by Todd Borg
Bob backed away from the dock.
Once we were out some distance, he shifted into forward and turned the Beats Working around. When he was fifty yards out, Bob said, “Hang on.” I held Spot’s collar as I sat on the settee where Joe was already sitting.
Bob pushed the throttle forward all the way.
The engines revved up to a low roar, and the boat accelerated fast. The bow raised up, then dropped down as we planed out. When the boat settled in at its fastest cruise, the speedometer showed 32 knots. It was fast, but the size of the boat and our distance above the water’s surface made it seem much slower.
Bob called out over the engine noise. “Where to on the South Shore?”
“The Timber Cove Pier.”
He nodded.
Spot again walked over to where Pretty Girl snoozed. She ignored him.
The ring of mountains around the lake gradually shifted some as we rocketed south, but we were still in the middle of the lake.
Spot went out the back side of the lounge, stepped over to the side of the boat, and stuck his nose into the wind. Outside of steak, there’s almost nothing a dog likes better.
Forty minutes later, we approached the pier. Bob slowed the engines. We dropped out of plane, the stern riding low for a bit. At such an angle, the yacht made a huge wake. We slowed further, and the boat leveled out as we coasted up to the dock.
Bob shifted into reverse to bring us to a stop. As Joe and I walked down the aft stairway to the tender deck, Bob called out.
“I didn’t have anything to do with the deaths of those people.”
“We’ll soon find out,” I said.
Bob brought the yacht within six inches of the pier. Joe and I stepped off. Spot followed. We walked down the snowy pier, Joe moving fast considering how slippery it was.
The engine pitch of the Beats Working rose a bit as it pulled away behind us. In a minute, the engines roared.
Diamond was in his Douglas County patrol unit. On the California side of the state line.
Joe sat in front. Spot and I got in back.
“Where to?”
“Joe’s house,” I said.
Diamond pulled out and turned onto Lake Tahoe Blvd.
“Are you okay with driving a Douglas County Patrol Unit in the wrong county in the wrong state?” I asked. “Against the rules?”
“Pursuit of bad guys knows no jurisdiction in my personal code,” Diamond said. “I’ll tell the sheriff it was quid pro quo, and we got the cheap end of the deal. Some of your crime-fighting is in our county, and Joe’s paying for it.”
Joe made a little nod.
FORTY-EIGHT
As Diamond drove, I called Street and filled her in. “Simone said that the man in the No Judgment group named Cameron had long wavy hair. So I thought he might be an employee at RKS Properties, a guy named Benjamin who works for Bob Hinton. Right age, right hair, and proximity to the case. But that hasn’t panned out, yet. So I’m back to the beginning. Ned still seems like the most likely murder suspect. Especially now that I found the list of names in his truck.”
“But you might never know now that he’s dead,” she said.
“Right.”
“What are you going to do next?”
“Hard to know. I may decide to go into the Desolation Wilderness and see if I can find her.”
“How can I help?” Street said.
“You could make a run to my cabin and gather up my back-country skis, boots, clothes, gloves, hat, and such. Maybe grab the small red pack and put some food and water in it. Diamond says the southbound tunnel at Cave Rock is closed due to an accident. But when they get it clear, you could bring my gear to Joe’s. Diamond’s bringing us there now. Joe’s going to pull out his spare maps and help me figure out where Simone might be right now.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Street said.
I hung up, then dialed 911.
“Nine-one-one dispatch,” a woman said.
“Gina,” I said, recognizing her voice. “This is Owen McKenna. I’m working with Sergeant Bains in El Dorado County and Sergeant Martinez of Douglas County on a case involving a woman named Cynthia Rorvik and her husband Joe. I will explain the details so you have them on the nine-one-one recording. I recently spoke to Simone Bonnaire, a friend of Mrs. Rorvik’s. She is currently someplace southwest of Rubicon Peak participating in the Tahoe Randonnée Extreme challenge. There is a possibility that she is in danger and being pursued by someone that we should consider armed and dangerous.”
Gina inhaled. “You said she’s at Rubicon Peak?” she asked.
“She was a few hours ago. She’s heading south. At the time we spoke, she was not aware of a pursuer, but I have reason to believe he is an athletic man who has gone by the name Cameron. My last communication with Simone was cut off when her phone battery died. I don’t know if she realizes the level of danger, but the man who I think is looking for her has revealed to her abuse victim’s support group that he murdered his mother. The other members of the group have died in suspicious accidents. I think Simone may be next. How quickly can you contact Search and Rescue?” I asked.
“We sent the Washoe County SAR up to investigate an avalanche in the Galena Creek Drainage off Mt. Rose. The report was that a slide carried a large group of skiers a long distance. The caller reported that some were not visible under the snow. But others were partially visible. He thought maybe a dozen in all.”
“Sorry to hear that. But this is El Dorado County.”
“I know,” she said. “But you know how all the service agencies help each other out.”
“El Dorado SAR went to help,” I said.
“Yes. Placer County, too. One team skied in from the side. Another is closer but down below and working up the canyon. The third is trying to access from above.”
