The Cascade Killer (Luke McCain Mysteries Book 1)

by Rob Phillips

  A few days later, McCain was doing an early morning check on some anglers down at a couple of the popular gravel pit fishing ponds along I-82 near Donald when he got a call on the radio.

  “Can you get up to the county jail as soon as possible?” the dispatcher asked.

  “10-4,” McCain responded. “What’s up?”

  “There’s been a jail break,” the dispatcher said. “They are asking for help from WDFW.”

  When McCain arrived, he counted thirteen cop cars, light bars lit up like a Christmas tree, parked this way and that on the streets around the jail. He pulled up next to the local ABC television van and recognized one of the young reporters he’d watched on the early evening news.

  The reporter looked like he was barely old enough to have graduated from high school, and although it was a bit hard to detect, he had a slight speech impediment. The news director must have really liked the kid though, because he was the go-to guy for live reports whenever news was breaking.

  As McCain walked by the reporter, he heard him say, “Hi, dis is Simon Erickson, reporting live from da Yakima County jail, where I am toad seventeen prisoners escaped from da jail in da early morning hours.”

  McCain just kept on walking looking for Williams or someone who could tell him what had happened and why he might be needed. As he walked, he wondered if Simon Erickson had graduated from WSU’s school of journalism. If so, he sure hoped Sinclair didn’t find out.

  Ultimately, he found the director of the county jail, one Robert Dyson, who gave him a brief situation report. Dyson was a gruff-looking man of about sixty. He had big bushy eyebrows and a five o’clock shadow, even though it was just 9:30 in the morning. The man, McCain thought, looked like he was tougher than a boiled owl, and would take no guff from anyone.

  According to Dyson, a group of inmates decided they’d had enough of incarceration, broken a table in two, and used one half to jam up entry into the lower level exercise area. They then used the other half of the table as a battering ram and had broken open a door to the outside. At that point all they had to do was jump the ten-foot-high spiked fence and they were free as the birds.

  According to an early morning jogger who was running by about the time the door busted open, it looked like a bunch of bees boiling out of a hive. He said the inmates ran out the door, jumped the fence and scattered like a covey of quail.

  In all, seventeen inmates had escaped before jail enforcement officers could get the door closed and things secure. Reporter Erickson had been correct in that. McCain wondered why, if there were seventeen inmates on the loose, all the law enforcement folks were crowded around the jail. They should be out looking for a bunch of dudes in orange jump suits.

  “One of the escapees was a LeRoy Johnson Sr.,” Dyson said, looking through his bushy eyebrows at McCain. “I understand you’ve had some dealings with him.”

  “Yes sir,” McCain said. “We caught him and his son, LeRoy Johnson Jr. poaching bears a couple months ago up in the national forest west of town. He’s just a few days in on a nine-month sentence.”

  “Well, evidently jail didn’t suit him much,” Dyson said. “Our videos show that he was one of the instigators of our little jail break. YPD and YSO have already rounded up nine of the inmates, but with eight on the loose, including Johnson, we could use some help. It is our guess that Mr. Johnson may have had a vehicle or a ride waiting for him, and he could be who-knows-where by now.”

  McCain said he would do some checking out at Johnson’s place and talk to LeRoy Junior to see what he could find out. As he walked back to his truck, he saw that the young ABC reporter was now talking to a skinny man with wild, curly black hair wearing a black Adidas sweat suit and a bandana tied around his head.

  “Dis is Mr. Carl Whitehead, who witnessed da escape. Tell us, what did you see dis morning?” Simon asked as he stuck a microphone into the jogger’s face.

  You gotta give the kid credit, McCain thought to himself as he loaded up and headed toward Tieton.

  When McCain got out to the Johnson homestead he stopped at the entrance of the dirt driveway and took it all in. The place had a look of desertion. It hadn’t been much to look at when the Johnsons were living there, but now it felt like a ghost town. There were still piles of junk here and there, along with a couple broken down cars, but it looked like no one had been home for a while. McCain recalled that when he and Hargraves had showed up the day they had arrested the Johnsons, he’d had to kick a whole herd of chickens out of the way just to walk up to the house. The chickens were gone. And so, evidently, was LeRoy Johnson Jr.

