Tahoe Silence

by Todd Borg

  Running a route on pavement obeys the same equation as hiking on a dirt trail. With little variation, it only takes one-third to one-half as much time to go down as it does up.

  We were already halfway down when Diamond and I had recovered from our oxygen deficits and were once again able to carry on a conversation.

  Street said, “If Silence was targeted, that would mean the kidnapping was planned in advance.”

  “They would’ve checked out the roads around her house,” Diamond said, “staked out the place to find out who was home and when were they home, and they would have noted the most common times she was outside.”

  Street jumped in again, “They also would have mapped out their getaway for the fastest route and the route least likely to attract attention. Right?”

  “Marlette should have hired you two,” I said.

  Street ignored me, her mind obviously racing. “If Silence was the target, then perhaps they had no intention of killing Charlie. Maybe he just got in the way when she was abducted. He posed too much risk, so they had to kill him.”

  “The question is why?” Diamond said. “Why would someone kidnap Silence?”

  Nobody spoke for a minute.

  I said, “The fact that there hasn’t been a ransom demand suggests several reasons. The most prominent ones would be that she heard something or saw something significant.”

  “But if she learned something that could incriminate someone, wouldn’t they just kill her to keep her from revealing it?” Street said.

  “Not if what she learned wasn’t incriminating,” I said.

  “I don’t understand,” Street said.

  “If she learned something significant, maybe the kidnappers want it.”

  Both Diamond and Street stopped jogging, so I stopped, too. They looked at me.

  “You mean,” Diamond said, “if she learned something like the location of buried treasure?”

  “Yeah. Maybe not a chest full of gold doubloons. A different kind of treasure. Buried inside the quiet of her mind.”

  NINETEEN

  After we’d dropped Street off at her condo and Diamond headed home, I started putting together some lunch, a ham and cheese and tomato and lettuce sandwich with mayo on twelve-grain bread, potato chips, apple, cookies and milk. For Spot, I poured some more of the sawdust chunks into his bowl and gave him some gourmet faucet water on the side. If he was envious, he didn’t show it. He devoured his large bowl in seconds. When he was done nosing the bowl across the kitchen and licking it dry, he turned and looked at me expectantly.

  “But you ate all of yours,” I said. “If you weren’t willing to share with me, why should I share with you?”

  I’m not certain he agreed with my logic, but after watching me eat for awhile, he went and lay down in the corner. He hung his head in the potent poor-little-me posture that I should photograph and have trademarked and turned into the theme for a chain of dog-treat stores. He held the pose for so long I finally gave in.

  “Your largeness,” I said.

  Spot looked up just a degree or two, his eyes drooping.

  “Catch,” I said and frisbeed a potato chip his direction.

  Michael Jordon could have learned something from the way Spot launched, twisted in mid-air, swung his head around as the chip arced, and snapped it out of the air.

  The phone rang and I picked it up.

  “Mr. McKenna?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Deputy Randy Rasmussen of Humboldt County. Got a message to contact you and see if I can give you some information on the Granite Mountain Boys. A pet project of mine. Heard you got a snatch down in Tahoe, might be one of Antonio Gomez’s transactions.”

  “He doesn’t kidnap, he transacts?”

  “Tony Go? Bet your ass. It’s always a deal of some kind. Usually the currency is greenbacks or white powder. Sometimes it’s young girls. What can I help you with?”

  I explained what I’d learned to date about Silence’s kidnapping and Charlie’s murder. I went long on the details of the killing and disposing of the body and the reports of motorcycles in the neighborhood at the time and stayed short on the details of Silence’s autism. No particular reason other than a little respect for Silence’s privacy. When I’d finished the report I said, “Does it sound like a Gomez transaction?”

  “Yeah, if you can find a reason why the girl would be currency,” Rasmussen said.

  “I’m working on that. If it doesn’t turn out she’s currency, if she was taken for kinky stuff, would that make it less likely Gomez was behind it?”

  “I think so, yeah. The problem, though, would be explaining the Aztec word on the boy’s forehead. Although, if one of his rank and file did it on the side, keeping it from Gomez, that could accommodate both a kinky motive and an Aztec God. Gomez’s gofers know about the Aztec thing, and they might try to play with it themselves.”

  “If Gomez did do this, how would you imagine it going down, where they’d hold her, how they’d treat her.”

  “Gomez is a planner. Most of the goons who follow him are idiots, but his inner circle are guys like him. Not much different than your average corporate board of directors. Gomez would have every detail figured out in advance, and he wouldn’t set the transaction in motion until he was sure he could bring it to a full and satisfying conclusion.”

  “The murder of the brother,” I said. “Does that sound like part of a sound plan?”

  “The way you describe it, no. Gomez wouldn’t plan a body dump like that. He’d want to take the girl clean. No muss, no fuss. If he planned to kill the boy, he’d do that clean, too. He certainly wouldn’t drive around with a dead person and then throw him out someplace. So either Gomez isn’t involved, or it was one of those glitches that intrudes on even the most careful plan.

