by Todd Borg
“He knows the rules. If he sees a bear or mountain lion or coyotes, he’s not to run but move away slowly, hands up to look bigger. He even carries pepper spray just in case. The only kids who’ve ever been hurt by wild animals were much smaller children bitten by coyotes.”
I looked out at the snow, which was so deep no one could walk through it. With Phillip so agile on his snowshoes, the forest was probably the safest place in the world for him. “I’m sure it’s fine, Janeen.”
Lyla Purdue appeared from the kitchen and Janeen introduced us. Lyla kept her distance, glancing at my bandages. Janeen turned back to me. “Do you still think Phillip and I are in danger from the man who attacked Jerry?”
“Possibly,” I said. “More likely, however, he is not after you but after whatever he thinks Thos had.”
“Something he thinks was hidden in the shrine in Kauai?”
“Yes.” I proceeded to give Janeen an account of our time in Hawaii, including our fruitless search for a possible manuscript by Mark Twain. Lyla retired to the kitchen while Janeen and I talked for a long time, but none of Janeen’s thoughts gave me any new ideas.
“Can you think of any place in this house where Thos may have hidden a notebook? Or a small box?” I gestured with my hands to approximate the size.
Janeen shook her head. “No. Thos was never here alone that I can recall. It would have been difficult for him to hide anything without us knowing it.”
“Would you mind if I have a look around?”
“No, of course not. Can I be of help?”
“Yes, please,” I said. A search was better done alone without distractions, but I wanted Janeen to be comfortable.
We went through the little house in less than an hour. Everything was neat and clean and orderly, even Phillip’s room. Having previously found Thos’s computer monitor hiding place, I knew something of Thos’s way of thinking. By that guideline, there were several very good places in Janeen’s house that Thos might have used, but I found no manuscript or other treasure in them.
“Are you disappointed?” Janeen asked me when we were finished.
“No. I want the killer to find his loot elsewhere. Then you and Phillip will be safe. Do you have a computer?”
“No. I know I should get one for Phillip, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Why do you ask?”
“I’m trying to contact anyone who communicated with Thos through email.”
I thanked her, told her I’d check on them tomorrow, and left.
TWENTY-SIX
It was now almost 2:00 p.m. The winter sun was low in the southwest and was obscured by the mountains of the Sierra crest. There is a high overlook as you approach Emerald Bay, and you can see the entire lake. The wind patterns across the water were dramatic as the mountains made chaos of the prevailing wind. Huge, dark clouds rushed over the mountains and hurtled out across the lake toward Nevada.
I tuned the radio to a local AM station and got a forecast as I cruised past the rock slide at Emerald Bay. The DJ reported that the storm in the Gulf of Alaska was just starting to move south down the coast of Canada. It wasn’t expected to hit Northern California for another couple days, yet already it was throwing tendrils of clouds down the coast and up into the mountains. They weren’t predicting snowfall totals yet, but they said the storm had the potential to deliver a major punch to the Tahoe area. We should expect the possibility of road closures from north of Truckee south to Yosemite.
I turned in at Rubicon Lodge. From my memory of the argument I had witnessed between Brock Chambers and the Viking, I believed that Chambers knew who the Viking was. I also believed that I could get the information out of him.
There was a young man with short blond hair so light his scalp showed through, and a stern-looking middle-aged woman at the reception desk. They seemed to be having a disagreement as I walked up. The woman noticed me first and moved her head and eyes to try to signal my presence to the young man whose back was toward me. He didn’t get it.
“No!” he said. “I don’t believe a word he says. If you think you’re going to get some severance out of this, forget it. Brock is a lying snake. There’s only one person who is going to make out on this collapse and that’s McCloud the hunter. You know she’s tight with him. The rest of us are going to get screwed to the wall. Frankly, I’m surprised the jerk didn’t try arson or something so he could stick the insurance companies with his financial...” he finally noticed the woman’s frantic gestures.
