Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  “It sounds like Grace Sun’s murder was a frustrating case,” Street said.

  “Yeah. You work cases in Homicide, you expect that a majority will remain unsolved. But when the victims are kids or old people or women in the prime of their lives, it stays with you.”

  “You didn’t know Grace Sun,” Street said.

  “No. But during the investigation I met her cousin, Melody Sun, who was her roommate. Melody discovered the body. I came to understand that Melody and Grace were close. In talking to Melody, I learned about Grace a little bit. It bothered me that we got nowhere on the case.”

  “Why was Grace killed?” Street asked.

  “We never knew. Melody and Grace lived in an apartment in North Beach, under Coit Tower. The place was torn apart, but we never found a clear indication of why she was killed.”

  “You think Grace interrupted a burglar, and that got her killed?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “But there was a pot of fresh tea and two teacups on the table. Tea had been poured and drunk. Earlier that morning, Melody and Grace had left the apartment together. Neither of them had made tea in the morning. And Grace was at work the entire day before she went home. So we narrowed the tea time down to sometime after Grace went home and before Melody went home. We determined that Grace had been dead about an hour when Melody arrived.”

  “So Grace came home,” Street said. “Then someone she knew came over and they had tea. Then that person left and someone else came in and killed Grace?”

  “Could be. But one cup had Grace’s prints on it, and the other was clean. Which suggested that the other tea drinker killed her, then wiped his prints off the cup. Before she died, Grace fought with the killer, scraped his skin with her fingernails, and got herself hit over the head with a cast iron frying pan, which caved in her skull and killed her. Then the killer ransacked the apartment. Drawers emptied, clothes pulled out of closets, cushions ripped off of couches and chairs. Filing cabinets opened and dumped on the floor. Books swept out of bookcases.”

  Street made a slow nod and shut her eyes for a moment.

  “The surprise came after we brought the body in. The medical examiner found a journal inside Grace’s shirt. She had a sweater over her shirt, and its bulk obscured the shape of the journal underneath.”

  “You think the killer was after the journal?”

  “We couldn’t tell. The fact that she’d hidden it there suggested as much. Maybe she had the journal with her when she came home. She may have come inside, heard the burglar, and quickly slipped it inside her shirt before he saw her. Or perhaps when someone knocked – the person she had tea with – maybe Grace realized that it was a person who was interested in the journal. So she hid it under her shirt.”

  “It must have been very valuable,” Street said.

  “Right. Except there was nothing valuable that we could find.”

  “What was in the journal?”

  “It was written in Chinese. Unfortunately, at some point in the past, the journal had been dropped in water, dirty water. Most of the writing had gotten blurred. We had an expert look at it, but he could tell very little other than a few details about the daily minutia of life during the gold rush. It was boring enough that nothing stood out.”

  Street thought about it. “You got the burglar’s DNA from the skin under Grace’s nails?”

  “Yeah. She’d gouged a surprising amount of bloody skin off of him. It was easy for the lab to get DNA from it.”

  “She obviously fought hard, but it didn’t do her any good,” Street said. “She still died, and you never found the perpetrator.”

  I nodded.

  “It would have been incredibly difficult for Melody to come home and discover the body.”

  “Yeah. She called nine-one-one. In the tape of that call, she was sort of composed. But by the time we got there, she’d pretty much come unglued. She was sitting in the apartment hallway, knees to chest, head banging on her knees, hysterical.”

  Street took the last bite of her rubber eggs, drank the last of her coffee. “It sounds like the burglar was looking for something specific instead of cash in a safe, or necklaces and earrings in a jewelry box. Something that could be inside of books or hidden in the furniture. Something like the journal Grace was hiding. Did Melody notice anything missing?”

  “No. That was another strange thing about the burglary. Two days later – time she’d mostly spent sedated and staying at a friend’s – I went with her back to the apartment. The cleanup crew had done a pretty good job, and Melody kept her emotions under relative control. She went through the apartment and could find nothing missing. Even a couple of weeks later, she still never noticed anything missing.”

  “And now an anonymous caller is saying that the killer is a guy who lives here at the lake,” Street said.

  I nodded.

  “Have you ever heard of this Thomas Watson?”

  I shook my head.

  “What will you do about that?” Street asked.

  “I called Bains at the El Dorado Sheriff’s Office, Santiago at Placer County, and Mallory at South Lake Tahoe PD.”

  “And Diamond?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “He have an idea?” Street said.

  “No. In fact, he said, ‘why tell me?’ and I said, ‘a Mex intellectual who happens to be a cop for Douglas County might have an idea that the rest of us would miss.’”

  “He probably scoffed at you for saying that,” Street said.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what he did.”

  Spot was out on the deck with us, snoozing in the sun, when a distant whistle of a bird caused him to lift his head and stare at the sky. Street and I followed his gaze to see a large raptor circling. It had huge wings with primary flight feathers separated at the wingtips. Its wings were held straight out like a seven-foot 1 X 10 board. Which meant Bald Eagle. It came around in a big soaring circle, and the sun flashed on its white head and tail feathers.

  It was a welcome change of subject, and we three focused for a time on the eagle. Eventually, Street had to leave to meet an entomologist colleague.

