by Rob Phillips
Through his binoculars McCain saw the black car pull up close to the front door of the double wide and saw the driver’s door open. He couldn’t tell exactly who got out, but he knew it wasn’t Sinclair. It was a man.
The guy went to the front door of the house, opened it and came back to the car. He opened the passenger door on the driver’s side, lifted a woman out of the car and carried her in.
McCain couldn’t tell who the woman was, nor could he tell if she was passed out or dead. She definitely wasn’t putting up a fight. Because it looked like Sinclair’s car, he had to assume it was her.
“We gotta get up there, Jack,” he said. The dog’s ears perked up at the sound of his name. A second later he was standing in his seat.
Before they headed toward the house, McCain called 911 and gave them his location. Then he grabbed his service pistol in his holster and attached it to his belt. He also put his Taser in his pocket, and then he and Jack jumped out of the truck. They worked quickly through the orchard, then up the hill to the house.
The killer placed her in the same chair where he had put the others. He zip-tied her ankles to the legs of the chair and secured her wrists behind her around the back of the chair.
When he looked at her he realized she was different. Yes, she was fit and pretty and had long black hair, but when he looked in her eyes he didn’t see the fear that he had seen in the other women’s eyes. All he saw in her eyes was rage. She was flat out mad, which scared him for a second.
He double checked the plastic ties and then he got in front of her. He explained to her that he really didn’t want to do all of this, but he had to punish her. He had to hurt her like she had hurt him. He asked her why she had left him with the horrible people. Why had she abandoned him with the people who beat him and treated him worse than their dogs? He asked her why she never returned to get him, to save him.
The more he talked to the woman the madder he got. The heat was rising within him again. His voice got louder and louder and soon he was screaming at her.
McCain could hear the man talking but he couldn’t see what was going on, so he slowly worked his way around the other side of the house, Jack moving quietly by his side.
He looked into one of the windows but could see nothing. The only light on in the house was in the front room, and McCain was on the other side of the house. He had to move around to get a better look.
He and Jack started moving slowly around, but McCain stopped when he heard the man’s voice getting louder. He still hadn’t heard Sinclair’s voice, so he still didn’t know if she was conscious or if she was gagged.
They continued moving around the house, stopping to listen when the man’s voice was raised, in obvious anger. Finally, McCain noticed a crack in the blinds and peeked through. He could see the back of the man who was again screaming in anger at Sinclair in the chair. He looked unarmed, but McCain knew he most likely had a gun nearby. The man, dressed all in black, stepped to the side just enough for McCain to get a good view of Sinclair. She was awake but gagged. Blood dripped from her head.
“Ah, shit,” he said under his breath. About then he could hear sirens in the distance. Come on, get here, he thought.
He looked again and saw the man turn as he heard the sirens wail. McCain could also see the anger in Sinclair’s eyes. She was tied to the chair, but he could see in her eyes she wasn’t afraid.
McCain drew his pistol as the man came toward the window.
“Give it up, Stratford!” McCain said. “I have cops on the way. Let’s end this. I’ve told them who you are, and they’ll be here shortly. Let Agent Sinclair go and end this now.”
McCain had backed away from the window, so he had no idea what was happening in there. But he knew if the deputy was getting a gun, Sinclair was in real danger. He decided to head for the door. If he could distract Stratford enough, he could possibly get in there to save her.
He thought he had heard sirens outside. But the voices in his head were drowning them out. He loved his mother but he had to punish her for what she did. He had to punish her and then rip her heart out, like she had done to him all those years ago. As hard as he tried, he would never understand how she could do that to him when he loved her so much.
The next voice he heard wasn’t in his head. It was a man’s voice and it said, “Give it up, Stratford.” He knew that voice. It was the damned game warden, McCain!
The cops were surely on the way, but he had played out this scenario in his head many times. He knew what he had to do. And he had to do it fast.
McCain, with Jack still by his side, stayed low and moved toward the front door. He could hear some rustling in the house but couldn’t tell what was going on. When he got to the front door, McCain reached up and tried turning the doorknob. It was locked.
He listened some more and heard movement, but it was farther away. McCain decided he couldn’t wait any longer. He stood up, stepped back, and with all the considerable strength he had in his 227-pound body, he kicked the door. To his surprise the door exploded open, pieces of the wood frame going everywhere. His momentum was carrying him forward, so he went with it and rolled onto the floor, coming up with his pistol ready for fire.
Sinclair was still there, zip-tied to the chair. She was moving her head in a motion that was telling him that Stratford was in the back. McCain stayed in a squatted position with his pistol pointed to the rear of the house and side-stepped slowly to Sinclair. He reached up and pulled the gag out of her mouth.
“He’s gone into one of those back rooms,” Sinclair whispered. Then she asked, “How did you know?”
McCain put his finger to his lips. He was listening to make sure that Stratford wasn’t coming back with a shotgun or something.
Then they both heard the motorcycle. It revved once, twice, and then it was on the move.
