Tahoe Silence

by Todd Borg

  “It’s okay, boy,” I said. I walked over, put my hand on the side of his neck. “I just wanted to check. Didn’t mean to make you sad.”

  I couldn’t get reception on my cell, so we walked up the mountain toward Angora Ridge above us while I checked the cell’s readout. When a reception bar appeared, I dialed 9-1-1. Spot sat down with a large boulder between him and the cabin, trying to distance himself from the smell of death.

  When the dispatcher answered I gave her my name and the address of the cabin and asked her to contact the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department. Then I walked down the road with Spot as I waited. I talked to him in reassuring tones, petting him, telling him he did a good job. We came back to the drive as the first two Ford Explorer cruisers showed up five minutes later. In another ten minutes three more vehicles arrived. Two men went into the house, handkerchiefs over their noses. They came back out gagging and reported that the victim was in the basement, but that decomposition of the body had progressed too far to make an immediate identification possible or to establish how the victim died.

  There were seven men and one woman and all were young and only one of them had any knowledge of me. I’ve learned that with other cops it is best to first tell them that I’m an ex-homicide inspector from the SFPD. Then I showed them ID and mentioned the name of the El Dorado lieutenant who knew me.

  Only after I’d established my qualifications and bona fides did I explain that I was now working as a private investigator on the Tahoe kidnapping and murder case and that Commander Mallory of the SLTPD was in charge and would field their inquiries. They all had varying degrees of familiarity with the case.

  Two crime lab boys arrived and went to work while one of the officers, a Sergeant Kelly, kept firing questions at me, so eager in his interrogation that he interrupted my answers. Finally, his partner intervened and suggested they just let me tell it from start to finish. I ran through the story twice.

  I was thorough, eventually covering how I ended up at the cabin and Michael Warner’s likely paternity of the kidnapped girl. I explained that I hadn’t been in the cabin and had not had any suspicion about his death until my dog whined. I added how I was peering into the basement window and accidentally cracked the glass and smelled the odor myself.

  “So you’re coming through the woods and your dog gets one whiff of something from some distance away and he whines and that made you think there was a body inside the cabin?” one of the men said, his voice incredulous.

  “It made me wonder. After I cracked the glass and had Spot sniff it again and I saw the way he pulled back, then I knew for sure.” I turned and gestured at Spot who was still lying down a good distance away, watching but not wanting to come any closer.

  “Is he a trained police dog?” the officer asked.

  “No, but he’s had some training on suspect apprehension and search and rescue. Not enough to be a professional dog. But he knows the smell of death and he shows it.”

  They all turned and looked at Spot who lay there and hung his head.

  “Looks major league bummed out,” one of the men said.

  “Dogs with search and rescue training feel that they’ve failed in some way if they find a dead body. They like to find live people.”

  I wanted to get home, so I got out one of my cards and handed it to the sergeant in charge. “Anything else you need, give me a call. Remember to check in with Mallory. I need to get back to work.”

  The men nodded, and Spot and I headed home.

  FORTY-FOUR

  I stopped at Street’s before I headed up the mountain. Her VW bug was in the drive so I knocked rather than use the key she’d given me. Spot and I stood like gentlemen callers when she answered the door.

  “Hi, what a nice surprise. I was just thinking that… Spot, what’s wrong?” She grabbed his head and rubbed his ears. “Why so glum?”

  I gave Street a short explanation of my activities. “He’s sad about the body. Can I leave him here a bit? A change of scene will cheer him up.”

  “Of course. C’mere, you big canine creature.” Street took his collar. “Spot and I will drink champagne and roast hot dogs in the fire,” Street said to me over her shoulder as she walked him into her condo. “You make your calls. When you’re done, come back for a nightcap in front of the fire?”

  “Will do,” I said, shutting the door behind me.

  As I drove up the mountain in the dark, I could sense the moonlight hitting the mountains of the opposite shore even as it hadn’t yet risen over the mountain behind my cabin. The moon glow was bright. It would be full in two more nights.

  As I picked up the phone to dial the dean, Catherine Timmeron, I thought about what had transpired in the last couple hours. Michael Warner had gone from being my best suspect to a likely murder victim. Marlette had said he was a sweet, kind, somewhat strange person who’d been helpful and gracious in meeting his biological daughter. He’d disappeared from school about the time that she was kidnapped. Now that the body in the cabin was probably his, it was likely that he too had been killed around the time that Silence and Charlie had been kidnapped. Maybe even before. Maybe Warner’s van had been stolen and was used to kidnap the kids.

  From there it was a connect-the-dots conclusion that Michael Warner had been the original source of the information that the kidnapper wanted.

  Perhaps Michael and the kidnapper had been friends. Michael could have been eager to talk about the amazing experience of discovering he had a daughter he’d never known.

  Maybe Michael ruminated on the nature of talking to a mute person, a person who didn’t respond in any normal way. Perhaps he’d had the same experience that Marlette had described, that talking to Silence was like taking a truth serum. Because it didn’t seem that she understood what you were saying, it loosened your inhibitions and you found yourself saying things that you would never reveal to anyone else.

