Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14)

by Todd Borg

  “Yes. Now maybe it was just words. Like, you know, when a person is really angry.”

  “Did he say any details about what he might do to make me pay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did he say, ‘I’m going to go to McKenna’s house and shoot him?’ Or ‘poison his dog?’ Like that?”

  Rita was shaking her head vigorously. “No. It was more general. Like you, um, messed with him, so he was going to mess with you. But he didn’t use the word ‘mess.’”

  “Has Mr. Timmens hired a replacement yet?”

  “No. It’s just me for the time being. I’m to answer the phones, help keep the schedule.”

  I said, “I have a question for you. The other day I saw you at the window of a silver car talking to a man named Kang. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Oh, no. He was a potential customer. He wanted to know about our services. I never knew his name. Did you say Kang?”

  “Yes. You don’t know him personally?”

  “No. Of course not.” Rita seemed affronted by the idea.

  “Don’t potential customers speak to Mr. Timmens to learn about your services?”

  “Yes. The man said he did that. He said that Mr. Timmens suggested he come here to see our facility. I was coming back from lunch just as the man pulled up at the back parking lot. He rolled down his window and said he had talked to Mr. Timmens and he was doing some initial research on armored truck services for the company he worked for.”

  I held up my finger. “Let’s just check on that.” I got out my phone.

  Rita looked worried.

  “Don’t worry. You’ve done nothing improper.” I dialed. While it rang, I said to Rita, “Did the man speak good English?”

  “Sure. Normal. Just like us.”

  I got Timmens on the phone, told him who was calling, and said, “I’m at your Sparks facility talking to Rita, and a question came up. Have you had any contact with a man named Kang? It’s possible that he used a different name. If he visited you in person, he’s Asian American and small in stature, although very strong. ”

  “No, nothing like that. Why?” he said in my ear.

  “He’s loosely connected to the Montrop murder case in Incline, and I saw him in his car near your Sparks facility. I wondered if he had tried to get information out of you.”

  “No. But Rita’s very observant. Maybe she’s seen something. Oh, and McKenna, Bosworth is no longer with us.”

  “Got it,” I said. I told Timmens I’d keep in touch, and we hung up.

  I turned back to Rita. “Timmens told me to ask you. So you can feel comfortable saying anything. What were Kang’s questions?”

  “He said he was doing quality control and security research on armored carrier firms because his company was thinking of switching providers. He wanted to know what personnel he should interview to learn how our schedules and deliveries and priorities were set. He also wanted to interview some of our guards and drivers.”

  “Did you give him names?”

  “Well, sure. Mr. Bosworth. And Matt and Jim. Was that not the right thing to do?” Rita looked very concerned.

  “No, that’s fine. Was there anything else that Kang wanted to know?”

  “No. He wrote down the names I gave him. Then he saw someone drive by where we were talking, and he got real tense. He said he had to go, and he sped off.”

  “Where did you go after that?”

  “Nowhere. I just went in the back door here and got back to work.”

  “If you see him again, give me a call, okay?” I set my card on her desk.

  “Sure.”

  “One more question,” I said.

  Her worried look came back.

  “I witnessed stress between Bosworth and Timmens,” I said.

  Rita made the slightest of nods.

  “There is a question about whether or not Bosworth might have been involved in the robbery in some way.” I didn’t see any need to tell her that the question was mine. If she inferred from my statement that the question was Timmens’, that might make her feel more comfortable in revealing what she thought.

  “Are you asking me if I thought Mr. Bosworth was, you know, doing bad things behind Mr. Timmens’s back?”

  “Yeah.”

  She thought about it for a long time. “I never saw, you know, evidence of wrongdoing. But Mr. Bosworth had a bad attitude. I sometimes wondered about that. Like, if his attitude would make it easier for him to do bad things. When Mr. Timmens fired him, Bosworth just stomped out of here. He tried to slam the door, but it’s got one of those dampers that won’t let you do that. So that just made him madder.”

