So that’s two, McCain thought to himself.
He hadn’t been surprised that the third name on his list hadn’t showed up, but he wanted to check it out just so he could eliminate him as a suspect. He knew he was stretching on all of them, frankly, but with two having been within fairly close driving distance of where the women in Colorado had disappeared, and when they had disappeared, it made them that much more interesting.
Sinclair had seen Burke a couple of times at the gym after the river rafting trip. They chatted some, and since Sinclair wanted to watch him she decided the best way would be to ask him to dinner for Friday night.
“Aren’t you and the game warden a thing?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “We’re just friends. So, what do you think?”
“Yeah, I’d be up for it. Just let me know when and where.”
They decided to meet at the Thai King Restaurant, located a couple of blocks off Yakima Avenue. Sinclair liked Thai and as it turned out so did Burke.
They met there at seven. Once they got their table and ordered, Burke asked, “So what do you do for work?”
“I work in the federal court,” Sinclair said. It was a lie, of course, but just a little one, because she often spent her days at the federal courthouse. When she told him, you could see his eyes glaze over just a little.
“You must really enjoy your outdoor jobs,” she said, turning the subject back to him. It was a good move, because he talked for a half hour straight on his love of fishing and skiing and water rafting.
They sat and ate and talked for what seemed to Sinclair to be hours. Finally, when she’d had enough, she looked at her phone, saw it was past nine and said, “I really need to be going. I have a couple of important meetings in the morning.”
“Really? Working on Saturday?” Burke asked. “Doesn’t sound like government work to me. Don’t you guys take off for Arbor Day and stuff like that?”
“Yeah, well, tomorrow isn’t one of those days,” she said.
They walked together out to their cars. They said their good nights, and she jumped into her big black Chrysler. Burke watched her drive off and then hopped into his silver Honda, started it up and turned out of the parking lot, going the other direction.
McCain decided to play a hunch. He’d told Sinclair he was going to Austin Meyer’s football game, but the kid’s team didn’t play at night. So, with nothing better to do, and since it was the night before the new moon, he took a chance. He loaded Jack into his Tundra and, with an address he had from a driver’s license, headed east toward Terrace Heights.
After following the road out past the landfill, McCain found a spot in a small orchard and parked far enough away from the rundown double wide to not cause suspicion, but close enough to where he could watch the place with his binoculars. It wasn’t quite dark, but there were no cars in the driveway and there were no lights on inside the manufactured home. From what he could tell no one was home.
“We’ll just wait here for a while and see what transpires,” McCain said to Jack.
The yellow dog wagged his tail and curled up on the passenger seat.
Chapter 24
The killer was waiting for her behind some arborvitae next to her house. As she pulled her car in under the carport he snuck around the back of the car. He watched, and as soon as she was stepping up out of the car, he hit her, hard, in the back of the head with his fist. Unlike some of the other women, she didn’t go down, but it stunned her. He hit her again, and this time she went to her knees.
He quickly pulled the zip ties out of his pocket, secured her wrists and ankles, opened the back door of her car and pushed her in. He stuffed a rag in her mouth, and to keep her lying down in the back seat, he buckled the seat belt around her and pulled it tight. Then he dug through her purse, found her keys, jumped into the driver’s seat, started the engine, backed out and took off.
It had all taken about thirty seconds. As he drove away, he looked around to make sure no one had seen him or was following them.
On the drive to his house he kept an eye on the rearview mirror. No one was following him. With the other women he had taken them in his car. For the sake of time, he decided to use her car. His vehicle would be fine where he parked it.
He drove out Terrace Heights Drive, past the Chevy dealership and Walmart, and out beyond the cemetery and the grade school. He was just past the landfill when she started squirming in the backseat. He looked back at her a couple times as he drove, and he was looking back when they went by the little orchard where McCain was parked in the trees, back off the road.
McCain saw the big black car roll by, and even though there were a few others like that around, he was pretty sure it was Sinclair’s. What he couldn’t quite figure out was, what she was doing out here right now. If she had the same hunch he had, wouldn’t she be bringing some back-up? He decided to just sit and watch. The problem was it was dark, and with very little moon and hardly any lights around the house, it was hard to see exactly what was going on.
Through his binoculars McCain saw the black car pull up close to
