10 Tahoe Trap

by Todd Borg

  I started above the highest roads surrounding Zephyr Heights, flew back and forth, looking for cliffs, following obscure trails out into the forest.

  Gradually, I moved north toward Cave Rock and on toward Glenbrook, scanning all of the areas one could reach by van. When I was certain that I was more than a half hour drive out of South Lake Tahoe, I banked around down slope, checking out every obscure corner, trying to think like a thug who planned to meet and shoot a woman farmer.

  My search was fruitless. Either Paco had given me information that wasn’t accurate, or I’d made an error in judgment. Or, possibly, the men who’d shot Cassie had come back and moved or hidden the van and the shooting victim.

  As I flew, I reconsidered the possibilities for where she could have driven her van. The vast majority of the Tahoe Basin is road-less wilderness. A high-clearance, 4-wheel-drive vehicle could access many of the old logging trails. But it was unlikely that the van fell into that category. It would be limited to normal roads, which made my search area relatively small. I felt confident that I’d done a thorough search, but I hadn’t seen anything.

  Frustrated, I brought the Cessna back around and headed back south. I could take a shortcut across the lake, but I stayed over the shore, scouting the mountains, looking for any spots I’d missed. I was approaching the Stateline hotels when I saw a Dodge Ram pickup, dark brown, with a white topper.

  I throttled back and got Diamond on my cell.

  “What’s all that noise?” he shouted.

  “Paco and I are doing an aerial search, looking for Cassie’s van. Where are you?”

  “Coming down Kingsbury, lake side.”

  “I’m the Cessna above the hotels.”

  We shouted over the roar of wind. I told him about the pickup.

  “It’s traveling southwest on Highway Fifty, just passing the Kingsbury Grade turnoff.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “Can you watch him? Fly circles or something?”

  “Will do,” I said as I put the plane into a tight bank to the left. I watched over my shoulder as the plane turned away. Then I caught a view of the pickup on the other side as we came all the way around.

  “Turning into the Mont Bleu parking lot,” I shouted into my cell.

  “Got it,” Diamond said.

  “The truck is parking on the open lot, near the ramp.”

  “I’m just now turning from Kingsbury onto Fifty,” Diamond said.

  I was still circling counter-clockwise. With the pickup now stationary, I kept it at the center of my circle. I pushed in the yoke a bit to lose some altitude. When I was down to 500 feet AGL, I leveled off. I glanced to the northeast, saw Diamond’s patrol unit approaching.

  “The driver’s door of the pickup is open,” I shouted. “A person is getting out. Wearing a black jacket, blue jeans. Looks like a woman. It looks like she’s carrying a bundle of flowers. She’s walking toward the hotel.”

  As I completed my next revolution, I saw Diamond pulling into the parking lot. He parked behind the pickup and got out.

  The woman opened the door of Mont Bleu and walked inside.

  Diamond looked into the pickup’s windshield, then walked around back. He peered into one of the small dark windows of the topper, holding his hands next to his face. Then he reached for the handle of the topper gate. It was unlocked. Diamond lifted it up and looked inside.

  Not exactly by the book. But I would have looked inside, too.

  Diamond shut the topper gate.

  I saw him raise his cell phone to his mouth.

  “It’s from one of the local flower shops,” he shouted. “The back is filled with enough flowers for a wedding. There are flowers on the front seat. She’s obviously making deliveries.”

  “Roger,” I said. “I’ll keep searching.”

  I continued to fly a search pattern until I felt I’d covered all possible areas Cassie could have driven to with the boy.

  It was a good time to head back to the airport as the clouds coming in over the Sierra crest were getting thicker and darker.

  I was on a flight path that would allow me to slip into the landing pattern on the final leg when I noticed some rock outcroppings close to town near the base of Heavenly Resort. They were just around the side of the mountain from The Face and Gunbarrel ski runs. It was the same area where the young autistic girl had fled a year before, lost in the dark until Spot found her.

