by Rob Phillips
Kingsbury was a local character in the Naches area, obviously retired because you’d see him at just about any time of day driving around or parked at one café or another. What he had retired from, McCain didn’t know, but the guy had the gift of gab. There were times when McCain was glad to chat with the gentleman, and other times he would cringe when he saw him coming.
When McCain saw the Chevy pull up next to him in the parking lot, he figured a little talk with Kingsbury might be a good way to pass a few minutes while he awaited the others.
“Hey, Jim,” McCain said. “What you doing up this way?”
McCain took note of the blue t-shirt that Kingsbury was wearing. In bold white print across the chest it read, IT’S BETTER TO WAKE UP AND PEE THAN PEE AND WAKE UP.
“I heard the silvers were biting at Rimrock,” Kingsbury said. “That asshole Frank Dugdale told me so. He’s a damn liar. You should never trust a guy with three first names.”
McCain laughed. He knew that Kingsbury and Dugdale were good buddies and that Kingsbury was probably not terribly upset at his friend.
“Well, you tell him they’re catching two-pound cutthroats up at Dumbbell,” McCain said. “He’ll hike in there and be lucky to catch a twelve-incher.”
“That S.O.B wouldn’t hike two hundred yards for a five-pounder,” the older man said. “I’ll get him back sometime. So, what’s going on up here?”
“Some horse riders found some bones. Not sure what they are, but we’re going to check them out.”
“Connected to those bodies that were found up in these hills?” Kingsbury asked. “There’s scuttlebutt around town there might be another Gary Ridgeway running around these parts.”
Gary Ridgeway was infamously known as the Green River Killer, one of the most prolific serial killers in United States history. He preyed on teenage girls and young women during the 80s and 90s and dumped many of their bodies along the Green River in Western Washington. When he was finally caught, he was convicted of murdering 49 women, although he had confessed to killing seventy-one.
“Oh, I don’t think that’s what we are dealing with here,” McCain said. “But the sheriff needs to take a look at it. I really am not involved in the investigation.”
The two men talked for a while longer. McCain told Kingsbury to go give Clear Lake a try if he wanted to catch a mess of trout to eat. When he’d been up there a little earlier in the day the folks fishing along the banks were having some good luck. It didn’t hurt that the WDFW hatchery crews had been to the lake a couple days before and dumped a few thousand rainbows in the lake.
“Aw, I don’t like the taste of those hatchery fish,” Kingsbury said. “But I have developed a hankerin’ for some of those silvers for the smoker. That damn Dugdale, I’ll get him back when he’s least expecting it.”
With that, Kingsbury jumped in his pickup and drove away. As he did McCain noticed a new bumper sticker on the back of the truck. It read: I’m not a Gynecologist, but I’d be glad to take a look. McCain just smiled and shook his head.
Williams was the deputy who showed up from the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office. He pulled in next to McCain’s truck, rolled down the window and said, “I’m getting tired of this.”
McCain filled him in on what he had seen and asked Williams if he was ready to saddle up.
“Can I walk?” Williams asked. “Me and horses don’t get along too good.”
“You can if you like, but it’s a pretty good haul. Over two miles uphill, almost the whole way.”
“Aw, geeze. Okay, but get me the calmest old mare in the string. The last time I had to ride a four-legged creature into the hills, I got a nasty old mule that spent half the time swerving into low limbs trying to knock me off.”
“I’ll talk to Patterson,” McCain said. “The mare I rode up on a bit ago was pretty easygoing. I had no problems with her. Maybe we should switch, and you should ride her.”
And, that’s what they did. After some stirrup adjusting, Williams was on the chestnut-colored mare McCain had ridden earlier, and McCain was astride a dapple-gray mare. They gave the horses a tap on the sides with the heels of their boots and they were off.
On the way up the trail, Jack again flanked them, running just off the trail as the two men talked.
“I thought maybe Stratford would get this call. Isn’t he the guy patrolling the passes now?” McCain asked.
“We both work the passes and kind of trade off,” Williams said. “He’s off for a few days, so I’m the guy. After looking at the bones, any idea how long they’ve been out here?”
McCain described the coloration of the bones and gave his opinion on the question. In his investigations over the years of dead animals, many that had been poached, he had a good idea how long it took for bodies to decompose in the mountains. He wouldn’t swear to it, nor would he have to, but his guess was the body had been up here about nine months, since maybe October.
The men were having no trouble moving up the trail until a small rattlesnake decided to cross right in front of Williams’s horse. The mare’s ears went back, her eyes got about three times larger than normal, and she gave one big snort before she started bucking like a rodeo bronc.
“HANG ON!” McCain yelled at Williams who upon further inspection didn’t need the advice. He was hanging on for dear life.
“WHOA! WHOA!” Williams screamed at the mare while pulling back on the reins.
But the horse kept crow-hopping and snorting. Luckily, Williams was a big, strong guy, and even though the judges would have disqualified him for holding on with two hands, he otherwise might have made a decent score. He lasted the full eight seconds before he decided to bail off to one side.
