Courage Begins: A Ray Courage Mystery Novella (Ray Courage Private Investigator Series Book 1)

by R. Scott Mackey

  “No.”

  “No? She was killed while having a tryst with another man. And you were seeing other women. Or so I’m told.”

  He didn’t bother to look at me as we strode through the fog. “We were not having difficulties.”

  “The report indicates that you were.”

  “The report is wrong. My wife and I loved each other. And I’m getting sick and tired of you—and your company—implying that I had anything to do with the unfortunate accident that killed her.”

  “You can see from our point of view that—”

  “I don’t see shit from your point of view! What I see is a multibillion-dollar company that makes more money each year than the GNP of most counties, trying to harass one of its customers. I paid my premiums, and it was your obligation to pay me what I was due.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. If he hadn’t been such an arrogant prick, I might have agreed with him. Maybe what I was doing was harassment, especially if he was telling the truth. We walked in silence for a few seconds.

  “What did you talk about?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Your speech. What was it about?”

  He stopped to look at me. A haughty smile crossed his face. “You should watch it for yourself. It’s on YouTube. It was a humorous speech. I got a standing ovation for it.”

  With that, he pulled open the glass front door and entered the office, leaving me standing outside in the fog.

  four

  The drive up from the valley floor, through the rolling foothills and up into the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, took a little over two hours. The mid-week traffic, light on Interstate 80, enabled me to cruise at a comfortable seventy miles an hour almost the entire trip. The depressing fog of the valley gave way to bright blue skies at Lake Tahoe. It was a spectacular day, the temperature in the low thirties on a windless, early afternoon.

  Times must have been good at the lake. Dozens of construction crews worked on houses, either building new ones or remolding old ones, as people invested in upgrades to their homes. Quite a contrast to the recent recession in which owners dumped vacation homes at fire-sale prices. What a boon to the local construction trades.

  I’d phoned the offices of Crane and Crane and got an address from the woman who answered. Pulling on a jacket, after emerging from my car, I found a crew working on the house I’d been looking for.

  Two men stood in front of a partially-framed new home, looking over blueprints spread on the hood of a pickup truck. Three more men worked inside the house, their efforts filling the mountain air with the harsh whine of a buzz saw and the rat-tat-tat of dueling hammers.

  “Is one of you Billy Crane?” I asked, raising my voice above the din.

  They looked at me warily, decked out in white hard hats, sweatshirts, and blue jeans. “Who wants to know?” the short man asked.

  I introduced myself, explaining that I worked for Cal Farm Insurance.

  “I’m Billy,” the same man said. “What can I do for you?”

  Billy shook my hand; thick calluses lined his palm and fingers. It was like grasping a catcher’s mitt. He reeked of tobacco and sweat, the odors mixing with those of the fresh cut wood and pine trees. If testosterone had a smell, it would be this.

  “What brings you all this way from Sacramento?” Though Billy was short, he outweighed me by a good thirty pounds. He sported a three-day growth of stubble and had a pinch of tobacco in his lower lip.

  “We’re still looking into the Bate accident from a couple of years ago. You know, the carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “Yeah, you don’t have to remind me. I know that one all too well. Lost one of my best men in that deal.”

  “Harley Cowan was one of your employees?” That hadn’t been in the case file.

  “Yes, sir. Damn good finish carpenter. Those are hard to find. Just couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants, and it cost him.”

  “How long had he been seeing Mrs. Bate?”

  “Hell if I know. “

  “Did it start when you began doing the improvements on the Bate home?”

  “Like I said, I don’t have a clue. He could’ve met her years before for all I know. Bate and his wife had been coming up here for a while.”

  I considered pursuing Cowan’s connection to Tiffanie Bate, but didn’t see where that could take me. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about the work you did on the Bate home?”

  “Sure, go ahead. I got nothing to hide.” He spit some tobacco juice on the dirt next to the truck’s tire.

  “When did Garrett Bate call you, and what did he ask you to do at the house?”

