The Cascade Killer (Luke McCain Mysteries Book 1)

by Rob Phillips

  “That was really good,” Sinclair said when they were finished.

  “I caught the salmon with my own two hands,” he said. “It’s my favorite fish to catch and to eat.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me. I guess I can add one more quality to your list. Looks, good job, kinda funny, and you can cook. Why aren’t the ladies beating your door down?”

  “Don’t get too excited. Salmon’s about the only thing I can make that tastes good. And, I think you could cook a spring salmon in the dishwasher, and it would eat just fine. Sorry, I don’t have any dessert.”

  “No problem. I really need to get going. Tomorrow is going to be another crazy day, now that you’ve found the Jimenez girl.”

  McCain and Jack stood on the porch and watched her drive away.

  “I really would like to get to know her better,” he said to the yellow dog before turning in to clean up the dishes.

  Chapter 18

  The killer was amazed the body of the girl had been found so quickly. Someone had been very lucky. Still, it was scary to think that the idiots would have been there just hours after he had set the woman free. He had always had the help of the elements to cover his tire tracks and footprints. He had used the game cart a couple times before, when the terrain allowed, and because it was a quicker way to get in and out of where he had let her go.

  There was no word about the white car he dumped by the river. That was good. They wouldn’t find it until fall, if at all. Not that he was worried about that because he had wiped down the car inside and out.

  They also knew now about the heart. Again, that didn’t matter. So what? He removed the bitches’ hearts. What did that tell anyone?

  Still, it was a close call. The closest yet. He would have to be a little more careful from now on.

  He would wait. If he could. Until the heat and anger rose up in him again. At that point he could make no promises.

  It had been three days since McCain found the body, and the media was going bonkers over it. A fourth body in the killing spree that even the national news was now calling the Cascade Killer. McCain had seen Sinclair interviewed on TV a couple of times, and the Yakima Herald-Republic had run a series of in-depth stories about the four victims, including a timeline of when they disappeared and a map of where their bodies had been located

  Luckily for McCain, Sinclair had kept his name out of the news as the person who had discovered the body. She told reporters that a hiker had seen the vultures and went to see what they were circling over. The next time he talked to her he would have to thank her for that.

  Maria Jimenez had been positively identified by her sister after her body had arrived at the county morgue. Later the coroner would announce that she had been strangled to death. There was no evidence of a sexual attack. The only other physical evidence was the bruising on the left side of her face. The woman had been hit prior to being killed, the coroner reported.

  The crime scene crew had taken plaster imprints of the tire tracks and the few partial shoe tracks that McCain had found. They weren’t quite ready to say the tire tracks came from a game cart, but McCain was positive they were. He’d seen too many on his checks of hunters over the years. When they did determine that it was a game cart, maybe then they could figure out who manufactured it based on the details of the track. That might lead them to some purchase records if the cart was bought direct from the factory or through some online store.

  The investigation was moving along, but at glacial speed, McCain thought. The killer was either very smart or very lucky. Probably both.

  On the following Monday, McCain decided it was about time to follow up on the Johnson boys. It was his experience that arresting poachers for one offense rarely stopped them from breaking the game laws again. The police arrest records were full of people who habitually took game and fish out of season.

  With the tables in the Yakima County Jail now securely bolted to the floor, LeRoy Johnson Sr. seemed to be firmly incarcerated. LeRoy Junior and his brother Theodore, on the other hand, were out in the world, most likely causing trouble. The brothers struck McCain as the types who might enjoy doing a little hunting out of season.

  The Johnsons’ house in Tieton was closer than Teddy Johnson’s Cle Elum cabin, so McCain ran up to the old man’s place first. He slowed as he approached the driveway. Surprisingly, the house was a regular beehive of activity. The flock of chickens was back, with birds scratching and pecking everywhere. McCain saw Junior’s Chevy and Teddy’s Dodge sitting in the gravel driveway.

