The Cascade Killer (Luke McCain Mysteries Book 1)

by Rob Phillips

  Sinclair looked at McCain and then at Jack and said, “I’ll get you for that later.”

  McCain just smiled as he scratched Jack’s ears and said softly, “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to retired Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife police officer Gene Beireis for his insight and guidance in helping to make sure my law enforcement characters were at least somewhat realistic.

  Thanks to Jon Gosch for his patience during what must have been a frustrating editing process. I was only an English minor at Washington State University, so I needed a great deal of help.

  And, thanks to all my friends who read along as I composed, giving me the belief that my story was actually good enough to be a book. You know who you are.

  A Preview

  of the next Luke McCain novel,

  CASCADE VENGEANCE

  In this new mystery, McCain and his yellow Lab, Jack, are asked to help locate a lost hunter. What they discover is dead bodies at an illegal marijuana grow deep in the backcountry. Assisted by FBI agent Sara Sinclair, McCain and Jack investigate what looks to be a vigilante killer taking out workers in the illegal drug trade.

  §

  Prologue

  The first sliver of light was just visible in the east when Shane Wallace parked his Ford Explorer in a pull-off high up on Manastash Ridge. He waited for it to get a bit lighter and then shouldered his pack, marked the spot on his GPS, grabbed his rifle, and headed out for the day.

  His plan was to walk up to the top of the ridgeline, and then work down it toward a drainage he had circled on the map. There were a few clear-cuts in the area, and with water nearby, he hoped the area would hold a few deer. During the first couple hours he saw a few deer, but besides a small forked-horn buck, which wasn’t legal to shoot, all he had seen were does and fawns.

  He was sitting up against a tree eating a snack mid-morning when he spotted a bigger buck move through a saddle about four hundred yards away. He quickly found the deer in his binoculars and saw that it was definitely legal. The buck had three points on one side of his antlers, and four points on the other. Shane’s heartbeat jumped, and the adrenaline started to flow.

  He knew the deer was too far to shoot at with his primitive black-powder rifle, but being new to the sport he wasn’t too sure what to do next. He decided to just sit and watch the deer to see where it headed. The buck slowly worked its way through the saddle, feeding on leaves as it moved along. After a few minutes, it disappeared over the hill.

  Wallace made his move. He walked as quickly as he could, trying to make as little noise as possible. As he approached the spot in the saddle where he’d last seen the deer he slowed his pace and searched for the buck. When he finally spotted the deer, he was amazed that it was still at least three hundred yards ahead of him. The animal wasn’t running and showed no indication it knew Wallace was stalking him. But the buck was covering some ground.

  Wallace watched the deer for a couple minutes until it disappeared into a dark green patch of vegetation. As soon as the deer was out of sight, he headed that way. When he got to the edge of the dark green foliage, Wallace stopped and looked at the plants a bit closer. He wasn’t a pot smoker, but he knew marijuana when he saw it. What the heck was all this pot doing up here, he wondered to himself. It didn’t take him long to figure out the plants were being grown illegally, and based on what he could see, the pot field was a substantial one.

  He had just taken his GPS unit out to mark the spot so he could report it when he was hit with a burning hot punch in the chest. A split-second later he heard the crack of a rifle, and he realized he had been shot. He was trying to understand why this was happening as he sunk to the ground, blood pouring from his body.

  Chapter 1

  Autumn in Central Washington was Luke McCain’s favorite time of the year. As an avid hunter, it meant there would be some hunts to enjoy in the weeks and months ahead. And as a Washington State Fish and Wildlife police officer, he would be very busy at work. He liked to be busy.

  At a little under six-foot five inches tall and a very athletic 224 pounds, McCain was in excellent shape for 38-years-old. He loved being in mountains. A veteran wildlife police officer, McCain worked out of the WDFW Region 3 office in Yakima, which was mainly responsible for the central part of the state. The area he patrolled was huge, with much of it encompassing hundreds of thousands of acres of National Forest Service and state-owned lands.

