by David Freed
“The tall guy’s name is Reza Jalali,” he said. “Owns a couple convenience stores in town. The other guy, I’ve never seen before.”
“Something hinky about that dude,” I said.
“Clearly, you don’t trust your fellow man, Mr. Logan.”
“I used to. Then I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who said that if you’re too open-minded, your brains fall out.”
Streeter smiled. I watched him dip a piece of bacon in the gravy, stuff the bacon in his mouth, and lick grease from his fingers. Back at the Tranquility House Bed-and-Breakfast, the Kavitches, Johnny and Gwen, would probably be serving up organic granola with reduced-fat yogurt and fresh fruit because that’s what B&B owners do—try to convince you that there’s something inherently healthier staying with them than at the Comfort Inn, where you cook your own waffles with premixed cups of “batter” that looks a lot like baby spit-up.
Streeter salted and peppered his biscuits and gravy. “So, what do you say? You think you could put a call in for me?”
I told him I’d think about it.
“Either way,” I said, “it’ll cost you a strip of bacon.”
“Knock yourself out.”
He slid his plate across the table.
Elevated triglycerides never tasted so good.
SNOW WAS coming down as I walked out of the restaurant. Big soft fluffy flakes that fell slowly through the pines, muffling all sound and washing all color from the morning. I used my arm to brush off the driver’s door on the Yukon, got in, started the engine and fired up the heater.
I figured there’d be little harm, making a call or two on Deputy Streeter’s behalf. I’ll admit, part of my motivation in helping him out was ego driven. I’d seen and done a thousand things in defense of my country. I’d been trained to compartmentalize those things, to keep secret from any and all but my fellow go-to guys the tactics, techniques, and procedures we exercised to do those things. But Streeter had been correct: I did know people in government who enjoyed access to restricted information, including Paul Horvath, an investigator with the FAA’s Flight Standards District Office in San Diego.
Horvath had been assigned to determine the cause of my near-fatal accident a few months earlier at San Diego’s Montgomery Airport. He’d concluded that an intentional act of sabotage had forced me to crash land the Ruptured Duck, and that the incident had been in no way my fault. That, however, hadn’t stopped the FAA from tormenting me for months afterward, what with the dozens of reports and sworn declarations I was compelled to submit just to keep my flight school certified and my pilot’s certificate intact.
I found Horvath’s card in my wallet and called him.
“Who?” Horvath said, yawning, half asleep.
“Cordell Logan.”
I’d forgotten it wasn’t yet 0700. It took him a few seconds to remember me.
“What time is it?”
I told him. Then I told him why I was calling.
“Let me make sure I have this correctly. You want me to give you confidential information from a restricted agency file?”
“Yes.”
“Without going through proper channels? Is that what you just asked me?”
“Proper channels could take weeks, Mr. Horvath. The information is needed in an ongoing police investigation, the murder of a young man in the mountains outside Lake Tahoe.”
“Mr. Logan, I’m as law and order as they come. I hope they find the killer and put him away. But what you’re asking me to do is to commit a crime, a very serious crime, not to mention jeopardize my career. I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”
I apologized for having called so early and signed off. Not without some reluctance, I then called my buddy, Buzz.
“This is not directory information, Logan,” Buzz grumbled over the phone. “Don’t you have any other friends who still work for Uncle Sugar? I’m busy. I have things to do, like saving the free world. Why are you always calling me?”
“Because we share a history, Buzz. Because I love you like the deranged, antisocial brother I never had.”
“Well, when you put it that way . . .”
Buzz (not his real name) was an opera-loving, former Delta operator who’d been among Alpha’s initial cadre of go-to guys—a “plank holder,” as they were known. He’d lost an eye to RPG shrapnel on one especially gnarly op outside Benghazi. After the White House shut down Alpha as a potential political liability, he’d ended up working at the Defense Intelligence Agency, riding an analyst’s desk that kept him inside most days, an assignment he’d used to good effect. Buzz cultivated more intra-agency connections over the years and possessed more behind-the-scenes insights about the inner workings of the alphabet agencies than probably any member of the intelligence community who ever lived.
