Tahoe Avalanche Read online

  “You mean you’re nosy as hell.”

  “Like I said, my business. I called Mallory, and he called the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department, and a sergeant named Bains called me back, and in exchange for info about my mysterious phone call, he told me that you went out with the dog trainer lady and her dog and found the bodies. Anyway, I gave Bains the number of the avalanche psycho off my caller ID. Then he pulled some strings or called in some favors and got a trace on the call in, like, five minutes. Amazing. Have you met this guy in person?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he cute? He sounds cute.”

  “Ichabod Crane meets the Phantom of the Opera without his mask.”

  Glennie stood up and glowered at me across my desk. Her eyes were just barely higher than mine were sitting. “McKenna, you are not the only handsome guy in this town.”

  “You’re right. George Clooney meets Pierce Brosnan.”

  “Better. Much better.”

  “What did the phone trace show?”

  Glennie sat back down. “The avalanche psycho called from a pay phone in Reno. Bains told the Washoe Sheriff’s Department. They dusted the phone, but it was wiped clean.”

  I nodded.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what the guy said?”

  “What did the guy say?”

  Glennie pulled out a little notebook, green paper with a pink spiral binding at the top. “I take notes as I talk on the phone. I don’t think I missed more than two words of what he said.”

  She flipped a few pages, then spoke. “The phone rang and I picked it up and said, ‘Glenda Gorman.’”

  “He said, ‘I set the avalanche at Emerald Bay.’”

  “I said, ‘Who’s calling?’”

  “He said, ‘None of your business. All you need to know is there’s going to be more avalanches. Payback for ruining the pristine Tahoe landscape. Tahoe belonged to the Washoe Indians, and they kept Tahoe clean and pure for thousands of years. White man has nearly destroyed Tahoe in just a few decades. Now Tahoe will start destroying white man in a just a few weeks.’”

  Glennie shut her notebook. “He hung up before I got a chance to ask another question.”

  “Can I copy your notes?”

  Glennie thought about it. She handed me the notebook. I got up and made copies.

  “What did his voice sound like?”

  “His enunciation was spotty and inconsistent. He was trying to sound dumber than he was. Emerald was two syllables and he didn’t pronounce the D. He just ran the words together. ‘Em’ralbay.’ When he said, ‘None of your business,’ he didn’t pronounce the word of. Your was yer and business was missing the middle S. Like, ‘None uh yer biness.’”

  “You rattle that off like a linguist.”

  “Like I said, it’s my job.”

  “He’s trying to disguise himself,” I said.

  “Yeah. But he’s doing a poor job. He sounds dumb but uses the word pristine. Just the kind of word that would be run-of-the-mill for a smart guy, so run-of-the-mill that he doesn’t think to edit it out. Same with the word nearly.”

  “A dumb guy doesn’t know the word nearly?”

  “Knows, but doesn’t use,” Glennie said. “The biggest giveaway that it is a fairly smart guy is the self-conscious couplet, ‘White man destroyed Tahoe in a few decades. Now Tahoe will destroy white man in a few weeks.’ A dumb guy wouldn’t think of that construction. He’d just say, ‘You wrecked Tahoe, so I’m gonna kill your asses.’”

  “So we’ve got a smart guy trying to sound dumb. But he’s not really smart or he would have done a better job of sounding dumb.”

  Glennie nodded.

  “You study speech characteristics when you could be home baking cookies,” I said.

  “Part of my business is to divine a person’s inner workings by the way they talk.”

  “I like chocolate chip, if it matters,” I said.

  “You think women can curry favors with cookies?”

  “Curry? I didn’t think anyone under forty knew that word.

  “It’s my favorite spice. I could put it in your cookies.”

  “Maybe you should stick with linguistics. You think the payback thing is true? That he’s some kind of eco-terrorist, like the Earth Liberation Front group that burns down buildings around the country?”

  “Could be,” Glennie said. “Could also be he just gets off making snow slide. Like a firestarter who tries to frame his kinkiness in some grander intellectual concept. I know that the Earth Liberation Front issues press releases taking credit for their burns. They haven’t said anything about this avalanche. For that matter, we don’t actually know that anyone caused the avalanche, do we?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to try to find out.”

  “Let me know? I’m late. I gotta run.”

  My phone rang and I answered it. It was Sergeant Bains.

  “Hey Bains,” I said. Glennie was at my door. She stopped.