  “Didn’t he take his things from his desk or wherever he had stuff?”

  “Not at first. He forgot to clear out his coat locker, so he came back later to get that stuff.”

  “He liked it freezing in here. Why would he keep a coat?”

  “Not a coat, but his skates and stuff.”

  “He’s a skater?”

  Rita nodded. “He belongs to a hockey club. They meet at a rink someplace near here, two mornings a week. I always thought he was, you know, too big to be a hockey player. Those guys have to move really fast.”

  “Do you know anything about the group he plays with? The other players? Or where they meet?”

  She shook her head. “No, he never mentioned anything more about it. Just that he played two mornings a week.”

  “Thanks, Rita. I appreciate your help.”

  She nodded.

  I turned to leave. Before I walked out the door, I turned back and said, “I’m glad for you that you no longer have to work in a freezer.”

  Rita gave me a big grin and a little wave.

  When I got out to the Jeep, I dialed Timmens again. After his secretary put me through, I said, “I wanted to tell you that I found another one of the robbers, a man who went to high school with the other two. He was killed over on the West Shore, the same way they were.”

  “Really? Wow. You’re doing a great job, McKenna. I’m not sorry to hear the man died. So you’ve got one more robber left. He’s probably the one who killed the others, right? That would make him an especially nasty piece of work. Be careful, McKenna.”

  “I will.”

  We hung up.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  I stopped at Street’s condo on my way home from Sparks. I knocked. I heard Blondie make a little bark from inside. As Street opened her door, I could see that she was shaky. Her voice wavered. She seemed unsteady on her feet.

  Spot normally greets her with enthusiasm. This time he stopped and looked at Street, his brow furrowed.

  I put my hand on her arm. “You got news about your father.”

  She nodded. Her skin was pale. She looked like she might be sick. “Aunt May called. They released him this morning.”

  “I’m so sorry. Did your aunt have any information about where he was going? The name of the place where he’ll stay?”

  “She said he’s going to a halfway house in St. Louis called Liberty Pathways. I’m supposed to get an email tomorrow with the contact info for his parole officer.”

  “That’s good. Anytime you’re uncomfortable, you can contact that officer and reassure yourself that everything is okay.”

  Street nodded.

  “You want to sit in front of the fire?”

  She nodded again.

  I shut the door behind me, then steered her over to her couch. I turned the dial on the fireplace thermostat control, and warm flames grew behind the fake logs.

  “Wine?” I said.

  She nodded.

  Street’s wine rack had three bottles in the lower row. All had dust on them. I pulled one out. Found the corkscrew. Pulled out the glasses. Poured.

  I handed one to Street as I sat next to her on the couch. Spot and Blondie had already taken up strategic positions in front of the fire, he, with his short hair, close to the flames, and she, with her thick fur, off to the side.

&n
bsp; The firelight reflected in Street’s eyes. She looked weary and tired and fearful. I’d been paying attention to another weary, tired, fearful woman. I worried that I’d missed my primary focus.

  “I want to help, but I would first need to know your desires,” I said.

  “Aunt May will be in contact with his probation officer. Tom Casey has to meet with the officer once a week, and the officer told Aunt May that he will be making unannounced visits to the halfway house.”

  I saw that Street’s eyes were directed at the fire, even though I knew that she was seeing something else.

  “I keep thinking about our justice system,” she said. “It can’t guarantee rehabilitation. It can’t guarantee our safety. All it can do is sometimes find a perpetrator and sometimes take him off the streets and sometimes give us a respite from our fears.”

  “The cliché that there is no justice probably comes from that ‘sometimes’ aspect. Nothing is certain except for the sometimes. And sometimes we let the wrong guy out. But when it happens, we can prepare for it.”

  “How?” Street said, her voice tiny and vulnerable.

