The Cascade Killer (Luke McCain Mysteries Book 1)

by Rob Phillips

  McCain opened the door, jumped out and called Jack. He scanned the group of mostly men and wasn’t surprised to see the big guy from the lake yesterday right in the middle of things. The little guy from the lake was next to him, and they seemed to be the focus of attention of several other men, and one really pissed-off woman.

  “Okay,” McCain said in a loud voice. “What’s going on here?”

  It helped that he was about three inches taller than anyone in the group, including the big guy, and with the hot weather, he was wearing his short sleeve duty shirt. One time when McCain was helping with a hunter’s safety class filled with twelve-year-olds, one of the kids in the class took a good long look at him and said, “Wow dude, you’re ripped.” McCain was hoping the people in this bunch were thinking the same thing. It always made things easier if they did.

  “These two assholes started making lewd remarks to my wife,” said a man in a green tank top with a bandana tied around his head.

  “Yeah,” the mad woman said. She was wearing a matching green tank top, her auburn hair tied up in a bun.

  “Okay, here is what we are going to do,” McCain said. “You two,” he pointed to the two trout fishermen from the pond the day before, “are going to go over and stand by my truck.”

  “And you two,” he pointed to the man and woman in the matching tank tops, “are going to go over there and stand by the outhouse.”

  At that the woman made a puking noise and said, “Really? That thing stinks like shit. Even the flies won’t go near it.”

  “Go,” he said and pointed. To the mob he said, “And the rest of you go on back to your campsites. Now, whoever called this in said someone had a gun. If I even think I see a gun, I am going to arrest the whole campground, and you’ll all be in lockup in Yakima until Labor Day. So don’t push it.”

  He took a look around and saw an older gentleman sitting in a lawn chair, watching the lively discussion while he enjoyed a beer next to a tent trailer. McCain walked over to him.

  “I’m guessing you’re a neutral party in whatever this is,” McCain said to the man. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  The man told McCain he hadn’t heard the two guys who were standing by his truck say anything, but they might have laughed or made a face or something when the woman had walked by. He said he thought the gal in the green shirt had maybe had one too many beers and was kind of parading around like Miss America. He guessed she didn’t like the way those guys looked at her or laughed or whatever.

  “She disappeared,” he explained. “And all of sudden here comes her biker-wannabe-husband, looking for a fight.”

  “Okay, thanks,” McCain said to the man. “Appreciate it.”

  He then went over to the two trout fishermen, who basically told the same story, leaving out the part about maybe laughing at the gal.

  “She’s just drunk,” the shorter guy said.

  “Okay, where is your camp?” McCain asked.

  The two men pointed to a big green Cabela’s tent pitched under a tall pine tree close to the river.

  “Stay here a minute longer,” McCain said. He walked over to the couple in the matching tank tops and said to the woman, “Tell me what happened.”

  “Those bastards started insulting my wife,” the man in the bandana said.

  “I didn’t ask you what happened,” McCain said to the man. “I asked your wife.”

  “I wassh getting bored and show I deshided to go for a walk,” she said slurring some of her words. “And thosh two assholes called me a prositu . . . a prosute . . . a whore.”

  “Where’s your camp?” he asked the husband.

  He pointed to the other end of the campground, about four hundred yards away, and said, “The white and blue trailer.”

  McCain told them to go back to their trailer and, talking directly to the lady, told them to take a little nap so they’d be wide awake when the fireworks started. He told them to stay at their end of the campground. And he gave them a stern warning that if he had to come back here again, people WERE going to go to jail, and that the sheriffs would get it all sorted out after the three-day weekend. He told them he was going to tell the two gentlemen over there the same thing.

  “Gentlemen, my ash,” the woman said under her beer-tainted breath.

  “If you really want to spend your holiday in jail, just try me,” McCain said.

  He went and gave the two trout fishermen the same speech. They assured him they hadn’t done or said a thing and promised to stay away from the drunken lady and her “mouth-breathing husband.”

