Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) Read online

  “C’mon up and I’ll show you.”

  It took twenty-five minutes for Santiago and three other deputies to climb up the slope. Two of them didn’t have snowshoes, which have ice claws on them to prevent slipping on ice and snow. So it was an arduous task to get up the mountain. As they approached, I could see them single file, carefully stepping in Spot’s and my tracks to avoid sinking in deep. When they finally arrived, I held out my gloved hand, palm up, the cigar butt balancing. He looked at it.

  “Your dog found that?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “After you scented him on the shell casings. I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe there is no shell casing to be found. But he found something equally out of place in this landscape.”

  Santiago pulled out a Ziploc bag, turned it inside out with his hand inside, and picked the cigar butt off my palm and bagged it. He shook his head as if confused.

  “It would be like if I said I dropped a quarter in the woods, and you looked around and could find no quarter. But if you saw something like, say, a ring, you would probably pick it up. Equally out of place.”

  “I guess it makes sense.” Santiago looked around the setting. “A perfect sniper’s nest,” Santiago said. “From this distance, you’d have to be a pro with a rifle, but there is a great sight line to Milo’s deck. So how did he escape? And how did he get here without leaving tracks?”

  “If you walk on snowshoes, you leave tracks,” I said, stating the obvious. “If you come in on skis, cross-country or downhill, you generally leave a track.”

  “The sun is pretty intense,” Santiago said, “but any track would still show, right?”

  “Yeah. But a skilled skier can come and go on spring corn snow without leaving a track,” I said.

  “I don’t understand.” Santiago was shaking his head. “You just talked about how a skier would leave a track.”

  I nodded. “Yes, if the skier skied forward in the traditional way. But you can side-slip down corn snow leaving only the faintest of marks. A skier going sideways on corn snow is like a smoothing machine. Like skimming sheetrock mud with a wide trowel. No tracks, no marks, except possibly a small line from the skier’s tips and tails. And just a few minutes of hot sun would blend and obscure that.”

  The sergeant turned and looked around the sight. “You’re implying that the shooter side-slipped into this space and took his shot. Then he’d have to side-slip out of here to leave without making tracks.”

  “Right.” I walked to the upper side of the boulder grouping and pointed. “Somewhere up the mountain above this spot, probably a long way up, the shooter was skiing the normal way. He came to a stop, then started side-slipping down to this spot.”

  Spot lifted his head and looked at me.

  “Not you, Spot,” I said. “This spot. This place.”

  Santiago was frowning. “I’m not a pro on the boards, but I know that a good skier can control that kind of descent so that he gradually goes forward or backward as he slips.”

  “Right. I figure the shooter slid his way into this area through those boulders.” I pointed above me. “He paused here, rested his rifle on this rock for support while he aimed and shot. Pleased with his shot, he tossed his cigar butt under that boulder. Who would ever find that, right? It probably didn’t occur to him that someone would bring a dog up here. So he put his rifle back in his pack or sling or however he carried it, then side-slipped his way down through here. When he got far enough away that he thought it was safe, he probably skied away in the normal fashion. When he got to where the snow stopped, he would have taken off his skis and hiked down the slope. Or got into a car he’d previously placed.”

  Santiago thought about it, his eyes narrowed. “Even a long sniper rifle would slide right into a ski bag that he could carry in plain sight, wherever he wanted.”

  I nodded.

  Santiago looked up the slope. “I don’t like this at all.”

  SIX

  When we got back down to Scarlett Milo’s house, Santiago led me back up on the deck. Two officers were still there, collecting blood and tissue samples off the deck boards. The deck slider was open and two more officers were inside, one taking snapshot photos, the other using a camcorder.

  “You said you haven’t been inside her house, right?” Santiago said to me.

  “Right.”

  “She gave you the impression on the phone that this was her house, and she said nothing to indicate that anyone else lived here or was visiting.”

  “Right,” I said again.

