Tahoe Heat Read online

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE HEAT

  “WILL KEEP READERS TURNING THE PAGES AS OWEN RACES TO CATCH A VICIOUS KILLER...”

  - Booklist

  “A RIVETING THRILLER... HARD TO PUT DOWN”

  - Midwest Book Review

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE NIGHT

  “BORG HAS WRITTEN ANOTHER WHITE-KNUCKLE THRILLER...A sure bet for mystery buffs waiting for the next Robert B. Parker and Lee Child novels”

  - Library Journal

  “AN ACTION-PACKED THRILLER WITH A NICE-GUY HERO, AN EVEN NICER DOG...”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE AVALANCHE

  “BORG IS A SUPERB STORYTELLER...A MASTER OF THE GENRE”

  - Midwest Book Review

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE SILENCE

  WINNER BEN FRANKLIN AWARD

  BEST MYSTERY OF THE YEAR!

  ONE OF THE FIVE BEST MYSTERIES OF THE YEAR!

  - Library Journal

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE KILLSHOT

  “A WONDERFUL BOOK...FASCINATING CHARACTERS, HARD-HITTING ACTION”

  Mystery News

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE ICE GRAVE

  “BAFFLING CLUES... CONSISTENTLY ENTERTAINS”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  “A CLEVER PLOT... RECOMMEND THIS MYSTERY”

  - Booklist

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE BLOWUP

  “RIVETING... A MUST READ FOR MYSTERY FANS!”

  - Addison, Illinois Public Library

  PRAISE FOR TAHOE DEATHFALL

  “THRILLING, EXTENDED RESCUE/CHASE”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  “HIGHLY LIKABLE CHARACTERS”

  - San Jose Mercury News

  TAHOE HEAT

  By

  Todd Borg

  Published by Thriller Press at Smashwords

  Copyright 2010 Todd Borg

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Thriller Press, a division of WRST, Inc. www.thrillerpress.com

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real locales, establishments, organizations or events are intended only to give the fiction a sense of verisimilitude. All other names, places, characters and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from Thriller Press, P.O. Box 551110, South Lake Tahoe, CA 96155.

  Library of Congress Card Number: 2010921173

  ISBN: 978-1-931296-18-2

  Cover design by Keith Carlson.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  TAHOE HEAT

  PROLOGUE

  “Don’t do it, Eli!” Sydney shouted from below the cliff. “This is a sacred Washoe Indian site. Climbers are no longer allowed here. You’ll bury yourself in bad Karma.”

  She stared up at her wild, skinny, genius boyfriend on the vertical wall of Cave Rock, the 100-foot prominence that rose from the East Shore of Lake Tahoe. They had parked at the State Park lot to meet a friend, got there early, and Eli suddenly decided to try a route. He put on his climbing shoes, chalked his fingers, and started up the rock.

  “It’s not worth the rush,” she yelled.

  Elijah Nathan didn’t respond to Sydney, didn’t even fully hear her warning, so focused was he on the crack that zig-zagged up the craggy face over the highway where the southbound lanes of Highway 50 emerged from the Cave Rock tunnel. If he could follow the fracture line to the top, it would absolutely be worth the risk.

  Elijah was free climbing without a belay rope. No climbing nuts or cams or chocks, no carabiners to hold a rope, nothing to anchor him if his sweaty, chalked fingertips should slip.

  The whole point of free climbing was the rush.

  He reached out his right hand, feeling, searching, found a grip, shifted his right foot to a tiny edge, moved his body up and to the side.

  “Eli, you’re freaking crazy, you know that?!” Sydney shouted from below. “You’re moving out of my sight line. I couldn’t advise you even if you wanted another set of eyes.”

  Elijah didn’t hear her. Listening to others was not one of his skills. CalBioTechnica, Inc., the company that he and his two partners founded, wouldn’t even exist if he had listened to the dozen experts who said you couldn’t compete with pharmaceutical giants. The recombinant DNA concepts that his buddy invented were new, and the formulas for a new class of biological drugs were unusual. Only Eli’s mentor, Old Man Martin, at Stanford’s Business School understood.

  “You got a vision, kid,” the 44-year-old geezer had said to the student working on his post-doctoral project. “Go for it. Don’t let their expertise get in your way. Only way to prove they’re wrong is to prove they’re wrong.”

  So Elijah Nathan took his friend’s concepts and designed a company around them. He wrote the business plan, structured a new kind of manufacturing model, and enticed several bio-tech equipment makers into donating CalBioTechnica’s first lab in return for future marketing possibilities. Then Eli recruited math wizard Jeanie Samples to come onboard as VP of Finance, and she pulled together their initial financing as if spinning gold out of burlap.

  Now, five years later, CBT had lucrative development contracts with big pharma, and a steady revenue stream from manufacturing for the name-brand companies. The first drugs to be marketed under the CalBioTechnica name were in the home stretch for FDA approval. Annual sales were approaching $100 million, and when the FDA approvals came through, CBT’s sales would explode.

