Tahoe Avalanche Page 6

  “Like March?”

  “Yeah, except March was more passionate. When they hiked up Mt. Tallac to ski the cross, March was very driven about it, focused on every detail of what to bring and exactly where to hike and what the best strategy was for skiing down. Then he raved about it afterward. Whereas Will acted like it was no big deal.”

  “The image of a geek isn’t usually someone so athletic that they ski the cross,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Will have a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Not real close, I don’t think. I believe he and Carmen used to date. Now they’re friends.”

  It was hard to see the details of Carmen’s face in the picture, because she’d been moving, but her smile was huge. She was short and stout and looked like she was having the best time of her life.

  “Tell me about Carmen. What’s her last name?”

  “Carmen Nicholas,” he said, his voice suddenly warm. “A real sweetheart. We only just met at that party. She’s been over here several times since and she’s brought me little gifts each time. Homemade cookies, a refrigerator magnet with a team picture of the Cowboys, a bottle of my favorite barbecue sauce.” He smiled. “I didn’t think I’d ever get attracted to anyone again.”

  “She’s what, about thirty years younger than you?”

  “Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not stupid. I know she’ll never really love an old crip like me. But she likes me. And I can provide something for her. I have some money. That sounds crass, but it is a currency of relationships more often than people like to think.”

  “Her job?”

  “She’s a casino cocktail waitress at Harrah’s. I’ve never visited her there, but I’ve kind of wondered about it because they wear those skimpy dresses and, frankly, I can’t quite see Carmen like that. She’s pretty plump, and she’s got legs like Whitebark pines, thick and strong as hell. But who am I to judge?”

  “What about Packer?” In the photo he looked like a punk rocker. Angular and sullen, with big bones and a heavy brow. He wore jeans so torn up it would be hard to pull them on without your foot going out the wrong hole. His black hair was greased straight back, and he had a pointed goatee below two lip rings.

  “The guy at the snowboard shop. He used to be March’s riding partner before March switched to skis. Packer’s a rough kind of guy. Smokes a lot of pot, drinks a lot of beer, talks loud, doesn’t care if people don’t like him.”

  “His last name?”

  “Mills. Packer Mills.”

  “Packer have a girlfriend?”

  Bill frowned. “I don’t understand all the questions about girlfriends and boyfriends. What is that with you? Does this have to do with the girl in the avalanche?”

  “Some,” I said. “But March’s disappearance bothered you immediately. When I looked into it I found March and a second body. I would normally assume both deaths were accidental. But your immediate worry when March didn’t come home makes me wonder otherwise. If either death wasn’t accidental, then the first place to start looking is friends and family of the deceased. You want me to stop?”

  “No, no. If March didn’t die an accidental death, I want you to find out what happened.” Bill looked away. “I don’t know if Packer had a girlfriend. I don’t think he was the steady type. More of a one-night-stand kind of guy.”

  “One-nighters with any of March’s friends?”

  Bill shook his head. “Not that March ever said.”

  “April?”

  Bill flashed a look at me, fire in his eyes. “Absolutely, not.”

  “Why do you care? You don’t like her.”

  “Right. I don’t like her. Doesn’t mean I want my niece doing it with that jerk.” He grabbed a black pawn and moved it forward one square, setting it down hard enough that the rest of the pieces jumped sideways. “And don’t even think about Carmen,” he said with anger.

  “You mentioned Paul,” I said. He was on the right in the photo. He was the only one with light hair, so light it looked like it had been triple bleached.

  “Yeah. Paul Riceman. A contractor up on Kingsbury Grade.”

  The TV, still silent, was showing a figure skating contest. Bill picked up the remote and turned it off.

  “Paul and March ski together a lot?” I asked.

  “Just now and then.”

  “Does Paul do much with the others?”

  “Not to my knowledge. I don’t think he’d even met Packer before he came to my party.”

  “Who else should I talk to? People who weren’t at your party?”