  “Dead people don’t have many rights, and there is no obvious person to give us a consent to search. But she may have relatives or heirs, which means we need a warrant to play it safe.”

  I knew his point. “Because a search could lead to evidence that might implicate her killer, and we don’t want that evidence to be inadmissible because we didn’t get consent from whoever owns this house.”

  Santiago nodded. “I called for a warrant before I climbed up that slope. Hopefully, it won’t be long before we get it.”

  “You’ve checked the place for other potential victims?” I asked.

  “Yes. And photo documented the scene. To play it safe, we can’t go through drawers until we get that warrant. But I’d like you to walk through the house and see if anything stands out based on what you spoke to Ms. Milo about.”

  “A look-see compatible with the plain view doctrine,” I said.

  “Right. We’ve already done that,” Santiago said. “But something that looks benign to us might look like evidence to you.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  So I left Spot on the deck and walked through the house. Santiago accompanied me. Nothing of interest caught my eye.

  Back on the deck, the medical examiner was speaking to two paramedics. They nodded, zipped the body into a black body bag, and carried it off.

  Two deputies trotted up the deck stairs and handed an envelope to Santiago. He pulled out a sheet of paper and looked at it.

  “Okay, we’ve got a warrant,” he said. He looked it over. “It’s thorough.”

  I took that to mean that they would be able to take her computer and look through her cellphone and anything else that might reveal a clue to her killer.

  Santiago’s men began a search of Milo’s abode. I joined them, not participating but watching. Santiago called out to the youngest men in the group. “Jacob and Brian, I want you two on Milo’s computer.” He pointed to Scarlett’s desk where her computer showed screensaver images of Sierra Nevada landscapes.

  “You remember what they taught you in the computer forensics class,” Santiago said.

  “Yeah,” Jacob said. “Document and photograph the make, model, serial number, and inventory number of the computer and any related media. Then we do a crash dump onto a virgin flash drive. That way we can save all the stuff in the Random Access Memory that would all be lost in a plug pull. After we’ve got that, we still pull the plug and we get to keep the hard drive as it was without any shutdown scrubbing.”

  “Okay,” Santiago said. “Remember chain of custody. I want complete documentation at every step. Does our evidence kit have new flash drives still in the wrapper and the new crash dump utility?”

  “Yes,” Jacob said.

  “Okay. Get to work.”

  One of them pulled a second chair up next to Milo’s desk chair while the other got a fresh flash drive from their evidence kit and tore open the packaging. They sat down with a legal-sized pad of paper, moved Milo’s computer mouse to turn off the screen saver, and started making notes as they proceeded to look into Milo’s electronic life.

  “On Milo’s desk is an old-fashioned paper address book,” I said to Santiago. “Okay if I look through it? I’ll wear my gloves.”

  He nodded.

  I pulled on my gloves, picked up the address book, and paged through it. It had obviously been in use for years. It had lots of names and phone numbers and pieces of Post-it
notes with additional bits of info. There were entries in pen and pencil. There were cross-outs and eraser smudges. Here and there were scribbles that looked like gibberish, perhaps bits of passwords that only had meaning for Scarlett.

  After my first perusal, I went through it again, forcing myself to look at each name to see if I recognized any of them. None seemed familiar. And there were no Milos listed. I looked to see if there were any notations that suggested that any of the entries were for people who might have been close to Scarlett, someone who could provide information about her. Nothing stood out, which wasn’t surprising. People don’t write sister-in-law or ex-husband next to names in their address books. They know who their family and friends are.

  I put the address book down and walked over to Santiago.

  “Nothing revealing in the book,” I said. “Okay if I look in her file drawers? I won’t change the order of any files or papers, but I’ll take notes of anything interesting.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Still wearing the latex gloves, I found a blank piece of copy paper. I pulled a dining chair over to a filing cabinet that was part of the desk arrangement.

  Milo’s files were orderly, and the labels were clear.

