Tahoe Chase (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller)

by Todd Borg

  The cab wasn’t far ahead, so I slowed to let it gain some distance on me. When the cab was a block down, I sped up and followed. The cab drove all the way to the end of San Francisco before its brake lights lit up. It came to a stop. I kept going until I was a block behind the cab, then pulled over and parked.

  Through the binoculars, I could just make out a dark shape getting out of the cab. The cab turned around and drove back toward me. I ducked down as it went by.

  I told Spot to be quiet, knowing that it was a command that he wouldn’t obey if he didn’t feel like it. I got out of the Jeep, eased the door shut, and walked down the edge of the road in the dark.

  San Francisco Avenue is lined with houses, most of them modest in size and style. Many are remodeled cabins from decades ago. At this time of night, most were dark on the street side. A few had lights on over their doors or garage doors. But it was not enough to see my mark. When I got near the end of the street, I tried to see tire tracks or footprints, but it was too dark.

  I listened for any sound that might indicate which house my man had disappeared into. There was nothing. Two of the houses at the end of the street had no lights on. If he’d slipped into one of them in the dark, there was no way for me to know.

  The road ended at the Truckee River Marsh. Although it was a cloudy night, the snow cover glowed a dim white. I was looking for a trail around the last house when I sensed a flash of light.

  I turned to look, but there was nothing but snow-covered meadow interrupted by stands of meadow grasses that had somehow stood up through the snow. Well out into the meadow was the Truckee River, dark undulating shapes as the water meandered toward the lake. In the distance was the black water of Tahoe.

  As if I were doing a grid search, I looked over the landscape in a regular fashion, taking care to study each part of the meadow whether there was something interesting to see or not. Nothing appeared to move. The flash of light had not been significant. I assumed it was someone walking their dog, using a flashlight intermittently to look for obstructions and hazards. But if that were the case, the dog would have been obvious in the night, a darker shape running around, silhouetted against the snow.

  Seeing no dog made me more interested in finding the source of the light. I found a little trail in the dim light of night and walked down it a hundred feet or so, wondering if I should explore the meadow or go back and look in house windows. I was about to give up when I saw a flashlight go on farther out, over by the shore. The beam silhouetted a man. I couldn’t tell for certain that it was the man at Ned’s house, but I assumed it was.

  I jogged out onto the marsh, going as fast as I could on uneven, frozen snow that had a thousand holes punched into it by walkers.

  As I ran, the man’s flashlight beam illuminated an object at the edge of the water. It was light in color and was about the size of a small rowboat. It was an unusual shape. The man bent down and appeared to lift up on it.

  I trotted farther out the trail, then stopped and raised my binoculars.

  The man had a type of boat I’d never seen before. It looked like an inflatable of some kind, but it looked high tech, with a center console that held a steering wheel. He pushed it into the water and jumped on. I heard the soft crank of a starter followed by an engine starting, an engine I couldn’t see. Such a small boat would typically have an outboard motor, but this was some kind of a quiet inboard contained within the center console. It was one of the smallest inboard boats I’d ever seen.

  I jogged down the trail hoping to get closer before the boat took off. The footing was uneven. My foot landed at a sharp angle, tempting a sprain. Then I slipped off the firm prints of people who’d come before me, and my leg sank deep into the untrampled snow at the side of the trail.

  The engine revved a bit. It had a hint of lower harmonics in its sound. A four-stroke with some power. When he gave it a touch of throttle, the sound of thrust was like that of a jet ski. No propeller on an inflatable hull meant that it was a very low-draft boat. Drive it up onto the beach. Drive it away with no fear of a prop strike.

  The boat cruised away, angling to the northeast.

  I ran until I got to the shore and raised the binoculars.

  He cruised without running lights, a violation of the law. I was breathing hard, and the image in my glasses jumped around. Eventually, my breathing calmed. With the image in the glasses steadied, I saw where he was going.

  In the distance beyond the inflatable, was a large dark boat with dim light coming from some windows down near the waterline. Even in the darkness, I could see that the boat, while big, was sleek and pointy. I guessed it at fifty feet or more, constructed like a very modern cabin cruiser built to look like a race boat.

