“Don’t worry about Lindsey,” he said, clapping a strong little hand on my shoulder. “You just do what you have to do. You’re in a war, my friend.”
31
WE STOOD near the snow-dusted footpath where Marlon Voss had died, watching as the Nevada County sheriffs cleared the scene. A surprisingly large group had gathered behind the yellow tape, heavily bundled against the Sierra Nevada cold. Two old volunteer deputies in Day-Glo green vests talked solemnly with the onlookers. A creek rushed past, loud. Smell of cedar and pine. I’d paid the taxi driver to wait and I could see him parked along the road, checking his phone.
Voss’s body was gone and the decomposed granite trail was thoroughly stained with his blood. One detective, two uniformed deputies, and a crime scene tech were the only law enforcement left. They didn’t seem to mind us being there. The tech squatted to take pictures of a small red flag that had been poked into the trail eight or so feet from where Voss had died.
“What caliber?” asked Taucher, her words a frosted exhale past the raised collar of her peacoat.
“A nine-millimeter.”
“How many?”
The tech looked us over. Big-faced, freckled, and young. “Just this one. I’m surprised he left it here.”
“Maybe it was too dark,” said Joan, looking up at parallel ridgelines of the canyon.
“Sunrise was seven nineteen,” he said. “But that eastern ridge blocks first light. So it’s more like seven thirty right here. Enough light to see a shell casing? Hard to say.”
“Did he see anyone?” I asked. “The man who found the body?”
“You should talk to a deputy,” he said, swiping the flag off the ground and standing. “I’m not even sworn. But I can tell you one thing—this is the most sickening killing I’ve ever seen.”
Dave Bridgeman, the detective, had spoken to Taucher earlier by phone. He confirmed that Voss had been shot at least once and beheaded, neither of which had been confirmed yet to the media, or to Voss’s widow or children.
“But we couldn’t get him covered before two more runners saw the whole gruesome mess,” said Bridgeman. “Everyone’s buzzing about it and the media’s all over us. The guy who found the body went into shock and we took him to Memorial.”
“I need to see him,” said Taucher.
“Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital on Glasson. You can’t miss it.”
She drew her phone, voice-dialed, and waited for the call to go through. I looked at the bloody swatch of gravel and listened to the creek roar past. This was once serious gold country. I tried to picture big lazy gold nuggets rolling downstream along the creek bottom. Tried to picture anything but Voss. Snowflakes slowly fell.
“What’s a PI doing here with the FBI?” asked the detective.
“Trying to help a friend,” I said.
Taucher turned her back to us, apparently in disagreement with someone.
Bridgeman put his hands into the pockets of his winter jacket. “I’m told there was something down in Bakersfield I might want to know about.”
“Ask Joan.”
“Don’t think I’d learn much,” he said with a small smile.
Joan’s voice was rising. I thought a moment, decided to take a chance on doing a good deed for what seemed like a good cop. What did I know? “Bakersfield PD detective Marcy Brown is a reasonable sort. You can use my name, but it might backfire.”
“I understand.”
* * *
—
The lobby of Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital bristled with reporters and camera crews trying to beat the cold. Taucher walked through them with her head down. I got to the elevator first and held the reporters off while Joan stepped in.
In a second-floor room sat the man who had discovered Voss at first light. He looked to be in his late seventies, probably trim and fit beneath the layers for warmth. He wore a hospital robe with a parka over it, and a fresh pair of light blue pajama bottoms. Patient-issue white terry-cloth slippers. There was a nurse in the room with him and a sheriff’s deputy outside the closed door.
He rose and shook my hand. “Bill Immel,” he said. “And you are?”
I introduced myself and Agent Taucher, whom Immel scrutinized with sharp eyes. He had a handsome but pugnacious face and a head of brown-gray hair.
“Sorry, I pissed my pants,” he said, pulling on the legs of his baggy blue pajamas. “Haven’t done that since the day Oswald shot Kennedy. But not because of Dallas. I was in a recon Huey over Quang Tri and the gooks hit us with fifty-caliber. That gets your attention.”