  As McCain was walking back toward his truck a slight breeze blew by and he about gagged. The woman was right about one thing: the outhouse definitely stunk like shit. He looked around for Jack who had conveniently disappeared during McCain’s speech to the campers and found him sitting right smack dab in front of a fat man sitting backwards on a picnic table bench. Jack was staring up longingly as the oversized man ate a foot-long hotdog, all slathered in mustard. McCain whistled for the dog, and Jack came on the run.

  “I think you were wishful thinking there, bud,” McCain said to Jack. “Come on, it’s too damned hot out here to be dealing with all of this.”

  McCain followed Jack into the truck, fired it up and turned the AC on high. As they waited for the fan to blow cold McCain looked in the rearview mirror and saw an older silver Honda pass by on the highway. The car had gone by so quickly McCain hadn’t gotten a good look at the driver, but he decided it was worth checking out. He jumped out ahead of a couple other rigs coming up the highway and kicked the Ford in the butt.

  He didn’t want to push the car, just get close enough to see who was driving. When he could read the license plate, he saw it had the same three first letters of the car he’d seen in Naches. He ran the plates on his computer and the registration showed the car was owned by a Chad Burke, age twenty-nine, with a last known address in North Bend, Washington.

  As they neared the unincorporated enclave of Rimrock Retreat, the Honda slowed, the left turn signal came on, and the car turned into the Trout Lodge café. McCain followed and pulled in right next to the car.

  McCain left the truck running for Jack and climbed out at the same time the driver of the Honda. The man was a couple inches shorter than McCain, and was, as the twelve-year-old kid in the hunter’s ed class would say, ripped.

  “It’s a hot one, huh?” McCain said to the guy.

  “Sure is,” the man said. “And the AC in this old Honda here is struggling.”

  The two men walked through the door into the lobby where there was a soda fountain and a small freezer with tubs of ice cream inside.

  “I was ready for something cool to drink,” McCain said.

  “They have the best ice cream cones here,” the guy said. “You should try one.”

  “You must live around here,” McCain said.

  “No. Well, I guess I do now,” the man said. “I came up from Colorado. I’ve been here for about ten months. I work for the river rafting company that runs trips down the Tieton River in September. Then I give ski lessons up at White Pass during the winter, and in the spring and summer I guide fly fishermen over on the Yakima River.”

  “Wow, each one of those is my dream job,” McCain said. “You ever fish the Naches?”

  “A couple times, but I’m so busy with clients on the Yakima, it’s hard to get to other streams.”

  “There’s some nice fish in the Naches, and people rarely fish it. I live close so I fish there quite a bit.”

  The gal at the counter finished scooping up two double-scoop ice cream cones and handed them to the men. The cowboy got a chocolate chip mint, and McCain went for a rocky road.

  “I’m probably going to regret this,” he said to Burke. “I’ll be wearing half of it before I’m done.”

  The cowboy paid for his cone, said “good talking to ya, see ya around,” and was heading for the door when McCain asked him, “Hey, didn’t I see you with a pretty, dark-haired
gal in Naches the other night?”

  The man stopped, turned around, gave McCain a quizzical look and said, “Yeah, wow, you’re pretty perceptive. I was on a date. Didn’t go too well either.” He smiled and walked out the door, jumped in his Honda and headed on up the highway.

  McCain grabbed about twenty napkins and sat down to eat his ice cream. As he licked away he thought about the little interaction he’d just had. Burke, the rafter/skier/fishing guide had been around when the three women had disappeared, and he was definitely strong enough to pack a dead body pretty much anywhere he wanted.

  Burke hadn’t lied to him when McCain had asked about being with a dark-haired woman, but according to Jim Kingsbury and Frank Dugdale, they’d seen the cowboy in the Honda with her at least one other time before. On the other hand, the cowboy hadn’t said it was a first date, or his only date with the woman.

  Something to ponder, McCain thought to himself. Then, with about one big dog bite left of his cone, he headed to the truck, opened the cab door, and gave the treat to Jack.

