Tahoe Avalanche Read online

  Diamond and I ran around in front of the van, put our hands against the grill and pushed. The van inched backward. The driver locked eyes with me, her teeth gritted, worry and fear passing between us like electric current. I dug my boots into the snow, turned my head and Diamond and I pushed as if to restart Paul’s heart with our effort.

  The van’s tires found purchase, and it pulled away from us. The driver backed into the street, stopped and lurched forward, tires again spinning. The big van skidded around and rushed down the street toward the boulevard, its siren rising and its flashing lights as staccato and unsynchronized as a fibrillating heartbeat.

  When the ambulance siren receded into the distance it was deathly quiet, the gentle snowfall in stark contrast to an atmosphere so tense that I could feel it prickle my skin.

  Diamond stood near me, still panting with his effort, his legs and arms stiff as boards, his grip on his snow shovel so tight there was no color in his fingers. And in the street, next to Spot, was the drag queen. She kneeled in the slush, her shivering visible from a distance, her shaking arms clinging to Spot like he was a life preserver.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Diamond got into his cruiser and got on the radio to make a report.

  I turned to the drag queen who was still waiting, shivering, next to Spot. I was still hot from shoveling. So I took off my jacket and gave it to her.

  “Here, put it on,” I said. “Let’s get in the Jeep and get you warmed up.”

  She pulled on the jacket and got in the passenger seat while I let Spot in back. She shivered. I was sweating. I started the engine and turned the heater on high. I directed the vents toward her and rolled down the window on my side.

  “I’m Owen McKenna,” I said.

  “So very pleased to meet you.” We shook hands. “I’m Terrance Burns.”

  “How well do you know Paul?” I said.

  “I was just one of the girls to him. He knows lots of girls.”

  “But you said you swung a hammer for him. Did the other girls swing hammers for him?”

  “No. So I guess I wasn’t exactly like one of the girls. But he thought of me as a she, not a he.”

  “How long did you work for him?”

  “Let me guess. You’re a cop?”

  “Ex-cop. Private investigator, now.”

  “Paul do something wrong?”

  “Not that I know of. How long did you work for him?” I asked again.

  “About six months, two summers ago. He mostly uses subcontractors, but he was in a jam on a remodeling job. The framing sub was overbooked, and Paul had to do it himself. But he couldn’t get it done on time without help. I used to work for a framing contractor down in Southern Cal, so Paul hired me. But now I’m a banker. I’m actually using my college degree from USC.”

  “How long have you known Paul?”

  “We met the summer before I worked for him. So three years, I guess. The girls and I had a volleyball thing going at the beach every Sunday that summer. Paul and some of his guy friends used to watch. I was the spike king because, well, you know why. Anyway, they would cheer me on when I would spike the ball. But the girls all agreed that every point won on my spike was only worth a third of a point. It was complicated. So Paul and his buddies would keep track of the thirds. They’d always yell out the score, calling my team The Terrance Girls and the other team The All Girls.”

  “Did you ever meet any of his ski buddies?”

  “No. That was his winter side. Me and the girls were his summer side. The two parts of him were completely different. He hung with different people in the winter. His personality was like that, too. He’d be all dark one day and sunny and cheery the next. I’d make up names for him that were light and dark. I’d say, ‘Hey, coffee and cream, hand me that nail gun.’”

  “You’ve probably heard about the avalanches where people died,” I said.

  Terrance nodded, her face serious.

  “Did you know any of the victims or hear Paul ever mention them?”

  “What were their names again?”

  “March Carrera, Lori Simon and Astor Domino.”

  “No. I’m sure Paul never mentioned them. And they’re just names to me.”

  “There are some other names I’d like to mention. See if you ever heard of them or if Paul ever mentioned them. Packer Mills and Carmen Nicholas? A girl named Ada? Bill Esteban? April Carrera?”

  “No,” Terrance said. “Never heard of them, either.”

  We talked for another twenty minutes. Terrance filled me in on everything she knew about Paul, his business, and his friends, male, female and in between. She told me about Paul’s current project, a solo gig building an off-grid cabin north of Truckee.

  We’d gotten out of my Jeep and Terrance had taken off my jacket when my cell phone rang.

  “Owen McKenna,” I said.

  “It’s Mallory.”

  “Commander,” I said.

  “Paul Riceman didn’t make it. The ambulance guy said they were able to trigger a weak heartbeat, but that it kept cutting out, or something like that. Something to do with a low body temperature. They brought him over here to our ER. They tried everything, but his heart kept stopping. After a while they couldn’t restart it.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” I said.

  “One thing I forgot to ask. Do you know Riceman’s next of kin?”

  “No. But hold on. I’m talking to Terrance Burns, a friend of his.” I turned to Terrance.

  “He died?” Terrance said.

  “Yes. Do you know his next of kin?”

  “Oh, God, that’s terrible. That’s so terrible.” Terrance was leaning against the Jeep. She began to sag.

  “Do you know if Paul had any next of kin?” I said again.

