Tahoe Avalanche Read online

“How do you know it was dynamite? You got a sample or what?”

  “They were what ski patrollers call three-by-eights. Three short sticks of dynamite, wrapped together. The dynamite left craters of darkened snow. And, yes, I have evidence. A little brown piece of the wrapping paper.”

  “So you place a perp up on the mountain, and he sees cars coming in the distance, climbing up the highway to Emerald Bay. He does a little count to get the timing right, then throws three charges and gets to watch what happens.”

  “Probably not. He couldn’t see the highway from up there. We’re thinking it was remote control. Some kind of a receiver and a transmitter like a garage door opener. Guy sits down by the highway and pushes a button at the right time.”

  “Hey, that’s good McKenna. A garage door opener.”

  “It was Mariposa Pearl, avalanche control specialist at Heavenly, who figured it out.”

  “Okay,” Bains said. “I can call her, get the details.”

  “I got a call from Glenda Gorman at the Herald,” I said. “You okay with me passing this along?”

  “Sure. She’s the one goes by Glennie, right? She called me. Told me I sounded cute.”

  “Is that a surprise to you?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Should it be? Do you think I’m cute?” he said.

  “George Clooney meets Pierce Brosnan,” I said.

  “Hey, McKenna, you’re not pulling my leg, are you? You really think that?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “So what about this Glennie broad?” Bains said. “Is she good looking?”

  “Marilyn Monroe meets Michelle Pfeiffer,” I said.

  “Come on McKenna. No one looks like that. Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth, sergeant, is that Glennie is smart, beautiful, and sexy. You should take her out to dinner at the earliest opportunity.”

  “But I haven’t even met her,” Bains said.

  “You’re going to let that get in your way? My friend, Sergeant Diamond Martinez in Douglas County, will probably get to her first, then.”

  “Who’s he?” Bains said.

  “Antonio Banderas meets Johnny Depp.”

  “Oh, Christ, McKenna. Hang up and free up this line. I gotta make a call.”

  I hung up and dialed Glennie, but her number was already busy.

  I drove over to Esteban’s house, thinking I’d get him talking, see if I could learn anything that might illuminate why he was following the girl. I could confront him about it directly, but then he might clam up. Better to get him talking and see where he’d slip.

  He let me in and, as before, insisted that I go up the stairs first while he followed. There was a light on in a room by the base of the stairs. The laundry room. The laundry tub was half full of water. Sitting in the tub was a broom, bristle end down in the water, the handle propped up by the pipes above.

  “Head on up,” Bill said, gesturing at the stairs.

  I went up. Soft music filled the living room. Jazz trumpet. It sounded like Arturo Sandoval.

  “Come sit here,” Bill said as he hobbled over to the kitchen island. On the counter was a glass, a napkin, a plate and a long skinny fork. I pulled out a barstool and sat on it. There were several blocks of cheese that Bill had been cutting. He returned to his task.

  “I’ve been putting together the fixings for a little fondu party. Got the cheese cut, and the bread is fresh out of the oven.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t want to crash your get-together. I didn’t have anything important.” I stood up and pushed the barstool back.

  “No, please stay. There’s nothing to crash. It was a party of one. Now it’s two.” Bill fetched a second plate, fork, glass and napkin. He poured me a beer and milk for himself and continued with his food prep.

  “March was good company. But now it’s just me again. Carmen has been keeping me company some. She’s a sweetheart, but she’s got a life to live.”

  “Have you always lived alone?”

  “Yeah. There’ve been some women who paid me attention when I was young. I was real close to one. Fay Perkins. I even asked her to marry me.” Bill sipped his milk. He adjusted the flame under the fondu pot. “She said no. It was probably best. She was a psychologist who specialized in grief counseling. I told her I believed I would make her a good husband, but that I probably couldn’t talk shop much. The nightclub is boring and I’ve got too many demons to hear about grief cases during dinner. Who knows if that was what turned her away. Could’ve been the gimped-up legs. Not like she was into skiing or anything real physical, though.” Bill stirred the cheese as it began to bubble, then shut the flame vents.