  As the inflatable got farther from me, it was harder to see details in my binoculars. The inflatable slowed as he approached the big boat’s stern. The man jumped out onto a tender deck, pulled on some kind of line and appeared to attach it to the bow of the inflatable. Then he stepped forward and reached for something.

  A second later I heard the sound of a motor whining. At first I didn’t know what it was. Then the inflatable lifted up onto the tender deck, and moved forward as if it were being pulled into a cavity of some kind. The motor sound quit. The man used both arms to pull on something above the boat. The vague picture of the inflatable boat disappeared as a white partition blocked my view.

  I finally realized what I’d seen. The inflatable was the yacht’s custom tender boat, a small, high-tech inboard designed to ferry people between the yacht and the shore. But unlike a dinghy towed behind or lifted off the water by a pivoting davit, this tender was simply winched into its own garage. With the garage door shut, no one could even tell the tender existed.

  In a few moments, the deep rumble of the yacht’s engines started. Running lights turned on. I heard the RPM shift as the props were engaged, and the yacht headed away.

  I watched through the glasses for fifteen minutes as the big boat motored at no-wake speed out into the lake. The dark shape on dark water soon disappeared.

  I walked back to the Jeep where Spot, no doubt hypoglycemic from lack of food, showed little enthusiasm at my return.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Early the next morning, Diamond stopped by my cabin. “Buenos días,” he said when I opened the door.

  Spot was at the door with me, wagging.

  I motioned for Diamond to come in. “Coffee’s still hot,” I said.

  “Stuff you made?”

  “You’re too picky to drink mine?”’

  “No,” Diamond said. “I just want to prep myself. Got doughnuts?”

  “Nope.”

  “Hold on.” He walked back to his Douglas County Patrol Unit and came back with a bakery bag. “Doughnuts,” he said, as he opened the bag.

  “Makes my coffee a little more palatable?”

  “Sí.” He held the bag out to me, holding it from the bottom.

  I reached into the bag, pulled out a doughnut, and tossed it to Spot. It disappeared with one chomp and one swallow.

  “That was a perfectly good doughnut,” Diamond said, pulling one out for himself.

  “I wouldn’t have given him one if I thought otherwise. You’re the one who introduced him to Danishes.”

  Diamond shrugged. “He’s a Great Dane.”

  Spot stared at Diamond’s doughnut bag. He carefully ran his tongue around his upper lip, starting all the way back on the left side, around the front, and back to the rear of the right side. He took a quick glance at me, then focused again on the doughnut bag.

  I took another doughnut and ate it as I poured Diamond a mug of coffee.

  “The throwing knives you gave me?” Diamond said. “Thought you’d want to know that they were made by Veitsi Mies.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A metal-folding bad ass in Omaha.”

  “Nebraska,” I said, remembering that Ned Cavett had gone there when he was a kid and ended up spending a long time in prison
.

  “Sí.”

  “What’s a metal folding bad ass do? Duct work for buildings?”

  “Different kind of metal folding,” Diamond said. “Kind where they make super strong swords. Layers of steel, layers of nickel, tungsten, chromium. Heated up, folded, hammered, heated up, folded again. Like Damascus steel. Guy’s a swordsmith. Got some Finnish in his background, thus his chosen name Veitsi Mies. Finnish for Knife Man.”

  “What’s it mean to you that Ned Cavett is carrying Veitsi Mies’s throwing knives?” I asked.

  “Just that Ned has some association with someone who’s way over on the dark side. Veitsi Mies makes the ceremonial swords for the Canyon Brotherhood.”

  “The methhead bikers.”

  “Yeah. Ned isn’t in their league. But good to be aware that Ned was probably exposed to stories from Veitsi when he was inside. Could give him an out-sized sense of bravado. Bravado can make even a dirtball like Ned more dangerous.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  Diamond bit off more doughnut and, chewing, said, “Making any progress with the accidents that might not be accidents?”

