Without Pity

by Ann Rule

  After Maeve and Kari had spent a few nights in the cabin, Al came to them and suggested that perhaps the three of them should move farther into the woods. Handy and Digger were paying rent for their cabin, but the three of them were not. “I’m afraid somebody’s going to show up to evict us,” Al said worriedly, “or worse. You know, strictly speaking, we’re breaking the law by being here. We could be in big trouble if they found us.”

  As the girls listened nervously, Al said he had heard that police were planning to move into the area and flush out squatters who didn’t belong in the summer cabins. He would end up in jail, and they might have to go to juvenile hall. Kari said she was eighteen, but Maeve looked anxious. Juvenile hall would be even worse than a private girls’ school.

  Al had an air of authority about him, and Kari and Maeve realized that he was probably right about moving deeper into the woods. They had managed to walk into these cabins easily. The police could show up at any time; they weren’t really very far from town. After a short discussion, they agreed to pack up and join Al in hiking farther from the highway as soon as he was ready.

  They had known Al for several days, but they felt as if they had known him longer. He seemed a lot wiser about the world than they were and Kari and Maeve had come to count on him. It felt safer to have a strong man to look after them. It had been so scary the first night when they had to burn their shelter to survive. With Al leading the way, they wouldn’t have to worry about being caught in a snowstorm again.

  The trio started out the next morning. The Index-Galena Road grew narrower until it seemed to disappear completely in huge waves of white as they neared the Troublesome Creek area. There they had to break through drifts and wade through waist-deep snow. They were vastly relieved when they finally came to several habitable cabins standing side by side in a narrow clearing that had been hewn from the thick forest. It was almost like seeing a mirage in the desert, but this was real, the little cabins placed improbably in a nearly impenetrable forest of towering fir trees.

  The snow on the tiny cabins’ roofs was five or six feet deep, and drifts nudged so close to the doorways that they had to scoop the snow away with their hands before they could force the doors open. The cabins were only about ten feet by fifteen feet, and, of course, there was no electricity or running water. Still, with the sun shining down on it, the whole setup looked like a scene from the Swiss Alps. The girls half expected to see Heidi come leaping through the snow.

  They would be safe here. The owners wouldn’t come to check on their cottages—not with all those snowdrifts they had waded through. And the police couldn’t drive this far; the road was drifted over for miles behind them.

  Maeve and Kari took one cabin; Al chose one right next door. They filled lamps with coal oil and were delighted to find the cupboards stocked with enough canned food and staples to last them until spring.

  Their first few days in the cabins were idyllic. They popped corn, played in the snow, and rearranged the rustic furniture in their cabins. Maeve and Kari felt good about joining up with Al. He was just a nice guy. He hadn’t made any sexual overtures. It hadn’t taken them long to find out that girls on the run had to expect men to come on to them, but Al wasn’t like that. He was kind of like a big brother.

  It was lonely way back there in the woods, though, and quieter than they had ever imagined it could be, with no television or radio, only the wind in the trees, a few birds calling, and crashes in the forest when a load of snow slipped off a tree branch high in the air. Maeve and Kari weren’t afraid, but they were grateful for Al. They were especially thankful for him when they began to hear frightening noises—sounds that they couldn’t identify.

  One night the three of them were spending an evening in front of the fireplace in the girls’ cottage. The coal oil lamps and the fire on the hearth sent flickering shadows on the rough walls, and the wind whistled against the frosted windows. It seemed as if they were the last people alive on the planet. And then suddenly there was a harsh scratching noise against one wall. It sounded as if an animal was trying to claw his way in.

  Kari and Maeve had confided to Al that they worried about wolves and coyotes—and bears. Most of all, they were terrified of the Sasquatch—the legendary half-man, half-beast rumored to rove free in among Washington’s mountains. There are those who swear they have seen the Sasquatch and his mate. The girls had even seen a blurred photograph that someone took of a creature who walked upright with a face that was half human and with thick, straggly hair sprouting from his body.

