“Well, let me know if you need any help,” the store owner said.
McCain wandered down a main aisle, scanning up and down the other aisles until he found Burke in the small section that carried camping supplies.
When he saw McCain, Burke said, “Hey, I don’t think they serve ice cream here.”
“Oh, right,” McCain said, acting like he didn’t recognize Burke for a minute. “You’re the guy with my dream jobs. How are the fish biting on the Yakima?”
“Fishing’s been good,” Burke said. “Best late in the day.”
“The whitewater deal should be kicking in pretty soon,” McCain said.
“We’ll be running trips starting right after Labor Day,” Burke said. “Have you ever done it?”
“Once on the Deschutes River down by Bend,” McCain answered. “But it was pretty tame.”
“Stop by when we get going. I’ll get you on a boat if you’re interested.”
“Looks like you’re going to be doing a little camping,” McCain observed dumbly.
“Yeah, I have a little work to do in the mountains,” Burke said, then turned and headed to the cashier’s counter.
McCain was afraid to push it too much. He grabbed a handful of Rooster Tails off the pegs in the fishing aisle, one aisle over, and then also headed to the counter.
Burke looked at the lures and said to McCain, “I thought you were a fly guy?”
“Oh, I’ll fish with lures now and again, but these are for my neighbor kid. He lost five of these this morning fishing with me on the Naches. I’ll make him work them off by taking care of my spoiled dog.”
“Well, good luck,” Burke said, and he headed for the door.
“Yeah, catch you later,” McCain said as he concentrated on Burke’s boots and their tread. If he wasn’t mistaken, they were about a size 12, maybe 13.
McCain had the urge to follow Burke, but he also wanted to get back up near Bald Mountain to do some checking around. He decided he’d go west up 410, to the Bald Mountain Road turnoff, and if it happened that Burke was going that way too, well, so be it.
Burke was about a half mile ahead of him, so McCain stayed back and just watched. It was short lived, however. Burke turned left at the Y and headed up toward White Pass. McCain thought about following, but he decided he’d go ahead and go back up by Manastash Ridge where he’d seen the rig around midnight.
He was in no hurry, so he took his time driving up the Forest Service road past Bald Mountain on the way to the ridge. He was on the same road as the night before, and he followed it along until he hit a road that gradually turned west off the main road up to the ridge. He was pretty sure this was the road the second rig had driven up in the dark.
All these roads saw a surprising amount of traffic in the summer. Several jeep clubs would camp down along the river, and they’d come up here and drive around all day. McCain failed to see the appeal of just driving around on dirt roads all day, by the jeepers or the road-hunters in the fall, but that was probably because he had to do it as part of his job.
Today, though, he was on a different mission. He was looking for a place where someone might have pulled off and walked down from the road a ways. He drove slowly, watching closely for anything that might tell him what that rig had been doing up there the night before.
Yes, the person driving the rig might have been coming in late to a camp. And if he found a camp up here, he’d stop and ask the campers about that. Unfortunately, he found none, and he started getting a really bad feeling in his gut.
Chapter 17
McCain threw the Toyota into first gear and let the vehicle creep along as he searched for any tire tracks, shoe prints or some other clue along the road that might tell him more about the vehicle he’d seen the night before. He also looked ahead, occasionally turning off the road to check all the obvious flat spots where someone might have had a camp recently.
The road was dusty and hot and seemed desolate. No birds chirped. No chipmunks skittered across the road. It was weird, he thought.
McCain drove around a big bend in the road and finally he saw life. But it wasn’t the living things he was hoping to see. A flock of turkey vultures was circling a small canyon downhill from the road. They circled and circled, like a scene from an old western. Clearly, they were zeroing in on something dead. Yes, it could have been a deer or calf elk killed by a cougar. Or, he reasoned, it could be a human body, dumped down the hill in the trees by a serial killer in the dark of the new moon.
From his years of experience in the field, McCain knew turkey vultures were among the most proficient of all the scavengers. Sometimes the big birds would spot their meals from the air, but more often than not turkey vultures smelled the dead animals they ended up scavenging. McCain had read that the birds have an unbelievable sense of smell and can scent carrion from over a mile away. He decided to see what this group of vultures smelled.
McCain parked as close to the circling birds as he could. He loaded his pack with water, trail mix, flagging tape and a jacket, and headed for the vultures riding the currents in a big loop. He kept Jack close to him, as he didn’t want the dog chasing a rabbit through somebody’s fresh tracks or any other evidence if he happened to find a body. Around his neck with an elastic harness he wore his binoculars, and he stopped to look through them often, searching for colors
