Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  “We better get out of here,” I said in a low voice. I turned and walked out. Santiago joined me on the sidewalk a few seconds later.

  “Did you get a good look at the guy I just bumped into?”

  “Yeah. What the hell kind of stunt was that?”

  I walked down the sidewalk at a fast pace.

  “That was Watson,” I said as Santiago caught up with me.

  “The guy you fell against was Thomas Watson? But I don’t understand what the box… Christ, now I get it. That was a setup. This whole gig was about using that tape to get a forest of arm hair from the guy who may have killed the woman in San Francisco.”

  “Yup.” I held up the tape.

  He looked at the tape up close. “And you got a bunch of roots, too. Perfect for DNA sampling.”

  “Yup.”

  “So this wasn’t about talking to me at all.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  Santiago walked in silence for a moment. “Maybe I’m figuring this out,” he said. “You wanted an officer of the law to witness that the hair on the tape did, in fact, come from Thomas Watson. That makes it more likely that the evidence would be admissible in court.”

  “Yup.”

  “But you didn’t tell me about your plan in advance because then a jury could interpret it as my plan, which, as an officer of the law, would be construed as an illegal search and seizure without a search warrant.”

  I nodded.

  “However, you, as a private citizen, can acquire the DNA of a suspect without repercussions unless the suspect files assault charges against you, which is unlikely considering the method you devised.”

  “That’s my hope,” I said.

  He shook his head back and forth. “Wait ’til I tell the boys.”

  “You’ll take charge of the tape evidence?” I said. I handed it to him.

  He nodded. “I can send it to the lab. I’ll see if they can give us the rush treatment. If the DNA is a match, we’ll need an arrest warrant. But how can we get one? The crime was in San Francisco?”

  “True, but we – they – already have a John Doe DNA warrant,” I said.

  “Great,” Santiago said. “A John Doe DNA warrant doesn’t identify a suspect by name but by DNA profile. And it gives any law enforcement officer the authority to arrest the suspect if his DNA matches.” He held up the tape with Watson’s arm hair. “So if this does the job, I can bring him in myself.” He grinned. “I’m thinking I’ll talk to the lieutenant and see what we’ve got on the schedule. Maybe we can spare a couple of deputies, have them watch Watson in case he realizes what happened and decides to run. We don’t have the budget to follow him far, but we could at least get a sense of where he’s going and alert our colleagues down the highway.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “Maybe next time we really can get a bite, huh? They have good fish.”

  “Count on it,” I said.

  EIGHT

  When I got back to my office on the far side of the lake, I fired up the coffee maker while I sorted mail. Spot focused on his office olfactory inspection. I poured coffee. At first, Spot was interested in the walls. Then he moved to the side of my desk.

  “You just sniffed all of that two days ago,” I said. “No one’s been in here since then. There can’t be that many new smells.”

  Spot looked at me and wagged. In typical Great Dane style, his tail wipered so far to the side that it came over the edge of my desk, endangering my tenuous organization of office detritus. I moved my stapler, my tape dispenser, and my pen mug that Diamond had given me in a misplaced effort to get me to share his new enthusiasm for French philosophers. The mug had a picture of a golfer who’s just sliced his ball into a pond. The golfer’s shirt said, ‘Sartre,’ and next to the pond it said, ‘An Existential Lie.’ Diamond explained that it was a triple entendre, but I didn’t really get it, and his disappointment in my ignorance was obvious. But it held a lot of pens.

  I dialed Agent Ramos. I was pulling an old croissant out of my mini-fridge when he answered. I set the croissant on the desk.

  “McKenna calling,” I said. Spot stared at the croissant.

  “Ah,” Ramos said. “I talked to an informant who’s gotten close to TransPacificTronics. He’s helped us in the past. He said that Watson currently stays at the Marriot when he’s in San Francisco, but that a few years ago – when Grace Sun was murdered – he used to stay in one of the suites at the Club Pacific Crest Hotel. So I called the Club Pacific and squeezed the reception desk manager.”