  Dyson had told McCain to report to YSO Deputy Williams, so when he found no one around and the house basically deserted, he called Williams on his cell.

  “Hey, Rifleman,” Williams said. “Tell me you’ve found Mr. Johnson?”

  “No can do,” McCain said into the Bluetooth microphone. “The place is pretty much empty. They’ve even moved the chickens out. Can you check with Yakima and Kittitas County records to see if our friends own any land anywhere else around here?”

  “Will do,” said Williams. “I’ll get back to you ASAP.”

  With that Williams clicked off, and McCain headed back to the office.

  A couple hours later McCain’s phone buzzed, and he saw Williams was calling back.

  McCain answered and said, “Find anything?”

  “Well, records don’t show any other properties owned by LeRoy Johnson, senior or junior. But there is a cabin up out of Cle Elum, owned by a Theodore Johnson. Now, I know there are like a million Johnsons in the state, but this Johnson’s previous driver’s license showed the same Tieton address as LeRoy one and LeRoy two.”

  “Interesting. Maybe another son of LeRoy Senior, or maybe a brother?”

  “Could be either,” Williams said. “But looking at his age, it most likely is another son. And by the driver’s license photo of Theodore, you can see they’ve definitely been kicked by the same mule.”

  “Okay,” McCain said. “I’m going to go grab Jack and then head up there. Text me the address.”

  Chapter 8

  Cle Elum was an old mining town in Kittitas County, just off Interstate 90 between Ellensburg and the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. It was a nice community, located in the coniferous forest in the mid-elevations of the Cascades. The little town had seen considerable growth over the past fifteen years, as more and more people from Seattle moved to the area and commuted an hour and a half each way to jobs at Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon. The employees who bought stock in these companies early on had become multi-millionaires when their shares had soared in value. There were stories of Microsoft janitors who had scraped a few thousand dollars together to buy stock in those early days and were now living in palatial homes around Seattle. Some of the employees or former employees, lived in beautiful million-dollar homes around a golf resort known as Suncadia in Cle Elum.

  There were plenty of older homes and cabins scattered around the area too, and that was what McCain was looking at when he found the little cabin owned by Theodore Johnson. He stopped well short of the driveway to the cabin and parked, leaving Jack in the truck. He walked through a growth of small fir trees to see what he could see of the cabin. The tiny cabin was set off the road a good 300 yards and surrounded by mature firs and pine trees. McCain could see a little smoke rolling out of the chimney and three pickups parked out front.

  He recognized the pickup owned by LeRoy Junior. He had seen the truck at the Johnson’s place. The other two trucks he didn’t recognize. He went back to his rig and called Williams.

  “I’ve got three trucks,” McCain said. “All pickups. One Chevy that I know is LeRoy Junior’s, but the other two, both Dodge Rams, I haven’t seen. I’ll text you the license plates if you could run them for me. And, if there are three or more guys up here, I wouldn’t mind a little support. I have Jack, but another officer would make me feel a little more warm and fuzzy inside.”

  “Roger that,” Will
iams said. “I’ll call Kittitas County and see if they have a deputy in the area.”

  McCain had a computer in his truck and had run about 27,000 plates in his life, but he didn’t want to be sitting there watching a computer screen when he could be keeping an eye on the Johnson clan. Instead he texted the two license plates to Williams.

  In case he needed to defend himself, his truck was outfitted with a Springfield Armory .223 rifle with a suppressor and a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun. Both long guns sat in a special rack in the truck next to a catch pole which he occasionally used to keep snarling dogs at bay, or to help secure the odd deer that caught a leg in a barbed wire fence and needed saving. The shotgun was loaded with double aught buckshot and rifled slugs, placed alternately in the extended magazine.

