Voodoo Ridge

by David Freed

  My truck, I knew, was too far away, and I couldn’t very well call for help; even if there’d been adequate reception, I’d forgotten to take my phone with me, leaving it on the passenger seat when I’d started out on foot, up the trail. I needed to find someplace where I could strip down and warm up—and I needed to do it fast. There was really only one hope: the cabin I’d passed earlier.

  By the time I got there, I was stumbling, willing myself forward one numb foot at a time, fighting with every waning ounce of willpower the urge to stop and rest.

  I staggered onto the cabin’s small, rough-hewn front porch and pounded my fist on the wooden door.

  “Hello? Anybody here? Hello?”

  No answer. A window with four small panes flanked the door. I turned away from it, shattering the lowest pane with my elbow, reached my hand in, and turned the deadbolt.

  The cabin was dim and warm, the air sweet with the musk of pinewood. Embers glowed in a rock fireplace big enough that I could’ve climbed into it. Split logs were stacked high on the right side.

  I threw two logs on, stoking the glowing coals with a charred iron poker, and stripped naked as quickly as I could. Standing there, the flames restoring me, I glanced around at my surroundings:

  The cabin was essentially one large room. There was a small Formica-topped dining table and two spindly, ladder-back chairs. A green swayback couch. A sagging La-Z-Boy recliner positioned close beside the fireplace. A galley kitchen with filthy dishes piled high in a metal, pump-handle sink. A rumpled twin bed with a brass headboard. Foreign policy magazines and engineering textbooks scattered and piled everywhere.

  The logs hissed and popped, shooting embers onto the blackened slate hearth and occasionally, my legs. I didn’t care. I could feel the blood returning to my limbs, the cognitive function to my brain. I closed my eyes and began to drift amid the fragrant, delicious warmth of the fireplace.

  Until the front door flew open.

  TWENTY-TWO

  There’s a reason why professionals use short-barrel assault weapons when breaching buildings. A short barrel allows for greater mobility in close quarters; the shooter is less likely to get his weapon hung up in a doorway or have some enterprising bad guy snatch it out of his hands as he comes around a corner.

  The man who came in shooting at me obviously hadn’t gotten the memo.

  Armed with an old lever-action Winchester, the kind of rifle you see in every John Ford Western ever made, he came storming in, firing wildly from the hip.

  Cock. Blam.

  The first round ricocheted with a spark off the rock fireplace and took out an old brass floor lamp, missing me by mere inches.

  Cock. Blam.

  The second round was considerably farther off-target, knocking a barn owl, stuffed and mounted, off the wall.

  Cock—

  I reached from behind the door before he could get off a third shot, clamped my hand around the wooden forestock, and relieved him of the Winchester.

  “Old” didn’t begin to describe him. “Ancient” did. He was bald but for the thatch of gray hairs protruding wildly from each of his Dumbo-sized ears. Baggy eyes. Yellowed teeth, missing in places. An insulated, one-piece army surplus snowsuit hung on his narrow frame like a kid wearing daddy’s pajamas.

  “Give me back my gun.”

  “So you can shoot me? I don’t think so.”

  “It’s my gun and you’re in my house.” He was looking at me funny, up and down. “What are you, some kind of sexual deviant?”

  Then I remembered: I was in the buff.

  “Fell in a stream, up the trail,” I said. “Had to warm up before I froze.”

  “So you break into my cabin?”

  “My apologies. I’ll pay for the window.”

  “You’re darned right you will.”

  I ejected all of the Winchester’s remaining cartridges, the shells clattering on the wood floor, leaned the rifle next to the fireplace, then proceeded to put my clothes back on.

  “What’re you doing?” the old man.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “It looks like you’re putting wet clothes back on.” He watched me ring out my socks. Water sizzled and hissed on the hearthstone. “Wait.”

  He walked over, reached into a box beside the bed, and tossed me a dry, red flannel shirt, followed by blue jeans, and a rolled pair of socks, olive drab.

  “I’d loan you some of my skivvies until yours dry out some,” he said, “but I’m not a weirdo.”

  I thanked him for his kindness and put on his clothes while he propped a book against the pane of glass I’d broken, to keep out the cold.

  “My name is Melvin Essex, by the way,” he said, “and I’m as old as the hills.”

  “Cordell Logan. And I’m getting there.”

  “That your truck down the road?”

  “It is.”

  “What’re you doing all the way up here in the middle of winter with no tire chains, no nothin’?”

  I told him. Essex listened intently.

  “You’ve had a rough go of it,” he said when I was done.

  “I’ll live.”

  “You hungry?”

  “Now that you mention it . . .”

  He had possum stew written all over him. Or fried squirrel. Something befitting a mountain man living the hermit’s life. But that wasn’t on the menu.

  “Got some fresh croissants and a nice Brie. Just picked ’em up in town.”

  “Works for me.”

  He went outside to his truck and returned with a grocery bag, laying the food on the table, along with a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice and two mismatched drinking glasses. We sat down and ate.

