Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) Page 14

  I thanked him. “Oh, one more thing,” I said. “Do you ever see tarantulas around here?”

  He frowned. “Not much. This is a city. But I’ve seen them twice. Two different summer evenings. It makes an impression on you when you see a spider that big. So I told people about it. And this one guy I told said that the boy spiders go cruising for girls on summer evenings. Isn’t that a hoot? Just like us. Why do you ask?”

  I pointed at the Jeep. “When we found this tire anchor, there was a dead wasp stuck in the concrete. We showed it to an entomologist. Turns out those wasps prey on tarantulas. They’re found where tarantulas hang out.”

  The man nodded.

  “Of course, tarantulas aren’t crawling around in the snow,” I said.

  “That tire anchor you’ve got?” Dan said. “I poured that concrete last summer. It sat in that stack until it was stolen.”

  “Thanks again.”

  I went across to the convenience store, flashed my license to the manager, explained that the Dock Artist had been robbed, and asked if they had a surveillance camera that pointed toward the Dock Artist. The woman came out of the store, walked around the side and looked across the street. Then she went over to the dumpster and looked up at a camera.

  “Could be our dumpster monitor catches the street at the edge. Let’s go look.”

  We went back inside and into her office. She sat down at a desk and worked a computer, clicking through different screens. “Here we are. This is the dumpster. This uppermost corner kind of shows the Dock Artist across the street. Down here in the corner of the screen is the time scroll. What time are you wondering about?”

  “I have no idea. Could be any time during the night after he closed three days ago.”

  The woman glanced at a clock on the wall. “Look, I have to run my register tape every hour on the hour. You sit here. You click here for fast forward, here for fast reverse, here for regular forward and here for regular reverse. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She left me in the office. I went back and forth, slow and fast. Nothing happened at the dumpster or in the uppermost corner.

  Five minutes later, the manager came back. “Find what you’re looking for?”

  “No. Sorry. But I haven’t gone through the whole time frame, yet.”

  “Here, let me sit there again.”

  We switched places.

  She started clicking on menus. “The owner thinks this neighborhood is real bad, so he got all these cameras and this software upgrade that allows you to automate a search, skipping by any section without movement and stopping whenever something happens. But I’ve never used it because the neighborhood is a lot safer than he thinks. We’ve never been held up, rarely been shoplifted, either. If only I can remember how to use it.” She kept exploring.

  “Here we are,” she finally said. She found a menu, used the mouse to draw a rectangle around the area in the uppermost corner, then hit enter. “There. Anything moves in that corner, it should stop at that point.”

  The little hourglass symbol showed passing time. Then it stopped. In the uppermost corner was a white cargo van that hadn’t been there before. She cruised forward and backward until we’d seen the entire sequence. The van pulled up at the corner of the fence, its left side facing the camera. The top of the van was cropped off by the camera. If someone had climbed on top of it to get over the fence, it wouldn’t have shown in the video. Nothing happened for several minutes, then the van pulled away.

  “How long total was it there?” I said.

  The woman clicked on the time symbol, subtracted in her head. “Looks like three minutes. A little more than three minutes.”

  I noticed that the van’s visit was shortly after 4 a.m.

  “Thanks very much,” I said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I called Sergeant Santiago.

  “Do you have lunch plans for tomorrow?” I asked. “Maybe we could meet and grab a bite.”

  “Sure. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Tahoe House Bakery?” I said. “Noon tomorrow?”

  “See you there,” he said.

  I next called Agent Ramos.

  “Do you know about a guy called Dan the Dock Artist in Carson City?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “He designs docks. He’s a big strong guy with a slight accent I can’t place, and he’s got a kickboxing setup in his workshop.”

  “Interesting. Does he look like Mikahailo?”