  McCain spent some time in the office filling out reports and going to meetings, but usually he was in the field checking on hunters and anglers. On occasion he and the other wildlife officers, still called wardens by many, would be asked to assist other police agencies in investigations and disturbances.

  McCain frequently had his big yellow Lab, Jack, with him when he was working in the field. The dog loved to ride along with McCain, and Jack had, on more than one occasion, assisted in the search and location of injured animals.

  The year prior, Jack had helped find the body of a woman who had been partially eaten by a bear. Then he helped track down the woman’s killer, who had also murdered several other women before dumping their bodies along the eastern slopes of the Cascades.

  It was the last Monday in September, a day off for McCain, so he was planning on taking Jack up into the mountains to hunt for blue grouse. He had worked all weekend, checking on deer hunters in the mountains and anglers fishing for salmon on the Columbia River. He was ready to go do some hiking and hunting.

  McCain and Jack were just climbing into his Tundra when his phone rang.

  “Yeah, this is McCain,” he answered.

  “Hi Luke,” a woman replied. “This is Deputy Hernandez with the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office. I assisted you last year on a call to run down a poacher who had escaped from the Yakima County Jail.”

  “Sure, deputy. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Listen, we’ve been called out on a lost hunter. We’ve located his vehicle, but we haven’t been able to find him. We’re hoping you and your dog might lend us some assistance.”

  “I’m off duty today, but if you can clear it with my boss, I’d be happy to help.”

  “I’ll have the sheriff make the call now. He’s pretty persuasive. Any chance you can head our way?”

  “I’ll grab my gear and start your way now. Text me the coordinates.”

  The deputy said she would and thanked him.

  “No grouse hunting for us today,” McCain said to the yellow dog.

  Jack turned and followed McCain back into the house.

  “We’re not going hunting after all,” McCain yelled into the kitchen. “There’s a lost hunter up in Kittitas County and they want my assistance. Well, not so much my assistance. They want Jack.”

  “Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” came the voice of his girlfriend. “He’s the star in my book, and he’s a whole lot cuter too.”

  Sara Sinclair and McCain had been dating ever since he and Jack had saved her from a mass murderer who came to be known as the Cascade Killer. There was an almost immediate attraction between the two before Sinclair was abducted, but after McCain and Jack had rescued her and then caught the killer, a real love had grown. She had moved in with McCain a couple months later.

  “What’s up?” Sinclair asked. She was tall and slim, with the body of a person who worked out regularly, because that’s exactly what she did. Her straight black hair fell to her shoulders, and her dark brown eyes were flecked with the tiniest of orange spots. She was the FBI agent in Yakima and was always more than interested in the daily activities of her fish and wildlife police officer boyfriend.

  “Not sure,” he said as he grabbed his service utility belt and vest. “They found the hunter’s rig but can’t seem to locate him. That’s all the deputy told me.”

  “Well, if anyone can find him, Jack can,” she said as she rubbed his ears.

  Sinclair had been eating a bagel with cream cheese before
heading to her office in downtown Yakima, and Jack was sniffing around for any crumbs that may have hit the floor. He paused in his search for a speck of food to allow Sinclair to pet him, and then looked up at her to see if his big brown-eyed puppy dog stare would entice her to give him a bite.

  As usual, it did.

  “Come on, you chow hound,” McCain said to Jack. “It’s time for you to go earn your keep.”

  McCain kissed Sinclair goodbye, and then he and Jack loaded up in his state-issued Ford F-150 pickup, driving toward Ellensburg. He had put the coordinates from Hernandez into the GPS map app on his phone and, while he didn’t really need the directions, the app told him the quickest way to reach the hunter’s truck.

  During the drive up to the ridge, McCain took another call from Hernandez.

  “Your boss cleared you to come assist,” the deputy said. “We’ll meet you at the missing hunter’s rig?”

  “How’d you find out the guy . . . I’m assuming it is a guy . . . was missing?”