  He told me he’d taught mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, and had been indicted at the height of the conflict in Vietnam for allegedly helping orchestrate an antiwar protest in which several police officers were injured. Investigators, he said, manufactured the case against him out of whole cloth. He was denied tenure. Within a year, he’d lost his job. He never found work again in academia and ended up on a General Motors assembly line in Flint, Michigan.

  “I vowed after that I’d never talk to another liar with a badge as long as I lived, and I haven’t,” Essex said. “More juice?”

  “No thanks.”

  “It’s like when the sheriff’s department came around a couple weeks ago,” he said. “They wanted to know if I knew anything about that boy you said got killed up the trail. Sure, I could’ve told them what I saw. But I wasn’t about to.”

  “What did you see, Professor?”

  He slathered Brie on his second croissant and looked at me over his glasses.

  “How do I know you’re not some undercover cop?”

  “If I were, I probably would’ve shot you the second you came in here, blazing away with that saddle rifle of yours.”

  “Could be you didn’t shoot me because you dropped your gun when you fell in that stream.”

  “Could be I didn’t have a gun to begin with.”

  “You’ve got cop eyes.”

  I got up, walked over to my wet jeans, pulled out my FAA-issued pilot’s certificate from my wet wallet, and showed it to him.

  “I’m a flight instructor.”

  He studied the plastic, credit card-size certificate, chewing slowly, then nodded like I’d convinced him and handed it back to me.

  “About ten o’clock the night before that boy died, I heard a car go by. Nobody comes up here that late. The engine sounded kind of strange. A dull, rotational knock, like he had a loose main bearing. I didn’t bother getting out of bed. Then in the middle of the night, I hear the same engine. Now he’s coming back down the road, and he’s coming fast. This time, I get up. There’s a good moon, and I see him out the window: a van. Green.”

  I stared into the fire, my memory flashing on the high school kid who’d been shoveling snow outside his family’s house the morning Savannah disappeared from the B&B. I rememb
ered his name—Billy. He’d called later to say he’d seen a woman who looked like Savannah trying to escape from a man parked outside a Mexican restaurant in South Lake Tahoe.

  The man, Billy said, was driving a green van.

  We chatted for another few minutes, mostly about airplanes and aeronautical engineering, with which the professor seemed endlessly fascinated, until my clothes and shoes were no longer wet but merely damp. They’d have to do. I changed out of Essex’s shirt, jeans, and socks, and into my own. My wallet held one twenty dollar bill. I tried to give it to him, to cover the cost of the window I’d broken, but he refused to take it.

  “I’m happy my cabin was here for you. And, besides, I don’t get many visitors these days. I enjoyed the company.”

  We shook hands.

  “Peace, love, and rock and roll,” he said, flashing me a V-shaped peace sign as I started down the road, toward my truck.

  “Groovy.”

  Was the green van that Essex had observed after Chad Lovejoy was shot to death the same green van that Billy, the snow-shoveling, snowboarding teenager, said he’d seen outside the Mexican restaurant? The same green van from which a woman who Billy said resembled Savannah tried to escape?

  I didn’t know, but I most definitely intended to find out.

  STREETER SEEMED mildly interested when I called him about the possible van connection.

  “Did anybody get a license number?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll check it out,” he said.

  “When?”

  “When time allows. We’re working a couple of new angles right now that look extremely promising.”

  The FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, he said, now was actively involved in the investigation. I assumed that the feds were assessing such evidence as tire tracks and boot prints, but I didn’t ask. Streeter would’ve been reluctant to provide any details, given the ongoing nature of his investigation, and for once, I didn’t feel like pressing the issue. I was tired. Beyond tired.

  I found a low rise overlooking the south end of Lake Tahoe and sat in my truck, the heater on low. The sky was clear. Whitecaps rippled the water, while the pines swayed fluidly on a stiff south wind. The trees reminded me of Savannah, the way she used to dance to samba music on the radio, her hips keeping perfect, seductive time to the beat, her arms snaking gracefully, always coaxing me with her hands and her smile to join her. I tried to block the memory from my head. I tried not to think of her. Only masochists seek that kind of pain.

  I needed to focus and find that green van.

  The kid who’d first told me about it, Billy, had said he’d get back to me if anything else about what he’d seen that night outside the Mexican restaurant bubbled up from the recesses of his adolescent brain. I never heard from him after that. Maybe it was time he heard from me.

  BILLY WASN’T home. His mother was. She stood inside the front doorway with her arms crossed, staring at me like I was trying to sell her a subscription to Pedophile magazine.

  “Why do you want to talk to him?”

  “It concerns a criminal matter.”

  “What? What kind of criminal matter?” She was in her early fifties, short and busty, with glittery nail polish, and frosted, severely jagged blonde and black hair that appeared to have been cut by a stylist in a foul mood.

  “He may have witnessed an abduction,” I said.

  “An abduction. Yeah, right. Look, whatever you think my son knows, or ‘witnessed,’ he didn’t, OK? He has a very active imagination. Besides, if he saw something, he would’ve told me, or his father.”

  “Billy may have information that could help identify the person who did it. Look, I’m not a cop.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “The victim was someone very close to me.”

  “My son knows nothing.”

