“I’ve got department meetings in the morning, so I won’t be on the mountain tomorrow,” McCain said. “I’m guessing Williams will be escorting you and the other investigators up to the bones. That is if you can get him on a horse again.”
McCain told her what had transpired on the horse ride up the hill, and as he did, he started laughing and because he was laughing so did she.
“I wish I could have seen it,” she said.
“Well, don’t razz him about it too much,” McCain said. “He’s a little sensitive. “
McCain told her good luck and goodbye and then pushed the hang-up button on his steering wheel. He was starving, so as he got into Naches he decided to pull into the café to grab a quick bite. He parked, jumped out of the truck, and was headed to the front door of the restaurant when he looked down the sidewalk and saw a young man in a cowboy hat walking with a woman with long black hair. He took another look back as the guy took off his hat and walked to the driver’s door of an older silver Honda. The woman got in the passenger’s side, and off they went.
“Silver Honda,” McCain said to himself. “Crap.”
He ran down the sidewalk, but the little car was just rounding the corner. He was just fast enough to catch the first three letters of the license plate.
McCain ran back to his truck and took off after the car. There were two ways out of town from where he was, and he took a guess at which way the car went. He figured the guy was heading to the highway and turned and headed that way. But when he got there, he saw no silver Hondas.
Doubling back, he headed to the old highway, and turned east. He drove slowly and looked up a couple side roads. Nothing. By now the car could be headed about six different directions, down the highway to Yakima, or up the highway to the mountains. At least he had the partial on the license plate. That was going to have to do for now. He wrote the letters down on a little notepad he kept in his shirt pocket and turned to go back to the café.
He thought more about it and realized that with who-knows-how-many silver Hondas still on the road from the 1990s and with about 5,000 younger women with long black hair in the area, the chances that those two things together meant anything at all was a longshot.
At the table, after he had ordered up a burger and fries, he started thinking about the Honda he had seen coming down into the Wenas that day back in April. The car and the guy were definitely out of place, and the timing was about right for when the body of the Alverez woman would have been dumped.
He was pissed at himself for not getting the license plate on the rig at the time, but it was what it was. He’d have Sinclair or Williams run the plates to see if they could connect the first three letters he’d gotten earlier with a 1990s silver Honda.
Seeing the cowboy with the girl a few minutes earlier made him wonder about other aspects. Did the killer know these women? Or did he abduct them in some kind of Ted Bundy way, getting them to assist him to his car and then knock them on the head and throw them in the trunk?
He had looked at the skull on the mountain pretty closely today, and he hadn’t seen any cracks in the bone. Nor had the coroner found any kind of damage to the heads of the other two women found in the mountains.
So far the sheriff’s investigators hadn’t found any link at all between the two women found earlier. Their paths didn’t seem to cross anywhere. They lived in two different areas of the valley, and there seemed to be no overlap socially. The Green River Killer had preyed on prostitutes and drug addicts, but the first two women seemed to lead normal lives with normal jobs.
He also started thinking about the killer. The guy had to be in some kind of shape if he had carried the woman, if it was a woman, up the Twin Sisters trail. McCain had packed a fifty-pound pack of water and fish up that trail, and it had been a chore. The same was true of the other two body sites. A person, probably a man, had to be in pretty good shape to pack someone that far from the road.
Or maybe the killer had used a horse or mule. He made another note in his book to have Sinclair check with the Pattersons to get the names of any people who might have rented a horse for one day, or overnight, during October or November. That was prime time for big game hunting along the eastern slopes of the Cascades, so his guess was there was a pretty long list of people who had rented horses.
She should check with any of the other outfitters too, to see if someone had rented a horse for one or two days during that period. They had the disappearance dates of the other two women. They should cross reference those dates, too, with any of the area horse packing operations.
As McCain was thinking about everything, something else was nagging at him. It was another idea to check out, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. About that time his burger and fries came, and as an afterthought, he asked the waitress to put the meal in a to-go box. He just wanted to get home, so he grabbed the box, jumped in the truck and headed down the highway toward home.
The next morning was full of meetings, the one part of the job McCain could definitely do without. His boss was a great
