by Rob Phillips
He was living in a crappy double wide mobile home out in Terrace Heights. Way out past the county landfill with no neighbors within two miles. That’s where he took them. And that’s where he took her. He loved to see the fear in their eyes. And when they saw the hatred he had for them they even got more frightened.
He didn’t make them suffer for long. He would yell at them and tell them how much he hated them until he couldn’t scream anymore. Then he would strangle them with his bare hands. And when he was sure they were dead he would use his hunting knife to cut open their chest and rip out their heart.
The next day he would put the heart in a plastic garbage bag, put it in with the rest of his trash and drop it by the landfill as he was going to work. Later that night he would load the body in the back of his rig and drive up into the mountains to set them free.
Some of the bodies he would pack over his shoulder. On others he had used his game cart to wheel them out away from the roads. He never knew where he was going to set them free, but he always knew when he saw it, even in the almost pitch dark.
When he woke up the next morning, he saw the news that the idiots in the sheriff’s office had finally figured out that the killings were done by the same person. Duh! They still hadn’t made the connection to Colorado though. They really were stupid. But sooner or later someone would check around and they’d know these weren’t his only victims.
Maybe he’d head to someplace new. Or maybe he’d stick around to see just how close they might come. Maybe he’d find another victim. Maybe not.
It was going to be a hot one. McCain could already feel the heat creeping in through the east-facing windows, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. It had been a late night, and he would probably still be sleeping if Jack hadn’t awakened him to go out to pee.
He switched on the TV as he ate some cereal and watched Wendy Storm giving the weather forecast. She was the nighttime weather person but was filling in for the normal morning person, or so she said. Wendy confirmed what McCain already knew: it was going to be Africa-hot out there again today. She signed off by saying, “stay cool out there, that’s the weather, I’m Wendy Storm.”
McCain said, “I shit you not.”
He had the next three days off, so today McCain thought he would go up and do a little more snooping around in the mountains. He had seen that vehicle go up the road below him last night, or more correctly, earlier this morning. He thought it might have been a camper making a late arrival, but he wanted to check it out anyway. And he wanted to look around the Wenas side of the hill too.
Before he got going, he called Sinclair.
“Hey, McCain,” she said in a tone of voice he had not heard before.
“If this is not a good time, we can talk later,” he said.
“The stuff is really hitting the fan today. I’ve got about five hundred calls on my desk from people who think they know who the killer is. And a bunch more from people who are worried their daughter or friend or sister could be next, because they look just like the three murdered women.”
“Well—” he started before she cut him off.
“And besides the local news people, all of sudden I’ve got calls from TV stations and reporters from Seattle and Portland. I even had a call from a reporter from The New York Times.”
“Wow, bad news travels fast. I won’t bug you now, but I do have a couple of thoughts and questions.”
“I’m about to go into a task force meeting. Can we talk later?”
“Sure, just call me when it works for you.” And he hung up.
He wanted to talk to Sinclair before he headed to the mountains, so he decided to wait for her call closer to home. Needing to kill a little time while staying in phone service range, he decided to go down to the river. Every now and again he’d grab Austin Meyers, and he and Jack and the kid would go do a little fishing. This was the perfect time to do so. He called the Meyers’ phone and Austin answered.
“Hi, Luke. Are you hunting for the Cascade Killer?”
“Naw, the FBI is handling that. In fact, Jack and I are going fishing on the river in a few and wanted to see if you wanted to come along?”
“Sure!” Austin said. “I’m totally bored. Let me check with my mom.”
Austin was knocking on McCain’s door ten minutes later. He had his spinning rod in his hand and an old-fashioned creel over his shoulder. He was in shorts, a Russell Wilson number 3 Seahawks t-shirt and was wearing a Boston Red Sox ball cap.
“Did you bring any food or water?” McCain asked.
“Yeah, my mom fixed a couple of peanut butter sandwiches for us, and I have a bottle of Mountain Dew.”
“Okay, well, let me grab my gear and we’ll be on our way.”
McCain knew that fishing the river during mid-morning was probably not going to be the most productive time of day, but even then he figured they’d catch a fish or two. And, because Austin’s dad lived in Arizona and didn’t get up here much after he had divorced the boy’s mother, the only time he got to go fishing was when McCain took him.
They’d fished before, and McCain had helped Austin through a hunter’s safety course in January, so he could get his hunting license this fall. And he’d gone to a few of the boy’s Pony league baseball games the past couple of months.
“You think the FBI is going to catch the killer?” Austin asked as they walked down the trail to the river.
“Yes, I do,” said McCain. “They always do. Sooner or later the person makes a mistake, and they get caught. The challenge is going to be trying to catch him before he kills any more women.”
“Yeah, I sure hope they do. Do you think they’ll want Jack to help again?”
“I don’t know. Probably not, but they could.”
When Jack heard his name, his ears perked up and he looked up at Austin.
The boy scratched Jack’s back and said, “I sure hope so. It was so cool how he tracked the bear to where that one woman was.”
“Don’t start pumping him up too much,” McCain said. “He’s already getting a big head.”