  After Street left, I took Spot out for a long mountain hike to clear my brain, then came back and ate lunch. Spot watched me.

  “You stare as if a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk is God’s answer to a dog’s prayers,” I said.

  Spot licked his chops. His nose flexed. He looked from the sandwich to me then back to the sandwich. His stare was so intense, it might toast the bread if I held it still.

  I stood up, tore off a chunk of peanut butter sandwich, and stirred it down to the bottom of his bowl, thinking it might encourage him to eat some of the dried sawdust chunks that are supposed to pass for dog food.

  Spot stuck his nose in the bowl, rooted around in circles and pulled out the sandwich morsel without touching the dog food. Then he lay down on his new cedar-chip mattress, a custom affair that was five feet long so he could stretch out. Even so, his feet and tail flopped over the edges and onto the floorboards.

  After lunch, my sleep deficit caught up with me. The rocking chair beckoned.

  Now I was awake and had answered the phone to a dial tone. I set the phone down only to have it ring again.

  “Hello?” I tried a second time.

  “Thought you were asleep or something,” Diamond Martinez said.

  “Sergeant,” I said.

  “Thought you would want to know that we’ve got a hostage situation on the lake. Guy out on the Tahoe Dreamscape dropped another guy overboard with a chain tied to him.”

  I was still groggy. “Intentional? Or accidental?”

  “Intentional. He’s currently got a hostage tied to the front of the boat. Threatening to drop him overboard, too.”

  “And you called me because…”

  “I’m in my patrol unit. I was just having a side-by-side with Ramos and another FBI agent on Lower Kingsbury when he got a call from dispatch. Turns out the hostage taker wan
ts to talk to you. Ramos is currently on his phone to the Captain of the boat, Ken Richards. Hold on, Ramos just folded his phone. He’s saying something to me.”

  A pause. Muffled voices.

  Diamond said, “I’m going to hand my phone through his window.”

  There was some wind noise, then a voice.

  “Owen McKenna, Special Agent Ramos here. Diamond filled you in.” A statement, not a question.

  “You have a hostage taker on the Dreamscape,” I said.

  “Yeah. Wants you out on the boat.”

  “Any idea why me?” I said.

  “No. Captain Richards says that the hostage taker’s got a heavy chain on the hostage. The hostage taker says he’s going to drop the hostage in the lake unless you come out to the boat to talk. Apparently, the hostage taker is very agitated. We don’t know more than that.”

  I tipped my head left and right, forward and back, trying to loosen a sore neck that was fast seizing up. I reached up and rubbed the muscles.

  “Can you get me out there?” I asked.

  “Yes. We have a boat available to us.”

  “Any idea who this hostage taker is?”

  “No. Agent Bukowski is with me. He’s trained in hostage negotiation. He’ll be able to give you an idea of how to proceed. We’ll be at your house in five or ten minutes.”

  We hung up.

  I put fresh water and Spot’s untouched food out on the deck and put Spot on the long chain, the lightweight variety that couldn’t be used to sink people in 1635 feet of ice-cold water. I grabbed my windbreaker and was waiting outside as a black Chevy Suburban pulled up. I got in the back seat, driver’s side.

  “McKenna, meet Bukowski,” Ramos said from the driver’s seat. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, shifted into reverse, backed out of my little parking pad and drove down the long private road that I share with my upscale neighbors. “Bukowski is up from the Sacramento office. He’s helping us on a different matter.”

  Bukowski turned around in the front seat. He reached across the back of the seat to shake my hand. He was maybe 35, younger than Ramos and me. Unlike Ramos, who always dressed just two notches shy of tux and tails and whose shiny black hair and tiny black moustache looked like they were barbered every morning, Bukowski wore a crisp white shirt with no jacket. His hair was greased and brushed up into messy tufts that angled backward. Despite the casual dress, his face looked earnest and focused and worried.

  “Do you have any experience with hostage situations?” he asked me.

  “Not enough to matter,” I said. “Give it to me from the beginning.”

  “You set up a dialogue with several principles as your guiding focus,” Bukowski said. “Slow it down, calm it down, reduce the tension. Make the hostage taker think that you’re doing everything you can to work with him.”

  “What about his demands?”

  “You tell him, ‘Let me see what I can do. It’ll take some time. But I’ll make some calls. I think you and I can work this out. I want a peaceful resolution to this. And I’ll keep working on it as long as the hostage stays safe.’ Like that,” Bukowski said. “You make your calls. You check back with him. You stay in his sight so that he can see you working on his demands. Your presence and your talk with him becomes his reassurance that someone cares. It’s all about empathy. Most hostage takers, if they think someone is listening to them, they chill a little. It’s when they think someone is blowing them off or planning a SWAT assault that they detonate their bombs.”

  “This guy has a bomb?” I said.

  “It looks like it. A large backpack with a wire going into it.”

  Ramos got to the bottom of my neighbors’ winding private drive and made a hard left onto the highway, accelerating fast enough to make the wheels squeal.

  “What if he demands something I can’t reasonably try to get for him?” I asked. “Ten million in cash and a helicopter.”

