by Todd Borg
After a minute, Georges spoke. “This picture,” he said, gesturing at the photograph in my hand. “Do you know who it is?”
“A man named Nick O’Connell.”
“Do you know anything about him? Did he have a record of violent crime?”
“Not on the books,” I said. “But he had a reputation as a violent guy.”
Ford nodded. “That certainly would fit what I heard about his actions on this boat. I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of glad I wasn’t on the boat during the situation. I’m not the typical go-to guy when it comes to situations that require physical courage. But if I’d been here, I might have charged him. It’s strange to be offstage when the most significant thing that’s ever happened on the boat goes down. It makes me enraged.” Ford Georges had a sudden look of discovery on his face. “Maybe the hijacker did a little research and figured out that we wouldn’t be here on the day he hijacked the boat. Maybe that figured into his plans.”
“Maybe,” I said. I pulled out two of my cards and handed one to Teri and one to Ford. “Let me know if you think of anything? Or if you remember where you may have seen this man. Even if you’re not sure. Call right away.”
“Not to be too dense,” Ford said, “but if this guy was the hostage taker, then why such interest? When the bad guy dies, I’d think that law enforcement would be more relaxed about nailing down the details of what happened.”
“We probably are more relaxed,” I said. “But there are extenuating circumstances that make it critical we understand exactly what happened and why.”
Ford nodded. “I see. And you can’t tell me just what those circumstances are.”
“Someday,” I said. “Tell me, please, where do I find Captain Richards and the Chief Mate Allen Paul and the deckhands?”
“Let me get you their contact info.” Ford walked over to a file cabinet, opened it, found a file and made notes on a piece of paper. He handed it to me.
I thanked them both and said goodbye. Teri gave Spot one more aggressive hug, and we left.
TWENTY-THREE
“It’s our connections to each other that make life worth living,” Street said, a statement that seemed unusual coming from a bug scientist.
It had been a very long day. Finally, I was alone with my sweetheart, out on my deck post-barbecued shish kebobs, looking down at the lake and up at the moonless sky. The air was crispy cold with hints of the coming winter. Spot was sitting next to us, leaning against my leg.
“Certainly true regarding my connection to you,” I said. “What makes you think it?”
“I was out on my walk,” Street said. “There was a family coming toward me on the trail. The parents seemed distant from each other. But their two young girls ran ahead of them. The girls were very engaged with each other. They had these little animal drawings on their faces. ‘You’re a donkey,’ one girl shouted, pointing at the drawing on the other girl’s forehead. ‘You’re a pig,’ said the other girl. Then the girl with the pig reached up to the drawing. It turns out they were stick-on drawings. She peeled it off and put it on the other girl and shouted, ‘now, you’re the pig!’
“It was such a simple thing that gave them enormous pleasure. They ran through the woods, shrieking with delight.”
“A connection at its most basic,” I said. “It reminds me of talking to Anna. She told me about a school she wants to start. She calls it Reach For The Sky, a Kick-Butt Tech School For Girls.”
“Good idea,” Street said.
“The thing is, here’s this woman who has been through all this trauma. You’d expect her to have the dreariest of attitudes. But when she starts talking about what she could do for under-privileged girls, she lights up.”
“Making a basic connection,” Street said.
The stars above were astonishing in their brilliance and their number.
I stood behind Street, holding her to me. “Probably a lot of connections out there. I forget what you said about how many stars there are.”
“Astronomers don’t really know,” Street said. She leaned her head back against my chest. “But they know it’s such a large number that it’s beyond comprehension. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are billions of stars. And the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies.”
“And each of those uncountable stars is like our sun.”
“Sort of. They come in a wide range of types. And because they are different sizes and each has a different combination of gases, they emit different wavelengths of energy. Some are yellower like our sun. Some are bluer. Some shine brightest in the range that is outside of our vision. There are also a lot of unusual stars, neutron stars, white dwarfs, supernova, pulsars, and other strange characters.”
“Like a regular community of mostly regular people but with the standard assortment of oddballs and weirdos.”
“Yeah. All stars share the same basic characteristics in the sense that each star is a huge collection of gases – mostly hydrogen – that are squeezed so strongly by the star’s enormous gravity that the hydrogen atoms fuse together to make helium. And if there is enough size and resulting gravity, the helium atoms fuse together to make other, heavier, atoms. And in the process a little mass is lost in each fusion. The mass is converted into energy, enormous amounts of energy.”
“The thing Einstein figured out,” I said.
“Important parts of it, yes. His famous equation e equals mc squared describes how much energy you get from that conversion of mass into energy.”
“And that is what heats the universe.”
“That’s what heats the area around the star,” Street said.
“I’m missing something?”
“Just that while the stars are very hot, and they keep their local neighborhood nice and toasty, the universe in general is very cold and getting colder.”
“Why?”
