Tahoe Payback (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 15) Read online

“Stay in touch,” he said, and we hung up.

  Next, I checked in with Street.

  “Any more feelings you’re being followed?” I asked.

  “No. A good day in that regard.”

  “Want to have dinner?”

  “Two nights in a row?” Street said. “Aren’t you the serious boyfriend.”

  Street and I ate dinner at her condo. I showed her the 50 Worst Charities list that the charity apologist had given me.

  Almost immediately, she spotted the Red Roses charity on the list. “Look, it’s got Dory’s real name listed. Do you suppose the murderer found her off this list?”

  “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Then what about the victim who died with a tennis ball in his mouth. He could be connected to a charity on this list!”

  “Maybe,” I said again.

  “Let me go over these.” She started at the top, dragging her fingertip down the names. “Look.” She sounded excited. “On the Fifty Worst list is something called, The Mountain Sporting Life Charity. The manager is listed as Nolan M. Avalon. Let me look that up on my computer.”

  She moved to her desk and started typing.

  “Owen, this could be it. It says, ‘The Mountain Sporting Life Charity gets people moving.’” She read off the screen. “‘The key to a healthy life is movement, and nothing moves like sports. Moving benefits people’s bodies and their brains. Moving prevents childhood obesity. Moving aids education. Moving helps self-esteem. Moving develops strong bones and muscles.’ And then, in big letters, it says ‘Moving Is Key To Success In Life and The Sporting Life Gets People Moving.’”

  She tapped some more keys, then dragged her finger to scroll down. “Now look at this. On this page there are multiple photos of people playing tennis.”

  “That’s revealing.”

  “And there’s an online donation form with boxes you can click for different levels of donation. And next to each box is a little balloon with writing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Look.” Street turned her computer so we could both see the screen. She pointed. “See here? You can click boxes for ten dollars or twenty or, get this, twenty-seven dollars and thirty-six cents. Then the boxes go to fifty dollars, seventy-five dollars and one hundred dollars. Below that is a gold-colored box with a gold star next to it that says, ‘Join the exclusive ranks of Golden Givers.’ Next to the ten dollar box, it says, ‘Get one hundred people moving.’ Next to the twenty dollar box, it says, ‘Get three hundred people moving.’ And next to the box that says twenty-seven dollars and thirty-six cents, it says, ‘Get five hundred people moving.’ Then there’s a red arrow that points to that box and in red caps it says, ‘Check Here For Our Most Popular Option and Signal your Devotion to Health.’”

  Street was doing an exaggerated shake of her head as she pointed at the screen. “Down below is a five-hundred-dollar box. It says, ‘Join at the Gold Star level and become a Golden Giver. We’ll rush you a signed, limited edition certificate of thanks along with the Gold Medallion commemorative necklace. This spectacular medallion comes with the Forever Feminine bar chain for women and the Go For Glory golden rope chain for men.’”

  She turned to look at me, an expression of disbelief on her face. “You’re not just choosing how much to give, you’re selecting the most popular option. You’re not just giving money, you’re joining an exclusive club. They aren’t just going to send you a plastic trinket, they’re going to rush you a spectacular gold medallion necklace. This is designed to suck in the least discerning people who are desperate for someone to send them something that makes them feel like they’re doing something valuable.”

  I said, “Can you imagine that this company actually gets anyone to move?”

  “I don’t know,” Street said. “It sure looks sleazy. Let me look up the manager, Nolan M. Avalon.” She typed. “Nothing comes up on Google.”

  “I’ll give the name to Santiago. Agent Ramos, too. Maybe the guy’s in one of their databases.”

  “You know what else this means,” Street said.

  “What?”

  “It means that anyone connected to the organization that compiled this Fifty Worst Charity list could be a suspect in Dory’s death and Nolan Avalon’s death, if, that is, Nolan was the victim hanging from the flagpole.”

  “I was wondering that,” I said, “because the charity watchdog guy who gave me this list seemed quite angry at the evil people who run scam charities. So I asked him if he ever comes up to Tahoe, and he said all the time. He has a cabin here.”

