With that, Austin said goodbye, gave a wave and headed home.
A short time later, as McCain was getting geared up to head to the mountains, Sinclair called back.
“Sorry about that,” she said, still sounding stressed. “My boss is all over me about this serial killer deal. He wants to see some progress. Like I don’t?”
“I just have a question or two, and a couple thoughts. We can talk later if that helps.”
“No, sorry,” she said. “The woman from Sunnyside is still missing, which really has me worried. We haven’t found her vehicle. And everything else seems to be a dead end, including the check on the places that rent horses. No one of interest rented any horses during the times the other women went missing.”
“Anything on the boot photo I took up on the trail where the bones were found?”
“The crime lab people said it was most likely from a man’s shoe or boot, size 12 or maybe 12 and a half. But they couldn’t tell from the photo if the track was three months or three years old.”
“Alright, well, holler if there’s anything I can do to help.”
“Just talking to you helps,” she said, her voice softening. “Something about you does that to me. I’m just getting so frustrated.”
“I totally understand,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
“So, what have you been up to since we last talked?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, just watching over about a thousand anglers from here to Cle Elum. Pretty taxing duty.”
He hoped that would lighten her mood a little.
Then he said, “Actually, after work last night Jack and I ran up into the Manastash on a whim. I figured if this guy had taken another victim, he might be dumping the body back up off Highway 410 somewhere. It’s big country, but we had nothing better to do. Jack chased squirrels, and I watched for crazy dudes.”
“Find any?”
“Just three. I water-boarded them, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get them to talk. Then I remembered, oh yeah, squirrels can’t talk. I started thinking about when the killer might have dumped the bodies. We’re guessing he does it at night, but I thought he might be picking the darkest of nights, where there is a new moon.”
“Okay,” she said. “Go on.”
“I’ve spent a lot of nights in the woods, and on the night of a new moon it is so dark even the animals are affected. So I started looking at the moon phases. Guess when the last new moon was?”
“Two nights ago? When the Jimenez woman went missing?”
“Actually, it was last night. That’s why I went up into the mountains to see what I could see.”
“Damn,” she said. She paused to think for a few seconds and said, “Don’t believe what everyone else says, you are smarter than you look, Luke McCain. “
“Aw, shucks,” he said.
“Wait a minute, wasn’t there a lawman on one of those old westerns on TV named Luke McCain? I remember watching it in re-runs with my dad.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. You must be WAY older than me, because I don’t remember any of those old TV shows.”
“I’ll think of it,” she said, ignoring his little jab. “Now, I gotta go catch a killer. You have fun harassing anglers.”
McCain called Jack, went out to his truck, fired it up, turned the AC to max and was about to take off when his phone chimed. Why did WSU disband its water polo team? Their horses all drowned. It was followed by about nine happy faces laughing so hard tears were coming out of their eyes.
It wasn’t that funny, McCain thought. Especially not to the horses.
McCain, with Jack riding shotgun, motored west on Highway 12 toward the mountains. As he slowed to go through Naches, he looked closely at the cars sitting at the fruit stands, stores, restaurants, mini-marts and finally the hardware store on the west end of the strip that was now the retail part of the town.
Naches was like a thousand other small towns in America. It had been a quaint little town back in the 50s and 60s, where everyone from the farms and orchards in the area would come to shop for groceries, eat at a restaurant, and go to church. But then in the late 60s the state built a new highway next to the river, bypassing the town. With the advent of newer, faster, more reliable cars, people started doing their shopping in the much bigger city of Yakima, fifteen miles down the road. Businesses in Naches started drying up, and the ones that survived picked up and moved out to the new highway, where all the traffic was.
Today there was an array of assorted businesses on each side of the highway and especially during the busy tourist time, they made hay. McCain didn’t see much of interest as he drove through the businesses until he spotted the silver Honda in the parking lot of the hardware store. He immediately felt the urge to buy some six-penny nails.
McCain pulled into the hardware parking lot, parked, and as he had been doing for most of the past month when he had Jack with him, either in his state truck or in his Tundra, he left the rig running with the AC on and the doors locked.
“I’ll be right back,” he said to the dog, like Jack knew how to keep time, and headed into the store.
The hardware store was a typical for a small town. It served orchardists and homeowners in the area with items they needed. It also had a decent fishing section, with rods, reels, and a variety of lures and baits the local anglers used on the rivers and lakes in the Cascades. McCain was a frequent customer, so he knew the proprietor and some of the main workers.
“Hey Luke,” the owner said when he saw him come through the door. “Off duty today, eh?”
“Yeah, I’m working on a couple projects,”