  “There are several ways. Unfortunately, they all require continual focus on the problem, an ongoing awareness of threat, a plan for response, and regular practice of the moves.”

  “That’s what I hate. If I want to prepare, I lose the innocence of free time. I can no longer just let a day unfold. Instead, I have to be on constant guard. Each day, I have to rehearse what to do if the enemy launches an attack. To be prepared, I have to assume that the worst can happen at any time. That’s not living free. That’s living under siege.”

  I made a small nod.

  Street drank wine.

  “I don’t want you to have to live like that,” I said. “But I want you safe. I’ll take my cues from you. Once you decide how you want to proceed, I’m in one hundred percent.”

  “Give me an example,” Street said.

  “If you decide to continue life as normal, with no changes unless you get a change of information, then I make no changes either, except to possibly be more vigilant. If on the other hand, you want to put up full security and make it very hard for Tom Casey to get to you, or to send someone else to get to you in his place, then I’ll turn your home into a bunker, your activities into an inscrutable maze, and I’ll turn you into a warrior that no one could attack without a potentially deadly response. If you choose a middle-ground approach, then we’ll work out a combination plan, alarm at your condo and lab, increased awareness, general security measures, escape routes, some defensive moves.”

  Street didn’t respond. We drank wine and watched the fire.

  “The girl named Evan,” she finally said. “She hasn’t found justice, either.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Men assaulted her and went free.”

  “I believe so,” I said.

  “And she’s got the responsibility of caring for her sister. But she has to do it with very little money.”

  “Yeah.”

  Street drank more wine. “If her situation were to get critical, I’d want you to call me.”

  “Because you could help me help her?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And that would maybe help you,” I said.

  “It could.”

  I drank the last of my wine. “Do you want me to stay here with you tonight?”

  Street shook her head. “No. I need to think through this situation alone.”

  “You want His Largeness for protection?”

  “No. You two go. I’ll be okay.”

  So Spot and I left.

  Thinking about Street’s evil father made me deeply sad for Street and intensely mad at Tom Casey.

  Maybe it was that building anger that fueled me when I parked at my cabin, got out, shut the driver’s door, and, before I could turn to let Spot out of the back, saw the ghostly hockey mask charging toward me from the dark forest.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  The thick growth of trees to the side of my cabin form a heavy canopy, ensuring the darkest of cover even when the moon is bright. But the mask, with its angry dark slots, made a face as evil as one could imagine on a dark mountainside.

  I had no weapon to defend myself from attack. From the speed of the rushing apparition, I instinctively knew that if I turned around to reach for the rear door handle, I would be dead before I could let Spot out. Instead, I dove to the side, my hands out as I slid to a stop on the dirt.

  There was a heavy thud in the dirt near my head, a vicious strike of some kind of stick. It was clear that the attacker intended to kill me.

  I scrambled up onto hands and knees and leaped back and to the side, launching myself toward my attacker. I could not see anything but the grotesque mask floating in the dark, but I sensed the movement of another swing of the stick. I raised my arms to protect my head as I sprinted into the attack. His invisible dark stick hit my outstretched fingers, bending them back as it crashed through and struck my shoulder.

  My instinct was to spin away from the pain. Instead, I leaped toward it, catching the stick across my abdomen as I went down to the ground. The attacker tried to jerk the stick out from under me. I felt the motion and got a hand on the stick handle, a hard rectangular shape like a hockey stick. I held on and kicked my foot out into the darkness.

  Maybe I hit his knee. He grunted and went down. I swung out with the stick, putting serious effort into it. The stick hit a tree, a blow that shattered the stick into multiple pieces.

  I kept hold of the short piece in my hand and leaped through the dark toward the glowing mask. The mask disappeared, then reappeared to my right. I charged. His fist came from my left. The blow to my ribs was like that from a battering ram. As I went down, I realized that he’d taken the mask off and held it out to his side for misdirection.