  “The Sasquatch is ten feet tall,” Kari whispered, “and they say he leaves a footprint eighteen inches long. If he wanted to get in, he could.”

  They listened, their voices hushed, to the scrabbling sound against the wall. After a while, the scratching stopped, but sitting around the fire wasn’t much fun anymore, and the girls didn’t feel like laughing at Al’s jokes. When Al left to return to his cabin, Maeve and Kari bolted their door and decided to leave the lamps burning all night.

  Just as they began to feel a little less frightened, they heard a shout and a cry for help. Shaking, they forced themselves to open the door. They found Al in the snow where he had fallen from a footbridge. He said he didn’t think he could walk, so they lifted him and helped him to his cabin. Once they got him there, he didn’t seem to be badly hurt, just shaken up. The girls scampered back to their own cabin.

  They had scarcely gotten the door bolted when there was a tremendous, violent scratching and clawing against the wall. Whatever was out there had to be huge. They heard a powerful thump, as if something was hurling itself at their fragile cabin in an attempt to break through the wall. When the thumps grew louder, Kari screamed and Maeve sobbed in panic as they ran to Al’s cabin, hysterically crying for his protection. But he wasn’t there.

  They screamed his name for several minutes, afraid to stay on his porch and afraid to go back to their cabin. Finally he came limping up, a dim figure in the dark.

  “Where were you?” Kari demanded.

  “I was chasing rabbits,” he said. “Somebody has to get us some food.”

  “Did you try to scare us?” Kari asked accusingly.

  Al shook his head and looked hurt. “You know me better than that. I wouldn’t ever try to frighten you. But maybe you two had better bunk over here tonight just in case there is something out there trying to get in.”

  If they had any qualms about sharing a one-room shack with Al, they needn’t have worried. He was a perfect gentleman. He slept in his bunk, and Kari and Maeve curled up in their clothes in the other. There were no more animal sounds, and gradually they all fell asleep.

  Still, with the morning light, Kari and Maeve made a decision. Life in the deep woods was not the picnic they had pictured. They were afraid something “out there” was trying to get them. Also, it was still snowing, and they were fearful that the snow would cause their roof to collapse. Then they wouldn’t have anything between them and the creatures that came out at night. The sky looked as if another snowstorm was on the way. If they didn’t leave now, they might miss their last chance to get through the drifts to the road.

  Al tried to talk them out of leaving. They had all been having a great time, he said, and they shouldn’t let some branch scraping the cabins in the wind scare them away. “I have a gun,” he said.

  “Where did you get a gun?” Maeve asked, surprised.

  “From this woman who lives down near Index,” he said. “She loaned it to me. If anything happens, I can take care of you.”

  “You can stay if you want to,” Kari said, as she stuffed her belongings in her backpack. “We are getting out of here while it’s not snowing and it’s still daylight.”

  Maeve nodded. “Come with us, Al,” she said. “There is something dangerous out in the forest. You heard it last night just as much as we did.”

  Suddenly even homework seemed okay. Maeve thought longingly of her family’s warm house and her own bed.

&nb
sp; “I can’t change your minds?” Al said with a smile. “Aren’t we the Three Musketeers?”

  “Nope,” Kari said. “We’re out of here.”

  Finally, grudgingly, Al agreed that maybe they should go. “But if you’re going down to town, I’m going too. I don’t want to be up here all alone.”

  Maeve and Kari didn’t have adequate clothing or boots. They put on all five of their shirts and three pairs of jeans. They looked at their cabin for the last time and began to plow through the deep snow, headed for Index. They had almost ten miles to go, and they wanted to be sure they took the right fork in the road so they would head south past Snowslide Gulch and follow the river down to town. Al told them to go ahead. They moved slower than he did, anyway, and he would catch up with them. “I’ll just get all my stuff in my duffel bag,” he promised. “And I’ll be along before you know it.”

  It was Saturday, February 27, although Kari and Maeve had just about lost track of the days of the week. There was no time up in the forest. No clocks. No radios to remind them. They slogged ahead, already feeling the snow seeping into their shoes.

