Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) Page 10

  I nodded. “The deaths could be unrelated. But Darla and Scarlett both had interest in the Italian Renaissance. Or at least art from the Renaissance. What’re the odds of walking into a Tahoe abode and finding art from the Italian Renaissance?”

  Diamond shrugged. “Not much. Now that you mention the Renaissance, the drawing on the warning note you got is kind of like the Vitruvian man.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ve seen it. Da Vinci’s famous man in the circle. The one that’s all about the proportions of the human body.”

  “Ah, right. So if that’s what the note references, then it’s another Renaissance connection.”

  Diamond nodded. “An inscrutable connection, but yeah.”

  “I found nothing to suggest that Sean Warner had any interest in the Renaissance, but he did have purple rosary beads in his car, and they are similar to rosary beads I found in Darla Ali’s apartment. So we’ve got Darla and Sean with similar rosary beads and their bodies found in the same place. Then we’ve possibly got Darla and Scarlett connected by a common interest in the Renaissance. That possibly gives us a connection between three murders, but two M.O.s for the murders, shooting and death by snowblower. That’s pretty weak, don’t you think?”

  “Tenuous linkage doesn’t mean no linkage,” Diamond said.

  “You mentioned that the fire in Zephyr Heights was arson.”

  “Yup,” Diamond said.

  “When Scarlett called me on the phone, she referred to her potential murderer as picking her off or burning down her house.”

  Diamond’s jaw muscles bulged. “So the question is, did she use the phrase as a figure of speech, or did she actually think someone might burn her house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We better take a closer look at last night’s fire.”

  I said, “Have you learned anything more about it?”

  “Not much. We have two victims who would have died but for some luck. You know the current Douglas County Fire Marshal, right?”

  “Terry Drier,” I said.

  “Right. This morning, he figured out that someone threw a jar of petrol onto the front porch and tossed a match.”

  “A Molotov cocktail,” I said.

  “Not quite. Drier found a burnt wooden matchstick along with shards of broken glass on a part of the front porch that hadn’t completely burned. It looks like the gas was tossed first. Then it was lit. A Molotov cocktail has a fuse that you light before you throw it.”

  “I wonder why the arsonist didn’t use the lit-fuse approach?”

  “I asked Drier that question. He said that it was probably because Molotov cocktails often blow up when they’re lit. They have a nasty habit of killing the person who uses them. I guess the right way to build a gas bomb you can lob is to use a fuse that’s soaked in kerosene, which is less volatile than gas. But that’s a hassle. Easier to just toss the gas, then light a match.”

  “Houses burn fast when you put gas on them,” I said. “Whose house was it that burned?”

  “Guy we all know. Although you maybe haven’t met him. I get the sense he’s somewhat reclusive.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Adam Simms.”

  “You don’t mean the famous nose tackle. Nine years on, what, three different teams?”

  “All three hundred fifty-five pounds of him,” Diamond said. “Football legends living among us. Practically in secret.”

  I thought back 25 years to Simms’s glory days. “I remember the famous four quarterbacks who seemed to bring out his greatest power.”

  “Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Brett Favre, and John Elway,” Diamond said. “Each was hit by Simms so hard that the press called them the Sacked-by-Simms Club.”

  “What happened to Simms’s house?”

  “Mostly gone.”

  “Simms got out of the house okay?”

  Diamond nodded. “His sister, too. Felicite. Spelled with an E on the end. She’s actually the owner of the house. She’s had the place as a vacation home for years, and Simms has lived there for the last year or two. She lives in San Francisco, but she came to visit a few days ago. Their bedrooms were upstairs. The fire went into the front porch overhang and gutted the upstairs first. Odds are Simms and his sister would have died if he hadn’t been up. But it turned out that he couldn’t sleep, so he and his dog were downstairs in the kitchen when the fire started. They heard something hit the porch. The dog barked. Adam went to the front of the house and saw the flames. He yelled to his sister, then ran outside and turned on the hose. But the shut-off valve was off because it’s winter. He went back in to check that his sister was awake. She was downstairs dialing nine-one-one. Then they ran outside and waited.”

