Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) Read online

  Spot shifted forward, doing a little two-step elbow shift toward me so that he was now within reaching distance. I pulled the opener out of my pocket, opened the next bottle, and drank deeply. Spot and I both stared at the flames through the wood stove window. I reached out and pet him while I drank.

  “She’s no Guinevere,” I said. “She doesn’t scintillate. There’s no gorgeous sparkle. She’s like Street was as a runaway trying to escape the abusive, deadly father. But unlike Street, who could blast through the multiple barriers with sheer force of intelligence and will and no responsibilities slowing her down, this girl has a sister to take care of. The sister is sweet and loving and deserving of all the girl can give her, but it still sucks up the girl’s mental and physical resources. The girl has no one to help. There’s no fairy dust to make it all better.”

  Spot, with new frontal exposure to the heat of the wood stove, started panting. But he was somber. He understood that my tone wasn’t happy.

  I drank more beer, guzzling it down harder now. I got to the end, drained the last drops, and set the bottle down on the floor, a hard impact, not unlike the way Evan had dropped her head to her hands.

  “Even still,” I said, “the girl’s got her own fire down in there, tamped down, half-starved of oxygen, but a fire nonetheless. From the outside, she appears to be an ordinary kid trying to make her way through life and doing a lackluster job of it. But when you get in up close, you see she’s someone who never really had a break, never got to stand at the round table and make her pitch, never got to show the knights what she could do if someone would just help get the wind in there to fan her desires.”

  FORTY-SIX

  It took two calls to get the name of the Assistant DA who was handling cases in South Lake Tahoe. I called his office.

  “Steve Ditmars’s office,”a man said.

  “Owen McKenna calling for Mr. Ditmars.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Ditmars is unavailable. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “Please. I’m the private investigator who provided most of the information that led to the indictment of Evan Rosen. I have new information about the case that Mr. Ditmars will want.”

  “Hold on, please.”

  I waited to music that had been designed as torture. This particular selection featured a male singer trying to sing with a baby girl voice and then channeling it through an echo chamber. The song had no discernable melody and unintelligible lyrics. It was an effective technique that would make most callers on hold give up. I, too, had almost succumbed when a voice came on.

  “This is Steve Ditmars.”

  “Owen McKenna. Thanks for taking my call, which is about Evan Rosen, a woman you have in custody. I have new information on the case. As you probably know, the search of Evan Rosen’s apartment revealed two thousand plus dollars in cash hidden under her garbage. The assumption was that it may have come from the armored truck robbers who were murdered. I’ve since learned that the money appears to be legitimate.”

  “Why don’t you come to my office and we’ll talk. I also have a development you’ll want to know. Something serious. Can you meet me today? Eleven a.m.?”

  “Sure.”

  The man told me where to find him in the El Dorado County government center on Johnson Boulevard, just around the corner from the jail in South Lake Tahoe. I told him I’d be there.

  At the appropriate time, Spot and I parked in the lot off Johnson. I went in and found Assistant DA Ditmars’s office. A secretary took my name and waved me in.

  Ditmars and I shook hands, said our how-do-you-dos, and made a little small talk about the weather. The man was maybe 28 years old at the outside. From just his first few words, he telegraphed an obvious, razor-sharp intelligence and substantial education. His youth might be a handicap in court. But his appearance would possibly scare jurors into doing his bidding. Ditmars was a thin, well-dressed man with a countenance so severe it would frighten children. His eyes were close set, his eyebrows angry black slashes not unlike the shape of the fright marks on the hockey masks. Ditmars had thick black hair combed up into a spiky look that had been set in place with so much goo that a saber-toothed tiger would rather take a chance on the La Brea Tar Pits than wander too close to Ditmars’s head.

  He pointed me toward a chair, sat down at his desk, and gave me a long and very serious look before he spoke.

  “You said you had information about the cash found in Ms. Rosen’s apartment.”

  I made a single nod. “Yes. I visited her at the jail last evening. She explained that she learned from her mother to always keep an emergency stash of cash, just in case things go bad. She’s a house cleaner by trade, a job that doesn’t produce a lot of income. Yet she has periodically added one hundred dollars to the kitty and built it up to over two thousand. The woman takes care of her sister Mia, a woman with a disability, and she considers the cash an insurance policy for Mia, to help her in the event that something should interfere with her house cleaning income.”

  Ditmars made the kind of nod that suggested he’d heard such explanations a thousand times over his long career in the legal profession. “Yes, I understand that this is possible. The specificity of the details make the story quite believable. But our main evidence is the button you and Sergeant Bains found in the hand of one of the victims.”

  “A button that could have come from any number of places,” I said. “However, it very likely came from Evan Rosen’s shirt. It increasingly appears that someone is trying to frame Evan for murder. I believe that the frame was carefully planned, and the real murderer chose Evan because she knew the robbers back in high school. Then he broke into Evan’s apartment, took the button from her shirt, and planted the ski pole under her clothes, all before the murders took place.”