  “Hell, I don’t remember exactly when he called me. It was, maybe, a month before we started doing work on his house, sometime in late summer. I remember because he was in a hurry. He got a little ticked when I told him we couldn’t start on his house until the next spring.”

  “Why the delay?”

  “Because we was crazy busy.”

  “But you said he contacted you about a month before you started.”

  “Yeah,” he said, laughing at some recollection. “He said he’d pay twice our going rate if we could get his work done by Thanksgiving. Said he wanted to enjoy the winter season comfortably. Offer like that makes you put other jobs on the back burner.”

  “What exactly did he want you to do at the house?”

  “He wanted to make it energy efficient. It’s pretty mild today, but the winters can get brutal up here. He was tired of freezing his ass off and said to spare no expense. We sealed up that sumbitch like nobody’s business.”

  “Did you think his request was unusual?”

  “No, not really. It costs a lot of money to keep your home warm up here in the winter. The kind of stuff we did to his house was expensive, but in the long run, he’d make most of the money back in energy savings. Plus, he’d have a more comfortable place to live.”

  “You put in more insulation and that kind of stuff, right?”

  “You name it, we did it. Triple-pane storm windows throughout—that was the big expense. Thicker insulation in the walls and attic, eliminated the gaps under the outside doors, caulking, weather stripping, and a few other things.”

  “What about the furnace? Did you install a new furnace for him?”

  Billy spit again. “No, that’s the crazy thing. I told him it would be smarter, and cost less, to heat the place with a pellet-stove system. He said he preferred the furnace. So I told him the one he had was over twenty years old, and that the newer models were ten times more efficient. And his was loud, too, sitting there in the hallway across from his bedroom. Hell, that change alone might have saved him more than everything else we did. He didn’t care. He said he wanted to keep the old furnace.”

  “The furnace that leaked and ended up killing his wife.”

  “Yep. Sure was. Damn shame.”

  five

  Detective Harrison Royle of the Tahoe Police Department met me at the Jack in the Box in South Lake Tahoe. I arrived first and ordered some chicken nuggets and a cup of coffee. At mid-afternoon, I was the only customer sitting in the restaurant. Harrison spotted me and sat at the table, declining my offer to buy him something to eat or drink.

  “I’m not going to have much to tell you,” he said, soon after we’d introduced ourselves.

  I was starving, not having time to stop after talking with Garrett Bate and leaving for Lake Tahoe to meet Billy Crane. I dipped one of the chicken nuggets into a plastic tub of spicy ranch dressing and devoured the morsel in two bites. I followed that with a sip of black coffee. Royle watched me with surprising interest. He was young, late twenties or early thirties, with a shaved head a lot of young men sported to conceal premature baldness. I didn’t quite get the logic in that, but had seen it many times in my teaching days.

  “Sorry, I missed lunch,” I said.

  “Is Cal Farm really reopening its investigation of the Tiffanie Bate and Harley Cowan deaths?”
r />   I nodded, starting in on a second chicken nugget.

  “Seems like a stretch to me,” he said. “No offense, but you guys looked into it as thoroughly as we did back when it happened. I’d think your resources would be better spent elsewhere.” Royle had a weariness in his eyes, suggesting he’d seen more in his thirty years than others had seen in sixty.

  I swallowed the nugget. “I’m an intern making twenty bucks an hour, so it’s not like we’re exactly throwing money away.”

  “An intern? Aren’t you a little old to be an intern?”

  “Thank you. It’s a long story. A career change thing.”

  “What were you before you were an intern?”

  “College professor.”

  He blinked and scrunched his face. “Isn’t interning as an investigator a step down from college professor? No offense meant.”

  “None taken. Like I said, it’s a long story.”

  He reached down and pulled out a folder from a nylon briefcase. “I brought the case file.” He handed it to me.

  I wiped my hands on a napkin before taking the packet from him. It was a couple of inches thick. “Anything particularly noteworthy in here?”