I told him how I’d happened to stumble upon the wreckage of the long-missing airplane, about the murdered kid, the crate from the Santa Susana Field Lab, and the FAA’s unwillingness to cooperate with a homicide investigation. Buzz asked me for the plane’s tail number. I gave it to him. He said he’d ask around and see what he could come up with. I didn’t even have to bribe him, which I usually did.
“You seem like you’re in an unusually agreeable mood, Buzz.”
“Got busy with the wife last night. First time in a month. I put on a little Pavarotti, she squeezed into something skimpy I got her for Valentine’s Day five years ago, which was the last time I remembered Valentine’s Day, and we rocked the house. The kitchen. Our bed. The dog’s bed. It was something, lemme tell ya.”
“I could’ve definitely gone all day without knowing about the dog’s bed, Buzz.”
“Hey, you asked.”
“So I did. Live and learn.”
“What are you doing in Tahoe, Logan? Tahoe’s for rich people. The beautiful people. Beautiful is not a word that comes readily to mind when I think of your sorry mug.”
“Savannah and I are getting remarried.”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“Say again?”
“We’re getting remarried.”
“To Savannah?”
“Affirmative.”
“The Savannah who dumped you for Arlo Echevarria?”
“One and the same.”
There was a time when Buzz wouldn’t have hesitated to tell me that I’d lost my mind, reconciling with a woman who’d left me for a brother warrior. But for once, he held his tongue.
“I just hope you know what you’re doing, Logan.”
“Makes two of us, buddy.”
He said he’d get back to me with whatever relevant insights he could find on the crashed Beechcraft. I told him I’d be waiting.
The snow was coming down heavier, beginning to blanket the cars in the lot. I envisioned a leisurely breakfast back at Tranquility House with Savannah, followed by a romantic interlude in the privacy of our bungalow with a cozy fire in the fireplace. We’d drive into town after that, take out a marriage license, and exchange vows.
I couldn’t have known that by the time I got back, she’d have gone without so much as a word of good-bye.
SEVEN
Nothing seemed amiss.
The damp washcloth draped over the faucet and the water beaded on the tiled walls of the shower stall told me that Savannah had showered shortly after I’d left our bungalow to meet with Deputy Streeter.
There were two bras and two pairs of panties in the plastic bag she used for dirty laundry. That told me she’d apparently dressed for the day and left—but without her long down coat, which was still hanging in the closet. I knew she wouldn’t have gone for a walk without it, given the weather.
I also knew she hadn’t gone for a run. Her Nikes were still packed in her suitcase, and her iPhone in its pink protective case was still on the nightstand, charging. Savannah never went anywhere without her phone.
I ventured back outside, searching for tracks in the freshly fallen snow, but the only ones I could see were mine. That told me she’d
gone before the snow started falling.
“Haven’t seen her all morning,” Johnny Kavitch said when I went into the main house. “She didn’t come in for breakfast. It’s still sitting on the table in the dining room, untouched. Yours, too. Gwen, have you seen Savannah this morning?”
Kavitch’s wife emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a red and white striped dish towel. “Listening to the TV. I’m sorry, were you calling me?”
“Have you seen Savannah this morning?” I asked before Johnny could.
Gwen frowned and stared at the floor for a second, trying to remember. “Come to think of it,” she said, “I can’t say that I have. I’m sure she’s around here somewhere, though. Unless she took your car and decided to go into town.”
“I had the car. What about your son? Where is he?”
“Preston?” Gwen traded a troubling glance with her husband. “Still sleeping. We let him sleep in. His counselor says it’s good therapy.”
The acrid taste of bile rose up in the back of my throat.
“Where’s his bedroom?”
