The theme song from The Pink Panther begins to emanate from Jimmy’s cell phone shortly after we pass Sequim, northbound on U.S. 101 toward Port Angeles. It’s Diane’s distinct ringtone, and Jimmy puts the call on speaker. “Find anything?” he asks bluntly, forgoing any attempt at preamble or greeting.
“Nice to talk to you too,” Diane replies. “And as a matter of fact, I did.” Her voice goes quiet and one might suspect that the call was dropped. I know better. Jimmy should too, but his head is bent around this case so tightly that he doesn’t pick up on it.
After allowing the silence to marinate a moment—and giving Jimmy every opportunity—I blurt, “Hi, Diane,” in a stupendously cheery voice I reserve for just such occasions. “How are things at the office?”
“Hi, Steps,” Diane coos, enjoying the game. “It’s pretty quiet on this end; just doing that analysis thing; turning water into wine and performing other miracles. You know how it is.”
By this time Jimmy is rolling his eyes as Nate and Jason smirk and grin.
“Well, if anyone can perform miracles, it’s you,” I say, laying it on thick.
“Oh, you’re good,” she replies appreciatively.
I chuckle. “I bet you’re calling because you found something interesting?”
“You would be right,” Diane replies, and just that quickly she’s all business. “In the interest of time, and because I know neither of you care, I’ll spare you the details about how I linked Gloria Cotton to her great-uncle’s widow, who’s been in a nursing home in Poulsbo for the last four years, one of those places that specializes in Alzheimer’s patients. That same widow still owns several properties in Kitsap, Jefferson, and Clallam Counties, but the one that piqued my interest is not far from where Murphy wrecked the car.”
“How far is not far?”
“Maybe six miles to the southeast.”
I raise my eyebrows and exchange a hopeful glance with Jimmy. At the same moment, Jason begins jockeying the Ford toward the median to make a quick U-turn. The location on Palo Alto Road where Murphy wrecked the stolen car is already a good ten miles behind us.
“Are we talking empty land, or are there buildings on this property?” Jimmy asks, leaning toward the phone.
“The assessor’s website indicates that it’s forestry land, no structures, but Google Earth shows what could be a cabin not far off the road.”
“What about an address?”
“This isn’t the kind of place that has an address,” Diane replies. There’s a pause as she works the mouse on her computer, and then she says, “Write this down…” and proceeds to read off two strings of numbers. “That’s the latitude and longitude for the property—and that’s according to Google, so if you end up in banjo country, take it up with them.”
“Where do we turn?” Jimmy asks.
“Stay on U.S. 101 eastbound for about three miles past Palo Alto Road until you reach Chicken Coop Road.”
“Chicken Coop Road…?” Jimmy replies skeptically, wondering if Diane is messing with him.
“It’s legit,” Nate says from the front seat. He turns halfway around so that he’s talking over his left shoulder. “One of our mentals lives near the end of the road. She calls us once or twice a week because the aliens keep dissecting her cows.” He shrugs. “Apparently they put them back together when they’re done, because the cows are always standing there chewing their cud and staring at us when we respond.” He makes a dubious face.
“Invasion of the Cow Snatchers,” Jason chimes in from the driver’s seat, and from Nate’s chortling response you can tell it’s not the first time the idea has been bounced around the office.
“So this is what passes for work while you’re away,” Diane says, feigning disapproval.
Some people say you can tell the expression on someone’s face just by the tone of their words. I don’t know if this is true, but Jimmy’s trying really hard not to grin when he continues. “Okay, so we get on this Chicken Coop Road … and then what?”
Diane is working from internet maps and Google imagery, which at best shows a primitive road leading off into the hills. “About a half mile up Chicken Coop Road, you want to stay to the right. You’ll have a three- or four-mile drive, best as I can guess, most of which is logging roads, so I recommend a four-by-four.”
Jason gives his nearly new department-issued Ford Fusion an appraising once-over from the driver’s seat, and then shrugs. “Murphy was in a car,” he says. “The roads can’t be that bad.”
“Murphy was in a stolen car,” Nate reminds him. “I don’t think he was worried about the undercarriage.”
Diane finishes deciphering the maps, adding a few more caveats and disclaimers, and then waits for any questions or comments from Jimmy.
“All right,” he finally says after scratching some notes. “I’ll call if we find anything. Cell reception might be spotty, so if we go missing you know where to start looking.”
When he says the last, I realize he’s only half kidding.
We soon come upon the south campus of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, with its totem poles, art galleries, and amazing views to the left and right of U.S. 101. Before we have a moment to fully appreciate these sights, we find ourselves angling off onto Chicken Coop Road, just as Diane promised.
Our visit with the quaintly named county road is brief; a half mile later it wanders absently off to the left, heading to better destinations, while we keep to the right and enter a much more difficult stretch of road—if that’s what we’re still calling it. Gone is the chip seal surface with its layers of tar and gravel built up into a relatively smooth byway. Instead, we find ourselves on a mix of dirt and gravel, with the inevitable army of potholes, ruts, high spots, and gullies that accompany such.
“Maybe we should turn back and get a four-by-four,” I hear Jason mutter from behind the wheel. Yet despite these misgivings, he continues on.
The second turn that Diane suggested leads to a dead end at a clear-cut. The stumps of harvested trees are stacked in great piles, ready for disposal, and the ruts created by the logging trucks have reached epic proportions. The Ford bottoms out several times as Jason turns around, and just when I think we’re out of the worst of it, the vehicle comes to a shuddering stop.
A string of expletives bursts from the driver’s seat, and then Jason states the obvious: “We’re high-centered.”
Just like that, Jimmy and Nate open their doors and step out of the car. Jimmy pauses to give me a penetrating stare before closing his door: apparently it’s time to push.
