Difficult Run

by John Dibble

  The next case concerned the disappearance in late June 1985 of a confirmed alcoholic from Vienna, Virginia who left his home to go late-night drinking on Difficult Run. His credit card records showed that he had stopped at a state-run liquor store earlier in the evening and purchased a fifth of vodka. His car was found in the Difficult Run parking lot the next day, but police did not find a trace of him there or on the trail, not even the vodka bottle. His body was never recovered and it was assumed that he had fallen in the stream, been swept into the river and drowned. M.J. decided it was probably a case of someone rock hopping while under the influence, but she printed the report anyway.

  The last case dealt with the disappearance of a resident of Falls Church, Virginia who went night fishing on Difficult Run in early May 1996. His fishing rod, tackle box and a flashlight were found on the trail, not far from where Doc was murdered. The body never surfaced and, due to the high water in the river, it was presumed to have been pinned to the bottom by the strong current. M.J. printed a copy of the report.

  Becky returned and said, “I talked to the head of records for the Fire and Rescue Department. It’s like I thought. Their computerized records only cover the same period as ours. She also said that their hard copy files before 1960 are kind of hit or miss because the volunteer departments kept their own records and didn’t always turn in copies to headquarters. Here, I’ll pull up their database and you can take a look.”

  M.J. entered the same dates. The database produced a list of several hundred reports for Great Falls Park. As before, many of them dealt with medical emergencies and there were multiple rescues of persons who had fallen in the river below the falls. There were twenty-seven reports for rescues on Difficult Run of people who had been swept away in the stream and no reports of suspicious accidents. Since all of the incidents on Difficult Run had occurred during daytime hours, M.J. disregarded them entirely.

  She thanked Becky again, picked up the copies of the reports from the Fairfax County Police files and drove back to the park. It was late in the afternoon when she arrived and Dodd was paging through one of the logs.

  “Ten left to go,” he said. “How’d you make out?”

  She told him about the three suspicious missing person reports she had found. “They fit the pattern,” she said. “Did you find anything?”

  “Well, no suspicious accidents or missing people, but I did find something that’s interesting,” he said. “In early April 1970 a call came into the office from a man. He and his wife had been out walking on Difficult Run the night before. They heard something moving through the woods north of the trail and when they looked they saw what they thought was a bear. Couldn’t shine their flashlight to get a better look because the batteries had gone dead, but there was a pretty bright moon shining through the trees.” Dodd paused. “Now here’s what got my attention: The man said that whatever it was turned and looked at them and when it did the face didn’t look like a bear at all, more like a gorilla. That’s when they decided to head back to their car.”

  “Could it have been a bear?” M.J. asked.

  “Well, we do get bears in the park sometimes, but not usually until later in the year,” Dodd replied. “I think what they saw was an ape.”

  “That incident just made me realize something,” M.J. said. “I’ve been trying to figure out what causes the attacks. I thought it might just be inherent aggressive behavior, but I think there’s another explanation. All of the victims had some sort of light with them—a flashlight, a lantern or, in the case of the boys, helmet lights. That makes sense because it was dark, but I think that’s what causes the ape to attack. I just remembered that Ollie Coppin talked about boys shining lights in the ape’s eyes and how it became enraged, bared its teeth and shook the cage. I’d be willing to bet that if that couple’s flashlight had worked, they’d have been attacked too.”

  “That makes sense,” Dodd said. “But I’ve been wondering about something else too. All of the victims except the boys and Doc wound up in the stream. Do you think this thing throws them in after it kills them?”

  “I’ve given that a lot of thought,” M.J. said. “I don’t think it throws them in. I think they’re trying to get away from it and their body falls in after they’re killed, just like what probably happened to Kevin Murphy in 1942. The reason we found the boys on the trail was because they were on bikes and the best route of escape seemed to be to ride away. In Doc’s case, I think Lola may have attacked first and Doc was trying to help her instead of running away himself.”

  She continued, “Put yourself in the position of the victims: You are walking or standing on Difficult Run at night. You hear something nearby and instinctively shine whatever kind of light you’re carrying in that direction. Then two things happen at the same time: The ape becomes enraged and you see what it is. You become frightened and look for a way to escape. The stream seems like the best way to go under the circumstances because staying on the trail guarantees that it will come after you, but maybe if you can get into the water, or, even better, to the far bank, it may not follow you. The problem is that when you turn to flee you expose your back to the ape and it pounces on you and breaks your neck.”

  “God,” Dodd said, “what a horrible way to die.”

  “It certainly is,” M.J. responded. “That’s why we’ve got to find these things and either capture or kill them. As I see it, there are only two more questions we need to answer: Why do these attacks all seem to have occurred at the same time of year and where do the apes live?”

  It was getting late in the day and M.J. offered to stay and help Dodd go through the remaining log books. “Thanks for offering,” Dodd said, “but it would probably take you longer to decipher all the entries. I can finish these off in about an hour because I know what I’m looking for.”