  “Squeezed?” I said.

  “My term,” Ramos said. “Some people find that dealing with FBI agents is intimidating. Like dealing with cops, only more so. And sometimes that reaction encourages people to reveal information they need not. Anyway, I found out that Watson was in San Francisco and stayed at the Club Pacific the day the Sun woman was murdered. It’s not much, but it’s something.”

  Spot took a half-step forward, his head over the edge of the desk, in striking distance of the croissant. His nostrils flexed. I pulled the croissant to safety.

  “Be interesting if we could get a warrant to pull his credit card records,” I said. “Maybe Sun and Watson ate at the same cafés in North Beach or hung out at the same bars on the wharf.”

  “I revisited our file on Watson,” Ramos said. “But I didn’t see anything suggestive in light of these recent events.”

  I took a bite of the croissant. It was enough past stale that petrified rock was only a week off. Spot studied me. He ran his giant tongue down one jowl and back up the other.

  Ramos said, “Watson has made some enemies. But none seem like good matches for the guy who fell into the lake. Wrong area, wrong MO, wrong physical type. I’m looking for any guys who might have been burned badly enough by Watson to want to do something as crazy as taking Street hostage.”

  Spot’s eyes were laser beams. I looked at the hard croissant, but I couldn’t see any little red dots of light on it. I tossed it in a behind-the-back-and-over-the-head pop-up. Spot was ready, having played my brand of ball before. He did the little bounce off his front paws, stood on his hind legs, his head arcing toward the ceiling, and caught the pastry like Willie Mays leaping up at the outfield fence. He didn’t chew that I could see, just snapped two or three times and swallowed. Then he gave me an expectant look.

  “One croissant is the maximum recommended serving,” I said.

  “Pardon me,” Ramos said in my ear.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Spot and I were discussing doggie nutrition.”

  Ramos paused. “I’ve been upstaged by dog food,” he said, no humor in his voice.

  “So,” I said, “you’ve got Watson’s proximity to Grace Sun the day she was murdered. That’s good.”

  “It’s still not probable cause.”

  “That’s the reason I called,” I said. “We may not need it.” I told him about getting Watson’s arm hair on the packing tape.

  Ramos was silent for a moment. Eventually he said, “Sounds like you engineered a good maneuver. It might just hold up in court.” It was a compliment of sorts, another unusual experience for me, coming from Ramos.

  “Do you have the tape with the hair?” Ramos asked.

  “Santiago has it. Placer County will have it analyzed.”

  “If Watson’s DNA matches what your San Francisco boys pulled out from under Grace Sun’s fingernails, and we get a murder conviction, that’ll take Watson out of the smuggling business without us having to nail him on it.”

  “We’ll know in a day or three,” I said.

  Shortly after we hung up, Street walked in. She was wearing heavy jeans and a long-sleeved, navy flannel shirt buttoned all the way to the collar. Over the shirt was a red fleece vest. I could see thick wool socks above the rims of her running shoes. Her hair flowed out from under a red, wool baseball cap, the kind designed to keep hunters warm in a Minnesota November. She was dressed as if the weather were 30 degrees colder than the sunny, Tahoe
fall, a lingering reaction to her imagined plunge to the depths of the freezing lake.

  Spot lifted his head toward Street’s face, his nose just two inches shy of her chin. He wagged as if it had been a few weeks rather than a few hours since we’d seen her.

  “Go okay?” I said as Street rubbed his head and ears.

  “Yes. The statement was easy. I just told Sergeant Bains what happened, all of which everyone involved already knew. The artist was trickier to work with. I’m sure that she’s really very good, but every time I’d say something and she’d try something, it just didn’t come out looking like anything. At one point she’d drawn a very good portrait of a gorilla with a bushy beard, and I started laughing. I know she thought it was rude of me, but I just couldn’t help it. In the end, we pretty much realized that the only part of this guy’s face that I really saw was when he pulled off his sunglasses for that one moment. I feel like I might recognize his blue eyes if I saw them again. But he was so close to me when he took off his glasses that I couldn’t really describe his face. Add to that my stress and I’m afraid I was really no help to the artist.”

