Tahoe Payback (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 15)

by Todd Borg

  Fairbanks didn’t have such skills. His front wheel folded back to the left, and the rear wheel lurched up into the air. Fairbanks launched over the handlebars. His facial expression turned to horror and shock. People gasped. A small scream rose in the still air. For a very brief moment Fairbanks was horizontal, arms out in front like Superman, flying through the air. Then he hit the ground in a belly flop, and skidded forward. He came to a stop near the finish line.

  People rushed to him, bending over, kneeling next to him.

  “Is he alive?”

  “Yeah, I can feel his pulse.”

  “Should we call a doctor?”

  “The poor man, I knew he was going too fast!”

  A woman was shaking him. “Sir, are you okay?!”

  As I got to him, we all heard him say, “I’m okay,” in a tiny voice. “I don’t need a doctor. I just need to catch my breath.”

  Several people were startled by Spot, and they jumped back.

  Holding Spot’s collar, I knelt next to Fairbanks’s head.

  “I’m okay,” he said again, still in the same belly-flop position, arms out in front of him, face in the dirt. It reminded me of my weapon hand training with Spot when I landed in the dirt in a similar position. But Fairbanks’s collision was much worse.

  I turned to the group of onlookers. “He’s okay,” I said louder. “This is my friend Douglas Fairbanks. It looks like he’ll be fine. I’ll stay with him.”

  Fairbanks didn’t move. “I’m a failure,” he said. His eyes were teary with the sting of falling or embarrassment or both. “I’m a complete failure at everything.”

  I ignored his comment as I helped him to his feet.

  “I can drive you home,” I said.

  “No, I should take the bus. They’re having a ceremony for us when the bus brings us to the South Shore. I’d like to be there for that. If you drive me, I’ll just look even more like a loser.”

  “Losers don’t ride dozens of miles on rugged mountain bike trails. That was quite an achievement. I’ve never ridden that far.”

  “I never should have, either,” he said. “I always go overboard on everything I do. I never face my limitations. I never know how to stop myself.”

  We heard someone call out to the crowd. “Thanks to all of you for participating. The Grand Tour was truly a grand event. The South Shore ceremony is still on our schedule. However, there’s been a slight delay with the shuttle bus. They had mechanical trouble, so they’ve sent another bus. Please be patient. The bus will be here eventually.”

  “We can wait in my Jeep,” I said. “That’ll be a bit more comfortable than sitting on the ground.”

  Fairbanks didn’t protest. I picked up his bike. Although it was battered, it was still functional.

  “If you want some support, you can hold onto Spot’s collar.”

  Fairbanks took my suggestion. He leaned on Spot and moved with slow steps. Spot matched his pace.

  I rolled the bike over to the Jeep and leaned it against the hood. I opened the passenger door. Fairbanks sat down in the passenger seat. Spot stood next to him at the open door. Fairbanks leaned his head back on the headrest and made a big sigh.

  I got in the driver’s side and sat with the door open.

  The only significant sound was Fairbanks’s breathing.

  Eventually, he spoke. “When I was a kid, they called me Dougie Fatbanks. I was teased endlessly. I never had a girlfriend. I don’t think any girl ever even noticed me. In college, I once asked a woman if she wanted to go on a date and get pizza, and she laughed at me.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yeah. She made this choking sound. It took me a year to get up my guts to ask another woman out. That woman frowned and said, ‘Are you serious? I’m sorry, I have standards.’ Another time, I asked a girl I liked if she liked poetry. She looked at me like I smelled or something, and she said she liked football and jocks.”

  “People can be thoughtless,” I said.

  Fairbanks continued. “Then one day in college, a very business-like woman started paying me attention. I was so awestruck that I didn’t even notice that she never once touched me, never once said anything affectionate. We never went out on a date. In hindsight, I think her marriage to me was just a way for her to escape her parents.

