Voodoo Ridge

by David Freed

  “You deserved it,” Jessica said as she slid off her stool and made her way toward the ladies’ room.

  “Call the cops! I’m filing charges!” Preston shouted.

  Everyone seemed to ignore him as I headed for the exit. Nobody tried to stop me.

  THE RED message light was blinking on the room phone when I got back to the Econo Lodge. Gil Carlisle, Savannah’s mega-wealthy oilman father, had called, weeping. At the crime scene that morning, Deputy Streeter had offered to notify Savannah’s next of kin so that I wouldn’t have to. I’d given him Carlisle’s name. Streeter in turn apparently had given Carlisle my number at the motel. Carlisle wanted me to call him back as soon as possible, to fill him in on the details of his daughter’s death.

  I had a moral obligation to do so. I understood that. I’d been married once to his daughter. I probably should’ve alerted him when she first went missing. It would’ve been the decent thing to do, certainly the less cowardly. Yet I hesitated. How do you explain to your former father-in-law, a captain of industry used to having his way in virtually everything, that the death of the child he loved more than anyone on this planet was fundamentally your fault? In what manner do you initiate that dialogue? I was too spent to sleep, too numb to cry. So I simply sat there, frozen and inert, and did nothing for a very long time—until the room phone rang, jarring me from my catatonic haze. I forced myself to pick up the handset.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Gil Carlisle.”

  I offered the only words I could think to say.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You should be, you son of a bitch.”

  Gone was the deceptively honeyed twang in his voice. Gone, too, was any semblance of the weeping, disconsolate father. The Gil Carlisle on the other end of the line was a man, in the parlance of his native West Texas, fit to be tied. He told me he couldn’t believe it when Savannah called him, to tell him we were getting remarried. He counseled her against it, he said, told her I was a loser, and that’s what I’d always be. But she wouldn’t listen to him.

  “Why did you have to go and find that airplane?”

  “I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times, Gil.”

  “Why didn’t you call me back?”

  “I was going to.”

  “When?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “You didn’t call me when she got taken, either,” Carlisle said. “I could’ve done something. Brought in help, you son of a bitch.”

  “I should’ve called you. I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that! ‘Sorry’ don’t bring my daughter back, goddamn it.”

  “I don’t blame you for being mad at me, Gil.”

  “You don’t blame me? Well, that’s mighty white of you, Logan. I’m gonna tell you something, son, that I should’ve told you a helluva long time ago: the worst day of my life was the day my cherished, beautiful daughter crossed paths with your sorry ass.”

  I couldn’t much blame him for saying that, either.

  “She told me she was pregnant. Couple months along. That true?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were gonna get married, make a decent woman out of her. That true, too?”

  “She already was a decent woman.”

  “Well, whoopty-damn-do. You thought she was decent. That don’t mean a damn thing to me, you know that? You don’t mean a damn thing to me.”

  Carlisle told me he would dispatch his private jet to retrieve Savannah’s remains as soon as the coroner released them. Her funeral would be in Las Vegas, where he lived. I wouldn’t be invited. If I showed up, Carlisle vowed, he’d have Nevada authorities arrest me on the spot for trespassing.

  “And one more thing,” Carlisle said. “Don’t even think about asking for any of her money. You weren’t married. You don’t get a dime. Not one penny.”

  “Do you really think I care about her money?”

  “Well, you sure as hell didn’t care much about her safety, did you?” He began to cry. “I don’t ever want to talk to you again. Do you feel me, boy? Never!”

  The line went dead.

  I’ve lost comrades in combat, classmates, buddies I’ve flown with. At Alpha, I watched brother go-to guys die in action. But the sense of loss I suffered in their passing was little more than emotional potholes compared to the black hole of grief that threatened to consume me as a result of Savannah’s death.

  I called Mrs. Schmulowitz to tell her the news because I knew she’d want to know. She listened solemnly and told me she wasn’t surprised. She’d had a dream the night before, she said, that Savannah was in heaven, sipping a martini and smiling.