  Driving back down Highway 12, McCain slowed at the campground where the ruckus had been earlier and looked it over carefully. Everyone seemed to be getting along. He thought about the husband and wife who were dressed in the same green tank tops and wondered what that was all about. He’d seen it other times on occasion and could never quite understand the appeal of dressing in the same shirt or same windbreaker as the wife.

  He thought about his past relationships and wondered which one of his girlfriends would have been one of those women who wanted her man to wear matching sweatshirts. The only one he could think of was Andrea Parker.

  “We dodged a bullet there,” McCain said to his yellow dog and rubbed his ears. The dog licked his shirt where a glob of chocolate ice cream had landed.

  The next day was a day off for McCain, and when it finally cooled down he threw on some cut-off jeans and some old sneakers, grabbed his trout rod and box of spinners and headed for the river with Jack. He loved fishing the river this time of year. It didn’t get dark until 9:30, which gave him plenty of time in the coolness of the evening to wade from hole to hole looking for trout. Jack loved it too. The big yellow Lab was definitely a water dog, and if McCain didn’t watch him, Jack would be splashing around right in the hole he was trying to fish.

  Being on the river also gave him some solitude to think. The driver’s license photo proved that Chad Burke was indeed the man’s name, but McCain couldn’t be sure that he was the driver of the silver Honda he’d seen in the spring coming down into the Wenas. The turkey hunter had said the guy he saw driving by in the Honda had on a cowboy hat, but McCain didn’t remember seeing the driver in one. Burke kind of looked like the driver McCain remembered, but kind of didn’t either. He just didn’t know.

  He was thinking again about Burke’s coy answer to his question about being with a pretty woman with dark hair when a sixteen-inch rainbow trout nearly jerked his little ultra-light rod out of his hands. He forgot about everything for a few moments while he fought the fish.

  Chapter 14

  Two days later McCain was again patrolling up at White Pass. He had heard from reliable sources that the silvers were biting at Rimrock Lake, and he decided he should go up and make sure the anglers there were sticking to the regulations.

  Most of the anglers trolled from boats to catch the little landlocked sockeye salmon, but a few fished off the rocks on the south side of the lake with pencil bobbers and whitefish flies tipped with maggots or white shoepeg corn.

  Rimrock was a decent-sized lake, six miles long and a mile wide, but the little salmon were quite prolific there, which meant the thousands and thousands of fish competed for a limited food supply. Because there were too many fish and not enough food, the kokanee never got very big. A whopper at Rimrock was twelve-inches long, and most years the bigger fish were nine or ten inches in length.

  Based on the overpopulation situation most every year, the state allowed anglers at Rimrock to keep 16 kokanee—called silvers by the locals—a day. And they were allowed to chum for the fish. Chumming was used to attract the feeding fish, and a good chum recipe consisted of eggshells, bran, powdered milk, and some salmon egg nectar. Every few minutes, an angler, either from the bank, or an anchored boat, would send a couple heaping scoops of chum into the water. It worked surprisingly well.

  McCain took the Tieton Reservoir Road off Highway 12 at the east end of the lake and stayed on it as it followed the southern shoreline of the big reservoir. He saw several rigs parked up ahead in the gravel shoulder and wasn’t surprised to see Jim Kingsbury’s truck among the few other pickups and SUVs. He was guessing that Dugdale was with him down near the shoreline, fishing off the giant boulders that bordered the lake.

  McCain parked his truck and got out to watch the anglers for a bit. Most were paying no attention to him, but two men saw him coming and started getting a little fidgety. McCain was climbing down the rocks to get to the group of anglers when he saw Kingsbury set the hook and fight a small, silvery fish to the bank.

  When he turned around to put his fish in an ice chest, he saw McCain and said, “Cool it everyone, it’s the law!”

  “Looks like you’re going to be able to satisfy that hankerin’ for smoked silvers,” McCain said as he kept an eye on the two jittery guys a ways down the bank. Suddenly they seemed like they needed to be somewhere, anywhere else. McCain walked right on by Kingsbury who was trying to tell him about the fish he had caught and made it down the bank seventy-five yards to where the two men were hustling out of there.