  “Not really. Probably contains pretty much everything you have in your file.”

  The papers had two holes punched in the top and connected to the folder with metal prongs. I scanned through the pages, flipping them up as I went. I stopped to read more closely when I came to the South Lake Tahoe Arson Unit’s report. I’d skimmed the same report in our files before, but wanted to see if something jumped out this time around. Nothing did. The report concluded the blockage in the furnace’s flue exhaust stack, coupled with a puncture hole in the stack beneath the obstruction, caused carbon monoxide to escape and eventually fill the home with enough of the gas to kill the occupants. The investigator called the location and size of the blockage and hole suspicious, but offered no evidence that the stack had been tampered with. An autopsy report confirmed both victims died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

  “What did you think about the blockage and hole they found?” I asked.

  Royle shrugged. “It was an old furnace. Residue builds up. As far as the hole, someone could have accidentally punctured it doing routine repairs. Then, over time, pressure from the exhaust expanded the hole.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No, I think somebody stuffed a bunch of soot in there. Then they punctured it with a screwdriver and widened the size of the hole with a pair of pliers.”

  I raised my eyebrows at the specificity of his theory.

  He turned both palms up and shrugged again. “Hey, that’s how I would’ve done it. That’s all.”

  “Was there any physical evidence putting Garrett at the scene?”

  “Yeah, his fingerprints were all over the place. Same with hair and skin. But it was his house, and he’d been inside a few months before. There were no prints or anything suggesting he’d been inside the utility closet where the furnace was.”

  I leafed through a couple more pages, and then came upon color photos inserted into a plastic sleeve. “Okay if I look at the pics?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I took out an eight-by-ten print of the bedroom. A blonde woman lay face down in a bed, the green comforter drawn partly back to expose a bare shoulder and arm. Next to her lay a man face up, his eyes closed. They could’ve been sleeping. I showed the photo to Royle.

  He nodded. “Dead. That’s how we found them. We got a call at nine thirty that morning from Harley Cowan’s dad. The kid hadn’t shown up for work, so Billy Crane calls the dad—Cowan lived at home. Dad said he hasn’t seen the kid, so he starts looking for him by driving around and sees Harley’s pickup at the Bate house. He’s pissed when no one answers, figures his son is having sex with the woman instead of going to work, so he finds an open side door and enters. Five minutes later he calls us.”

  I no longer had any interest in my chicken nuggets. Even looking at them, and the tub of ranch, made me feel queasy, so I closed the box and slid it to the edge of the table. I put the photo back in the sleeve and pulled out a couple more. They didn’t reveal anything new, just the same scene from different angles. The last photograph showed a close-up of the hole in the flue stack. I had to admit, Royle’s description of how the hole could’ve been created seemed spot on.

  “Do you have the surveillance video from the Hyatt in Sacramento?” I asked. Cal Farm’s file lacked the actual video footage. Our report relied on the written description of the video provided by the Tahoe Police, stating Garrett Bate was the subject captured on camera the night of his wife’s death.

  “Yeah, Sac PD helped us a lot with this one. They went through all the videos from the Hyatt and sent us digital files. It took a few weeks with all the footage and red tape with the hotel. I personally reviewed everything and wrote the report. I can forward you a link to the video if you want.”

  I told him I’d like to see what they had and gave him my e-mail address. “Our file says the coroner put the time of death at midnight.”

  “Plus or minus an hour, but certainly within that window.”

  The timeframe bothered me as much as anything. Even if Bate had been able to leave immediately after the real estate awards at the Crocker, there was no way he could get to Tahoe in time to tamper with the furnace’s gas line. Hell, they might have been dead about the time the event ended.

  “Could Bate have tampered with the furnace earlier, like a day or two, or even a week before?” Bate supposedly had an alibi for a couple of weeks leading up to the deaths, but he could’ve sneaked out at night and returned the next morning.