  “Hard to compare a steroidally-bulked grown man to a photo of a skinny young kid, but it could be him. Same eyebrows. He has a dock-design and installation business in Carson City. You will remember that when Amanda Horner was dropped into the lake, she was tied to an anchor made from an old tire filled with concrete? Diamond and I found a dead wasp stuck to the concrete. I showed it to Street. She said it was a tarantula wasp, and we thought that might help us find the origin of the tire anchor. But she also found a logo stamped in the concrete. That logo belongs to The Dock Artist. I showed him the tire anchor that helped drown Amanda Horner, and he says that he made it. He also says that two of the anchors were stolen from his place of business three days ago. He showed me footprints in the snow.

  “So I walked across the street to a convenience store and looked at the security footage from their cameras during the night that the anchors were stolen. A white cargo van pulled up to the Dock Artist’s yard and stayed there for several minutes, long enough for someone to climb the fence and steal the tire anchors. Of course, every tenth vehicle on the road seems to be a white cargo van. Even Dan the Dock Artist has a white cargo van.”

  Ramos asked for the Dock Artist’s address, and he said he’d check it out.

  The next morning, the roads were icy, slowing traffic. I took it slow going north around the lake, through Incline Village and Kings Beach. In Tahoe City, I turned left at 89 and took Fanny Bridge over the Truckee River where it flows out of the big lake. About a mile south, I turned into the Tahoe House restaurant. Santiago was waiting in his patrol unit. I found a parking spot in the lot, told Spot to be good.

  “Sergeant,” I said. He nodded as we shook hands.

  Santiago and I chatted as we walked inside, scanned the menu board, then ordered gourmet sandwiches on fresh-baked bread.

  We found a table.

  “Creepy, the way that woman was tied under water,” Santiago said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you thinking that somehow she is connected to Ian Lassitor’s drowning?”

  “It appears that way,” I said. “Turns out that Nadia Lassitor is being blackmailed,” I said. “Apparently, Ian had a life insurance policy worth two million, and Nadia is the beneficiary. Someone knows that and is blackmailing her for the two mil.”

  “What’s the blackmailer’s leverage?”

  “First, he said that Nadia would die if she didn’t pay him. Now, it looks like he kidnapped her daughter in Sacramento.”

  “You haven’t been able to track the ransom demand?”

  “His only communication was a vanishing email.”

  “Great,” Santiago said. “Score another win for technology. They say there isn’t any privacy anymore, but when we want to find someone, good luck.”

  “I could pursue a court order, try to pry open the email service that Nadia uses and work backward from there, but that could take months. Agent Ramos thinks our perpetrator might be a guy named Mikhailo who’s possibly been killing people for years.”

  Santiago said, “Unfortunately, we found no evidence in the Lassitor drowning that would point one way or another. No one appears to have witnessed anything. The nearby houses are all vacation homes, vacant in the winter. We interviewed the only two neighbors who are ever around. One, a part-time resident who lives in Minden, Nevada most of the time, saw nothing. The other is a crazy lady who lives in a cabin across the highway. She gave us nothing.”

  “A crazy lady?”

  “That’s wha
t we’ve called her ever since we first tried to talk to her years ago when we had a string of burglaries. She won’t answer her door. Once, she was outside when we pulled up, but she wouldn’t talk other than mumbling something about aliens.”

  Santiago sipped coffee. “Maybe you should check from the insurance angle. Who did Nadia tell about the policy? Did Ian tell someone about it? Stuff like that.”

  I nodded.

  The waiter brought us our sandwiches.

  I bit into turkey, lettuce and tomato on whole grain Ciabatta.

  “Have you learned anything about Lassitor’s drowning?” I asked.

  “Not much,” Santiago said with a full mouth. “The boat was broken in two. Lassitor’s body was in the bow section, which was still floating. The stern had sunk. There were scrape marks on the bow that made it look like some other boat had run over the woodie.”

  “You think there’s any chance of recovering the stern?”

  Santiago shook his head. “The body and bow were found about a half mile offshore. My map says the lake is seven hundred fifty feet deep there. Too deep to find any wreckage unless we had a submersible and the budget to drive it around. And even if we found it, bringing up the wreckage is another problem.”