  “Excuse me, guys,” McCain said to the two. “Can we chat for a second?”

  The two men stopped, and McCain caught up to them.

  “Can I see your driver’s licenses and fishing licenses? And before you start with some story about how your wife washed your fishing license with the laundry or you left it in your other pants, I can look on the computer in my truck and know within about thirty seconds if you purchased one or not. I’m feeling benevolent today, so don’t lie to me, and I’ll give you a warning.”

  Both guys couldn’t get their driver’s licenses out fast enough, apologizing immediately. McCain wrote their names down and told them he would share them with the other WDFW police officers in the area, and if they got caught again without a license their fine would be doubled.

  As McCain returned, Dugdale asked, “Are you going to ask me if I have my license?”

  “No, because I already checked on you and Jim,” McCain said. He looked over at Kingsbury who was wearing a white t-shirt with DON’T TASE ME BRO! written in bold black letters on the front. “So I found the guy in the silver Honda. Have you guys seen him or the gal with the black hair around town again?”

  “Yeah, I saw the guy once more,” Dugdale said. “I was going to call you, but you said not to. He was at the hardware store in Naches. I didn’t see what he was buying. I was in there to get some replacement pieces to one of my toilets and—”

  “He doesn’t care what you were buying,” Kingsbury interrupted. “And to answer your question, no, I haven’t seen him or that cute gal again. Too bad too, she was a looker. By the way, that was pretty nice of you to let those guys off with a warning.”

  “Yeah, well don’t tell anyone,” McCain said. “I might get a bad reputation.”

  About that time Dugdale set the hook on a fish and brought it quickly to shore. He took it off the hook and tossed it into the same cooler that Kingsbury was using.

  “We’re two short of our limits,” Dugdale said as he shoveled another heaping scoop of chum out of a five-gallon bucket and tossed it into the lake near where their bobbers were standing erect on the water’s surface.

  After a quick thanks and a goodbye, McCain was back to his truck to finish his tour around the lake. He checked a few other bank anglers and stopped and checked a couple guys at the boat ramp on the north side of the lake to see how they had done. They too had caught their limits.

  As h
e was driving back down the mountain toward Yakima he thought more about Chad Burke. McCain wondered what his shoe size was, and that reminded him he hadn’t heard from Sinclair on what she had found out from the photos of the boot print he took up at the bones. And he thought about the woman with the long black hair he had seen only so briefly on the sidewalk in Naches that night. He wondered where she was right now.

  The next morning, as McCain was getting ready for work and watching the morning news for the weather forecast, his phone started ringing. It was Sinclair.

  “We have the identity of the woman found on the trail,” she said. “Her name was Tandy Miller, and she was from Enumclaw. They ID’d her with dental records.”

  “Okay, that’s different,” McCain said. “She’s not from the valley.”

  “No, but she had long black hair and was dumped on our side of the Cascades,” Sinclair said. “Enumclaw is just over the hill, so definitely could be the same guy.”

  “Yeah,” McCain said. “But why not dump the body on the west side of the mountains, or at least on the Highway 410 side? Enumclaw is a lot closer to this side via Chinook Pass.”

  Sinclair went on to tell him that after they’d searched in Central Washington for missing women fitting the description of the two women found earlier, they expanded the search to statewide and Miller’s name had popped up.

  “Sure enough, the dentals matched,” Sinclair said.

  “I assume she was Caucasian?” McCain asked.

  Sinclair told him she was and said the best the local police could tell, the young lady had gone missing on Halloween. She worked at a coffee stand in Enumclaw and was supposed to be home at around 11:30 p.m., after her shift Halloween night. Her roommate didn’t think anything about Miller not coming home that night, because as the roommate said in the interview, ‘I’m not calling her a slut or anything, but she didn’t have a problem with hooking up with random guys now and again. Since it was Halloween, I just assumed she went and partied with some other friends and didn’t come home. I don’t keep track of her that much.’