  “Some,” I said. “On a tip from Ned’s girlfriend Simone, I’ve been watching their house. Around ten-ish last night, Ned had a visitor. Likely a guy that the girlfriend believes pays Ned to spy on Joe Rorvik. The visitor came and left in a cab. When he left, I followed him over to the Al Tahoe neighborhood. The guy got out of the cab and walked over the Truckee Marsh to a boat he’d beached there. It was quite the little tender.”

  Diamond looked blank. “I grew up in Mexico City,” he said. “Not the first place you think of for learning about boats.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know much about boats myself. A tender is a small boat for ferrying people to and from a large boat. If there is no dock, the large boat anchors offshore and people come to shore on a tender.”

  Diamond nodded. “Like tying up your cruiser or sailing yacht to a buoy at Sunnyside, and they bring you in to the restaurant on the little dinghy.”

  “Exactly. And big boats often have a low deck on the rear for carrying the little boat. It’s called the tender deck.”

  “McKenna’s boat university,” he said.

  I ignored him. “Anyway, this tender was small and wide with an inflatable perimeter, an inboard engine, and jet propulsion.”

  “An inflatable Jet Ski?” Diamond said.

  “No, this was an actual boat you step into. Looked like it could hold four people. But it was light enough that the guy could push it off the beach by himself. He drove it out to a sizable yacht. An interesting detail is that the tender slides up into its own garage at the rear of the yacht. Probably, even in daylight, you can’t even tell that the big boat has a small boat hidden in its belly.”

  “Any idea who the big boat belongs to?” Diamond asked.

  “No. Thought I’d look online today. See if the search gods know anything.”

  Diamond ate the last of his doughnut, and, as he finished his coffee, he made a tongue-smacking noise and looked into the cup as if there were a bug in the bottom.

  “You gonna live?” I said.

  “Remember that Thoreau said that the mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation? Gotta be the only reason why you would drink that stuff.”

  “You think I’m desperate?”

  Diamond was at the door. “Must be,” he said. He pet Spot and left.

  I got on the computer and began poking around. I typed “tender boat hides in big boat garage” into Google. I got nothing. I typed “new yachts on Lake Tahoe,” and “Tahoe cabin cruisers with inflatable tenders.”

  I got nothing of relevance.

  Like an aimless, wandering dog, I expanded my search to “Nedham Theodore Cavett domestic abuse.”

  Nothing.

  I typed in “Veitsi Mies throwing knives” and got hundreds of hits. Ned’s knives were a big deal, but none of the hits was about Ned.

  I typed in “tender boat with inboard engine.”

  This time I got a couple of interesting search results. Up popped some Zodiac-style inflatable boats that had center consoles that did double duty as steering wheel mounts and housings for small inboard engines. The boats were similar to, if not the same as, what I had seen. Finally, I had learned something, but it didn’t get me any closer to finding Ned’s spymaster.

  After an hour or more, I decided to have lunch. We had what was supposed to be a short break between storms. I fired up the barbecue, put on several brats to the side of the coals so they wouldn’t burn, and carefully laid a bunch of fries perpendicular across the grill so they wouldn’t fall through. When the food was done and we were eating, the phone rang.

  “Yeah?” I mumbled, mouth full. Spot and I were out on the deck, enjoying high-altitude December sun. Maybe the air temperature was only 30, but the sun was like a broiler on medium-high.

  “You’re eating lunch,” Street said.

  “Street, my sweet, so nice to hear the mellifluous harmonics of your voice. We are, yeah.”

  “What’s on the menu?”

  “Barbecued brats and cheddar cheese on Kaiser rolls, fries, Ketchup, and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale,” I said.

  “What’s Spot eating?”

  “Barbecued brats and cheddar cheese on Kaiser rolls, fries, Ketchup, and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale,” I said. I dipped a fry in Ketchup and tossed it to him. He snapped it out of the air with a click of teeth. His tail was on medium speed. If I picked up another brat, his tail would go into the red-line zone.

  “You know that’s bad food,” Street said.

  “I ate broccoli at your house the other night.”

  “So?”

  “They cancel out,” I said.

  “You think that eating a little good food means you can eat bad food with impunity?”