  “The sister is normally in San Francisco?” I asked.

  Diamond drank beer. “I understand that she isn’t his sister by birth. They just refer to each other as brother and sister. Apparently, they were foster kids in a group home in New Orleans, and they’ve kept in touch over the years. They make a real odd-couple pair. She’s a tiny little thing, probably weighs a fourth of what Simms weighs.”

  “You said her name is Felicite?” I asked.

  “Felicite Genoveva. I couldn’t understand what she said at first, so I asked. She said it’s Creole, that her ancestors were free people of color who came to New Orleans from Saint-Domingue in the early eighteen hundreds.”

  “Where’s Saint-Domingue?”

  “What is now Haiti in the Caribbean. Around the time of the American Revolution, Saint-Domingue was a small French colony that produced half of all the sugar and coffee sold in Europe. All grown on slave plantations.”

  “And you know this because…”

  Diamond shrugged. “Something I read somewhere.”

  “Sounds like Felicite’s proud of her heritage, what with telling you that, but she grew up in a group home,” I said.

  “We hang onto whatever gives us a sense of self.”

  “Like machismo,” I said, grinning.

  Diamond made a single solemn nod.

  “Does Adam have the same background?”

  “No idea.”

  “They have any idea of why someone would torch their place?”

  Diamond shook his head. “Logical answer would be someone who is targeting his celebrity. One of those deranged individuals who stalk and assault famous people simply because they’re famous. But Simms might be targeted for more reasons than just rubbing up against his fame,” Diamond said. “He infuriated a million sports fans over the years by hurting their heroes. Probably, some angry, sick fans might want to take him down as punishment.”

  “What about his sister?” I asked. “Could she be the target?”

  “I floated that idea, and Adam scoffed. He said the usual things. That Felicite is sweet and kind, and everyone loves her. And Felicite admitted that she’s basically invisible and unknown by anyone. She works at a tech company, but it’s a low profile job. Only a few people in her company deal with her. Adam believes that he must be the target, and if Felicite is hurt, she’s collateral damage. So he wants her to go back to San Francisco right away. She’ll probably head back to The City as soon as she’s done talking to us and the insurance company. If you want to talk to her, you should do it soon.”

  “Where are they staying tonight?”

  “Their neighbor Ronald Baumgarter took them in. He’s clearly awestruck by Simms. He’s got a big house with lots of bedrooms, so it’s logical that he offers space just because Simms and Genoveva are neighbors.”

  I said, “When you said that someone could be after Simms for payback because he specialized in sacking the most beloved quarterbacks in history, did Felicite have any comment?”

  “Yeah. She said that Adam has been out of the league for two and a half decades and that he hasn’t done any of the things that keep footballers in the limelight. He hasn’t been a commentator, hasn’t done anything controversial, hasn’t bought into a team or joined any tea
m’s management. A lot of people have forgotten about him. Especially people under the age of, say, thirty, who were only five years old or younger when Simms ended his career. So the arson is very puzzling to her. She wondered if it was just a random event. Aside from the idea that someone tried to burn them up, I could tell that she was very upset about losing her house. She’s trying to keep it in perspective. You don’t want to focus on the loss of property when it may be that some demented fan is bent on killing your celebrity step-brother.”

  I asked, “Did either of them say anything that would indicate a possible connection to Scarlett Milo, Darla Ali, or Sean Warner?”

  “No.”

  Diamond and I were quiet a moment.

  “Is Adam employed?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Did he invest well?”

  Diamond pinched his lips, making a sad face. “I didn’t ask about it specifically. But from what I gather, he did like lots of sports stars. He lived the high life while the big money was coming in, and he didn’t put much away. When the paychecks stopped, his life style burned through what little savings he had, and he’s been struggling for the last decade or so. I got the feeling that without Felicite’s generosity, he would be homeless. Felicite made it sound as if he had to move out of his East Bay place. So she let him stay at her Tahoe house.”

