Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) Page 34

  I visualized another dead body in the sleeping berth, wondering if it was Kang.

  But intruding into my thoughts were other things I’d seen, things I hadn’t made sense of until now.

  I remembered that even petite, well-meaning Evan Rosen had said that she and others had picked on the nerds when they were in high school. Such common harassment can be humiliating. And that might have put Evan and the robbers on someone’s revenge list.

  In that thought came the realization of what this case was really about.

  It wasn’t about money at all. It was about bullying.

  Kids had done what kids do. They’d picked on a kid who was probably younger, smaller, and weaker.

  What they never could have imagined in their youth was that the kid they picked on, the nerd they thought was so uncool, was smarter. And he grew up to be a psychopath who convinced the guys who bullied him to participate in a robbery to get a huge amount of money. Then he killed them off in the most violent, punishing way possible. It was all done in a manner to make the motive look like money, and pin the crime on someone else by using a double frame.

  Pick on the wrong kid, and you might suffer a payback beyond anything you can imagine.

  As Diamond was reaching to open the broken door, we heard movement. Thuds and bumps. Then came footsteps on the roof above us. The killer was still alive. He’d scrambled up through the sleeping berth hatch and clambered onto the deck above the main cabin, the deck that was our roof.

  I called out in a loud voice. “You don’t have to do this, Jonas. You’ve demonstrated that you are superior to all these dirtballs who tormented you as a kid. You’ve proven it to me, to everyone.”

  As I spoke, Diamond opened the broken door to the sleeping berth, leaned in and looked up.

  There was another grunt. Then came the explosive sound of crunching material as a ski pole spear plunged down through the roof above my head. The pointy spear missed my shoulder by a foot. As it stopped, held in place by the grip of the roofing material above, its point was an inch above Mia’s head.

  Diamond ran up out of the main cabin and through the pilothouse out to the aft deck.

  I pulled Mia off the settee, and we followed Diamond up through the companionway into the pilothouse. Spot joined us. The roof over the pilothouse was taller, giving a bit more room in case Jonas thrust more ski pole spears down from above.

  Mia squirmed in my arms as I forced her down onto the bench where Evan lay beneath the mound of yellow rain slickers. I realized that she still had tape over her mouth. I pulled it off in a single, fast jerk. She cried in pain and shock.

  “Evan is here!” I said at Mia’s ear. “She’s frozen, and I need you to warm her up.” I lifted up on the pile of coats. Evan was still unconscious, and I still couldn’t detect any shivering, a very bad sign. “Do you see, Mia? Evan is very cold, and she needs you to warm her up.”

  Mia realized it was Evan and began shrieking. Her cries were both joyful and fearful.

  I gently pushed her down next to Evan. “Hold her, Mia. Warm her up. I’ll put these raincoats over both of you.”

  Mia draped herself over Evan and held her hard, and I covered them both with raincoats. “Don’t move until I come back,” I said.

  Spot looked toward the door where Diamond had run out, then looked down at where Evan and Mia lay under the pile of raincoats.

  “Spot!” I said. I took his collar and pulled him over next to the heaped pile of yellow raincoats. I pointed at Evan and Mia and said, “GUARD THEM.” I lifted the pile of coats to expose Evan and Mia’s heads and directed Spot’s nose to them. When I was certain he’d gotten a good whiff of them, I said, “GUARD THEM!” once again.

  I shut the door down to the cabin, then ran out of the pilothouse, shutting the door behind me so that Spot wouldn’t be tempted to abandon his station. With the doors shut, Spot would stay better focused. If the killer should attempt to enter the pilothouse, Spot would be on guard.

  I found Diamond on the port side of the pilothouse. He had his gun up, pointing toward the bow. Standing on the foredeck at the tip of the bow was a figure in the darkness. He was wearing dark pants and hoodie with the hood pulled up. So the only easy thing to see was the bright white hockey mask, an angry, scary design that looked like Hades himself. It was made of hard plastic and had angular, menacing eye openings. There was a pointy nose with narrow slit nostrils. The mouth was a vertical grill of dark stripes that gave it a Hannibal Lecter look.