  McCain rarely used the shotgun, and only pulled the rifle when he needed to put down an injured elk or deer. He decided maybe he’d go ahead and grab the shotgun to carry along when heading into chat with the Johnsons. Even though he practiced at the range once a month with his service pistol, McCain was much more comfortable with a rifle or shotgun in his hands.

  He was back in the little stand of firs watching the cabin when his phone buzzed. He checked the phone and saw a text from Williams. Truck 2 owned by Theodore Johnson. Truck 3 owned by Aaron Armitage. Johnson has no priors but Armitage has done a little time at Coyote Ridge. Kittitas Co. deputy is three minutes out. McCain texted “Thx” back at Williams and moved slowly back to his truck to await the Kittitas deputy.

  The deputy pulled up next to McCain’s truck, jumped out and introduced herself as Alivia Hernandez. She was about five foot four inches tall, and stout but definitely not fat. A couple of tattoos were peeking out of her shirtsleeves on her biceps.

  “Whatta we got?” Hernandez asked.

  McCain filled her in and told her he thought one of them should go in from the front and knock on the door, while the other watched the back to see who, if anyone, might come out that way.

  “I’m not worried about any real problems,” McCain said. “But in this situation, it is good to keep our bases covered.”

  It was decided that Hernandez would go in and knock on the front door, and McCain would swing around with Jack and watch the back.

  When Hernandez tapped on the door, a voice from inside said, “Who is it?”

  “Kittitas County Sheriff,” Hernandez hollered. “Can you please come to the door?”

  A man opened the main wooden door, peered through the screen door and asked, “What do you want?”

  “Are you Theodore Johnson?” Hernandez asked the man who was just a few inches taller than her, with a round face and thinning hair.

  “Yeah, I’m Teddy Johnson,” the man said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Johnson, you’ve probably heard there was a jail break down in Yakima this morning and your father was one of the inmates who jumped the fence. Any idea where we might find him?”

  Johnson smiled at Hernandez and said, “No officer, I got no clue where he is. My brother LeRoy is here with me, but we ain’t seen hide nor hair of the old man.”

  “Anyone else in there with you?” Hernandez asked.

  “Yeah, my buddy Aaron’s here, but that’s it.”

  “So, you’ve not heard from your father today?”

  “Me and the old man don’t get along too good.”

  “So, that’s a no?”

  “Yeah, I ain’t heard nothin’ from him.”

  “You mind if I come in and look around?”

  “Yeah, I would mind. So, unless you got a warrant, maybe you should leave.”

  Hernandez could smell pot, and from the look in Teddy’s eyes, he was pretty well baked. She would like to get a look around inside but knew it probably wasn’t a good idea to push it.

  “Okay, Teddy,” she said as she held out a card. “If you do hear from your father, you’d be doing him a favor by calling our office. You, your brother, and your friend don’t need a harboring-a-fugitive conviction on your records.”

  Johnson reached around the slightly opened screen door, took the card, smiled a goofy smile, and closed the wooden door on Hernandez.

  McCain was still waiting in some tall brush behind the house when he saw a window in the back corner of the cabin slide open and a man’s leg appear. The body attached to the leg was that of the newly escaped LeRoy Johnson Sr. He dropped to the ground and briskly strode toward McCain.

  “Hello, LeRoy,” McCain said as Johnson walked past him.

  LeRoy all but jumped out of his skin before collecting himself and spinning around with a wild roundhouse swing at McCain. He missed and took off running.

  McCain hated running down a suspect. He was fit and a good runner, but he always felt encumbered in his ballistic vest and hated how everything in his utility belt flapped around. Johnson only made it about fifteen yards before he was hit from behind by McCain who didn’t hold back after the attempted roundhouse. Both men went down in a cloud of dust. With the aid of McCain’s forearm, Johnson’s face was ground into the dirt and pine needles. He made a sound like someone was letting the air out of a rubber raft.

  Johnson continued to grunt and groan and then said, “Well, damn it to hell.”

