Tahoe Chase (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller)

by Todd Borg

  “I don’t even know what a quadratic equation is,” I said, “so you obviously know more about math than I do.”

  “Really, I don’t,” Joe said. “But part of a ski racer’s job is to see a mountain slope – even the narrow path defined by the gates on a race course – and understand the nature of its shape, how its valleys and ridges connect and how to pick the fastest line through that landscape. Mountain valleys and ridges are not unlike the folds of origami.”

  “Cool linkage,” I said, “ski racing and origami.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said as if he’d heard it before. “In fact, origami artists refer to the paper folds as mountain folds and valley folds depending on whether the folds go away from you or toward you.”

  Joe sipped his beer, more relaxed now that we were talking about origami. “I love the concept of origami. Even though I made these myself, when I look at the finished work, I can’t really see the original piece of paper anymore. The alchemy even works its magic on the alchemist.”

  I was struck by the old man’s infectious passion. I picked up the ski racer, and carried it over to another window. “This stands over a foot tall,” I said. “You must use large paper.”

  “Come, I’ll show you.” Joe gently pushed Spot’s head off his lap, stood up, and led me through an opening to a study of sorts. Spot jumped up to follow.

  There were bookshelves on the wall, filled with row after row of amazing paper sculptures, most white, some with colored and patterned paper. On another wall was a counter with a roll of what looked like white butcher paper in a dispenser. In the middle of that wall were two large windows that looked out to the trees.

  In one corner was a large plastic garbage can. It was filled to over-flowing with small origami sculptures.

  I strolled into the study and stepped to the side of one of the windows, somewhat out of sight from anyone who might be outside, but able to see if something moved.

  “This paper is thirty-six inches wide,” Joe said, unaware that I was watching the trees. He continued, “Usually we work with square pieces, but I can make the paper as long as I want. Tear off a piece and fold it into something, repeat a thousand times, and you’ll get pretty good.”

  “Like skiing,” I said. “I’d love to see it in action.” I moved to the other side of the window and leaned up against the wall to make myself hard to see from outside.

  Joe pulled some paper off the roll and tore off a piece about a foot and a half long. He sat down at a large table in the center of the room. There was a grid printed on the table. Joe lined the paper up on the grid and used the table edge to tear the paper. When he was done, he had a square piece 18 inches on a side.

  Joe folded the sheet in half, then unfolded it and folded it in half at right angles to the first fold. Unfolding it again, Joe folded two corners over.

  Using the crease marks as guides, Joe began new folds, some to keep and others to create more crease marks. I’m sure there were geometric principles behind his actions, but they eluded me.

  I saw no more movement out the window. But I kept watching.

  Joe worked fast and with confidence. In a few minutes, he stood up and handed me a sculpture of a tall man with a large head. The man was wearing a hooded cape and looked strong and intimidating.

  “Amazing,” I said. “It looks like Darth Vader’s brother.”

  “Sort of,” Joe said. “It’s my interpretation of Erebus, God of Darkness.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m new to Erebus,” I said.

  “One of the early gods in Greek mythology. Perfect subject for origami.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Just because origami subjects are often light and happy. I suppose it’s a match-up between subject and the lightness of the medium. Birds and flowers and ballerinas. You do see some large animals depicted, bulls and elephants, but they are rare. Erebus is all about dark power, a perfect counterpoint to a delicate art made of a delicate substance.”

  “I’ve never paid attention to origami. This can obviously be a...” Another movement outside? I focused on the place in the trees where I thought something shifted.

  “This can be what?” Joe asked.

  “Art. Origami can be a serious art medium.”

  Joe nodded. “The Chinese were folding paper over a thousand years ago during the Sung Dynasty. And Europeans sculpted with both cut and folded paper during the Renaissance. But it was seventeenth century Japanese artists who elevated folded paper to something serious, more than just pretty shapes.”

  “The math you referred to,” I said. I stepped over to the other side of his table where I had a view out the other window.

  “Yeah. Not only can you use math to broaden origami possibilities, but you can use origami to expand your math exploration. The study of the math of origami has led to lots of practical applications like how they fold airbags in cars.”

  It made sense as soon as Joe said it. “How to fit the bag into a small space and control the way it unfolds?” I said. “That came from origami?”

  “Even more wonderful is what they now do in space. A Japanese mathematician named Koryo Miura used origami to figure out a way to fold and unfold giant solar panel structures so that they can take the folded structure out of the rocket or space shuttle and completely unfold it by simply pulling on two corners. It automatically assumes the correct shape. The huge solar panels that power satellites no longer have to be laboriously assembled by space-walking astronauts.”

  “Art powers science,” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s pretty awesome,” Joe said, sounding for a moment like a teenager.

  I was beginning to think that if I’d actually seen any movement outside, it was probably just an errant squirrel moving in my peripheral vision. Nevertheless, I kept watching. I’d learned long ago that patience was often rewarded. Certainly, impatience rarely was.

  I thought about the shortest path from the study to the front door, as well as to the deck slider, while I kept watch on the windows. I decided that the fastest route to intercept any trespasser would depend on which way the trespasser was going.

