by Todd Borg
“He’ll be fine, eventually.”
“Thank God. I was so worried. I left messages at your office and cabin.”
“Sorry. Takes me awhile to return messages. Any chance we can get together today?”
“Sure. Where do you want to meet?”
I was thinking about risks to Glennie as she spoke. The killers had probably seen the draped car in Diamond’s back yard. Did one of them lift up the edge of the tarp to see the make and color? I thought it was safest to meet her away from the newspaper building, away from her house and away from Diamond’s Orange Flame. “Maybe we could meet at Tallac Estates?”
“Sure.”
“You know where the Baldwin Mansion is. Why don’t you park near there and walk toward Baldwin Beach. There’s a great place just off the trail.”
“Okay. Give me an hour,” Glennie said.
Glennie showed up just after Spot had found a pile of pine needles to lie on. She ran over to him. “Spot, you poor baby.” She pet him, careful to avoid his wound. He turned his head when she rubbed around his ears.
“I checked every death near Tahoe in the last few months and found one or two that you might want to look at,” Glennie said. She opened a file folder, pulled out the first paper and handed it to me.
I looked at her notes while she spoke.
“The first one is Monica Lakeman. She was thirty-nine years old, never married, no kids. She owns, I should say owned, a property management company specializing in vacation rentals. She was active in the Truckee business community, was on the Board of Directors at the Chamber of Commerce.”
“How’d she die?”
“There’s a long stairway down from the deck at one of her rentals near Tahoe City. It is a property she owned herself, and she took special pride in its maintenance. She was doing a last-minute inspection before a corporate group came from Miami. She fell down the stairs, hit her head and broke her neck.”
“She was alone at the time?”
“Supposedly. The coroner’s conclusion was that the broken neck from the fall killed her.”
“But there was a question about what caused the fall?” I said.
“Yes. The stairs were in good condition and there was nothing unusual that would cause a person to trip. She fell during daylight. There was no rain or anything else to make the stairs slippery.”
“They do any analysis?”
“Yes. The results were consistent with what would have happened in a typical fall. They found some skin and pant fibers on the third tread down and skin and makeup on the seventh tread down. There were abrasions on her knee and a bad scrape on her face.”
“Who inherited?”
“The company and her property are being sold. All proceeds go to a charity that specializes in helping disabled kids. Apparently, her only sibling was a disabled brother who died very young.”
“Not a promising case,” I said.
“No, but it fits what you asked for. A woman whose death could have been a murder.”
“Yes, it does.” My attention went to a plane doing big S-turns in the sky. It was a small, high-wing plane, white with blue stripes, probably a Cessna 150. I watched it for a minute, thinking back to my last flying escapade when I broke Jennifer’s mother out of the asylum on the Nevada desert.
The plane came out of its steep banking turn to the starboard, rolled over to port and arced the other direction. “You said you found another death?” I said.
“Yes, a strange one.”
“Who was it?”
“A banker named Eduardo Valdez. Forty-five years old. He was the senior loan officer at Fidelity Trust and Security in Incline Village. He was hit by a drunk driver at about one in the morning.”
“Happens all the time.”
“Not like this. The driver hit him on the Mt. Rose Highway about two-thirds of the way up from the desert to the Mt. Rose Ski Area.”
I realized it was not far from where Tyrone’s boss Tony Nova lived. “He was out walking the Mt. Rose Highway late at night? His car break down?”
“Not according to the driver. The guy said the victim wasn’t walking. Said he fell from the sky.”
“Some drunks are imaginative,” I said, laughing.
“I’ll say,” Glennie laughed with me. “That’s terrible, isn’t it. A prominent banker dies and we’re laughing about it like it was roadkill.”
“Yeah, but he was a prominent, flying banker. How’d they catch the drunk?”
“The guy called nine, one, one on his cell. He was waiting when the cops got there.”
“They find the banker’s car?”
“Yeah, it was at home in his garage.”
“Of course,” I said. “Who needs a car when you can fly?”
Glennie giggled and slugged me on the shoulder. “Stop it, you’re horrible.”
“The guy change his story after he sobered up?”
“No, that’s the thing. The next morning he stuck with the story. Said he was driving up the mountain, going slow because he’d had too much. It was dark and he didn’t want to miss any of the switchbacks. Next thing he knows, a body falls out of the sky in front of his car.” Glennie stifled another giggle. “The driver never changed his story. He’s still in jail in Reno in case you want to talk to him.”
“Eduardo have a family?”
“He divorced eight years ago, left his job at CitiBank and moved here. His ex stayed in New Jersey. No kids, just like Monica Lakeman. A socialite in Incline said she can’t imagine divorcing him. She gave him an eleven on the one-to-ten bachelor scale. She said, quote, he had M.E.L.S. coming out his ears.”
“M.E.L.S.?”
“My question, too. She said that’s how her Incline friends rate men. Money, Education, Looks, Style. The order is important. She said his death had to be some kind of accident. Like, he got a ride from someone who let him out to walk, then the drunk hit him on the road. She said there was no possible reason why anyone would want to kill him.”
“Except for excessive M.E.L.S.?” I said.