  “Never know,” I said.

  Street told me she wanted to hear about my day, but had to get over to her lab to make a phone call. She gave me a kiss, pet Spot, and left.

  I told her I’d stop by later.

  I dialed my old work number I still had memorized from years before. I asked to be put through to Joe Breeze, the cop who was working homicide with me when Grace Sun was killed. Three transfers later, he said hello.

  “Owen McKenna calling,” I said.

  “Like a ghost in my ear,” he said. “Tall guy, right?”

  “Memory like a bear trap,” I said.

  “Sure, now it’s coming back to me. We did everything but sleep together for what, five years? I can even picture your face if I try hard. But I still don’t forgive you that the ladies always spoke to you instead of me when we did our song and dance. I tell myself it’s just the tall boy thing. Women are always impressed by size. If we were the same height, I’da probably had it all over you.”

  “No doubt.”

  “What’s up?” Breeze asked.

  “You remember the Grace Sun case? Had a boat hijacker up here at the lake. Claimed that Grace’s murderer was a guy named Thomas Watson.”

  “Heard about the hijacking. But y’all obviously did a good job keeping the lid on the connection to Grace’s murder, because I didn’t know about that. Who’s Watson?”

  I gave Joe the gist of what had happened and how I’d sampled Watson’s DNA.

  “We’ll know in a couple of days if the DNA matches what was under Grace’s fingernails,” I said.

  “Good work, McKenna. Be sweet if we could close Grace’s case. But I wonder what motivated the hostage taker. Kinda out there, him going to all that trouble.”

  “Why I called. Remember the journal that Grace had inside her shirt when we found the body?”

  “Yeah,” Breeze said. “Written in Chinese. And it was water stained. Blurred the writing all to hell.”

  “Most of it, anyway. I’d like to take another look at it.”

  “You think something in it would point to Watson?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” I said.

  “If this Watson’s DNA matches what Grace had under her nails, what difference would it make? We could close the case.”

  “True,” I said. “But it still wouldn’t explain why the hostage taker went to all the trouble.”

  “You think the journal will point to the hijacker?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “I remember during Grace’s case, we had that professor try to translate the journal. He couldn’t get much out of the blurry characters. But he did figure out that the journal was probably a hundred years old or more. So it’s unlikely that anything in it is going to connect to this situation. Nevertheless, I’d like to take another look at it. Can’t hurt, right? It’s still with the other evidence, right?”

  “No doubt. You want to come down to The City and take a look?”

  “I thought you could FedEx it to me,” I said.

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Why not? I was the detective on the case. I have a valid reason for looking at the journal.”

  “Technically, you’re not even a law enforcement officer anymore,” Breeze said.

  “This is a compelling exception. I’m a consulting expert. I may find something that leads to the killer.”

  “It would break the chain of custody,” Breeze said.

  “No it wouldn’t. The Evidence Custodian has you sign for it. You document when and where you put it in FedEx’s hands. I sign for it on my end. I document that I never let it out of my sight. Then I send it back to you.”

  Breeze blew air into the phone. “No matter what you say, sending the journal to you would be irregular. If you compromise our case and we lose a conviction, my career would be on the line.”

  “I thought you were nearing retirement, anyway.”

  “Funny guy. Chrissakes, McKenna. It’s like you never left. Next thing, you’re gonna be telling me all over again about the time you helped catch the Propane Killer.”

  Breeze was referring to the case where he and I and two other cops went into an apartment building where a suspected arsonist-murderer hung out with his drug-shooting buddies. When we heard a child screaming, we made a no-knock entry into an apartment and came upon a man sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl. We arrested the man, and the crime scene technicians collected irrefutable evidence. Later, when we confirmed to our own satisfaction that the molester and the arsonist-murderer were the same person, we didn’t have a strong enough case to prosecute the man for murder. I had an idea that compromised the sex evidence and destroyed the state’s sexual assault case. But it helped us find sufficient evidence to convict the same man of murder and put him on Death Row. Afterward, the DA gave me a wink-and-a-nod reprimand for my transgressions.