“Upstairs. Why?”
I bounded up the stairs, taking them three at a time.
“That’s our private residence,” Johnny hollered after me. “You can’t go up there! Hey!”
I ignored him.
Preston’s bedroom was down a short hallway decorated with framed family photos, the last door on the left. It was the only one that was locked. I booted it open, splintering the jam, and went in. He bolted upright, shirtless, startled awake. The posters covering his walls were a testament to the blood-fest video games he was apparently into—Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat.
“Get out of my room!”
“Where is she, Preston?”
“Where’s who? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
I moved toward him.
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t know where your wife is, man!” He pulled the covers up around his pale, concentration camp survivor chest and cowered against the headboard, trying to get as far from me as he could. “How would I know where she is? I told you. Get out!”
“I’m gonna ask you one more time, Preston, then I’m gonna take you apart, one piece at a time. Now, where . . . is . . . she?”
“I told you! I don’t know where she’s at! Dad! DAD!”
“This is definitely not cool!” Johnny said, bounding in with his wife hard on his heels. He was clutching a ski pole like a spear.
“You need to take a deep breath and calm down, Mr. Logan,” Gwen said with her palms outstretched, pleading. “Please. Before someone gets hurt.”
“My wife is missing and I’m wondering if Cujo here knows something he isn’t telling.”
“You have no right to call my son names,” Gwen said.
“Mom, I told him. I don’t know nothing what he’s talking about!”
I might’ve corrected him on his use of double negatives, but intuition told me that was the least of Preston Kavitch’s sins.
STREETER ANSWERED his phone on the second ring. I told him that Savannah had disappeared, and that I was worried.
“How long has she been gone?”
“I don’t know. I came back from meeting with you, and she wasn’t here.”
“We don’t usually take missing persons reports until the party’s been gone at least twenty-four hours,” Streeter said.
“Every hour a kidnapping victim remains missing, the chance of recovering that victim alive declines ten percent.”
“How do you know that?”
“It doesn’t matter how I know. I’m asking you to help find her.”
“Does she jog?” Streeter asked.
“Occasionally.”
“OK, so it could be she went jogging. Maybe she stopped for coffee somewhere.”
I told him how her running shoes were still packed away in her suitcase.
“There’s something else you should know,” I said. “She’s pregnant.”
“How far along is she?”
“Couple months.”
Streeter speculated that Savannah may have had a complication with her pregnancy. He said he’d put in a call to the local hospital.
“If there was a medical problem,” I said, “she wouldn’t have just started walking, and definitely not without her coat. She would’ve asked the people we’re staying with for a ride to the hospital. She didn’t do that.”
“Well, there’s probably some logical explanation,” Streeter said. “She’ll be back. You just need to be patient.”
Patience, unfortunately, has never been my strong suit.
“I have a proposition,” I said.
“A proposition?”
“You get a fingerprint tech over here in the next hour and I’ll get you the information you want from that FAA file.”
“If I didn’t know better, Mr. Logan, I’d say you’re trying to coerce a sworn peace officer.”
“I prefer to call it a quid pro quo.”
Streeter drew out a long, slow breath over the phone. “I can’t promise an hour,” he said, “but I’ll see what I can do.”
I hung up and stood at the window, gazing out at the white-flocked Currier and Ives landscape. Streeter had asked me how I knew about kidnapping survival statistics. I wasn’t about to tell him that of the seven authorized rescue missions I’d participated in as a member of Alpha to rescue the victims of kidnappings, only two resulted in those victims returning home alive. The last mission had been the worst: an airborne insertion into eastern Yemen to save two American missionaries taken hostage by extremists. One of the kidnappers detonated a suicide vest at the last minute as we moved in, blowing himself and the two missionaries to pieces.
I blinked the bloody image from my head.
Where are you, Savannah?