  I banked the Cessna and came around by the outcroppings. From the air they didn’t look like much, rocky projections only 50 or 60 feet tall. They wouldn’t be notable unless you were on the prairie. But from the perspective of a Central Valley kid looking out a van window at night, they might look like cliffs.

  I pointed. “See those rocks, Paco? They kind of sit at a right angle from each other. Remember how you said that Cassie parked in front of cliffs? What do you think? Could those be the cliffs?”

  Paco just stared down at them. He didn’t speak. I couldn’t tell if it was just another instance of his engagement being dialed down to the lowest setting. Or was he revisiting that early morning and the trauma of the shooting?

  “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  The rocks weren’t on a paved road, but they were near Pioneer Trail, and the nearby ground was grus, a kind of coarse granite sand. It looked packed as if high school kids regularly drove off-road to party in the shelter of the rocks.

  I took a pass over the outcroppings, banked around 180 degrees, then came back again. The rocks were on a slope. I flew across the slope. I saw no sign of a van or anything else unusual.

  It looked like there was a trail that went around the back, upper side of the rocks. If the woman had driven the van behind the rocks, I wouldn’t be able to see it from the air unless I flew very close to the trees above the rocks.

  My flight had so far been calm. But even on calm days, there can be thermals and downdrafts in the mountains, especially with increasing clouds. Nevertheless, I thought I could get in closer without too much risk.

  I lined up the Cessna so that I could again find a line that was like skiing a traverse, heading across the mountain at a slight downward angle.

  My pass over the rocky projection revealed nothing, but I was still too far up and out to see clearly behind the rocks.

  From Paco’s description, his foster mom was shot not far from the van. There was no van nearby, but it may have been moved. And if someone dumped a body, they would likely leave it where it would be difficult to see from an air search.

  I banked in a large circle and came back around, close to my original track but picking a course that was much closer to the trees above the rocky outcropping.

  “There,” Paco said, pointing. It was the first voluntary word he’d said since we took off.

  I tried to look where he pointed. Maybe there was a bit of something in the trees. Something light-colored. Maybe not.

  “What did you see? I didn’t see anything.”

  “A shoe,” he said. “It’s Cassie’s.”

  If only I could go slower.

  “How do you know it’s hers?”

  “She has Nikes with a red swoosh.”

  I made another circle and came back for another flyby.

  I edged the throttle back a bit, slowing the plane a touch. Too slow would be dangerous if we hit a down draft or wind shear. But Ben Rashid had told me that the Skyhawk’s stall speed was 54 knots. I still had some margin for error.

  I came in just above the treetops.

  As I approached the rocks, I studied the forest below. I scanned back and forth, looking into the rocky crags.

  There were trees and rocks and dirt.

  Paco pointed again. This time I saw it. A white athletic shoe with red stripe, lit by a lucky beam of sunlight shining through an opening in the forest canopy.

  I turned away from the mountain, throttled up and circled around, climbing like a soaring raptor. I went around twice, climbing back to 500 feet Above Ground Leve
l, scanning the ground below continuously.

  I saw no van.

  Paco was still facing the window, but I don’t think he was seeing anything outside.

  Pioneer Trail was the closest paved road, but it was unclear from my position where the dirt trail turned off.

  I circled again, climbing up to 1000 AGL. From that altitude I could see the turnoff in relation to other streets I knew.

  Then I headed back to the airport, entered the pattern on final, and landed. After I settled up with Ben Rashid, Paco and I rejoined Spot in the Jeep, turned left out of the airport, took Elks Club over to Pioneer Trail, and drove toward the part of the forest where we’d seen the lost shoe.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The dirt turnoff from Pioneer Trail was unmarked and faint enough that the Forest Service hadn’t erected their standard barrier of boulders and logs to prevent unauthorized driving in the woods. Respecting their desire to prevent unnecessary soil compaction, I left the Jeep at the side of Pioneer Trail, and we hiked in.