  I rolled over twice, hitting a tree trunk. Got up, still holding the broken end of the stick.

  The mask was floating in the darkness, taunting me. I knew it wasn’t on his head, but I couldn’t tell if he was holding it out with his left hand or right hand.

  I threw the piece of stick to the ground far to his side. He spun at the sound. From the motion of the mask, I guessed his location. I took two running steps and dove through the air, turning to make a horizontal blocking motion, my legs and arms stretched out for maximum reach.

  My right upper arm and back caught his shin bones, made him trip and fall over me. He went down with a loud exhalation.

  I jumped up, saw the mask on the ground, and made my best guess as to his position in the dark.

  My leap was foolish, driven by rage. I launched into the air, arcing down to land on my knees rather than feet, a move that might have hobbled me for the rest of my life if I’d been wrong about his position. But my knees never struck the rocks and logs of the forest floor. One hit his sternum, the other his throat.

  My assailant made a gagging, choking sound and then stopped moving.

  I pushed myself up, pulled out my phone, and pushed the button to turn on its light.

  In the dim glow of phone light, I could see Randy Bosworth, the former manager at Reno Armored, staring up at the night sky, his lifeless eyes reflecting the moonlight.

  Two hours later, Diamond came into my cabin. As he opened the door, I could see the harsh flood lights they’d set up in the woods. “They’re hauling the body away” he said as he pet Spot. “The medical examiner said that a knee drop to the chest and neck can kill a man in several ways. But based on your report of nearly instant death, he’s guessing the blow ruptured the man’s aorta.”

  I nodded.

  Diamond continued. “Quite the mess out there. Pieces of hockey stick strewn about. Fresh-broken branches. Forest duff scraped off the dirt like someone was doing some random digging with a hoe.”

  I nodded again.

  “And that boy is one big piece of beef. Armed with a hockey stick and protected with a hockey mask. Yet you took him down without any
help from your hound.” Diamond said it like a question.

  “I’d been down at Street’s. She told me that the parole board just released her father. That news had me already upset. So when Bosworth attacked, I got pretty mad.”

  Diamond said, “Do you think that Bosworth is the fourth robber? Is he the guy who killed the other three?”

  “I doubt it. If he were, I would have thought he’d come after me with a woomera or tennis racket and a ski pole spear. I think this was him blaming me for losing his job.”

  “So we’ve still got a killer out there?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Maybe two. The fourth robber killing his comrades and Jonas Montrop’s kidnapper killing David Montrop.”

  After a bit, I said, “Beer or coffee?”

  “I’m working. Coffee.”

  I filled the drip pot and turned it on. When it finished, I poured two mugs.

  “You want me to call Street and tell her what happened?” Diamond said.

  “No. I’ll do it after I’m calm.”

  As we drank coffee, Diamond asked questions about both cases, his focus on any possible link between the two.

  He said, “The main connection between Montrop’s murder and the truck robbers is the girl, right? Evan Rosen?”

  “Yeah. She worked for Montrop and went to school with the robbers.”

  “And she had animosity for all of them,” Diamond said.

  “Maybe a little for Montrop, but definitely a lot for the robbers. They assaulted her.”

  “So she is the most logical suspect,” he said.

  “Most logical person to frame, too.”

  “Why do you think she didn’t do it?”

  “Lots of little reasons,” I said. “But mostly, my gut instinct.”

  Diamond nodded. “You got a suspect for framing her?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The one other person connected to both cases. Flynn. Mystery man from Australia. He knew Montrop’s son Jonas from way back. There may have been many reasons why Flynn didn’t like Montrop. Maybe he didn’t like that Montrop referred to where he lived as ‘the projects’ in Incline Village. Flynn was also unhappy that Jonas sold him a leaky boat. And Flynn hung out with Evan and the robbers at Wilson High School. The third robber’s body, Gavin Pellman, was found dead in Flynn’s bed. At least, I believe it was Flynn’s bed.”