  Perched over his shoulder was a large tube, a quiver for ski pole spears. In the opposite hand was a tennis racket. Because the rest of his body was dark, the mask and racket and quiver seemed to float in space.

  “You’re trapped, Jonas,” I called out.

  “That’s what you think.”

  “Psychopaths like you are tripped up by your arrogance.”

  “Is that what you think? That I’ve been tripped up? Oh, but I have lots more surprises.”

  “Too late,” I said. “You went too far, carried on a charade that was too elaborate and involved too many people.”

  “McKenna, you don’t have a clue.”

  “Your singular achievement was to fake your own kidnapping before the other crimes took place. You couldn’t be considered a suspect when you were supposedly strung up in the boat, right? That took impressive planning, killing your stepfather with his paddle board and then leaving the forged note about me on his desk. You knew that it would draw me into the case, and you hoped I’d find you tied up in your boat, thereby cementing your alibi.”

  “And you fell for it all the way,” he said, laughing.

  “What was your stepdad’s phrase? Obfuscation is fortification. The dirt decoy bag was obfuscation, right? If Kang had arrived earlier than normal to garden, he might have seen you in disguise. You would have shouted something about finding dirt instead of ransom money. Kang would never have thought it was you. And the cops would never think there was a connection between you and some strange sequence of events that left dirt in your stepdad’s car. A son would simply steal money or simply kill a father. The obfuscation made it look like something else.

  “Then you created the rope burns on your wrists and urinated in your underwear to set up the timeline that convinced us that you were tied up for days, while you were actually out killing your stepdad and robbing the Reno Armored truck and then murdering your fellow robbers. Spearing them with ski poles using your tennis racket as a woomera to connect with Flynn’s Australian background was another brilliant move. It’s too bad I untied the ropes that bound you. If I’d simply cut the lines, that would have preserved the knots. We would have been able to see what kind of clever slip knot you’d used so that you could put your hands through loops of line and tighten them after you’d waded out to your boat.

  “If I hadn’t found you, you would have released yourself and claimed you finally undid the ropes that tied you.”

  Jonas laughed again, a cackle of delight as if I were admiring his genius.

  “We never found any other clothes. Did you walk all the way from your house wearing nothing but underwear? Probably not. You must have had another boat to use for transportation. So much obfuscation. Well done.”

  Several yards beyond Jonas, moored to the same buoy that held the pilothouse boat, was an aluminum fishing boat with an outboard motor. It was probably how he arrived from the South Shore, and it was his intended escape vehicle after he left a boat full of dead bodies.

  “You’re demonstrating how little you know,” Jonas shouted. “You and the cop and the women will die, and Flynn will disappear at the bottom of Lake Tahoe. And it will be obvious to the world that Flynn was the killer and chief robber. You want obfuscation, just go through Flynn’s things. You’ll find the receipt for the purchase of a bunch of hockey masks. I showed them to Flynn, and he got his prints on them. People will think he was the source for all of them. There’s even one hidden in Randy Bosworth’s house and another one at my stepdad�
�s house. No one will be able to figure it all out.”

  “We know that your stepfather didn’t buy his current house in Incline Village until five years ago. I’m guessing you didn’t really live in Incline before that,” I said. “You knew Flynn and the other kids at Wilson High in Reno. You referred to Flynn living in the projects. But it wasn’t a joke about some building in Incline Village. It was a poor neighborhood in Reno where you lived, too. Right, Jonas? You went to the same schools, getting bullied by the older kids, right? You faked everything about this case, the ransom phone call, all the suspects. You probably used stories of potential riches to shape the behavior of the gardener Kang.”

  Jonas started to say something, then stopped.

  I wanted him to confess to the murders, so I kept pushing.