  “As for how he’d handle the details,” Rasmussen continued, “it’s hard to say. Gomez is a neatnik. Everything in its place. He’d probably keep the girl in a decent place, not out in the dirt. A trailer or a basement where people couldn’t hear her. I heard she’s mute. But she could still scream, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think Gomez would treat her reasonably well, feed her, get her a coat if she’s cold, stuff like that. As for his minions, I can’t say. They’d know they weren’t supposed to touch the money, so to speak. They’d keep it in good shape until the payoff. But you never know.”

  “Commander Mallory at the South Lake Tahoe PD mentioned that he’d heard Gomez was into sacrifice. Can you add anything to that?”

  “Not much. It’s a persistent rumor that won’t go away. There’s a lot of stories about this guy, some verified, some rumors to be verified later. Verified includes the girl who was kidnapped from Sonoma several years ago. She was raped, then murdered, and later found in a ditch. Her forehead was inscribed with Aztec words. The two bikers who confessed to it rode with Tony Go. Then there was the meth lab bust in the El Dorado foothills. Five men, all bikers who rode with Tony Go.

  “In the unverified department are the religious sacrifices. There’s some anecdotal evidence to the effect that Tony Go personally performs a sacrifice at the rise of the full moon. Drinks the blood, the whole nine yards.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if that turns out to be true as well, but for now it’s all just stories from guys who rode with him for a time and then ended up getting three squares from the state. Incidentally, I looked it up.”

  “What?”

  “The ancient Aztecs really did that. They made sacrificial offerings. Had blood rituals and stuff. It was a way to make room for new life.”

  “Can I call you with questions as they come up?”

  “Certainly. Let me give you my cell, skip the phone tag in the department.”

  We hung up and I saw that it was time to try the doctor again.

  TWENTY

  I dialed Dr. Power’s office and he took my call.

  “Any chance you could run over here now?” he said. �
�I’ve got a cancellation.”

  “Be there in a few minutes,” I told him.

  When I was back in his office I said, “As I mentioned when I was here before, I’m considering the possibility that the girl was not a random victim.”

  Power nodded. “Kidnapped by someone who knows her?”

  “One possibility,” I said.

  “Perhaps the kidnapper became fixated on her.”

  I nodded. “Another possibility would be that maybe she saw someone commit a crime.”

  “Interesting,” Power said. “A witness who can’t say what she witnessed. Even so, why kidnap her? If she presents a danger as a witness, why not just kill her?” Then Power’s eyes widened. “Sorry to be so crass about it.”

  “You’re just thinking like an investigator.”

  “Maybe Charlie was the witness, so they took him and killed him and wound up with her as baggage. But then that wouldn’t make sense either, would it? If they had no compunctions about killing him, they’d kill her to get her out of the way.”

  I said, “A third type of non-random kidnapping would be if a kidnapper thought she was the key to something important and is trying to use her to get the important thing.”

  Power paced back and forth in front of his desk. “I wouldn’t want your job, Owen. Too difficult and too disturbing.”

  “Let’s go back to the first scenario,” I said. “Suppose someone was fixated on Silence and kidnapped her. What can you surmise about such a situation?”

  “It’s a possibility with lots of antecedents and a thousand psychological explanations,” Power said. “The literature is full of examples. But I won’t bore you with the verbiage. The main point is that mental pathology knows no limits. Once you’ve been in this business for awhile, you realize you could never have a body of research exhaustive enough to cover every scenario. Every day in this country a new event triggers a reconsideration of the psychiatric canon.” Power seemed to think about what he’d said. “By my reckoning, anyway. But back to your question. What kind of person is likely to do that? Frankly, it could be anyone. For anyone you can pick, I could construct a reason.”

  “How about a teacher?” I said.

  “Sure. I’ll try to keep to layman’s terms. Let’s say a teacher once had a student, or more to the point, an autistic student. The teacher loved that child dearly and was making good progress with her. One day the child died a tragic death. It left a gaping hole in the teacher’s psyche. The passage of time only made the longing worse. One day the teacher saw the opportunity to replace the missing child with a similar child. Only, this time the teacher decides to keep the child to herself, hiding the child away where no harm could come to it.”

  “What about a neighbor?” I said.

  “Certainly. The neighbor gets to know the child through daily contact. Or maybe the neighbor only sees the child from a distance. The neighbor seems normal to everyone else in the neighborhood, but in fact has serious problems and doesn’t have appropriate coping skills. The neighbor develops fantasies about the child, and the child is perceived as the missing link to the neighbor’s happiness. The neighbor believes his constant hunger will finally be sated once he has the child in his possession. The fantasies may have nothing to do with the specific child but everything to do with the neighbor’s pathology. Perhaps the neighbor observes the child’s schedule and routine and figures out the perfect time to take the child so that the police will think a motorcycle gang took her. And like the teacher, the neighbor could care less about ransom and is only interested in possession.”

  I spoke up. “You make it sound like anyone in or near Silence’s life could be the kidnapper, regardless of how unlikely it would appear.”

