Tahoe Heat

by Todd Borg

  “Owen, where are you going?” Street called up to me.

  “Not to worry,” I yelled.

  I gave Paint a jerk on the reins and a kick with my heels. To my astonishment, he reared up until we were pointing directly at the sky, pivoted on his hind legs, and did a skidding gallop down the trail toward Street and Spot. I hung onto the saddle horn with one hand, the reins with the other.

  With a dangerous collision imminent, Street yelled, “Whoa, boy! Whoa!”

  I took up the chorus, yelling, “Whoa!” and “Stop!” while I pulled back on the reins. At the last possible moment, Street gave Prancer a kick, and she jumped out of my way. Spot leaped sideways as Paint and I blasted through where they’d been standing. Finally, I brought Paint to a standstill, at which point he stretched out his neck and commenced mowing another tuft of grass. I sat there, my breathing pronounced.

  “Honey,” Street said, drawing alongside, “if you take your hands off the saddle horn, you’ll be better at hanging onto the reins. It would help your balance, too.”

  I looked down at where my hand had a death grip on the saddle. I pulled it away, and tried to straighten my aching knuckles. “Just wanted to find out if this old boy could move.”

  “Right,” Street said.

  Spot was watching with a certain wariness from the other side of an outcropping of rock.

  Street stared across the canyon to a short cliff and frowned. “Something over there,” she said. “Just visible below that cliff.”

  She and Prancer turned off and headed toward the cliff.

  FIVE

  Street approached the cliff and dismounted like a pro. She hooked Prancer’s reins onto a Manzanita bush and walked over to the base of the cliff. As Paint and I crested the rise, I saw the yellow crime scene tape that encircled the remains. It made a rough circle 40 feet in diameter. Diamond had put it low to the ground so that it didn’t advertise from a distance.

  Street squatted down to look at the bones. I climbed off Paint, looped his reins around the same bush, and walked over to see what she’d found.

  It was an ugly sight, human bones in a human shape, with just enough dried skin and other tissue to destroy the disconnect that we have when we see clean bones and perceive them as an artifact of a human. In contrast, this looked very much like the recent leftovers of an actual person, and it was disturbing.

  Spot approached the body, stopped a short distance away. He sniffed the air, made a little cry, and backed away.

  I knew that he was reacting to the lingering smell of a dead human, a smell that professional search dogs often find depressing and occasional helpers like Spot struggle with as well.

  His eyes were droopy and sad. He walked away from the body, over toward the cliff, sniffing the ground aimlessly, then lay down in the shade. He put his head down on the dirt, facing at an angle away from us as if to focus on something else.

  Street managed to telegraph a scientific remove, but I knew that inside she was experiencing the same free-fall as I was.

  The bones were dressed in hiking shorts and shirt and boots. The body lay chest down in a bed of sandy dirt. The back of the olive-green, short-sleeved shirt had been torn open. The skull and top couple of cervical vertebrae were missing. One set of arm bones was flung out as if pointing toward the north. A small silver ring holding a sapphire sparkled on the index finger. The other arm was bent underneath the chest. The spine was twisted a quarter turn so that the pelvis, contained within dark gray shorts, lay on its side. The legs were both bent at the knees. The lower tibias and fibulas disappeared into tall wool socks and hiking boots that looked improbably large on the bones.

  The skin that remained was dried and darkened. It draped the bones like a dirty fabric. In a few places, the skin was completely gone, the exposed bone cleaned and white.

  Street astonished me with her control.

  She opened her toolbox, pulled out the tools and vials she uses for collecting insects. She poked and prodded about the body as she looked for insects. She moved around to the other side and continued her search, lifting bits of sun-dried skin, scraping at the dirt under the edges of the corpse.

  “No luck?” I said, looking for a way to break the silence and lighten the mood.

  “Just some dermestids.” She pointed to a few small beetles.

  “No maggots or flies?”

  She pointed to a group of small brown objects on a nearby bush.

  “These are their pupal cases,” she said.

  I bent down to look. They were like miniature, long, skinny footballs with an opening in one end.

  Street said, “The blow flies lay eggs on a corpse very soon after the person or animal dies. The eggs hatch to maggots. When the maggots are fully grown, they leave the corpse and crawl like worms to a place like this to pupate. They form a little oblong container where they undergo metamorphosis into adult flies. Now the pupal cases are empty.”

  “Hate it when those little buggers fly the coop,” I said, attempting levity.

  “Yeah. Can’t tell how long ago they did their thing.”

  “Their thing being lunch on the corpse.”

  “Right,” she said. “If we saw adult flies emerging from the pupal cases, or if we saw pupa inside the cases...”

  “Or if you saw the maggots in their various instar stages, you could tell how long since the person had died.”

  Street turned. “I had no idea you paid so much attention during those other cases.”

  I moved around the corpse, saw another cairn about seventy or eighty feet away, walked over and took a look.

  “Skull’s over here,” I called out to Street. I saw Spot’s ears move as I spoke, but he didn’t lift his head, didn’t move.