  A couple half-breed dogs were tied by a length of chain to two trees next to the house. They both strained at the chains, barking at the chickens. Or more likely, McCain thought, they were just barking to hear their heads rattle. It always amazed him how people could just let their dogs bark incessantly. Didn’t it get on their nerves? Even trying to watch television, listening to the dogs bark in the background would drive him nuts.

  There was nobody outside, so he decided to cruise up the driveway and see if anyone popped their head outside. Sure enough, he had barely stopped when LeRoy Junior stepped out on the porch. McCain saw him turn and say something to someone inside, and a second later a thinner version of the younger Johnson stepped out. Williams had been right. They were definitely kicked by the same mule.

  The brothers were the same height, had the same round face, and had the same wispy bit of sandy-colored hair on top of their heads, which was forecasting some serious male-pattern baldness in their future. While LeRoy Junior was kind of dumpy, Teddy was in pretty good shape. He looked like one of those guys who hadn’t worked out or lifted a weight a day in his life, but he was strong in a natural sort of way. His brother missed that gene, along with a few others, evidently. The men were outfitted in jeans and t-shirts, LeRoy in a blue Seattle Mariners shirt, and Teddy in a black shirt with some kind of a logo on it. Probably from a rock band that nobody had ever heard of, McCain figured.

  He got out of the truck and tried to say hello over the barking dogs, without much success.

  “Unless you got a warrant, you can just get the hell outta here,” Teddy hollered.

  “Just wanted to stop by and see how LeRoy was doing. I know he’s pretty close to your father, and I wanted to make sure he was doing okay.”

  “Well, ain’t that benevolent of ya,” Teddy said. “My brother’s doin’ just fine, thank you. Now git outta here.”

  “Okay, well, you boys have a good day,” McCain said as he began backpedaling for his truck. As he passed Teddy’s pickup he glanced into the bed and spotted a thin-wheeled game cart and what appeared to be fresh blood.

  “Next time, save yourself a trip and send a postcard,” Teddy said before he and LeRoy returned to the house.

  As McCain backed out of the driveway the dogs were still barking and the chickens, about thirty of them, were picking and scratching, scurrying around like a bunch of ants.

  There were about fourteen reasons why Teddy Johnson might have a game cart in the back of his truck, McCain thought. But in the middle of summer, combined with fresh blood stains, only about three of those reasons were likely legitimate. He had no reason to think Teddy might be involved with the dead bodies in the Cascades, but it certainly was a strange coincidence. More realistically, Teddy and his simple brother had picked up where the old man had left off.

  Even so, McCain decided to call Hargraves and let him know what he had seen.

  “Hey Luke, what’s up?” Hargraves asked.

  “On a whim I ran up to the LeRoy Johnson compound today. You’ll never guess what I saw.”

  “I don’t know, a bear riding a bike.”

  “Nope. Before they ran me off, I saw a game cart and fresh blood in the bed of one of their pickups.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me any. They probably just finished carting half a beef into the garage for butchering.”

  “Probably, but then again, they might be up to something.”

  “So, what do you w
ant to do?” Hargraves asked.

  “I’m not sure. Let’s think on it, and tomorrow let’s . . . hold on, I’m getting another call. See you at the office.”

  McCain pressed a button on his phone to receive the incoming call from Sinclair.

  “Hey, you’re a TV star,” he said. “I can’t change the station without seeing your face.”

  “Yeah, it’s one of the crappier parts of the job. And these young TV reporters around here ask the stupidest questions. Didn’t they teach them anything in school?”

  McCain knew that many of the reporters hired by the local TV stations were graduates of WSU’s school of broadcast journalism. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.

  “Yakima is about the 126th largest TV market in the country,” McCain said. “All the really good young reporters go to the bigger markets for higher pay. So, we get Simon Erickson. He’s a nice, hardworking guy, but I don’t think he’s going to be the next Lester Holt.”