  Street raised her eyebrows.

  “Also, the Bureau of Investigation woman who chases charity fraud for the California Department of Justice seems to have a permanent case of anger for all scammers. I casually asked her if she ever gets a break to come up to Tahoe. She hesitated, then said she was up here last week.”

  Street’s eyebrows went higher.

  Later, as Spot and I were about to go, Street said, “This private investigator stuff is exciting. Dead bodies from twisted murders and financial fraud and shady characters.”

  I looked at Spot. “Hear that, Largeness? What we do is exciting.”

  Spot yawned, long and wide.

  Back at my cabin, I called Sergeant Santiago even though it was late. If he didn’t want his phone to ring, he’d set it on voicemail.

  He answered.

  “Owen McKenna calling,” I said. “Any ID yet on the body you took off the Kings Beach flagpole?”

  “Nope.”

  “I have a name to consider. Nolan M. Avalon. He’s listed on a Fifty Worst Charities compilation by a so-called charity watchdog group down in Folsom. His charity is called The Mountain Sporting Life Charity and their tag line is, ‘We get people moving.’ On the website are multiple pictures of people playing tennis.”

  “And this guy Avalon is on the list?”

  “Yeah, he’s listed as the CEO. I haven’t found anything on him yet, but what’s notable is that this Fifty Worst list is the first place I’ve seen the Red Roses Charity listed, and that listing also includes the Red Roses CEO, Dory Spatt.”

  “The woman who got strung up on the island in Emerald Bay.”

  “Right.”

  “Good lead,” Santiago said. “Let’s hope it goes somewhere. Hey, when you referred to the Fifty Worst list, you said it was by a so-called charity watchdog group. What does that mean, so-called?”

  “It’s called Charity Lights Archive, and it’s really just a lobbying group that’s owned by charities. It peddles biased information that the charities want to present as unbiased.”

  “Ah. And maybe some crank is using that list to track down bad charities and knock off their CEOs.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “The person to contact at Charity Lights Archive is Reese Rangeman. Maybe he has more information on Nolan Avalon.” I read him the number off the info sheets I’d gotten from the Bureau of Investigation.

  “Will do. Thanks.”

  Late the next morning, Doc Lee pulled his little black sports car into The Red Hut parking lot just after me. He got out, took a look at Spot, whose head was out the window, and walked around the far side of his car to keep his distance. I’d never known Lee to be afraid of dogs. Maybe it was just giant dogs. Probably, he simply didn’t want any shedding hair and dog slobber to end up on his clothes.

  We shook hands. His graceful fingers and perfect manicure seemed designed for delicate surgery. A stranger might expect a precise, light grip. But he nearly crushed my knuckles.

  We walked into the restaurant.

  Like me, Lee wore jeans. But his were dark brown and fit just so and they didn’t have any faded-color wear at the knees and butt. His shoes were tan suede and appeared designed for hiking, but there were no stains like Tahoe hikers get from stepping in snow and puddles and trudging through dirt. Lee’s shirt was the same tan as his shoes, and it had a discreet logo patch sewn on the pocket flap. The sleeves were turned up in a careful fold
revealing tan forearms, thin but muscular. His watch had a new band the same brown as his jeans.

  “Table by the window?” he said to the host, who brought us over to an outside corner. The tables at The Red Hut are ’50s diner design, with the classic salt and pepper shaker and napkin holder. Above our heads was a section of chairlift with two seats. It set the Tahoe-Laid-Back attitude.

  We ordered without looking at menus. I got an omelette and coffee. Doc Lee got scrambled eggs and pancakes and side orders of hashbrowns and toast and sausage and milk and OJ and coffee.

  “Hungry?” I said.

  “We have these little bags of M&Ms in the ER. Six bags can get me through most any night. But I should probably have some other nutrients.”

  “Implying that M-and-Ms have nutrients?” I said.