  “I invited all of March’s best friends. But I remember one other girl who is a friend of April’s. I guess she knows March, but not real well. Her name is Ada. I don’t know the last name.”

  “She live in Tahoe?”

  “I assume so,” he said.

  “How’d you meet her?

  “April brought her to the house. A real firecracker. Smart as they make ‘em.”

  “How would I contact her?” I asked.

  “Through April, but April doesn’t answer her phone.”

  “Anyone else you can think of?”

  “No one comes to mind. Hey, it’s getting late,” he said, “and you haven’t had any lunch. Can I make you a sandwich? I learned some good tricks in my club after all those years.”

  I stood. “No thanks. I’ll save my appetite. Got a date with my sweetheart for dinner.”

  “That would be Street Casey? You can always bring her over here, if you want. I’m even better at dinner than I am at lunch.”

  “We’ll do that some time. How do you know her name?”

  Bill looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I guess I must have heard it around somewhere. When I was asking the cops about you, maybe.”

  We looked at each other. I tried to see past his eyes, wet and dark as a seal’s. I wanted to see the gears turning, servo-mechanisms whirring. Always, you look for the glitches, the grit stuck in the gear teeth, the broken connectors, the leaking pipes, the frayed cables, the stripped and shorted wires. But I couldn’t see past the dark eyes, past the weary sadness.

  “I’ll give you a call when I learn something new,” I said and left.

  TWELVE

  I called Street at her lab while I drove home and asked if she’d like dinner at my place.

  “What’s on the menu?”

  “To be decided. But as you are a woman of elegant tastes, I should warn you that it would likely be humble.”

  “Humble works.”

  I next called the number Bill gave me for April’s cell. Her voicemail answered, a quiet voice that nevertheless sounded tough and angry. “If you want to leave a message for April, go ahead. Maybe I’ll call back.”

  “April, this is Detective Owen McKenna. I am investigating an avalanche at Emerald Bay that March was involved in. I have some questions you can help me with. Please give me a call.” I left my number and hung up. I didn’t want to say anything in my phone message that would suggest that March had died. Best to do that in person. But maybe Bill called April as soon as I left his house. Or maybe April heard about the slide from someone in Tahoe.

  I had a good hour before Street would show up, and I’d been thinking about Ellie’s perfectly trained dog.

  “Spot,” I said as I pulled up to our cabin and got out of the Jeep. He jumped out and looked at me, anticipation mixed with boredom. I could tell he was making those calculations that dogs use to predict the chances that their owner is about to produce food. “Do you want to emulate Honey G?” I said. “Do you pine for search-and-rescue fluency? Are you plagued by feelings of inadequacy?”

  I opened the front door. Spot walked in, went directly over to his bed and lay down, ignoring me. The food calculations must have given him a negative answer.

  “I think we should brush up on your tracking skills.”

  Spot didn’t move except to sigh.

  I’d been thinking about hand commands like Ellie used with Honey G. I was also
envisioning a scent tracking exercise. I found an old rag and tore it in two. For a distinctive scent I rubbed the pieces with deodorant. I could hide one and use the other to scent Spot on. I stuffed them in my pocket.

  To get Spot’s attention I opened the cupboard over the fridge and pulled out my secret tube of potato chips. They were the manufactured kind, regular even discs of salty processed potatoes, perfect for edible Frisbee exercise.

  Spot jumped up, suddenly alert. His eyes were intense and his ears made little adjustments like radar antennae tweaking their position for maximum reception.

  “Outside before you drool,” I said, opening the door.

  Spot raced out in anticipation. I shot a disc out across the snow and he went after it like it held the key to eternal bliss. I heard his jaws snap and the chip was no more. Several rounds later it was clear that, as with humans, a dog would never stop eating them until the source was taken away. I put the chips back in their hiding place.

  I fetched my gloves and went back outside. Spot sniffed my gloves, just in case I still had a chip left.