  “She’s OK, bubby. She’s in a better place.”

  “I hope so, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

  I hung up the phone and wept. Somewhere in the night, as falling snow muffled the sound of passing cars and trucks, but not the rhythmic rooting and orgasmic moaning of the couple in the room above mine, I finally drifted off.

  That’s when they came to me—the ravens I’d seen that morning in the trees high above the ditch where Savannah’s body was found. In subconscious revelation, I grasped what they’d been trying to tell me.

  NINETEEN

  In Greek and Egyptian legend, the presence of a raven portends bad weather. Some African and Asian cultures believe that the bird forecasts death. For Shakespeare, the raven was evil incarnate; for Poe, it was the embodiment of lost love and despair.

  The only reason I knew all that was because of Lieutenant Commander Andy Ziegler.

  Andy was a naval aviator with big teeth and a skull filled to overflowing with pointless trivia, which he was only happy to uncork with minimal provocation. He flew EA-18Gs off the USS Nimitz, with Electronic Attack Squadron 135—the “Black Ravens.” With his hunger for useless information, he’d gone out of his way to learn everything he could about the deviously intelligent birds whose likeness he and his squadron mates carried into battle on the empennages of their warplanes.

  We’d met stateside during a debrief after a particularly sensitive snatch-and-grab in which Andy and his squadron mates jammed hostile radars to cover Alpha’s extraction by helicopter from a Middle Eastern nation that shall go nameless. We became friends after I mentioned to him that I’d flown A-10s during my air force days.

  “Are you aware that the Gatling gun on the A-10 Warthog was developed by General Electric?” Andy asked me.

  “I am aware.”

  “And you don’t find that funny in an ironic way? I mean, c’mon, it’s GE.”

  “I’m not getting it, Andy.”

  “The ‘we bring good things to life’ company? Developing a weapon to end life?”

  I had to admit, it was pretty ironic.

  Andy invited me to spend Christmas at his parents’ 1,200-acre cattle ranch in eastern Montana after Savannah and I split. He was confident that big sky country and a break from greasing bad guys would do me good. We galloped Appaloosas across the frozen High Plains by day and chased local women by night in the saloons of Miles City. Two months later, on a routine night training hop, both of Andy’s engines inexplicably quit on approach to the carrier. He ejected, but his parachute failed to deploy. The navy never found his body.

  It was a grinning Andy Ziegler who’d come to me that night in my dream. He was flying his jet upside down between clouds as red as strawberries, mouthing the same advice he’d given me after Savannah and I divorced:

  “Have no regrets,” Andy said. “You can’t move on, you can’t think straight, can’t see straight, if you’re flying backward.”

  I awoke in a sweat in my silent and dark room at the Econo Lodge before the dawn. Andy’s words reverberated on my tongue.

  Have no regrets.

  Regret and guilt consumed me after my divorce. Savannah had walked out, but not without cause. I’d grown brittle, short-tempered, and increasingly closed-off emotionally. I’d been unfaithful to her. I attributed my bad behavior to the stresses associate
d with the violent nature of what I did for a living, along with my inability to disassociate me, the covert operator, from me, the husband who could never tell his wife how he actually earned his living. At the same time, I blamed her, unfairly, for not understanding me better. I regretted my behavior and felt great guilt over the damage I’d wrought. All of that, along with anger, clouded my ability to function after we’d said our good-byes. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t think straight. And, now, here I was, come full circle, seven years later, paralyzed by the same emotions.

  For a full day and night, I had lain there in that cheap motel room, unable to sleep. I wept until I had no more tears left, my stomach aching from convulsive waves of grief that surged through me on a relentless, anguishing tide.

  The next morning, I willed myself out of bed and into the bathroom. I tore the plastic wrapper off a plastic cup, filled it from the sink, and drank it down, then turned on the light. The eyes that stared back at me in the mirror seemed not my own, haggard and shot through with veins, older than when I’d seen them last.