“So we have no available team near the Sierra Crest.”
“Correct. I’ll see what I can do about bringing in a team from one of the other counties. Douglas County is closest. But Desolation is hard to get to.”
“What about a chopper?”
“Most can’t land in deep snow. Even if we can find a bird that can go in, they’d still have to wait until morning light.”
“Who called in the Galena Creek report?”
“Of course, that’s normally privileged information. But I can tell you that we don’t know who the caller was. The caller ID system didn’t report the number. Maybe it was one of those untraceable cell phones. Prepaid, or whatever.”
“The caller didn’t say his name?”
“No. He just said he was out doing some back-country telemarking and saw the slide from a distance.”
“He say anything else?”
“Only what I already said about the number of skiers and such. He sounded knowledgeable, if that helps. He spoke of the slide as if he’d had experience, so the information about the location was probably accurate.”
“Anything about the call stand out?”
“There was nothing notable about the call. Oh, except he had a real raspy voice.”
“A raspy voice,” I repeated. I thanked Gina and hung up.
Diamond turned off Lake Tahoe Blvd, and headed up to Angora Highlands.
I thought about Joe’s neighbor Michael Paul, the guy with the voice so raspy that it was distracting. Michael could have called in a false avalanche report just to tie up local SAR teams and make them unavailable to search for Simone.
I wondered if Michael had a white ski outfit. I remembered his big black Range Rover, the vehicle that he used for getting into the back-country. When Dwight told me about the person who ran him off the road, he wasn’t sure about the vehicle that had swerved toward him, but he thought it was black. I didn’t think of Michael’s hair as being long, but it was certainly wavy. If Simone knew any guys with buzz cuts, that might give her the perception that Michael’s hair was long. The biggest mismatch between Michael and Simone’s description of Cameron was that Simone hadn’t
seen any tattoos on Cameron. But she couldn’t remember seeing him in short sleeves or shorts, so it was possible that Cameron was a pseudonym for Michael Paul.
FORTY-NINE
I told Diamond what the dispatcher had said.
“Let’s stop at Michael Paul’s house,” Diamond said. “Which one is it?”
Joe directed him.
“I’ll stay here with Joe,” Diamond said as I got out of the patrol unit.
“The house appears empty,” I said. “The lights are off, garage door closed. I’ll probably just be a minute.”
I got out and rang Michael’s bell, but there was no response. I tried the door. It was locked.
To the side of the garage, there was a narrow trail in the snow. The path ended at a door near the place where an interior wall would separate the house and garage. I tried that door. It was also locked.
The back yard was covered with four feet of untrampled snow. But right next to the house, less snow had accumulated. Hugging the wall of the house, I stepped into the snow and moved along the back of the house to the far corner.
There was a low deck about two feet above the ground. The deck hadn’t been shoveled and had three feet of snow on it. I climbed up the short stairs and tromped through the snow to the glass slider. It too was locked.
At the corner of the deck, I could look around the other side of the house. There were no doors. So I retreated and rejoined Diamond and Joe and Spot, and we drove to Joe’s house.
Once inside, I asked Joe, “Do you or Rell know anybody who has a white ski suit?”
“I don’t ski anymore,” Joe said, his words matter-of-fact. If he had regrets about not skiing, he kept them to himself.
“I was thinking about how people in Tahoe often go about their daily errands in their ski gear. They come down off the mountain and head directly to the supermarket, still wearing everything except their ski boots. I thought maybe when you bump into people you know, maybe some of them are wearing their ski clothes.”
“But you’re only interested in white,” Joe said.
“Right. I saw a skier in white following Jillian. I didn’t see any indication that she was in danger, but something about it felt wrong.”
Joe shook his head and then stopped. He frowned, then angled his head just a bit like a dog trying to get a different take on a sound.
“Come to think of it,” he said, “Michael has a white suit. No, not a suit. A white jacket and white ski pants. Not the snug kind. The loose kind with shoulder straps. Ski bibs. In fact, I saw him in it just a couple of days ago. I drove home, and as I pulled into my driveway, Dwight was out for a walk. He stopped and talked to me for a bit. As we were talking, Michael drove by in his big fancy Range Rover. He said he was going up into the back-country to make some turns. He had his bibs on. And his jacket was on the seat next to him. White and white.”
“You have a good memory,” I said.
“No, I only remember because of Dwight.”
“Why is that?”
“Because,” Joe said, “every time Dwight looked at Michael he had this worried look on his face. I couldn’t help noticing. So at one point when Michael was going on and on about the great snow conditions in that raspy voice of his, I looked at him to try and figure out why Dwight would be worried. The only thing I could come up with was a little mnemonic joke. Dwight is worried about white. White worries Dwight. Like when you get a song lyric stuck in your mind. I knew it was silly, but that’s what came into my mind. So I remembered it.”
“You never figured out what actually bothered Dwight?”
“No. I even asked him after Michael drove away, but Dwight just got embarrassed and said that he is intimidated by Michael and his cockiness. I told him not to be, that Michael is a bit of a blowhard. Dwight didn’t even know what a blowhard is. Different generations, I guess.”