  The girls looked back to see if Al was following them, but they didn’t see him as they rounded the first bend in what they hoped was the road. It was hard to tell.

  It was midafternoon on Sunday when Handy and Digger heard someone frantically pounding on their door. They opened it to find Al, exhausted and disheveled. He was babbling something about a girl “being hurt” way back in the woods.

  “You’ve got to get help!” he shouted. “She’s way up there, and it’s really bad. Really bad. Call the sheriff—or somebody.”

  Digger didn’t stop to ask questions. He hurried out to where he knew there was a pay phone and called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s emergency number.

  The dispatcher gave the call to Deputy Allen Halliday who was on patrol in the Index area. He soon got backup from Deputy Frank Young. All the deputies knew was that someone was hurt—“possibly shot”—and the general location of the cabins up near Troublesome Creek Campground. But they realized almost at once that snow and ice prevented them from driving their patrol cars in to aid the injured girl.

  Because its boundaries encompass so many perilous areas, Snohomish County has maintained one of the country’s top search-and-rescue units for many years. Now Young and Halliday called Inspector C. R. “Bob” Fisher, and he sent Deputies Don Daniels and Bob Korhonen in a four-wheel-drive vehicle that had snowmobiles aboard.

  At the same time, Young called Detective D. C. “Doug” Engelbretson at home, where he was on call for the weekend.

  “We don’t know too much now,” Young said, “but there’s something strange going on here; maybe you’d better come up, Doug.”

  Fisher and his crew joined Deputies Young and Halliday. Digger and Hank told the rescue men that they thought a man they knew only as Al and two young women named Kari and Maeve had left several days before to go up the Index-Galena Road almost to Garland Hot Springs.

  “I think they must have hiked a long way,” Digger said, “maybe eight or ten miles. Al came down and said there was trouble, and one of the girls was injured.”

  “Where is he?” Fisher asked.

  Digger shook his head. “I don’t know. He’s gone. He was gone when I got back here from phoning you guys.”

  Fisher’s men, who had made almost a thousand rescues since their unit was mobilized, looked in the direction Digger gestured. A road—if it could be called that—extended at least partway through that area. After that they would be searching through a forest so deep in snow that any trail or road would be obliterated. Moreover, it was dark. Fisher had gotten the call at 2:30 P.M. Even though his group had gotten up there in record time, he estimated it might be after six before they could find whatever lay ahead in the black woods.

  Halliday, Young, and Engelbretson waited anxiously as the four-wheel vehicle disappeared into the drifts. At Troublesome Creek, Fisher, Daniels, and Korhonen abandoned the rig and moved forward aboard snowmobiles. At one point, their powerful lights played over bright crimson stains in the snow. It didn’t look good.

  It was 7:50 P.M. when the mobile radio at the base camp crackled. “We have the girls,” was the terse message. “Have an ambulance waiting.”

  Doug Engelbretson, whose area of expertise was homicide investigation, waited anxiously, straining his eyes for the sight of lights coming back down the road from Troublesome Creek. Finally he hurried forward as the search-and-rescue rig emerged from the woods with two passengers on board.

  Both were girls, but there was no time for Engelbretson to get much information about what had happened. One girl—the sixteen-year-old, whose name was Maeve Flaherty—was loaded at once into the waiting ambulance, which headed toward Providence Hospital in Everett. Kari Ivarsen, who said she was eighteen, seemed to be in shock but otherwise uninjured. She was taken where she could get warm and have some food.

  Doug Engelbretson learned that Maeve Flaherty was alive when she reached Providence Hospital, but that she was in critical condition from a gunshot wound and was undergoing surgery.

  Engelbretson waited until Kari Ivarsen was finally able to talk. He assured her that Maeve was alive and receiving expert care, but he did not mention how critical Maeve’s condition was. Even though time was of the essence in finding the person who had shot Maeve, Engelbretson could see how delicate Kari’s grip on reality was. He questioned her gently about what had happened up there in the deserted woods. As she spoke haltingly, he listened, horrified. Kari Ivarsen spun out a tale of twenty-four hours of shattering terror.

