by Rob Phillips
The road was dusty and hot and seemed desolate. No birds chirped. No chipmunks skittered across the road. It was weird, he thought.
McCain drove around a big bend in the road and finally he saw life. But it wasn’t the living things he was hoping to see. A flock of turkey vultures was circling a small canyon downhill from the road. They circled and circled, like a scene from an old western. Clearly, they were zeroing in on something dead. Yes, it could have been a deer or calf elk killed by a cougar. Or, he reasoned, it could be a human body, dumped down the hill in the trees by a serial killer in the dark of the new moon.
From his years of experience in the field, McCain knew turkey vultures were among the most proficient of all the scavengers. Sometimes the big birds would spot their meals from the air, but more often than not turkey vultures smelled the dead animals they ended up scavenging. McCain had read that the birds have an unbelievable sense of smell and can scent carrion from over a mile away. He decided to see what this group of vultures smelled.
McCain parked as close to the circling birds as he could. He loaded his pack with water, trail mix, flagging tape and a jacket, and headed for the vultures riding the currents in a big loop. He kept Jack close to him, as he didn’t want the dog chasing a rabbit through somebody’s fresh tracks or any other evidence if he happened to find a body. Around his neck with an elastic harness he wore his binoculars, and he stopped to look through them often, searching for colors that didn’t match the natural surroundings, or any unusual disturbances in the foliage or the ground ahead.
When McCain had walked roughly three-quarters of a mile he spotted a thin, indented line in the dirt about thirty yards ahead. At first, he thought someone had ridden a mountain bike through the rocks and shrubs and trees. But as he got a closer look, the tire track was too thin to be a mountain bike. Mountain bike tires are fat so that they can go over rough ground easier. This track was more like that made by a racing bike tire.
Would anyone ride a ten-speed out through this stuff, McCain wondered. He didn’t think so. Then it dawned on him. He’d seen those tracks during hunting season. Some hunters used game carts to haul out deer or elk quarters on the thin-tired carts so they didn’t have to carry the meat on their backs. He leaned closer and could see the tread pattern in places, meaning the tracks were relatively fresh. Old tracks would have been smudged by the wind and rain.
Keeping Jack at heel, McCain followed the tracks, carefully staying to one side so as not to disturb them. As he continued, he found a few partial footprints. Wherever he found them he tied a piece of the bright pink flagging tape to the nearest bush or tree. Sometimes the tire tracks would disappear on the hardest ground or over rock, but by staying on the same general course, McCain would eventually pick the track up again.
It took him almost a half hour to cover the next mile. When the track finally ended up at the body of Maria Jimenez, McCain was saddened, but not surprised.
Evidently the vultures had just found the body because they had done very little damage. The gaping cut in the chest, on the other hand, and the bruises around the woman’s throat revealed the fatal damage done by the killer. McCain had been right. The killer was taking the heart out of the bodies before he dumped them.
McCain wasn’t a terribly religious man, but he said a prayer for this poor woman, or girl, really. Just twenty-two. A tragedy for sure. With the flagging tape he carefully circled the body in a ten-foot arc. Then, as he had done at the body found by Jack, he took his sweaty t-shirt off, and draped it over a bush as close to the body as he could in hopes that his human scent would keep the scavengers away.
He put on his jacket, told Jack to heel, and started back toward the truck, careful not to disturb any tracks. At the truck, he saw his phone had no service, so he drove back up to Manastash Ridge and called Sinclair.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I’ve found the Jimenez girl’s body.”
“What? How?”
“I need you and the sheriff and whoever else up here as soon as possible. It’s definitely the missing girl, and it was definitely done by the same guy. I think I’ve got boot tracks.”
“Tell me where you are and how to get there, and someone will be there as quickly as possible.”
He figured the YSO deputies knew how to get there, but he gave her the coordinates from his GPS unit just in case.
“I just missed him, Sara,” he said quietly. “I know it was still too late for the girl, but I was that close. I watched him drive by last night. I should have followed the lights.”
It was the first time he’d called her by her first name. She knew he was hurting when he said it.
“You couldn’t have known, Luke. We’ll talk about it later. I’ll get there as quickly as I can.”
The first deputy to arrive was Paul Garcia. He’d been at the first site the night Jack had backtracked the bear, but McCain hadn’t remembered him being at the other bodies, at least not when he had been there.
“Thanks for coming so quickly,” McCain said as Garcia climbed out of his marked SUV.
“Yeah, no problem,” Garcia said. “The lady FBI agent was going to catch a ride with Williams, or maybe Stratford. She was worried her car wouldn’t make it up here. They should be here in ten.”
“Okay, we’ll wait,” McCain said.
Jack went over to Garcia who gave him a few pats on the side. “How in the hell did you find the body so quickly?” Garcia asked. “Did Jack find her?”
“No, Jack just kept me company. I spotted some turkey vultures and went in to see what they were working on. It’s a day off, and I thought what the heck, Jack needed some exercise and I wanted to do some elk scouting, so we headed up this way,” McCain said, with a little creative editing included.
