“It’s a hot one, huh?” McCain said to the guy.
“Sure is,” the man said. “And the AC in this old Honda here is struggling.”
The two men walked through the door into the lobby where there was a soda fountain and a small freezer with tubs of ice cream inside.
“I was ready for something cool to drink,” McCain said.
“They have the best ice cream cones here,” the guy said. “You should try one.”
“You must live around here,” McCain said.
“No. Well, I guess I do now,” the man said. “I came up from Colorado. I’ve been here for about ten months. I work for the river rafting company that runs trips down the Tieton River in September. Then I give ski lessons up at White Pass during the winter, and in the spring and summer I guide fly fishermen over on the Yakima River.”
“Wow, each one of those is my dream job,” McCain said. “You ever fish the Naches?”
“A couple times, but I’m so busy with clients on the Yakima, it’s hard to get to other streams.”
“There’s some nice fish in the Naches, and people rarely fish it. I live close so I fish there quite a bit.”
The gal at the counter finished scooping up two double-scoop ice cream cones and handed them to the men. The cowboy got a chocolate chip mint, and McCain went for a rocky road.
“I’m probably going to regret this,” he said to Burke. “I’ll be wearing half of it before I’m done.”
The cowboy paid for his cone, said “good talking to ya, see ya around,” and was heading for the door when McCain asked him, “Hey, didn’t I see you with a pretty, dark-haired gal in Naches the other night?”
The man stopped, turned around, gave McCain a quizzical look and said, “Yeah, wow, you’re pretty perceptive. I was on a date. Didn’t go too well either.” He smiled and walked out the door, jumped in his Honda and headed on up the highway.
McCain grabbed about twenty napkins and sat down to eat his ice cream. As he licked away he thought about the little interaction he’d just had. Burke, the rafter/skier/fishing guide had been around when the three women had disappeared, and he was definitely strong enough to pack a dead body pretty much anywhere he wanted.
Burke hadn’t lied to him when McCain had asked about being with a dark-haired woman, but according to Jim Kingsbury and Frank Dugdale, they’d seen the cowboy in the Honda with her at least one other time before. On the other hand, the cowboy hadn’t said it was a first date, or his only date with the woman.
Something to ponder, McCain thought to himself. Then, with about one big dog bite left of his cone, he headed to the truck, opened the cab door, and gave the treat to Jack.
Driving back down Highway 12, McCain slowed at the campground where the ruckus had been earlier and looked it over carefully. Everyone seemed to be getting along. He thought about the husband and wife who were dressed in the same green tank tops and wondered what that was all about. He’d seen it other times on occasion and could never quite understand the appeal of dressing in the same shirt or same windbreaker as the wife.
He thought about his past relationships and wondered which one of his girlfriends would have been one of those women who wanted her man to wear matching sweatshirts. The only one he could think of was Andrea Parker.
“We dodged a bullet there,” McCain said to his yellow dog and rubbed his ears. The dog licked his shirt where a glob of chocolate ice cream had landed.
The next day was a day off for McCain, and when it finally cooled down he threw on some cut-off jeans and some old sneakers, grabbed his trout rod and box of spinners and headed for the river with Jack. He loved fishing the river this time of year. It didn’t get dark until 9:30, which gave him plenty of time in the coolness of the evening to wade from hole to hole looking for trout. Jack loved it too. The big yellow Lab was definitely a water dog, and if McCain didn’t watch him, Jack would be splashing around right in the hole he was trying to fish.
Being on the river also gave him some solitude to think. The driver’s license photo proved that Chad Burke was indeed the man’s name, but McCain couldn’t be sure that he was the driver of the silver Honda he’d seen in the spring coming down into the Wenas. The turkey hunter had said the guy he saw driving by in the Honda had on a cowboy hat, but McCain didn’t remember seeing the driver in one. Burke kind of looked like the driver McCain remembered, but kind of didn’t either. He just didn’t know.
He was thinking again about Burke’s coy answer to his question about being with a pretty woman with dark hair when a sixteen-inch rainbow trout nearly jerked his little ultra-light rod out of his hands. He forgot about everything for a few moments while he fought the fish.
Chapter 14
Two days later McCain was again patrolling up at White Pass. He had heard from reliable sources that the silvers were biting at Rimrock Lake, and he decided he should go up and make sure the anglers there were sticking to the regulations.
Most of the anglers trolled from boats to catch the little landlocked sockeye salmon, but a few fished off the rocks on the south side of the lake with pencil bobbers and whitefish flies tipped with maggots or white shoepeg corn.
Rimrock was a decent-sized lake, six miles long and a mile wide, but the little salmon were quite prolific there, which meant the thousands and thousands of fish competed for a limited food supply. Because there were too many fish