  Would Savannah still be alive, I asked myself, had I not caught that glint of sunlight from an all-but-forgotten airplane? Would she still be alive had I followed the instructions of her kidnapper? And there was Andy Ziegler, courtesy of those chattering ravens, still talking to me:

  Have no regrets.

  He was right. Was I really to blame for Savannah’s death? Any pilot would’ve done exactly as I had done—reporting what appeared to be a crash site in hopes of saving lives. And even if I had done what Crocodile wanted me to do, there was no assurance that he would’ve let Savannah live. The only thing I knew for sure was nothing was ever going to bring her back. The only task left unfulfilled was to take my pound of flesh from the man who had taken her from me. But that wouldn’t happen, I realized, so long as my mind remained a tormented mess.

  I ran the shower as cold as it would go and stepped in. The stream of frigid water stung like needle pricks, robbing me of breath, but it forced me to focus.

  At Alpha, we were taught that the most difficult question to answer is always the one to which the answer is obvious. Like peeling an onion, you start from the outside and work your way in. To me, standing there in that freezing shower, the obvious answer was either Gordon Priest or Preston Kavitch. Deputy Streeter had warned me about approaching Priest and interfering with his investigation. Fair enough. It was Kavitch I was more interested in, anyway.

  My gut didn’t buy Streeter’s assertion that Kavitch was clean simply because the perverted little panty sniffer’s ankle monitor showed he hadn’t left his parents’ B&B the morning Savannah disappeared. Anything electronic can be manipulated. There were other ample reasons to suspect Kavitch. He was no stranger to the criminal justice system. He was on a first-name basis with the psychopharmacology industry, and probably needed a lot of cash to maintain that relationship. And, if that weren’t enough, he gave me the creeps every time we crossed paths.

  From cold water to scalding hot, I soaped and scrubbed from my scalp to my toes, then rinsed off, my skin tingling, toweled dry, and lay back in bed, waiting for the sun to come up. I knew more ways to kill a man than I was willing to count. In Preston Kavitch’s case, if my investigation proved fruitful, all I’d need was one.

  CONSTANCE, MY friendly divorced librarian, seemed genuinely pleased to see me again.

  “I need some help,” I said. “I’m doing some research on a local resident.”

  “Of course.” She licked the tip of her index finger and slid a slip of scratch paper out from a small plastic bin sitting atop her desk. “What’s his name?”

  “Preston Kavitch.”

  “Any relation to the Kavitches who own that nice bed-and-breakfast across from the lake?”

  “Their son.”

  Constance wrote down his name with the nub of a pencil, the kind you find in any library.

  “Do you know how old he is, approximately?”

  I told her.

  “If you told me what kind of research you’re doing, the purpose,” Constance said, “I might be able to help you more.”

  “It involves a murder investigation.”

  She looked up at me slowly, with eyebrows raised and a slight downturn of her mouth that conveyed a sudden awareness of who I was.

  “I read about you in the paper. Your wife was killed. She was pregnant.”

  “Ex-wife. We were going to get remarried.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  I nodded.

  “And this Preston Kavitch, he’s a suspect?”

  “Maybe.”

  Constance nodded, drawing her own conclusions. She typed on her computer. After about a minute, her desktop printer spit out a few pages.

  “Can’t find much on him, I’m afraid,” she said, handing me the pages. “A couple of stories in the newspaper about him being arrested for this or that. Here’s one about him being in a play at the high school. Ah, speaking of which, follow me.”

  She led me to a bookshelf crammed with South Lake Tahoe High School yearbooks, arranged chronologically. Constance picked out the one with 2006 printed on the spine, the silver cover featuring the image of a horned Viking hat. She flipped through the book until she found what she was looking for: two opposing pages of color photos highlighting the high school theater club’s annual spring play—a production of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail.”