  “I don’t know,” Terrance said. “He never mentioned any family.”

  I spoke into the phone. “No next of kin that we know of. I’ll call you if I learn of any.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Terrance Burns went to tell the girls the news about her ex-boss. Spot lay in the Jeep, depressed at finding yet another lifeless body. I got two pairs of latex gloves out of the box under my seat.

  Diamond headed for Riceman’s house, and I started with his truck. I searched in, around, and under both front and back seats, through the glove box, in the cup holders, under the floor mats. I found nothing but the usual items, fast food wrappers, a stray mint, some spilled toothpicks.

  I went around back, opened the topper latch and pulled down the rear gate. The truck bed was empty except for some dirt in the grooves of the bed liner. I was closing it back up when I realized what I’d seen. I called Street.

  “Working on something important?” I said when she answered.

  “Updating my Tahoe Basin insect catalog. Why?”

  “I’m up at the top of the Grade. Spot found Paul Riceman’s body buried where the snow slid off his roof.”

  Street inhaled. “Murder or an accident?”

  “I’d guess murder. I also found a little bit of dirt in the back of Riceman’s pickup. I wonder if you could look at it. See if it is similar to the kind of dirt those beetles live in.”

  “Give me twenty minutes.”

  I told Street where the home was, and we hung up.

  I joined Diamond in the house. We took our time and left nothing out except those areas that would require destruction to get to. We opened jars in his fridge, but we didn’t cut the couch cushions apart. We pulled out everything in his drawers and closets, but we didn’t pry up floorboards. We took off switch plate covers, but we didn’t take apart his computer or his printer. We lifted up throw rugs, but we didn’t pull up carpet.

  We had no idea what we were looking for other than something that Riceman may have taken the trouble to hide or something that would connect him to any of the other avalanche victims or their friends.

  Paul’s house contained nothing unusual except several large working models of biplanes from the barnstorming days. They had five
-foot wingspans and gas-powered engines. They hung in custom slings from hooks in the lofty A-frame ceiling. On a shelf sat the radio remotes for flying the planes from the ground. I picked one up.

  “You think a guy could use one of those transmitters to fire an avalanche from a distance?” Diamond asked.

  “I don’t know. But I have an idea who to call to find out.” Someone knocked at the door.

  It was Street. She stood with her toolbox in one hand and a sample jar in the other. She held up the jar. “I already looked in the back of the pickup. No beetles. But I’ll take this dirt sample back to the lab and scan it under the scope to look for any signs of carabid presence.”

  I gave her a hug and walked her out to her car. She pointed at the slide and the hole we’d dug to pull out Riceman. “How do you think it was caused?” she asked.

  “Don’t know, yet.”

  I thanked her, and she drove away.

  Two hours later, Diamond and I had found only two things worth noting.

  One was a topo map of Tahoe that looked identical to the one I found in March’s bedroom and in the caretaker’s cottage where Astor lived. Like the others, it had no hand-made markings on it.

  The second item I noticed was a Post-it note stuck on Paul’s desk phone. It was written in pen in barely legible cursive, handwriting that I’d seen elsewhere in the house and was certain belonged to Paul.

  “Look at this,” I said to Diamond. I read from the Post-it, “‘Three by eight seems a good size, and what about AC for the project?’”

  “Any number of things on a construction job might be cut to three by eight feet or three by eight inches,” Diamond said. “But I don’t get the AC reference. Alternating current, right? Why would a contractor even refer to the question of whether AC would be the way to go on a construction project?”

  “When you were calling in your report, I talked to Terrance Burns, the drag queen. Burns said that Riceman was building an off-grid cabin. I’ve read a little about off-grid power. Most off-grid houses use inverters to convert the low-voltage direct current from solar cells into higher-voltage alternating current for normal household use. But apparently, inverters waste a little bit of juice. So some very small projects use DC exclusively because it’s more efficient and it works well if you’re just running a few lights and not plugging in household appliances.”

  Diamond nodded.

  “But I can think of other translations of the note,” I continued. “The words ‘three by eight seems a good size’ could refer to the three-by-eight explosives that Mariposa Pearl said are the preferred size for avalanche control.”

  “You got an alternate explanation for AC?”

  “AC could refer to March’s sister, April Carrera,” I said.

  Diamond thought about that. “You think Riceman’s death was an accident?”

  “Let’s take another look.”

  We went outside and looked at the large pile of snow from which we pulled Paul. It sloped at a steep angle from the ground up the side of the roof. The other side of the roof still had a curling cornice of snow six feet deep and fifty feet long, clinging precariously to the ridge of the roof. It looked like it could slide at any moment.

  “You wouldn’t want to be under it when that cornice goes,” Diamond said.

  “No. How do you figure it could be done? Let’s say you get Paul to walk below it. You could toss something important where he’ll see it and then go fetch it. But you have to make the roof release at exactly that moment.”

  Diamond shook his head. He studied the roof, then walked down the slide residue, looking up at the roof ridge.

  I walked around the other side, staying a good distance from the roof in case the remaining snow gave way. Before I got around the house, Diamond whistled. I continued my circuit through the deep snow.