  After being cooped up in the Jeep at the airport, Spot ran around, excited, sniffing out the mysteries of squirrels, bears, and coyotes, and the less common Tahoe residents like mountain lions.

  The trail wound back through a Jeffrey pine forest that the Forest Service had recently thinned. Hundreds of cut tree stumps showed a laudable effort to reduce the disastrous fuel buildup that was the result of 100 years of misdirected fire suppression. If they could multiply that thinning by ten thousand times, they might make the Tahoe Basin relatively fire safe. But no amount of mechanical thinning can bring the forest back to its natural condition where small, regular lightning-caused fires not only clear out the underbrush but open the cones of fire-dependent pines and let the seeds out to germinate in fire-cleared soil. Instead, the Forest Service burns the slash of the thinned-out trees, and hand-plants new trees, an ironic effort to restore some semblance of nature to a forest that managed itself for eons before Smoky Bear’s arrival.

  At occasional intervals, I saw tire tracks on the trail. The varying marks appeared to have been made by multiple vehicles. The only information I could infer came from the softness of the marks. There were no skid marks and no areas with dirt thrown up. It appeared that all recent vehicles had been driven at a slow crawl, by drivers who were calm.

  I paused now and then to keep Paco from falling too far behind. His face was toward the ground.

  A quarter mile in, where the land began to rise up toward Heavenly Ski Resort, I saw rock projecting up above the forest canopy.

  When I approached the rock, I tried to visualize where the shoe would be, based on what we’d seen from the air. I only knew that it was toward the back side of the rocks.

  I turned around. Paco looked at me. Spot was not in sight.

  “Spot!” He appeared in the woods to the side, loping toward us.

  The trail with tire tracks went up a gentle slope toward the rock outcropping.

  “Are you coming up this slope with me?” I asked Paco.

  He shook his head.

  “Then stay there where I can see you?”

  He nodded.

  I hiked up the slope. Spot bounded past me. The woods became thicker, but I could still look down and see Paco and the open woods around him. No one could approach him without being obvious.

  I scanned for the shoe that we’d seen from the air. This was an area the Forest Service had not thinned, and the forest was so dense that I could see very little distance up into the trees.

  Spot ran ahead. Near the outcropping, he made a sudden turn, trotted to the side and stopped.

  As I approached, I saw him sniffing a shoe.

  It was a Nike athletic shoe, left foot, nearly new, with a red swoosh.

  I picked it up by the laces to minimize damaging any evidence. It was large for a women’s shoe, and it had a number 9 printed inside of the tongue. Assuming it belonged to Paco’s foster mother, Cassie was a good-sized woman.

  I turned, studying the woods for any other signs. As I’d already seen from the air, there was no van or anything else of interest.

  In a few places were marks that may have been made by boots or shoes, but they were inconclusive. The ground was dry, and the granitic grus, with its lack of cohesiveness, was among the worst materials for picking up tracks. It took only the vaguest of impressions.

  Without walking on the tire tracks, I stood in several places trying to reconcile the tire marks with the description Paco had given me. He said he looked out the van’s windows to see a pickup against a cliff. Then he ran from the van to the pickup, saw no escape around the rocks, and hid inside of the pickup.

  It took some imagination to make the rocks before me seem like a cliff around which there was no escape.

  I walked down to Paco, held up the shoe.

  “Does this look like Cassie’s?”

  He nodded. I couldn’t quite read the look on his face. Not so much sadness as significant fatigue. Like pictures I’d seen of the faces of starving children.

  I pointed at the rocks. “Could these rocks be the cliffs you saw in the dark?”

  Paco looked up at the outcropping. He shrugged.

  Spot walked over to me. He sniffed the shoe. Then he lifted his head, turned a bit, raised his head farther, his snout pointing toward the forest.

  Air scenting.

  “Spot, sniff the shoe, again,” I said. “Do you have the scent?”

  I grabbed his chest and gave him a little shake, the sign that indicates he has a job to do.