  “I’d think a psychologist would be able to look past a physical handicap,” I said. I was thinking that if Bill was sick enough to be a stalker, the psychologist probably sensed it.

  “You’d think,” Bill said as he cut the bread into chunks. He stabbed one with his fork, dipped it in the cheese and popped it in his mouth. He pointed at me and the food as he chewed.

  I joined in.

  “Someone bumped their car door into Fay’s at the supermarket once,” Bill said. “It was a really tiny dent. Most people would just live with it. But she had that door replaced.”

  I nodded, ate more bread and cheese, drank beer.

  “Other than the kids’ friends, I don’t really know anyone in this town,” he said. “That’s part of why I appreciate Carmen.”

  We continued to eat and make awkward conversation. He never asked why I stopped by. He never said anything that had anything to do with the girl he followed.

  After an hour I left.

  When I pulled into my driveway I saw a strange shape in the snow not far from my front door. I got out and let Spot out of the back. I pulled out my pack and was walking to the cabin when I realized that someone had done a little snow sculpture. Maybe one of my rich vacation-home neighbors had come up with kids and they had gone around the neighborhood making shapes in the snow.

  But the sculpture looked more sophisticated than something kids built. As I got closer I saw that it had four legs, a tail, a deep chest and large head.

  Spot saw it too, and he went to investigate at the same time that I remembered Street’s words about being careful.

  “Spot! No!” I leaped forward and caught him from the side in a full tackle, driving him away and down into the snow as the sculpture blew up in a blinding flash and ear-thumping boom.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I was horizontal in the snow on top of Spot as the bomb went off near my feet. The shockwave hit so hard it was as if someone had swung a baseball bat at the soles of my shoes. The blast numbed my ears and stung the right side of my face.

  I checked Spot. He seemed okay except for a small wound on his ear. I wobbled on unstable legs into my cabin. I called Diamond and explained what happened. I could barely hear him over the ringing in my ears. Two Douglas County Deputies arrived in fifteen minutes and Diamond came a few minutes later with Street in his cruiser. She looked horrified when she saw me.

  “My God, Owen, your face is torn open!”

  “I felt something sting,” I said, touching the side of my face. Warm, wet blood flowed from my temple down under the edge of my jaw. “I must have got hit by a piece of shrapnel or ice.”

  “I’ll get a compress.” She fetched a washcloth. “You’re cut bad. You’ll need to get stitched up. Hold this on it until we can get you cleaned up.”

  I pressed the cloth against the wound as Street hugged me. She then held Spot who was almost as shaky as she was.

  I went over the details with the cops while Street called Doc Lee. The cops collected lots of bits of brown dynamite wrapping as well as two tiny shards of what looked like black plastic. They searched the area for ski or snowmobile tracks and found nothing but tire treadmarks exactly like those from Diamond’s Explorer, which meant the marks also matched a huge number of other SUVs and pickups throughout Tahoe.

  The person who did the snow sculpt
ure wore the most common type of snow boots, available in lots of stores. The only thing of note was that they were large, size twelve or thirteen.

  “Where do you think the bomber waited?” Diamond asked.

  “Somewhere up there.” I waved my arm at the vast expanse of mountain that rose up behind my cabin all the way to Genoa Peak and stretched off for miles to the north and south.

  “Lotta wilderness,” Diamond said. “Hard to search.”

  “Almost no point. If the bomber was on a snowmobile, he could already have the machine in a garage or on a trailer heading out of town. A person on skis could silently ski out of the forest anywhere. He could even ski over the back side of Genoa Peak and drop all the way down to Carson Valley.”

  Diamond nodded. “Be safe. I don’t think this guy is finished.”

  Spot and I stayed at Street’s that night. More for her comfort than mine. I knew the killer could put a bomb at her place just as easily as at mine. Doc Lee came with his bag and stitched me up, telling me that the scar would be thin but over four inches long. He looked at Spot’s ear, which Street had scrubbed. “Got a little hole here,” Doc Lee said. “Perfect for an earring. But it will heal.”