  I began to roll up large snowballs and built three snowmen outside my cabin. One was near the deck, one by the parking pad, and one on the corner of my small lot. It was a difficult project because Spot kept jumping on my snowballs as I rolled them.

  The snowmen were each separated by fifteen feet or more, but all were in view from the front door. I wanted Spot to see them all together.

  Despite their forked-stick arms, I was pleased to have achieved such an impressive human likeness, with indentations for eyes, pine cones for ears, and protruding lumps of snow for noses.

  When I was done, I called Spot over.

  Because we’d been doing search-and-rescue work, I thought we should expand to suspect work.

  I called him over to my front door and had him sit like any good student.

  “The critical thing to remember in suspect apprehension,” I told him, “is to get the correct person. Are you with me?”

  Spot stretched his head forward and sniffed at my gloves again.

  “Later, Spot. Now I want you to focus.”

  Spot stood up, stretched his front legs out so that his chest lowered down, but kept his butt in the air. His eyes looked demonic. He had snow on his nose and between his ears. His tail was a high-speed metronome. He didn’t know what we were going to do, but he knew we were going to do something. Dogs like to do stuff.

  “So watch me very carefully,” I said. I was going to work on directing him with a hand command.

  Spot lowered farther so that his chest was down in the snow. He was about to spring on me.

  I turned away, hoping to cool his excitement and lessen the chance that he would leap his 170 pounds onto me. One of the problems I’d always had in training Spot was that he thought everything was about having fun. Good to have enthusiasm, but I sometimes envied trainers who worked with Goldens, Labs, German Shepherds and other breeds that took their doggie work more seriously than do Great Danes.

  I was aware, however, of a small advantage that Danes have when doing both suspect apprehension and search and rescue. Suspect apprehension requires aggressiveness. Search and rescue requires gentleness. Some breeds, after they’ve been trained as police dogs, are not suited to search and rescue because they may forget that finding the victim is not the same as finding the suspect. The last thing a lost hiker needs is a dog finding them and then holding them with his teeth until his handler comes.

  Great Danes are inclined to think that both activities are a game. And they need almost no aggressiveness to intimidate a suspect. Their size alone does the job.

  “Okay, Spot,” I said. I squatted down at the front door. It was still snowing lightly and the dormer over the door gave a little shelter. “Turn around,” I said. I reached my arms around his chest and with some effort shifted him 180 degrees. “Spot, do you see the suspect? Do you?” I put some excitement and tension in my voice.

  Spot turned his head and looked at me, his eyes intense. Finally, we were going to do stuff.

  Kneeling next to Spot, our heads were the same height. I put my arm around his neck, grabbed his head with both hands and pointed him toward the snowman on the right. “There’s the suspect! Do you see, Spot?” I tensed my hands on his head so that he was pointed directly at the right snowman. Then I extended my arm next to his head and pointed at the guilty snowman. I figured it would be obvious to him that I was indicating the snowman and not something near it because of the recent activity of building it. Even so, I was careful to make certain that Spot could not misunderstand which snowman I was pointing at. “Take down the suspect, Spot! Take him down!”

  Spot shot away from me, his head pointed toward the snowman on the right. Three long fast leaps later he launched into the air on a rising arc. He opened his giant mouth and closed it on the snowman’s head, ripping it off the snowman. His chest hit the snowman in a full body block and the snowman was smashed into a sorry lump of snow.

  I felt a momentary smugness with my training success, but only until Spot got up running, picking up speed in a wide arc and closed in on the next snowman. He repeated his attack, destroying the second snowman, and then attacked the third with increasing precision. After that, he raced around in circles, pleased with his accomplishment.

  I walked over to the lump of snow that had been the correct suspect, beckoned Spot and praised him lavishly. Then we went to the second snowman and, using my scolding voice, I told Spot it was bad to kill innocent bystanders. Same for the third snowman, but I don’t think Spot believed me considering that these were snow people and not quite like the real thing.