It doesn’t matter that it’s cold, wet, and muddy outside. My feelings on the matter became irrelevant as soon as the car gave its ugly convulsion and came to an abrupt stop. Complaining about it will only make things worse.
Jimmy is always quick to remind me that working for the FBI entails a lot of collateral duties that aren’t necessarily spelled out in the job description. Tracking shine through impossible terrain is a good example. Same with examining body parts, washing the smell of decomp out of my hair with baking soda and vinegar, and having a serial killer take a potshot at me with a shotgun—twice.
All things considered, I suppose pushing a stuck car from the mud in the middle of Sasquatch country isn’t so bad.
Jason’s still revving the engine and spinning the front tires as we move to the rear of the vehicle and brace up against the trunk. Not wanting to be outdone, I give it my all, only to realize that Jimmy and Nate have no intention of being outdone, either. Straining against the trunk and bumper in synchronized spurts that set the car to rocking back and forth, we expect it to break loose at any moment, yet none of us are prepared when the wheels actually grab and drag the Ford’s low-slung belly from its perch.
All three of us go down at the same time.
Jimmy and Nate are on their feet almost as soon as their hands and knees hit the ground. They grumble over their misfortune, but the complaints cease when they look over and see me spitting brown muck and rising slowly to my feet, like some drunkard who was just mowed down by the bulls at Pamplona. I wait for the laughs, but to their credit they keep it bottled up—for now. Every ounce of me knows that I’m going to hear about this later.
“What happened to you?” Jason asks as I open the back door and retrieve my backpack.
“Bodysurfing,” I reply flatly, and close the door a little too hard.
I was never a Boy Scout or even a Cub Scout, but years of fieldwork have taught me to appreciate the organization’s motto: Be Prepared! As such, my backpack—or go-bag—is equipped for scores of unusual situations and emergencies. Falling into the mud isn’t one of them. Still, I find a pair of clean socks and a container of antibacterial wipes, which I use to clean the mud from my face and hands. After sealing the soiled socks and wipes inside a gallon Ziploc bag, I go to work scrubbing my coat and jeans, using up the remainder of the wipes.
When all is said and done, my face and hands are almost clean, but the state of my coat and jeans leaves a lot to be desired.
Jason finally manages to find a clean towel in the vastness of his cluttered trunk. He folds it in half and places it on my seat so I won’t taint the new upholstery. The gesture is innocent and understandable, but for a moment I find myself empathizing with lepers.
Once we’re all back in the warmth of the car, Nate turns around and studies me from his perch on the front passenger seat. He glances up and down, taking in my filthy clothes, and in a perfectly serious voice asks, “Did you find any tracks while you were down there?”
And so it begins.
Backtracking a few hundred feet to the main logging road, we continue southbound and then take the next offshoot to the left. This one seems to do the trick and the GPS mark on Jimmy’s phone once again draws nearer.
Our speed is ten miles an hour at best, so it takes six minutes to cover the next mile. The road is just turning to the right, leading west and deeper into the hills, when Jimmy calls out. “Hold up a minute.” He zooms his screen and studies the map, turning the phone to the left and then the right to align the road and the map.
“We’re close,” he says, “but now we’re starting to move away from the GPS coordinates. Did we miss a road back there?”
“No roads,” I say, “but there were two or three sets of tracks leading off into the trees. They looked more like ATV and four-by-four paths.”
“Let’s check them out.”
Jason pulls ahead until he has room to turn the Ford around, and then starts back the way we came, moving slowly as all eyes scan the edge of the logging road for signs of passage.
“Here,” Nate calls a moment later, spotting the first impressions. It’s not much, just parallel ruts worn into the earth on the right side of the road. The primitive path leads away to the east—or what I’m assuming is the east. I haven’t had my bearings since we left Chicken Coop Road, and the weak, intermittent sun gives none of its shadowy clues.
My eyes follow the ruts along the downward-sloping terrain until a wall of prickly green forest rises up and swallows the diminishing tracks, leaving no clue to their destination. From our vantage point, the hills rise and fall in every direction. This area hasn’t been logged yet and is blanketed in trees so completely that one might imagine it’s all one giant rolling sea of green, if not for the fact that some of the peaks are grander than others. Snow crowns the tallest of these, adding the illusion of whitecaps to the mix.
Jason eyes the deplorable dirt path hesitantly. “How far do you think it goes?”
“A couple hundred feet to the trees,” Jimmy guesses. “After that…” He shrugs.
“Why don’t we do this part on foot?” Jason suggests.
Nate grins. “Now he’s worried about the car.”
As I step out and close the door behind me, I nonchalantly pull my lead-crystal glasses off and make a show of wiping the lenses with the bottom of my shirt, all while taking an unfiltered peek at the path and the logging road. My disappointment increases the more I glance around, until I give up altogether and slip the spectacles back in place.
When I look up, Jimmy’s watching me.
I lock eyes with him and give a barely perceptible shake of my head, disguising it by taking a few intentionally jolty steps away from the car. Murphy’s shine is nowhere to be seen, either fresh or old. Much as I hate to admit it, he’s never set foot on this ground. It doesn’t bode well for our present course, and with the clock ticking on seven potential victims, we can’t be wasting our time on dead ends.
If it were just me and Jimmy, we’d probably skip over this dirt path and move to the next one. But we have baggage today in the form of two Clallam County detectives, and illusions must be maintained.
The air is crisp with winter when we set out—just enough chill to give our exhaled breath a misty hue that lingers a moment and then vanishes; angel’s breath, my mother calls it. Had I known this was going to be the last pleasant moment of the day, I might have walked more slowly and breathed more deeply … had I known.