10 Tahoe Trap Read online

  Spot hadn’t moved. He was still chewing on the cord. Unlike some people, dogs don’t give up until they have exhausted themselves.

  I was careful with the knife, working away from Spot, careful not to cut him. I had him freed in a minute.

  He immediately ran toward where the men had parked their pickup, then he trotted toward the cabin, following their scent trail. I went with Spot up the short steps onto my deck and peered down the mountain. I saw the flashing lights of two patrol units as they turned up the private drive 1000 feet below. There were no other vehicle lights. Maybe the men were hiding in the woods, lights off. More likely, they had gotten away.

  Still without my keys, I had to knock on the front door to get Street to let me in. She opened the door. Her hand was locked hard onto Paco’s as if she wasn’t going to let go no matter who tried to take him.

  We sat down, me on the rocker, Street and Paco next to each other on the little couch.

  Paco’s eyes were wide and worried underneath an intense frown. He still held Street’s hand, but he kept some distance between them. Street probably wanted to pull him into her lap, but she was a good judge of these things. Give the boy time and space. Be there, but don’t push.

  “Maybe Diamond’s boys can pull some prints,” Street said.

  I looked around the cabin. The men hadn’t ruined anything except maybe Paco’s psyche. Paco seemed fine, but no kid can be fine after what he’d been through.

  There was a knock on the door. Spot didn’t bark, so it was okay. I opened it to see Diamond. Two Douglas County vehicles were in the road. I stepped outside and gave Diamond the whole story while his crew collected evidence, took photos, filled out forms.

  “Both of the kidnappers are wounded in some degree,” I said. “And I broke the left front window of their pickup. But I’m sure they are gone.”

  Diamond walked over to my deck and looked down the mountain. There were no vehicle lights in the forest.

  “Sergeant,” one of the deputies said. “Something here.”

  We walked over. The deputy shined his flashlight on the fishnet, then moved it so the beam traced the edges of the net.

  “This was carefully set up,” he said. “The net was rigged with a line that laced through the perimeter of the net. See how these cords are all gathered together? It looks like they held the net up loose and tossed it over McKenna’s dog. Then they pulled on this cord, and it snugged the net up, kind of like a drawstring on a mesh bag. The cord goes to this slip knot so you can tighten it, but it won’t loosen.”

  “Good work, Denny,” Diamond said. “You find any sign of what made the squeaking noise?”

  “Yeah. Real simple, but kind of brilliant, too, if you know what I mean.” He shined his light on the ground near the middle of the net, right about where I’d cut Spot free. “Simple rubber-duckie squeeze toy,” he said. We could see it in his flashlight beam. “I figure one guy steps on the duckie. Spot runs up. Maybe he couldn’t see the guy in the dark, but he probably smelled him when he got close. But by then it was too late, and the guy tossed the net over him. Meanwhile, the other guy hits McKenna with the Taser.”

  “Why didn’t they just Tase Spot?” Diamond asked.

  “I could only guess,” I said. “Could be they only had one Taser. Could be they didn’t know if a Taser would work on a dog.”

  “You think they could be that dumb?” Diamond said.

  I shrugged. “It wasn’t the kind that shoots out wires. It was the hand-held type. You have to stick it against your victim, then pull the trigger. Maybe they thought that Spot could get his teeth on them if they came that close.”

  Diamond nodded in the dark. “Like a cartoon, dropping a net on him. But I guess it worked well enough.” He lowered his voice. “If these guys want to kill the boy so he can’t testify to the shooting he witnessed, why didn’t they just pop him and you both in your cabin?”

  “All I’ve got are guesses. My road is long and there’s only one way out. If one of my neighbors were here and heard a gunshot, they might call it in, and a cop like yourself might come up the road before they could get away. Or maybe I’d stay alive long enough to call it in. Or maybe a gunshot would rile my dog so much that he would chew through chain-mail to get to the shooter. But probably the most obvious reason of all is that even idiots know that if you shoot a cop or ex-cop, you bring the wrath of all cops down on you. Right or wrong, we often put more focus on the killer who takes out one of our own.”

  Diamond turned to Denny. “Let me know if you need any help getting that net unstuck and gathered up. Maybe there’ll be a tag on it that will tell us the manufacturer. If we could track it through to a point of sale somewhere, somebody might remember who bought it.”

  “Probably stolen,” Denny said.

  “Of course,” Diamond said.

  “Right,” Denny said. “Like you always say, police work is about being thorough.”

  Diamond turned to me. “Any idea what kind of pickup?”

  “It was dark and I was kind of busy,” I said.

  Diamond nodded. “Fishnet is creative,” he said. “These guys look like fishermen?”

  I smiled. “Hard to tell what they looked like. The one moving the boulders was big and white. The one driving the pickup was big and black. Both were bald.”

  “Total bald, like shaved? Or part bald like natural?”

  “Total.”

  “Anything else?”

  “They’re not athletes and they’re not fighters.”

  “Why do you think that?” Diamond asked.

  “Way they moved. Clunky. Way they dealt with pain.”

  “How did they deal with pain?”

  “Yell and scream.”

  Diamond nodded. “But muscles.”