“Damn it,” McCain said. “He’s running.”
McCain took off toward the back of the house, Jack running right behind him. But they were too late. When he got to the back door and looked out toward the fading sound of the motorcycle, all he could see was a yellow headlight and a red taillight bouncing out through the sage brush, headed west.
Chapter 25
As soon as he saw Stratford getting away on the motorcycle McCain called 911, again. He told them Stratford was the killer, and that he was on the run on a motorcycle. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell the dispatcher what road the killer would end up on or what kind of a bike he was on.
McCain was cutting the restraints off Sinclair when the first sheriff’s deputy arrived. It was Williams.
“What in the hell is going on?” he asked.
McCain quickly told him what had happened, and Williams got on the radio and called out an APB on Stratford, riding a motorcycle, heading west toward Yakima.
McCain continued to look after Sinclair as another sheriff’s deputy and a state patrol officer joined them. A couple minutes later, an ambulance arrived.
“I don’t need an ambulance,” Sinclair said. “I need to get after that asshole.”
“You need to be checked out,” McCain said. “You said he hit you in the head hard, twice. You might have a concussion, or worse.”
“I’m fine,” she said. Jack had come over and was sitting at her side. She rubbed his ears.
“Stratford, who would have known?” Williams asked himself. “How did you know, McCain?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “Not for sure. I had an inkling, but really didn’t know. I played a hunch that if it was him, he’d bring a woman here tonight. Little did I know it would be Sara.”
“Boy, am I glad you did,” Sinclair said.
The medics with the ambulance checked Sinclair’s head, dressed a couple cuts, and told her she would probably have a headache for a couple of days, but other than that she was going to be fine.
“I’d like to shoot that son of a bitch,” Sinclair said, rubbing the back of her head lightly.
“What was he screaming at yo
u?” McCain asked. “He sounded really pissed.”
“I think he thought I was his mother,” she answered. “Sounds like he had a terrible childhood and was blaming his mother for everything. My guess is the women he killed resembled her. And I guess I do too. He said he loved her but he had to punish her.”
“Great,” said Williams. “Definitely a psycho. We better find him.”
The medics were getting their stuff together and were about to leave, but they told Sinclair she should take it easy and watch for signs of a possible concussion.
“You have someone at home who can keep an eye on you?” the medic asked.
“No, I live by myself,” she said. “But I really don’t want to go back to my house tonight.”
“You can crash with me and Jack if you want,” McCain said. “Jack can be a rude host though. Sometimes he’ll crawl right into bed with you.”
“I’d like nothing more,” Sinclair said, and gave the yellow dog a hug.
It was decided they would leave Sinclair’s car at the double wide. It was evidence in a crime, and the crime scene crew would need to come in and dust it for prints, even though they had two eyewitnesses who could identify Stratford as the man who abducted Sinclair.
Once the law enforcement officers had everything they needed from McCain and Sinclair, the two of them, along with Jack, walked slowly down the gravel road, through the orchard to where McCain’s truck was parked. As they walked, she asked McCain how he had figured it out. Again, he said he really didn’t know the Stratford was the guy. He told her about checking Burke, Stratford, and Teddy Johnson with the sheriff in Colorado to see if any of the men had lived in or near the place when the women there went missing.
“The sheriff in Colorado ran the driver’s licenses for the three men’s names,” McCain explained. “Burke was the only one living in Colorado, in a ski resort town less than an hour from where the women went missing.”
“So, Stratford didn’t live in Colorado during that time?” she asked.
“No,” McCain said. “But when I looked at the map of Colorado, I noticed the county where the women went missing was on the state line with Wyoming. I asked the sheriff to check Stratford’s name there, and sure enough, he had worked as a deputy for the sheriff’s office in Sweetwater County, Wyoming.”
“Hmmm,” Sinclair said. “What about the third man? Who is Teddy Johnson?”
“I thought it was a real longshot that he was the guy, but when I was checking on some bear poachers right after Jack and I found the Jimenez woman, he had a single wheel game cart in the back of his truck and there was fresh blood in the bed of the pickup.”
“You could have gotten a blood sample and had it checked against the woman,” she said.
“Not without a warrant,” McCain said. “And Johnson was about to shoot me as it was. We arrested him a couple days later for a list of things as long as your arm. He’s currently a guest of the county down at the jail, so I figured he wasn’t going to be kidnapping and killing any women tonight.”
“And he never lived in Colorado,” Sinclair said.
“Not that I could find,” McCain said. “The other thing I noticed about Stratford is how he acted around the dead bodies. He was at two of the recovery sites, and he acted like he could care less. He didn’t look at the remains, said he was squeamish, and when you showed up at the body of the Alverez woman, he made some smart remark about what you were going to find there. Like he already knew you’d find nothing.”
McCain also told her about running into the deputy at the mini-mart in Naches, after he’d stayed on the ridge and watched a rig go up to where he had found the Jimenez woman.