  “Sugar,” he said as if I were missing the obvious. “One of the basic food groups for docs.”

  “I knew you were hyper concerned about nutrition, what with being a doc and all. But I must have missed the candy part.”

  “With sugar and strong coffee, you can face anything, even gunshot wounds and knife attacks.”

  “We have those in Tahoe?”

  Doc Lee looked up at the chairlift, thinking. “Just last year I had a lady who was cutting up onions, and she sliced off the tip of her finger.”

  “And that qualifies as a knife attack.”

  He shrugged. “This is Tahoe.”

  A waiter brought our food. I had to scrunch my plate over to one side to make room for all of Doc Lee’s plates.

  The way he attacked his food made me think of the way Spot devours hotdogs.

  “You had a question about death,” Lee said through a mouthful of pancakes.

  “Yeah. You’ve probably heard about our recent murders. The victims were hung by their ankles and were found with items in their mouths. We haven’t got the toxicology reports back yet. But I’m wondering if hanging upside down will normally kill a person.”

  “Here’s the thing about death,” Lee said as he stuffed sausage into his mouth, eating with gusto. “People are just another kind of animal. Like animals, some are fragile. Some are tough and resilient. You can’t tell which in advance. You tie one person up by his feet, he will hang, fighting for life, for days. Another person anticipates that they’re probably going to die, and they lose the fire and die of stress in a few hours. A third maybe has an undiagnosed aneurysm. In the brain. Or on the aortic arch.” Doc Lee paused to work on his hash browns.

  “You know about our circulatory system?” he said.

  “Sort of. Our heart pumps the blood. Arteries carry our blood away from the heart. Veins return it to the heart.”

  “Right,” Lee said, chewing, then swallowing. “The thing is, the heart produces enough blood pressure to drive the blood through the smallest vessels, our capillaries, where the blood delivers nutrients and oxygen and picks up the products of metabolism like carbon dioxide. But when the blood comes out of the capillaries and gathers in our veins, there’s no more blood pressure to drive the blood back to our heart.”

  I figured out where he was going. “Which is why our blood spurts if we cut an artery and just oozes if we cut a vein.”

  “Yeah.” Lee slurped more coffee. “So to aid in venous circulation, our veins have one-way valves in them. Especially in our legs. Those valves keep our blood from running back downhill. When you flex your legs and work your muscles and move and bend and do all the other stuff of an active life, those movements squeeze your veins here and there, squishing the blood inside. Because of the one-way valves, the blood can only squish one direction, back up toward your heart. But when you turn upside down, those valves don’t do anything to prevent all the blood in your body from wanting to rush up your veins to your head. Even in the arteries, without all the one-way valves, the pressures and flows work when people are upright or horizontal or anywhere in between. When people are upside down, the arterial flow gets messed up, too.”

  “Stand on your head for very long,” I said, “and you’ll be very red faced when you get back up.”

  “To say the least. Now let’s go back to the person who has a brain aneurysm. Turn him upside down, the increased pressure can cause that baby to rupture. The brain floods with blood, and the pressure on the brain shuts it down in minutes. In the case of an aortic aneurysm, a rupture causes the person to bleed out internally in less time than it takes to pound a beer.” Lee slurped coffee, then shoveled a big forkful of syrup-soaked pancakes into his mouth.

  “When you say bleed out, you mean all the blood that is normally in the arteries and veins comes out of them and collects inside the body cavities.”

  “Yeah,” Doc Lee mumbled, chewing. “Depending on where the aneurysm is, that part of the body fills with blood. Could be the thoracic cavity or the abdominal cavity. But inverted suspension would create a greater stress on aneurysms that are higher in the body.”

  “Like the brain or the aortic arch,” I said.

  Lee nodded. “You have a good grasp of anatomy. You could be a doc.”

  “But would I want to?”

  He looked at me as if my question made no sense.

  “Let’s say a person doesn’t have an aneurysm,” I said. “What if they’re relatively healthy and have a strong constitution. How long would they typically last when hung upside down?”