  “Find the victim, Spot! Find the victim.”

  I gave him a smack on his rear.

  He trotted off between some trees, stopped, sniffed the ground. Spot made a single paw-swipe at the dirt, sniffed again, then lifted his head and looked at me.

  “Find the victim, boy!” I said again. “Find the victim!”

  Spot swung his head around to look out through the forest. But he didn’t move.

  “C’mon, Spot,” I said. I walked through the trees toward a clearing. Spot followed. In the open space, the breeze was more prominent.

  Spot suddenly lifted his head.

  He walked directly upwind. It was a low-grade alert. He had a scent, but he wasn’t excited about it. His tail was down. Paco and I followed behind, not distracting him. Thirty yards down the trail, there was a rise, and the trail turned. Spot went straight. Off the trail. Walking upwind.

  He didn’t trot like an eager dog. But he went relatively straight, which told me his intent. An ambling dog looking for a scent leaves a track that goes this way and that and circles back. A purposeful dog with an air scent follows the scent as long as it’s clear.

  I followed, keeping back, not wanting to distract him. Paco followed behind me.

  Spot went around a boulder and came to a clearing. He stopped, did a kind of a point, holding his snout forward in a steady position. But his tail was down. It was an alert of the worst kind.

  Then he lay down.

  I walked past Spot. Five yards ahead of him was an area of dirt that bulged up just a bit. The dirt was mostly sand, which, after you pile it, dries fast and looks just like the ground nearby.

  Had Spot not found it and reacted with sadness, I wouldn’t have noticed it. It didn’t stand out in any significant way. But his reaction made it clear that we had found a grave.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I took Paco’s hand and put it on Spot’s collar. We walked back toward the Jeep. The sky had gotten darker. Rain began to fall. I saw Paco turn back and look for a moment toward the area where we’d found the grave.

  I checked my cell phone. There was one bar of reception. I dialed the South Lake Tahoe PD, asked for Commander Mallory, was put on hold, transferred, and put on hold again.

  “McKenna, here,” I said when he answered. “Got a probable murder victim that is probably in your jurisdiction.”

  “Probable and probably aren’t very concrete words,” he said. “You got a body?”

  “Not
yet. But Spot found a grave. I’m thinking that your boys might have a shovel.” I explained to Mallory where I was and what had happened.

  “You say it may be in my jurisdiction. We’ve got enough problems in our city. Why don’t you call the county. Get Sergeant Bains to take care of it.”

  “It’s probably yours,” I said.

  I heard him breathing over the phone.

  “Come down Pioneer Trail,” I said. “You’ll see my Jeep on the east side of the road. Bring a rain jacket.”

  “On my way,” he finally said and hung up.

  Paco and Spot and I were waiting in my Jeep, out of the rain, when Mallory showed up in his unmarked, followed by a patrol unit.

  We got out. I pulled my spare rain jacket out of the back and draped it over Paco’s shoulders. It came down to the ground.

  “I don’t want it,” Paco said, shrugging it off. “It looks like a dress.”

  “No it doesn’t,” I said, putting it firmly back on him. “It looks like a cape. Makes you look like a superhero. Especially with those shades on the top of your head.”

  Paco gritted his teeth, but left the jacket on his shoulders.

  “You want to leave your sunglasses in the Jeep? It’s raining.”

  He shook his head.

  Mallory got out, Coke can in his hand. His frown wrinkles were deep enough to hold nickels.

  Two cops got out of the other vehicle. The one I’d met, Sergeant Tibbs, nodded at me, but I didn’t know the other. Mallory didn’t introduce us.

  Mallory looked at Paco, then back at me. “I heard about a brief kidnapping at your place last night. Is this young man the subject of interest?”

  “Yeah. Meet Paco. Paco, meet Commander Mallory.”

  It was probably a pointless introduction. Paco and Mallory appeared to ignore each other.

  Mallory spoke to me. “Diamond said that you foiled the perpetrators.”