  “Decades later, I took a kind of personal stock of my life, and I decided to change. I started walking to and from my office, four miles each way. In one year, I lost 100 pounds. I’ve still got more to lose, but that gave me confidence. Then I got a mountain bike and started bringing it to Tahoe. I told you how I met Isadore, a beautiful girl who paid me some attention. We went out to dinner together. We talked and drank wine at this romantic restaurant. It was amazing.” He paused as if remembering.

  “What about it was amazing?”

  “Well, it was mostly just that I was going out to dinner with a woman. I’d never been on a real date before. I’d been married for decades but had never experienced a romantic evening.” He paused. “But then it turns out that Isadore was really Dory Spatt, a charity scammer. A thief.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  The race organizer again called out to the crowd. “People, we just got an update on the bus. It is currently going past Glenbrook. So the delay will be less than an hour. We’re so sorry about this! To make it up to you, our race crew member William has gone to the market for a case of champagne along with cheese and crackers and other treats. So we’ll have a free champagne party feast on the bus when it gets here.”

  There were a few whoops and hollers from the crowd.

  “Do you still want to wait for the bus?” I said.

  “Yeah. I should. I need to learn how to hang out with people.” Fairbanks sounded pained. “I need to learn how to be normal.”

  He pushed himself out of the Jeep and stood up. “I think that while I wait I’ll just walk my bike around the area roads, try to loosen up my muscles and get my brain in a better place.”

  “Okay. You’ve got my cell number.”

  Fairbanks nodded. He put his hand on his bike seat and began to walk it away. Then he turned back.

  “Hey, McKenna.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That was awesome of you to come and show support.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I was about to drive off when my cell rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Bains calling.”

  “Yes, sergeant.”

  “First, I got your message about the wasp killer. I called the ME. They’re confidant that Dory Spatt had no chemical in her mouth or lungs.”

  “Really,” I said. “That’s interesting.”

  “The other thing,” Bains continued, “is that early this morning, we were called out to investigate a sunken boat that was spotted by a pilot who was flying over Emerald Bay. The boat was north of the entrance to Emerald Bay. We sent our boat patrol out there, and they found an aluminum runabout under twenty-five feet of water. In some ways, it’s a surprise it took so long for someone to spot the wreckage because it was so visible from the surface. But it was in an underwater boulder field that boaters stay away from so they don’t rip holes in their hulls.”

  “What was notable about the sunken boat?”

  “Nothing about the boat itself. A sixteen foot runabout with a basic steering cockpit in the center. But there was a body attached to the boat. The body’s right arm was trapped between the steering cable and the boat hull.”

  I was trying to visualize it. “Like maybe the person realized the boat was about to swamp, and he reached out to grab the edge of the boat for support but accidentally got his arm jammed in between the cable and the boat hull?”

  “Right. Only the body was a she, not a he.”

  “That’s unusual,” I said. “Not too many women go out boating alone in bad weather.”

  “We found a wallet on the body. The ID said the victim’s name was Glenn Smith. Sounds like the woman you told me about.”
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  As soon as Bains said the name, I had a rushing cascade of thoughts.

  “That’s the woman who was at the doctor’s house in Ukiah arranging for its sale, the daughter of the doctor who died hanging from his ankles. The neighbor lady said the doctor’s daughter was really angry about the Red Roses of Hope charity.”

  Bains said, “That was the charity that you said the murder victim, Dory Spatt, ran?”

  “Yeah. Which suggests that Glenn Smith could have been Dory’s murderer.”

  “Right,” Bains said. “In Glenn Smith’s pocket was a brochure from the Red Roses charity.

  “But if Glenn Smith strung Dory up on the Fannette Island tea house and then died when her boat swamped, then the subsequent murders by hanging don’t make sense.”

  Bains didn’t reply.

  “Unless the other murders are copycat killings,” I said. “That would explain why no one found any haiku at the other murders even though Spot found a haiku at the Emerald Bay murder.”