  “That is exactly my point. We’ve all heard the stories after a kidnapper or killer is caught. The sister says it couldn’t be her brother. He’s a pillar of the community and he paid for the new church and he’s been a super uncle to her kids. Or the son says it couldn’t be his dad who was the little league coach and the town’s favorite barber and grew orchids for a hobby.”

  Power stopped pacing and sat on the edge of his desk. “No, I’m afraid that you can’t easily pursue a kidnapper by searching for a particular mental health profile. There’s two main reasons. First, the profile is too general. You’ll notice that in most of these cases where there is no specific evidence, the profile is always the same. The kidnapper is likely to be male with low intelligence, little education and poor social skills. Further, the kidnapper usually has a low income from a menial job. While this may describe the man who is eventually caught, it won’t help you find him. There are simply too many men who fit the description to make it a worthwhile sorting mechanism.”

  Power continued. “The second reason such a psychological profile won’t help you is that the profile isn’t causal. The vast, vast majority of men with below average intelligence and income and education and social skills are not kidnappers.”

  “You make it sound hopeless,” I said.

  “No, I just want to dispel the notion we get from TV and movies, that without much in the way of clues, we can nevertheless use psychology to find a killer.”

  “From what you know of the girl, can you form an opinion about the kind of person who may be drawn to kidnap her?”

  “Not beyond the scenarios I already described. The only

  additional possibility that comes to mind is that this particular kidnapper may have had some exposure to children with autism disorder or some other communication disability. But it is a small likelihood.”

  I thought about what he said. “What can you tell me about autism?”

  He paused, took a breath and made a slow shake of his head. His unruly eyebrows caught the light. “As I mentioned earlier, I’m not an autism expert. But I can give you a little sense of what is involved.

  “Perhaps the single most salient feature of autism is that the individual has trouble communicating. They usually have difficulty forming clear speech and difficulty in understanding what other people mean with the jumble of words that make up speech. They also have difficulty understanding how other people receive communication. This last thing is probably a problem with empathy. For example, an autistic child knows when they are hungry. But they may have trouble realizing that you could be hungry at different times than they are. If they think of it at all, they will often assume that you share their feelings, that if they are hungry, you must be hungry. In a sense, they cannot distinguish between different senses of self, theirs or yours or mine.

  “When you think about it, the problem of differentiating between themselves and others creates almost as many communication problems as not being able to use language. Communication functions because the speaker has some kind of understanding of how the listener is receiving the words. An empathy for the listener. Without it, the speaker just drones on, never knowing what is appropriate to say or when and how to say it. Autistic people also have difficulty writing. The complexities of language, spoken or written, seem to elude them.

  “I should probably interject that we refer to autism problems as a spectrum because there are many, many manifestations of autism. For those of us in the business, it is possible to see an autistic child who is unlike any other autistic child we’ve ever seen.”

  Power paused, thinking.

  “I’ve heard of Asperger’s Syndrome,” I said. “How does that differ?”

  “Kids with Asperger’s Syndrome are often very verbal and much closer to you and me. They have certain autistic characteristics, but we refer to them as high-functioning kids. These kids can be bright and good with words. Their problems are more about social awkwardness, not picking up the subtle social and emotional cues that people telegraph. They may not be able to look you in the eye. They won’t pick up on the meaning behind certain facial expressions or body language. They may exhibit unusual or repetitive body movements. Sometimes they will say things that are inappropriate for a situation.”

 
; “Is there any good treatment for autism?”

  “Yes, for some kids. Some of the most successful intensive intervention techniques are focused on working with the child’s language skills. Many autistic kids get better with behavior modification that has language improvement as its goal.”

  “What about Silence? Could she get better?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m sure the Special Education teachers in the schools have done their best, but the problem with the Ramirez girl as I see it, is that she is too retarded. There may also be brain damage that is specific to those parts of the brain that control verbal development. Language is a very complex process, and she probably doesn’t have the brain power to use even the most rudimentary language.”

  “Sad,” I said.

  “Yes. This business of autism is one of the saddest and most disappointing afflictions that we come across. Whenever I see a child with autism disorder, I see in the parents a level of hope and fear almost unmatched with other disorders. The result is that everything about autism is loaded, and doctors quickly learn to tread lightly.”

  “You mean that you’re afraid to say or do anything that might give people a false sense of possibility regarding their child?”

  “Yes, we don’t want to give false hopes, but of course

  almost worse would be to give parents a sense that their child’s limitations are greater than they really are.

  “Naturally, parents are desperately eager to hear anything that suggests that their child is not so impaired as it seems,” he continued. “They want to know that things can get better. Much better. And sometimes, with some children, they can.

  “But with other children, if you tell the parents the truth, some of those parents will keep going to other doctors until someone tells them what they want to hear. There is a large emerging community that looks aghast at the doctor who is realistic about the future life of the autistic child. That doctor is now considered by many to be trapped in the intellectual ghetto of Western Medicine, hopelessly shut off from all of the alternative and holistic and Eastern concepts that might improve the child.”