  “Of course. Check marks in the credit column cancel out check marks in the debit column,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Anyway, why not just eat food that’s really good for you?”

  “Because really good food tastes bad, and really bad food tastes good. The whole point of eating broccoli is so you can eat brats. It’s the broccoli-to-brats equation. This is cutting-edge nutrition stuff. I thought all scientists were familiar with it.”

  “I’m not familiar with much of your world.”

  “Is that why you won’t marry me?” I said.

  “You never formally asked.”

  “What if I formally asked right now?” I said.

  “Well,” Street paused, “your diet might be a sticking point.”

  “I’d let you eat all the broccoli you want. Tell you what, you want to come over and join us? You could bring some broccoli. We could test-drive eating separate meals together.”

  “Thanks, hon. It’s a sweet offer. But I better get back to work.”

  “Truth be told, I’d turn it down, too,” I said. “It would be hard to watch us eat brats while you’re picking broccoli out of your teeth.”

  “And after the brats, you’d probably eat a bag of doughnuts for dessert,” she said.

  “Actually, we already had the doughnuts an hour ago with Diamond.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  After lunch, I began calling Tahoe marinas, starting at Kings Beach – which would be noon on the lake clock – and working my way clockwise around the lake.

  “Hi, this is Tommy John Smith from Tom’s Craft Brews over behind the Timber Cove pier,” I said when they answered. “Hey, we had this guy come down the pier a few days ago and pick up a case of our TJ Smith Mountain IPA. It kind of stood out, you know, what with it being winter and there aren’t a lot of boats out. Anyway, after he left, we noticed that he left his sunglasses on our counter. They’re prescription Persols and look pretty pricey. So I wanted to return them, but I don’t know his name or number. So I’m calling marinas to ask you if you’ve seen his boat. It’s one sweet ride, probably over fifty feet, real pointy looking like a combo cigarette racer/cabin cruiser
. And it’s got an inflatable tender that parks in its own garage at the back of the big boat. I figure I’ve been exposed to most of the boats on the lake, but this one is bigger and faster-looking than most Tahoe cruisers I’ve seen. Any idea whose boat that is?”

  “Nah. Sorry I can’t help you,” the first guy said.

  I repeated my call at the next marina and got roughly the same answer. I dialed my way through Incline, down the East Shore, across the South Shore, and on up the West Shore. It wasn’t until I’d gotten around to Tahoe City at ten o’clock, that someone knew what I was talking about.

  A woman who introduced herself as Shirl said, “She hasn’t stopped here, but I saw her cruise by a few months ago. It would have been around Labor Day. She was about a hundred yards out, so I didn’t get a real good look at her. But from what I saw, that baby is pure boat candy. Like you say, I could tell she was fifty-plus feet if she’s ten. She has a black hull and white topsides. Looks real James Bondy. So I grabbed the glasses to check it out. Dear God, lemme step aboard, spend some time, have a gin and tonic, and lounge in my silk robe! Innaways, I didn’t see any tender, but I took a zoom pic with my phone just to use for reference, and in my free time the rest of that afternoon, I poked around on the computer looking at boat pictures, and guess what?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I found it!” Shirl said. “She’s a Predator Fifty-Four, built by Sunseeker Yachts. Turns out she’s pushing sixty feet. And she’s got this Oh-My-God layout. In the lower cabin, you’ve got your saloon with your entertainment center, dining, and full-on galley. Then there’s the master stateroom with en suite bath. ’Course, in this business, I’ve seen that before. I even learned from a French tourist how to pronounce it. The EN in en suite is like the word On, but you kinda drop the N. Almost sounds like you’re grunting. Innaways, in addition to all that, there’s two more staterooms and a whole other head. So she can sleep six. Now topside, you’ve got your aft sundeck and cockpit and lounge and wet bar with a hydraulic skylight roof so, rain or shine, you’re stylin’. There’s also a forward sundeck. And the tender deck has a swimming platform and a hot and cold outdoor shower for when you come out of the water. We’re talking a fifty-nine-foot-long, three bedroom house that goes thirty-three knots, and it looks like it goes a hundred and thirty-three knots. Can you believe it?!”