“Except for that,” Glennie said.
I stood up. “Glennie, I owe you.”
Glennie stood and walked over to where Spot was still sprawled on the mat of pine needles. He had assumed what I’d come to think of as the duct tape position, stretched out on his right side, bandaged side up, left front leg held out straight so that the elbow and shoulder joints didn’t flex.
Glennie bent down and pet Spot. “You don’t have to thank me,” she said. She came over and looked up at me. “Just don’t forget about me, okay?”
I knew what she meant. I was in love with a woman who wouldn’t commit to me. Yet, here was a good woman who would. “I won’t, Glennie.”
“Be good to Spot,” she said as she walked away.
THIRTY-FOUR
I got Spot folded back into the broken Karmann Ghia seat and we drove across town to the bike shop. It was getting late, but I still had errands to run before I went to my next hiding place.
“Hey,” Joey said when I walked in. “You get hold of Wheels on that guide thing you wanted?”
“Yes, I did. He was very helpful. Any idea where I could find Bobby Crash?”
“The snowboarder? I don’t know where he lives, but he works up at Squaw. You could check there.”
“Thanks. I also wanted to rent a mountain bike.”
“What happened, you crash yours?”
“No,” I said, thinking that I couldn’t risk picking it up at my cabin. “I’ve got a friend coming to visit and we wanted to go for a ride. He’s a tall guy like me, so whatever fits me will work.”
Joey scanned the rack. “I’ve got one large frame left. Lemme give it a turn through the parking lot, check the derailleur.”
He pulled the bike from the rack and rode it around the blacktop, shifting up and down through the gears. “Looks good,” he said as he braked to a stop.
“Let me adjust the seat post.” He wheeled it over next to me, opened the qui
ck-release and pulled the seat up to its highest position. “What do you think?”
I got on, put my foot on the pedal. “Feels good.”
Joey was staring at the little Karmann Ghia. “How you gonna get this bike home?” He walked over to the car. The passenger window was open. Spot had cranked his head around and rested his jaw on the door.
“Big dog,” Joey said as he gave Spot a pet.
“I thought I could lash the bike to the little luggage rack,” I said.
“Be like tying it to a paper clip,” he said.
I purchased some bungie cords and Joey found some foam padding. We jammed the padding under the pedal and the axle points, then lashed the bike down to the luggage rack. It was wobbly, but seemed to hold. I thanked him and left.
I stopped at the supermarket and bought a couple of days worth of food, human type and dog type. I found a small daypack to put it in.
My biggest concern was driving up the east shore past the driveway to my cabin without being seen. A Harlequin Great Dane in an orange Karmann Ghia was not the best way to be incognito. But I had no choice.
I made it unaccosted to the Spooner Lake Campground where I’d met Wheels Washburn. I parked in one of the less-visible spaces. There were other cars and pickups and campers around, but the only people I was aware of were making noise inside of a tent.
When you wear a pack on your front, the straps want to slip off your shoulders. So I put the daypack on my front first, followed by the backpack. The straps of the backpack held the straps of the front pack in place. Last, I pulled out the tarp and tied it in place over the car.
I climbed onto the bike, called to Spot, and pedaled into the woods. I stayed in the trees and headed back out toward the highway. Spot followed. He moved slowly.
Cars sped by on the highway. When a break came in the heavy traffic of summer tourists, I pedaled out of the woods and across the road.
There is an old Forest Service trail some distance away that heads down toward the lake. I angled through the woods toward it.
The east side of Tahoe gets only a third the moisture of the west side because it is farther from the Sierra Crest, the topographic feature that wrings precipitation from the clouds. As a result, the forest is much thinner and I was able to ride much of the way.
I was riding across an open meadow when I heard a familiar sound, a low drone from the sky. I looked up to see a plane, a blue and white Cessna 150 coming just over the treetops.
“Spot!” I called out. “Come!” I turned and pedaled fast to a stand of fir trees. I plowed into the boughs of the tree, falling purposefully to the side. My bike went down and I slid on my stomach up to the tree trunk like I was diving for second base.
“Spot!” I yelled again. He loped in after me, favoring his left front leg. I pulled him down under the thick branches as the plane came over the meadow.
Maybe I was being paranoid, but twice I’d underestimated the men pursuing me. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. It was the same plane that had circled overhead when I was talking to Glennie on the South Shore. If the killers were in the plane, Spot and I would be an easy shot with a rifle.
The plane went into a big S-turn. It looped around and came over the meadow twice. It continued on, back out over the treetops and disappeared. I waited, thinking about the banker falling from the sky. The drone of the plane eventually went silent.
“Okay, Spot,” I said, getting on the bike.
The old Forest Service road was rutted and overgrown. We followed it for a couple of miles as it angled down toward the lake. A half mile before the water, we came to a tree where a blaze mark had been cut decades before. We turned and followed a trail across a steep forested slope and through a boulder field. Just after we crossed a dry creekbed, we came to a broken-down structure that I’d discovered years before. The one-room cabin had been made of small logs. The roof had fallen in and the ground had eroded under one side, leading to the collapse of one of the walls. It remained a broken, three-sided structure with a great view of the lake.
