was pulled out of the mud and towed into a hangar belonging to Chuck Stewart (not his real name), the wealthy former CEO of a sportswear company.
Kyle wasn’t really surprised to hear about the plane. It meant that Colt had finally got him. “He was mad that I’d beat him the previous year, that I’d kept him from breaking in by staying here every night for two months while he hit all those other businesses in town.”
Sleeping on the floor with a .44 Magnum strapped to his leg hadn’t played well with the mild-mannered organic grocer. “The stress caused a huge spike in my blood pressure, so I had to start taking my Chinese herbs. I couldn’t keep staying here forever, though. It was exhausting. I needed to be at home in my own bed. So I basically spent all my year’s profits on this security system.” Kyle upgraded to a top-shelf sixteen-channel, high-resolution night-vision “really bad-ass system” that he could monitor from home on the Internet and communicate with via his iPhone. “It gave me a false sense of security… I mean this is a health food store; how many levels of surveillance do I need?”
A total of $1,200 was gone from the tills. The key to the upstairs office had been in the cash drawer, but it wasn’t used. Instead, the office door had been busted open. The business’s main computer was destroyed. “He thought the central server was the security backup, so he broke it open and jumped up and down on it, shattering the cards.” The actual surveillance system was in a self-contained unit. Colt had tilted all the cameras down and unhooked them from the system, then realized the monitor also housed the memory. “He cracked it open to reach in and see if there was a hard drive. He would have gotten it if he took out the twenty-four screws, but there wasn’t a Phillips-head around. So instead, he put it in the sink and turned on the water.”
Downstairs in the store, working by the light from the beer and wine displays fronting the walk-in cooler, Colt raised all the covers over the vegetables bins and slid open all the deli cases. “He left them open and we had to throw out all the food,” says Kyle. He didn’t touch any of the beer or wine, but Kyle was sure he took some organic produce. He also went into the walk-in and took an entire two-by-three-foot baker’s tray loaded with raw meat- and-cheese croissants that were proofing. “No way you could think they were ready to eat,” says Kyle.
Colt also lifted a big hunk of dessert, an entire organic cheesecake. This one was blueberry, not strawberry like on his shopping list collage, but close enough.
AS SOON AS I turned on my phone that morning, it rang with news of the stolen plane. Already, though, the Homegrown story had twisted into “the police dusted the floor and found footprints.” I got to Kyle’s expecting evidence of human footprints and instead had to laugh when I saw all the big “goofy foots” drawn on the floor. They even kind of fit in with the hippie vibe.
The first thing that struck me about the footprints was that there were a lot of them—thirty-nine, so many that they almost created a paisley pattern on the floor. Nothing about Colt said “Hitchcock fan,” so I assumed it wasn’t an homage to
The “C-Ya!” he tagged onto the end was in jaunty bold letters. Knowing the extent Kyle had gone to keep Colt out of his store, it was easily seen as a “Na na, you can’t stop me, I’m smarter than you!”—the same kind of tweak as restealing a bike out of a police station, or breaking a dog out of a pound, or returning again and again to take food from a home that kept upping its security measures. For a gamer, it was a great challenge.
When I went to the airport and saw the spot where the Cirrus ended up in the grass, something else occurred to me. The plane apparently landed at the north end of the runway and stopped quickly. That’s the quiet end of the airport bordered by the Ditch, a field and woods, so it made sense to land there just to make sure no one saw you run off. But it also made perfect sense if your real plan was to land, run to town for a quick snack and to leave your mark a la Zorro, and then take off again. That would be an all-time “You can’t catch me!” Secret-Agent Double-0 Smart-Ass, level 30 game move. It would take two daring night flights and two landings, the ultimate in- your-face to all those who’d been joking online that Colt must not have read the second half of the flight manual.
He’d told Pam to get ready for the paparazzi…
Two guests at Smuggler’s Villa reported hearing a plane revving its engine again and again at 4 a.m. that morning—as if the pilot was trying to get it unstuck. The timing fit.
One last detail that struck me about Homegrown is that the footprints were drawn with chalk from the menu board. Was the tag a spur-of-the moment decision—he saw the chalk and a bell went off? Or did he already know Homegrown so well that he knew the chalk would be there?
A local Eastsound woman later told me she’d seen someone suspicious in Homegrown the previous fall. “He caught my eye because he was extremely tall, barefoot at a time of year when even the barefoot folks around here are wearing shoes, and because he had this shit-eating grin on his face.” When Colt’s photo ran in the paper, she recognized his face even though there’d been something slightly different in his appearance. “When I saw him, he had on a dreadlock wig.”
Pam told me that Colt said he’d been going out in public in disguises, telling her, “You wouldn’t even know me, Mom.” He never said, though, whether one of his characters was Rasta Harris-Moore.
THE ONE UNASSAILABLY DISTURBING fact was that Colt was now embracing the Barefoot Bandit persona. He was actively courting the media. No, he wasn’t its creation, but he was digging the attention. Later, we learned that Colt had already been on the island in January, hiding inside Chuck Stewart’s hangar. To take the chill off a cold winter’s night, Colt squeezed his six-foot-five frame inside a Mini Cooper stored in the hangar and turned on the seat warmers. He stole a notebook and flashlight out of the glove compartment, and in a detail the cops—all amateur psychologists—love, he broke off one of the side mirrors to look at himself and feed what they believed was his narcissistic personality disorder.
What the visit to Stewart’s hangar meant was that Colt had been able to move on and off Orcas without being noticed, without having to steal a boat or a plane. The Anacortes plane was a prank done solely for the thrill and the headlines. That kind of behavior tacked on to the guns and the cop teasing meant that the danger to both Colt and everyone else had cranked up immeasurably.
THE FEBRUARY SUN SANK behind the islands at 5:30 p.m. Back home, after an uncomfortable talk with Sandi about being more vigilant, taking the keys out of her car, locking down the house, and using the new safe, the woods around our cabin once again seemed darker.
Where was he? If he had planned a hit and run, he was probably still looking for a quick way off the island. Flying was out, as the wind picked up wildly after dark. And surely the police now had eyes on the marinas. Or not.
At eight, I drove to Deer Harbor Marina to look for Colt or for people looking for Colt, and didn’t see either. By nine, I was in Eastsound and went to the airport and the Ditch and drove up and down the streets. Everything looked deserted. I drove down Orcas’s own Haven Road and parked by the Odd Fellows Hall, about 150 yards away from the huge NO TRESPASSING sign that marked the ancient Indian burial ground at Madrona Point.
Walking down the road, I expected a cop or FBI agent to jump out at any moment. This spot seemed a no- brainer for a stakeout, so I hunched my six-foot frame even shorter so no one could mistake me for the Bandit. Once I passed the warning sign and lost the glow of Eastsound, though, size didn’t matter. It was a black, moonless night and no one could see a thing. I kept to the path only by altering course whenever I tripped over a rock or bush. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the point where I could see a faint radiance of water and sky through the crowd of black, skeletal silhouettes of madrona trees to the west. About fifteen minutes in, I stopped and sat on a log. I couldn’t see or smell any campfires. The only option seemed to be to sit and listen. However, by this point the wind was gusting over 30 mph, hissing loudly through the trees. A regiment of infantry could have marched by without my hearing them. If Colt was heading in or out, though, he’d have to use this trail. Then I wondered what the hell I’d do if he did.