The nurse was a petite Filipina who gave Immel a flat look as she wrapped an old-fashioned blood-pressure cuff around his upper arm.
“I like you, Alma,” he said, sitting on the bed. Alma squeezed the rubber inflator. “Sorry about the ‘gook’ remark. I’m not racist. But I’ll tell you two, when I saw that man on the running trail with his head lopped off I fell to my knees and peed. It just happened. I was in the middle of a good run, too. Who came in behind you just now?”
Taucher and I both looked back at the closed door, then to Bill Immel.
“There’s no one,” said Taucher.
“Behind you, I said.”
“No one, Mr. Immel,” said Joan.
Alma released the pressure and took the reading.
Immel squinted at each of us knowingly. “Have you made an arrest yet?”
“No, Mr. Immel,” said Taucher. “Did you see anyone else on the path this morning? Before or after you found Mr. Voss?”
“I did not,” said Immel. “I’m always one of the first ones out there. Along with the decedent.”
“So you had seen Mr. Voss before?” Taucher asked.
“All the time. Always running opposite directions. Nodded but never spoke.”
Alma hung the pressure cuff over one shoulder and entered something on her tablet. “Still high, Mr. Immel. You lay back on the bed and relax.”
“I will not,” said Immel. “I’m trying to help these people. So listen up. It was seven twenty-eight a.m. when I found him. I don’t know why I looked at my watch, but I did. Kneeling there, my heart was beating very hard and my whole body went cold. There was nothing I could do. His head . . . Kay always used to tell me . . . well, a lot of things.”
“Did you hear a gunshot?” asked Taucher.
“No. The path runs along the creek. Loud with all the run-off. The first part of the month was warm for these parts.”
Taucher nodded. “Did you hear or see a vehicle when you were kneeling beside the body?”
“I saw a vehicle parked off the road. Sometimes the runners park there in summer, when it’s crowded. It seemed out of place there, because this morning it wasn’t crowded at all.”
“What kind?” asked Joan.
“Toyota 4Runner,” said Bill. “Two thousand two, gray. I’ve got one, too. Love it. Oh, and I almost forgot—there was someone behind the wheel. Possibly a woman.”
Taucher and I traded looks while Immel peered at us. “You’re like watching two lemons that just lined up on a slot machine,” he said. “But the third lemon never comes. Meaning you don’t pay off. Meaning you don’t tell me anything.”
“Describe her,” said Taucher.
“You try describing a smudge behind a windshield two hundred feet away with snow coming down,” said Immel.
“Did you touch the body?” asked Taucher. “Mr. Voss, I mean?”
“No,” said Immel. “I saw no profit in that. I think that’s the whole point of these beheaders, to make you feel helpless.”
“That’s an excellent synopsis of the terrorist mind-set,” said Joan.
“Jihadis in Grass Valley?”
“I did not say that,” said Joan, giving me a “me and my big mouth” look.
“Did you call nine-one-one?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Did you have your phone with you?”
“Always. Jacket pocket. One that snaps.”
“So you were there when the first deputies arrived?”
“I feel like I still am there,” said Bill Immel. “Blood has such a strong smell, especially that much of it. His eyes were half open. Dreamlike. Go away! Alma? I think I will lay back for a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”
He sighed and stood and hovered by the bed while Alma turned down the sheets and propped up some pillows. “Were you serious about jihadis, Agent?”
“We haven’t ruled anything out yet,” said Taucher. “But I very much want to thank you for your help.”
Immel worked his bulky layered body into the bed and Alma covered him with a sheet and blanket. “Warm enough, Bill?”
“Just a chill.”
“You would be more comfortable out of those clothes.”
“I’m keeping my clothes on.”
“Hot soup?”
“That would be real good,” said Immel. “I wish I could stop seeing what I saw. But you can’t unsee things. If enough people in America saw what I saw this morning, it would be bad for the country. Very bad. Productivity would go down.”
I set a business card on his bed tray and told him he could call me anytime for any reason.
