by Mark Hall
says ‘Don’t get trucked’, which is the first thing Landon said to you.”
“That isn’t too uncommon a phrase. What are the boxes for, you think?”
Chris pulled the note out of his pocket from the canister that was hanging on the bull’s neck. He typed the code into the first box and then some other series of letters into the second and pressed the enter key. Nothing happened for several minutes – Chris refreshed the site a few times but nothing changed.
The next time Chris refreshed the site, almost a half hour later, there was a change. Chris grinned.
“It looks like we just joined the FTF Society” he said, “but our username got changed.”
“We have a user name?” I asked.
“Not really. I entered in the code from the bull with the user name ‘caughtyou’. But the username listed with that cache has been changed to ‘neverwill’. It seems we know a couple things about the person behind all this.”
“Like what?”
“We know he is smart to come up with these caches and hide them without getting himself killed. We know that he carefully plans each of these weeks or months in advance. We know he has some skill with his hands or at the least has a great deal of outdoor experience. We know he can host his own website and that he looks at it frequently when a cache has recently been posted. We also know he is very sure of himself to change our username like that. But there is something else.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
Chris continued. “He does this out of meanness. He is deliberately posting caches that could kill people. They are more than just difficult or hard to get to – he added a rating that shows the likelihood of the cache actually killing someone. He relishes the DNFs because he lists them. Then there’s ‘Bovine Bully’. This guy is mean or wants to be mean or a bully. And I don’t think this is the end of it, either. He’ll post another one.”
“How do you figure he plans these out in advance?” Cory asked.
“When could he have possibly put a canister or a box in the falls? He absolutely had to do it when the water was really low like during the summer. Then he waits until that particular weekend to post the coordinates, when the water was several feet high making it virtually impossible to get to it. Out of meanness and dang near evil.”
“Certainly criminal” I added. “The way I see it, we have to get a look at the back end of that site to track where it is originating from then we can get there and catch him”.
“I don’t think he will give us that long” Chris replied, “but I do think he might be more into this to the point he makes himself vulnerable.”
“Really?”
“Yes. My guess is that he was one of the campers up at High Falls when that cache was posted, so he could see people trying to find it and suffering through what he had set up. He was likely down in the woods the night he set off that cache that Landon tried to FTF. You can bet that if he plans these so far in advance that he already has the next one in place, ready to go or at least ready with little effort on his part.”
“If you think that is right then we can watch this site for the next one and beat him to it” Cory said.
“It isn’t beating him to the cache. It is going to be a matter of finding him at or near the site where he could watch people fail at trying to FTF. Unfortunately, we can’t possibly know where the next cache might be and someone could FTF it before we can get there. There could be dozens of people watching this site for when he turns on a cache.”
“When might he turn it on?” Cory asked.
“I am not sure but I doubt it would be long. If this guy plans like he does and is as web-savvy as we think he might be, I can’t believe he is going to stay put where he can be caught. He is probably both putting the next cache in motion and packing up to leave at the same time. If the cyber crimes folks can get to him, great, but we need to respond to whatever cache comes up, whenever it comes up.”
I called back up to the cyber crimes and made them aware of all this so they can track any activity on the site and let us know when the next one comes up. You can’t know how many people are involved in several divisions throughout law enforcement in each state on each and every case. Hundreds of people work every day, sometimes all day, in support of investigation.
We called over to Landon to confirm the things we had found out about the site, which he did. I told him that we had posted a bogus username as the FTF which got a laugh out of him. He was going to be fine but I doubt he looks at steak the same way again.
Through the night and into the next morning we waited for news from cyber crimes but didn’t hear anything. Cory left us that morning for the hospital again and I had to run up to my office in Macon after lunch to file a report and after that, we rode on the east side of town for a quick visit to the state court. We were just pulling down Mulberry Street when the phone rang from cyber crimes. The site had been edited and they had just raided the house where the site had been maintained. Chris was right, as usual. The house was empty except for a single computer, not even the monitor was left. It was rented out for the past year, paid in cash, to a man named Shane Reff. That was a name I didn’t think was real.
Chris said, “Hand me that list of campers registered at High Falls at the time of that first murder”.
I passed him the list and wrote down the updated information from the FTF Society site. We got the next and possibly last, cache information. The GPS coordinates were latitude: 32.840069 and longitude : -83.607384. I plugged that into the map on my phone and immediately realized how lucky we were.
“That’s barely ten minutes from here!” I exclaimed. “At the Indian Mounds!”
SEVEN
“Let’s go, then!” Chris yelled and we got in the truck and headed that direction. I explained that the Ocmulgee National Monument was a series of Native American mounds that spread over nearly a thousand acres just further east outside of town.
“I don’t know what could be dangerous over there”, I said. “There are the mounds and a gum swamp but not anything that would present a threat. There’s the river but it isn’t at a bad stage. I don’t know.”
Chris said, “Keep your lights off and let’s get there quietly. If this thing is now available to the others trying to FTF into the Society, then if we make a fuss it will run them off, and Shane Reff, too. He’s there, I am sure, and he should know that we’ll be there, too.
Chris took my phone and looked at the map. “What did cyber say the message was on the cache?” he asked.
“Aw heck, I don’t know. Look it up on the site - I was in too big a hurry to remember.”
Chris pulled it up on his phone. “Here it is. ‘FTF Finale’ is the title. The message says ’30 under cache drops at 4:07. Ammo box’.”
“What in the heck does that mean?” I asked. “4:07 is one hour from right now”.
“Let’s get to the park and go from there”.
We got there a couple minutes later and Dean Woodruff, the park ranger I called, met us in the parking lot. We filled him in one what was going on as we walked the concrete path toward the Earth Lodge. We went in the structure to try to make it look like we were visitors and not actually trying to catch someone, or find the cache.
“Ammo box?” Dean asked. “does he plan to shoot people?”
“No”, Chris answered, “the ammo box is the cache. Some of these are the size of a pill bottle, some are those magnetic key holders, and some are the size of a lunch box or an ammo box. Shooting is not what this guy wants to do. He wants to make a trap – and that is what it is – and I think he wants to watch it work.”
“How many people are out here right now?” Chris asked.
“It’s hard to say.” Dean replied, “There are three parking areas including the main lot at the museum where you parked. But based on the cars there and how it usually is this time of day on a Friday, there could be twenty, maybe thirty?”
“Is the
re anything out here that could be fatal, either accidentally or on purpose?” I asked Dean.
“The mounds are a little high but the bottom of them is wider than the top – if you jumped off, you’d just roll to the bottom. There are the stairs that lead up the mound, too. We have snakes occasionally?”
“The swamp?” Chris asked.
“Right now the water isn’t up so at the deepest it might be five or six feet near the beaver dam, maybe. But that is well on the back side of the property. There’s the river.”
“But it isn’t up right now either and that section of the Ocmulgee is slow moving anyway” I said. “What else is there? A radio tower? An old well or something? Anything?”
Just then Dean’s face went pale. “The train track”, he said. “The train runs through every day right at 4:00.”
“This GPS says we are about 425 feet from the cache” I said. “What part of the track is that close to us?”
“The bridge” Dean answered. “Right along this path toward the earth mound.”
“Remember”, Chris said, “Shane Reff is probably here and most likely watching everything going on with this cache. We can’t do anything that would scare him off but we have no idea what he looks like.”
We walked out of the Earth Lodge and followed the concrete path as I watched the GPS. Sure enough, when we arrived at the bridge entrance, we were 60 feet from the position. The tracks ran east and west so of course the bridge ran north