  Ditmars rested his hands on the desk, the fingers of his left hand twisting a heavy ring, perhaps a class ring, on the ring finger of his right hand. “I understand that is a remote possibility. However, Ms. Rosen has withheld other important information, information that suggests a strong motive for the killings.”

  “And what is that?” I asked.

  “Nine years ago, when Evan Rosen was nineteen, she claimed she was sexually assaulted, possibly by multiple men. We’ve obtained a police report from the Reno Police.”

  “You’re saying she was gang raped?”

  “So she believed. She had gone to a dance rave in a warehouse area of Reno. She remembered having some drinks, dancing, and seeing some people she knew. Then she remembered nothing further until she woke up early the next morning lying on a couch at an abandoned apartment. Ms. Rosen had a shirt on, but her pants and underwear were off, the underwear torn. She was horrified and frightened. So she put on her pants and left, running two miles home to the apartment where she lived with her mother and sister. There, she took a long bath to calm herself and tried to remember what happened. She called a friend, and the friend came over and convinced her to report the crime to the Reno Police. The police took her to the hospital emergency room where they have a rape kit. Unfortunately, there was little to find. Because the woman had bathed and urinated and brushed her teeth and changed her clothes, direct evidence of any rape was gone. However, the hospital was able to get enough of a urine sample to test, and they found in her urine a drug called Rohypnol. It’s illegal in this country but legal in many other countries, where it is commonly prescribed as a sleeping pill. It is also commonly used as a date rape drug because it has little to no odor or taste and it easily dissolves in drinks. Newer supplies have had dye added because of this very problem. But the non-dye version is still available in some places. And even the version with dye can’t be seen if it’s put into dark beer or other dark drinks.”

  I said, “I assume this stuff knocks you out like other date rape drugs?”

  Ditmars nodded. “If someone drops it in your drink, it dissolves fast and renders you pretty helpless or even unconscious within fifteen minutes of consuming it. And of course, when th
e drug is combined with alcohol, it has an even more intense effect. When you awaken hours later, you feel like you’ve got a major hangover. And you generally can’t remember anything that happened during the time the drug was in your system.”

  “A terrible situation,” I said. “But what does it have to do with your current case against Ms. Rosen?”

  “As you might imagine, Evan Rosen had no memory of any assault. But in addition to waking up with her pants off, she reported feeling very hung over and with a sickening feeling that she’d had sex that she couldn’t remember. Nor could she remember anyone who’d been at the apartment with her or even how she’d gotten there.”

  I stayed silent, waiting for the punch line that Ditmars had been working toward.

  He said, “In the police report, she stated that she clearly remembered the earlier part of the evening at the rave. She said that three guys from her high school class had shown up at the dance. She didn’t dance with them, as she had always thought them disgusting, but as she was dancing somewhat provocatively – her words on the police report – with another young man, the kids from her high school catcalled her and made lewd suggestions. Later, they hung around her in a kind of triangle so that no matter which way she turned, one of them was always behind her. She said they were drunk and rude, and they scared her dance companion away. She said that she was distracted when they frightened her dance partner, and she believes it was probably at that moment that one of them dropped a pill in her drink. From that point on, she remembered nothing until she woke up in the abandoned apartment.”

  “Did the police charge anyone?” I asked.

  “No. There was no evidence and no witnesses.”

  “So there was no case to bring,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “Did she remember the names of the three guys from her high school who were catcalling her?”

  Ditmars nodded. “Yes. Lucas Jordan and Carter Remy, the two men who were killed by the ski pole spears out by Baldwin Beach. The third was another student named Gavin Pellman.”

  It was the name of the person in the other photo Rosen had pointed to in the yearbook, the third person who, in her words, didn’t deserve to live.

  Ditmars said, “Because she believes they raped her, that gives her substantial motive for wanting them dead even if money weren’t involved.”

  “The third name you mentioned,” I said. “Any idea what happened to Pellman?”

  “No.”

  “You said it was nine years ago. That’s a long time to nurse a motive,” I said.

  “Maybe it took that long for her to get brave enough or hardened enough to murder.”

  “It would take a great deal of strength to stab someone clear through with a ski pole. And from the angle of the thrust, it appears that the murderer was quite tall.”

  “Such are appearances,” Ditmars said. “But that doesn’t prove anything. Someone as devious as Evan Rosen would take that into account and try to arrange the crime to make the situation look like it doesn’t fit her well.”

  “But my other explanation makes even more sense now that you’ve found a possible motive. It gives the real murderer even more reason to frame her.”

  Ditmars shook his head. “I think you should face the facts. It’s common for people like her to end up like this, in a jail cell, at the end of a long history of bad choices.” Ditmars said it in a way that sounded like he was being philosophical. But it merely sounded petty and vicious.

  “We all make bad choices at times,” I said. “When I was young, I went to bars that I would now think were stupid places to hang out. Going to a rave and dancing provocatively may not be as safe as going to Sunday school, but it doesn’t mean you deserve to be raped.”