  “This could be a parallel situation,” I said. “Information in that journal could lead me to different, better evidence.”

  Breeze was silent for a bit. “Give me your shipping address,” he said.

  I recited the number.

  “How you gonna read the journal, anyway?” Breeze said. His voice radiated doubt. “That Berkeley professor couldn’t even help us.”

  “Met an ER doctor when I moved up to Tahoe. He’s fluent in Mandarin. I’ll see if he can help.”

  Breeze grunted, then hung up.

  NINE

  I’d just gotten to my office the next morning when Sergeant Santiago called me on my cell.

  “Got the lab report. They matched Thomas Watson’s DNA with the DNA you collected from under Grace Sun’s fingernails three years ago,” he said.

  “You pick Watson up?”

  “Byron was on the Watson rotation. He had tailed Watson to the supermarket. Forsythe met Byron in the parking lot. They arrested Watson in the produce aisle while his bodyguard was at the ice cream cooler. Watson was cool. Went without a fuss. Which we appreciated when we found his concealed carry.”

  “Heavy equipment?”

  “Forty cal Browning in a concealment T-shirt.”

  “Is he in the Truckee jail?” I asked.

  “Until we transfer him to San Francisco,” Santiago said.

  “I’d like to talk to him when it’s convenient,” I said.

  “Sure you would. But the guy hasn’t said one word. Not even to Byron and Forsythe.”

  “Never seen that before,” I said.

  “No kidding. It’s like he went to law school himself.”

  “He ask to call his lawyer, yet?”

  “Nope. That surprised me. Most dirtballs aren’t lawyered up, but a guy like this seems like he’d be pretty tight with a lawyer somewhere. But maybe he doesn’t have one. “

  “You’re cops. And he’s in your jail. That would make some people reticent. But maybe he’ll talk to me. I’m a civilian. Practica
lly harmless.”

  “How did I forget that,” Santiago said. “All you did was rip out his hair, and now he’s a candidate for the big injection at San Quentin. You’re like his best bud. Anyway, you know the routine. The lead inspector at SFPD will be the first to talk to Watson. Anyone else would need explicit permission from the lead inspector to talk to Watson.”

  “Right,” I said. “But who says we have to follow routine? Besides, I would just be a guy who stops by the jail, maybe to inspect the plumbing or something. I could say a few words to Watson while the rest of you are having coffee.”

  Santiago was silent for a long moment.

  “We do have a faucet that keeps dripping,” he finally said.

  “Be there in an hour,” I said.

  The Truckee jail was a low-profile building with little signage. Most locals probably didn’t know where it was or even that it existed. I parked on the street and left Spot in the Jeep. He had his head out the back window and made a bark that morphed into a groan as I walked away. I turned around, held my finger up to my lips, then shook it at him. He barked again. Like a windshield wiper, his tail wag was set on intermittent, waiting to see if the conditions would get more exciting before it shifted to normal speed.

  I called out, “That’s a zero on the sign language obedience scale.”

  He barked again. No respect.

  “Any change in the patient?” I asked Santiago when he met me just outside of the front door.

  “Nope. Like a monk, he’s so quiet. And he sits in the lotus position. What’s that called when they do the moaning thing?”

  “I don’t know. Tibetan absolutions? Gregorian chants?”

  “Yeah, that. I keep expecting him to start chanting.”

  “When’s the transfer?”

  “The San Francisco boys are coming for him tomorrow.”

  Santiago took me into the jail. A uniformed Nevada County Sheriff’s deputy who looked about twenty-one was on duty at the door. Another was at the desk.

  “Two cops on guard,” I said to Santiago.