“Or maybe it’s been going on a while,” he agreed.
They talked a bit more about constitutionalism and federal lands. Then Mac asked, “What do you know about these wilderness survival weekends the sheriff is involved in?”
“Didn’t know he was,” Peabody said, startled. “I deal with a guy named Craig Anderson, out of Marysville, and Ken Bryson, in Sedro-Woolley, does the logistics. They seem to be very popular with the Seattle crowd. Men in their 30s who want to come up and pretend they’re Rambo, it seems like. Why?”
“It keeps coming up,” Mac said vaguely. “They get permits and everything?”
He nodded. “Anderson’s been real professional to deal with.”
Mac noted he didn’t mention Bryson again.
“Good to know. Been thinking it might be an interesting feature piece.”
Peabody looked at him skeptically. “I didn’t think you did many feature pieces,” he said, revealing for the first time that he’d recognized his name.
Mac grinned. No, Janet didn’t let him do many feature pieces, he thought amused. Like using a Glock instead of a flyswatter.
He and Angie got up to leave, then he hesitated. “If you have time? How far out is the ravine the hiker was found in? Could you take us out there?”
Peabody looked at the clock, and shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Let me tell Sarah we’re going out. Meet me out back.”
Mac and Angie headed out the back of the building where a National Park Service jeep was parked. “Mac?” Angie asked.
“Dunno, babe,” he said. “I don’t know.”
Chapter 12
The North Cascades National Park was one of the most majestic and beautiful parks in the nation, Mac thought. And he’d seen a few. Not necessarily by his choice. But this one was remote. It was home to grizzly bears, timber wolves, and some said, veterans gone feral — men who couldn’t handle society after the ravages of whatever war they’d fought in, and headed for the hills. He thought of Eli Andrews, Janet’s husband. Eli couldn’t handle Seattle and life with Janet after Kuwait; he hid in the wilds of Seattle’s homeless population. When Mac needed help to rescue Janet, Eli had come with him. And he stayed behind in Jehovah’s Valley where he and Janet grew up. Mac hoped he was doing OK. He hadn’t figured out how to ask Janet about him. Maybe he could ask Timothy.
Men like him, like the men in these hills, were more dangerous than either the wolves or the bears, Mac thought.
Still it was beautiful land. He could understand how war-ravaged men might have found it easier to deal with the challenges of mountain peaks than the complications of interacting with people on a daily basis.
Not him. He’d lived in Bellingham for four years and never did more than drive the North Cascades Highway loop once. He was a city kid. And Afghanistan had taught him all he wanted to know about high mountain peaks that got cold in the winter and hot in the summer. More like the eastern side of the Cascades than here, but he saw no reason to ever go back into the hills unless someone was paying him.
Paying him a lot.
But he and some friends had driven the North Cascades Highway one summer. The highway loop was closed most of the year — open from May to October with some flex on both ends. And it was beautiful. From a vehicle.
Mac glanced at Peabody. “The North Cascades Highway open yet?”
He shook his head, and started the jeep. “Highway 20 will open next weekend I think,” he said. “Be another month for some of the other roads.”
Even calling Highway 20 a highway was generous, Mac thought. There were people out here who literally could not drive to town without 4-wheel-drive off-road vehicles for six months out of the year or more. He shook his head.
“You hike?” Peabody asked.
“Not since I got back from Afghanistan,” Mac said. He glanced back at Angie.
“Angie?”
“Used to,” she said. “Been awhile.” She was looking at the mountains with longing, however.
“If you see something you want to photograph, say so,” Peabody said. “I’ll stop.”
Well that was an improvement.
Peabody obviously loved the Park. He pointed out things of interest, stopped frequently for Angie, and seemed to be in no hurry. “What troubles me about this ravine,” he said as he parked at a trailhead, “is that it’s so close to the road out. He had to have been coming down the mountain and he was so close to being out.”
Mac said nothing. The more he heard, the more uncomfortable he became. The hiker had been hunted, he thought. And when it looked like he was going to escape them — and then be able to tell what happened — someone killed him and tossed his body in the ravine. Could that really have happened? Time in Afghanistan left him with a belief that more atrocities happened than most people realized. But here?
“How did the body get discovered?” Mac asked, troubled.
“Totally a fluke,” Peabody said. “We’d been searching the known trails. If the hiker had left them and gone too far from one, we knew we’d never find him. One of my rangers was searching and realized he was going to miss his boy’s baseball game. So, he decided to take a short cut across country to get back. He sees crows hovering over this ravine, and he thinks, ‘shit’. He works his way over — not easy from the direction he was approaching — and there’s the man’s body. He sends up a flare, and calls us in. But coming from this direction? Getting there is easy. Getting the body out from where he died wasn’t. He got himself wedged in I think.” He shook his head.
Mac looked out the window of the jeep as Peabody navigated across a wooden bridge over a rushing stream. Water everywhere this time of the year, he thought. It was a wet, temperate rainforest up in here. But beautiful if you liked all this green growing stuff. He still tended to see everything