  The next morning, Street and I were up early, discussing our options. She thought that Spot would be safer with her. While she knew that a threat to her or Spot would be the ultimate way to bend me to the killer’s wishes, her instincts told her that the killer wanted to make the impression on me directly.

  “Call it an ego thing,” she said. “The sculpture bomb was a performance. This guy is beating his chest to impress you. Coming after me when you’re gone wouldn’t satisfy him.”

  I agreed with her and left Spot in her care.

  I left at 7:00 a.m. and got to Sacramento just after the rush hour. I turned off in Vallejo and went north around the bay on 37 to Marin County and was on the Golden Gate by 11:00 o’clock.

  I found the Simon mansion on a curving manicured street above China Beach on El Camino del Mar in Seacliff, not far from the Presidio. I squeezed in between a new Jaguar and an old Rolls, its lugubrious countenance looking unhappy in the rain.

  The Simon’s front door was a five-foot-wide slab of hand-carved oak. I pushed the button and heard the same ponderous chimes as they probably use at the Queen’s Palace in London.

  A tall elegant woman in her late forties answered the door. She wore a black pantsuit with a see-through knit wrap over it. Two little dogs, one light gray, the other mottled, charged out beneath her feet. They jumped up on my legs, almost reaching my knees. Their barks could shatter wine glasses.

  “Are you Mr. McKenna?” She shouted over the dog barks. She looked with alarm at the bandage on the side of my face. “I’m Clarice Simon. And these are our girls, Salt and Pepper. They’re Pomeranians. Salt! Pepper! Quiet!” The dogs barked even louder. “So good of you to come,” Clarice shouted. As she shook my hand, diamonds sparkled on her fingers and on her wrists and in her ears and around her neck and probably on the fringes of her underwear. “Please come in. Sam and I are so glad you are looking into our daughter’s death. After you called us, we did a little checking and found that you are highly recommended.” She emphasized the word highly.

  We walked through the cavernous entry with the dogs barking and skittering around my feet. I bent over and snatched the one named Pepper off of the floor. I held her tight to my chest, my hand around her neck so her head was immobilized and she couldn’t bite. Astonished, she stopped barking. Salt sensed the change, ran on ahead of Clarice, spun around and stopped, a tiny high growl warbling in her throat.

  After we traversed the entry, we went through the central hall for awhile, eventually arriving at a living room a little too small to host the G-8 summit.

  “Sam, this is Mr. McKenna.”

  “Owen, please,” I said.

  Sam was a lanky man, and his rumpled clothes looked ill-fitting to the same degree as his wife’s clothes looked perfect. When he stood up from a deep upholstered chair his right pant leg stayed up, the hem stuck on the top of his sock. The bulge where his knee had been ballooned forward. He reached out without taking a step, leaning improbably far forward. I set Pepper down and hurried to meet his outstretched hand before he could fall on his face. He seemed waxen and glazed-over, still in shock.

  “The officer told us about our daughter three days ago. But it was just last night that we found out she was murdered,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Pepper was on her hind legs, doing a little pirouette, pawing at my legs, wanting me to pick her up again. Salt had jumped up on a distant chair and she eyed me with suspicion.

  “We should have known,” Clarice said. “The policeman drove all the way down from Tahoe to give us the news of her death. That seems unlikely if it had been an accident. He didn’t say it was murder. But he must have suspected it. However, now that you are on the case, perhaps there will be some justice. Don’t worry about your fee. Whatever it is, we don’t mind.”

  “There is no fee. I’m not working for you.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Clarice said. “You called. You came down. The officer I talked to said he was certain you would find the killer if they didn’t find him first.”

  “I may find the killer, but I’m working for another client. His nephew was killed in the same avalanche.”

  “His nephew was murdered like our daughter?”

  “Not suffocated, no. He was actually killed by the avalanche. But I believe their deaths are connected.”

