Tahoe Avalanche Read online

  Packer wore goggles and an iPod and he held a snowboard against the machine. Sparks flew off the metal edges of the board. The noise was deafening. Packer’s head nodded to the beat in his ears.

  He looked like he did in Bill’s photo, big and rangy with black hair polished against his scalp. The goatee was scraggly and the lip metal was tarnished.

  After a few minutes, he hit a switch and the machine began to wind down like a jet after landing. He set the board down, turned and saw me. He picked his iPod off his belt and dialed back the volume.

  “Hey,” he said. He was the first person I’d seen who didn’t seem to notice the wound on my face.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m Owen McKenna, a private investigator. March’s uncle hired me to look into March’s death. He gave me your name. Said you would be able to fill me in a little on March’s life.”

  “Uncle Bill, he of the bourgeois oppressor state.”

  “Marx goes around and comes around, doesn’t he?” I said.

  “Actually, the whole of politics leaves me limp. I’m just a poet prole, looking for love on the mountain.”

  “Who are your main influences?” I said. I didn’t know jack about poetry, but it seemed like a way into this kid.

  “Ferlinghetti, Ginsburg, Snyder, lotta the beats.”

  “You write that kind of verse?” I asked.

  “I’m working on my chops, but I wouldn’t use my name and theirs in the same sentence. You into poetry?”

  “I’m one of the philistines. I think I know what I like, but I don’t know anything about it. I like Frost. Does he rate on your scale?”

  “The god of formalism? No, he’s like a realist painter. Everything nice and neat and pretty. And totally predictable.”

  “So you write more like the way Pollock or DeKooning painted,” I said.

  “Hey, not bad.”

  “Or Kline or Rauschenberg?”

  “Exactly. Poetry should be visceral. It should have surprise. What’s your medium? Oil? Acrylic? Watercolor?”

  “I have some art books. But I don’t have the talent to do art.”

  “Anyone with books in this post-literate world gets my time,” he said. “What can I tell you about March?”

  “There was a girl’s body in the slide. Lori Simon. She was killed and then put in the way of the avalanche. March was killed by the avalanche. I’m looking for a connection between them.”

  Packer was shaking his head. “I read about it in the paper. But I’d never heard of her before.”

  “March never mentioned a girl he’d been seeing?”

  “Not to me. Although Benson out front, you probably saw him when you came in, he said he saw March with some girl down in Reno a week to two ago. You could ask him about it. Maybe that was Lori.”

  “The slide up at Sand Harbor,” I said. “The guy killed in his Blazer was named Astor Domino. Ever heard of him?”

  “No,” Packer said.

  “Any idea where April is?”

  “Nope. Haven’t talked to her in weeks.”

  “March left his uncle a note saying that he was going to meet the Guru of the Sierra in Tahoe City. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No. But you should know that March and I didn’t spend that much time together. He’s pretty far out of my circle. We met on the mountain, we worked together for a few months, and we’ve seen each other at a kegger or two, but that’s about it. He didn’t understand poetry. ‘Course, no one does. Then he switched over to skis, and my buds are all riders. Frankly, I was surprised that Uncle Bill invited me over there in November. But I guess March still thought we were buds. Hell, maybe we were.”

  I pointed at his iPod. “What you got on there?”

  Packer raised his eyebrows. Maybe the first time someone outside of his group had ever asked.

  “Bunch of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie tunes. They were inspiration for the beats.”

  “Good stuff,” I said. “I noticed you’ve got Dizzy’s beard.”

  Packer grinned. Then he turned and looked at a stack of snowboards. “Good to talk, man, but I gotta get all these tuned before I can go home tonight. Check with Benson on your way out. See if he knows that girl.”

  I thanked him and went back out front.

  One of the kids who’d been looking down the snowboard was handing a credit card slip to a young woman.

  She said, “Thanks.”

  He said, “Hey, no problem.”

  She left.

  “Are you Benson?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Packer said you saw March with a girl down in Reno some time back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ever seen her before?”

  “No.”

  “Did March say who she was?”

  “No,” Benson said. “I didn’t talk to him. Not like we hang together. I just saw him and this girl at a microbrew bar next to a snowboard shop. I was going in to check out the shop ‘cause I’m thinking of moving to Reno. They got a great skate park. And I saw March through the window. I waved, but he didn’t see me.”

  “What did the girl look like?”

  “It was dark in there and they were sitting in a booth so I couldn’t really see. Kind of normal, I guess. Medium hair.”

  “Medium length? Or medium color?”

  “Both, I think.”

  “Short, tall, skinny, fat?” I said.

  “Um, medium height, medium thickness.”

  “Anything about her strike you?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know how sometimes you see a girl and something sticks with you. Like, she seemed too young to be drinking beer. Or, she’s so pretty, how’d that guy get her to go out with him? Or, she smiled on only one side of her mouth. Something you remember.”

  Benson shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t remember anything.”

  “You ever hear of the Guru of the Sierra?”

  “Guru? You mean like the Dalai Lama?”

  “I don’t know. March called him that. The Guru of the Sierra.”

  “Guess I ain’t much help.”