  “You get any sense that he’s got enemies?”

  “My only sense was that he seems as agreeable as a teddy bear and about as easy to get along with.”

  “Without a job, any idea what he does with his time?”

  “He said he writes poetry.”

  “A noble calling,” I said, “but hard to pay the bills.”

  Diamond nodded. “Even the most famous poets - the ones who win the Nobel Prize - most of them still have to teach to earn a living.”

  “It’s a sweet, romantic thing for a fearsome tackle to write poetry,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s a smart guy,” Diamond said. “But there is something off in him. He sort of goes blank now and then. Then he’ll say the same thing twice as if he didn’t remember that he’d already said it.”

  “I do that myself,” I said.

  The sun shifted and stabbed through the clouds. The twilight glow behind the West Shore peaks of Alpine Meadows went from a soft pink to a sudden brilliant orange.

  Diamond leaned on the deck railing and held up his beer. “Here’s to the world’s greatest view.”

  I tipped up my beer to drink the last swallow and then raised it farther to get the last drops of the precious brew when the neck of the beer bottle exploded.

  SIXTEEN

  Chunks of glass blew into my eyes and face and down into my mouth. A loud crack snapped in the air a moment later. I wasn’t sure, but it sounded like the sound came from up on the mountain above my cabin. I was too stunned with the blast of glass shards to react.

  Diamond moved first. Before I even realized that I was unable to see well, he grabbed me and jerked me back from the deck railing. He put his arms around me and ran me backward over to the cabin wall like a linebacker driving me back. Diamond pulled open the slider, shoved me inside, and walked me over to the far corner of the living room where I sat on the floor on Spot’s bed, clenching my eyes against the cutting grit of glass and spitting glass shards and slivers out of my mouth.

  I couldn’t see. I could feel Spot sniffing me. I listened as Diamond shut and locked the slider, trotted across my small cabin to lock the front door, then turned off the lights. I heard some other movement in the dark, the pull of a Velcro strip. It sounded like he’d pulled his weapon out of the concealed carry holster at the small of his back. He got on his phone and called in to report the shooting.

  “You okay?” he said when he got off the phone. “Can you breathe?”

  “I’ve got some glass issues, but yeah,” I said. My words were slurred by a thousand prickly glass spears stuck into my tissues. My tongue and lips and gums all gripped and pulled and burned each other. “Feels like I’ve got diamond-grit sandpaper on the inside of my eyelids and sea urchins in my mouth,” I mumbled.

  “Don’t move. We’ll lie low in the dark until reinforcements come.”

  My eyeballs stung in a way I’d never experienced. The natural impulse to blink was excruciating, my lids stuck on my eyeballs by dozens of tiny razors gouging both eyes and lids.

  “Probably lucky you tipped your beer bottle up another inch just as the shooter was pulling the trigger,” Diamond said.

  “No kidding,” I said, only three syllables, but garbled almost to the point they were unintelligible. “Rather have this than have the bullet go through my neck or head.”

  “Probably hurts, glass in the eyes,” Diamond said. “You want anything, let me know.”

  I mumbled, “I’m trying to keep my eyeballs staring straight ahead behind my clenched lids.”

  “They have those anaesthetic drops. You just need to hang in there until we get you to the hospital. Help will be here in a few minutes. We’ll keep the lights off and hurry you out in the dark. That way, the shooter won’t be able to get a clear shot at you. You think the shooter is on skis?”

  I nodded, then realized that Diamond couldn’t see me nod in the dark. “That would make sense,” I mumbled.

  There was a particular pain on my right eye, a red hot needle stabbing into my eyeball. I gripped the eyelashes of my right lid and tried to readjust the position. My eyes were streaming tears, but that didn’t flush out the glass that was stuck in the flesh. “He no doubt had planned his escape,” I said, torturing the words. “A sloping traverse across the mountain would take him down to the highway a long distance from here, and it could be done at considerable speed. As your men come up the highway from Stateline, one of the vehicles they drive by will likely be the shooter.”