  “Right,” Bains said. “We never publicized any info about the haiku. A copycat would have learned about the symbolic charity roses in the Fannette Island victim’s mouth. That info was in the newspaper. But a copycat murderer wouldn’t know to put a haiku on the scene.”

  We were both quiet a moment.

  “We may have solved the Fannette Island murder,” Bains said.

  “Yeah.”

  “But we’ve made the murders at Kings Beach, Truckee, and last night at Van Sickle Park more of a puzzle,” he said.

  “However, we may have learned something valuable.”

  “What would that be?” he said.

  “If we find any possible suspect who had an alibi for Dory Spatt’s murder, that person can be considered once again.”

  “Good point,” Bains said.

  “Call me if you learn anything else?” I said.

  “Likewise.” Bains hung up.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  I sat in the Jeep, confused and surprised, trying to sort out the implications of a potential copycat killer. Because Glenn Smith was dead from a boating accident near Emerald Bay, everything I’d learned about her, especially her father’s donations to the Red Roses charity, made the daughter a good suspect for Dory Spatt’s murder.

  Hanging her victim by the ankles might seem like a fitting punishment when her father had died that way. What didn’t make sense was that the hanging by ankles seemed like a connection pointing toward Glenn Smith. It made her more likely to get caught.

  I paused on that thought. Maybe, as happens with some murders, the killer wanted that connection. As if, in Glenn’s anger, she found murder more satisfying when there was a faint clue that led back to her father’s death in Ukiah, California. Certainly, the haiku made it very obvious that the motivation for the murder was the scam charity.

  As I had that thought, a sudden realization startled me.

  Haiku, spelled backward, was Ukiah.

  I realized that could be a coincidence. However, it could also be a clever way to taunt law enforcement. I’d seen it before. Clues that, though somewhat obscure, were intentional. In my experience, it was almost a common component of very bright killers. It added the ego component. See how smart I am? I can give you a very clever clue. But you still can’t catch me.

  In this case, it seemed that Glenn was making her connection to the killing as obvious as possible without providing actual evidence. Unfortunately, for her, she likely died that same stormy night that she committed murder.

  Spot and I still sat in the Jeep, Spot sound asleep.

  In the distance, I saw Fairbanks plodding down the road, wheeling his bicycle. His head was lowered with obvious depression. He came to a T intersection, turned, and disappeared from my sight. I realized that he was heading down the road where the scientist lived.

  My thoughts segued to the work of scientists. In Professor Calvarenna’s case, the work was basically math. It must be an amazing life to earn your way through the world by conjuring up the laws of the universe using nothing more than math, and then applying those laws to things that no person had ever thought of before. Spending one’s life studying Lagrangian points must be as esoteric a career as there is. Parking places in space. Concepts so dramatic that charity scammers use them for metaphorical business models.

  Spot pushed himself up in the back seat where he was lying, standing with his back against the Jeep’s headliner. I watched him in the rear view mirror. He looked at me with droopy eyes, turned a circle in the cramped space of the seat, and lay back down.

  “Not sure turning a circle will give you a more comfortable parking place,” I said.

  Spot acted asleep. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he wanted to spite me for not making barbecued cheeseburgers for lunch. Spot sighed, then rolled onto his side.

  That would make his parking place more stable.

  I remembered that Giuseppe had said that some Lagrangian points were more stable than others. A spacecraft could possibly fly out of the bowl at some Lagrangian points but would always stay inside the bowl at others. He said the astronomers had even found a small asteroid permanently trapped in one of Earth’s Lagrangian points.

  As I thought about Lagrangian points, a foggy thought nagged at me. My memory was not at all clear on the subject. But I thought Giuseppe had referred to the point numbers in a way that suggested that the lower-numbered points were less stable, and the higher-numbered points were more stable. But then I also thought he said that the numbers ‘climbed toward instability.’ Which would imply the opposite.

  If the first three points were less stable, and the fourth and fifth points were more stable, the nomenclature didn’t ‘climb toward instability,’ it climbed toward stability.