“I’m only seventy-eight,” he said. “I’m strong as a goat and my mind is not wholly gone. But something changed back there on that running trail. I am changed.”
“You are still in shock, Bill,” said Alma. “You eat soup and you feel better.”
“Bring it on, beautiful.”
I found us a way out through the ER so we wouldn’t have to deal with the reporters again. Out back on the entrance ramp, a Nevada County Fire and Rescue truck idled in a pool of pale exhaust. Our taxi waited out front.
Taucher stopped under a snow-laced pine tree to take a call. I watched the snow and hoped it would stay light enough for takeoff. The airport was a few hundred feet downslope and I thought my chances were good.
Taucher shoved her phone into her coat pocket and gave me a look as cold as the day. “Nothing from Ben Azmeh.”
We stood there for a long minute in the dainty snow. Letting the silence be.
“This guy’s heading south for Lindsey,” I said.
“We’d be foolish to think anything different.”
I tried to subtract what else we knew from all we didn’t know, to reduce things to the essential: a ten-hour drive from where we stood to Fallbrook, where Lindsey was hunkered down with Zeno and the Irregulars. So, if Caliphornia had left here promptly after killing Voss, he’d make Fallbrook by five thirty in Sunday traffic.
“And when he gets to San Diego,” I said, “he’ll want to see a helpful, friendly face.”
By the time the taxi driver got us within sight of the Nevada County Airpark, Taucher was calling in the 4Runner’s stolen plates to the California Highway Patrol, requesting an all-units-be-on-the-lookout notification and a message on every Amber Alert emergency-message sign in every county of the state.
It was too late to tell her they wouldn’t do the Amber Alert, though she probably knew this already. Amber Alert is for missing or endangered children—period. There’s Silver Alert for missing oldsters and a Blue Alert for cops in danger. But no alert for someone who has just beheaded a citizen on his morning run.
Taucher started to argue, voice rising. In the rearview mirror I saw the cabbie look back at her.
But to my surprise, she silenced herself, listened for a long while—breathing like a bull in a rodeo pen—then thanked them and hung up.
“We got the damned BOLO at least,” she said.
As we pulled into the tower I called Burt and Lindsey and put them on my own personal Ford Alert. Lindsey sounded worried, but Burt said they were “ready for anything.”
Next I talked to Clevenger, who quickly agreed to hover one of his drones over the casitas and monitor the video feed for intruders. Then he apologized for the lucky shot in Ping-Pong. I checked in at the tower and we trotted out to Hall Pass 2 through pinpricks of snow.
32
HECTOR PADILLA’S HOUSE, at twilight: dark inside but the porch light on. If we were right about Caliphornia’s destination—and if he’d driven fast—he could be here in under an hour. We were parked half a block down from the house, shrouded by my blackout windows and a sycamore still trying to hold on to its big yellow leaves.
As darkness fell, most of the other houses on the block came alive with Christmas lights. Santa’s sleigh took off from a roof. A trio of lighted angels, winged and posed in song, stood on a lawn not far from us.
“Where would he be by now?” asked Taucher.
“North San Diego County. Maybe closer.”
Taucher had set her tablet on the floorboard, screen dimmed but angled optimistically up to her in case of a response from Ben Azmeh.
My phone stood upright in a cup holder, still logged on to Facebook, where we had followed Marlon Voss’s murder in Grass Valley. The online buzz was minor until the mainstream media caught Bill Immel leaving Sierra Nevada Memorial.
We watched the two-minute CNN video: Bill in a wheelchair in the hospital lobby, Alma behind him at the handles, and a uniformed guard trying to give Bill some space from the reporters. Hair awry, still bundled in his sweatshirt and parka. His mind wandered. He told about running almost every day, then this morning finding the headless body. He described the snow falling and the steam still rising from the bloody pool on the running path and the half-open eyes of the dead man. The reporter asked him how it felt to see such a thing.
Helpless and sick, Bill Immel answered. Then he said he’d forgotten the question.
