Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13)

by Todd Borg

  TWENTY-ONE

  Felicite and Diamond left. Adam woke up and, as Felicite predicted, was confused. He looked around at the room. Blondie was excited. She licked his face and pawed at him. She made his adjustment to strange surroundings much easier.

  Adam didn’t remember my name, but as I spoke to him, it seemed he started to remember me. He continued to lie in bed for half an hour as we talked, then he sat up.

  “I had a seizure,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “You saw it?” He looked very uncomfortable.

  “Yes. It wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about. I felt bad that you had to go through it.”

  Adam pet Blondie as he seemed to stare at the wall.

  In soft words, he said, “If I were religious, I’d think this is how God is punishing me.”

  “What makes you think you should be punished?”

  “I’ve done bad things.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Just… stuff.”

  “Lots of people have done bad things in their lives,” I said. “Doesn’t mean they should always be punished. Sometimes just their understanding that it was bad is enough to bring a bit of justice to the world.”

  Adam didn’t respond.

  After a bit, I said, “If you want to talk about it, I’m a good, non judgemental ear.” I felt bad as soon as I said it because I realized that it wasn’t necessarily true. If Adam confessed to a minor crime, I might ignore it. But if he confessed to a bad crime like murder, I would turn him in.

  But Adam went silent and said no more.

  Eventually, he became less morose and more like the Adam I’d met before his seizure.

  I re-explained about the safe house and showed him around the place once again and reminded him that he could come and go as he liked. He was quiet, but it seemed that he understood.

  I found a pizza in the freezer and made a meal. I knew Adam could easily eat the whole thing, so I had just a single piece to be sociable as I explained that Felicite was called back to the Bay Area by her boss, and that I had to leave. When it seemed that he was cognizant of his situation, I gave him my card with my numbers, and Spot and I left.

  When I got down Kingsbury Grade, I called the SLT police and got put through to Mallory.

  “Commander,” I said when he answered, “I’m hoping for some kind of an intro to the city plow drivers.”

  “We’ve already grilled them,” he said. “But maybe you can learn something new. Hold on.” He put me on hold. “Here’s the number,” he said when he came back. He gave it to me, and I wrote it down. “Brann Crosen is the guy who more or less organizes the city’s drivers,” Mallory said. “You probably recognize that name.”

  “Sorry, but no.”

  “After Brann Crosen was hired by the city, there was suddenly national press coverage about him with regard to a lawsuit against his former employer in SoCal, a construction company. Turns out Crosen had quit the company after just two days on the job. He claimed he’d been the victim of harassment aimed at new employees.”

  “Like a fraternity hazing?”

  “Yeah. So his lawyer brought a civil suit, charging the construction company with intentional infliction of emotional distress, all of which supposedly happened the first two days on the job.”

  “From the press coverage that resulted, I assume that Crosen won the lawsuit.”

  “And got an award of a hundred big ones.”

  “Nice pay for two days’ work,” I said.

  “No kidding.” Mallory’s anger was obvious. “Anyway, be aware of who you’re calling on. That guy would sell his mother to a pet food manufacturer if he got a good price.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Mallory said.

  “What’s that?”

  “There was mention in the initial press coverage that Crosen had changed his name. I don’t recall if they followed that up or if anyone knew what name he grew up with. But you might want to know if you end up looking into his background.”

  “Got it.” I dialed the number Mallory had given me.

  “Brann Crosen,” a voice said.

  “My name’s Owen McKenna. I’m an investigator working with the SLTPD. I need to speak to someone about your highway snowblowers.”

  “The rotaries? What about them? We have seven street maintenance crew. We have five equipment maintenance crew. We have a code enforcement officer. We have seasonal employees. We have graders, plows, dump trucks, rotaries. If you have a problem with a ticket or a towed vehicle, your best plan is to keep your vehicle off city streets. That simple. Keep the street clean, we don’t get mean. Do the right thing, we won’t ding your bling.”

  He was a fast talker, and he wasn’t going to make it easy to butt in. So I made it harsh.

  “Got it,” I said. “I’m calling about the man and woman one of your machines chewed up and spit out at the snow dump.”

  He went silent for a bit. “That’s just an urban legend.”

  “It happens to be a true story.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  I continued, “It’ll be less talked about if you talk to me. I’m easy when you help. You want to obstruct, I’ll have Commander Mallory call the mayor and the city manager and tell them how helpful Brann Crosen is to justice in this town.”

  Another pause. “What can I help you with?”

  “I want to know about rotary security.”

  “We don’t have any rotary security. We use them as needed and park them in the city yard when we’re done. Not like somebody is going to steal a fifty-thousand-pound snowblower with the city logo painted on it.”

  “If one of your employees didn’t borrow it for a little moonlighting, then I’d like to get your input on that. Tell me where to meet you in fifteen minutes.”

  More silence on the phone.

  “Or Mallory can set up an appointment at the PD. Maybe they assemble a Grand Jury and grill you for a few weeks.”

  “I’m at the yard on Industrial Avenue,” he said. He told me about the fence gate that looked locked with a padlock but really wasn’t.

  “See you in a few,” I said.

