Standing near the back of the room, Mack listened impatiently to what seemed like time-wasting bickering. He was almost ready to kidnap Tommy if he had to and go after the guy himself. It felt like every second counted.
Although it certainly felt longer to Mack, the various departments and personalities agreed quickly, and unanimously, to set out in pursuit just as soon as a few arrangements could be made. Although there weren’t many ways to drive out of the area-and roadblocks were being set up immediately to prevent this-there was a very real concern that a skilled hiker could pass undetected into the Idaho wilderness to the east or Washington state to the north. While officials in the towns of Lewiston, Idaho and Clarkston, Washington were being contacted and notified of the situation, Mack quickly called Nan to give her an update and then left with Tommy.
By now he had only one prayer left: “Dear God, please, please, please take care of my Missy. I just can’t right now.” Tears traced their way down his cheeks and then spilled off onto his shirt.
By 7:30 p.m. the convoy of patrol cars, FBI SUVs, pickups with dogs in kennels, and some Ranger vehicles headed up the Imnaha Highway. Instead of turning east on to the Wallowa Mountain Road, which would have taken them directly into the National Reserve, they stayed on the Imnaha and headed north. Eventually they took the Lower Imnaha Road and finally Dug Bar Road into the Reserve.
Mack was glad he was traveling with someone who knew the area. It seemed at times that Dug Bar Road went in all directions simultaneously. It was almost as if whoever had named these roads had run out of ideas, or simply got tired or drunk and began naming everything Dug Bar just so he could go home.
The roads, with frequent narrow switchbacks edging steep drop-offs, became even more treacherous in the pitch dark of night. Progress slowed to a crawl. Finally, they passed the point where the green pickup had last been seen, and a mile later came to the junction where NF 4260 went farther north-northeast and NF 250 headed southeast. There, as planned, the caravan split into two, with a small group heading north up the 4260 with Special Agent Wikowsky, while the rest, including Mack, Emil, and Tommy, went southeast on the 250. A few difficult miles later, this larger group split again; Tommy and a dog truck continuing down the 250 where, according to the maps the road would end, and the rest taking the more easterly route through the park on NF 4240 down toward the Temperance Creek area.
At this point all search efforts slowed even more. The trackers were now on foot and backed up by powerful floodlights while they looked for signs of recent activity on the roads-anything that might suggest the particular area they were examining was something other than a dead end.
Almost two hours later and moving at a snail’s pace toward the end of 250, a call came in to Dalton from Wikowsky. Her team had caught a break. About ten miles from the junction where they had separated, an old unnamed road left the 4260 and headed straight north for almost two miles. It was barely visible and deeply potted. They would either have missed it entirely or ignored it, except that one of the trackers had flashed his floodlight off a hubcap less than fifty feet from the main road. Out of curiosity he retrieved it, and under the covering of road dust found it splattered with specks of green paint. The hubcap had probably been lost when the truck had tussled with one of the many deep potholes strewn in that direction.
Tommy’s group immediately turned back the way they had come. Mack didn’t want to let himself begin to hope that perhaps, by some miracle, Missy might still be alive, especially when everything he knew told him otherwise. Twenty minutes later, another call from Wikowsky; this time to tell them they had found the truck. Choppers and search planes would never have seen it from the sky, covered as it was under a carefully built lean-to of limbs and brush.
It took Mack’s crew almost three hours to reach the first team and by then it was all over. The dogs had done the rest, uncovering a descending game trail that led more than a mile into a small hidden valley. There they found a rundown little shack near the edge of a pristine lake barely half a mile across, fed by a cascading creek a hundred yards away. A century or so earlier this had probably been a settler’s home. It had two good-size rooms; enough to house a small family. Since that time, it had most likely served as an occasional hunter’s or poacher’s cabin.
By the time Mack and his friends arrived, the sky was beginning to show the grays of predawn. A base camp had been set up well away from the battered little cabin in order to preserve the crime scene. The moment Wikowsky’s group had found the place, dog trackers had been sent out in different directions to try and locate a scent. Occasionally, the baying indicated that they had found something, only to have it disappear again. Now they were all returning to regroup and plan the day’s strategy.
Special Agent Samantha Wikowsky was sitting at a card table doing some map-work and drinking a large dripping bottle of water when Mack walked up. She offered him a grim smile, which he didn’t return, and an extra bottle, which he accepted. Her eyes were sad and tender but her words were all business.
“Hey, Mack.” She hesitated. “Why don’t you pull up a chair?”
Mack didn’t want to sit down. He needed to do something to stop his stomach from churning. Sensing trouble, he stood and waited for her to continue.
“Mack, we found something, but it’s not good news.”
He fumbled for the right words. “Did you find Missy?” It was the question that he didn’t want to hear the answer to, but desperately needed to know.
“No, we didn’t find her.” Sam paused and started to stand up. “But, I do need you to come and identify something we found down in that old shack. I need to know if it was-” she caught herself, but it was too late, “I mean, if it is hers.”
His gaze went to the ground. He again felt a million years old, almost wishing he could somehow turn himself into a big unfeeling rock.
“Oh, Mack, I’m so sorry,” Sam apologized, standing up. “Look, we can do this later if you like. I just thought…”
He couldn’t look at her and even found it difficult to come up with words that he could speak without falling apart. He could feel the dam about to burst again. “Let’s do it now,” he mumbled softly. “I want to know everything there is to know.”
Wikowsky must have signaled the others because, although Mack didn’t hear anything, he suddenly felt Emil and Tommy each take one of his arms as they turned and followed the special agent down the short path to the shack. Three grown men, arms locked in some special grace of solidarity, walking together, each one toward his own worst nightmare.
A member of the forensic team opened the door of the shack to let them in. Generator-powered lighting illuminated every part of the main room. Shelving lined the walls, an old table, a few chairs, and an old sofa that someone had hauled in with no little effort. Mack immediately saw what he had come to identify and, turning, crumpled into the arms of his two friends and began to weep uncontrollably. On the floor by the fireplace lay Missy’s torn and blood-soaked red dress.
For Mack, the next few days and weeks became an emotion-numbing blur of interviews with law enforcement and the press, followed by a memorial service for Missy with a small empty coffin and an endless sea of faces, all sad as they paraded by, no one knowing what to say. Sometime during the weeks that followed, Mack began the slow and painful merging back into everyday life.
The Little Ladykiller, it seemed, was credited with taking his fifth victim, Melissa Anne Phillips. As was true in the other four cases, authorities never recovered Missy’s body, even though search teams had scoured the forest around the shack for days after its discovery. As in every other instance, the killer had left no fingerprints and no DNA. He’d left no useful evidence anywhere, only the pin. It was as if the man were a ghost.