He turned around. “Oh. Good afternoon, sir.” If he was startled by the bruises on my face, he didn’t show it. “May I help you?” His face was red.
“I had an appointment with Brock at three o’clock,” I lied. “Name’s Owen McKenna.”
“I don’t understand. I can’t imagine that Brock had set up any appointments for today. He’s...” the man stopped speaking, wary, finally on guard.
“Three o’clock. That’s what we set up last week.” I thought that as long as he’d handed me the financial problem concept, I may as well go with it. “If Brock’s late, that’s one thing. But if he dropped the ball on this deal, well let’s just say that time’s running out. If I’m going to cover his overdue payables and his cash-flow shortage for the next six months, then he’s going to show me the respect of showing up for his appointments. There are a lot of other places I can invest four hundred K. Now, where is he?”
“I’m sorry, sir, we don’t know where he is. Ever since he filed for protection with the court he hasn’t been in. We’ve called all his numbers and Jimmy even ran over to his house. But no one is there. All I can do is direct you to his attorney, Lynette McCloud.”
“Is she handling his bankruptcy?”
“I don’t think so. But she’s his friend and gives him general advice.”
I tried to stand even taller than my six-six and leaned in over the young man. “You just referred to her as McCloud the hunter. What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” he stammered. “We just call her that because she goes hunting with Brock.”
I jerked my head toward the trophy heads on the walls behind me. “You mean she shoots big game?”
The guy steeled himself to answer. “I believe, Mr. McKenna, that Lynette McCloud would shoot any damn thing she felt like shooting.”
I kept my eyes severe and unmoving for another couple of seconds. “Tell Brock to call me at my office. If I don’t hear from him in twenty-four hours, I’m out.” I walked out.
Back in the Jeep, Spot sniffed me all over just as he had the last time I’d been in the Rubicon Lodge. Was it the dead animals on the walls? Or the people in the lodge?
I drove back out the lodge’s drive and turned north on 89.
I’d looked earlier and found the address of Morella Meyer’s Commercial Diving and Salvage Shop in Tahoe City.
Her shop was a block from the Truckee River and three blocks from the lake. It was in a small building that backed up to the forest. The building had once been a gas station. Now, a beauty salon occupied the left side where the cashier’s area had been and Morella’s shop was behind the garage doors on the right side where mechanics had once worked on cars. Although the garage doors still looked functional, it was a cold January day. They were closed tight. The beauty salon was shut as well with all the lights off on that side of the building. I parked in front of a huge bank of snow left by the plow. There was a little sign on the corner of the building and I found a door there.
I heard the hum of machinery before I opened the door. “Morella?” I said when I’d pushed in the door. “Anybody home?”
Morella stepped out from behind a large rack of scuba tanks. “Oh,” she said, startled. “The compressor makes so much noise I didn’t hear you come in.” She spoke loudly to be heard over the racket. “I remember you. You were at the Rubicon Lodge last week. Captain Mallory’s friend.” Her demeanor was pleasant but not friendly. Her wayward eyes seemed to look at me in sequence. First, the left eye zeroed in on me, then it wa
ndered a bit to the side as the right eye took me on. I still couldn’t remember which one was glass. And she still looked beautiful in spite of her wild eyes.
“Owen McKenna,” I said.
“I remember,” she said. “You had a bad fall?” she said as she reached out to shake hands. Her hand seemed small and soft for someone who worked with scuba tanks and other heavy equipment.
“I was in a helicopter crash in Hawaii.”
“Oh, my God. That’s terrible. Well, I’m glad you’re okay. Mostly, anyway.”
“I wanted to talk to you about your dive that day.”
“The dive where I didn’t find anything.”
“You were going to dive again the next day, weren’t you? Find anything different that day?”
She shook her head as she reached over and checked a silver tank that was sitting in a fiberglass container that looked like a short shower stall. A hose from the compressor was attached to a valve on the top of the tank. At the top of the shower stall was a shower head that sprayed a light stream of water over the tank to keep it cool while it was being filled with hot compressed air. “You told me not to just look for a bullet, right? I was to look for anything unusual or out of place. So I did.”