  McCain knew all of this because one of his buddies used to be a news director for the ABC station in town. The buddy had done the news anchor thing, and then became the news director before taking a job with the County Health District as their public relations director.

  “Didn’t Tom Brokaw have a speech impediment?” Sinclair asked.

  “I think so. I guess there’s hope for Simon yet.”

  “Hey, I’ve heard from a couple other states on my request for similar missing or murdered women,” Sinclair reported. “And a couple other things have popped up. I thought maybe we should get together to talk. I’d like to get your thoughts on it.”

  “I can come to your office anytime later this afternoon, if that works.”

  “Sure, let’s meet at five. See ya then.”

  It was getting close to lunch time, so McCain decided he’d drop down the hill from Tieton and go into Naches for some chicken strips and a cold soda. Seeing all the chickens at the Johnsons must’ve had a subliminal effect on him, he thought. The little hamburger place in town made the best chicken strips, and when he had a craving for strips, he headed there. Then after lunch he could run up the Tieton River and make sure none of the anglers on the river had caught a bull trout. He definitely wanted to keep Andrea Parker off his back.

  He had just picked up his order from the carry-out window and was sitting down at the picnic table in the grass next to the building when Jim Kingsbury pulled in. He must have seen McCain’s truck sitting in the parking lot because he parked, jumped out of the truck, and came right over to where McCain was eating. He wore a bright yellow shirt reading PROCRASTINATE NOW in bold purple letters.

  “Hey, Jim. Where’s your partner?”

  “He’s at a doctor’s appointment in Yakima. I wanted to let you know that I’ve been keeping tabs on that cowboy in the silver Honda. I saw him around town a few times, and then he just disappeared.”

  “Okay,” McCain said, chewing on a chicken strip. “So, what was he doing around here when you saw him?”

  “He was in the grocery store buying a bunch of food. And then I saw him twice in the hardware store buying a big length of chain, some heavy-duty locks, and propane.”

  “Which way did he go after he left the hardware store?” McCain asked.

  “West. I thought about following him, but Frank told me not to. He said you’d be ticked.”

  “Yeah, it’s probably a good idea to steer clear of the guy. Besides, he’s done nothing wrong that we know of. He’s probably just fixing up a cabin or something near Rimrock. I’ve seen him up that way a couple of times.”

  “Okay, but just thought you’d like to know. Say, those chicken strips look good. I think I’ll order me some.”

  After lunch McCain made his checks on the anglers up the Tieton. While stopped to talk to a man and his daughter fishing off the bank, he looked into the trees across the river and noticed a small gray box affixed to one of the cottonwood tree trunks. It took him a second, but then he realized he was looking at a digital trail camera. Hunters around the country had been purchasing them by the thousands and placing them on trees and fence posts and all sorts of other things to keep track of deer, elk, and other wildlife. The cameras were quiet, and the newer ones didn’t even need a flash to catch the animals at night. Some even shot in video. They were triggered by movement, and most held the photos on a SIM card. The really fancy ones could be hooked up to smart phones and would transfer the photos to a computer or tablet, almost in real time. In a way, McCain thought, it was a bit unfair. Technology had slipped into the outdoor world, and hunters were using it everywhere.

  On the way back to town he started thinking about the trail cameras. What if some hunter had one of those cameras up in the mountains where it might have taken a photo of the killer packing one of the dead women to be dropped? Or perhaps someone’s home security cameras near the Bald Mountain turn-off or along the Wenas Road might have recorded the vehicles going by on the nights the women disappeared? It was long shot, but he would mention it to Sinclair when they met.

  When he arrived at her office, Sinclair’s big black Chrysler wasn’t there, so he sat in his truck and did a little research on trail cameras on his phone. He was totally involved in what he was reading when there was a tap on his window. He jumped in surprise.

  Agent Sinclair, standing there dressed in her FBI work attire of black slacks, white blouse, and black boots, was laughing.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Thanks for meeting me.”