  McCain got up, helped Johnson to his feet, and placed handcuffs on his wrists. It was then he realized that Jack was standing in front of the man growling with bared teeth. As McCain replayed the event in his mind, he remembered seeing Jack running next to him during the sprint to tackle Johnson.

  “Good boy,” McCain said to the growling dog.

  “You wouldn’t let that yellar dog bite me, wouldja?” Johnson asked.

  “If you make another run for it, you can count on it,” McCain said.

  Hernandez, hearing the ruckus at the rear of the cabin, had come around quickly to see what was going on. She had her service pistol drawn but put it away when she saw McCain with Johnson in cuffs.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, we’re good,” McCain said. “What’s the story with the rest of the Johnsons?”

  He sat the senior Johnson down on a stump and told Jack to sit a few feet from the man. Then he walked over to the deputy so they could talk in private.

  “They claimed to not have seen or heard from Mr. Johnson,” she said. “Maybe I should go back and have a little chat with them.”

  “Good idea, but if you guys can spare another deputy, you might want to call in a back-up.”

  McCain was still not too sure that the younger Johnsons, or their friend with the prison record, were above a little violence, especially if it were three on one.

  “I want to get Johnson Senior back to Yakima,” he said as he walked back toward LeRoy who was giving Jack an evil stare.

  McCain had left his shotgun leaned up against the pine tree when he played linebacker on Johnson, so he grabbed it, got Johnson by the arm, and headed to the truck. Hernandez followed along and radioed for assistance.

  On his way back to Yakima, McCain dialed up Deputy Williams.

  “Got him,” McCain said when Williams answered. “We’ll be back at the county lock-up in forty-five. Let Dyson know, and you might mention to him that maybe they should bolt those tables down in the jail. It might save some future headaches.”

  “They had maintenance crews doing just that this afternoon when I was there,” Williams said. “I think we’ve got all but a couple of the inmates rounded up. The county is offering a thousand-dollar reward for information on the two guys still out there. Someone will drop a dime on them, and we’ll have them soon.”

  Chapter 9

  The county coroner released the identity of the second woman twelve days after her body had been discovered in the Cascades by the shed hunters. She was identified by dental records as a twenty-six-year-old Mexican national who had been working in one of the fruit warehouses in Yakima. Her name was Sonya Alverez. She had been reported missing on March 11th by her boyfriend. He said she had gone to work at the warehouse a
nd apparently just disappeared.

  As McCain had suspected, the young woman hadn’t been a hiker, and her disappearance had been a total mystery to her boyfriend and friends.

  When she’d been reported missing, Yakima Police had suspected that her boyfriend, a twenty-nine-year-old Javier Garcia, might be involved with her disappearance. But Garcia had been in California visiting family from March 4th until he returned home when he couldn’t reach his girlfriend. According to his cell phone history, he had tried to call Alverez several times on March 9th and for several days following.

  According to her employer, Alverez had been at work on the 8th, but hadn’t shown up for work as scheduled on the 9th or 10th or beyond. After Garcia learned his girlfriend had missed work, something she never did, and hadn’t been in contact with any of her friends or co-workers, he filed a missing person report with the Yakima Police Department.

  When McCain saw the photo of Alverez in the paper the next morning, he took a good look at it. He realized that Alverez and the Native American woman, Emily Pinkham, were of two different ethnicities, but if you looked at the photo quickly, you might think the two women were sisters.

  The next day McCain called Sinclair and asked if she wanted to grab a steak someplace after work.

  “Are you asking me out on a date, Officer McCain? Or is this business?”

  “Call it what you want,” he said. “I know you’re not investigating the death of the Alverez woman, but I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.”

  “I’d be up for a steak,” she told McCain. “I’ll even buy you a beer.”

  “Yeah, I’m really not much of a beer drinker.”

  “Not a beer drinker!” she responded. “You live in the hop-growing capital of the world, and you went to one of the biggest beer-drinking universities in the country, and you don’t drink beer?”