  I thanked him and left.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was dark when I left the shop. Cocktail hour. Which meant Carmen might be at her job.

  I parked in one of the big lots behind Harrah’s casino, walked in and cruised the tables. I asked another waitress and she said she didn’t know anyone named Carmen Nicholas.

  I kept working the casino floor. After five minutes of searching I saw her handing a beer to a lone man at a blackjack table. She turned away, carrying a tray with two martinis on it.

  Her confidence wearing the summer dress at Bill’s house was nothing compared to what it took to put on her current outfit. She obviously figured that if she dressed and acted like she was hot stuff, she’d actually be hot stuff and get tips to match.

  She was poured into a short little silver lame wrap three sizes too small. But it squeezed and kneaded and pulled her body into a figure of sorts, and if her muscular legs were a bit clunky in their lace stockings and spiked heels and her belly a little too obtrusive in the sparkly dress, her breasts were served up as if on a platter, and they upstaged everything else.

  I came up behind her.

  “Hi Carmen.”

  She spun around. “Oh, Mr. McKenna! What happened to your face? You scared me.”

  “Slipped in the snow and bumped my cheek on the ice.”

  “It looks very painful. I hope you are all better soon.” She reached up and gave me a gentle pat near my bandage.

  “Any chance you could take a moment? You could help me with a couple questions I have about March’s death.”

  Carmen breathed out and her entire physique sagged. Her tray tilted, the martinis sliding sideways. She reached out with her other hand to grab a big brass railing for support.

  “This is only my second day back on the job. I was out for most of a week after I heard the news. I can’t stand it, poor Ma
rch being buried like that. Crushed in an avalanche. I’ve gone over to Bill’s three times since March died. It’s like we both need the other to prop us up. The other day when you came by was the best Bill has been.” She stopped to breathe, bowing her head.

  Her hair was lacquered up like an Egyptian vase that balanced on top of her head. It wobbled dangerously close to the martinis.

  “Were you close to March?” I asked.

  Carmen’s eyes teared up. Her lower lip quivered. Her breath was short. If it was acting, she could do better on stage than hustling cocktails.

  “I think I loved him,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “I first met him here at work. He and Will stopped in at the Olive and Spear after the Crosby, Stills and Nash show. I was on that night. They had beers and they talked to me. March was so nice, so gracious. He told me that I was good at my job. No one ever told me that before.

  “I fell for him that first night. A few days later I saw him at Baldwin Beach. He was playing Frisbee with this handsome guy who I got to meet. Paul Riceman. I’ve seen Paul a few times since including at a party that Bill had. Anyway, March and Paul invited me to join them and we played three-way Frisbee. They were so good, but they never made me feel bad when I missed.”

  “Did March know how you felt about him?”

  “No. It was a one-way love.”

  “Does Bill know you loved March?”

  “No. Please don’t tell him. Bill is such a dear. I would never want to hurt him. I originally went over there just to feel closer to March. But I’ve grown to really like Bill.”

  “Did you ever meet or hear of a girl named Lorraine Simon?”

  “The girl in the avalanche. I read about it in the paper. Is it true, the rumors I’ve heard? That March didn’t die accidentally? That he was murdered and the avalanche was, like, the murderer’s weapon?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “One of the other waitresses heard a bunch of people talking about it at one of the tables.

  “What about the girl? Did you ever hear of her?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “How about Astor Domino? Did you know him?”

  “The man killed in the Sand Harbor avalanche? No. Do you think he was murdered, too? The paper said a caller took credit for setting both avalanches. Is it true? Can you make avalanches go where you want so you can kill people with them?”

  “I don’t know, Carmen.”

  She lowered the tray with the martinis and set one edge of it on the railing. “Is there any way I can help you catch March’s killer?”

  “I’m looking for a connection between the victims. If you hear of anyone who knew March, Lorraine, and Astor, let me know?” I handed her a card.

  Carmen nodded, her eyes serious. She tucked the card under the pile of napkins on her tray.

  “Have you lived in Tahoe long?” I asked.

  “It’ll be a year next month. I came down from Eureka. Everyone thinks living on the coast is so wonderful, but you have fog all summer and storms all winter and there’s, like, six days in the spring and fall when the weather is perfect. Here, it’s sunny all the time. Well, except when it’s snowing. And it does snow, sometimes, doesn’t it?” She tried to force a grin through her sadness.

  “Sometimes. Do you have family in Eureka?”

  “Just my father and sister. My mother split with a logger from Oregon fourteen years ago. Fourteen years and three months ago. My poor daddy had to finish raising both me and sis. Now my dad’s got prostate cancer real bad. He’s sixty-seven. They say it’s real common at that age, but I think that it came

  from the stress with him and mom and all that. I really believe that the mind and body are connected. If the mind undergoes stress, the body shows it. Do you believe that?”

  “It can probably happen.”

  “If you aren’t happy, your energy fields get mis-aligned. Then you get sick. I used to drive him to Redding to get his treatments. Radiation, chemo, the whole package. Every month they inject him with a mix of stuff. He calls it the cancer cocktail. Now dad jokes that he and I both live off cocktails.