  I gestured with the Erebus sculpture. “How do you figure it out? Are there books with folding diagrams?”

  Joe nodded. “I started with some of those. Then I started inventing my own.”

  “Like the mathematicians?”

  “No,” Joe shook his head. “They use computers. Maybe blackboards, too, for all I know. They use equations to create complex shapes. I’m a fold-by-the-seat-of-my-pants guy. No equations in my art. I try different things, and the result is often unsatisfying or even stupid-looking. But I sometimes see a way to adjust it to make it better. It’s like any art. You keep learning and improving your craft bit by bit.”

  I pointed to the garbage can. “Are these your rejects? There must be thousands of origami sculptures in that can.”

  “No, those are the entries in a contest that I ran last spring.”

  I was surprised. “Joe, you’re not the kind to just kick back and relax, are you?”

  “Well, when I heard the latest figures about how this country is getting more scientifically illiterate, I thought about encouraging would-be artists to see what they could do that might advance science. It was called the Art Meets Science Origami Contest. I wanted to see if any people out there had invented any designs that would advance science in some way.”

  “Like airbags and solar panels in space,” I said.

  “Yeah. So I offered a five-thousand-dollar first prize and four twelve hundred and fifty dollar prizes. Ten grand was enough to get the contest written up in several magazines and put on a bunch of websites. In addition to giving out prize money, I sent the five winning entries to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They have the foremost origami mathematicians there. I haven’t heard back, yet, but I think that the one that I awarded first prize to is going to raise their eyebrows.”

  Ten grand was also enough to attract dirtballs looking for easy m
oney. “How did people send you their entries?” I asked.

  “Mail. UPS. FedEx.”

  “Did the contest publicity information have your home address?”

  Joe gave me a worried look. “My home address is the only one I have.”

  FIVE

  “No one would think that ten grand in prize money means I have ten grand in cash sitting around,” Joe said.

  “Probably not. But it does suggest that you have resources, resources that might show up in other ways that someone could steal. You also said that you had five hundred in a money clip.”

  “That they didn’t take,” Joe added.

  I nodded. “Did you know or have you met any of the winners?”

  “No.” Joe shook his head. “At least I don’t think so. I handled the judging and Rell mailed off the money. She would know the names. But I guess that means they’re lost unless I can find them in her notes.”

  “We could find the canceled checks and get the names that way.”

  Joe frowned. “She got money orders from the Post Office. I forget why, but she had a reason.” Joe paused, and looked off at nothing specific, his face sad. “I wasn’t a good listener. She took care of so much. I didn’t pay enough attention.”

  Joe’s face went vacant for a bit. “Do you have a girl, Owen?”

  “Yes. A good one. Her name is Street Casey. Maybe you’ll meet her.”

  “Do you pay attention to her?”

  It was a personal question that I wouldn’t have liked from most clients, but I didn’t mind it coming from Joe.

  “Probably not enough,” I said.

  I turned back to the trash can full of origami sculptures. “Do you remember anything about the winners?” I asked. “Where they lived, for example?”

  “Rell talked about it. Let me think. All over. I believe the winner was from Chicago. She might have mentioned Boston, too. I forget the others.”

  “You said you sent the winning entries to MIT. Any chance you took pictures of them?”

  “Yeah.” Joe walked into the kitchen, pulled out a drawer and brought me some photos. “I printed them on copy paper, so they are hard to see. But you get the idea.”

  They were worse than hard to see. I could tell that they were complex geometric shapes, but that was about it.

  I took one of the sculptures out of the can. It was a type of ball made of many similar sides.

  “That’s a dodecahedron,” Joe said.

  “Sure, I knew that,” I joked.

  Another was a type of fan that expanded and contracted, snapping into each position.

  “Not too many animals,” I said.

  “A few. But my instructions for the contest explained that we were looking for anything that could have an application in science. So there is a preponderance of entries that reveal controlled motion or geometric shapes that might be considered hard or even impossible to fold out of paper. Each entrant also had to include a short explanation of why they thought their creation had scientific merit. And of course they had to include folding instructions.”

  “Did the entry fee cover the prize money?”

  Joe frowned. “There was no entry fee. The prize money was my contribution to art and science. A small price to pay in hopes of finding something of scientific value.” Joe pointed at the can full of sculptures. “Also, I very much enjoy thinking about the thousands of hours away from the TV that these sculptures represent.”

  “Are you going to do it again next year?”

  Joe smiled and shook his head. “No. I may be naïve, but I’m not stupid. I had no life for many months while I fielded questions and wrote emails and judged sculptures all day long, seven days a week. And when I found a piece that I didn’t understand but could see that maybe it had merit, then I had to take photos from all angles and email them to origami mathematicians who were kind enough to give me an opinion. At one point, the project began to feel like I was living a nightmare that wouldn’t go away. I also made Rell pretty miserable during those months.”

  Joe stood up as if even the memory of the contest made him weary.

  I hadn’t seen any more movement outside by the time we moved back into the living room. Joe’s mood seemed better, so I pointed to the sliding glass door that led out to the deck.