  “You were right,” he said in my ear. “The girl in the slide was murdered before the avalanche ever started. By suffocation. But the guy was killed by the avalanche.”

  “You got an explanation that fits?” I said.

  “Not even close. Hey, I’m not far away. You going to be there? I’ll give you the details in person. Besides, I love to take my cruiser across the state line. It always tweaks the Nevada deputies when they see us on their turf.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Glennie was still at the door as I hung up. “That was Sergeant Bains?” she said. “George Clooney meets Pierce Brosnan?”

  I nodded.

  She looked at her watch again. “Damn, I gotta go,” she said and hurried out.

  FOURTEEN

  The morning sun had risen enough that it was now shining on the left side of my desk. I took the little poinsettia Street had given me and slid it into the sunlight. Its leaves were as brilliant as fresh-polished fire engines. It shimmered with joy.

  A tiny triangle of sun missed the desk and poinsettia and hit the bottom of the wall by the door. Spot spied it, got up, walked over and sniffed it. He lay down hard against the wall so that the patch of sun shined on him. My door opened. Sergeant Bains walked in and saw Spot. “Sorry to interrupt his nap. Not like he’s upset, though.”

  “Like a poinsettia in sunlight, he shimmers with joy.”

  Bains looked at me. “I don’t buy you’re a poet.”

  “What was the giveaway?” I said. “Shimmers?”

  “Probably got that word from your girlfriend. She’s the bug scientist, right? The medical examiner in Sac wants to speak to her. Some kind of bug question.”

  “Did you ID the girl?”

  “Yeah. A Lorraine Simon from San Fran. Lived in one of those mansions over by the Presidio. Twenty-two years old. The girl, not the house. I drove down last night to inform her parents. They were out. They have a baby-sitter, sits for their Pomeranians. I told him a white lie about some stolen property that belonged to his employers. In the fifteen minutes I waited for them to come home I learned more than you’d want to know about Lorraine’s parents.

  “Girl’s old man is a guy named Samuel Simon. Wife is Clarice. Simple Simons they ain’t. They own a company that does hydro-dynamic research. Under contract to ship builders. Something about laminar flow. Don’t ask me what that means. They employ eighteen engineers. And I almost forgot. In their spare time, he’s a radiologist and she’s an attorney. And, oh yeah, she’s served two terms in the state legislature. Lunches with the Guv. And the doc is on the board of one of those cancer foundations.”

  Bains hitched up one trouser leg and perched his thigh on the corner of my desk. “Finally, they came home and I told them about their daughter.”

  “How’d they take it?”

  “Mom was pretty strong, dad went shaky and the dog-sitter had a meltdown. Dr. Simon had to give him a sedative. Then he popped some pills himself.”

  “You learn what Lorraine was doing in Tahoe?”
>
  “Only that she’d graduated from college and was taking a year off. Dad’s words. Snowboarding and mountain biking.”

  “What does mom say?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Mom talks like one of those life coaches. Who knows what it means. Stuff like Lori was self-actualizing her true potential, and she was flowering, and she was on a spirit quest.”

  “You tell them how she died?”

  “Earlier in the day, when I talked to the ME, he said his findings were preliminary, so I just told the parents their daughter’s body was found in an avalanche.”

  “They say anything revealing?”

  Bains shook his head. “Nothing. What about the uncle of the kid? Esteban. You talked to him more than I have so far. He seemed awfully tense to me.”

  “Esteban’s wired tight as they come. He’d redline any kind of meter you strapped on him. I think it’s his frustration at being handicapped. He was an athlete as a young man and he was crippled by an accident on the gridiron. He’s still angry as hell. I think his handicap contributed to his reaction to his nephew going missing.”

  “And now that he knows his nephew is dead, how’s he reacting to that?”

  “He seems to blame himself. He said March suddenly got interested in investing, and he thinks that means the kid was into something bad. Esteban feels that he should have done something about it. He had an anxiety attack when I was there.”

  “What’s the thing about investing?” Bains was fishing.

  “He only said that March asked him about financial planners and it stood out as strange because March wasn’t the planning type.”

  “You gonna share when you find out anything else?”

  “Bains, never mind that I’m working a case in your territory, for twenty years I was a cop same as you. I know that I-help-you is the best way to make for you-help-me.”

  Willie Nelson started singing On The Road Again out of Bains’s shirt pocket. Bains pulled out his cell phone.

  “Bains,” he said.