“Any luck?”
“No. Same clear ice water, same smooth bottom. No bullet, no dead bodies, no skull-and-crossbone clues floating around waiting for a diver to find.” The compressor clicked off and the old garage was suddenly silent. “Excuse me, I need to switch tanks.”
Morella unhooked the stiff black hose from the top of the tank. She pulled the dripping tank out of the mini shower stall and lay it down on a carpet-covered work bench.
“How much air do you put in these tanks?”
“This type is high pressure steel, they hold eighty cubic feet.”
“Lot of pressure when you squeeze that much air into about, what, a third of a cubic foot?”
“Yeah. Thirty-five hundred pounds per square inch.” She set another tank into the stall, hooked it up, and started the compressor. She was turning on the cooling water when the phone rang.
“Meyer’s Diving,” she answered. “Who? Oh. Hello. Well, I’ve got a customer. I don’t know how long. Actually, it’s Owen McKenna. No. He’s a detective. He’s working with the police on the murder of the guy in the water. What? No, just asking me stuff about my dive.”
There was a pause. Morella glanced at me and then casually angled away from me. “No,” she said in a softer voice. “Well, I suppose twenty minutes.” She hung up.
“Someone who knows me?”
She glared at me for a brief moment. Then her eyes softened. “No. I just used your name because some people know of you even if they don’t know you personally. It didn’t sound like... I don’t think this person had ever heard of you.”
“Morella, remember when I asked you about the note in your day planner?”
She glared at me.
“I need to ask again.”
“That is my personal business.”
“But it may have bearing on this case.”
Morella shook her head. She took a towel off a rack and wiped down the wet tank she’d just filled.
“Let me explain,” I said. “I was gone in Hawaii for a few days checking into Thos Kahale’s background. He’s the man who was shot in Lake Tahoe.”
Morella appeared to ignore me. She put the tank in a rack. To the side was a separate rack. She pulled an orange tank out of it, checked an air pressure gauge, then cranked open the valve a little. The shrill rush of escaping air filled the small shop like the whoosh of a jet. It was much louder than the compressor.
I kept talking, louder than before. “Three other men were killed in Hawaii. Thos’s cousin, uncle and grandfather. So it is critical that we consider every bit of information that could possibly pertain to this killer.”
Morella looked at me, then turned to a cabinet and pulled out a drawer. It contained several large chrome-plated valves of the type that go on the top of the tanks. She selected one and shut the drawer.
“Morella, you wrote ‘call Strict ASAP after dive’ in your day planner. If it has nothing to do with your dive or Thos’s murder, then tell me about it and I’ll leave you alone.”
She continued about her business as if I weren’t there.
“But if it has anything to do with Thos, I need to know.”
She ignored me.
I kept talking, telling her about Thos’s grandfather who was smothered and his uncle who was killed in a car accident that may not have been an accident. And his cousin John who died in the helicopter crash. And the young tough named Napoleon who was dropped at the hospital in Kauai with a fatal knife wound. When she understood the depth of this killer’s activities, maybe she would overcome whatever personal embarrassment or financial incentive she had to keep quiet.
It didn’t seem to make a difference. There were face masks and fins and snorkels to rinse out and wet suits to hang up and CO2 cartridges to check in the buoyancy compensator jackets and valves to change on tanks and regulators to check.
I ran out of story about the time she glanced up through the rear windows for the second time. I turned to see what was catching her eye, but there was only snowy forest turning dark in the approaching twilight.
The compressor shut off. Morella shut off the shower head, pulled the wet tank out of the stall and hefted it up onto the carpeted work bench. She took a towel and dried the tank off, rolling it over on the carpet.
“Morella, if you are afraid to talk, I can help. Together, we can deal with whatever is bothering you. This killer will strike again. What you tell me now may save a life.”