  “Is this the deck that Rell fell from?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Joe pulled open the door and walked out. Spot followed him. I trailed behind, casually looking around, my eyes turning farther as I tried to scour the forest without being noticed. Although Spot would struggle in the deep snow, I could send him on a search mission to “Find The Suspect.” But even if a person was in the woods, that didn’t make them guilty of anything. There was no cause to have Spot take them down.

  The sun suddenly poked out and was surprisingly hot despite the cold air of December. Joe pointed over the railing.

  “This is the spot,” he said.

  Hearing his name, Spot looked at Joe, anticipation on his face. He wagged a quick one, two.

  I walked over, rubbed Spot’s head. “He means place, your largeness, place.”

  My dog didn’t understand, but he liked the attention. People were saying his name. He knew that was a good thing. Maybe it would lead to food. He kept wagging.

  I looked over the railing where Joe indicated. It was a long way down. The snow-covered ground was lumpy, probably granite boulders. The area was shaded, protecting the snow from the sun’s heat. The snow was tramped down and covered with footprints.

  From nearby in a tree came the chick-a-dee call of a Mountain Chickadee. Over and over. I looked out but could not see any bird.

  “That’s Molly,” Joe said.

  I turned and looked at him.

  “One of Rell’s birds. The bird eats out of Rell’s hand. But no more. I hear Molly every day. At least, I think it’s Molly. She sounds lonely. I put out seed for her, but she doesn’t come to eat.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what to say.

  The railing was solid. It had balusters spaced every six inches. Rell couldn’t have gone between them. She had to go over. I stepped back and tried to visualize a 5-foot 2-inch woman coming at the railing, striking it, and the inertia flipping her over.

  Just as Joe had said, it didn’t seem likely.

  I turned to Joe. “Where were you when Rell fell?”

  “I was in Reno at the doctor’s office.”

  “When did you get back?”

  “I got home just as it was starting to get dark. Maybe five o’clock. I spoke to her by phone right before I left Reno. That would have been about three-fifteen or three-thirty.”

  “You found Rell below the deck?”

  “Yes.” Joe swallowed. “I pulled into the garage and called for her when I walked into the kitchen. There was no answer. I opened the slider and called outside. Again, there was no answer. So I dialed her cell phone and heard the ring. I followed the sound and looked over the deck. I saw her lying on the rocks below.” He made a little hiccup, turned away, and cleared his throat.

  I gestured at the closest houses. “Do you know these neighbors?” I asked, as I shifted position to get a view of a different part of the forest.

  “We’ve met and spoken, but no, we don’t really know them well.”

  “Were they home?”

  Joe pointed to the big tan house on the north side. “At first, I thought the neighbors on this side were home because I thought I saw him driving his car. After I found Rell and called nine-one-one, I knocked on his door. But the lights were off, and no one was home.”

  Spot turned his head and lifted his nose high, nostrils twitching. But he made no other motions that would indicate a person out in the forest. The wind was blowing toward us from Mt. Tallac. So any scent on the breeze probably came from a long distance. The scent of a nearby person would be moving away from Spot.

  “What are their names?” I gestured toward the house that Joe had pointed to.

  “The Howsers,” Joe said. “They
live in L.A. He’s an entertainment attorney. They come up to ski during the holidays and spend the glory days here.”

  “Glory days?”

  “The best of Tahoe summer. July Fourth through Labor Day.”

  “Have the Howsers been here recently?”

  “No. It’ll be hard to tell them about Rell. They like her.”

  “What about the other side?”

  Joe gestured toward the stone and timber-frame house on the other side. “Melanie Schumann. She’s a composer. Classical stuff for symphonies. I asked her if she was related to the famous Schumann. She said no. She said he did romantic stuff, whereas she writes postmodernist something or other. I forget her words. Something like ironic oratorio. She said it is like opera but without acting. Anyway, she’s only here in the summer now and then. Lives in the Bay Area. I always thought that composers just wrote music. But apparently, that’s just a part of it. They spend a lot of time working with orchestras and such.”

  “Is there anyone else in the neighborhood that you know well?”

  “No. Dwight Frankman is the closest to a friend that we’ve got. A couple times a year, he hauls our bottles and cans to the recycle center. We have a service do the snow removal, but sometimes Dwight stops by with his shovel to do the walk when there isn’t enough snow to send the service out. When you get older, these things make a big difference.”

  “Can you remember the names of any other homeowners?”

  “Just a guy named Michael Paul. As you know, most houses in Tahoe are vacation homes. Empty most of the year. This neighborhood more than most. One of our vacation-home neighbors had a party one summer. He wanted all the neighbors to get to know each other. As far as we could tell, the only other person besides Dwight who lives in this end of the neighborhood full time is Michael Paul. Paul is almost as young as Dwight but much more mature. He started a tech company in Silicon Valley. I think he sold the company to one of the big banks a few years ago. Now he’s a retired playboy. I think he still has a house in Mountain View, but he spends most of his time up here.”

  “How old is Michael?” I asked.