a young woman, wearing dark jeans, cheap Mexican sneakers, and a thin, black, long-sleeved top that was rucked up, probably in an attempt to get cool. The exposed skin is charred brown and black, and part of her midsection has melted away, fluid seeping into the sand beneath her.

Adams follows his volunteers to the body, draws a line in the sand, and squats just outside it. He sees no tracks; the wind’s high, and she’s been lying here a long time. No water bottle; either she tossed it earlier, or her body was dumped. But her cellphone’s lying next to her—is it her cellphone? Or does somebody just want it to seem like that?

Her body’s moving. “It’s boiling!” one of the younger volunteers exclaims.

“Son, her stomach’s moving because of the maggots,” Adams says, his voice as gentle as he can manage. The young man throws up. He wipes his mouth, looking mortified. “No shame in that,” Adams says. “I’ve done it myself.”

The county sheriff’s deputy shows up, checks for bullet wounds, orders the body bagged.

“That’s it?” Adams asks, incredulous. “No coroner?” He points out the cellphone, still lying on the sand, and somebody tosses it into the bag with her.

“I could have ID’d her in 30 minutes with that phone,” Adams mutters.

A retired St. Louis private eye, he’s been flying out to the Arizona desert regularly for six years to run his Project Bluelight, hunting any human who doesn’t have a legal right to be there. He looks for “sign”—drag marks where somebody used a ladder to cross a road without footprints; cow tracks oddly placed, because somebody glued a molded-plastic cow hoof to the soles of their shoes. A toothbrush in a back pocket usually means this is somebody’s last stop before freedom. A discarded backpack means its owner wants to hit the community looking like he already lives there.

Adams rages about holes in the border, calling it our country’s No. 1 security problem. But the way this girl’s body is being treated—this isn’t right. “I don’t care how much I hate these people for being in our country,” he tells his team, “she was somebody’s daughter.” He talks to U.S. Border Patrol, talks to the sheriff’s department, calls the Arizona Daily Star. The case nags at him: He likes action, not tragedy; clearly divided friends and enemies, not tangled sympathies. “She was so close—maybe a mile from help,” he says. “She probably got left behind because she couldn’t keep up—maybe she blew an ankle. The coyotes are paid to deliver; they won’t wait.”

Why yank a coroner from air-conditioned peace, then? For the sheriff’s department, this was a run-of-the-mill case.

“I will not let this go,” Adams tells the Arizona Daily Star reporter. “I am considering coming out of retirement, taking this case, and finding her family.”

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To the Star reporter, he probably sounds like he’s reading from a bad script. But Joe Adams lets nothing go. “For other private eyes, it was a living,” he says. “To me, it was winning. Every case was a competition, and my opponent was my enemy.”

He reads danger as a taunt, a chance to battle wits. He says he’s always thought of this fearlessness as “a flaw, almost” in his personality. Granted, it’s a convenient flaw: He befriended a kidnapper in Costa Rica; trained rebels in the jungle of Burma (also known as Myanmar); brought in a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list; turned down a hit job and became the intended victim’s bodyguard instead. None of that scared him.

What scares him is sitting in a wicker love seat on his patio, watching his favorite red-eared slider turtles sun themselves on a waterfall’s boulders and thinking about his past. The assignments he volunteered for never felt like suicide missions—somehow, he was always sure that if one person survived, he’d be that person. But in the contentment of his new life, with the woman he calls his queen sitting next to him and the world’s biggest Shih Tzu, Uzi, lying at his feet, he can’t figure out why he was so sure.

Adrenaline comes over most people in a white rush. Their heart races, their vision tunnels, and they either freeze or run. Adams’ heart rate slows. It’s as though the prospect of danger quiets him, calms his body, and focuses his thoughts. His reflexes speed up, decisions come in a single blink, and everything else slows way, way down. That cool, crocodile-like lethargy has saved his life more than once. It’s saved other people’s lives, too—and taken more than a few.

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In Adams’ first encounter with the U.S. military, he cracks.

Two Air Force officers show up at his high school in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Joe’s called to the principal’s office to tell them about the UFO he photographed. He developed the negatives in the classroom in front of everybody, and the UFO appeared with thrilling clarity on the wet photo paper. The town newspaper ran the story on the front page. It’s the late ’60s—flying-saucer sightings are causing more hysteria than The Beatles—and the Air Force is compiling Project Blue Book, evaluating reports to determine whether UFOs are a threat to national security.

Joe blurts the truth: He stuck nails in the tops of two baby-moon Ford hubcaps and strung them with fishing line and hung them to spin from a tree branch. He doesn’t add his private rationale: “People want to believe this stuff. I was just feeding the monster.”

He was supposed to be feeding horses, every day after school in his family’s stable. His father, Joe Sam Adams Sr., is gone a lot, racing stock cars and working as a union organizer. He lives in a man’s world, and his son craves admission. Joe Jr. hunts, target-shoots, plays football, trains horses. His father checks up regularly, making sure Joe and his brother are following the rules. One day he gets so frustrated with Joe, he tears the downspout off the house and beats him with it.

Joe forgets why. But he remembers he deserved it.