  Kari recalled how she and Maeve had planned to walk out of the woods to Index the afternoon before. “Al didn’t want us to go, but we were afraid to stay,” she said.

  “Afraid?” Engelbretson asked.

  “The snow—it was so deep—and we thought we might freeze. And there were funny scratching noises on our cabin at night.”

  Kari said that she and Maeve had put on as many clothes as they could to protect them from the freezing temperatures and had begun the nine-mile hike toward town. “We must have been walking for about an hour and a half when all of a sudden Maeve just fell forward into the snow. She just kind of keeled over.

  “She seemed to be kind of out of her head,” Kari remembered. “I didn’t know what had happened, but I was scared. I started crying and screaming for Al, because I knew he would help us if he was around.”

  She said that Al was supposed to be following them into town, but he had sent them on ahead. She was relieved when Al heard her screams and caught up with them.

  “I saw Al coming, hurrying to help,” she said. “But before he got to us, he turned around and fired his rifle at something behind him.”

  “What was he shooting at?” Doug Engelbretson asked.

  “He said there were two men on the ridge who were shooting at us. He shot at them to drive them off,” Kari said.

  Kari said that she and Al considered trying to get Maeve down to Index for help, but they knew it was too far. Somehow they managed to get her on her feet, and, half-carrying her between them, they finally made it back to the cabin.

  Kari closed her eyes, remembering a nightmare. “I remember saying, ‘Maeve, you’re in shock,’ and she said, ‘Yes, yes, I’ve been shot.’ And I said, ‘No, no: you’re in shock.’ But then I undressed her and I held the flashlight over her back, and I said, ‘My god, Maeve, you have been shot!’”

  Kari said that she and Maeve had been so thankful to have Al there. “He said he had worked for a veterinarian in Kansas,” Kari told Engelbretson. “He said that he knew enough about medicine to get the bullet out.”

  Al had taken complete charge of the situation, according to Kari Ivarsen. “He told me to get clean snow to pack the wound in Maeve’s back to kill the pain. Then he took this huge bread knife from the kitchen table, and he cut a large X across the wound.”

  Kari had watched him work over Maeve. He seemed to know wha
t he was doing, but he couldn’t find the bullet. She didn’t know why they had to take the bullet out right away, but Al said they had to.

  “Every time Maeve moaned from the pain, Al packed more snow on the wound to freeze the area,” Kari said. “And then he said he needed something sharper,” Kari recalled. “He got a piece of glass—”

  “Glass?” Engelbretson asked quickly.

  “Yes…just a piece of broken glass, and he filed it down until it was pretty sharp, and he started probing with that.”

  Next, Kari said, Al took a broken pool cue and stuck it in the ugly bullet wound, saying he could feel the bullet but that he needed tweezers to get it out.

  Kari told Doug Engelbretson that she had begun to sense that something was not right. A growing horror had risen in her, she said, as she watched Al working over Maeve, who was in and out of consciousness at this point.

  “He was enjoying it,” Kari said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her pain was turning him on,” she said. “I realized he wasn’t trying to help her—not really. He was enjoying sticking the knife and the glass and that pool cue into her.”

  With that awful knowledge, Kari said she had begun to wonder who had really shot Maeve. They hadn’t seen anyone except Al. They had only his word that snipers were firing at them. Al had a gun, and she had learned that he was behind them all the time they were walking, although they had not heard or seen him. It was as if he was stalking them like deer or rabbits.

  Kari said she thought as fast as she could. If she panicked, she knew that neither she nor Maeve would get out of that cabin alive.

  “I told him that maybe we’d better let her rest awhile,” Kari said. “I told him I would fix her some hot soup, and maybe that would give her some strength.”

  To her great relief, Al had agreed. Maeve couldn’t eat much, but Al stopped trying to operate on her. She tossed and fretted, but occasionally she was able to take a few sips of soup. Kari said she felt a little more confident that Maeve would survive, because she could see very little blood from the wound, except for the irritation Al had caused by probing for the bullet.