“What are the odds?” Garcia asked, skeptically. “You’ve been around when every one of these bodies have been found.”
“Yeah, well, I do work up here in the mountains a lot,” McCain said. “So I seem to be around. And let me think about it. Oh yeah, that’s right, it is you guys who called me in on the other three.”
Deputy Williams arrived without Sinclair and expressed surprise that she and Stratford weren’t there already. “They were ahead of me,” he said. “They should have been here by now.”
All three men looked back down the road, like Sinclair and Stratford would just magically appear, coming their way. Garcia went to his rig and radioed Stratford, who replied a minute later, saying that they were on their way. He’d taken the wrong turn.
A few minutes later, Stratford’s SUV came bouncing up the road in a cloud of dust. Sinclair and Stratford exited the vehicle as Williams fixed Stratford with a stern look.
“How can you get lost?” Williams asked Stratford. “You’re up in this country all the time. Did you not hear the words Bald Mountain Road when the call came in?”
“Yeah, I did,” Stratford said. “But I got mixed up and turned up the Rock Creek Road.”
“It’s no big deal,” Sinclair said. “We’re here now. So, Officer McCain, can you lead us to the body, and as we go, tell us how you discovered it?”
McCain looked at her shoes and was pleasantly surprised to see that she wore hiking boots. He again shouldered his daypack and whistled for Jack who came and fell in line with the group.
“The coroner is on the way too,” Sinclair said. “One of the deputies can come back up and wait for them after he sees where the body is.”
After they had walked down the hill a good ways, McCain pointed out the thin tire track and a couple of the shoe prints he had marked. A little farther down the hill, he stopped and said, “See the pink circle of tape down there in the brush? That is where the body is.”
“Okay,” Sinclair said. “I don’t think we all need to be down there. And one of you deputies needs to go back to the rigs to meet the coroner. Another deputy can stay here. McCain, I’d like you to come along with me and, I assume, Deputy Williams?”
Williams
was the ranking deputy, so he said, “Stratford, you’re way younger and fitter than Deputy Garcia. Why don’t you hike back to the rigs, and Paul, you stay here per the agent’s request.”
“I’m fine with that,” Stratford said as he turned and headed back the other direction. “Those dead bodies give me the willies.”
Sinclair, Williams, McCain and Jack hiked down the last 500 yards to the body. When they arrived, McCain and Williams stood back and let the FBI agent do her thing. She carefully got in close to the body and examined it without touching it. And then she took out her camera and took about a hundred photos.
“Did you notice anything here, McCain?” she asked after looking at the body and surrounding area.
“Other than the gaping chest wound and the big space where the heart should be, I did notice bruising around her throat. And it looks like she was bound around the wrists. I couldn’t see the ankles. And she had a fairly large bruise forming on the left side of her face. It’s hard to see from here, but I looked from down below and I could see it.”
“Okay, I’ll check it out,” she said. “I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think she was sexually assaulted. She’s in the same clothes her sister said she was wearing the day she went missing. Would someone re-dress a body if there was a sexual component to this thing?”
“How do you know?” Williams said. “This guy obviously has some serious issues.”
They looked and chatted for a few more minutes and then heard some voices up the hill. It was the coroner’s crew talking to Garcia. They were packing a stretcher and some other equipment. It was going to get real crowded here in a couple minutes, so McCain took the opportunity to bow out. He told Sinclair that unless she needed him here, he was going to head back up to the truck.
“That’s fine,” she said and paused. “You know, you could do one more thing for me. If you don’t mind, can you try to follow the wheel track back up the hill? That would get us to where the killer parked. Maybe we can get a truck or car tire track there.”
McCain did just that. At first, he tried to follow the track that would have been made by the cart without the added weight of the woman, when the killer would have been pushing it back to a vehicle. Then he realized that was stupid. The deeper tire imprint was easier to follow, and it had to come from the vehicle too. So he followed it instead.
When he got to the road, sure enough McCain could see where a vehicle had pulled off into the grass. The problem was it was very rocky, so tire imprints were incredibly hard to see. McCain again pulled some pink flagging tape out of his pack and tied it to a bush nearby. He’d leave it to the experts to see if they could get an imprint of the tire. But from what he could see, they were going to have a tough time.
All this time, Jack had been the perfect dog, sitting quietly off to the side and dutifully following McCain wherever he went. As they were walking back to his truck, McCain turned and said to Jack, “Hey boy! You’ve been such a good dog, let’s go find a squirrel.”
Jack took off for the trees. As McCain followed, he noticed something small and white in the long grass. He reached down to pick it up. It was one of those wrappers that individually wrapped toothpicks came in. It was empty, but on the outside McCain could read the name of a restaurant. The paper was still white and clean, so McCain figured it hadn’t been there long. Then he looked back to his pink marking tape. He was quite a ways from where the vehicle had been parked. Too far, in his opinion, for something to have blown out of a rig. Especially last night. There was absolutely no wind when he and Jack were sitting on the ridge watching for cars.
He decided he would give it to Sinclair to see if she wanted to follow up on it.