When they hit the river, Jack took off downstream, splashing and playing and drinking water from the river. McCain and Austin went upstream to the first deep hole where McCain knew the bigger trout liked to lay.
“Throw your spinner over toward those bigger rocks and let it roll down through the hole,” McCain instructed.
Austin followed the directions perfectly, and within a few seconds he was fighting a nice fat rainbow.
“Way to go! Do you want to keep it for dinner?” McCain asked.
“Let’s let it go. That way I can catch it again maybe sometime.”
“Good idea.”
As they fished along upriver, McCain and Austin talked.
“How’s your baseball team doing?” McCain asked.
“Okay. We’ve won four and lost three. I got a triple the other day.”
About then Jack came running along the edge of the water. The dog was sopping wet, and as he got to McCain and the boy, he stopped and started shaking the water off.
“HEY!” Austin yelled, holding his hands up in front of his face to try to shield it from the dog-water assault.
McCain just laughed.
“I’d sure like to have a dog like Jack someday,” Austin said as he wiped water from his arms and legs.
“Well, keep getting good grades and showing your mom you’re responsible enough to take care of a dog, and I bet she’ll let you have one. When it is time, I’ll help you find a good one.”
“That’d be cool. Maybe you can help me train him to become a tracking dog, just like Jack.”
“I’d like that. And so would Jack. How about we dig into those sandwiches?”
As they sat on a rock and ate the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they talked about dogs and girls and football. All kinds of guy stuff. And as they did, a yellow dog sat right in front of them, watching every bite they took. Austin was the first to give in. He tore off some cr
ust to give to Jack who happily gobbled it up and waited for more.
“You are one spoiled dog,” McCain said. “If a stranger saw you acting like that, they’d think you never got fed.”
Austin just laughed and gave Jack another bite of bread.
The two fished for a while longer and then headed back to the house.
“Thanks for taking me fishing,” Austin said. “It was fun. You’ll probably have to tell my mom about the big one I caught and let go, because she might not believe me.”
“Tell her to call me. And thanks for going with me. Jack’s fun, but he’s not much for conversation. We’ll do it again soon.”
With that, Austin said goodbye, gave a wave and headed home.
A short time later, as McCain was getting geared up to head to the mountains, Sinclair called back.
“Sorry about that,” she said, still sounding stressed. “My boss is all over me about this serial killer deal. He wants to see some progress. Like I don’t?”
“I just have a question or two, and a couple thoughts. We can talk later if that helps.”
“No, sorry,” she said. “The woman from Sunnyside is still missing, which really has me worried. We haven’t found her vehicle. And everything else seems to be a dead end, including the check on the places that rent horses. No one of interest rented any horses during the times the other women went missing.”
“Anything on the boot photo I took up on the trail where the bones were found?”
“The crime lab people said it was most likely from a man’s shoe or boot, size 12 or maybe 12 and a half. But they couldn’t tell from the photo if the track was three months or three years old.”
“Alright, well, holler if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“Just talking to you helps,” she said, her voice softening. “Something about you does that to me. I’m just getting so frustrated.”
“I totally understand,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
“So, what have you been up to since we last talked?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, just watching over about a thousand anglers from here to Cle Elum. Pretty taxing duty.”
He hoped that would lighten her mood a little.
Then he said, “Actually, after work last night Jack and I ran up into the Manastash on a whim. I figured if this guy had taken another victim, he might be dumping the body back up off Highway 410 somewhere. It’s big country, but we had nothing better to do. Jack chased squirrels, and I watched for crazy dudes.”
“Find any?”
“Just three. I water-boarded them, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get them to talk. Then I remembered, oh yeah, squirrels can’t talk. I started thinking about when the killer might have dumped the bodies. We’re guessing he does it at night, but I thought he might be picking the darkest of nights, where there is a new moon.”
“Okay,” she said. “Go on.”
“I’ve spent a lot of nights in the woods, and on the night of a new moon it is so dark even the animals are affected. So I started looking at the moon phases. Guess when the last new moon was?”
“Two nights ago? When the Jimenez woman went missing?”
“Actually, it was last night. That’s why I went up into the mountains to see what I could see.”
“Damn,” she said. She paused to think for a few seconds and said, “Don’t believe what everyone else says, you are smarter than you look, Luke McCain. “
“Aw, shucks,” he said.
“Wait a minute, wasn’t there a lawman on one of those old westerns on TV named Luke McCain? I remember watching it in re-runs with my dad.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. You must be WAY older than me, because I don’t remember any of those old TV shows.”
“I’ll think of it,” she said, ignoring his little jab. “Now, I gotta go catch a killer. You have fun harassing anglers.”
McCain called Jack, went out to his truck, fired it up, turned the AC to max and was about to take off when his phone chimed. Why did WSU disband its water polo team? Their horses all drowned. It was followed by about nine happy faces laughing so hard tears were coming out of their eyes.
It wasn’t that funny, McCain thought. Especially not to the horses.