“And that whole deal with him getting lost when you were with him coming up to the site,” McCain said. “I believe that was all on purpose.”
“Well, we know who he is now,” she said as she climbed into the passenger seat of McCain’s truck. “We just have to find him.”
They drove to Sinclair’s house, so she could get a few items for an overnight stay with McCain. He went with her into the house and waited for her on the couch.
“Thanks for doing this,” she said when she returned with a small duffle. “I’d probably be fine here, but it will be good to have a little company.”
As they were leaving, just for the heck of it, McCain took a swing around a couple of the blocks near Sinclair’s house. There, parked on one of the side streets, was Stratford’s county sheriff’s SUV.
“I’ll call it in,” said Sinclair. “If that is the vehicle he used to haul any of the other women, there might be some DNA evidence in there.”
“You know,” McCain said. “If he used his sheriff’s rig to pull over the women in their cars, they’d have trusted him and followed orders if he asked them to get out. And anyone passing by would pay no attention to just another motorist getting stopped by the cops.”
Stratford was glad he had planned for a possible escape. How the hell had McCain figured out it was him? He knew he hadn’t been followed. Somehow, McCain knew. But how?
He’d purchased the Triumph Tiger 800 just for this purpose. The bike was a great off-road motorcycle but had the power to go as fast as needed on the highway. He had ridden the trail many times during daylight, and now he knew exactly where he was going, even by the small headlight.
The trail led to an irrigation canal, which had a dirt service road along it. When he hit the service road he took it to a paved road that fed into another paved road that ran along the Yakima River until it hit I-82 heading north and west.
He knew every police agency in the state would be looking for him, so his plan was to head for the mountains, ditch the bike and hike the Pacific Crest Trail south into Oregon. He’d hike it all the way to Mexico if he had to.
He rode for a couple miles on the freeway and jumped off on the second exit to Selah. That would get him on the road up into the Wenas, then into the Norse Peak Wilderness where he would eventually cut the top of the Cascades and the Pacific Crest Trail.
As he rode, he felt the cool evening air blowing against him and he felt free. He wondered how long that feeling would last.
Chapter 26
McCain had given Sinclair the option of sleeping in his room or in a guest room with a bed that was only slightly better than sleeping on the floor according to a couple of guests. She had opted for the guest room, and after sitting and talking with McCain until almost two o’clock in the morning, she went in and immediately fell asleep.
“How was it?” McCain asked when she wandered out into the kitchen a few hours later.
“Actually, it wasn’t bad,” Sinclair said. “I was so emotionally exhausted I could have slept out in your driveway.”
He poured her a cup of coffee, and she checked her phone. Evidently the whole world wanted to speak to her because she had thirty-one missed calls.
“Good thing you put it on silent,” McCain said. “So what’s the plan?”
“Well, I see about half of these calls are from my boss,” she said. “Maybe they caught Stratford and we can put this whole thing to bed. I’ll call him now and see what’s going on.”
After a lengthy conversation with her boss, Sinclair hung up and turned to McCain. She told him they didn’t have Stratford but thought they knew where he was heading. The FBI had received reports from people in Selah and out in the Wenas of a motorcycle rider racing through that country a short time after Stratford fled. Sinclair said the sheriff’s deputies had checked with all the motorcycle shops in the area and found out Stratford purchased a hot Triumph bike, built for both highway and off-road riding. They had the license number of the bike and were looking for it, and him.
“The only reason he would ride that way is if he was headed into the Cascades,” McCain said. “He seems to feel like he knows that country.”
“According to my boss, every available sheriff’s deputy in two counties is up that way searching for him,” she said.
“What about you?”
he asked. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, if I can get you to give me a lift home, I’m going to stand in a shower until the hot water runs out. Then I need to answer some of these other calls,” she said. “The office is bringing me a new car.”
“I hope it’s not as big and ugly as the last one,” McCain teased.
He drove Sinclair home and asked her if she needed anything else. She told him that she was good and then she said, “Let’s get together later.”
“That sounds good,” McCain said. “Call me when you can.”
McCain headed for home, as he had a few phone calls to take care of himself. Word had gotten around that he had figured out Stratford was the serial killer, and everyone from the Director of the Fish and Wildlife Department on down wanted to hear about it.
He was supposed to be on the clock, but McCain had called his boss and told him he’d be late. They had chatted about how the whole thing had unfolded the night before, and his boss decided he should just take the day off.
That is exactly what he was planning on doing, until he took a call from Deputy Williams.
“They found the motorcycle,” Williams said before McCain even had a chance to say hello. “It’s up at the end of Forest Service Road 1902 near Cougar Valley. He’s taken off on foot from there.”
“That’s some real wilderness up there,” McCain said.
“You know that country better than most of us,” Williams said. “Any chance you and Jack would want to come up and help us search for him?”
McCain told him he’d have to check with his bosses, but if they approved, he would be on his way.