  “His name is Shane Wallace. His wife called it in late Saturday night when he didn’t come home. He’s muzzle-loader hunting for deer, and he is hunting alone. She said he was new to hunting and was very worried he’d gotten lost.”

  “When did you find the rig?”

  “Not until late yesterday. Some hunters noticed it had been sitting there for two days and called it in. The plates matched. We called in our search and rescue team. They searched through the night but have had no luck in locating Mr. Wallace.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there in less than an hour.”

  McCain clicked off and then, as he had promised, called Sinclair and gave her the details.

  “Hopefully Jack and I can find this guy and be home by dinner.”

  “I hope so too. Good luck and be safe.”

  McCain had been involved in a few other lost hunter searches. Elk hunters in Yakima County often got lost in the rugged terrain of the Cascades. Most of the hunters were found alive within a day or two, but on a rare occasion a hunter would be found dead. A couple had died of heart attacks or from other medical problems, but one, McCain remembered, had succumbed to the elements.

  In general, hunters don’t plan on getting lost, so they rarely carry enough supplies to survive a few nights in the wilderness. Especially during elk season when the weather can be very unpredictable and is often well below freezing at night, being prepared with the right items can mean the difference between life and death.

  But this was a little different. The late September temperatures had been typical of Central Washington. Daytime highs in the mountains had reached the upper 60s, with nighttime temps dropping to near freezing. And it was dry. Even if Wallace was unprepared to spend a couple nights in the woods, the elements were such that a person should have no problem surviving for a while, even without food.

  McCain wondered if Wallace had wounded a deer and had followed it around the mountain and gotten so turned around he didn’t know which way to go. That happens sometimes. Or, he could have been injured in a fall. Still, he thought, if Wallace was somewhere in the vicinity, he should be able to hear the search and rescue people who would be whistling and making plenty of noise as they looked for him.

  When they got close to the coordinates Deputy Hernandez had given him, McCain could see four rigs parked near a pull-out. There were two Kittitas County sheriff’s units, a dark grey Chevy three-quarter ton pickup and a gold Ford Explorer.

  McCain recognized Hernandez right away. The deputy was short and stocky, and as McCain remembered from their meeting the year before at a bear poacher’s cabin in Cle Elum, she was tough, smart and capable.

  He pulled up behind the other rigs, and McCain and Jack jumped out.

  “Hey Luke,” Hernandez said. “Thanks for coming. This is Deputy Ryan Barnes, and this gentleman is Vern Kennedy. He’s the head of the Kittitas Search and Rescue group.”

  McCain shook hands with the two men and asked Kennedy, “Your people are still out looking, I assume?”

  “Yes,” Kennedy said. “But we’ve found no sign at all of Mr. Wallace. Of course, we have no way of knowing which way he went. We’ve been searching in ever increasing circles around his rig here.”

  “We got the spare key to Wallace’s rig from his wife, and have looked around in it, but there’s not much in there that might tell us which way he went,” Barnes explained.

  “Any clothing items?” McCain asked.

  “Yeah, there’s a hooded sweatshirt in there.”

  “Okay, I’ll grab that and let Jack give it a good smell. I’ll get my gear, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  Jack was not a professionally trained tracking dog, but he had an incredible nose, and somehow he knew what or who he needed to follow when McCain asked him to do so. The serial killer was the first person Jack had tracked, but he wasn’t the only person he’d located.

  Earlier in the summer McCain and Jack had been called in to help find a three-year-old boy who had disappeared from his family’s campsite up near Lost Lake. McCain let Jack smell some of the little guys’ clothes and after he found a couple tracks leading away from the campsite, he let Jack go.

  As it turned out the boy was only about five hundred yards from the camp where Jack found him safe and sound. Evidently the youngster had crawled into the end of a big hollow log, and had fallen asleep. Jack found him in about fifteen minutes, much to the joy of the boy’s very frightened parents.

  The search for Shane Wallace, McCain knew, was not going to be quite so easy.…