mentioned that her old well looked to be about seven feet deep. “How can you tell?” asked Annette. The abandoned well, she knew, had been filled with approximately one ton of rocks the size of babies’ heads and sealed with a five-hundred-pound cement lid.
Not anymore, said the friend.
Someone had slid open the lid and painstakingly excavated the rocks. “They were smart enough to not just pile them around the well or I would have noticed,” says Annette. Instead, he carried each one at least a hundred feet away. Annette searched around and found the missing rocks on a dead-end gravel road nearby. Emptied to exactly six and a half feet deep, the old-fashioned well made an ideal hidey-hole. The rock walls that show above ground were covered with moss, camouflaging it during the day. Anyone inside would be invisible to infrared cameras, and even if a searcher stumbled across the well, he might not think anyone could be down there with the huge concrete lid in place.
Climb inside, though, and you realize that because the well’s stones are smooth, even a six-foot-tall middle- aged writer can reach up and slide the heavy lid back into place. So it would be no problem at all for a six-foot-five athletic teenager.
Annette believes she once even heard Colton. “I was working in the garden and heard what sounded like a big metal bowl drop and bounce—
She didn’t call the police that time, though she did when she found that her well had been converted into a spider hole. “They were elated,” she says, “because they kept chasing him back here and couldn’t figure out how he was disappearing.” The deputies asked her not to tell anyone about the find, and they noted it as one place to carefully search whenever he ran toward Madrona Point.
The police, however, didn’t know exactly where to look for Colt in the woods at the other side of town on the twelfth. It would be two weeks before a resident spotted another of his campsites, this one tucked into the bushes at the edge of the airport near the dog park. Colt had been able to lie back and watch two of his favorite things: planes and pooches.
The cops did at least know that he was just yards away from two previous targets: the airport and all its hangars, and the Ditch with its boats. Somehow, though, Colton slipped past the deputies, went to Brandt’s Landing Marina on the Ditch, and climbed aboard a sporty twin-engine cabin cruiser worth about $75,000. The boat he chose belonged to Jason Linnes, manager of the Island Market, which had been burglarized just four days before. The keys, as with most of the island’s boats at the time, were aboard—hidden, but not too hard to find.
“I always left the keys in the boat, and in the car, and left my house unlocked,” says Linnes, whose family has been on Orcas since the late 1800s. “I was raised that way.”
Once inside, Colton relaxed and stretched out in the berth. Sometime before daylight on the thirteenth, he fired up the engines and pulled out of the slip—no mean feat as there’s very little wiggle room at that crowded end of the marina. He managed to drive out of the Ditch without dinging any of the nearby boats, then turned on the GPS and navigated directly to Point Roberts, a geopolitical oddity that hangs off the Canadian coast but remains part of the United States.
Jason could understand his family’s market getting hit—“That was just business”—but it seemed like too much of a coincidence that out of all the boats in the Ditch, his was the one Colton picked. “The boat was more personal than the store. And one happening after the other… that was creepy. I didn’t sleep for days, wondering, Does he know me? Is he after me? Is he really gone? I didn’t have shades on my house windows before but now I have ADT installing a security system. That sucks.”
According to Linnes, as Colton brought the boat to shore the lower units of both engines hit rocks, damaging their skegs. Later that day, the U.S. Coast Guard found the boat tied to a Point Roberts mooring buoy and they towed it back to Orcas, where a San Juan County deputy found bare footprints on the swim platform.
When residents woke to the news that another of their neighbor’s boats had been stolen and found abandoned on the mainland, everyone wondered the same thing: Is it over?
Chapter 9
We hoped so.
On an island with no industries other than real estate and tourism, the last thing you want are your adjectives changed from “serene” and “scenic” to “paranoid” and “crime-ridden.”
The precious image of a calm sea lapping the beach below a cozy-luxe cabin set amid tall firs tarnishes a bit if you have to add barbed wire and light it up like a prison camp. Public relations–wise, the only thing worse for Orcas Island than a serial criminal terrifying the blue hairs would be if our cuddly, iconic killer whales suddenly started crunching on kayaks to get at their soft, chewy insides.
The one bright spot was that word hadn’t really gotten out. The
A week after Jason Linnes’s boat was found at Point Roberts, I was certain it was all over. Whoever this guy was, he had a plan. You’d have to be defective to keep committing burglaries in the same tiny area—on an island no less—unless you were doing a hit and run. He must have reached his magic number, the dollar amount that would let him kick back on some Baja beach and tip Tecates for a year. Or suck Molsons in Canada. Whatever. It didn’t matter. He was somebody else’s problem now.
Those somebodies were, for a short while at least, the residents of Point Roberts. Point Bob is a footnote of international politics twenty miles north of Orcas Island as the crow flies—and if you don’t have a boat, that’s the best way to get there, because the other option is driving through two border crossings. This U.S. exclave illustrates what happens when uninformed bureaucrats attack. The United States and United Kingdom solved a nineteenth- century boundary dispute over the West Coast by agreeing to split the mainland territory along the 49th parallel. Problem was, nobody consulted an accurate chart. The 49 line cuts through a nub of land on what’s now called Boundary Bay, south of Vancouver. Instead of simply trading the five square miles for a wagonload of otter pelts and calling it even, the Americans decided to keep the land. It’s now a funky little outpost with 1,300 people, a marina, and a small tourist-based economy but very few other services. Point Roberts’s kids have to board buses and cross the frontier north into Canada, then loop around for a forty-minute drive to the crossing at Blaine, Washington, where they reenter the United States to get to school.
Life at Point Roberts may be full of inconveniences, but residents consider it worth the hassle for their beautiful location on the Salish Sea and, since their little community is protected by a border guard, for its security.
When Colton landed in Point Roberts, he dialed up the cell phone of his friend Josh, who he’d served time with in Green Hill School, a juvenile prison. Colt had planned a “Hey, look out the window!” kind of surprise for his buddy, but instead got a “Dude, I moved” downer. Josh had relocated to Vancouver. So Colton improvised.
Whatcom County sheriff’s deputies stationed in Point Roberts had one of their busiest days in memory when folks who owned vacation homes arrived the following weekend to discover they’d had a visitor. In the couple of days after Colton waded ashore, someone pried open the sliding glass door at one home, took a shower, and then wrapped himself in a blanket while he listened to the radio and enjoyed a can of Coke. Before he left with a stash of canned goods, he refolded the blanket and put it back on the bed. At another home, a burglar jimmied a deadbolted door, raided the fridge, and slept on the bed. At a third, someone tried to force open two deadbolts, gave up, and attempted to reach through the cat door with a barbecue fork to twist the latch, gave that up, and finally broke a window. Inside, he took a nap on the bed. A fourth Goldilocks-style break-in within the same short period qualified the rash as a plague—and potentially a spree. Then the burglaries stopped as suddenly as they had started.
Despite the threat posed by millions of hockey stick– and curling stone–wielding Canadians massed along our borders, the northern U.S. frontier remains loosely guarded. At Point Roberts, it’s a simple matter of