“Entropy. It’s a basic principle of physics. Energy dissipates. It always flows away from areas of concentration. Plus, the universe is expanding really fast. Maybe faster than the speed of light. And another law of physics is that as matter expands it cools off.”
“If there’s only so much energy, and if it has to occupy a bigger space, the temperature will be cooler?” I said.
“Exactly.”
“So entropy basically means that hot things always tend to cool off,” I said.
“Well, pretty much, yeah.”
We were silent for a bit, staring up at the enormous sky, looking at millions of pinpricks of light that had been twinkling through the universe since the beginning of time.
Street broke the silence. “I think at some root level that people, like all life, tend to draw together as a kind of reaction against entropy. It’s as if our connections with each other, our communities, are temporary hotspots in the cooling universe.”
“There are,” I said, “some things that don’t cool off with time.” I traced a line from her temple, down her cheek to her neck.
“What would that be?”
“The heat you generate in me.” I ran my hands down the sides of her body. Despite her thick clothes, her curves were manifest.
Street turned in my arms and looked up at me. “Well,” she giggled, “you could be the exception to the second law of thermodynamics.”
“I’m not just a momentary hotspot? Entropy doesn’t apply to me?”
“Maybe we better check,” Street said. She took hold of the front of my shirt and pulled me into my cabin.
TWENTY-FOUR
In the morning, I headed south into town and turned up Kingsbury Grade. I cruised past the building where Street has her bug lab and turned into my office lot.
Spot and I got out of my Jeep and went inside.
The mail delivery service had stuffed some bills and junk through the slot, but the answering machine light was steady.
I tossed my jacket over the back of the desk chair, loaded the coffeemaker and turned it on. The details of the case were many, but they led to no conclus
ions. Maybe if I just did some serious detective thinking.
When the machine stopped gurgling, I poured coffee, sat down in my chair and leaned back to a cacophony of squeaking chair mechanics.
If there isn’t a rectangle of sunlight coming in the window, Spot normally lies down near the door. But today he walked over and sat next to me, turning his head so he was looking directly at my face from about 18 inches to my left. It’s his equivalent of a toy poodle standing on its hind legs in front of you, begging for attention or a treat or both.
“What?” I said.
Spot stared at me. His tail swished the floor. Then he flicked his ears and swung his head to the door. His ears were making their little adjustments. 12 noon, then 1:30, then the left one swiveled to 10 a.m. while the right one hovered at 2 o’clock.
He puffed air through his jowls.
Someone knocked twice.
“Door’s open, come in,” I said.
A woman walked in. She looked mid-thirties, tallish, and biggish.
Spot had already jumped to his feet and gone around to sniff her.
She pet him, moving with a pronounced lightness as if she were a sprite half her size. She wore a long navy wool coat and under it black boots with heels that gave her a certain elegance and made her biggishness seem comfortable. With her movement came a waft of air that smelled a bit like fresh-cut celery. She had large hands, and on her right little finger a gold ring. Her face was solid, with heavy features. Stage looks. She’d be handsome at a distance.
“Owen McKenna, I’m Anna Quinn.” She walked over, leaned over my desk, and reached out her hand and smiled.
I stood up and shook. “Quite a surprise,” I said.
Her smile glowed. Her teeth weren’t especially straight, and her gums were more substantial than she probably wanted. But she beamed. I’d never before had the sensation that I could feel the warmth in a person’s smile. But Anna’s smile was like sunshine.
“When I looked you up after you first contacted me,” she said, “I learned that you had a big dog.” She rubbed the sides of his head.
He wagged.
“Meet Spot,” I said.
“Oh, look, he has an ear stud,” she said. “Well, well, Spot,” she said as she touched the sparkling rhinestone, “don’t you have the bling to go with your size.”
He wagged harder.
“And what caused the hole in his ear?”
“A run-in with some avalanche-control dynamite.”
Anna looked at me, eyes wide. “He was in an explosion?!” She turned to Spot. “Poor baby! You should come home with me. I will be more protective of you!”
Spot pushed forward in her grip and turned so that he was sideways next to her. Then he leaned against her, still wagging. Anna had to put one foot out to brace herself.
“You probably think I’m out of line coming back to the real world,” Anna said, “but I can tell you that I haven’t felt this free in three years. It is really great!” She held her arms out at an angle and rotated 360 degrees like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.
I pointed to my single visitor’s chair. “Please.”
“Will this hound want to climb into my lap if I sit down?”
“Yes. But he knows it’s an unreasonable thought. He’ll probably be content just to put his head on you.”
“And get more white hair all over this coat,” she said as she looked down at the coat which was not so navy now as it had been a few moments before.
“Sorry. I have one of those roller things. We can roll it over you before you go.”
She sat, looked at Spot, patted her lap.
Spot immediately stepped forward and leaned against her some more. Anna hugged his head, rubbed around his ears.
“What motivated your appearance?” I asked.