  “Hard to say,” Lee mumbled. He was finishing off his sausages. Considering how vigorously he ate, I couldn’t see how he remained so thin. Maybe it was the one-meal-a-day constraints of a 70-hour ER work week. “Could be days. More likely, one day. They didn’t teach us this in school.”

  “I want you to play murderer for me. If you were going to kill someone, why would you choose to hang them upside down, considering that they might live a long time?”

  Doc Lee chewed more pancakes. He swallowed and said, “I wouldn’t try to kill someone by hanging them upside down. It wouldn’t be painful in any major way, but it would still be a kind of torture.”

  “But what if you chose the hanging thing because it suited you for media purposes?”

  “Then I’d kill them first so they didn’t suffer.”

  FORTY

  I thanked Doc Lee for his time and went to my office.

  Doc Lee had me wondering about killers who want to punish their victims as opposed to merely wanting them dead. If a murder victim dies in a painless way, maybe the killer just wanted to collect an insurance benefit and didn’t want the victim to suffer. But if a killer goes to the trouble of stringing his victim upside down and leaving them to die of exposure, then it would seem that the killer had a great deal of anger.

  I remembered what Street had read about the Mountain Sporting Life Charity that gets kids moving. It made me wonder about how charities use sports to help disabled people. I also wondered how they find the disabled people they help. Or if you were disabled, how would you reach out to a charity that might help you.

  I thought of Aubrey Blackwood, the watercolor painter with MS. She’d given me her card. I found it and dialed her number.

  After I identified myself and we chatted a bit, I said, “I’ve an awkward question.”

  “I can probably give you an awkward answer,” Aubrey said, sounding cheerful.

  “I’m working on a case involving a charity whose purpose is to help people with disabilities. I’m wondering how they find the people they benefit. Or does it go the other way? Do the people getting benefits find the charity? So I thought I’d call you and ask if you’ve ever had dealings with charities. No doubt there are charities that provide benefits to people with MS.”

  “Well, now, you’ve just lifted up a rock with some nasty stuff underneath it.”

  “Your experience hasn’t been great,” I said.

  “Let’s just say that those of us in the disabled community trade stories now and then. The gist of those stories is that we don’t see much help. When I lived in the Bay Area, I belonged to a poker club for disabled women
. We called ourselves the Broken-Bod Girls. We met twice a month to play cards. And one of our running gags was that whenever we’d receive charity come-ons, we’d bring them to our meeting and make fun of them. It was always a riot reading them and mocking them.”

  I laughed. “It’s obvious that you all love charities.”

  “Yeah. I’ve actually had no personal dealings with charities. None has ever contacted me about anything. When I was a kid, I once had a nurse who put together a list of needy kids who had Multiple Sclerosis. My name was on the list. The nurse sent it off to multiple charities that claimed to help children with difficult conditions. But from what the nurse said to me a year later, none of the kids on the list ever heard anything from any charity. I’m not saying that charities don’t help the needy. Maybe they fund projects behind the scenes. Like maybe the nurse would never find out if a charity is paying for medical equipment at the hospital and such. But I never got any personal help.”

  “So you don’t feel any animosity toward charities?”

  “Oh, no. We just made fun of the goofy pleas they send out to get people to send in money. You’ve probably seen them. There’ll be a picture of some little girl who can’t stand up, and under the picture it says ‘If you send us twenty-five dollars, we’ll be able to buy crutches for this poor little girl and give her a new chance on life.’ Well, I was that poor little girl who couldn’t stand up, and my father had to buy my crutches with the money he made as a clerk in a department store shoe department. That man helped me in every way, carried me when my legs got too stiff, bought me clothes, and worked nights so he could take me to and from school in this old used wheelchair he found at a junkyard. He even encouraged me to go to college, and he put money in an account for that. That money eventually paid for two years of my tuition. I got my degree in accounting and spent my entire career working for Solano County. I’ve always said that if you want help with your disability, don’t look to charity handouts, because they won’t come through. Just find a father like mine.”