  “I bet you loved getting revenge on those jerks who pushed you around as a kid. They probably beat you up and humiliated you. So the only reasonable thing was to kill them, wasn’t it? It was an amazing strategy to get them all involved as actual robbers. How delighted they must have been to have you come to them with this opportunity for riches. Then, at the end, you made sure they saw you as you speared each one of them to death. That was the ultimate goal, to be certain they understood it was revenge.” I let the statement hang.

  “But Evan didn’t torment you, did she? I’ve met her, Jonas. I can imagine that she might have been rude and brusque and even dismissive of you back in high school. But did she go beyond that? From what I know of her, I doubt it. Yet you were willing to let her take the blame for the murders.”

  Jonas didn’t reply.

  I waited, wanting to charge forward and grab him but not wanting him to leap into the water, where I’d have to swim after him as he raced to the the small powerboat.

  After ten long seconds came his voice, a high, wrenching tenor, garbled behind the hockey mask, and choked with tears. “I was just a little kid in elementary school, eleven years old, when the Three Gs came after me. That’s short for Three Geniuses. That’s what those scum called themselves. They were so stupid, they thought that was clever. They trapped me in the corner of the school playground and put dog shit down my shirt.

  “So I threw the dog shit at them. The teacher didn’t see what they did, but she did see me. I got suspended! They called the apartment where I lived. But of course my stepfather wasn’t around. He was off in San Francisco putting together another one of his scams. I was living with neighbors in the same building as the Three Gs. And the neighbor lady was too busy to come to school and sign the form for them to let me back in. Because of that, I had to spend ten days stuck at home before they let me back in school.”

  Jonas backed up against the rail at the bow of the boat. His body leaned out over the water below, but he was held in place by his boot heel, which he hooked on the lower railing.

  “The second time the Three Gs did it, I ran to the teacher and showed her. She thought I’d faked it and said I was disgusting. Later, because I’d told the teacher, the Three Gs beat me up, slamming my head onto the ground. I had to go to the doctor and get thirteen stitches in my head. The entire year was like that. I had to endure some kind of torture at least once a week.” Jonas stopped for a moment. I could hear him crying.

  “Every new school year, they came up with a new torture. Even after they dropped out of school, they would hold me down and cut off my hair in weird patterns. They poured urine down the front of my pants so that it looked like I urinated on myself. They stole my books, partially burned them, then left them on the principal’s doorstep so he could find them with my name inside. And you know why? They said it was the toll that brainiacs had to pay to make the world fair.

  “I was fourteen when my plan for revenge began to take shape. There was nothing I could conceive of that would be sufficient for the years of torture they put me through. But I made sure they could see me during their last moments. That was sweet, sweet, revenge.”

  “But why put Evan through such revenge?”

  “They were looking for me after school one day. I hid inside the apartment maintenance shed. It was the best hiding place. They never would have found me. But Evan saw me as I went in. She told them where I was. They gave me the worst beating of my life.”

  “Evan was just a kid, too, right?” I said. “Most kids do crappy things at some point. But she didn’t participate in beating you, did she? Maybe she was forced to tell them where you were. Later, they raped her, Jonas. They committed a worse crime against her than they ever did against you.”

  “Telling them where to find me was still a crime! It was terrible to be sold out!” He was panting hard, his enraged breaths making a shrill noise as the air rushed through the slots in the hockey mask. Gradually, his breathing slowed. When he resumed talking, his voice was a low hiss.

  “They committed hate crimes against me. For that, they had to pay. Even my evil stepdad got his punishment. He ridiculed me from the time I was a little kid, saying that my acne was my fault and that I would never get a girl if I acted so nerdy. He was clever, and he knew how to dupe people, but he was stupid and mean. Just like the rest of them. He pretended to be a caretaker for the three big bands that kept houses on the lake. He skimmed their accounts by making up fake charges for fake repairs. What a small-timer! Padding the maintenance bills! He wrote the alarm codes in his book. It was so easy to look at his booking calendar and see when the bands were out of town. For years, I’ve had access to their houses and cars and boats.”

  Jonas reached his left hand up and drew a ski pole spear from the quiver.