  “My pleasure,” McCain said. “I’ve been thinking about this killer thing all afternoon. And I have some thoughts.”

  When they got into Sinclair’s office, she told him the crime lab had come around and now believed the thin tire track McCain had found was from a game cart. The problem was, from what they could tell, several of the manufacturers used the same tire on all their carts. So, trying to find purchasers of one particular cart was going to be next to impossible. The crime lab people had also analyzed the boot imprints near the cart track and couldn’t determine a make of boot or shoe. But based on the partial prints they believed the shoe size was 12 or 13.

  Sinclair said a search of Jimenez’s body and clothing for anything that might carry DNA of the killer was negative. She said that they had not yet found Jimenez’s car. Not that it would do much good other than possibly giving an idea where the abduction had taken place. If they knew that, they could ask locals if they had seen anything the night before the new moon.

  “We have the analysis from our profiler, some professor at Dartmouth,” Sinclair said. “She believes it is a white male, age twenty-five to forty-five, who has some serious issues with women.”

  “Really,” McCain said. “I could have told you that. That fits about every serial killer in the history of the world.”

  “I know,” Sinclair said. “She’s still baffled by the removal of the heart, but thinks it relates to unrequited love.”

  “I guess I should be a professor someplace,” McCain said.

  Sinclair went on to tell him that Colorado had come through with a couple of missing women that fit the profile—young, fit, long black hair. Both of them, she said, had just disappeared.

  “They pulled a David Copperfield, is how the sheriff in Moffat County put it,” she explained. “That’s where the two women went missing. Both were normal people, working in good jobs, seemingly happy with life.”

  “Did you get the dates when they went missing?” McCain asked.

  “Yes, a little over a year ago, about a month apart,” Sinclair said.

  “And did you put those dates to the moon phases?” McCain asked.

  “No!” she said. “I didn’t think about that.”

  She grabbed the dates off the email she had on her phone from the Colorado sheriff, and McCain brought up the moon phase chart.

  “There you go. A perfect match to the new moon, for both of them,” he said. “It’s gotta be the same person.”

  “So, if we can fin
d someone who worked and lived in that part of Colorado a year ago, we might have something,” she said.

  “Yep, and if he’s a white guy, twenty-five to forty-five, with big feet, who hates women with black hair and is fit enough to pack a 120-pound body up a trail, boom, we got our guy.”

  “Don’t forget, he owns a game cart,” she said.

  “I can name you about eleven guys off the top of my head that fit that, including Deputies Stratford and Williams,” McCain said. “Well, except for the Colorado part, and the hating women with long black hair. And Williams might be a bit older than forty-five.”

  Sinclair said they were still running down calls from people who thought their neighbor, or brother-in-law, or boss was the killer, but so far nothing had even come close to panning out.

  McCain told Sinclair about the whole game camera idea, and his thoughts on the home security cameras adjacent to the roads they thought the killer had driven on the nights of the new moon. Sinclair was aware of the trail cameras but didn’t know how popular they had become. She thought it was a great idea.

  “How do we get the word out to the hunting world, to ask if they might check their cameras in the areas where we know the bodies were found, to see if there is anything out there?” she asked.

  “There are all kinds of hunting chat sites on the internet and hunting groups on Facebook,” McCain said.

  He knew that because now part of every fish and wildlife police officer’s job was to watch those different sites and groups. In the past few years several poachers had been discovered because they couldn’t help themselves and just had to show off their ill-gotten trophies. The problem was, in many of those photos, there were things in the background that tipped off authorities to the fact that the animal was taken out of season, or in a unit that wasn’t open.

  For instance, one guy McCain had run down claimed to have shot a big mule deer buck in one of the high mountain units during an early season hunt in September. McCain knew the area the unit was in was hit with an early snowstorm and there was snow on the ground for the duration of the season. Unfortunately for the poacher, the photo showed him with the deer in perfectly clear and dry country. Way in the background in the photo was a cell tower, which showed pretty much where the man had killed the deer.