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In his second encounter with the military, Adams is 20 and tougher, his fear of authority already starting to dissolve. “Just give me a rifle, drop me out of a helicopter, and let me fight,” he tells his Marine Corps recruiter. Every man in his family has served in the military. He needs to know he can pass the test of combat.

Instead, he gets stationed in D.C., part of a high-scoring group handpicked to hear about a special naval intelligence unit. Adams rolls his eyes, picturing guys behind desks signing papers. Then he hears some of the details, and it’s James Bond stuff, CIA. “I could be a spook,” he thinks. “This is pretty cool.”

He takes the rules more seriously than he lets on, driving to camp with no pants on because he doesn’t want to muss their perfectly ironed creases. He wants to be better than everybody else.

He gets sent to California to train with Navy SEALs. He gathers intel for target selection and photo interpretation in Vietnam and prepares to be deployed. Instead, he’s transferred to an air-conditioned office in North Carolina.

“There’s no war in North Carolina,” he groans. But the war is Haiti: There’s intel that President Papa Doc Duvalier is on his deathbed, and Baby Doc’s enemies are conspiring to seize power. Adams gathers data for a mission that will help ensure that 19-year-old Jean-Claude Duvalier is installed as president.

On a trip to D.C., he gets a job offer. “Military contractors” aren’t publicly acknowledged in the 1960s; the CIA talks instead about “proprietary companies” and recruits military intelligence officers to staff them. Adams is granted an early discharge and sent to an island to train in jungle warfare. He winds up working in Laos and Cambodia; that’s all he’ll say. Four months later, his boss leaves, and the new guy brings his own staff. “I’m not going to get myself killed with people I don’t even like,” Adams decides. “I’m going home.”

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He can’t wait for his hair to grow out. Vets aren’t much welcome, and he’s grown a little disenchanted with the war himself. He’s still in the reserves, though, so he treads carefully.

Mainly, he wants a job where he can carry a gun. This seems so obviously desirable, so necessary, in fact, that he doesn’t bother looking at alternatives. But at first, the closest he can get to that kind of power is his own body. He lifts weights, building onto his 5-foot-7-inch frame a musculature so dramatic that when people see the photos decades later, they’ll think Photoshop.

Adams decides to hitchhike out to California and become a stuntman. When one of his rides drops him in St. Louis, at Brentwood Boulevard and Highway 40, he walks up to George Turner’s Gym. He met the owner at a powerlifting competition and wants to say hi. He hangs out for a day or so, goes on to California—and makes a quick U-turn back to St. Louis.

“I’m a farm boy,” he tells his new friends at the gym. “It was too fast-paced out there. Too risqué. Too…demented.” He stays in St. Louis and pumps a lot of iron. In 1974, he gets married. He also gets named Mr. Missouri, then Mr. Mid-America. He starts his own gym in Maplewood, calling it American Athletic Clubs so it sounds like there’s more than one.

One day, a car drives by Adams’ gym while he’s standing outside, talking to a member who’s a boxer. Adams hears a gunshot and a revving motor. The boxer falls to the sidewalk. Adams jumps in his car and speeds off in pursuit. “He can’t hit me,” Adams thinks. “He’s a criminal; he’s got no discipline.”

He blocks the car, yells to neighbors to hold the driver, and takes off on foot after the shooter. His cowboy heroics make the news, and a friend at the Sunset Hills Police Department calls to say he should apply for a part-time police job. He’s still exhaling his drawn-out “Naaah” when his friend dangles the lure: “You could carry a gun.”

That gets Adams to the interview. One of the officers recognizes him from the TV news and slides a badge down the conference table. Reflexively, Adams slams his hand down on it. “Pick it up and raise your right hand,” the officer says, grinning.

The job involves showing up on any county radio calls that involve a weapon. Adams likes it until the rules start getting in the way. In 1978, the year his marriage ends, he goes out on his own, doing skip traces and bail-bond recovery, learning to be a private eye.

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He collects people. If he goes out for dinner and somebody at his table mentions working in IT for Southwestern Bell 10 years earlier…hel-lo. He memorizes connections, does favors, cultivates sources. He develops a reputation for finding people who don’t want to be found.

When a man jumps bond and eludes a horde of bounty hunters, Adams locates a young woman who testified a little too glowingly, in a previous trial, about what a great person this guy was. Adams goes looking for her and finds an empty apartment.

“They owe me three months’ rent,” her landlord grumbles.

They?

“Describe the guy she’s with,” Adams says. The description fits. He asks to search the apartment. Other bounty hunters have already been there: slashed the mattresses, dumped the drawers, raked through the trash. Adams climbs up on a chair and reaches way back on top of the grease-filmed refrigerator. He’s careful that way, ever since he searched a drug house and found the lipped top of the kitchen cabinets lined with $100 bills the Drug Enforcement Administration must have missed. Here, he finds a few stray pieces of mail—including an unpaid bill from a pager company on Cherokee Street. He drives there straightaway. The owner says he just turned that pager off. “Can I buy the number?” Adams asks. “Don’t turn the other one off. I’ll pay you six months in advance.”

He shows up at the bond skip’s next appointment.

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The article goes on and one with more great stories about Joe doing good things for good people.  It’s well worth the read.  This guy is an American hero.