“Okay, Teddy,” she said as she held out a card. “If you do hear from your father, you’d be doing him a favor by calling our office. You, your brother, and your friend don’t need a harboring-a-fugitive conviction on your records.”
Johnson reached around the slightly opened screen door, took the card, smiled a goofy smile, and closed the wooden door on Hernandez.
McCain was still waiting in some tall brush behind the house when he saw a window in the back corner of the cabin slide open and a man’s leg appear. The body attached to the leg was that of the newly escaped LeRoy Johnson Sr. He dropped to the ground and briskly strode toward McCain.
“Hello, LeRoy,” McCain said as Johnson walked past him.
LeRoy all but jumped out of his skin before collecting himself and spinning around with a wild roundhouse swing at McCain. He missed and took off running.
McCain hated running down a suspect. He was fit and a good runner, but he always felt encumbered in his ballistic vest and hated how everything in his utility belt flapped around. Johnson only made it about fifteen yards before he was hit from behind by McCain who didn’t hold back after the attempted roundhouse. Both men went down in a cloud of dust. With the aid of McCain’s forearm, Johnson’s face was ground into the dirt and pine needles. He made a sound like someone was letting the air out of a rubber raft.
Johnson continued to grunt and groan and then said, “Well, damn it to hell.”
McCain got up, helped Johnson to his feet, and placed handcuffs on his wrists. It was then he realized that Jack was standing in front of the man growling with bared teeth. As McCain replayed the event in his mind, he remembered seeing Jack running next to him during the sprint to tackle Johnson.
“Good boy,” McCain said to the growling dog.
“You wouldn’t let that yellar dog bite me, wouldja?” Johnson asked.
“If you make another run for it, you can count on it,” McCain said.
Hernandez, hearing the ruckus at the rear of the cabin, had come around quickly to see what was going on. She had her service pistol drawn but put it away when she saw McCain with Johnson in cuffs.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, we’re good,” McCain said. “What’s the story with the rest of the Johnsons?”
He sat the senior Johnson down on a stump and told Jack to sit a few feet from the man. Then he walked over to the deputy so they could talk in private.
“They claimed to not have seen or heard from Mr. Johnson,” she said. “Maybe I should go back and have a little chat with them.”
“Good idea, but if you guys can spare another deputy, you might want to call in a back-up.”
McCain was still not too sure that the younger Johnsons, or their friend with the prison record, were above a little violence, especially if it were three on one.
“I want to get Johnson Senior back to Yakima,” he said as he walked back toward LeRoy who was giving Jack an evil stare.
McCain had left his shotgun leaned up against the pine tree when he played linebacker on Johnson, so he grabbed it, got Johnson by the arm, and headed to the truck. Hernandez followed along and radioed for assistance.
On his way back to Yakima, McCain dialed up Deputy Williams.
“Got him,” McCain said when Williams answered. “We’ll be back at the county lock-up in forty-five. Let Dyson know, and you might mention to him that maybe they should bolt those tables down in the jail. It might save some future headaches.”
“They had maintenance crews doing just that this afternoon when I was there,” Williams said. “I think we’ve got all but a couple of the inmates rounded up. The county is offering a thousand-dollar reward for information on the two guys still out there. Someone will drop a dime on them, and we’ll have them soon.”
Chapter 9
The county coroner released the identity of the second woman twelve days after her body had been discovered in the Cascades by the shed hunters. She was identified by dental records as a twenty-six-year-old Mexican national who had been working in one of the fruit warehouses in Yakima. Her name was Sonya Alverez. She had been reported missing on March 11th by her boyfriend. He said she had gone to work at the warehouse and apparently just disappeared.
As McCain had suspected, the young woman hadn’t been a hiker, and her disappearance had been a total mystery to her boyfriend and friends.
When she’d been reported missing, Yakima Police had suspected that her boyfriend, a twenty-nine-year-old Javier Garcia, might be involved with her disappearance. But Garcia had been in California visiting family from March 4th until he returned home when he couldn’t reach his girlfriend. According to his cell phone history, he had tried to call Alverez several times on March 9th and for several days following.
According to her employer, Alverez had been at work on the 8th, but hadn’t shown up for work as scheduled on the 9th or 10th or beyond. After Garcia learned his girlfriend had missed work, something she never did, and hadn’t been in contact with any of her friends or co-workers, he filed a missing person report with the Yakima Police Department.
When McCain saw the photo of Alverez in the paper the next morning, he took a good look at it. He realized that Alverez and the Native American woman, Emily Pinkham, were of two different ethnicities, but if you looked at the photo quickly, you might think the two women were sisters.
The next day McCain called Sinclair and asked if she wanted to grab a steak someplace after work.
“Are you asking me out on a date, Officer McCain? Or is this