I cleaned out the clutter of pine cones and fallen branches, laid out Diamond’s sleeping bag on the sand floor and set about making some dinner before it got completely dark.
I opened the dog food bag and let Spot eat out of it. I got Diamond’s stove fired up and heated a couple cans of soup directly in the cans. When we were done eating, Spot and I walked in the twilight down through the forest to the lake a half mile below. Spot walked into the water and drank for a long time. I splashed water on my face and drank from cupped hands.
It was dark as we walked up to our campsite. But the moon was brighter than the previous night. Back at the broken-down cabin, I showed Spot where to lie.
“C’mon, boy. We gotta share Diamond’s sleeping bag.”
At high altitude, it often gets down into the 30s during summer nights. Even if Spot weren’t half-shaved, his thin fur couldn’t keep him warm. I put the sleeping bag over the two of us. Our shelter had no roof. The stars twinkled through the branches of the Jeffrey pines. A cool breeze rolled down the slope from above. The birds had gone silent. I lifted my head and looked out at the lake. A single light moved across the water. No one knew where we were, not even Street. If the killer was as smart as I thought, he’d realize I wouldn’t let her know where I was staying. Thus, he couldn’t use her to get the information. But he could use her to force me to come in from the cold. The thought made me nauseous. I called her on my cell.
We spoke for fifteen minutes, each of us reassuring the other that we would be safe. Then we said goodnight.
It was getting late, but George Morrell, the psychologist, said evening consults were okay. He answered on the fourth ring.
“The killer called me,” I said. “I wondered if I could ask you about it.”
“Certainly.”
I told George about the attacks at my cabin and at Diamond’s house. I described the phone call just before Spot got shot and the other phone call where the killer said he owned Street’s and Spot’s and my future. When I was done, I said, “Any thoughts come to mind?”
George spoke slowly. “I don’t imagine I can add much to what you already know, but I’ll go through it anyway.
“Obviously, the assaults by gun suggest that these men are serious about killing you. Although, my guess is that you are primarily dealing with one individual.”
“You mean, one guy is calling the shots?”
“Yes. Only one guy is motivated to kill you. Any others who come along are support troops to the general. The fact that he is departing from methods that can look like accidents, or even from the handrail that can be easily destroyed by burning, makes it clear that he is getting desperate.”
“That’s why he brought help when he came to Diamond’s,” I said.
“Yes. Your pursuit of him is pushing him into riskier behavior. This is both good news and bad, the good being that these tactics make him more likely to get caught.”
“And the bad?”
“The bad being that you are much more likely to get killed. Think of the suicide bomber analogy. The less the killer cares about consequences to himself, the more success he has at his mission. And because you have a girlfriend, he is also likely to get at you through her, putting her in serious danger.
“As for the synthetic voice, if he really is mute for reasons of cancer or otherwise, this would be an excellent indication. I’m not familiar with the electronic device you describe, but my guess is that he can speak normally and is using it as a disguise.”
“You think I shouldn’t spend time trying to track down throat cancer victims?”
“Correct. Someone who uses an electronic larynx in real life would be loathe to speak during the commission of a crime. It would make them an obvious suspect.”
“I might be more successful looking at recent sales of electrolarynxes,” I said. “Better yet, I might look for an oncologist who specializes in throat tumors. One who also knew the young women
who died.”
“Yes,” Morrell said. “That’s the direction I’d take.”
A great idea, I thought, except that I’d been unsuccessful in learning anything about Faith and had only uncovered the barest bits of Glory’s life.
“Why do you think he is calling me?” I said.
“To taunt you. It gives him excitement, and it cranks up the tension so that killing you will be a bigger release for him.”
I thanked George for his help.
“Owen,” he said before he hung up.
“Yeah?”
“You don’t yet know why he killed the two young women. But you know why he wants you. Death is a game to him. He also appears to be shrewd and intelligent and, I think, entirely sane. I’ve seen that combination before.” He paused.
“You were going to say something else.”
“I don’t want to sound melodramatic. But this is the most dangerous kind of killer you can face. Unless you change your name and move away, he’s probably going to succeed in killing you. I can’t stress how careful you need to be.”
“Message received,” I said. “Thanks.”
In the middle of the night I woke up to a noise. Spot was awake, too. He didn’t growl, but his head was up, pointed toward the forest. I lay motionless and silent. My chest was tight, breaths short. The forest made little sounds. Spot listened. Five long minutes later, Spot put his head down. I tried to relax. I went over the Turner painting in my mind, hoping the focus would make me sleepy. Instead, my mental picture of the froth and fury of wave and wind made me more agitated.
Why would Turner voluntarily submit to such a dangerous stunt as being lashed to the mast in a storm? Was it because he wanted to confront his worst fears, drowning or freezing or being pummeled to death by the elements? Did he record the experience with paint and canvas so that future viewers could draw on his harrowing experience? Or was it, as Susan Sontag might argue, merely a depiction of nature’s fury? Nothing more than a snapshot of a weather phenomenon. Nothing that would throw illumination on what drives a sane man to kill two young women and possibly more, then target me.