“My dad got like that when he was about Bill’s age,” said Taucher. “Scattered. Scared. Lost his courage. Then dementia started to creep in. It really seemed to start when he fell from a ladder. Putting up Christmas lights. And the fall didn’t hurt him physically, according to the doctors. No concussion, no breaks, just a twisted ankle and a bruised shoulder. But it scared him. It made him think how fast things can change and what a hostile thing a commonplace ladder can be. And that’s what I saw in Bill Immel having to see Voss. Like falling off the ladder. You see something terrible, so fear rushes in, and you can’t easily get rid of it. And terrorists know that—one act makes a million fears. Tens of millions. Look at Nine-Eleven. Or the IS execution videos.”
A vehicle came down the street slowly, passed. I watched it in the rearview. Fog rolled in from the west.
On Facebook, Marlon Voss’s widow, Danella—apparently standing on the front porch of a home in lightly falling snow—said that her husband had been, “. . . a great husband and father. A great Air Force pilot. He was brave and patient and funny. He was the love of my life.” A twentysomething man who looked a lot like Marlon Voss appeared in the doorway behind her and gently pulled her back in.
Something in that moment got to me. The woman turning back into the house with her son. People and a house forever and terribly changed. The math was so wrong. Start with a brave and selfless doctor in Syria. Then a well-liked young man working as a landscaper in Bakersfield, a man with a lot of life still ahead of him. Now a pilot and his family. All of their relatives and friends. Next, a young mother? The math of vengeance, never balanced or even. Never finished. The scar on my forehead itched. I rubbed it.
A live local feed featured Nevada County sheriff’s detective Dave Bridgeman confirming that local Grass Valley resident Marlon Voss had been found beheaded on a running trail outside of town. No arrests had been made. He asked citizens to be alert to strangers and unusual activity but not to alter their daily routines. No, they did not recover a murder weapon, and he wouldn’t speculate on what specific type of weapon had been used.
Sacramento FBI spokesperso
n Minerva Dakis followed up, saying that they had found no evidence of this murder being a terrorist act, but the Bureau was not ruling anything out. She asked that anyone who had been in the area that morning report anything unusual, explaining that the first twenty-four hours are critical in crimes such as this. The FBI tip number ran as a footer across the screen.
“Minerva being there makes this look like a terror investigation,” said Taucher. “It’s the right call, though. It gives Caliphornia a stage to act upon. Puts his name on the playbill. But it puts pressure on him, too. We need the pressure.”
“He still hasn’t taken credit for Kenny or Voss,” I said.
“He will.”
There were several more Facebook posts and Tweets by Grass Valley residents. Some had stood behind the crime scene tape, posting videos and selfies as the sheriffs worked the murder site. Others had formed an ad hoc “Vigilance Committee” in the saloon of an old gold rush–era hotel—Victorian lamps and high-backed smoking chairs and bottles stacked behind the bar. The committee chairman said they were concerned that Voss’s murder could have been “terrorist in nature,” although the small Muslim community in Nevada County was known as peaceful and hardworking. He pointed out that there was also a “biker population,” though this didn’t seem like “their kind of crime.” Several of the Vigilance Committee members knew Marlon and Danella Voss, and spoke highly of them.
Taucher shook her head and sighed.
“Life is waiting, Joan.”
“How can you be so young and act so old?”
“Years of practice.”
She gave me her sharp-eyed predator’s once-over. “So what’s with that scar on your head? You touch it when things bug you. Then you furrow your brow like you’re expecting an explanation.”
“There’s a story behind it.”
“So cough it up.”
While we waited for Caliphornia to show, I told Taucher about my one pro bout. It took place in the then Trump 29 Casino down in Coachella, of all places, in 2005. This was when I was Roland “Rolling Thunder” Ford. Twenty-six years old, fighting heavyweight. I’d been out of the service for only a few weeks. Still thinking I was the world’s toughest Marine. I’d never been knocked down in a Marine Corps bout. I hadn’t lost life or limb in the hell of Fallujah. I’d never really been defeated at anything, in my own eyes, at least.
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