  So the kidnapper figured it out. He realized that Michael had revealed to Silence the secret that was so valuable. The kidnapper met Michael at the cabin and tried to get the information out of him, but Michael wasn’t forthcoming. The kidnapper killed Michael and took his van, using it to kidnap the kids. He killed the son Charlie and ever since has been trying to get the information out of the mute girl.

  I punched in Catherine’s number. It rang and I debated whether to tell her about Michael’s death. I decided that it was appropriate to withhold the information for two reasons. The first was that we didn’t technically know that the body in the cabin was Michael’s. The other reason was that once Catherine was told of his death, it would be difficult to get useful information out of her. The possibility of saving Silence trumped any concerns about when she learned of his death.

  “Hello,” she answered again in the same small cultured-sounding voice.

  “Hi Catherine. Owen McKenna calling again. Sorry to bother you, but I have another question.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m back in Tahoe. I found the cabin that fits your description. Michael’s van is not there. I’ll check back tomorrow. But in the event I don’t find him, I’m wondering if you can tell me whether anyone else at the university worked with him. Are there any professors who might be familiar with the projects that Michael worked on?”

  Catherine was clearly someone who didn’t speak until she was ready. I was about to ask if she were still there when she spoke.

  “The only person I can think of is Ruben Olivera. He is an associate professor of chemistry. They seemed to get along well and sometimes had lunch together. Michael never said anything about sharing projects, but I’ve sometimes noticed a kind of cross-discipline talk that you don’t often see within a discipline.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s just that physicists will sometimes go slow when talking to other physicists about their ideas. Especially, if the idea is kind of out-there, so to speak. I think it’s just human nature to avoid possible ridicule. Same with chemists and astronomers et cetera.
But physicists would feel more open to talk to chemists and vice versa.”

  “Any chance you have Ruben’s home number? It could be very important.”

  Another pause while she considered.

  “Let me get my book.” She put down the phone, came back after a minute and read off a number.

  “Thank you very much,” I said.

  I called Ruben’s home number and got voicemail with a complicated menu. I chose the pager option, punched in my number and hung up. He called back in one minute.

  “I’m returning a page. You called me,” a voice said. The man’s perfect diction and enunciation were clear despite his Mexican accent and a lot of background noise.

  “Thank you for returning my call. My name is Owen McKenna. I’m calling about…”

  “Wait a second, please.” Someone was shouting in the background. Something about tacos and cheese and cerveza. The noise went away and Ruben was back. “Sorry. I’m in a restaurant. You were saying?”

  “Dean Catherine Timmeron gave me your home number. I’m calling about a colleague of yours. Michael Warner.” I gave Ruben the gist of the situation, including the hope that Warner could provide information that might help in solving a kidnapping. “We’ve checked his home in El Dorado Hills and the cabin where he often stays in Tahoe and we haven’t been able to talk to him. I’m wondering if you’ve heard from him?”

  “No. Not since he went on his camping trip.”

  “Any idea about the purpose of his trip? Dean Timmeron said that he was working on a project and that she thought he needed to get away to think. Can you give me any sense of what this project was? It may be linked to the reason the girl was kidnapped.”

  “First of all, I would never violate a confidence. Second, I don’t know any specifics. I only have a conceptual idea of what he was working on. Having said that, let me see if I can answer you without violating his trust. In general terms I can say his project was an invention of sorts. Not an object, but a process. A kind of new mathematics applied to a technical procedure.” He paused. “Does that help?”

  “Is this the kind of thing that could make money?”

  Ruben laughed. “Oh, you have no idea. From what Michael said, it would revolutionize part of an industry.”

  “Did he ever say whether he’d spoken to anyone about this?”

  “He never spoke about it. It was a secret.”

  “Just you, then?” I asked.

  “Like I said, he spoke about it only in conceptual terms. I don’t know what it is. I don’t think anyone knows what it is.”

  “How about the conceptual terms, then. Do you think you were the only one he told? Or would he have given other people a conceptual sense of his project?”

  “Michael was private. He didn’t need outside approval.”

  “So no one else even knew that he was working on something big. Just you and, to a lesser extent, Dean Timmeron.”

  “Right,” Ruben said. Then, after a moment, he added, “And the money guys.”

  “What money guys?”

  “Michael talked to some venture capital firms about his idea. Again, conceptually. He knew it was worth money. He wanted to have an idea about how to proceed when it became time to launch.”

  “Any names of the venture capital firms come to mind?”

  “No. There was an outfit in Palo Alto. Another in San Jose. There was even a group in Tahoe, come to think of it.”

  “Do you remember him mentioning any names?”

  “Not that I recall. He just called them venture capitalists. Sometimes he abbreviated and referred to them as the VC. I remember that because my dad was American and he was in Viet Nam. He talked about VC, too, but of course that was an abbreviation of a different term. Even so, it stuck in my mind.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I appreciate your help. Let me give you my other numbers in case anything else comes to mind.” I started to recite my phone numbers when he interrupted.