  Even disguised as a medieval knight, Preston Kavitch was hard to miss. Same stringy body. Same long, greasy hair. What caught my eye, however, wasn’t so much his picture as it was the name that appeared directly above Kavitch’s in the play’s cast of characters—a schoolmate whose bullet-ventilated body would be found eight years later lying in the mountains high above South Lake Tahoe, beside a crashed, twin-engine Beechcraft:

  Chad Lovejoy.

  “Mind if I make a copy of this?”

  “I’m sorry. Patrons aren’t allowed to make copies of reference materials,” Constance said, then smiled empathetically. “However, as head librarian, I can do whatever the hell I want.”

  UNLIKE VICTIMS of random terrorist attacks, most murder victims die at the hands of someone they knew personally. I read that somewhere. Chad Lovejoy knew Preston Kavitch. Their shared history was one more nail in Kavitch’s coffin, as far as I was concerned. And yet, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether meting out my own personal brand of payback for Savannah’s death was the way to go. Perhaps it was the Buddha talking to me, or some newfound maturity in the wake of my grieving over Savannah that compelled me to realize I’d likely spend the rest of my days in prison were I to take the law into my own hands. Whatever the reason, it stopped me from stalking, beating a confession out of him, then killing Preston Kavitch.

  I called Streeter instead.

  “It’s a small town,” he said after agreeing to meet me at Steve’s, the same coffee shop where we’d met the morning Savannah vanished. “So they went to high school together. It means nothing.”

  He slid the copy of the yearbook page Constance had copied for me at the library back across the table.

  “So you’ve ruled Kavitch out as a suspect?”

  “I told you. Kavitch wears an ankle monitor. And that monitor indicates he’s never been within five miles of that downed airplane.”

  “He could’ve tinkered with the monitor.”

  “We would’ve known. The computer would’ve shown it. The bracelet he wears is state of the art.”

  “Such as that is in El Dorado County.”

  Streeter leaned back in his chair and folded his arms indignantly. “Despite appearances to the contrary, Mr. Logan,” he said, “this isn’t Mayberry.”

  Ruby the waitress shuffled over to take our order.

  “I know what he’s having,” she said, tilting her head with affection at Streeter. “What about you, sugar?”

  I ordered oatmeal—hold the raisins—and waited for Ruby to move on. I still wasn’t convinced that the
weirdo from the B&B was anything other than guilty, but I let it go for the time being.

  “So, if it wasn’t Preston Kavitch,” I said, “who was it?”

  “We’re still operating on the assumption that it was someone Lovejoy did state time with,” Streeter said.

  I asked him if he’d contacted Jethro Murtha, the ex-con in Los Angeles who’d told me about Lovejoy’s uncle, Gordon Priest, and Priest’s supposed sketchy business dealings with members of Lake Tahoe’s Iranian community.

  “Not yet.”

  “What’re you waiting for?”

  Again, Streeter folded his arms and gave me that look.

  “I don’t mean any disrespect, Mr. Logan. I appreciate that you’ve lost someone very close to you. But I have to be honest and tell you, I resent your suggestion that we’re not doing all we can to close this case as quickly as we can. We’re moving as fast as we can, with the resources we have available.”

  My impulse was to tell him that his best wasn’t good enough, though on some level, I suspected he knew that already.

  “I want to know what you do know, where it stands,” I said. “I think I have that right.”

  “I’m sorry. Department policy—”

  “—Ever been in love, Deputy? So in love that all you could think about was her? Every waking minute of every day? And when you weren’t awake, you were dreaming about her, because you knew that was it, the one?”

  Streeter stared down at his coffee, cupping the mug with both hands, and nodded solemnly.

  “This was the woman I planned on spending the rest of my life with. If the shoe were on the other foot,” I said, “I’d do the same for you.”

  He rubbed his chin and the side of his neck. He exhaled, then told me that the investigation showed Savannah had been strangled at some other location, and her body dumped in the grave where it had been found. He said that boot prints at the scene matched those taken at the site of the downed Beechcraft where Chad Lovejoy had been shot to death, strongly suggesting that the same suspect had been responsible for both killings. The prints were of a man with unusually large, wide feet—size 13EE.