  “God, this really sucks,” Simon said. He walked over to a sideboard, pulled a glass stopper out of a decanter and poured whiskey into a crystal glass, filling it to the brim. He drank it down partway, poured it back up to the brim and carried it to his chair. “You bust your ass to give your daughter everything in the world and some scumbag kills her. Why? She was good and pure and kind. She never hurt a soul. Was it something we did? Was it my business? Did someone kill her because she had the misfortune to be born into a successful household?”

  “Sam,” his wife said. “Calm down. It’s going to be okay. Lori was a free spirit. She’s finally found her freedom.”

  Sam shouted, “Did someone resent her riches or her opportunities or her beauty? Why did they prey on an innocent girl?!”

  Clarice sat down on the arm of the chair as Sam downed the rest of his drink. She touched his shoulder. “Sam, honey...”

  “Don’t honey me!” He brushed her hand off his shoulder. “If you’d ever been here, spent time as a mother instead of sweet-talking the governor and the legislators and the voters...”

  “Sam, don’t talk to me like that! I’ve done good work! Lori would tell you that she wanted me doing that work, making this state a better place.” Clarice was crying, tears flowing freely.

  “You were a politician, not a mother!” Sam hissed.

  Clarice jumped up off the chair arm and faced him. “You weren’t a father! You were a doctor, an engineer, a financier! Who took that child to dance lessons and swimming lessons?! Who coached her through algebra and geometry?! Who got three state legislators to write her letters of recommendation?! Who went and saw her dorm at Humboldt State? Who, Sam?! Who?!”

  “It was always about you, Clarice. Do you even know what she studied in college? Do you know her major?”

  “Of course I do. How dare you.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was... It was communications. I got my secretary to help her with her papers. Or sociology. Maybe that’s what Herm helped her write about. Oh, God, I don’t know! She started out in biology or some worthless science, and how can I keep track when she was always switching! The girl was a complete flake!”

  Sam was weeping. “When Lori went to that study camp in Costa Rica, what was it they studied?” Now his voice was so soft it was nearly unintelligible.

  “I don’t know,” Clarice whispered.

  “That girl’s family who took her to Vail the week
we had to be in Paris to talk to those ship builders, who was that family?”

  “I don’t remember,” Clarice said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  There was still plenty of afternoon left when I got back to Tahoe. I was remembering the photo Uncle Bill had shown me of his party. March’s best friends were Will Adams the computer geek, Carmen Nicholas the cocktail waitress-turned-Bill’s new paramour, Packer Mills the snowboarder, and Paul Riceman the contractor who lived up on Kingsbury Grade. The one person that Bill thought of who wasn’t in the photo was April’s friend Ada, last name and whereabouts unknown.

  I drove to the snowboard shop where Packer Mills worked.

  There were two kids at the front counter, holding opposite ends of a snowboard. They had it up at eye level so they could sight down its base. They had weird hair and metal coming out of their skin, and their ratty pants were hanging so low that, if they hadn’t been wearing boxer shorts, they would have lowered the bar to a new plumber’s-butt standard. They spoke English, but it was the arcane language of snowboard and skateboard speak, filled with inscrutable phrases and unusual idiom. I couldn’t understand anything they said. I could tell they were smart, but they belonged to a group whose very purpose was to be unfathomable to society in general and adults in particular. But like a generation of ex-hippies, they now seemed to be the majority, and most of them had grown up, so their raison d’être had lost its point. Eventually, the rest of us would die off, and the world would be theirs. Then they would have to cope with a new, younger generation that defined itself by speaking, acting, and dressing unlike those pesky old board riders.

  I waited. One of them looked at me and stared at my bandage.

  “Help you?”

  “I’m here to see Packer. Is he in?”

  “In back.” The kid gestured toward a doorway behind him.

  I walked into the back of the shop where they worked on snowboards. Packer was bent over a huge machine made for grinding, sharpening and polishing board bases. The machine had a large sand belt and a stone wheel, all cooled with a constant spray of water. There was an LED readout with red numbers and a keypad for inputting information.