  “In that case,” she said, “I’m going to stop by my office and then head to my apartment. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  As M.J. was driving down the GW, her cell phone rang. It was Jake.

  “So, what’s going on with the murder cases?” he asked.

  “If you buy me some pizza and beer, I’ll fill you in,” M.J. replied.

  “Sure. Anything else?” he asked.

  “Anything else on the case or anything besides pizza and beer?” she asked with a laugh.

  “Well, I was hoping for something else after we eat.” he said.

  “We’ll see, but I’m really tired. I’ll meet you at the pizza place about seven thirty,” M.J. said.

  When she arrived, Jake had already secured a table and ordered two beers. M.J. gave him a kiss on the cheek, sat down and took a long drink of beer.

  “So what’s going on with the cases?” he asked.

  “I’m going to tell you, but I want you to promise you’ll keep it to yourself for now,” M.J. said. “I haven’t filed any more reports and I don’t plan to until I tie up some more loose ends.”

  “I promise,” he said. “Sounds pretty mysterious.”

  She began telling him about everything that had happened since the murders of Doc and Lola. Jake sat quietly, taking it all in. He ordered another round of beers after about thirty minutes.

  When M.J. had finished, Jake said, “Wow! If that’s who—or should I say what—committed these murders then it’s the longest running serial killing case in history.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I guess it would be,” she replied, smiling.

  “What can I do to help?” he asked.

  “Nothing right now,” she replied, “but when I pull the rest of the pieces together, I may need to get you involved. Mostly, I’m going to need you to back me up on this when I have to take it to Swain.”

  “Not a problem,” he said. “Let’s order some pizza.”

  After they ate and were walking back to their cars, Jake asked, “So, can I come over tonight?”

  M.J. thought for a moment, then said, “Sure. That would be nice. But don’t expect me to be grea
t company. It’s been a long couple of days. I’ll also warn you that I’ll be getting up really early.”

  “I think I can handle all of that,” Jake replied. “I’ll see you at your place.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  M.J. LEFT QUIETLY THE NEXT MORNING to keep from waking Jake, who was sleeping soundly. As she drove to Great Falls Park, she thought about the night before and was glad that she had spent it with him. They had made love and then cuddled while they slept, which had given her a sense of refuge from the events of the last few days. She realized that the idea of moving in with him no longer seemed so foreign.

  On her morning run she once again found herself scanning the forest, but this time the landscape seemed decidedly more foreboding. She imagined the figure of an ape, crouched and moving slowly and cautiously through the underbrush, stopping occasionally to listen for sounds of the humans that it sought to avoid. It occurred to her that even such a large animal could move through the forest unnoticed in broad daylight, although she remained convinced that the apes had long ago become night creatures to eliminate human contact altogether. She wondered how it would be possible to track such an animal, much less capture it. After all, Dr. Peterson had made three trips to the Congo without ever even seeing one. Would it be any easier for him or anyone else to find one now in the dense forest of Great Falls Park?

  She recalled Peterson saying that during his trips he had been shown droppings that supposedly came from the Bili Ape. Even assuming these traces could be found in the expanse of Great Falls Park, she knew they would not provide the type of proof she needed. First and foremost, there would be no way to prove that the droppings were actually those of an ape. She could just see herself marching into Swain’s office and tossing an evidence bag filled with excrement on his desk. Lieutenant, I’ve solved the case! This is a bag of ape shit! Just visualizing the scene made her start laughing. No, she would have to find a way to prove the existence of the apes that could not be questioned and right now she was not sure what that would be.

  She showered, changed and went to Dodd’s office. He was sitting at the conference room table with a chart spread out in front of him. He glanced up with an excited look on his face.

  “M.J., I think I may have figured something out,” he said. “The fact that all of the murders occurred in the spring was really bugging me, so I stayed late last night to research what else might have been going on when they occurred. I started with the date of the earliest incident that you found that would still be covered by our records—that would be April 16, 1972. When I looked at the entries around that date it showed that for that entire week the river was at flood stage, so high that it came all the way into the park. So I checked the entries around all of the other incidents and, sure enough, each time the river was at flood stage. Not always enough to flood the main park, but enough to fill up Mather Gorge to its rim. Then it dawned on me that Kevin Murphy was murdered in the spring of 1942, right after a huge flood here. We don’t have records going back that far, but 1942 is one of the marks on the post out by the overlook that I showed you—just below the one for the Great Flood of 1936.

  “Here, take a look at this,” he said, pointing to the chart on the table. “This is a graph of the daily river depth going back to 1966. The horizontal red line shows the depth that would be flood stage. I put a notation by the dates for each incident, including the couple that probably saw an ape in the forest. You can see that they all occurred when the river was way up.”

  M.J. bent over the chart and ran her finger down the red horizontal line. “What do you think it means?” she asked.

  “I think it means the apes live somewhere in the cliffs along Mather Gorge,” Dodd said. “When the river gets high enough, they have to leave their nest and move to some place that’s not flooded. I believe that place is Difficult Run. If you think about it, Difficult Run is a miniature version of the gorge—a stream, plenty of rocks and not a lot of human activity, especially at night.”