“I finally got level-headed about all of this. It just seems so obvious that the man who tried to kill me was the hijacker. You, of course, are playing it super cautious, not wanting me to take any chances. But all of life is taking chances. And the more I thought about my doubts, the more they were like dandelion seeds in the wind. Every time I held them up to the slightest examination, they were too flimsy to stay put. I also decided that I was tired of being afraid. What’s the point of trying to be cautious and protect your life if it’s not a life you want to live?”
I nodded.
“You think I’m being careless,” she said.
“A bit. But I understand your reasoning. I’d probably do the same thing.”
“You’d come out of the woods?”
“Yeah.”
“But you think I shouldn’t have. Why?”
“I want to know what’s going on. When I can’t settle a case, when I don’t understand what’s happening, I go into a protective pattern. My instincts tell me to gather up the critical people and things and bring it all in out of the risky weather. Board up the entrance to the cave, stoke the fire and hold tight until I can figure out exactly what’s going on out there.”
Anna gave me a blank look. The pleasure that was on her face when she’d walked into my office was gone.
“Do you agree that the man who came after me was almost for certain the hijacker?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So you think that, almost for certain, I’m safe?”
“No.”
“Why?” Anna let go of Spot’s head and folded her arms across her chest. Indignant. Spot lifted his head to look at her. He sat his rear on the floor and hung his head, eyes droopy. Then he slowly slid his front paws out until his elbows touched the floor and he was lying down. Now Anna’s lap was high where it had been low. He lifted his chin up and set it across her thighs. As if she were unaware of what she was doing, Anna rested her hands on him, one on the back of his neck, one on his head. The hand on his head folded one of his ears down flat. It looked painful, but Spot was already taking the deep breaths of sleep.
“The reason I don’t think you’re safe is that the hijacker may have told others about you and the journal. Either the journal was valuable enough, or the information in it was valuable enough to kill you for it.”
“But I knew nothing about the journal.”
“Right, but he didn’t know that. And we know he didn’t work alone. He had an accomplice on the hijacking, a man he may have told about you and the journal.”
“The man he threw overboard.”
“Right. And he may have had other accomplices that are still alive.”
Anna looked frustrated. “So where are you going with this? Outline for me what kind of big risk you see out there in the dark,” she said.
“Just that if other people learned about you and the journal, they might be after you.”
“Look,” she said. “The hijacker killed his helper and took a hostage. Obviously, he was totally wacko. So even if he spun some story about me and the journal to others, what’s the chance that they would be that wacko, too?”
“I’ve learned that the hijacker had a relationship with a militia group,” I said. “These guys are not model citizens. You said yourself that he could belong to a gang where their gang identity is spinning knives.”
“That was my paranoia talking. The little voice in my head trying to justify why I’ve been hiding these last three years.”
“Where have you been living?”
She hesitated. “I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore, now that I’ve come out. Fresno. It’s a great, sleepy little city in the farming country near the south end of the Central Valley. No one goes there except truckers hauling produce. No one pays it any attention. It’s probably the most overlooked big city in California. Perfect for hiding.”
“Who knows you’re here in Tahoe?”
“Just my friends Lacy Hampton and Ben Merrill. It’s Lacy’s family vacation home where I’m staying. She’s a nurse in Fresno and comes up for two weeks every fall. She drove up a week ago. I just got here last night. And Ben teaches website design at the commu
nity college in Fresno. He occasionally consults me on the business side of web design. He’s a good guy. There’s nothing romantic between us. We just have coffee together. They are the only two people that I’ve totally confided in about my predicament.”
I nodded. I handed her a pen and paper. “Can you give me the address where you’re staying?”
Anna scribbled it out and handed it back.
I knew the area. “Up on what we call middle Kingsbury,” I said. “Not too far from here. What kind of car are you driving?”
“A Camry. White. Two thousand seven.” She gave Spot a pet. “You really think I might still be at risk.” She looked a little worried and a lot exasperated. I’d obviously destroyed her mood, her hope.
“Yeah. More now than before.”
“Why?”
“Because you came here. Anyone involved in this case would have reason to watch me, my cabin, my office. They could perceive me, rightly or wrongly, to be the biggest threat to their purposes. If they have been watching, then they may already have seen you.”
“But you’re in the business. Surely you would notice if someone was staking you out.”
I shook my head. “That only happens on TV. In the real world, it is very easy to take a bag lunch up into the forest.” I pointed out the window. “A person could spend an entire day up above that outcropping of boulders and I’d never know it. Or they could sit in a vehicle across the street in that lot. If they had tinted windows, I would never see them. Or they could be in any number of different businesses, watching out a window. There are a lot of windows with views of this office building.”
“Okay, I get it. What do you think I should do? Go back to Fresno?”
“That would be smart. Someone may already have seen you here. But if not, the less time you are in Tahoe, the better. I can follow you until we are far south, and I believe that no one is following. Grace taught you to be prepared,” I said. “I think leaving Tahoe would be the best way to be prepared.”