  The skull and cervical vertebrae were exposed and white in some places, covered with skin in others. Unlike a live person, the flesh under the skin was gone, making it look like the skull had been shrink-wrapped with skin. The head, void of flesh under the skin, darkened, and without eyes, wouldn’t have bothered me, except that this one still had most of its hair. Some tufts of hair had come out and gotten caught on some brush nearby. But what remained was still thick and red and long. The hair, unlike the rest of the corpse, still looked alive, as if the person had just brushed it that morning.

  I wanted some of the hair so that I could have a lab compare its DNA with that of any hair that Ryan Lear would hopefully bring me. So I broke off a few strands, carefully folded them into one of the baggies I carried, and slid it into the slot of my wallet.

  Street came over.

  I said, “With the adult flies gone and the head dragged over here, it could be a very long time since the person died, right?”

  “That’s what I would have thought.”

  “Except for,” I said.

  “Except for the dermestids.”

  “Remind me again what they do,” I said.

  “Dermestids are hide beetles,” Street said.

  “Meaning they eat skin,” I said.

  “Yes. The moisture content has to be relatively low before they are attracted to a corpse. But the corpse can’t be completely desiccated or even the dermestids will pass it by.”

  “If hide beetles like a dry corpse,” I said, “the maggots must’ve reduced it to mostly skin and bones some time ago. How long ago do you think the victim died?”

  “Impossible to say with any accuracy if we don’t have maggots present.” Street thought about it. “The weather has been hot for Tahoe, up into the upper eighties in town. Even at this elevation, the temps would have been up into the seventies in the afternoon. But it still would drop to freezing at night. That kind of cold really slows the work of maggots. It would probably take at least two weeks for the blow flies to go through all the stages from eggs to maggots to pupas to adults and then fly away. Maybe more. At that point, the corpse would be desiccated enough for hide beetles.”

  “So we’re looking at a rough time-of-death of two-to-three weeks ago.”

/>   “Yeah,” she said. “Very rough.”

  I looked up at the small cliff from which the person probably fell. It stood about twenty feet high.

  “Not a very tall cliff,” Street said. “And the rock here is somewhat crumbly, not always the firmest footing.”

  “I’ll hike up there and have a look while you get your samples,” I said.

  “Be careful.” Street bent down towards the skull.

  Spot came with me as I climbed up and around to get to the place from which the victim may have fallen. It was steep, and I had to use my hands in a couple of places. Spot is too big to be an especially agile dog, but he made it up without any problem, and the two of us stood on a rocky projection and looked down at Street and the horses as well as at Carson Valley spread out 2000-plus feet below.

  The place would make a spectacular lunch overlook, but it was a bit of a distance from the trail, so only explorers like the people who discovered the body would find it. It was easy to imagine that someone who’d fallen from the cliff to the rocks below could go undiscovered for a long time.

  I looked around for any indications of what might have happened, but nothing stood out. There was rock, and there was air, and the transition from one to the other would take nothing more than a small distraction.

  I was turning to leave when a tiny glimmer of red caught my eye. I stopped and turned back, but saw nothing. I went through the motions again, trying to remember where I’d seen the color.

  Still nothing.

  So I did a spiral grid search, starting at my best guess at where the red came from. Visualize a 2-inch square and look closely at it. Now move one square to the left. Then one square up. Now right. Right again. Down. And so on in an expanding clockwise pattern. It is slow and tedious and frustrating. I’d had some experience with the process back on the SFPD. A 3-foot square has 324 2-inch squares contained within. A 6-foot square has 1296 squares. It can take all day. But if you’re careful and thorough, you will almost always find the missing item.

  I was lucky. On square 32, just a hand-span away from where I’d started, was a tiny piece of red paper next to a rock. I picked it up. Not paper. Leather. Very thin, very light, very red. It was torn most of the way through.

  The red was too bright to be any natural thing from a plant or animal. I bagged it and put it in my wallet with the victim’s hair.

  Spot and I climbed back down to Street. She was putting vials into a rack inside her toolbox.

  “See anything?” she asked.

  “Just a tiny piece of red leather.”

  “A piece of clothing?”

  “I doubt it.” I took it out and showed it to her.

  “Looks like a piece of fringe from a purse or something. You think the victim died falling off the cliff?”

  “It’s likely. A fall from that height could easily kill someone if they landed on their head. But any other landing would probably leave a person wounded, perhaps still able to call out to hikers on the trail across the arroyo. I’ll be interested in the Medical Examiner’s report. If the skull and cervical bones show no damage, then it’s likely the victim didn’t land on their head and lived for some time. Which makes me wonder why someone didn’t hear them calling.”

  “Maybe no one was on the trail to hear,” Street said.

  I saw movement and looked up to see Diamond and another man. They carried foam boards and a shovel.

  “Any luck with bugs?” he said to Street.

  “Dermestids,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “I’d be premature to ask about time of death, right?”

  “Yeah. But I’m guessing two to three weeks.”

  He nodded, then introduced us to his deputy, a man named Smithy. Street went over to comfort Spot, while Diamond and Smithy and I dug under the main portion of the corpse and got it sandwiched between Diamond’s foam-covered boards.