  “Anyway, I saw an ad in our local paper for jobs in this hotel and casino. I guess it works for Tahoe companies to advertise in the small towns around the state. There are lots of good workers who like the idea of a more exciting life. ‘Course, the reality of slinging drinks at night isn’t quite the same as what you expect from looking at the pictures of Tahoe in the brochures. But I thought I’d apply. I knew the pay would be way more than I got in the gift store.

  “And my sister was just moving back from Portland. She was a secretary for a business that installs home irrigation systems. In Portland where it rains all the time. Is that weird or what? They went out of business in about two years.”

  “This is a good job?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. I get an hourly base plus tips and benefits. There’s enough for me to get by and still send some gas money back to dad and sis. She drives him to Redding, now, and gas is getting so expensive.” Carmen’s eyes opened wide again as she noticed the martinis. “Oh, my God, I forgot these drinks.” She lifted the tray and turned to scan the tables. “Those men probably gave up on me. I have to go. Call me if you have any more questions?”

  I got out another card and a pen. “Your number?”

  She gave it to me and I wrote it down.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The next morning, Spot and I drove up the East Shore.

  The slide that buried the road near Sand Harbor was small but obvious. The rotaries had made a clean cut through the frozen river of snow, leaving vertical walls of white ice seven or eight feet high on both sides of the curving highway. I drove through the passage, pulled off the highway on the far side and got out.

  The slide was maybe thirty feet wide and a little deeper than I was tall. It didn’t look like much compared to the larger and deeper Emerald Bay slide.

  I got my snowshoes out of the back and let Spot out. We climbed up on the slide residue. Because the east side of the Tahoe Basin gets only a third as much snow as the west side, there was only a half-foot of fresh snow on the slide.

  The long thick bulge of residue looked like someone had peeled it out of the snow carpet on the upper mountain and laid the piece down like a rug on the lower mountain.

  There was a scattering of large trees. Based on what Mariposa had told me, this slope was steep enough to slide, but not big enough to regularly produce large avalanches with tree-breaking power.

  So I played a little game of ‘what if’ as I looked at the landscape.

  What if it was a variation of the Emerald Bay technique? A charge could have started the slide up in the trees. Then two charges could have been placed farther down, releasing snow that would come in from the side. With thoughtful placement and careful timing, the killer could probably create three small slides that would converge as they descended. The gathering river of white might have enough momentum to easily punch across the shallower slope just above the highway and bury the road.

  As Mariposa had suggested with the Emerald Bay avalanche, it was conceivable that the killer could have been driving his vehicle up the highway with the victim following. Maybe the victim knew the killer and was following him on purpose. Or maybe the victim didn’t know that the killer was in the car ahead of him. Either way, the killer could slow to a stop, forcing the victim to stop behind, and then fire the explosions by remote control.

  The victim had been pointing north when they dug out his vehicle. Any vehicle that forced him to stop would have to be north of the point where the avalanche came down.

  I climbed back down onto the highway and walked to where the obstructing vehicle would likely stop. Spot stayed up on the slide and stood with his toes at the edge of the fresh-cut wall. He looked down on me, his head lowered, his jowls flopping open.

  I heard a car approaching from the north and moved to the edge of the road. “Stay there,” I said to Spot.
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  The car rushed by, unaware that a large animal was directly above him, watching the car’s movement.

  I climbed back onto the slide track and hiked up the river of white. Spot ran ahead.

  At the top I found a depression in the snow, similar to what Mariposa had found at the top of the Emerald Bay slide. Twenty-five yards down, I found two more depressions, one on either side.

  I thought about Lori Simon.

  Was it possible that there was a second body in this slide as well?

  I could drive back to Ellie’s Three Bar Ranch, borrow Honey G and see what he could find.

  As before, it would take an entire day for two round trips to the foothills and a thorough search of the slide. Honey G was clearly superb at Search-and-Rescue. But I had a dog by my side who had just taken a refresher course from the master. It would only take a few minutes to give him a try.

  I knelt down next to him, put one hand on his chest and the other on his back, just as Ellie had with Honey G. I gave him a little vibration to get him excited.

  “Find the victim, Spot! Find!”

  I gave him a pat and he ran off.

  It was nothing like the organized, methodical search that Honey G had demonstrated. Spot meandered here and there, ranging up the slide path a good fifty yards and then coming back down. When he veered off the slide residue into the bottomless powder to the side, he seemed to understand that a victim wouldn’t be there, and he climbed back onto firmer snow.

  Spot’s staying power was greater than mine. After wandering the slide on both sides of the highway, I was ready to give up before he was. I couldn’t be certain, but I believed there wasn’t another body in the slide.

  I called Spot and praised him lavishly as we walked back to the car.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I’d gotten the Sand Harbor victim’s address and description from the Washoe Sheriff’s Department.

  Astor Domino was twenty-seven, originally from Brooklyn, New York. The old Blazer he drove belonged to his parents who still lived in Brooklyn. The Washoe lieutenant said that the parents had been informed that their son had died in an avalanche. The lieutenant also said that Astor was in his last year at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village. His major was Ecology, and he was on track to graduate with honors in the spring. He lived near the college.