  “Lots,” I said.

  “You think these guys are show girls? Or do you think they are dangerous?”

  “Worst kind of dangerous. The way the one guy looked when he ran toward me, he telegraphed mean and amoral.”

  “You guess these guys are hired killers like Agent Ramos thinks? Or are they personally involved in this?”

  “I’d guess hired. They didn’t radiate any vibe of emotional involvement.”

  “I don’t like the hired killer thing.”

  “No one does,” I said.

  “What’s your next move?”

  “Haven’t figured that out, yet. C’mon inside, I’ll make you a copy of the letter Cassie wrote me.”

  We went in, and I put the letter through my copy machine. I found the sales journal pages with Cassie’s entire customer list and made copies of those as well. I handed them to Diamond. We went back outside to talk away from Paco.

  “I wonder if selling travel info is legal,” Diamond said.

  “Probably. But ethical? Borderline. Technically, anyone could conceivably get travel info on executives. But it’s not like studying a company for its assets and technologies and innovations and then investing on that basis. It’s coloring outside of the lines. Either way, short of finding Cassie’s body and evidence related to her death or bringing in the men who took Paco, these cash payments this JM guy made to Cassie seem like the most productive place to start looking.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Diamond said. He folded the pages, put them in his pocket. “I’ll see if I can find anything on these names.”

  Diamond looked around at the dark forest. “You know that those boys will be back,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where you gonna stay?”

  “I’m hoping that Street’s okay with us crashing at her place for the rest of tonight. Tomorrow, who knows. But it looks like I better keep Paco moving.”

  “Maria is coming over tomorrow night, but it’s okay if you want to put my place on your itinerary after that.”

  “Glad to know you’re still seeing her. She’s a good influence on you.”

  “Actually, Maria’s pulled back a little. We still have dinner now and then. She still lik
es me. But it’s been a long time since any sleep-over. Kind of miss that.”

  I nodded. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Let you know if our lodging plans bring us your way.”

  “Those guys know your wheels,” Diamond said. “I’ve still got the old pickup, if you want to borrow it. Be tight, though, with your hound in the same seat as you and the boy.”

  “Tight and still alive is a good thing,” I said. “The trick will be getting to your place unseen. Take a careful driver.”

  “Who better than you?” Diamond said.

  “Good point,” I said.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Street was okay with us staying at her condo, but none of us slept much. Although I was confident that Salt and Pepper wouldn’t be back the same night, I’d parked the Jeep at the far end of the condo lot so it wouldn’t be so obvious.

  A few hours later we were eating toast and jam and bananas for breakfast. Paco skipped the banana. He put enough butter on his toast to make it soggy.

  “We could force feed him spinach,” Street said with a wink. “Try to get some nutrition into him.”

  Paco didn’t comment.

  There was a knock at the door. Spot wagged.

  I looked out of the peephole and opened the door for Diamond and another officer.

  “We went back up to your cabin after dawn to see what we could find,” he said.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “We didn’t find anything,” he said, ignoring me. “Some chunks of seaweed in the fishnet they threw over Spot, and that’s all.”

  Spot wagged at the sound of his name, stuck his nose in Diamond’s abdomen. Diamond pet him.

  “Any tag on the net? Something that might indicate where it came from?”

  Diamond shook his head. “They probably found it washed up on a coastal beach somewhere. Or stole it out of a fishing boat. Not likely it will give us a lead. But we’ll let you know if anything comes of it.”

  “Thanks. We still on to crash at your place tomorrow night?”

  “You come without a tail, yes.”

  “See you then.”

  He left.

  Street poured more coffee, and we went out on her small deck. The deck boards were wet from the previous night’s drizzle, but the sun was stabbing through the clouds, and things were starting to warm and dry.

  Street brought out a towel to dry off the deck chairs, and we sat in the sun.

  I told Street I had to make a call and asked her to keep Spot with her and Paco. I stood outside where I could see Street and Paco but far enough from the building that I had a little privacy.

  I called my old friend Conan Reynolds, the full-time hiker, biker, skier who puts in a few part-time hours as a lawyer.

  He was in, we traded chitchat, and I asked him if he knew anything about immigration law.

  “A divorce guy like me? Are you kidding? But I know a guy in Sac who does some immigration stuff. Name’s Kyle Bolen. Let me find his number and call him on the other line.”

  I waited five minutes. Conan came back on the line. “Bolen is willing to give you five minutes, professional courtesy to me.”

  “Wow, you’ve got some pull, huh?” I said.

  “No. I just reminded him about the last round we played at Edgewood. I told him that I’m still keeping it a secret. So he wanted to return the favor.” Conan read me Kyle Bolen’s number.

  “Thanks, Conan.”

  I dialed Kyle Bolen, and his secretary put me through to him.

  I introduced myself, explained that I had temporary charge of a young undocumented immigrant, and asked if he could give me any information on whether or not the boy might be allowed to stay in the country if he came out of the closet.

  “Hey, McKenna,” Bolen said, “I don’t want to put you off, but you’re talking about opening a real can of worms, here. A big can. Big worms.”

  “Can you describe this can a bit?”