McCain and Jack hiked around a bit more, and then went back to where the truck and the other official rigs were parked. They waited there for Sinclair to see if she had learned anything else.
When she arrived, she asked if she could catch a ride back to town with him.
“Sure,” he said. “Jump in.”
He told Jack to get in the backseat, gave a nod to the deputies standing at their cars, and they were on their way.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you finding the girl, and doing it on your own time.”
“No problem. I just had a hunch about the new moon thing and was lucky to pick the road the killer used.”
“I don’t know. Your hunches have seemed to be right on.”
“I’m still mad at myself for not checking out the lights that came in here last night. I might have caught the killer, or at least might have been able to identify his vehicle.”
“How could you know?” she asked. “You couldn’t.”
“I’m sure you are checking on this, but are there any women fitting the description of the dead women who have gone missing or found dead in any other states?”
“Yes, I sent out that request a couple days ago. I’ve heard from some, and they don’t have anything that might be related. I’m still waiting on a couple others.”
McCain reached into his shirt pocket. “Look at this. I found it not too far from the place where the killer parked his rig. Might be worth checking out.”
Sinclair took the little toothpick wrapper and looked it over. “Antonio’s? Do you know the place?”
“Yeah, it is a nice steakhouse on Yakima Avenue. Has a pretty nice bar too. It’s one of the popular night spots in town.”
“That shows you how much I get out. I’ve never been there.”
“I’ve been a couple times with some buddies, but as you know, doing the bar scene is not really my thing.”
“Well, if the killer frequents the place, we can at least check it out. But with no description of the guy, how do we even know who to ask about?”
“Unless you need to be someplace right away, we could swing by Antonio’s now. That way you can at least say you’ve seen the place.”
“Yeah, I’d be up for that. What about Jack?”
“We’re going right by my place. Let me drop him off and feed him, and we’ll be on our way.”
“Sounds good. I’d like to see where the famous Luke McCain lives.”
“Believe me, it’s not terribly exciting. But Jack and I get along just fine there.”
“Not to get too personal, but how does a good-looking guy with a good job and an average sense of humor not have a significant other?”
“Agent Sinclair, how would I . . . wait, you are asking about me, aren’t you?” he said with a smile.
She just stared at him.
“I know this sounds corny, but I just haven’t met the right girl, I guess. I lived with a woman when I was working on the west side of the state, but she had some issues that didn’t become evident until she was firmly entrenched in my house. And I’ve dated a few ladies over the past few years, but nothing has really hit the ‘this is her’ button.”
He looked at her, and she was looking back with a goofy grin on her face.
“What about you?” McCain asked. “How come an above-average looking lady with some smarts and, how’d you put it, an average sense of humor, isn’t married?”
“I got very close once. But the shithead decided it would be fun to have a little weekend fling with his ex-girlfriend. I’m an FBI agent, don’t you think I might find this out? On a whim, I did a little checking right before our wedding day and learned of his unfaithfulness. How’s the old saying go? Once burned, twice shy. Or is it once bitten, twice shy? Doesn’t matter, you get the point.”
“Understandable. Well, let me be honest with you. I think you’re very attractive, and once we get beyond this whole serial killer thing, I’d like to get to know you better. That is if you’d be interested.”
“Funny, I’ve been having the same thoughts. But let’s do get this asshole caught before we travel down the getting-to-know-you-better road.”
They talked a bit more about the girl, the turkey vultures, the game cart, and the human tracks.
“You think the boot tracks
will match the partial track that I found up with the bones of the Miller woman?” McCain asked.
“I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The crime scene people will definitely check it.”
A few minutes later they were pulling into his place. McCain climbed out of the truck and let Jack out the back door.
“Come on in,” he said to Sinclair. “I think all my dirty shorts and socks have been kicked under the bed. It will only take me a few minutes to feed Jack, and then we can be on our way.”
“You might want to wash your face and put on a clean shirt,” Sinclair said. “You look like you’ve been wrestling with a cougar.”
“Will do. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you,” he said and laughed.
McCain fed Jack, who wolfed his kibble down like it was the best tasting food he’d ever eaten. Then he freshened up, put on a pair of clean Wranglers and a Polo shirt, combed his dark brown hair and declared himself ready.
When they got to Antonio’s, the place was jumping. The music coming over the sound system was fairly loud, and the crowd noises made it even more difficult to hear.
“You want to grab a table?” McCain asked. “I can get you a drink.”
“You know what, let me look around for a bit, just to get a good idea what this place is, and who the clientele is, and then let’s go someplace else.”
“You got it.”
When they got back to McCain’s truck, he said, “I have a nice spring salmon fillet in my refrigerator. I was going to barbecue it tonight. I’d be happy to share it with you. It would definitely be nice to have some company. That is if you can stand a yellow Lab watching you eat.”
She laughed and said, “I’d love it. Run me to my car at the sheriff’s office, and I’ll follow you home.”
McCain grilled the salmon on the barbecue, threw a quick salad together, warmed some garlic French bread in the oven, and they ate on the patio. He made Jack lay down while they ate, so neither of them had to put up with hungry brown eyes staring at them.