McCain, with Jack riding shotgun, motored west on Highway 12 toward the mountains. As he slowed to go through Naches, he looked closely at the cars sitting at the fruit stands, stores, restaurants, mini-marts and finally the hardware store on the west end of the strip that was now the retail part of the town.
Naches was like a thousand other small towns in America. It had been a quaint little town back in the 50s and 60s, where everyone from the farms and orchards in the area would come to shop for groceries, eat at a restaurant, and go to church. But then in the late 60s the state built a new highway next to the river, bypassing the town. With the advent of newer, faster, more reliable cars, people started doing their shopping in the much bigger city of Yakima, fifteen miles down the road. Businesses in Naches started drying up, and the ones that survived picked up and moved out to the new highway, where all the traffic was.
Today there was an array of assorted businesses on each side of the highway and especially during the busy tourist time, they made hay. McCain didn’t see much of interest as he drove through the businesses until he spotted the silver Honda in the parking lot of the hardware store. He immediately felt the urge to buy some six-penny nails.
McCain pulled into the hardware parking lot, parked, and as he had been doing for most of the past month when he had Jack with him, either in his state truck or in his Tundra, he left the rig running with the AC on and the doors locked.
“I’ll be right back,” he said to the dog, like Jack knew how to keep time, and headed into the store.
The hardware store was a typical for a small town. It served orchardists and homeowners in the area with items they needed. It also had a decent fishing section, with rods, reels, and a variety of lures and baits the local anglers used on the rivers and lakes in the Cascades. McCain was a frequent customer, so he knew the proprietor and some of the main workers.
“Hey Luke,” the owner said when he saw him come through the door. “Off duty today, eh?”
“Yeah, I’m working on a couple projects,” he fibbed as his eyes searched the store for Chad Burke.
“Well, let me know if you need any help,” the store owner said.
McCain wandered down a main aisle, scanning up and down the other aisles until he found Burke in the small section that carried camping supplies.
When he saw McCain, Burke said, “Hey, I don’t think they serve ice cream here.”
“Oh, right,” McCain said, acting like he didn’t recognize Burke for a minute. “You’re the guy with my dream jobs. How are the fish biting on the Yakima?”
“Fishing’s been good,” Burke said. “Best late in the day.”
“The whitewater deal should be kicking in pretty soon,” McCain said.
“We’ll be running trips starting right after Labor Day,” Burke said. “Have you ever done it?”
“Once on the Deschutes River down by Bend,” McCain answered. “But it was pretty tame.”
“Stop by when we get going. I’ll get you on a boat if you’re interested.”
“Looks like you’re going to be doing a little camping,” McCain observed dumbly.
“Yeah, I have a little work to do in the mountains,” Burke said, then turned and headed to the cashier’s counter.
McCain was afraid to push it too much. He grabbed a handful of Rooster Tails off the pegs in the fishing aisle, one aisle over, and then also headed to the counter.
Burke looked at the lures and said to McCain, “I thought you were a fly guy?”
“Oh, I’ll fish with lures now and again, but these are for my neighbor kid. He lost five of these this morning fishing with me on the Naches. I’ll make him work them off by taking care of my spoiled dog.”
“We
ll, good luck,” Burke said, and he headed for the door.
“Yeah, catch you later,” McCain said as he concentrated on Burke’s boots and their tread. If he wasn’t mistaken, they were about a size 12, maybe 13.
McCain had the urge to follow Burke, but he also wanted to get back up near Bald Mountain to do some checking around. He decided he’d go west up 410, to the Bald Mountain Road turnoff, and if it happened that Burke was going that way too, well, so be it.
Burke was about a half mile ahead of him, so McCain stayed back and just watched. It was short lived, however. Burke turned left at the Y and headed up toward White Pass. McCain thought about following, but he decided he’d go ahead and go back up by Manastash Ridge where he’d seen the rig around midnight.
He was in no hurry, so he took his time driving up the Forest Service road past Bald Mountain on the way to the ridge. He was on the same road as the night before, and he followed it along until he hit a road that gradually turned west off the main road up to the ridge. He was pretty sure this was the road the second rig had driven up in the dark.
All these roads saw a surprising amount of traffic in the summer. Several jeep clubs would camp down along the river, and they’d come up here and drive around all day. McCain failed to see the appeal of just driving around on dirt roads all day, by the jeepers or the road-hunters in the fall, but that was probably because he had to do it as part of his job.
Today, though, he was on a different mission. He was looking for a place where someone might have pulled off and walked down from the road a ways. He drove slowly, watching closely for anything that might tell him what that rig had been doing up there the night before.
Yes, the person driving the rig might have been coming in late to a camp. And if he found a camp up here, he’d stop and ask the campers about that. Unfortunately, he found none, and he started getting a really bad feeling in his gut.
Chapter 17
McCain threw the Toyota into first gear and let the vehicle creep along as he searched for any tire tracks, shoe prints or some other clue along the road that might tell him more about the vehicle he’d seen the night before. He also looked ahead, occasionally turning off the road to check all the obvious flat spots where someone might have had a camp recently.