  I parked on the street, told Spot to be good, removed the unlocked padlock from its hasp, pushed through a rusted gate, and walked into the yard. There was a pole building open at the sides where there would normally be walls. I could hear Frank Sinatra singing “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”

  The place was a boneyard of large, rusted snow removal equipment, old hydraulic hoses and pumps, snow blades with broken mounts, bent impeller wheels, a transmission up on concrete blocks, an engine hoist, and a sand and salt spreader that was designed to be bolted onto the rear of a dump truck. Just to the side of the roofed area were two dump trucks that were next to a six-wheel grader that was missing a wheel, which was next to a rotary plow. The rotary was the size of a small train locomotive. Its huge corroded auger looked dangerous even with the machine turned off.

  Frank’s song was coming from a boombox over in one corner of the yard where a slim guy in his mid-thirties was working on a large, old differential and axle. He saw me and walked over.

  “May I to help you?” He had a touch of Mexican accent.

  “I’m looking for Brann Crosen.”

  “Oh. I am Emilio. Señor Crosen is to work in the small of the offices.” He gestured.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Emilio walked back to his work and his boombox.

  A man came out of a metal-clad building at the corner of the yard.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “Owen McKenna. We talked on the phone.”

  He wasn’t a huge guy, but he obviously worked out with the aid of steroids. He stood about 5-8, and was broad enough at the chest that I guessed he could slap three forty-fives on each end of the bar and press three sets of six reps each. He looked at me the way a lion looks at a giraffe, a predator gauging his superiority over a larger but older
and less capable animal. He knew I would be no threat if he had the rest of the gym-rats pride around him. But running solo made him wary. He didn’t speak. Up close, I saw that he used a small touch of eyeliner on his eyes. Maybe there was some eyebrow shaping as well. He was clean shaven except for a little U-shaped line of hair that went from the corners of his mouth down and around the bottom of his chin. The effect didn’t seem especially flattering, but what did I know. Maybe it was part of the body-builder thing. Maybe it drove body-builder groupies wild.

  I pointed at the rotary. “How many of these blowers do you have?”

  “Total? Or how many that work?”

  “Working.”

  “Three. And one of the working three has a permanent case of the flu. Drive engine works great, but the blower engine gets emotional each time we use it. Lately, it’s been running sixty forty against cooperation.” He pointed out toward Emilio. “That’s why we’ve got the Hispanic guy. He can make any engine run.”

  “Where are they now?”

  He pointed to the one in front of me. “This is the one that doesn’t work. It has more problems than we can fix. But buying new is out of the question.” He patted the machine on the side of its intake housing. “These babies are spendy as a yacht.”

  Crosen turned and pointed to the far corner of the yard. “That one over there works, but it’s waiting on another set of shear pins, and we ran out. The distributor sent pins for a hardware store blower. What were they thinking. The one with the flu is sidelined over on Emerald Bay Road. Fred’s got the third working rotary up on Keller as we speak. Nice days like this give us a chance to catch up and clear out berms. Late April can still bring on serious dumps, so we don’t let up until June.”

  “Do you know which rotary was used on the two victims?”

  “We never noticed any rotary out of place. Everything’s been business as usual for the last many weeks. I won’t agree that one of our rotaries was the culprit. And anyway, the cops sent two guys around here to take samples or swabs or whatever you call it off the machines. Looking for DNA, I guess. I never heard that they found anything.”

  “The act of blowing snow kind of continuously cleans the machines out, doesn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “Probably.”

  “Do you ever clean them in any other way?”

  “Sometimes when we accidentally scoop up mud and other debris, we hose them out.”

  “So a machine could chew up a person and not show it after, right?”

  “I s’pose.”

  “Are there any rotaries around the south end of Tahoe that don’t belong to the city?”

  “Most don’t. Douglas County hires private snow removal for their roads over on the Nevada side. Seems to me their contractor usually has one or two working the Nevada side all season. But the main rotary inventory belongs to Caltrans. They’ve got thirty-six of them for District Three, which includes Echo Summit and Donner Summit. Of those, quite a few rotate through the SLT sub shop.”

  “Do you know all of your drivers personally?”

  “The city drivers, of course. Caltrans drivers, no, although I’ve met some.”

  “Have any of the city drivers ever been in trouble? Drug problems? Money problems?”

  “Look, a guy who spends his nights crawling snow berms in a machine that kills your hearing and shakes your brain ’til your fillings fall out, isn’t your typical soccer-coaching, church-going guy who takes his mother-in-law out to breakfast once a week. Even so, we’ve got drivers with families. A couple of them even go to church.”

  I could still hear Emilio’s boombox. Frank was now singing “New York, New York.”

  “What about Caltrans drivers?” I asked.

  “Like I said, I’ve met some. But there’s a lot of guys. A woman, too, according to what I’ve heard. Although I can’t imagine what kind of woman would want to drive one of these beasts. Yeah, the power’s a rush, but the work sucks. You’re constantly staring through a fogged-over windshield that’s scratched and dulled, and you usually work during storms when you can barely see where you’re going, and you mostly work at night when traffic and pedestrians are minimal, and you have to concentrate every second to make sure you don’t hit someone walking their dog or some kid who’s got earbuds cranked up so loud that they couldn’t hear a ship’s foghorn ten feet away. The stress from all that is crushing.” Crosen paused. “Anyway, you could check with the Caltrans dorm here on the South Shore. They’ve got eighteen beds. A bunch of guys room and board there during snow removal season.”

