Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) Page 12

  Spot was standing tall, nose in the air, sniffing toward the Thompson.

  “Stay here,” I said. I stepped on the gunnel of our boat, reached my leg up and over into the Thompson’s cockpit, the rear part of which had taken on water. I walked uphill to the companionway that led to the small cabin below.

  The companionway door was shut. I grabbed the latch and turned. The door swung open under the force of gravity because of the steep upward angle of the partially-sunken boat.

  I peered down into the cuddy cabin, but couldn’t see because it was dark inside. The cabin windows must have had the blinds pulled.

  Holding onto the edge of the companionway opening, I reached my foot out and down, feeling for the first step, trying to adjust for the boat resting in an uphill position. I found the step, put weight on that foot, then lifted my other foot out and down, stepping into cold water. When I’d descended to the fourth step, I ducked my head, lowered it through the companionway opening and into the dark cabin.

  As I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, I became aware of repugnant odors, urine and acrid sweat and the fetid smells of a tropical swamp.

  Gradually, I saw light coming in from around the edges of a drape across a window. With another step, I was able to reach the window. I swept the drape to the side. A harsh shaft of sunlight cut through dusty air. What I saw made me inhale.

  Hanging by his wrists from ropes that stretched up to the handles of some upper stowage lockers, was a small young man, naked but for his underpants. His head slumped down with unconsciousness or maybe death. Although his eyes were closed, he looked like the picture on Jonas Montrop’s driver’s license. His knees were slightly bent, lower legs mostly under the water. I stepped uphill toward him, and leaned toward his bent head. There was duct tape over his mouth. I pulled it off.

  A whisper of rancid breath washed across my face.

  He was alive.

  TWENTY

  I wrapped one arm around his chest and lifted him up to take the tension out of the lines that were knotted about his wrists. He was very light, like a teenaged boy, and his skin was cold and clammy. While I held him up with one arm, I fumbled with my other hand, grabbing at the knots, catching the cords with my fingernails. I got one untied and then the other before I remembered that I had a pocketknife in my pocket. With the knots untied, his arms flopped down in such a loose manner that it was as if there was no muscle tension at all.

  When Jonas’s arms were free, I hitched him close to me, still holding him with one arm so that I could reach and hold the edges of the companionway and carry him up the stairs.

  When I was back up in the cockpit, I worried that the way I was carrying him was squeezing his chest and making it hard for him to breathe. I shifted his body a bit so that I was holding his weight more by his waist and less by his chest.

  I swung one leg over the Thompson’s gunnel and made the big step down to the runabout.

  Spot immediately sniffed Jonas all over, but he gave me space as I came aboard.

  I lay Jonas down on the rear seat. He was unresponsive. But still breathing.

  I took off my life jacket and then my shirt and lay the shirt over his body.

  Then I pulled out my phone and dialed 911.

  “Nine, one, one Emergency,” the dispatcher said. “Please state your name and address.”

  “Owen McKenna calling from a boat near Brilliance Marina in the Bijou area of South Lake Tahoe. I have found kidnapping victim Jonas Montrop. He’s unconscious and hypothermic and possibly near death. I’m bringing him into the marina. Please send an ambulance immediately. And inform Commander Mallory.” I probably didn’t need to state the obvious, but I wanted to make it clear to the dispatcher. “The boat where I found the victim is a crime scene. Mallory will want a team to collect evidence.” I hung up and started the runabout. I untied the line that held the boats together, then shifted into Forward and pushed the throttle forward just a touch.

  I didn’t want a breeze to cool Jonas further. I also knew that it would be a long ten or fifteen minutes before an ambulance arrived at the marina. So I went slowly, hoping that without a breeze caused by our motion, the sun would warm Jonas.

  When I pulled up to the marina dock, the man in charge came out. He was smiling until he saw Jonas.

  “I called nine-one-one,” I said. “An ambulance is on its way. This kid is hypothermic. I want to put him down on the warm dock boards. Maybe you can find a blanket.”