  “What was the body’s condition?” I asked.

  “Bad. One elbow was broken in multiple pieces, and it looked like Lassitor tried to smash the cockpit dash with his face. But there wasn’t much swelling or bruising. Probably the cold water iced him so thoroughly that the body shut down before it could react to the facial blow. Also, his hand was impaled with a shard of wood that also penetrated the dash of the boat. We had to saw the wood to disconnect Lassitor from the boat. Other than that, his body was fine.”

  Santiago nodded as he chewed and swallowed. He showed no discomfort at talking about dead bodies while he ate, the mark of a seasoned law officer.

  “Who ID’d the body?”

  “The neighbor first, then later, the widow.”

  “The neighbor is the one who lives in Carson Valley?”

  “Yeah. Craig Gower. Carson Valley and Tahoe. Has a dainty little beach house of maybe seven thousand square feet. Compared to Lassitor’s castle, Gower could feel a bit inferior if he was given to such thoughts. But he’s an old guy and wheelchair-bound, so maybe house size isn’t at the top of his worries. We know him from a few years ago. A real sad story. He was driving with his wife and daughter and got in a head-on collision. His wife and daughter were killed, and he was paralyzed. He’s about as broken as you can get. But he still has his business in Minden. A factory that makes thermostats. But even with money and a nice house or two, I don’t know how he keeps on going.”

  “The circumstances of Lassitor’s death suggests a lot of questions,” I said.

  “No kidding. Like how could Lassitor be so stupid to go boating in a storm?” Santiago shook his head.

  “If there was a collision, it could have been intentional.”

  Santiago grinned. “Two million would be a nice bank account for a woman who wanted to start over, wouldn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “But how would you do it?” he said. “Run Lassitor out into the lake, hope that there were no witnesses, and then arrange the collision? Why not just tie a concrete block to him, and toss him overboard?”

  “Unless the killer wanted the body found.”

  “Like the woman who was drowned on the South Shore,” Santiago said. “A kind of a message.”

  “I should go chat with Gower,” I said.

  “Actually, I have a couple of questions to ask him that I forgot the last time around. You can join me, if you want.”

  “Don’t want to interfere with official sheriff’s office business.”

  Santiago was shaking his head before I finished my sentence. “You handed us the big collar last fall. I owe you.”

  Santiago got out his cell, dialed, and arranged a visit.

  When he hung up, he said, “I’ve spoken to old man Gower a few times and he sounds more fragile each time.”

  “In addition to being paralyzed, he’s probably got survivor’s guilt too,” I said.

  “What makes it worse is that he was driving and it was his fault. Apparently, he drifted over the center line.”

  Santiago drove his patrol unit, and I followed. We continued south on 89, passed the Sunnyside restaurant, and after another mile Santiago turned left into a long, narrow drive that had vertical snow walls like those near Nevada Beach but that were much higher because the West Shore gets three times as much snow as the East Shore.

  I turned in after him. After winding through the trees for sixty or seventy yards, Santiago pulled up at a rambling home that probably dated from the 1950s. Sided with cedar shingles, it looked like someone had slid wooden boxes up against each other in a scatter-shot combination, which created unusual roof lines intersecting like geometry puzzles.

  I left Spot in the Jeep and joined Santiago at the front door.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The door opened sooner than I expected. Perhaps a sensor had picked us up as we turned into the drive. A man in a wheelchair looked out. He looked to be in his mid-70s, with a gentle if sad face and soft gray hair. A lap blanket covered his legs.

  “Sergeant Santiago,” the old man said. “Back to ask more questions about Ian Lassitor, I presume.”

  “Just a few things I’d like to go over, if you’ve got a minute,” Santiago said.

  The man seemed to think about it. A gust of air swirled in through the open door, fluttering the corner of the lap blanket.