  Ditmars flipped his hand through the air in a dismissive wave. His spiked hair wobbled from the motion. “Of course not. But she probably did those kinds of things often, going to the wrong places, hanging out with the wrong crowd. Because people in my line of work talk shop, I know of that Reno neighborhood, and I’ve heard of Wilson High School. Kids from that part of town are notorious for getting into trouble. They know what the right thing is, but they actively choose the wrong thing.”

  “You never made bad choices?”

  “No.” Ditmars sounded affronted. “I could have. Where I grew up in the industrial part of South San Francisco, kids often got into trouble. But I decided early on to be a good kid. I got grief for it. But I had the sense to stick to my principles.”

  “How do you know that Evan Rosen didn’t do the same thing?”

  “Because she went to a rave and drank. Probably lots of times. And this time it caught up to her.”

  “Let me ask a related question,” I said.

  Ditmars frowned.

  “Did you do well in school?”

  “Of course. I was in the top five percent of my high school class. I graduated from Sac State with honors. I went to California Western School of Law in San Diego and graduated in the top half of my class. I passed the bar exam on my first try.”

  “Did you have two parents growing up?”

  “Sure. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Did both of your parents participate in your life, help you with homework, take you to events, take you traveling, take you up to The City to see a play or visit a museum? Did they take you on family vacations?”

  Ditmars looked shocked.

  I continued, “Did your parents have enough money that you never worried about food on the table? Did you ever want for a doctor or dentist when you needed one?”

  Ditmars’s ears had turned red. His eyes were even narrower than before.

  “Listen, McKenna, I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but…”

  “I’m pointing out that you had a host of advantages that pre-selected you for success. For you to sit here and judge Evan Rosen with your sanctimonious attitude is the height of callous indifference. Maybe she made some bad choices, but she was raised in a crappy neighborhood by a mom whose husband abandoned the family. As long as she can remember, she’s had to help take care of her disabled older sister. Her mom had significant health problems and died a few years back. Now the sister lives with Evan. Evan cleans houses, which is back-breaking work. She has to bring her sister along on her jobs. She never had anyone dedicated to giving her a full life with an intellectually-engaging childhood. Nevertheless, Evan was valedictorian of her high school class. And she has a four point O average at UNR.”

  Ditmars shook his head. “Anyone could be valedictorian at that high school.”

  I continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “But she couldn’t go to college after she got out of high school, partly because she had to stay home to help take care of her sister, partly because they had no money, but mostly because she didn’t have anyone giving her positive feedback and showing her the way. She has a dream of someday going to law school and joining you in your profession, but her circumstances have so far precluded that from even being a remote possibility.”

  Ditmars stood up. He was shaking with anger. “McKenna, you are so far out of line, you’d better be careful. Yes, I had decent parents who tried to do well by me, but I bootstrapped my way all the way up through school, studying my ass off, taking out student loans, which I’ll be paying off for the next twenty years. I didn’t have a rich daddy who paid all my bills. I’m covering it all myself. So you can leave this office right now.”

  I stood up to go. “Just one more question. Did either of your parents or aunts or uncles go to law school, let’s say California Western School of Law where you went?”

  Ditmars hesitated. “What if one of them did? So what? I earned every accolade I’ve been given.”

  “No further questions, counselor,” I said, and walked out.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Because I was in South Lake Tahoe, I decided to stop by the hospital and see how Jonas Montrop was doing.

  There was a different woman at the reception d
esk. After inspecting my credentials, she consulted her computer and told me that he’d been released that morning.

  “Does your record show where he went? Do you know who picked him up?”

  “No, I’m sorry. He probably went home, right? I remember him waiting here for a bit. I noticed him because he looked worried. Then a cab arrived, and he left. We have a phone number on file. I can’t give it to you, but it’s a local prefix if that helps.”

  I pulled out my note of his home number and read it off.

  “Yes, that’s what we have,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  I left and drove over to Tahoe Keys Boulevard and pulled into Jonas’s drive, parking next to the old VW microbus.

  When I knocked on the door, a frightened voice said, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Detective Owen McKenna, Jonas. I went to the hospital, and they said you’d been released. I thought I’d stop by and see how you are doing.”

  The door opened an inch until chains stopped its movement. Jonas looked out at me, then carefully peered past me and to the sides. He shut the door. I heard two chains being slid. I knew that no number of chains would secure the door because it was set into such a lightweight frame. But if it gave him comfort, that was good.

  The door opened. Jonas motioned me inside, then quickly shut the door behind me, rehooking the chains.

  “The cops had someone replace the broken lock,” he said, pointing. “He put metal straps up to hold the door frame back together. And he added two chains. So at least I’m a little safer.”

  “Are you worried the kidnappers will come back?”

  “I shouldn’t be, if only because my stepdad is now dead. Who would they ransom?” He glanced at the windows. “But I admit I’m afraid. I used to like this cabin. Now I just see how the door is flimsy, a couple of the window locks don’t work, and the back door is completely hidden by trees so none of the neighbors would notice if someone broke in. I’m going to move to an apartment building as soon as I can find one for a similar rent. That will be safer.”