  First, I pulled out a folder labeled “Will.”

  In it were a bunch of papers with a lawyer’s name at the top. They were filled with what looked to be the standard legalise that renders even the simplest statements inscrutable. But eventually, I figured out that Scarlett Milo had put her assets, which were substantial, into a kind of trust that would benefit several environmental organizations that focused on endangered species habitat preservation.

  Several of her assets were mentioned. I scanned for information on another house that might reveal whether or not this house was a vacation home, but there was none. From her will, it appeared that if she had any relatives, they weren’t close enough that she wanted to leave them anything.

  I found a real estate file. In it was only the Squaw Valley house. The tax statement came to her name. If Scarlett had any kind of a life partner, they weren’t part of the home ownership.

  In her investment file, I found statements from several investment companies. In addition to cash and IRA accounts, she had stock funds, mostly conservative, large-cap companies. She’d been taking mandatory IRA distributions for several years, which put her age into her 70s.

  To check, I found a file on her vehicles. In addition to the DMV information on an Audi and a Range Rover, I found a copy of her driver’s license, which showed her age as 74.

  There was enough money in her accounts to attract predators, but most of it was locked up in investment vehicles that would not make it easy to get immediate withdrawals. That took her out of the target range for the kind of scum that goes after older women.

  But somebody wanted Scarlett Milo dead… Maybe it had nothing to do with money.

  There were files for utility bills and charitable contributions and travel. I flipped through each and found nothing unusual. Scarlett was frugal with her heat and electricity, generous with her charity, and she traveled a lot. Her last trip appeared to have been to Florence, Italy, a place I hadn’t visited. But I knew it was a popular tourist destination.

  There was another file labeled Amazon and in it computer printouts that showed some kind of vendor account at Amazon. I looked over some of the pages. It appeared that Milo had written a series of books called “The Smart Single Woman’s Guides.” There were seventeen titles such as, The Smart Single Woman’s Guide To Financial Power, The Smart Single Woman’s Guide To Romance Without Commitment, and so forth. The books covered everything from traveling alone to coping with aging parents, from changing careers to legal strategies to finding a cultural passion, etc. I got out my phone, went to Amazon’s website, and typed in Milo’s name. Up came the book series. The books had lots of reviews and high ratings. The sales rankings showed that they were popular books, and they would produce a good income.

  I wondered if they would produce any enemies.

  I turned off the phone and took another walk around Milo’s house, trying to see it anew, but I saw nothing notable.

  I wandered over to her bookshelves. In the era of Kindle, her books were an impressive commitment to the long history and tradition of bound volumes of words on paper. The shelves took up one entire wall. The left side was fiction, mostly hardcover, classic 19th and early 20th century novels mixed in with more modern literary greats like Bellow, Updike, Barbara Kingsolver, and Toni Morrison.

  The right side of the wall was nonfiction, biographies, histories, and even a few science books on the latest theories of modern physics. There was also a shelf devoted to Tahoe subjects, guidebooks for hiking and biking and cross-country skiing.

  Most interesting to me was Milo’s collection of art books, large volumes filled with color plates of the greatest art of the last 2000 years. She had more art books than I, and I had no doubt that she was much more knowledgeable than I was about the world of art. While I like to page through my books the way a five-year-old kid looks at picture books, admiring and pondering the art without much deeper understanding, something about Milo’s collection made me think that she was much more academic in her approach. Perhaps she’d been a scholar.

  The largest section of her art books focused on the Italian Renaissance, including monographs on Michelangelo, da Vinci, Botticelli, Raphael, etc. In addition to conventional art books with art reproductions, Milo also had several textbooks on the Italian Renaissance. I flipped through a couple of them. They were dense with information that didn’t mean much to me beyond communicating the sense that the Renaissance was mostly about art and mostly about Northern Italy.