  Diamond stood looking up at the back end of the house. He pointed toward the peak and the deck that projected out under it.

  I looked up toward the shadowed overhang. The waning light of late afternoon was flat. The house was a dark triangle against a dull gray sky smudged with the light gray falling snow.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “The rope,” Diamond said.

  “Where?”

  “From the peak of the roof, going down into the snow. Stretched tight, right along the roof’s edge.”

  “Oh, I see it,” I said.

  “Looks like there was a dark-colored rope where someone hung a flower pot or one of those plastic owls that are supposed to keep songbirds from building nests under the eave.”

  Diamond still had his arm up, pointing. He drew in the air with his index finger. “Someone got up on that deck and attached a long coil of nylon cord. They took the coiled rope and hiked out to that rise over there, pulling the rope tight so it went over the snow on the roof. They walked in a big arc until they got the cord to the front of the roof’s ridge.”

  Diamond walked that direction and sighted along the roof. “Except, it doesn’t look like that rise over there is high enough. You’d have to get the rope another twenty feet up to clear the cornice.”

  I went to the front of the house. “You could use the utility lines in the street,” I said. “Tie a rock to your rope and toss it over the lower lines. Those are the cable TV lines. The high voltage lines are the ones at the top. As long as you stayed away from those you wouldn’t light yourself up.”

  “That’d be better,” Diamond said, “but I still don’t think you could get your rope high enough.”

  “Remember that time we camped before they invented those bear-proof food containers? And there wasn’t a tree high enough to string up our food?”

  “Yeah,” Diamond said. “We used a three-point suspension between three trees and hung that pack out over a gully. Someone could do that here.”

  I looked up at a big Jeffrey pine that shaded Paul’s walkway. The lowest branches were a good forty feet in the air. “If someone could get a rope up over that first branch, then it could be used to hoist the other rope coming from the cable TV utility line. Adjust the tension here and there and you could drop your cord down onto the roof snow right where you want.”

  “So you agree with me,” Diamond said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Once the perp had the cord running the length of the roof, he tucked the end of it down into the snow where the roof edge is near the front door. Later, after Paul came home, he knocked on the door.” Diamond was moving around, acting out his scenario. “Paul answered, and the perp talked to him and then pretended to see what he’d already left in the snow below the roof. Paul looked and saw the item and went over to get it.

  “At just the right moment, the perp pulled the cord out of the snow where he’d tucked it out of sight, and he ran down the walkway, jerking it so hard that it cut into the snow on the roof and released it down onto Paul.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said.

  FORTY

  Diamond left, and I made phone calls as I drove back to my cabin, to Street to arrange dinner, to Sergeant Bains to tell him about Paul Riceman’s death and our suspicions that it was murder. Then I called Bill Esteban.

  “March’s friend Paul Riceman was killed in an avalanche today,” I told him.

  “What? Mother Mary. Was it a murder?”

  “I think so. Can I stop by in the morning?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll be here.”

  That evening Street told me that the dirt in Riceman’s truck looked promising as a home for a carabid like the one found in Lori Simon’s lungs. Street sensed that our evening discussion was going to descend into darker events and darker human motivations. So she invoked the one-glass rule, which meant that we could only discuss the crime during our first glass of wine. After that we had to switch to pleasant topics.

  As always, it was a good policy, and after a simple baked salmon and asparagus dinner, she decided on a sleepover, and we eventually went to bed and watched a DVD movie on my laptop.
/>   In the morning, I called information for Dust Devil, Texas, and got the number for Gabriella Mendoza, the woman who was the best friend of Maria Carrera, March and April’s mother.

  Gabriella answered on the fifth ring. “Hola.”

  “My name is Detective Owen McKenna. I’m calling from California where I’m working for Bill Esteban. You probably are aware that March Carrera died in an avalanche.”

  “Si. William called me. It is a fright to my soul. The poor boy. And April. She is on the island all alone.”

  “We think someone caused the avalanche. We think that person knew March.”

  “It gets worse,” Gabriella said. “Where is my creator in this?”

  “I have a couple of questions about when March and April were little. You took care of them.”

  “I did my best. And what has come of it? March is gone. William has kicked April out. She is having a struggle.”

  “Did April live with Bill in Tahoe or in Texas?”

  “With March and William. In Tahoe.”

  “Why did Bill kick her out?” I asked.

  “William has a temper. April has the same temper. They are like two cats who cannot live in peace. But why call me? You think the avalanche was made by a person from Texas?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Can you think of any friends of March and April who moved out west? Anyone from your community who now lives in California or Nevada?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard of anyone from your town who became a skier or snowboarder?”

  “No. You must understand, our town is very poor. The meat packing plant is the only job. Same now as then. Maria did her best. But when she died, she had nothing. With money, she could have made the car brakes repaired. She would have been able to stop the car. She died because she was poor. I did my best. William helped some. But it was very difficult. The other people in town are the same. No one has money for ski or snowboard.”