  Bukowski nodded. “Right. The forty-virgins-and-a-tropical-island demand. Sometimes they do that. If so, you say, ‘I don’t think I can get that for you. But what I can do is tell the authorities that we need time to work this out. I can guarantee your safety as long as the hostage stays safe.’ When he asks for something you can give him, say, cigarettes, you ask him to give you something in return.”

  “Like getting the hostage into a safer position,” I said.

  “Right. If he agrees, you give him just one cigarette.”

  “Got it.”

  “If the hostage taker wants food, you give him a single small item, and get another concession in return.”

  I nodded. “Any idea what the hostage taker wants?”

  Bukowski looked at Ramos.

  “None,” Ramos said over his shoulder. “Captain Richards only said that he is intense bordering on frantic and demanding to speak to you.”

  “Weapon?”

  “Other than the bomb, none that the captain can see,” Ramos said, looking at me in the mirror. He used his front teeth to bite some micro roughness off his lower lip, hit the button to roll down his window, spit it out. “Is this out of the blue?” he asked me in the mirror. “Or is anything going down that you know of?”

  “Don’t know if it’s related, but I got a call each of the last three nights,” I said. “A guy claimed that he knew who killed a woman in a case I was involved in before I quit the SFPD. A woman named Grace Sun.”

  We entered the Cave Rock tunnel, Ramos accelerating through the dark. I tensed involuntarily as we popped out of the southbound tunnel opening where the young man had fallen to his death a few weeks before.

  “Caller ID himself?” Ramos asked. “Or you get it off your phone?

  “No to both. The readout said ‘private.’”

  “He say who it was he claims killed the woman?” Ramos asked.

  “Yeah. Somebody named Thomas Watson.”

  Ramos swerved a little as he looked at me in the rearview mirror.

  “You know Watson?” I asked.

  Ramos looked at Bukowski. “Legal name of Tommy Watts, right?”

  Bukowski nodded.

  “Christ,” Ramos said. He glanced at me in the mirror, then looked back at the road as he came around a curve, heading toward Skyland. He accelerated. “That’s why Bukowski is up at the lake. We’ve been working with ATF on a case involving a company we think is running guns. One of the agents they had on it disappeared a few months ago. There’s an import corporation called TransPacificTronics that purchases Chinese stuff through a Malaysian intermediary. We don’t know yet how it works. It appears that the Malaysian purchase orders detail electronic goods, but in actuality represent automatic weapons. Somehow those weapons are brought across the Pacific, then transferred onto fishing boats and brought onshore into Mexican fishing villages. The guns are in small containers buried in the holds with the fish. These guys are bold and aren’t just targeting Mexico. We intercepted two shipments coming into California coastal towns as well. Morro Bay and Mendocino. We believe they’ve also used Tomales Bay and Crescent City. The fishermen plead ignorance.”

  “Like they have no idea how the weapons got in the holds of their boats,” I said.

  “Right. We don’t know the volume of weapons, and we don’t know where they are all going. They probably end up in drug cartels or at gun shows. We do know that a bunch of them have gone to a militia group called the Red Blood Patriots. We confiscated some of their weapons in a motel raid and matched the serial numbers to the Chinese factory that made the weapons – an outfit that Tommy Watts has worked with – but we haven’t been able to accurately trace the supply chain to this continent. Even so, we’re sure that Tommy Watts is involved with the guns that end up going to militia groups.”

  “Multiple militias?” I said.

  “We’re assuming several. Watson is a businessman. He’s perfected a money-making enterprise. Can’t imagine he would stop with just one customer.”

  I was surprised. Ramos had never before been forthcoming w
ith me. We had worked with each other in the past, but there’d always been a divide for us to bridge.

  “You think this import company is owned by Thomas Watson?” I asked.

  “No, no. This is a big outfit. Watson is a relative small-timer. TransPacificTronics’ ownership is a consortium in Singapore. The consortium is a partner in a private equity group. None of that information is publicly available. This stuff is like an onion. Companies that own other companies. The international aspect makes it harder to peel.”

  He paused as he steered through a curve. “Tommy Watts grew up as a poor cowboy in West Texas, went to the U.S. Naval Academy, served in the Navy for ten years, most of that time in the Far East. Then he quit and suddenly started living a better life. He has condos in San Diego and Mexico City in addition to his new place here in Tahoe. He’s associated with known smugglers and has dinner with guys who work for TransPacificTronics. He travels extensively in the Far East, especially mainland China. His cover is as a weapons consultant hiring out to the independent contractors who provide security and protection to international corporations. We think his consulting is bogus and that he is actually a critical part of TransPacificTronics’ supply chain, procuring the weapons where they are made. We have hearsay evidence linking him to a bid request for Chinese AK Forty-Sevens, but we can’t attach anything incriminating to him.”

  “You bring him in for questioning?”

  “We’ve knocked on his door several times, both when he was alone and when he had company, but he doesn’t answer. We followed him in his car. When he got out, we asked him if we could speak to him. He ignored us. We stopped by the Chips-n-Brew in Tahoe City when he was enjoying his afternoon libation. He and his two pals calmly stood up and left, never uttering a word.”