  The man looked shocked, but he nodded and hurried off.

  I lashed the runabout to a dock cleat, lifted Jonas up and laid him on the dock. The man rushed up with several blankets. I laid two of them down, shifted Jonas onto them, and then covered him with two more blankets.

  “Does this boy have something to do with the boat you were looking for?” the marina man asked.

  “Yeah. He was tied up inside it,” I said.

  The man looked horrified.

  Sirens sounded in the distance. A police patrol unit showed up first. The cop ran out to the dock. We had just exchanged a few words when a giant fire truck arrived followed by the ambulance. There was no room for the fire truck to park, so it just stopped in the middle of the street. Multiple men and one woman trotted out of their vehicles, a show of the silly policy of excess response to a nine-one-one call with no apparent purpose unless spending taxpayer money was the goal.

  Paramedics strapped Jonas onto a gurney and wrapped him in more blankets. The medics loaded the gurney into the ambulance and drove away as Mallory showed up.

  “Commander,” I said.

  “Can you show me where you found him?”

  I nodded. Mallory turned to the other cop. “Did you grab the evidence kit?”

  He pointed to a large toolbox he’d set on the dock.

  Mallory turned to me. “Let’s go.”

  They climbed into the runabout, Mallory leaning his hand on Spot’s back, and I drove them at speed over to the Thompson cuddy.

  I repeated my landing technique and lashed the two boats together.

  “There’s water to the rear of the cockpit and in the rear of the cabin,” I said. “Jonas was tied up in the cabin, facing toward the stern, hanging from a line on each wrist. Both lines are still hanging where I untied them.”

  “Got it,” Mallory said.

  He was the first over the gunnel and up into the Thompson. He strapped on his headlamp, turned it on, and looked down into the cabin. The other cop followed, carrying the evidence kit.

  Five minutes later, I saw another boat emerge from the shore to the west. It looked like it also came out from Brilliance Marina. The boat raced up to planing speed, then immediately began slowing as it approached. I waved. The boat had two more cops, both in uniform.

  I helped them tie their boat to the Thompson. The cops climbed up into the little cabin cruiser and quickly went to work.

  Of the four officers, two were still down below in the tiny cuddy cabin. The third man was dusting the cockpit. Mallory was periodically on his radio, keeping track of the rest of the department’s activities across South Lake Tahoe. I’d never seen Mallory taking this much interest in the hands-on work of a case, work that was usually handled by a sergeant.

  I called out to Mallory. “I have to leave for an appointment. You can all ride back on your other boat, okay?”

  “Okay,” Mallory called back.

  When I was back at the marina, the man looked at the clock. “You went over the four-hour time limit, so I should be charging you the extra time. But it seems like you kind of got stuck with a law enforcement problem, so I feel bad about that.”

  “You can bill the city for the extra time,” I said. “Add it onto the bill for the boat they rented.”

  “You think so? Really?”

  “Really,” I said.

  I signed my paperwork, and left to go meet a professor at the community college.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I was at the college off Al Tahoe Boul
evard a bit before the appointed time. Spot was so asleep in the back of the Jeep that I don’t think he even noticed me leaving.

  Because it was early June, just before spring quarter was finished, there was a kind of lightness of step among the collective body of students walking about campus under gorgeous sunny skies.

  As I walked through the parking lot, I called Sergeant Lanzen and told her that I’d found Jonas Montrop. She asked for details, and I filled her in.

  “Anything on your end?” I said.

  “Not much. I sent two men back out to re-canvas Montrop’s neighborhood in Incline Village. They found a neighbor who has a filtered view of the opening to Montrop’s drive. She said that she saw a car parked in the opening of Montrop’s drive the morning of his murder. It was under tree shade, so she wasn’t positive of the color, but she thought it was either black or midnight blue or midnight green.”

  “She get the make?” I said.

