The two men looked at each other for a moment, and Mac wondered if the gulf of experience was too vast to bridge. Mike tapped his fingers on his desk. “Let me work on it,” he said at last. “Tell me more about your story.”
Mac summarized what was going on.
“Hundreds of guns? What for?” Mike asked, obviously startled.
“And that’s the question everyone wants to know the answer to,” Mac said grimly. “A cop I know ran this question on their own domestic violence calls over the last six months. Came up with 15. He found that troubling. Seemed low to me.”
Mike jotted something down on his notepad. “I’ll rerun that query using the same parameters and terms I use for the civil docket,” he muttered. Then he looked up. “How much do you know about data searches?”
Mac shrugged. “Got a friend who makes a lot of money doing data mining,” he said. “With him? When he goes off into jargon, I just nod my head as if I understand. Figured I’d do the same with you.”
Mike laughed. “Why bring this to me instead of him then?”
“He’s been helping me,” Mac said. “I’m learning social media this week.” Mike laughed again at his sour tone. “But Shorty’s not a reporter. And it seemed to me that a reporter might see things in this that a data analyst wouldn’t.”
“Good enough,” Mike said. “I’ve never tried this tight a turn-around. Let me work on it. You coming to happy hour tomorrow?”
Mac nodded. “Thought I would,” he said.
“I should be able to give you something by then,” Mike said.
Mac escaped to his end of the building where people moved faster. Hell, we even talk faster, he thought. And louder. He relaxed. The Special Projects unit made him itch.
At the end of his work day, Mac went to the gym for a workout. Nothing better than the treadmill to consider what he’d learned. And he had an hour before Shorty would get home from school. He shook his head. Shorty, the math teacher.
But then, people shook their heads over Mac, the cop reporter, too.
He’d tracked down an old drill sergeant that he knew. The man didn’t recall a Pete Norton. “Skinhead? Might be the first guy to ever have to grow his hair longer to be a Marine,” he cracked. “Let me do some checking.”
The coroner’s office would release the results on Friday. But it wasn’t the first body they’d gotten from the national park that looked like this, the assistant coroner said. “I would expect the conclusions will be the same too,” he said, willing to chat a bit.
“How many bodies?” Mac had asked.
“Four? Five? In the last two years that I’ve worked here,” he said. “And they all were like this, no obvious signs of cause of death. Severe dehydration, a lot of superficial bruising and scratches, post-mortem damage. We’ve ruled them natural causes. Dehydration is usually what kills a lost hiker.”
“Post-mortem damage?” Mac asked curiously.
The man hesitated. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Some animal predation. But some? It’s weird. It’s as if they stumbled down a hillside, died near the top, and then continued to tumble down, accumulating damage. Off the record? It feels more like someone tossed them down the hill after they died. But we can’t tell how they died.”
Mac could hear the frustration in the man’s voice. He was silent for a moment trying to figure out how that worked into his hunted scenario. But then, these could be the men who almost got away, he thought. So, herded over a cliff?
“How deteriorated were the bodies when you got them?” Mac asked at last.
“Until this one? Very. So, we are hopeful we’ll learn more from this one,” he said. “But I wouldn’t hold my breath. I think the results are going to be inconclusive.”
Mac thanked him. Called Sarah, the park ranger from last Sunday who’d reminded him of a middle school teacher. She remembered him.
“Are you getting complaints from hikers about gun noise in the park?” he asked.
“All the time. Didn’t Peabody tell you? Comes from that wilderness survival guy Ken Bryson, I’m convinced. But Peabody isn’t so sure, and he’s been reluctant to pursue it for some reason,” the woman said, her frustration obvious. “Probably the number one complaint we get — outranks no toilet paper in the latrines, I think.”
Mac laughed and thanked her. So why hadn’t Peabody mentioned it? Didn’t sound like Sarah — a woman he instinctively trusted as a source —respected her boss much, either, it was in her when she called him by his last name like that. He made note of that. Angie had been skeptical too.
Now on the treadmill he considered that. What had Angie seen that he hadn’t?
He’d also talked to some of Norton’s deputies. None of them were willing to say a word on the record except that he was an excellent officer of the law, and that his constitutional sheriff beliefs weren’t that far off base. “That’s why he’s an elected official,” one of them pointed out. “So that he doesn’t answer to anyone but the voters.”
Off the record was another story. One deputy, a woman, admitted she was job hunting. “Most of the deputies are,” she said. “Especially women. Skagit County is a great place to live if you like the outdoors. But I can’t work for that asshole much longer. He puts our lives at risk. It’s as if we have a bullseye on our backs for every gun fanatic in the county, and there are a lot of them here.”
“I was there at the Jorgensen incident,” Mac said.
“Yup. Man shoots at deputies, and nothing happens? Shit like that gets around. It’s as if he’s declared open season on his own men. And us women? I’m leaving in two weeks. Haven’t given my notice yet, so don’t go mentioning it, you hear? Trying to decide if I want to file a discrimination complaint on my way out the door.”
She’d been there six months. His abusive
