When he pulled up the photos that he thought Sinclair might be interested in, McCain could see nothing but a dark screen at first. Then McCain looked closer, and he saw the outline of what appeared to be a moth.
“I saw the moth,” Smith said. “I thought, nothing to see here, and I was just about to delete the photo when that darker spot in the upper right corner caught my eye.”
McCain and Sinclair moved in closer to look at the image on the computer screen. Smith scrolled over and enlarged the dark spot. It was grainy and very blurry, but it was definitely the image of a man, and he was pushing a game cart.
The date stamp on the photo was March 9, the day after Sonya Alverez had gone missing. Smith told McCain the camera was just off the road up Milk Canyon, above the Wenas.
“Can you pinpoint exactly on the map where this camera was?” McCain asked.
“I can do one better,” Smith said. “I have that onX map program, and I mark every one of my cameras, just so I can find them quickly.”
The accountant pulled out his smart phone, opened the map, and zoomed into where the camera in question was placed. McCain was interested to see why the camera had caught the killer but didn’t have any photos of investigators or the recovery team.
“We parked about 300 yards up the road from there,” McCain explained. “Did you get any other people on that camera?”
“Actually, I do have a few other photos with people and dogs in them,” Smith said. “Here’s one with a young guy and gal. And another with a golden retriever.”
“Those are the kids who found the body when they were shed hunting,” McCain said. “And that was their dog, Mutt, or maybe it was Jeff.”
Sinclair and McCain stared at the photo of the man and the cart, but with so little detail, there was no real way to identify him. McCain looked at the man’s head for a cowboy hat. That certainly would have been recognizable, but he could see nothing.
“I’ll send the photo to our lab and let the technicians play with it,” Sinclair said. “But frankly, I’m guessing they’re not going to be able to do much with it.”
Sinclair gave her email address to Smith, so he could send the trail camera photo to her. She and McCain thanked Smith for calling and helping with the investigation.
“I’m guessing you’re right,” McCain said as they walked back to their rigs. “It’s something but it’s probably not going to help much.”
“All we can do is keep thinking and checking stuff out,” she said. “Sooner or later we’ll get a break.”
“Sooner would be good with me,” McCain said.
“Me too,” she agreed.
Chapter 22
The hot summer days of August quickly turned into the hot summer days of early September. Nothing was shaking on the investigation of the Cascade Killer. Sinclair was getting frustrated, and McCain felt that if they didn’t do something soon, they might have another dead woman out there somewhere.
McCain had been thinking about the other women who had done the David Copperfield in Colorado, and he decided he’d like to chat with the sheriff of Moffat County. He was just finishing up some computer work before heading home to feed Jack and decided to give the sheriff a call.
He forgot that Colorado was an hour ahead of Washington, so when he called he got a dispatcher who said Sheriff Armstrong was off duty. McCain gave the dispatcher his cell number and asked her to have the sheriff give him a call any time.
Surprisingly, Sheriff Armstrong called him back about ten minutes later.
“Hello, this is McCain,” he said into his phone.
“Yeah, this is Bill Armstrong down here in Craig, Colorado,” the sheriff said. “What can I do you for?”
“I’ve been sort of involved in this serial killer investigation here in Washington,” McCain said. “I think you talked to the FBI about the possible connection between our four dead women and a couple of missing women down your way?”
“Yessir,” Armstrong said. “It sounds like pretty similar circumstances. By the way, how can you be sort of involved? Isn’t that like being sort of pregnant?”
McCain explained that he wasn’t officially on the task force that was doing the investigation, but he and his yellow Lab Jack had been involved in locating two of the women’s bodies and he had figured out the whole deal about the new moon.
Armstrong hadn’t been told about the new moon aspect, and when McCain explained it to him, the sheriff said, “Okay, you’ve got my attention now.”
“Well, I actually have three names of people I’d like to have you check in your database if possible,” McCain said. “I’m just looking to see if they had a Colorado driver’s license and an address somewhere in your neck of the woods during the time those two women went missing.”
“I can do that,” Armstrong said. “We’re a pretty small department here in Moffat County, but I can get the state police to run them for me. Shoot me the names.”
“I’ll do you one better,” McCain said. “I’ll send you Washington driver’s licenses on all three. Give me your email address and I’ll send them as soon as I have them in hand.”
McCain already had the license for the cowboy, Chad Burke, but he could get the other two with one quick phone call, which is exactly what he did. When he had all three, he sent them to Sheriff Armstrong with a note that simply said, “Thanks!”
The response from Moffat County was waiting for him when arrived in the office the next morning. They had three matches on different Chad Burkes, but only one, based on the photo on the Colorado driver’s license, was an actual match. He’d lived in the small ski resort town of Steamboat Springs, just east of Moffat County. McCain looked up a map of Colorado on the internet and figured Steamboat Springs
