“Okay, I’ll be there in less than an hour.”
McCain clicked off and then, as he had promised, called Sinclair and gave her the details.
“Hopefully Jack and I can find this guy and be home by dinner.”
“I hope so too. Good luck and be safe.”
McCain had been involved in a few other lost hunter searches. Elk hunters in Yakima County often got lost in the rugged terrain of the Cascades. Most of the hunters were found alive within a day or two, but on a rare occasion a hunter would be found dead. A couple had died of heart attacks or from other medical problems, but one, McCain remembered, had succumbed to the elements.
In general, hunters don’t plan on getting lost, so they rarely carry enough supplies to survive a few nights in the wilderness. Especially during elk season when the weather can be very unpredictable and is often well below freezing at night, being prepared with the right items can mean the difference between life and death.
But this was a little different. The late September temperatures had been typical of Central Washington. Daytime highs in the mountains had reached the upper 60s, with nighttime temps dropping to near freezing. And it was dry. Even if Wallace was unprepared to spend a couple nights in the woods, the elements were such that a person should have no problem surviving for a while, even without food.
McCain wondered if Wallace had wounded a deer and had followed it around the mountain and gotten so turned around he didn’t know which way to go. That happens sometimes. Or, he could have been injured in a fall. Still, he thought, if Wallace was somewhere in the vicinity, he should be able to hear the search and rescue people who would be whistling and making plenty of noise as they looked for him.
When they got close to the coordinates Deputy Hernandez had given him, McCain could see four rigs parked near a pull-out. There were two Kittitas County sheriff’s units, a dark grey Chevy three-quarter ton pickup and a gold Ford Explorer.
McCain recognized Hernandez right away. The deputy was short and stocky, and as McCain remembered from their meeting the year before at a bear poacher’s cabin in Cle Elum, she was tough, smart and capable.
He pulled up behind the other rigs, and McCain and Jack jumped out.
“Hey Luke,” Hernandez said. “Thanks for coming. This is Deputy Ryan Barnes, and this gentleman is Vern Kennedy. He’s the head of the Kittitas Search and Rescue group.”
McCain shook hands with the two men and asked Kennedy, “Your people are still out looking, I assume?”
“Yes,” Kennedy said. “But we’ve found no sign at all of Mr. Wallace. Of course, we have no way of knowing which way he went. We’ve been searching in ever increasing circles around his rig here.”
“We got the spare key to Wallace’s rig from his wife, and have looked around in it, but there’s not much in there that might tell us which way he went,” Barnes explained.
“Any clothing items?” McCain asked.
“Yeah, there’s a hooded sweatshirt in there.”
“Okay, I’ll grab that and let Jack give it a good smell. I’ll get my gear, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Jack was not a professionally trained tracking dog, but he had an incredible nose, and somehow he knew what or who he needed to follow when McCain asked him to do so. The serial killer was the first person Jack had tracked, but he wasn’t the only person he’d located.
Earlier in the summer McCain and Jack had been called in to help find a three-year-old boy who had disappeared from his family’s campsite up near Lost Lake. McCain let Jack smell some of the little guys’ clothes and after he found a couple tracks leading away from the campsite, he let Jack go.
As it turned out the boy was only about five hundred yards from the camp where Jack found him safe and sound. Evidently the youngster had crawled into the end of a big hollow log, and had fallen asleep. Jack found him in about fifteen minutes, much to the joy of the boy’s very frightened parents.
The search for Shane Wallace, McCain knew, was not going to be quite so easy.…