Williams actually stuck the landing, hitting on both feet, standing perfectly straight as the horse spun away and ran back down the trail toward the corrals.
McCain was amazed at the whole event, and after he saw that Williams was okay, other than maybe needing some clean shorts, he started laughing.
“Dang, that was some ride,” McCain said to Williams between laughing fits. “You sure you and horses don’t get along?”
“Not funny,” Williams said. “About the only thing I like less than horses are rattlesnakes. Where is that thing? I’m going to kill it.”
“I don’t think Mr. Patterson would appreciate that. I think old Buttercup there is one of his best ponies.”
“Not the horse, the snake!” Williams exclaimed. “I coulda been killed.”
McCain laughed again and looked around for Jack. The dog was sitting about twenty feet way with a happy dog look on his face. It seems he had enjoyed the rodeo performance immensely.
When they finally arrived at the bones, Williams took his time looking around and taking photos with his cell phone. Then he taped the area off with yellow tape that he’d carried with him in a small daypack. The crime scene folks would be back up to the site the next day for a more thorough look around, but Williams had enough information to give them a report when he returned to Yakima.
On the way back down the hill McCain offered to let Williams ride the gray horse, but Williams said there wasn’t enough gold in Fort Knox to get him back on another horse. The whole walk down the trail Williams discussed his dislike for riding something that had a brain the size of a tennis ball, weighed ten times what he did, and could squash a man like a roach. McCain just chuckled as Jack searched around every tree and rock for another pesky squirrel to hassle.
When McCain and Williams returned to the corrals it was obvious the arrival of a rider-less horse had created a bit of a stir. Patterson was getting another horse ready to take up the trail himself, to make sure the men were okay.
Meanwhile, the ABC-TV van had shown up, and there stood Simon Erickson. It seems they had been monitoring their police scanner, as most news stations and print reporters were apt to do, and he had headed up the mountain to see if he could get enough to report on the story of the human bones found on the trail.
Whe
n Erickson saw Williams leading the way on foot, with McCain riding behind, he thought Williams had been caught by the horseman and was being transported to jail. His lucky day. He swung his camera around at the two men and began filming. Once he realized both men were law enforcement officers, he took a different tack.
“Would one of you officers have da time to give me a short interview?” Erickson asked.
“Don’t look at me,” McCain said. “Deputy Williams is in charge here.”
Williams gave McCain the same look he had when he was looking for the snake.
Chapter 11
McCain replayed the wild horse ride in his mind and laughed as he drove down the mountain. It had been a long day, and he was anxious to get home and get to bed. He was almost to Naches when his phone rang.
“Hey, I assume you got my message?” he said as he answered.
“What do you think?” Sinclair asked.
“It’s him,” McCain said. “Even though there was no way for me to tell if it was a woman or man by looking at the bones, seeing the long black hair nearby tells me it had to be a woman.”
“How long dead?” she asked.
“I’d say nine months,” McCain answered. “But that’s just a guess. I know it’s too late today, but it would be worth checking the reports for a woman gone missing around that time.”
“I already did,” she said. “After I got your message, I started checking immediately for anyone missing in the last twelve months that fits our other women’s description.”
“And?” McCain asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Or at least not yet. Of course, we have a few Native women who are still missing, but none from that timeframe.”
“Has YSO officially asked for your help yet?”
“No, but I’ve notified my boss to let him know it is probably coming.”
“I’ve got department meetings in the morning, so I won’t be on the mountain tomorrow,” McCain said. “I’m guessing Williams will be escorting you and the other investigators up to the bones. That is if you can get him on a horse again.”
McCain told her what had transpired on the horse ride up the hill, and as he did, he started laughing and because he was laughing so did she.
“I wish I could have seen it,” she said.
“Well, don’t razz him about it too much,” McCain said. “He’s a little sensitive. “
McCain told her good luck and goodbye and then pushed the hang-up button on his steering wheel. He was starving, so as he got into Naches he decided to pull into the café to grab a quick bite. He parked, jumped out of the truck, and was headed to the front door of the restaurant when he looked down the sidewalk and saw a young man in a cowboy hat walking with a woman with long black hair. He took another look back as the guy took off his hat and walked to the driver’s door of an older silver Honda. The woman got in the passenger’s side, and off they went.
“Silver Honda,” McCain said to himself. “Crap.”
He ran down the sidewalk, but the little car was just rounding the corner. He was just fast enough to catch the first three letters of the license plate.
McCain ran back to his truck and took off after the car. There were two ways out of town from where he was, and he took a guess at which way the car went. He figured the guy was heading to the highway and turned and headed that way. But when he got there, he saw no silver Hondas.
Doubling back, he headed to the old highway, and turned east. He drove slowly and looked up a couple side roads. Nothing. By now the car could be headed about six different directions, down the highway to Yakima, or up the highway to the mountains. At least he had the partial on the license plate. That was going to have to do for now. He wrote the letters down on a little notepad he kept in his shirt pocket and turned to go back to the café.