Diamond said, “Joe, if Simone is being chased and she realizes it, can you predict her next move?”
“What do you mean?”
“Simone will have been thinking about what Owen said about Cameron possibly being dangerous. She will have been considering the possibilities. She may decide that she’s in serious danger. She may also scan the landscape and see someone coming toward her. Either way, she would scan the territory and choose how she runs based on the topography of the landscape, right?”
Joe frowned.
“You could get a sense of her decisions based on your maps.”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “Tell me how you’re thinking.”
“Think of it this way,” I said, picking up on Diamond’s thoughts. “Imagine that Simone has decided to run, to escape. So she thinks about the landscape and she looks at the mountainsides and she visualizes the escape routes that you put on her maps. She’d see things that would make her think that some routes were better than others, right? You’d be much better than me at figuring out where she’d come down. Glen Alpine? Cascade Lake? Velma Lakes to Eagle Lake to Emerald Bay?”
Joe frowned harder. “You make it sound like it’s up to me to save Simone’s life,” he said. His voice had a plaintive quality to it, a tremolo of fear.
“I don’t mean to put pressure on you. Just think about it. That will give you ideas. If you come to some conclusions, we’ll discuss them and decide whether I should go in and try to find her. If so, we’ll figure out how best to do that.”
“I don’t like it,” Joe said.
“Me neither. But it’s all we can do.”
“Have you decided that Michael is our man?”
“No.”
“So you haven’t decided to go after Simone.”
“It’s a moot point unless I know how and where to look for her.”
Joe nodded and got up. He was standing more bent than usual. He walked over to the origami table.
“I gave Simone my best maps,” he said. “But I might have others. He looked in some bins and pulled out some rolled maps. He unrolled them on the table, rolled them back up, unrolled some others.
“Here we are,” he said, smoothing out old paper and running his big arthritic hands over the maps.
Spot reached his head over the table, investigating what Joe was doing. His jowls dragged across the maps.
“These are older than the ones I gave Simone,” Joe said, “and they’re at a more macro scale. But they should still be useful.”
FIFTY
Joe looked as serious as I’d ever seen him.
“Let me think,” he said. He moved his fingers here and there, touching different places. His hands shook when he pointed at mountains.
“You said she was at Rubicon Peak. I remember most of her route from there.”
“Great,” I said. “Now comes a difficult question, and I’m sorry to ask it.”
“What?”
“If a person is following her and he is determined to kill her, what about the landscape would suggest how he might do it to make it look like a accident?”
Joe looked very sad. “I suppose he could just push her off any mountain.”
“Well, maybe yes. But I’m thinking that he would want to choose a place where her fall would be certain to end in death.”
Diamond said, “Another consideration is that he’d pick a place where other people would be unlikely to see it. A secluded place, less open.”
“Okay, let me consider that,” Joe said.
He bent over the map, his face a mass of frown wrinkles. I looked over his shoulder, but I was aware that for me, topo maps were something to be deciphered, a foreign language where I knew only half of the words. For Joe, it was like reading the morning paper. He picked up a pencil, wrote numbers on the mountains, drew some arrows.
I left him alone. Because my cell didn’t get reception at Joe’s house, I used his phone to call Street. She said she had collected my ski gear and checked and found out that the Cave Rock tunnel was open. She would be on her way in a few minutes.
I waited.
In time, Joe str
aightened up.
“I think this was the order of the peaks. And I think this was her desired route based on what I previously drew for her. Now I have to imagine how she would react if and when she thinks she is being chased.”
“Yeah, that would help,” I said.
He leaned back over the maps.
FIFTY-ONE
“Okay, I’ve got some recommendations,” Joe said. “I’m worried. I think we should hurry.”
“Agreed.”
Joe turned from the table to look at Diamond and me. “Tell me, please. You told Simone that Manuel and Jillian had died, and Simone now believes that they were part of her group. But does she know how they died?”
“She understands that their deaths looked like accidents but were likely murders,” I said. “She believes that Ned was the likely killer.”
“But if she comes to think that the killer is someone else,” Joe said, “she’ll be wondering how he is going to try to kill her and make it look like an accident, right?”
Diamond said, “She’ll be thinking about which routes make a killer’s job easier or harder. The obvious choice for the killer is to repeat the process he used with Jillian, a hip-check at the wrong moment to send Simone into a tree or off a cliff.”
Joe said, “So if Simone stays away from cliffs and trees and doesn’t give him an opportunity, he will look for whatever is the steepest slope she skis near, especially one that faces northeast where the avalanche danger is greatest.”
Joe pointed to one of the maps.
“These three red lines are her probable routes from Rubicon Peak. Number one is where she originally planned to go, which, as I recall, is Phipps Peak followed by Dicks and Jacks Peaks. The logical way would be to stay on the Tahoe Rim Trail. It generally follows these ridge lines.” Joe traced with his big finger. “Any track off the ridge would be too steep to safely ski. Once she got down to this saddle, the only reasonable direction would be this route up here. Does that seem logical to you?”