  “But where in Mather Gorge?” M.J. asked.

  “That I don’t know, but let’s take a little trip and see if we can figure it out,” he said, handing M.J. a pair of binoculars from a shelf and taking a pair for himself.

  They took Dodd’s SUV and drove to the C&O Canal National Historic Park located in Maryland, across the Potomac from Great Falls Park. They walked from the parking lot over the bridge to Bear Island, which formed the northeast boundary of Mather Gorge, then followed a rugged path called, appropriately, the Billy Goat Trail to about the midway point in the gorge. There was a ledge above the trail that was a good place to sit and view the rock walls on the other side of the river.

  M.J. looked through her binoculars and slowly surveyed the cliff on the Virginia side of the gorge. This section of the gorge was easily a mile long and contained hundreds of crevices and cave-like openings.

  “They could be living in any one of those openings,” she said.

  “Well, I think most likely they’re using one toward the southern end of the gorge to stay away from people. The rock climbers are mostly confined to that area,” he said, pointing upstream toward a higher section of the cliff.

  “Even so,” M.J. replied, “they could be anywhere over there.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right, but at least we can concentrate on just one area of the park,” Dodd said.

  Suddenly, M.J. blurted out, “We need a trail camera! Like the one that was used to take the picture of the ape I showed you.”

  “That just might work,” Dodd replied enthusiastically, “but I don’t think these things probably stick to a trail. Besides, we can’t put it anywhere that a hiker might see it and take it home as a souvenir.” He thought for a moment. “They probably forage back in the forest along the rim of the gorge. There’s a little meadow right over there,” he said, pointing at a spot downriver about a hundred yards. “It would be a good place for the camera. Nice open field of view and back far enough from the trail that hikers wouldn’t see it.”

  They went back to Dodd’s SUV and, instead of returning directly to the park, drove to a shopping mall just off the Capital Beltway that had a large sporting goods store. In the section devoted to hunting gear they found an area with an array of trail cameras.

  Dodd examined the specifications on several of the packages, then picked one up and said, “This is what we need. Motion activated, infrared flash, programmable. We’d better get some extra batteries and another memory card too.”

  They drove back to Great Falls Park and took the camera into Dodd’s office, being careful to close the door. Dodd took the camera out of its box, inserted the batteries, briefly looked at the instructions and began adjusting the settings. “There, that should do it,” he said after a few minutes. “It’s programmed to only take pictures between dusk and dawn. The range is only about forty feet, but anything that moves in that area will have its picture taken. Let’s take it out to the site.”

  He placed the camera in a small backpack and they walked down to the section of the River Trail that ran along Mather Gorge. At the southern end of the trail, they looked around to make sure there were no hikers, then left the trail and walked into the forest. As Dodd had said, there was a small meadow, perhaps one hundred feet wide and about fifty feet deep. The ground cover was wild grass about a foot high and a rock outcropping ran along the entire back of the open area.

  They strapped the camera around a tree on the side of the meadow closest to the gorge and aimed it toward the open area. Dodd pressed a small switch on its side and said, “It’s ready to go. We can come and get the memory card in the morning, replace it with the spare and see what we got.”

  The next morning, M.J. went to the park and, instead of running, hiked to the meadow and removed the memory card from the camera, replacing it with the spare. She went back to Dodd’s office and he loaded the card into the reader on his computer. There were six images, all of deer grazing in the meadow.

  The infrared flash
gave the scenes an eerie quality. Although the foreground was fairly vivid, animals beyond the forty-foot range of the flash appeared as shadowy images, except for the eyes of those looking in the direction of the camera, which appeared as bright dots.

  They repeated this routine on the following days. There were more images of deer, an occasional fox, and a mother raccoon being followed by her three babies. On the third day, there was an image of a pack of coyotes, causing Dodd to remark, “Well, I guess that confirms the sightings that have been reported.”

  That afternoon, M.J. stopped by the National Zoo on her way back to Anacostia Station. She parked, walked to the Great Ape House and entered the area that housed the gorillas. She had come, she decided, because she wanted a better sense of just what she was dealing with. After all, this was not a case where you could do a background check on the suspect, perhaps ponder a mug shot or interview some acquaintances.

  She went to the glassed-in area that housed the Western Lowland Gorillas. One was sitting on an artificial tree in the back of the enclosure, pondering the visitors lined up along the glass barrier. People were taking pictures with cameras and cell phones and M.J. wondered why the flashes didn’t produce the same angry reaction in the gorilla that she believed had caused the attacks on Difficult Run. Then she realized that the gorillas in the zoo had never lived in the wild and were, for all intents and purposes, domesticated—they had grown up having lights flashed in their faces.

  The gorilla left its perch and ambled down to the glass barrier. It stopped right in front of M.J. and looked directly into her eyes. She returned the gaze and in that moment realized that this was a thinking creature, perhaps closer to human than animal. This, she thought, is what the killer is like, and it caused her to feel a small shiver.