  “If I could just talk to him for a—”

  “—I told you, he’s not here, OK? We don’t want any trouble. Please don’t make me call the police.”

  She shut the door in my face.

  In most foreign places, you can’t simply hang out in a vehicle and wait for your target to show up. I tried that once with two other go-to guys in a Citroen along the Rue Charles de Gaulle in downtown Tunis. We were tracking a bagman working for a radical Salafist group, waiting for him to make a money drop outside the Monoprix supermarket. Several local men mistook us in our berkas for female Tunisians and began making what could best be diplomatically described as “amorous advances.” We broke off the surveillance and drove on, but not before one of my colleagues reached through the window and crushed the windpipe of one would-be suitor who’d gotten a little too fresh.

  Waiting for a high school kid in South Lake Tahoe would be cake by comparison.

  I parked a block up the street, affording a view of both avenues of approach, and settled in. Dozens of cars and trucks passed by, along with two dog walkers and several joggers. Nobody even so much as looked in my direction.

  After about ten minutes, a primer-gray VW bug came put-putting down the street and passed by.

  Billy was driving.

  I fired up the ignition, made a hard right turn, and followed the VW into his parents’ driveway. Billy parked behind a fire engine red Dodge Ram pickup with chrome wheels and got out of the Volkswagen, lugging his trumpet case.

  He didn’t see me initially as I pulled in, jumped out, and approached him.

  “Yo, Billy, you got a sec?”

  He turned toward me, brushing the hair out of his eyes. The expression on his face was a blend of surprise and fear.

  “You remember me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When we talked on the phone, you said you’d let me know if you thought of anything else you saw that night. Remember that?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much.” He licked his lips. “All I saw is pretty much everything I told you.”

  “ ‘Pretty much’ suggests to me there might be more.”

  His eyes darted side to side. “Uh, no. Not really. That was pretty much about it. Can’t remember anything else. Anyway, I better get inside.”

  I blocked his path.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, Billy.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Clearly, he did.

  I stood aside anyway and let him pass. As I did, the front door opened and a short, bald man with gray sweat pants, a black “Harley of Reno” T-shirt, and a Fu Manchu moustache came charging out, spitting angry, with a claw hammer in his hand.

  “Get off my property.”

  “It’s OK, Dad,” Billy said, grabbing him and holding on, trying to stop him from coming any closer to me. “He’s not the guy.”

  In the wake of Savannah’s disappearance, I’d been attacked by a man with a gun, another with a knife, and now one with a hammer. What in the hell, I wondered, was going on?

  “There’s no need for violence,” I said, which would’ve sounded mildly humorous had Billy’s father known my personal work history.

  “I said get off my property!”

  Billy looped his arms around his waist and dug his heels in like a rodeo cowboy wrestling a steer, struggling to hold on.

  “Dad, stop! It’s not the guy!”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. I told you. This is the guy who showed me the picture.”

  “Oh.” Billy’s father drew a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said to me. “I thought you were somebody else.”

  “Which guy?” I said to Billy.

  “Billy, no,” his father pleaded. “Don’t. Please.”

  The kid looked over at him like he was trying to make up his mind, then, finally, at me.

  “The guy who took your girlfriend,” Billy said. “I saw him again.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Billy’s father, Gary, was an unlicensed contractor who’d recently been indicted for allegedly defrauding several residents of the Lake Tahoe area by billing them for home repairs tha
t never were performed. Which explained, Gary said, why he’d sought to prevent Billy from contacting authorities about what he knew of the man in the green van.

  “I didn’t want it jumbling things up and messing up my trial,” Gary said. “You know how juries are.”

  I said I understood, even if I didn’t, and asked Billy to tell me what he knew. It went something like this:

  Several days after Billy called to tell me he’d seen a man forcing a woman back into a green van outside the Los Mexicanos restaurant, he’d spotted what he was convinced was the same van outside an auto parts store in the town of Truckee, where he’d gone to price out a new muffler for his VW. He was standing behind the van, tapping the license plate number into his phone, when the van’s owner appeared and demanded to know what the hell he was doing. Intimidated, Billy couldn’t think of anything to say other than, “Nothing.” The guy snatched Billy’s phone away, demanded that the kid divulge his own name and address, which Billy did, then threatened to come pay him a visit if anyone, particularly the cops, contacted him for “any reason.”

  Frightened, Billy promptly raced home and told his parents what had happened in Truckee. He also told them about me, how I’d first approached him the day Savannah went missing, and about what he’d seen that day after school outside Los Mexicanos.

  “I swear I was gonna call you back,” he told me, “but . . .”

  “His mother and me, we told him not to,” Gary said. “We don’t want any trouble from that man.”

  “That man,” I said, “may be responsible for two murders.”

  “Well, we don’t want to be number three.”

  “I still remember the dude’s license number,” Billy said.

  “No, Billy,” his father said.

  “But, Dad—”

  “I said no, son! Now, go inside.”

  “I need that number,” I said. “And I’m not going anywhere until he gives it to me.”

  “Do you have any children of your own?” Gary asked me.

  His question stung like a punch. I could’ve told him about how Savannah was pregnant when she died, but I didn’t.

  “No.”