The Kavitches insisted I pay for the door jamb that I’d wrecked, and demanded that I check out by noon. Weirdly, they didn’t seem the least bit concerned or even interested in Savannah’s welfare. I told them I was sorry for damaging their home and for casting aspersions on their son, Preston, even if he was a creepy slacker. Repentance is a demonstration of wisdom as far as Buddhists are concerned. Admitting guilt and accepting responsibility for one’s actions are supposed to lessen the effect of negative karma. Selfishly, I hoped that my feigning contrition would bring Savannah back. But I’d racked up more than my share of negative karma over the years. It would take a lot, I knew, to balance the scales.
Are we rewarded, ultimately, for the good we do in life? What about when we do bad things for ostensibly good reasons? If you pump two rounds into the head of a sociopathic jihadist at point-blank range as he enjoys oysters on the half shell at an upscale French restaurant in Cairo, and one of those rounds exits his skull, killing his otherwise innocent, twenty-two-year-old mistress, does bad erase good? I didn’t know. I still don’t.
The sheriff’s print technician arrived at 0925, crunching into the snowy parking lot of the B&B in a silver Toyota Camry. The car had chains on the front tires. The technician wore UGG boots, gray leggings, and a military-style parka, the hood trimmed in fake wolf fur. With her briefcase kit in hand, she flipped open her ID with a flourish and showed it to me as I opened the door. Brown unkempt hair. Small brown eyes. She was petite and looked about twenty-five. I didn’t catch her name.
“I don’t know what was so important that I had to drop everything on my day off and race over here,” she said, striding past me, inside. “I’m missing my Pilates class.”
I shut the door behind her. “I’m missing more than that.”
She asked me if I’d touched anything. Door knobs? Plumbing fixtures? Wood surfaces?
“All of the above.”
“What about this?” She stooped at the waist and peered closely without handling an empty drinking glass sitting on a nightstand, the side of the bed Savannah slept on.
“Not that I recall,” I said.
She opened her kit, got out a small brus
h, a cold-cream-size jar of finely ground carbon powder, and went to work while I threw on my leather pilot’s jacket and went for a walk.
The thermometer had dipped into the high teens. I was sweating. Savannah was in trouble. I could feel it. The urge to take control of the situation, to do something, was overpowering. In my wallet was a dog-eared picture of her, wearing long gold earrings and a strapless, sparkly purple gown, taken on the day we first met, at the wedding reception for my Air Force Academy roommate. She was unquestionably the most exquisite woman I’d ever known. Even after our divorce, I couldn’t bring myself to part with her picture. Sometimes at night, when sleep eluded me, I would take it out and gaze for hours at her perfect face to remind myself how much her leaving had wounded me, hoping my bitterness would swell such that I could force her out of my head once and for all, forever. Only the strategy never seemed to work. The pleasure I derived from staring at Savannah’s likeness, knowing that she was once mine, outweighed the pain of having lost her. So I kept the photo. And, now, walking residential streets near the Tahoe lakefront, my hair and beard wet with snow, I stopped to show it to anybody who was willing to look at it.
“Have you seen this woman this morning?”
Nobody had, but everyone I approached expressed concern and assured me that they’d all keep a sharp eye out for her.
A wispy Filipino mail carrier in his US Postal Service Jeep spent five minutes telling me in great detail how his own sister had gone to get milk and eggs at a corner market in Fresno one morning and never came home.
A kindly looking grandfather walking his golden retriever remarked how beautiful Savannah looked in the photo, joking that it would be his lucky day to find her before I did.
A big, rangy-looking sewer cleanout technician wearing a beat-up straw cowboy hat felt compelled to give me a lesson on the fundamental differences between men and women. He was stowing his Roto-Rooter machine in his van and quickly closed the back doors as I approached, like he was in a big hurry to get to his next service call—but not too busy to chat after I showed him Savannah’s picture. “Dwayne” was stitched above the left pocket of his stained denim work shirt. He looked to be in his mid-forties.