  “One thing I do remember,” he said.

  “What’s that.”

  “About the Tahoe VC. Michael said some name that I don’t remember. But I recall that he referred to the name as like the writer.”

  “Emerson?” I said, thinking of Marlette’s neighbor who said he invested in businesses.

  “That’s it. The American writer Emerson. The Tahoe firm was named Emerson, or Emerson was the name of one of the principals. Something like that.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  I thanked Ruben, hung up the phone and went out to the Jeep. I was at Emerson Baylor’s house fifteen minutes later.

  I parked in his drive. There were no other cars in the drive, but the garage doors were closed and light shown from several of the windows. The doorbell chimed like a four-note chord on a church organ when I pushed the glowing button and I had to wait only a few seconds before Emerson opened the door.

  “Hello?” he said, then, “Oh, you are the detective. I’m sorry, I forget your name.” He was dressed in off-white trousers with crisp creases and tan leather slippers and a white dress shirt open at the neck and a tan V-neck sweater of exactly the same shade as the slippers. He held a snifter of brandy in his left hand.

  “Owen McKenna,” I said.

  “Yes, of course. McKenna.” He shook my hand and gestured with the snifter. “Please come in.” He turned and walked into the house. “I’m just watching one of those crime shows. You know, unbelievable situations with no purpose other than to show off the tall femme fatale and her long hair and long legs and the taller lawman who makes a point of not leering even though the woman is wearing an outfit that should only be allowed in a bedroom and even then only with a permit from the county supervisors.” He picked up a remote and turned off the big flat-screen TV on the far wall.

  We were in a huge room suitable for a large spread in a magazine. There was a marble gas fireplace with large faux logs caressed with flame. Out in the room were multiple sitting areas and leather furniture with Native American throws artfully arranged across the chair arms. In one corner was a grouping of Washoe Indian woven baskets, poised as if for a still-life drawing class. At one end of the room was a brick wall painted white. On it, framed in a wide gold moulding, hung four small paintings of grand pianos, each from a different perspective and each highlighted by an ellipse of light from recessed ceiling lights. In front of the paintings was a large couch upholstered in a rough white fabric. The couch sat at right angles to a matching loveseat. At their intersection was a marble table on which sat a tall purple vase and from which sprouted a burst of red-orange gladiolus, again lit by a recessed light fixture.

  Emerson waved his hand toward the furniture and said, “Have a seat. Anywhere you like.”

  I walked through a pattern of circles where ceiling cans threw light onto a thick white Berber carpet and sat on one of the couches. Emerson sat across from me. He held his snifter out and swirled his brandy, but I still hadn’t seen him take a sip. “Can I get you a Remy Martin? I have the V.S.O.P.,” he said.

  “No thanks.”

  “You’ve made a breakthrough, have you?” Emerson said. “Or so I infer from your unannounced visit in the evening.”

  Up close, I could see a network of tiny veins across his nose and the balls of his cheeks. The thick white hair that I’d remembered looked a little less white and a little less thick. His speech, still warm and friendly, had gotten a little more thick.

  “I’ve come to ask you about Michael Warner.”

  “Who?” Emerson frowned.

  “Michael Warner is a physics professor at Sacramento State University.”

  “Warner? Michael Warner? I’m trying to remember.”

  “He’s developed some kind of new idea and he’s spoken to several venture capital firms including yours. I’m wondering what you can tell me about him.”

  Emerson stared at his glass and swirled his brandy. Light from the fireplace refracted through the liquid and threw amber kaleidoscope patterns over his face. He frowne
d. “I don’t remember many of the details. There was a young man who made an appointment to see me a few months ago. We met at my new office over near the gondola that goes up to Heavenly. Was that Warner? Let me think.” Emerson stood up, walked over to an open area of carpet and stood under the wash of one of the recessed lights. He looked like a performer in a play, in the spotlight, about to begin a soliloquy. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to jog his memory or trying to buy time. He finally took a sip of brandy and then spoke. “Okay, it’s coming back to me now. Michael Warner is a slim fellow, brown hair, brown eyes, about five-nine or ten? Late thirties or early forties? Real geeky as they say? Quite nervous?”

  I realized I’d never gotten a mug-shot description of him, but it fit the way Marlette described her former lover. “I haven’t met him. It sounds right.”

  Emerson was turning in the light. He shut his eyes and listed toward his left side as he spoke. “He came in and began talking about his invention. No hello or how are you. Just the focused talk of the scientist. I’ve heard it before. I think it’s called Geek Speak. I’ve sometimes thought that the less someone has of the social niceties, the greater the chance they have a valuable invention. What do you think?” He looked at me.

  “Could be,” I said. “What was the result of the meeting?”

  “He didn’t go with us.”

  “Does that mean you offered to invest in his invention?”

  “No, no. It’s not like that. What I did was outline how it could work, not how it would work. I explained that if he had a marketable invention or concept, and if we felt there was a chance of substantial profit in it, we would undertake a feasibility study.”

  “Did he tell you what his invention was?”