  The skull went faster, although at one point we had to wait while Smithy took a breather. He walked over to a boulder that was in the shade of a scrubby juniper. Like Spot, he sat down facing the valley below, and took his hat off. After five minutes he came back, and we finished our packing and wrapping. Throughout the entire process, Smithy said no more than a dozen words. He was young, and I guessed that this was his first body. We strapped the foam boards onto Paint and walked with him back up the mountain as Street led the way on Prancer.

  “I can walk, and one of you can ride Prancer,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But remember, she bucks men off.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Spot brought up the rear, his mood depressed, no doubt failing to comprehend why some people, just like those who feed him and play with him, end up dead.

  When we got to the Jeep trail, Diamond and Smithy transferred the cargo into their Douglas County SUV, and, with Spot still trailing behind, Street and I rode the horses back down the lake side of the mountain toward Lana and Tory’s ponderosa.

  About half way down the mountain we came to a trail intersection. Near it stood two horses with saddles, their reins tied to a tree. In the shade nearby sat two guys wearing jeans and muscle shirts. Their cowboy hats didn’t go with their Nikes. They lounged back on one elbow each, and drank beer from cans.

  “Afternoon,” I said.

  “Sho’nuff,” one of them said.

  The other laughed and said, “You come up from the place with the multi-cultural tourists. We was riding down there earlier and saw your hound dog when you were saddling up.”

  “You are tourists, too,” I said, not specifically knowing it, but certain nonetheless. “Just not as multi-cultural.”

  “Way we like it,” he said.

  Street spoke up, “Let’s go, Owen,” she said with tension in her voice. She rode on past, through the intersection. Spot stayed.

  After she had gone a short way but was still within hearing distance, the other guy said, “Skinny broad, but she looks good in them jeans.” He finished his beer, crunched his can, and threw it onto the trail in front of me.

  “We don’t leave litter in Tahoe,” I said.

  “You gonna make me pick it up?”

  “I could. My dog could. Instead, I’ll just pick it up the next time I come through. C’mon, Spot,” I said.

  I gave Paint a shake of the reins and we went on down the mountain. The two guys laughed behind me.

  Lana, Tory, and the Elles were not in sight when we got down, maybe napping in the afternoon.

  Street helped me take the saddles and the toolbox off the horses. We put the horses back in their stalls. Street found a large brush and brushed down both horses while I watched.

  “How many years since you rode?” I asked.

  “Sixteen or seventeen, I guess.”

  “You still seem to remember it well.”

  “Like a bicycle,” she said. She looked into Prancer’s big brown eye, brushed her neck. “But horses are special. These guys have a soul unlike anything else.”

  We were walking past Tory and Lana’s pickup on the way out to my Jeep when Street glanced into the pickup bed and stopped. She frowned, moved around to the other side of the truck, leaned over and looked into the corner of the bed. She pulled a toothpick from out of her shirt pocket, reached down into the pickup, and used the toothpick to pick up a dark object that contrasted with the white paint of the truck.

  She walked over and showed me. It was dark brown, tubular, about a quarter inch in diameter, and an inch or more long.

  “Like a little tube of bark that slipped off a twig,” I said.

  “No, look. See the segments? All the little rings?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is what happens to a millipede after a glowworm encounter.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Have you ever seen fireflies?”

  “Sure. Bright, blinking lights low down over fields at night. But I don’t recall them since I was a kid. Back east.”

  “Yeah. That’s because the
California versions of fireflies don’t have the fire. At least, not the flying versions. For example,” she gestured with the toothpick, “this involved a California Phengodid. The male of the species matures into a flying beetle similar to other firefly species. Except our guy doesn’t have any light action.”

  “He’s light impotent?” I asked.

  “Yeah. But the female more than makes up for his lack of performance.”

  “She’s into bright lights, or hot sex?”

  “Both. She’s got pheromones that drive the males crazy. But she’s also a strange creature. She doesn’t mature into a typical adult beetle. She stays larviform.”

  “Not sure I like the sound of that.”

  “No. You wouldn’t like watching what she does, either.”

  I took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “She looks like a moist, yellow caterpillar with big brown spots. She’s naked, no hair, and she glows in the dark.”

  “And her perfume drives the guys wild,” I said.

  “Yeah. But I’m not sure how they would react if they took the time to watch her eat.”

  “Not a pretty sight?”

  “No. She likes nice, big millipedes. She grabs them by wrapping her body around them, and gives them a death-bite right behind their head. Then she commences her dinner.”

  “Perhaps I should fortify myself with a beer before you give me the details.”

  “You can take it,” Street said, grinning. “Her particular Thanksgiving feast behavior is to dive right into the millipede’s body, and tunnel through the entire creature, starting just behind the head, eating her way through, and exiting out the tail, leaving only the hollow shell.”

  I pointed at the brown thing on Street’s toothpick. “The tube you’re holding.”

  “Yeah. But you want to know the best part?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Sure you do. Her lights are so bright, that you can watch her glowing through the millipede’s shell as she eats her way through him at night.”

  “Lovely world you study,” I said.

  “Have you ever seen a glowing snail?” Street said, her grin moving from mischievous to maniacal.