  Did I hear it the wrong way? Or could Giuseppe have gotten it backward when he explained it to me? He was a classic scientist, focused almost exclusively on his work, absent minded as a result. There was no question that an absent-minded professor could forget where he parked his car, not remember the names of people he’d known for 25 years, and have trouble recalling the day of the week or month of the year.

  But getting his basic science turned around?

  That would be like forgetting how to tie one’s shoes or how to spread peanut butter on toast.

  I got out my phone and Googled Giuseppe Calvarenna. Up came several hundred hits. Winner of multiple prizes. Astrophysics professor emeritus. A feature on his patents in a magazine called Invention Journal. A Wikipedia bio. Author of numerous articles on cosmology and – surprise – philosophy. A New York Times feature about the professor speaking at a White House dinner. There was an article in The Times of London that described a conference where Giuseppe Calvarenna and Stephen Hawking made a joint presentation on the latest view of the Space-Time Continuum.

  I clicked on the Wikipedia entry.

  It detailed Giuseppe Calvarenna’s long and illustrious career. There was a list of his substantial awards and a summation of his acclaim. There was even an entire section devoted to his groundbreaking work on Lagrangian points.

  After I skimmed through the prose, I noticed the last paragraph, which told of his untimely death from heart failure a year ago.

  I had almost missed it. The very-much-alive Giuseppe Calvarenna had supposedly died a year ago.

  I hit the back button, which returned me to the Google page.

  Below the Wikipedia link was a link to a blogpost by Giuseppe himself titled, “As With Mark Twain, The Reports of my Death are Greatly Exaggerated.”

  I clicked on that and came to a blog where Giuseppe wrote, ‘I am still alive (to the great dismay of several people!) and I have no idea how the death of my poor namesake in Arkansas has been confused with me.’

  I read through many details on how Giuseppe had been a victim of name confusion. It appeared that the primary reason was because the name Giuseppe Calvarenna was unusual. The person who inadvertantly spread the misinformation was a science writer at Cosmology Tech World. Th
at writer had noticed the obituary of an Arkansas teacher with the same name, and the obit was in the same newspaper as an article on the scientist Giuseppe Calvarenna, and the writer had connected the two. The obit had also come just two weeks after a widely-reported heart valve scare that brought the famous Tahoe physicist to a Reno hospital.

  As a result, Tahoe’s number one scientist had been assumed to have died.

  Yet, it got me thinking. I gripped the steering wheel, my hands squeezing the plastic as if I could generate insight through pressure alone.

  Let’s play the game of What If?

  What if the brilliant physicist did in fact die from heart failure?

  Then, what if someone well-versed in identity theft had been studying the man’s reluctance to engage in the new world of Facebook and other such websites? A clever thief would realize that someone who has not embraced that new world is more easily manipulated by it. A clever thief might pay special attention to a wealthy scientist and inventor who had life-threatening heart disease.

  What if the identity target, reclusive scientist Giuseppe Calvarenna didn’t have close family? What if he wasn’t enamored of uploading selfies of his every moment into cyberspace? That non-photographed person wouldn’t be easy to identify. And without siblings or kids or neighbors who saw him often, a studious thief could see an amazing opportunity. When the scientist died, it might be relatively easy to adopt a similar hair style and color, wear the same frumpy clothes and simply move into Giuseppe’s house and replace the dead man. If the real, dead Giuseppe hadn’t been chummy with his neighbors, probably even the neighbors wouldn’t notice the switch.

  The biggest problem might be what to do about the dead body. If the real Giuseppe had died at home, the new “replacement” Giuseppe would have to convince the authorities that the dead body had belonged to an imposter or an acquaintance who looked like him. If the real Giuseppe had died while out of his house, shopping or traveling, the process might be easier. The new Giuseppe could simply claim that there had been a terrible mistake. Once the new Giuseppe had moved into Giuseppe’s home, his presence there would help him telegraph a sense of legitimacy.