  Below Milo’s books were two shelves of vinyl records. I scanned the titles. Swing era music from the ’40s and jazz from the ’50s and ’60s. The only music that spanned several decades was a large number of Frank Sinatra records.

  There was nothing else especially notable about Milo’s house. Her effects provided a picture of an educated, wealthy woman who’d done well writing guides for single women.

  The last place I looked was the garage. It looked like any other garage, although perhaps neater than most. There was a cream-colored Audi and a black Range Rover, just as Scarlett’s DMV file showed. Nothing was notable.

  I went back out on the deck. Santiago was talking to one of his deputies. He turned to me.

  “Find anything of interest?”

  “A healthy investment portfolio, and an interesting collection of books, but nothing that seems like it might connect to her murder. I saw no indication of any family, and her will leaves everything to some environmental groups dedicated to preserving the habitats of endangered animals. How about you?”

  He shook his head. “The only thing that stands out is we can’t find her cell phone.”

  “I should’ve thought of that. She was talking to me when she was shot. It’s got to be here someplace.” I looked around at the deck, then over the railing.

  Santiago gestured toward the house. “The portable phones are all in their cradles. So she must have been talking on her cell.”

  “Let’s call her number,” I said. “She gave it to me, and I called her when I got to the turn-off down below. Hold on, it should be in my phone.”

  I brought up the menu of my recent calls and redialed the most recent one.

  I heard a distant ring.

  “Below the deck,” Santiago said.

  Santiago’s deputy ran down the steps as the ring came again. He leaned over, hands on his knees. It rang again. He moved over toward one of the pier foundations that held up the deck. Another ring.

  “It sounds like it’s coming from underground.”

  There were no more rings.

  “The phone must have gone to voicemail,” he said.

  “I’ll dial again,” I said.

  The faint ring came again. The deputy got down on his hands and knees. He turned his head like a dog trying to dete
rmine a sound location.

  “Oh, wow, there’s a little rodent hole. Her phone must’ve fallen down there. I’ll try to dig it out.”

  He started clawing at the dirt. “How do rodents dig this stuff? It’s mostly rocks.” He kept digging. Santiago came down next to him. The phone kept ringing.

  The deputy’s hand was well below the surface, the dirt coming halfway up to his elbow. “You don’t think a ground squirrel would attack me for tearing up his house, do you?”

  “Never know,” Santiago said. “But your big mitts are ugly enough, that rodent will probably be too scared. Be like Godzilla in his bedroom.”

  “Funny guy, sarge. You’re a regular stand-up comedian. Oh, I felt something smooth.” The phone stopped ringing. “Got it!” the deputy said. He carefully withdrew his hand. Delicately pinched between the tips of his index and middle fingers was a cell phone.

  Santiago took it, pushed the button to turn it on.

  “It’s locked with a password,” he said. “I bet it’s got some clues to this woman’s life. Maybe we can get a hacker to help us.” He turned to me. “You got any other ideas about how to pursue this case?”

  I shook my head. “Still in a bit of shock. I’ll let you know if I think of anything. One more thing before I go,” I said. “Do you mind if I make a copy of the note I gave you? The one Scarlett wrote on the back of the receipt? Scarlett has one of those all-in-one printer copiers on her desk.”

  “Sure.” Santiago pulled it out of the notebook he carried. We made a copy, and he put the original back in his book.

  I said goodbye, and Spot and I left.

  SEVEN

  The sun was nearly setting as I exited the valley out through Santiago’s roadblock at the Squaw Valley entrance. I didn’t know the officers posted there. It was faster just to let them search my Jeep than it would have been to have them call Santiago. I thanked them as they finished and let me through.

  Out on the highway, I turned south toward Lake Tahoe. The mountain shadows were long, and I barely noticed a little puff of dust that seemed to pop up out of the hood on my Jeep. Then my right front tire blew, and the Jeep swerved toward the shoulder. I hadn’t heard any sound over the road noise, but it all added up to gunshots, this time more than one.