Morella stopped drying the tank. “Okay,” she said. She leaned against the counter, her hands resting on the tank, its smooth round end against her flat belly. “Strict is the name I...”
She was cut short by an explosion. Glass filled the air as a garage window shattered. At the same time the valve on the back end of the scuba tank she was holding blew off in a percussive blast.
With the valve gone, the exhaust opening had 3500 pounds per square inch of thrust and the tank became a rocket with instant acceleration.
The tank shot into Morella’s abdomen and carried her across the garage. It slammed her with tremendous force into a workbench. Freed from Morella, the tank flew at an upward angle toward the ceiling. There was a crunching boom as it blew through the sheet rock.
A fraction of a second later I saw the tank shooting down outside. It hit the icy parking lot near where Spot watched from my Jeep. The tank bounced off the ground and shot skyward, accelerating like a missile until it arced out of sight.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I rushed over to Morella. She was slumped down next to the edge of the workbench, her face against the concrete floor. There was a severe injury to her head near her temple. Blood and brain tissue were on the sharp corner of the workbench vise. The metal had cut through her head from side to front. I could see from the injury that her eye was destroyed and it wasn’t the one made of glass.
Morella was not breathing. The small pool of blood on the floor was not expanding. I felt the carotid artery in her neck. There was no pulse.
Powdered glass hung in the air near the exploded window. I ran over and looked out. There was no movement in the dark forest. I sprinted out the door and angled down the road toward where I thought he would have parked.
In the far distance an engine revved. Red taillights flashed in the dark and the vehicle roared off. It turned toward the highway and disappeared. I couldn’t see the make and I knew that there was no point in giving chase. The highway in Tahoe City went three directions and there were many neighborhood roads to disappear into. He could be anywhere.
I went back inside and knelt next to Morella’s body.
Twice before in my earlier police career I’d been faced with the decision of whether or not to start CPR.
There are conflicting statutes and court precedents that apply an
d many more opinions from medical ethicists. But they all fade into the background when a person is dying and you are the only one to breathe air into their lungs and artificially squeeze their heart.
I knew that even if I could perform a miracle and restart her heart, I would not be prolonging life for a vital young woman. I’d seen too many head injuries to have any illusions about the outcome. The brain damage was far too extreme. Instead, I would be prolonging existence for a blind, comatose body, dependent on feeding tubes and other machinery.
I didn’t think I was playing God when I finally stood up and walked with slow, heavy steps to the telephone.
My 911 call brought a Placer County Sheriff’s cruiser in less than one minute. I stepped outside to meet him. The deputy was in his late twenties, old enough to be professional. When he saw the damage to the building he immediately called for backup. When I showed him my license, he didn’t get huffy as younger cops tend to do and instead recognized me as one of his brethren. But when he stepped into the garage and saw what had happened to Morella Meyer, he staggered.
“Jesus, sweet Jesus,” he said, then leaned over and vomited. I steered him back out into the fresh winter air and kept him there until reinforcements arrived.
The paramedics were first. Two young men in a red truck. The cockier of the two thought he was a TV actor. “Well, holy goddamn!” he sang out in a sing-song voice when he saw the body. “We got us hamburger! Ain’t no CPR can fix hamburger!”
I took most of the front of his jacket in my fist, lifted him up and slammed him back against the wall. “One more word,” I hissed in his face. “Just one more word.”
He went pale. I let go of his jacket and he fell to the floor. He got up and scrambled out to his truck.
In time many other deputies arrived, along with a fire truck. As twilight turned to night, the flashing red and blue lights cast an eerie flickering glow into the snowy forest.
I’d spent some time explaining the events to the Placer County deputies when Mallory strode into the shop. “Long way from where I belong,” he said. “But this probably connects, so I thought I’d stop by.” He turned and saw Morella’s body. His eyes showed horror for a moment and I thought he was going to be sick, too. He turned away, swallowed and stared at the forest outside while he took several deep breaths. Finally, he scanned the room without looking back toward Morella’s body. He saw me. “What the hell happened to your face?”