  Elijah knew the numbers better than his accountants. A little less than a hundred million at a 70% gross margin, less fixed expenses, variable expenses, salaries for 197 employees, and other miscellaneous costs still added up to real money. And this was just the beginning. After their scorching five-year sales arc into the big leagues, Elijah had decided that the way to build a monster money-maker was to listen very carefully to expert advice and then run as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

  The result was a thrill. But still nothing like the rush of free climbing.

  Elijah made another, smaller, crab shift up and to the left, his chalk bag swinging from his belt. Forty feet below him, a pickup came out of the tunnel at high speed, followed by two cars, bumper-to-bumper, like in a NASCAR race. Elijah didn’t even notice. He wasn’t aware of the sun broiling his head. He didn’t notice the vast blue of Lake Tahoe shimmering under a strong August breeze. The world had shrunk down to a wall of rock and a network of fracture lines. Following them up and across the rock without placing any safety was beyond a thrill. It was better than skiing off of a cornice, better than riding the curl of a wave. Better than sex.

  The air flowing into his lungs felt mentholated, the product, he knew from past experience, of endorphins flooding his brain.

  He shifted farther to the right, out of Sydney’s range of vision. Two more feet and he’d be able to reach a vertical crack that rose up toward the heavens.

  Four more cars raced by underfoot, one after another.

  Compared to the surrounding mountains, the little hump of cave-riddled rock didn’t look like much, but it had been a stubborn obstacle to all of the early Tahoe travelers who wanted to trek north or south along the East Shore. With typical disdain for sacred Native American places of worship, the white men decided that the only solution to Cave
Rock’s implacable obstruction to easy travel was to dynamite two tunnels through it. They blasted two lanes each for both the northbound and southbound sides of Highway 50.

  To the Washoe, it was an unforgivable desecration of sacred land. And long after the endless violation of cars and trucks and RVs roaring through Cave Rock, many members of the small remaining Washoe tribe still refused to use the tunnel, even if that refusal necessitated a 75-mile detour around the giant lake.

  Eventually, the U.S. Forest Service, under mounting legal pressure, declared Cave Rock off-limits to climbers. They even ordered that all of the dozens of world-famous climbing routes be stripped of the countless pitons and bolts and other climbing aids that had been pounded into the rock.

  But Eli didn’t care.

  It wasn’t that he rejected the Washoe’s long history at Cave Rock and their claim to the land. Eli was simply a narrow-minded prodigy who only saw the world through his own perspective. What mattered to him was what he wanted. And what he wanted was to be in charge, to be in control, and to never again let the bullies of his childhood have their way. Eli had discovered that the power of his intelligence led to the power of money. And now that he, along with his partners, had become very wealthy while still in their twenties, he wasn’t going to play by anyone else’s rules ever again.

  Eli lost track of the passage of time as he climbed. He followed the cracks in the rocks like an ant sniffing out the path to sweet nectar. He went up 10 feet, moved laterally 6 feet, then up another 10. After 50 feet of ascent, his body began to tire, first in the hand muscles, then the forearms, then across his back. Because he was climbing without the protection of aids or belay, he had no opportunity to rest. That was what made it exciting. And that was what drew the crowd gathering below and made drivers pull their cars over to the side of the highway to park and watch. A free climber lives or dies based on his or her skill and strategy. And steel fingertips.

  A few minutes later, Eli had conquered yet another class 5 route, and he pulled himself up and over the edge near the top. The burst of neurotransmitters flooding his brain was as great a feeling as he’d ever had. It was as if his body were filled with a blinding light.

  After a hands-and-knees scramble up the last portion of steep slope, he stood up at the top of Cave Rock. Slowly, he inched back down toward the edge, his lungs still puffing hard, and looked down the vertical cliff, savoring his accomplishment.

  Directly below him, 80 feet down, cars and trucks raced out of the southbound tunnel, their drivers and passengers oblivious to the drama that had played out above their heads.

  “Eli!”

  A loud voice. Close behind him.

  “Payback!”

  Elijah turned toward the sound, twisting on his right foot. Something sharp cut into his ankle. His foot slipped. The motion jerked diagonally through his body, knocked him off balance.

  Elijah fell to the left. His palms hit the rock, ground into the rough surface. His left knee bent and slammed down onto a protruding shard of rock. Pain shot up his leg. Eli grabbed at the rock with both hands, but he fumbled at loose grit.

  His motion carried him the last few inches toward the edge as he scrambled for a hold on the granular surface. He ignored the pain in his knee and his ankle, and clawed at the surface.

  Eli was a serious climber. He’d climbed some real walls in Yosemite and was planning to eventually tackle El Cap. His ultimate goal was the Trango Towers in Pakistan. Serious climbers didn’t succumb to a slippery slope above a little bump of rock that was barely 100 feet high.

  But his hands and feet couldn’t find a grip.

  Just as he slipped off the edge of the steep rock and began his plunge down the vertical face, his right hand found a good, solid hold, his fingers wedging into a crack, knuckles jamming against rock.

