The one person who did know kept moving.
Dressed in just shorts, a sweatshirt, and shoes he says were two sizes too small, Colt claims he hiked for four days with no food, subsisting on two bottles of Gatorade. Toppenish Mountain east of the landing site resembles parts of the Afghan Central Highlands. Instead of the Khyber Pass, though, Colt had access to roadways cut by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For the first day and a half even the weather cooperated, offering him unseasonably warm temperatures 20 degrees above average. After that, it stayed a balmy 60 during daylight, but fell to below freezing at night. Colt says he hiked thirty miles to the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railway, where he hopped a freight to Oregon, jumped off, stole a car, and drove it to Reno, Nevada. Colt says he spent most of the winter in Reno, staying with a friend.
Chapter 4
Meanwhile, back on the Wild West’s watery frontier, the residents of Orcas Island woke on November 12 to a big breakfast of WTF?
As soon as he’d gotten the call from the state police, Bob Rivers phoned his friend and plane mechanic, Geoff Schussler, and asked him to go check the hangar. Schussler found a whole lot of empty where the Cessna should have been.
Two San Juan County sheriff’s deputies responded to the call. Schussler had taken great pains not to touch anything, but he says the deputies shrugged it off, giving a cursory look and telling him that “there weren’t any good surfaces” to check for prints. Schussler looked around at a lot of smooth metal and hard plastic that the thief had to touch to break in, find the key, and get the plane out of the hangar. “This was an airplane,” he says, “not a stolen bike… I thought they’d take it more seriously.”
If they had successfully lifted a print, the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office would have instantly found that their suspect had been in the system for a very long time considering his age. They would have gotten an earful about him and his MO from their law enforcement brethren down in Island County. With that information, they might have figured out that this wasn’t Colt’s first Orcas crime by a long shot. As it was, though, it’d be nine months and many more local crime scenes and victims before they even knew whom they were dealing with.