He thought more about it and realized that with who-knows-how-many silver Hondas still on the road from the 1990s and with about 5,000 younger women with long black hair in the area, the chances that those two things together meant anything at all was a longshot.
At the table, after he had ordered up a burger and fries, he started thinking about the Honda he had seen coming down into the Wenas that day back in April. The car and the guy were definitely out of place, and the timing was about right for when the body of the Alverez woman would have been dumped.
He was pissed at himself for not getting the license plate on the rig at the time, but it was what it was. He’d have Sinclair or Williams run the plates to see if they could connect the first three letters he’d gotten earlier with a 1990s silver Honda.
Seeing the cowboy with the girl a few minutes earlier made him wonder about other aspects. Did the killer know these women? Or did he abduct them in some kind of Ted Bundy way, getting them to assist him to his car and then knock them on the head and throw them in the trunk?
He had looked at the skull on the mountain pretty closely today, and he hadn’t seen any cracks in the bone. Nor had the coroner found any kind of damage to the heads of the other two women found in the mountains.
So far the sheriff’s investigators hadn’t found any link at all between the two women found earlier. Their paths didn’t seem to cross anywhere. They lived in two different areas of the valley, and there seemed to be no overlap socially. The Green River Killer had preyed on prostitutes and drug addicts, but the first two women seemed to lead normal lives with normal jobs.
He also started thinking about the killer. The guy had to be in some kind of shape if he had carried the woman, if it was a woman, up the Twin Sisters trail. McCain had packed a fifty-pound pack of water and fish up that trail, and it had been a chore. The same was true of the other two body sites. A person, probably a man, had to be in pretty good shape to pack someone that far from the road.
Or maybe the killer had used a horse or mule. He made another note in his book to have Sinclair check with the Pattersons to get the names of any people who might have rented a horse for one day, or overnight, during October or November. That was prime time for big game hunting along the eastern slopes of the Cascades, so his guess was there was a pretty long list of people who had rented horses.
She should check with any of the other outfitters too, to see if someone had rented a horse for one or two days during that period. They had the disappearance dates of the other two women. They should cross reference those dates, too, with any of the area horse packing operations.
As McCain was thinking about everything, something else was nagging at him. It was another idea to check out, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. About that time his burger and fries came, and as an afterthought, he asked the waitress to put the meal in a to-go box. He just wanted to get home, so he grabbed the box, jumped in the truck and headed down the highway toward home.
The next morning was full of meetings, the one part of the job McCain could definitely do without. His boss was a great guy, but he loved to hear himself talk, as did a couple of the other folks in the Region 3 office. Meetings that should take about ten minutes would drag on endlessly.
As one of the biologists droned on about something, McCain wondered how Sinclair was doing with Williams up on the mountain. Was she an experienced rider? And, although he thought he knew the answer to the question, he wondered if Williams had tried riding another horse up the trail. He replayed the whole bucking bronc show from the day before and started to chuckle. It was about then he heard his name.
“McCain? McCain?” the woman’s voice asked. “Did you hear my question?”
Damn, McCain thought. It was Andrea Parker, the head fish biologist for Region 3. She and McCain had a little history. About a year after he’d moved back to Yakima, she had taken a shining to him, and they had dated a few times. She was a pretty woman, very smart and very nice, but there just never were any sparks. At least there weren’t any for him. Evidently, she had felt a little differently, and when he told Parker that he didn’t think the relationship was worth pursuing, she didn’t take it too
well. He wanted to scream, “Get over it” at her so many times. It had been almost eight years for crying out loud! But he had always just smiled when she tried to get under his skin.
“I did hear your question, Andrea,” McCain said. “But once again you are asking the wrong person.”
If he remembered correctly, she was talking about bull trout in the Little Naches River before he had zoned out. In these meetings she almost always was.
The bull trout was now listed as a threatened species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and one of the jobs the WDFW police officers were being pushed to do was to keep a close eye on anglers fishing in waters where the bull trout lived and spawned.
The average angler barely knew a walleye from a bass, so to them a trout was a trout. If they caught a bull trout, about 90% of them would bonk the thing on the head and cook it over the fire in a skillet with fried potatoes and onions. He’d told Andrea that one time, and she got this horrible look on her face, like she’d just been told someone was killing starving children in India. If she and the other fish biologists had their say on what the enforcement officers did, they would be watching the rivers for bull trout poachers 24-7.
When McCain was a kid, everyone called bull trout “dolly varden,” and you could go up to some holes on the Tieton and Naches Rivers and catch a whole creel full of the things. The biologists back in the day thought of them as scrap fish. Bull trout are veracious feeders, and all you had to do was run a Mepps or Rooster Tail spinner in front of them and it was fish on. They were big fish too. The state record bull trout was caught out of the Tieton River, right below Rimrock Dam back in 1961. The fish weighed twenty-two pounds, eight ounces.
Of course, that was way before the biologists determined that bull trout numbers were threatened. Some people, including Andrea Parker, had spent their entire careers on one small watershed, working to bring the bull trout population back up to acceptable numbers.