  “Let me just say that the government tells a story that they’ve created for public consumption, and the story is that they don’t search out and deport undocumented workers who don’t cause trouble, especially undocumented children who’ve been in this country for some time. But the underground reports are different. And the voices of those who get picked up and put into the deportation machine have no forum. They post their tales of misery on little-known websites. The general public never hears about them.”

  “What does the law actually say about deporting illegal immigrants?”

  “Oh, bud, you don’t want the actual legalese. It’s a bunch of unreadable lawyer-speak. But in essence, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in nineteen ninety-six did in fact cut back on habeas corpus rights for illegal immigrants. Congress wanted to make it easier to deport undocumented immigrants. It sounded good in principle. But the INS interpreted the new law as giving their agency a broad increase in their power. Many legal scholars question that interpretation.”

  “Are you saying that the government is abusing their power?” I said. “Or are you saying that the law is bad?”

  “Both answers depend on your point of view,” he said. “If you are an undocumented worker, doing your job and staying out of trouble, then yes, the new law would seem over-reaching.

  “But if you are a victim of crime committed by an illegal alien, or if you are an environmentalist or a hiker confronting the countless tons of trash that illegal immigrants leave in the desert during their three-day walk across the border, or if your house or land have burned up in a wildfire that was started by illegal immigrants not putting out their campfire, then you will think the law is good. Although, even then one might argue that deportation doesn’t prevent the trash and fires. Only stopping illegal immigration in the first place would solve that problem.”

  He paused. “Why don’t you tell me about this kid.”

  “He’s ten years old, born in Mexico, brought here illegally. He was a baby when his mother carried him over the border.”

  “I’m hoping you’re going to tell me that the kid speaks Spanish,” Bolen said.

  “Nope. The kid’s mother died soon after they came over the border. The kid was taken in by the neighbor lady. Then she got dementia. At that point the kid was rotated into a round-robin daycare in the neighborhood. He stayed in different houses and apartments for several days at a time, always moving.”

  “No state foster care?” Bolen said.

  “No. Apparently, the people in the small town thought that engaging the authorities would come with the risk that the child might be yanked out of the little bit of stability they’d made for him after his mother’s death. They worried that he would be put in a state-sponsored orphanage and possibly even deported. I didn’t get the impression that they thought the boy’s life in the town was ideal. But they reasoned that it was better than having him sent to a country he doesn’t know and a language he can’t speak.”

  “Of course, his school must be complicit in giving him cover.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yeah. The principle and teachers have taken the same approach as his caregivers. They have tried to do what’s best for the kid rather than what the law demands. I understand that they’ve had to make appropriate adjustments here and there. Paperwork and such.”

  “As with all illegal kids,” Bolen said. He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I don’t have very good news for you, assuming you’d like this kid to stay in this country. Immigration law is a mix of good law, stupid law, and everything you can imagine in between. Further, many of the laws have conflicting components. Some state and federal laws don’t mix well and that includes California law. And nearly all of the laws have unintended consequences.”

  “Like most laws,” I said.

  “Yeah, but Immigration law has the extra difficulty of being an area that inflames passions. People get almost as worked up about immigration as they do about abortion. The result is that our laws are rarely judged with calm remove.”

&
nbsp; “All this suggests that this kid I’m talking about may get deported.”

  “There’s a chance of it, yes. Hold on a sec.” I heard what sounded like the click of a cigarette lighter, then a long exhalation.

  “The basic position of the government,” he said, “is that anyone who is here illegally, regardless of the reason, has to leave and apply through the normal channels. Even if they aren’t caught and deported, even if they leave voluntarily, they have to wait ten years after leaving before they can apply for entry.

  “For many illegals who’ve raised families and built small businesses, it can be like a death sentence. There are mothers whose children were born here and hence are legal. But the mothers get deported and possibly never see their children again.”

  “We always hear about illegal immigrants who were picked up because they committed a crime,” I said.

  “Powerful reasons to deport them,” Bolen said. “And some illegal immigrants, just like some legal citizens, commit crimes. And some of those crimes are horrific. But the association often adds to the rhetoric even as it subtracts from common sense. When a news story describes a criminal suspect who’s an illegal alien, they almost always sensationalize it, giving the impression that illegal immigrants are naturally bad people.”

  “Do illegal immigrants commit more crimes as a percentage than legal citizens?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how the groups compare. But I do know that some anti-immigration people get pretty loose with statistics. Sometimes you’ll hear or read comments about how many millions of illegal immigrants are criminals, when they are leaving out the fact that for many of them, the only crime they have committed is coming over the border illegally. The statistic gets used to paint a picture that is clearly a mis-characterization. It’s a black-and-white view of something that has a lot of gray area.

  “The mother of the boy you are talking about broke the very serious law of coming to this country without papers. She probably did it to find work and make a better life for herself and her baby. According to the law, she should have been punished, fined and/or deported had she not died.

  “People often stand behind a law without asking if it’s a good law. But how bad was the woman’s illegal entry? Maybe she’d already been deported and then re-entered illegally. If so, that second entry is a felony offense. Yet would she be bad like other felons? Should she be characterized like someone who robs or rapes or murders?”