  Diamond got on his phone and explained as much to someone.

  When he hung up, he said, “Or the suspect could be driving north and heading over Spooner Summit,” Diamond said. “Or he could also climb up and go over the east side of the mountains and drop down to Genoa or Jack’s Valley.”

  I knew that Diamond was probably standing to the side of the living room window, peeking through the blinds out into the forest, trying to see anything in the darkening twilight, hyper aware of any potential sounds. He was talking just to help keep me focused on something other than the trauma of broken glass in my face.

  “But going over the mountain would be very difficult,” I said, words slurred, the glass in my tongue catching on the inside of my mouth. “This cabin sits at seventy-two hundred feet of elevation. Any decent shooting location with a view of my deck wouldn’t be more than two or three hundred feet up behind the cabin. The ridgeline north and south of Genoa Peak mostly runs around nine thousand feet. To climb up and over would be a fifteen hundred-foot ascent followed by a four thousand-foot descent. That’s a serious climb in what will quickly be total darkness, especially...” I gagged on something very sharp in my throat.

  “Hey, you okay? Do I need to do anything? Maybe you shouldn’t talk.”

  I tried to make an “Uh huh” noise without moving my tongue and throat.

  “I’m guessing the shooter went down on this side,” Diamond said. “There are many places off the highway where he could have left his car. The Logan Creek or Cave Rock neighborhoods, for example.”

  “You’re probably right,” I mumbled, concentrating on keeping my burning eyes still.

  We continued to sit in the dark. Eventually, we heard a siren, then another, and then a third.

  “Hang in there,” Diamond said. “Ambulance will be here soon.”

  “I don’t need an ambulance,” I said. “Anyone can give me a ride to the hospital.”

  “I can’t waste a deputy on that,” Diamond said. “Besides, what if you need oxygen or something to keep you alive?”

  “What I need is beer to numb the pain.”

  “Pretty sure the ambulance doesn’t carry beer,” D
iamond said.

  Five minutes later, Diamond led me out of the cabin. He held my arm as he guided me to the ambulance.

  “Can you take Spot down to Street’s?” I said.

  “Sure. She at her condo or at her lab?”

  “Condo. And go easy when you tell her what happened?”

  “Will do.”

  They put me on the gurney and strapped me down, and we were at the hospital in South Lake Tahoe twenty-five minutes later.

  Although I couldn’t see, I could tell by his voice that Doc Lee was working the ER.

  “Every time I’m here, you’re working,” I slurred, my eyes still shut. “You ever take time off?”

  “No. I live at the hospital twenty-four-seven just to be sure that I’m here when you come in, which you do far too often. You need to give other people a chance to use our services. What I’m going to do is get some drops into your eyes. I’ll lift your lids to do it. It will hurt, but not for long. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “But when the pain goes away, try to hold your eyes still. Otherwise, the glass chips will chew up your eyes and eyelids.”

  He put in the drops, and the fire was intense. But then the pain went away fast. Doc Lee wore a very bright LED headlamp and magnifying glasses. He made a little murmur as he looked at my eyeballs.

  “What’s that mean?” I mumbled.

  “What?”

  “You made a murmur sound,” I said.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Okay,” I said, “just tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m thinking that you had a really close call. Your eyes have so much glass in them, they look like those sparkly Christmas bulb ornaments for hanging on trees. What’s good is that most of the sparkle is on the sclera. Very little is on your cornea. How’d you manage that?”

  “I saw the bullet coming, and I looked away just as it hit my beer bottle.”

  “Wow. Fast reflexes. Let’s take a look at your mouth.”

  I opened my mouth and the doctor looked around.

  “Stay put. We need to get you an ophthalmologist and an ENT.”