“Everything looks in order, Mr. Ferguson. Sorry you missed the turkey.”
“Yeah, well, that happens. The worst part of it is, now the old boy will be educated. All the calling in the world won’t get him to come in again.”
“Well, maybe you can find another eager tom. Say, you didn’t happen to see a guy in silver Honda up this way, did you?
“You know, I did. Didn’t look like a hunter though. He just drove right by me when I was walking alongside the road a ways back. Kinda weird having a small sedan like that up here on these rough roads.”
“That’s what I thought. He might have been up here mushroom hunting or something.”
“I guess,” Ferguson said. “He was wearing a black cowboy hat. Maybe he was up here looking for lost cattle?”
“In a Honda? Oh well. You have a good day and hope you find another willing tom.”
Chapter 4
It took eleven days for the county coroner to identify the woman McCain and Jack had found. He had used dental records to identify her, and DNA samples confirmed it. Her name was Emily Pinkham. She was twenty-seven years old and a member of the Yakama Nation. Her last known residence was in White Swan on the Yakama Reservation.
The coroner couldn’t make any clear conclusion as to how she had died, nor could he figure out when she had perished. McCain had been right in his assessment of the situation. The cold and snow had kept her body in pretty good shape, that is until a hungry black bear had stumbled across it.
Over the past decade there had been eighteen mysterious disappearances of Native women in Washington State, and when Emily Pinkham went missing in late October the previous year, local authorities made a concerted effort to find her. But it was to no avail. Nobody had seen her with anyone suspicious. And the last person to see her alive, her cousin Jeanine Washut, said she was on her way to work at Legend’s, the Yakama tribal casino in Toppenish. Emily worked as a waitress at the buffet restaurant inside the casino. When she missed work for a couple of days, the missing person alert went out, and authorities went on the search.
The problem with missing and murdered Native women had become such an issue in Washington, and around the country, that the governor of Washington State and the U.S. Senate had developed task forces to try to figure out what was going on. The many families that were dealing with the loss of their loved ones had pushed and pushed and pushed to try to shine a light on the issue and solve these crimes.
The local paper, the Yakima Herald-Republic, had run well over a dozen stories on the problem during the past year, but even with the stories, the task forces, and money sent by the federal government, it seemed the authorities were no closer to figuring out what might be happening. The case of Emily Pinkham was just the most recent of these mysterious deaths and disappearances, and it stoked the flames of the rumors that there was a serial killer out there who preyed on Native women.
Not all cities the size of Yakima had an FBI office. But because the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation was one of the largest Native American tribes in the West, they often called the FBI in to help with criminal investigations. The FBI had been working hand-in-hand with Yakama Nation police on the cases of murdered and missing women, and after the discovery of the woman’s identity, the FBI agent out of the Yakima office called a meeting in Toppenish of the various law enforcement agencies to discuss the death and discovery of Pinkham.
FBI special agent Sara Sinclair was new to the local office. She’d been working in Yakima since the first of the year and had spent the past four months getting up to speed on the investigation. The discovery of Pinkham’s body was the first new case on her desk as a potential victim of a possible serial killer.
Sinclair had previously worked in the field office in Portland, but when the last agent in Yakima took a job in Washington D.C., she had applied for the transfer and gotten it. She was somewhat familiar with the case of the growing number of missing and murdered Native women and wanted to see if she could help solve them. And she had. Or at least, she had solved a couple. Her work had helped locate two different missing women. One was found living in a homeless encampment outside of Boise, and another was located with relatives in Eastern Montana.
The woman in Montana had left after her habitually-abusive husband had smacked her around in another drunken rage. When he’d finally passed out she had taken a Seattle Mariners souvenir baseball bat and had whacked him about the head and body. She didn’t care if he was dead. She jumped in their Nissan Pathfinder and headed east until she ran out of gas money.
The husband didn’t die, but he did have a cracked skull, a couple broken ribs, and hurt like hell for a few weeks. As he recovered from his injuries he thought maybe he’d been lucky to escape death, and didn’t care if he ever saw his wife again.
The woman’s relatives in Wapato had reported her missing, and although the Yakama Tribal police suspected the man of possibly killing his wife, with no body or other real evidence, they didn’t have enough to press charges. Still, her name had been added to the list of mysterious disappearances, that is until Sinclair had located her.
She had done other work around the region too, including some drug trading investigations with the DEA and a possible human trafficking case, but most of her time was spent on cases within the boundaries of the 1,130,000 acres