  “Don’t do it, Jonas. Sergeant Martinez has you in his sights. He’s an excellent marksman.”

  “Look, I’m turning myself in. I just thought you’d want to see how it works. The tennis racket woomera. The ski pole spear. I used ancient aboriginal principles, but I’ve created a new weapon. Much more efficient. And because it’s a tennis racket, it’s completely disguised.”

  Diamond said, “Raise that racket above your shoulder, you’re dead.”

  “See,” Jonas continued as if he hadn’t heard Diamond speak, “you just nock the back end of the spear into the upper rim of the tennis racket, like this.” He placed the notched end of ski pole spear against the outer end of the racket as he spoke. The spear seemed to click into place. “Kind of like nocking an arrow onto a bowstring. But instead of an arrow lying against the bow for support, the spear lies against the racket. Your fingertips hold the spear next to the racket handle so you can easily carry it. The spear is longer than the racket, but the extra length is hidden behind your forearm. It’s a brilliant design. When it comes time to hurl the spear, you release your fingertips as you begin your swing. The spear tip swings out and up while the end of the racket propels the spear to a very high speed by pushing against the end of the spear, the same way a bowstring propels an arrow from its end. After a little practice, you can get the spear to go wherever you like, not unlike the way you can direct a tennis ball. It’s very powerful as you’ve already seen.” He began to raise the racket out from his waist as if to show us.

  “Drop your weapon!” Diamond said. “Drop it now!”

  “Okay, okay! Don’t get so tense. I’ll set it down on the deck.”

  Diamond was rock steady aiming his gun as Jonas slowly stepped forward across the foredeck above the sleeping berth. When Jonas was a few feet from Diamond, he bent over and laid the racket with its nocked spear down on the roof deck above the main cabin.

  Diamond made a little head movement toward me even though he kept his gun and his eyes on Jonas. I leaned over, reached across the deck, picked up the racket and spear, and stepped away.

  “Now your quiver,” Diamond said. His gun was just four feet from Jonas’s chest.

  “I have to reach my hands above my shoulder to get it off.”

  “Move very slowly.”

  Jonas reached up to the quiver strap and slipped it off his shoulder. He used his other hand to grab the quiver by its open end.


  “I’m going to put it down where I set the racket,” he said.

  Diamond didn’t move.

  Gripping the quiver across its open end, Jonas bent over and gently lowered the quiver to the deck. “There. All safe. You can now...” He flipped the quiver toward Diamond, making Diamond jerk his gun out of the way.

  Like a sprinter just out of the starting blocks, Jonas exploded forward. He took two steps and leaped up onto the roof of the pilothouse. He took another step and then jumped up into the air.

  Diamond swung his gun around and fired.

  Jonas landed with both feet on the hatch in the pilothouse roof.

  I saw that he’d grabbed one of the ski pole spears as he’d tossed the quiver. He held the spear next to him, its oily sheen catching the light, as he crashed through the shattered hatch and dropped out of sight down into the space where Evan and Mia lay.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  I ran along the narrow deck at the side of the pilothouse while Diamond ran down the opposite side. I heard the crank of the engine starter motor. The engine rumbled, then roared. The boat moved forward with a sudden jerk, nearly sending me running off the stern into the lake.

  I caught myself by grabbing the side rail.

  The boat accelerated fast, the bow rising into the air. I realized that Jonas must have detached the mooring line when he was at the bow. The big boat rumbled at full throttle, heading west into the lake.

  I got to the rear pilothouse door just before Diamond. I was wondering if Spot was standing guard over Mia and Evan when his growl roared from within. Then came a scream.

  The boat jerked into a left turn as I pulled open the pilothouse door.

  All I could see in the dark was the pile of yellow raincoats, a tussle of movement in the center of the space, and the scary hockey mask appearing to float in the darkness. Spot’s deep growl mixed with Jonas’s high-pitched cry. It seemed as if Spot was shaking Jonas. There was a thrashing motion that moved toward the doorway.