  “Come in. We can talk near the fire. Get you boys warmed up.”

  He reached down and pulled on one of his chair’s push rings and pushed on the other, rotating the chair. I noticed that Gower’s chair was outfitted with a motor and a small control stick on the right arm, but he propelled himself across dark oak floors. I shut the door behind us, and we followed him through the entry.

  There was a staircase that was fitted with a platform lift that Gower could roll onto and then it would travel up the stairs.

  We went by a large, open kitchen area with long, polished, black-granite counters and a black-granite dining table. In the center of the table was a big glass bowl of oranges. The orange color reflected off the black granite.

  Gower rolled past the dining room, then turned left into another room.

  In striking contrast to the modern kitchen, the living room felt like the lobby of an old lodge, with a row of small-paned windows facing the lake and, on the opposite wall, a crackling fire behind a heavy screen in a stone fireplace. There was a low wooden table, rustic in design. On it was another glass bowl of oranges.

  The man turned his chair to me and reached out his arm. “Craig Gower,” he said.

  “Owen McKenna.” We shook. Gower’s grip seemed fragile.

  He saw me notice the oranges.

  “I own part interest in an orange grove in Southern California. Valencia oranges. The best for peeling and eating. Of course, I’m biased. The grove doesn’t supply a significant income, but it allows me the indulgence of oranges for much of the fall and winter.”

  “They are beautiful,” I said.

  “I see you have no uniform,” he said.

  “I’m a private investigator. I’m helping with the Lassitor case.”

  Gower nodded. “You boys want a beer?”

  “Thanks, but I’m working,” Santiago said.

  Gower turned to me. “I always thought that the point of self-employment is that you can have a beer during the day, right? I’ve got Paddleboard Pale Ale from the Tahoe Mountain Brewing Company.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. Many times in the past, I’d noticed that the camaraderie of a shared beer resulted in people saying things they wouldn’t have said had they been in a formal interview without libation.

  Gower turned the chair again and slowly rolled himself out of the living room. I wasn’t sure, but I guessed that it might have been inapprop
riate to offer my help. He was obviously independent in his wheelchair.

  I looked out the windows. There was a path that led out to Gower’s dock where a good-sized cruiser was moored under a rigid canopy. It was like half a boathouse, providing protection from snow and rain. In the distance to the side was a stone boathouse that must have been Lassitor’s. I couldn’t see Lassitor’s house, or castle as they referred to it.

  Gower returned in a minute with two tall glasses of beer, each set in holders on the sides of the chair. “They don’t bottle their beers in regular bottles yet,” Gower said. “But I get them to bring me the large-size growlers. With that and my fire, I’ve pretty much got what I need.”

  Gower handed a glass to me, raised his, and said, “To your health,” and drank. I joined him.

  “Good stuff,” I said.

  He nodded, licked some foam off his upper lip.

  “You have a motor on your chair,” I said, “but you roll yourself.”

  “Only exercise I get. Motorized rigs are great for quads and others who need them,” he said. “And it’s handy for me when I’m going up ramps or trying to hold a couple of grocery bags in my lap as I’m going from my van into the house.

  “But lots of people in chairs have use of their upper bodies. Like everybody, we can use all the exercise we can get. Unfortunately, some of us just end up using the motor for convenience. Then our upper body strength goes away.”

  “Just like able-bodied people taking the elevator when they could walk the stairs,” I said. “I’m guilty of it, too. Like going to the club for exercise and driving around the parking lot trying to find the closest space.”

  Gower smiled. He looked warm and pleasant with a smile, but I guessed that he didn’t find much cause for it.

  “I’m determined to get exercise even if nothing works in the lower half of my body. I crushed my lumbar vertebrae in a car accident a couple of years ago.”

  He paused.

  After a moment, Santiago said, “Mr. Gower, unlike before when we spoke of the details of what you saw when Lassitor went out in his boat, today I’d like to ask you about your opinions rather than facts.”