  “Not specifically, but she said the logo was interlocking rings that reminded her of the Olympics logo. So that pretty much has to be an Audi.”

  “I would think so.”

  “Oh, sorry, Owen, gotta go.” She hung up.

  I couldn’t remember which building held the science offices, so I went in the main entrance, asked at the information counter, and was directed to the correct wing.

  Dr. Frankie Blue had a small, windowless office filled with bookshelves, which were full. There were two rolling metal carts that held equipment, the purpose of which I couldn’t even guess. On the floor, leaning against the wall, was a whiteboard that had scraggy printing in red and blue dry marker. The blue marks were comprised of letters and symbols arranged like three complicated mathematical equations. The red was for the arrows that looped around and connected different parts of the equations.

  Blue was sitting on the very edge of her desk chair, hunched over her desk, pen in hand, studying and marking a group of papers that were stapled together.

  I paused for a moment to stare at the equations.

  “Oh,” she said, sensing my presence and looking up. “Can I help you?” she said as she took off her red reading glasses and let them fall to her neck, hanging from a cord.

  “If I had to learn and understand the stuff on your whiteboard, I would be in deep trouble.”

  She glanced at the board, and said, “It looks inscrutable, yes. But it’s really just the ATP reaction, Adenosine Tri-Phosphate. Standard metabolic stuff.”

  “Oh, of course. Standard stuff. I must have had a little brain cramp there.”

  She smiled.

  “Dr. Blue, I’m Owen McKenna. My girlfriend Street Casey called you yesterday.”

  “Yes, of course.” She rotated in her chair, reached up and shook my hand. “You’re the detective. I don’t know Dr. Casey well, but I know of her work. She’s done some groundbreaking stuff with forest ecology. A real brain, that one.”

  “She says the same about you,” I said. “I’ve brought a bit of plant material that may connect to a case I’m working on. Street said you would be the person to look at it. See if it’s anything you recognize.”

  “Happy to.” The woman pushed back her chair and stood up. “Let’s go down to one of the labs where I can get a better look at it.”

  I followed her out of the office, down a hall, through a fire door and into a different, but connected, building. She walked into a room that had four rows of high, narrow tables that students would stand at as they did their work, experiments or whatever. Blue went over to the far wall, which had a workbench running its length. On it were multiple pieces of technical equipment which, like the stuff in her office, I had no idea about.

  Blue turned to me. “Do you have the item?”

  I pulled the baggie with the Reno Armored business card out of my pocket and held it out. “On the card is a glob of pine pitch. Stuck in the pitch is the head and thorax of a Western Pine Beetle, as Street explained to me. She also saw another bit of material that she thought was plant matter. That is what I’m hoping you can identify.”

  Dr. Blue slipped her glasses back on, carefully pulled the business card out of the baggie, and held it up to the light. She made a little nod, then walked over to one of the machines on the bench. She flipped on a switch, and a light came on at the bottom of the machine. She pulled out a sliding tray, set the card on it, then slid it back in. There were two eyepieces near the top. It was a microscope, although of a different design than the one in Street’s lab. Blue looked in the scope, turned a focus knob, then another, then looked for ten seconds without moving. Then she pulled a three-ring binder off a bookshelf, flipped through the pages, and paused on one, studying it. Then she went back to the microscope.

  She finally spoke. “Rorippa subumbellata,” she said, still looking into the eyepieces.

  “Is that the name of the plant material?”

  “Yes.” She pulled away from the microscope and looked at me. “I’m not a botanist, but this one is pretty obvious. We’ve studied it here at the college. You’re no doubt familiar with the Mustard family.”

  “Mustard, the condiment, yes. Mustard, the plant, no.”

  She nodded. “There are many different kinds of mustard plants, all in the genus Brassica. They grow all over the world. We grind their seeds and mix the material with a carrier like water or vinegar to make the yellow condiment. The oil from the pressed plants has many interesting properties and is even being used as a bio-fuel. And, of course, many people eat mustard greens.”