  “No. All our experts agree that the hole would have leaked enough carbon monoxide to kill anyone in that house running the furnace for more than a couple of hours. Tiffanie had been staying there for almost a full week. If the tampering had been done earlier, she would’ve suffered from the CO poisoning before she did.”

  “Maybe she didn’t turn on the heater.”

  Royle shook his head. “It was cold as hell that week. She probably ran the heater non-stop while she was there. The PG&E meter records confirmed that.”

  I thought I’d been coming up with new possibilities, but the police and the Cal Farm investigators had already explored every angle I’d imagined. So much for my cleverness.

  “What about a hired gun, so to speak? He could’ve paid someone to go inside the house, when Mrs. Bate was out during the day, and tamper with the furnace.”

  “We looked at that hard. Went through all of his bank records and assets. He hadn’t taken more than forty dollars at a time out of an ATM in over a year. No major transactions in any of his accounts. Other than his two houses and the cars, he didn’t own anything major. We confirmed, with their homeowner’s insurance company, they didn’t own any expensive jewelry, except for Mrs. Bate’s wedding and engagement rings. We’re still monitoring his finances in case he, you know, deferred payments, but so far nada. We even put our best snitches here at the lake to work on it, but they said there was nothing on the street about someone doing a number on that furnace.”

  “Could’ve been an outside guy.”

  Royle reached over and grabbed one of my nuggets. “Do you mind?” He held it up, and I shrugged. “There’s a slim chance that happened. But again, no indication that anyone, from anywhere, has been paid. I just don’t see it.”

  “Were there any other suspects besides Bate?”

  “We talked to everyone they knew up here, and nobody had a motive to kill either one of them—Tiffanie or Harley. We talked to several people at Bate Real Estate, but that was a dead end. In Sacramento, Tiffanie Bate didn’t have any enemies we could find, or anyone who’d benefit from her death.”

  I turned to the last page of the file, a sheet of lined notebook paper on which someone had written “Miscellaneous.” “Is this your handwriting?”

  Royle craned his neck to look across the table. “Yeah, those are m
y notes. I always jot down any random things that come up during an investigation. There’s nothing that’s worth a damn.”

  I skimmed the sheet anyway, stopping about halfway down the page at a one-sentence notation. “Tom Oberto says he spotted the suspect on the eight hundred block of Seventh Avenue in the Tahoma neighborhood at seven o’clock the night of the murder.” I turned the file around so Royle could see it. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing,” he said with a snort after reading it. “Tom is a local drunk, who also happens to believe in every conspiracy theory on the market. We get a call from him two, three times a month, claiming he knows for certain this neighbor or that is making crystal meth. He heard about the deaths, came to the conclusion the husband did it, and in a drunken stupor, called us. Even if he had spotted Bate, Tom isn’t credible. Lacking a corroborating witness, his testimony is crap.”

  six

  I spent the night in Tahoe, looking for Tom Oberto in every drinking establishment in the west and south sides at the lake. I started at Sunnyside, where the bartender had never heard of Oberto. I had no guarantees he’d be out drinking; he could’ve been a stay-at-home drinker. Yet Royle made it sound like Oberto was a local crackpot, known to the community at large. People like that tended to do their drinking where they had an audience. Nothing popped when I did a web search for him on my cell phone. No phone number, no address, no digital or social media footprint at all. If he was the conspiracy theorist Royle described, then it made sense Oberto had disconnected from the digital world.

  When I walked into the Fat Cat Bar and Grill, I’d pretty much exhausted all the local watering holes. I’d not had a drop to drink at any of the other bars, but decided I’d order a beer and think about whether to give the east and north shores a shot as well. It would make for a long night, but it was better than staying through the next night, or giving up on Tom Oberto altogether.

  I settled on a stool at the end of the bar, where about ten of us sat, all men, all middle aged or younger. The bar curved at both ends, with eight seats in the middle and two seats on the curved ends facing one another. Directly opposite me, on the far end of the bar, a man wearing a green baseball cap and red flannel shirt spoke in a loud voice.