  Undaunted, I proceeded to rebuild the snowmen. This time I buried one of the deodorant rags in the neck of the center snowman.

  Back at the front door, we faced away from the snowmen. I took the remaining portion of the rag and let Spot sniff it.

  “Do you have the scent, Spot? Do you?” He didn’t seem to care.

  I stuck the rag against his nose. “Smell it, Spot. Do you have the scent? Find the suspect!”

  I made no hand signals. I just gave him a little smack on his rear and he took off. He shot straight for the center snowman, ripped off his head and crushed his body.

  As he came around to ravage the second and third snowmen, I was already sprinting toward him, my arms out wide. I flapped them madly, feinting left, then right, pretending I could stop him if he wanted to make mischief.

  I saw motion to the side and turned to see Street Casey pulling her VW beetle into the drive, tire chains on all four wheels.

  Spot ran to meet her.

  She got out, looking sleek and glamorous in her long black coat. She had on narrow-cut black pants and boots that were slim and stylish despite their non-skid soles for snow and ice. Her hair was pulled up and back in a bun and her gold earrings sparkled. She’d put on some makeup that emphasized her cheekbones. Her lipstick was the shade of red that said, kiss me, you idiot.

  I dropped my arms to my side and stood panting.

  Spot jumped around her, his greeting skills as enthusiastic as his other tricks.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” Street said to me. “You were practicing for flight? You have such nice technique, but I think you need a little more plumage for proper lift.”

  “We were practicing suspect apprehension,” I said.

  “Of course. I’ve seen it on TV, right? Cops see a bad guy, first thing they do is run and flap their arms like flightless turkeys.”

  “First thing. Scares the crap out of crooks.”

  Street walked to the front door and stood under the overhang. She looked like the perfect enticement to come inside and get out of the snow.

  “If you were willing to take a break,” she said, “from this flapping apprehension thing, we could go inside and have a glass of wine and commune with your fire before we commune with your dinner.”

  “My fire? Or the fire in the woodstove?”

  Street wrapped her arms
around me, her hands exploring. “Both,” she said. She pulled the remaining deodorant-rag out of my pocket. She sniffed it, frowning. “Is this an apprehension accessory?”

  “Bad guys often smell bad,” I said.

  “And good guys smell good?”

  “Always.”

  “We better check,” she said, opening the door and dragging me inside.

  Later, I pulled two wine glasses from my collection of four.

  “The fire was hot,” Street said, “but we have a wine emergency.” She wore my old terry cloth bathrobe. It wrapped around her nearly twice and dragged on the floor like a wedding dress. “I noticed your wine rack when I came in. You are completely out. I thought of going to the store right then, but your ardor was, um, quite spirited. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “I can run to the store now if your post-coital needs are dire,” I said.

  “They are.”

  So I did.

  THIRTEEN

  First thing in the morning, Glenda Gorman from the Tahoe Herald walked into my office. She walked over to where Spot lay in the corner, gave him a pet, then sat down in one of my visitor’s chairs and did a staccato rat-a-tat with her boots on the floor. “Burrrrrr, it’s cold,” she growled through clenched teeth. She wore a fake fur coat, fawn brown, which set off her blond curls. The curls were just so, as with the little eyeliner that emphasized the blue of her eyes. She looked good and she knew it.

  “Some places, Glennie, twenty degrees in January is considered warm,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Bunch of M states. Minnesota. Montana. Maine. Michigan, Manitoba.”

  “Masochists,” she said. “And isn’t Manitoba a province?”

  I shrugged. “Hard for us Tahoe types to keep track of anything east of Reno.”

  “Anyway, I’ve got some hot news. I received a phone call you’ll want to know about. A guy claims he set the avalanche at Emerald Bay.”

  “Why do you think I want to know?”

  “My business, ace reporter and all. You’re working for the kid’s uncle.” She put her boots up on the edge of my desk and rocked her chair back, balancing on its rear legs. “I have informants all over this metropolis.”