  For a moment, he felt the huge relief that came with arresting his fall. But his body swung hard, a 160-pound pendulum suspended from a two-knuckle pivot point. At the bottom of his swing, his finger bones broke skin. His feet flailed against the smooth rock below. Left fingers clawed at the rough surface, but found no hold.

  His right knuckles ground so hard into the rock, they left bloody, pulverized chips of bone behind. Electric pain pulsed up his arm. His hand lost its grip.

  Elijah Nathan fell 80 feet and hit a protruding rock above the tunnel opening. He flipped over in the air before his life ended against the hood of an eighteen-wheel Peterbilt logging truck loaded down with 40,000 pounds of Ponderosa pine.

  A minute later, several bits of what looked like red confetti were still coming down from the sky, swirling on the breeze.

  ONE

  The light was blinking on the machine when I walked into my office. I hit the Play button while Spot searched for a good place to lie down.

  It sounded like a young man. His voice was stressed.

  “Mr. McKenna, my name is Ryan Lear. I think I’m in serious trouble. Please call me. Any time, night or day. I can be reached at one of four numbers. In the Bay Area, in Tahoe, cell, and at work. Cell is best.” He recited the four numbers.

  I dialed them in order, got three voicemail services, and finally, a secretary at the work number.

  “CalBioTechnica,” she said.

  “Owen McKenna returning Ryan Lear’s call.”

  “Let me check. I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting.”

  “He said it was important.”

  “I’ll have him call you as soon as he’s available.”

  Ryan already had my office number, so I gave her my cell. I thanked her and hung up.

  I’d heard the company name, CalBioTechnica, but I didn’t know anything about it.

  I Googled the company and found that it was a bio-tech company, specializing in recombinant DNA research and, according to the media, responsible for some promising emerging drugs in the new class of biologicals. Despite the excitement, it struggled in the shadows of companies like Genentech. CalBioTechnica was scraping by on development and production contracts that were estimated at $93 million in the current year, its fifth year of operation.

  I was in my third year of self-employment after quitting the SFPD and scraping by on even less.

  The coffee maker finished gurgling. I drank some, paid some bills, grabbed some bagels and water out of the mini-fridge, collected the Matisse monograph that I’d left at the office the last time I was there, and left.

  Like nearly all summer days in Lake Tahoe, this one was more of the same weather, almost boring in its predictability. Clear skies that were a light cobalt blue at the edges and pushed toward ultramarine at the zenith, high-altitude sunshine turned up to the barbecue setting, air temperature that was dialed down to the mid-seventies.

  I took Spot to Nevada Beach for a little exercise. It was still early enough in the morning that few tourists were out on the miles-long stretch of perfect sand. Despite the August heat, the white snow cross on Mt. Tallac across the lake was still substantial.

  I found a stick and threw it down the beach. Great Danes don’t fetch with the dedication of retrievers, but Spot ran with gusto. He likes to retrieve, but he isn’t wild about giving the stick back to me. I was patient, having learned long ago that you can’t simply decide to take a stick from the mouth of a 170-pound Great Dane unless he wants to let it go. He ran around, taunting me with the stick. I acted bored. Eventually, he dropped it.

  This time I threw the stick into the water. Spot ran into the water until it reached his chest, then stopped. Danes have a thin coat and no body fat, and Tahoe’s icy water never warms up much even near the shore.

  He looked at the floating stick, trotted left, then right, whining, wondering whether there was a shallower, warmer way to get the stick. He got up his nerve and leaped in. Just like a person jumping into freezing water, he made a lot of splashy, inefficient movement, his front paws breaking the water’s surface as he thrashed out to the stick and brought it back. He came out of the water in a rush and raced up and down the beach to
celebrate life in warm sunshine.

  Eventually, he dropped the stick.

  I threw it back into the water.

  From the water’s edge, Spot watched it arc toward its splash-landing. Then he turned and looked at me.

  “You’re not working to ability,” I said.

  He sighed, walked back from the water until he reached dry, hot sand, and lay down.

  “A Black lab would keep chasing the stick no matter how cold the water is,” I said.

  Spot ignored me and flopped down onto his side, soaking up the sunshine.

  Two para-sailors were out on the lake. Their parachutes, big billowy bursts of color, looked like giant flowers being towed behind boats. Over by the Tahoe Keys was a regatta, fifteen or twenty sailboats all racing north toward the windward mark. Close to the beach, three jet skis raced by, bouncing on the light chop. The MS Dixie sternwheeler headed west on its morning cruise to Emerald Bay.

  My cell phone rang. I expected the young man who thought he was in danger. It was Diamond Martinez.

  “Busy?” he said.

  “Working hard as always, Sergeant,” I said.

  “Office office, or one of your outdoor offices?”

  “Nevada Beach.”

  “Gonna be there for a few more minutes?”

  “Judging by how long it’ll take me to get the sand off my dog, another hour.”

  “Okay if I stop by?”

  “If you bring treats. We’re a couple of stick throws north of the parking lot.”

  Diamond showed up fifteen minutes later with two coffees. He looked and smelled freshly washed, his thick black hair shiny and combed back. He twisted the coffees down into the sand, then pulled a doggie biscuit out of his pocket.