  I gestured toward the business card in the microscope. “This pine pitch came off a tire on the armored truck that was robbed. Are there any places along the highway between the South Shore and Reno where this is common?” I asked.

  “Not on the highway, anyway. In fact this is very uncommon.”

  “But you just said it grows all over the world.”

  “Various mustard plants do, yes. But this is a very unusual variety. In fact, it’s on the verge of extinction. It only grows in one place in the entire world.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “The common name for this is the Tahoe Yellow Cress. The only place on Earth with Tahoe Yellow Cress habitat consists of a few places along the shore of Lake Tahoe.” Dr. Blue paused as if to let me consider the impact of her statement.

  She continued, “We believe that this particular mustard plant used to grow in other places. But changes in environment have killed it off everywhere else. Tahoe is the last place where you can find it. It’s a low-lying green plant with little yellow flowers. Very pretty in a non-dramatic way. It grows in the beach sand near the water, generally between the low and high water lines. And it’s very particular. When we have a drought for a few years, and the water level stays lower, the plants highest up on the shore will often die. The lower plants do better and expand. But when the water levels rise after a heavy winter, those lower plants are inundated and die off. In several places around the lake, we’ve put up fences around the plant to keep people from trampling it.”

  “Why has it survived in Tahoe?”

  “We don’t know. Some combination of high altitude and pure water and granitic sand, and a climate with just the right mix of weather makes it do well here. Beyond that, it’s a mystery. But because bio-diversity is precious, it’s very important that we save the Tahoe Yellow Cress. Scientists have even grown the plants in a lab and then planted them around the lake, trying to expand the population in hopes that it might survive. Because of its uniqueness, we have our students study it in one of the classes we teach, Plants of the Tahoe Basin.”

  “Is there any kind of a map that shows which shores one can find it on?”

  “Yes. There’s even a website devoted to it. I’ll write it down for you.” Dr. Blue wrote on a pad, tore off the paper, and handed it to me.

  http://tahoeyellowcress.org/

  “Here, I’ll show you.” She walked over to a computer and brought up the website. “Here’s the map. It has color coding for beach
areas with known populations. I’ll print it out.” She clicked and a nearby printer whirred. She handed me the page.

  I pointed to the business card. “The partial bug I mentioned that is stuck in the pine pitch next to the Tahoe Yellow Cress?”

  “Yes?”

  “Street said it’s a Western Pine Beetle. They’re the beetles that attack Ponderosa Pines.”

  “Right,” Blue said.

  “Can you think of any areas where they grow in close proximity to the Tahoe Yellow Cress?”

  “Thus suggesting where this pine pitch might have come from?”

  “Right.”

  Blue frowned. “As you might know, the most common pines near the lake are Jeffrey and Lodgepole with relatively few Ponderosa Pine. Jeffrey Pine occasionally hybridizes with Ponderosa. The hybrids are uncommon, but some of what look like Ponderosa are really half-breeds. Maybe those attract the Western Pine Beetle. I don’t know. Dr. Casey would. There isn’t much pure Ponderosa near the Tahoe beaches where Tahoe Yellow Cress grows. Nothing comes to mind.” She studied the map for a bit.

  “Wait,” she said. She pointed at the map near the beaches out by Camp Richardson. “Most of the basin was clear-cut back during the heyday of the Comstock Lode, and they used the lumber to shore up the mining tunnels under Virginia City.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “But back at the turn of the twentieth century, Lucky Baldwin and D.L. Bliss left some old growth Ponderosa untouched on their land here on the South Shore and on the West Shore. You can tell because they’re very big.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Those monster trees over at Valhalla near Camp Rich.”

  Dr. Blue nodded, then pointed to the map. “And not too far away is where Taylor Creek flows from Fallen Leaf Lake into Lake Tahoe. There is some Tahoe Yellow Cress nearby.”