  “Where is that dorm?”

  “At the Caltrans maintenance station out in Meyers. They’ve got eight rotaries based out of that location, plus plow trucks, graders, sanders, loaders. Kind of like us only a lot bigger.”

  “In your opinion, if someone wanted to borrow a rotary for a short mission, how would they do it? Would they need to steal a key to the yard and sneak in at night or what?”

  Crosen was shaking his head before I finished the sentence.

  “It doesn’t work like that. The world of snow removal doesn’t have security like the TSA at airports. Sure, we try to keep track of our operations. But we send our drivers out night and day. They have a territory and a general plan of attack. But they need to adjust their route according to conditions. If they come upon a pile-up, they don’t just sit there waiting for two hours until the wreckers clear it. There’s too much work to do. So they change their plan and keep working. If they get stuck and their cell phone battery is dead from when they were lying in slush trying to fix a broken tire chain, or their machine is down from scooping up a manhole cover, they leave the rotary in the street and walk for help. Maybe they remember to lock the driver’s door. Or maybe they’re driving the one without door locks. There’s no GPS tracking on these old rotaries. The city can’t afford to know everything about every rotary at every hour. But the idea of someone taking one? That’d be like stealing a rhinoceros. Who’d want to? Whatever you wanted a rhino for, there’d have to be a lot easier way.”

  “Nevertheless, if someone saw an opportunity to borrow a rotary, use it as a murder weapon, and then put it back where he found it, it’s possible that no one would even know. Someone could have even taken it out of this yard, for example. Right?”

  Crosen was shaking his head. “You’re suggesting something that is technically possible. But practically, I don’t buy it. You’d have to have a lot of stars lined up to get away with it.” Crosen’s voice had risen, his agitation pronounced.

  I was thinking about the timeline for the rotary murders. The previous day, Sanford Burroughs had told me that Darla had gone to work four days before and didn’t return. I said to Crosen, “Can you look at your schedule for the period of three to five days ago and see if there were any rotaries near the snow dump?”

  “Probably,” he said. He turned and walked to a little metal shed that was tucked under a corner of the big open-sided pole building. I followed. We went inside. He pulled a homemade schedule pad off his desk and flipped back two pages. “Yeah, we had a rotary near the snow dump on each of those days. We also had a grader doing cleanup on the streets near the snow dump.”

  “What’s cleanup?”

  “After a storm, we attempt to clear all streets within twenty-four hours. If no other storms are on track for a follow-up dump, we go out and scrape the streets a second time to pick up ice and snow that’s loosened in the sun, and we move the berms over another notch to widen the streets. When the streets are cleaned and the snow is bermed as high as the graders can push it, then we send out the rotaries. Only after the rotaries go through is our city back to the way we want it.”

  “Could one of your rotaries have been left unattended near the snow dump?”

  “Sure, although that would be unusual.”

  “How hard is it to drive a rotary?”

  “I know what you’re really wondering,” Crosen said. “Could your average Joe hop up into the cab on one of these thin
gs and drive it away? The answer is that it wouldn’t be easy. Someone who has heavy equipment experience could figure out how to start the engines and shift. But learning how to drive and steer and run the blower and control two engines is a specialty skill. You would either need experience, or you’d have to have someone explain it in great detail.”

  “Could one research it? Study it online or something?”

  “I suppose it’s possible, but it seems unlikely. Here, take a look for yourself.”

  He walked me over to the parked rotary. “Go ahead, climb up the ladder and look inside. The door’s open.”

  So I did. The only thing I recognized was the steering wheel. There were knobs and levers and sliders and switches and dials and gauges and odometer-styled readouts.

  One item looked especially foreign.

  I called down to Crosen. “What’s this lever?” I pointed and leaned sideways so he could see.

  “That’s your rear steering joystick. You use it to set your crab angle. Four-wheel steering.”

  Despite the cockpit’s complexity, it looked primitive. The machine was obviously very old. The glass on two separate dials was broken, fogged by a wavy bead of silicone glue. One switch was held in place with duct tape, another with yellow filament tape crispy with age. The metal dash had torn as if from flexing deep within the interior of the machine. The vinyl seat was cracked with exposed foam shedding yellow powder like dander.

  I backed out of the door and climbed back down.

  Crosen was gone. I looked around and saw him going back into the office in the metal building.

  Over on Emilio’s boombox, Frank had switched to “What Kind Of Fool Am I?”

  I walked over and stuck my head in the door. “One more question, please. You ever hear of a woman named Scarlett Milo?”

  “No,” Crosen said, not paying much attention. He was bent over the desk, looking at a yellow slip of paper, like what you get on a triplicate form where the top copy is white, the next is yellow, and the last is pink. He was frowning.

  “Find something?” I said.