  I heard a woman’s voice talking.

  “Thanks,” Bains said and hung up. He pulled his radio off his belt, inspected it and swore. He turned to me. “Radio isn’t working. Office called to say there was a big slide on the Nevada side. Hit a section of road near Sand Harbor. A witness said a car was buried.”

  FIFTEEN

  I called Diamond Martinez.

  “Have you heard about a slide at Sand Harbor?”

  “Yeah. A possible vehicle involved. The Washoe Sheriff’s Department will have more in the morning.”

  “Coffee at my cabin?”

  “If I can get up your road. Weather report says another foot by morning. How many is that this month? Twenty feet?” Diamond sounded disgusted.

  “Good thing it keeps settling. You on duty in the morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then your Douglas County SUV should be up to it.”

  We hung up.

  We were in one of those wet weather patterns. El Nino and La Nina were doing their courtship dance out in the Pacific. To impress the girl, El Nino hurled a blast of moisture at the coast of Northern California every twenty-four hours. The rain bumped across the coastal ranges, dropped down for a quick wet sprint over the Central Valley, then made the long climb up the west slope of the Sierra. Frostbitten by the ascent, the storm clouds got angry and lashed Tahoe with snow. I doubt La Nina even noticed.

  I leaned back and put my feet up on the desk to think. The phone rang. I stopped thinking.

  “Owen McKenna.”

  “Mr. McKenna, my name is April Carrera.” She sounded tentative. Frightened. With stuffed-up sinuses like she’d just gotten over a bout of crying and cranked herself up to call me.

  “Thanks for calling, April. Your uncle is worried.”

  She took a moment to answer. “Uncle Bill doesn’t worry about me. He exudes anxiety about me.”

  “Is that why you went to the Dominican Republic?”

  “Did Uncle Bill tell you that’s where I went?”

  “That’s what March told him,” I said. “Are you there now?”

  Another pause. “Yeah. But don’t ask what town. You might tell Uncle Bill, the last person on earth I’d want to know.”

  “April, have you heard about your brother?”

  “Yes. March died in an avalanche. Uncle Bill said it on my voicemail. That’s sensitive, isn’t it? A real soft touch, ol’ Bill. ‘Hey, April, where you been, you never return my calls, by the way, March was killed in an avalanche.’” She started crying.

  “I’m sorry, April,” I said. “If there’s anything I...”

  “If there’s anything you can do... I guess I’ve heard that one before, haven’t I? Everybody’s sorry. Everybody wants to help. Yeah, well it’s too late for that, isn’t it?”

  “I understand your anger.”

  “No, you don’t! And don’t ever think you understand anything else about me, either! Do I make myself clear?” She hung up.

  Later, I was driving past the shopping center near Stateline when I noticed an Escalade that looked familiar, so I pulled in. Bill Esteban was sitting in the front seat. The engine was running, and he was looking away from me, toward the supermarket. He made no moves to suggest he was going into the store or had just come out.

  It seemed peculiar to me, so I stopped behind a large panel van and watched.

  Bill continued to stare at the doors of the supermarket.

  After a couple of minutes I noticed him shift. He moved his head as if watching someone. Then he shifted into reverse and began to back out of his space.

  I pulled out and followed him. Spot was lying down sleeping in back, so I wasn’t obvious.

  Bill drove down to the end of the parking row and stopped. I stopped where I could see him. The only person clearly in his view was a young woman who was loading a baby into a car seat in the back of an old beat-up Chevy. She shut the back door and began putting her groceries into the trunk. I couldn’t see her well, but she appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. She was very small, probably weighing 100 pounds. Except for her Asian heritage, her size and apparent fragility reminded me of Lori Simon, the girl whose body we’d found in the avalanche.

  The girl pushed her empty cart through the snow and left it in the cart drop-off area, then got in her car. It started with a large puff of blue smoke. She backed out and drove away.

  Bill followed her. I followed Bill.

  The girl drove across Lake Tahoe Boulevard and took the back streets behind the motels to a small trailer park. There she transferred her baby and the groceries into a small trailer that had been badly remodeled into two half-trailer apartments, with a door for each side and a scar on the outside where a second bathroom had been grafted side-to-side onto the original bathroom.

  I stayed well back, watching Bill as he watched the girl. When the girl was inside, Bill drove away. I followed him as far as Tahoe Keys Boulevard where he turned to go home.

  I called Bains as I turned around.

  When he answered, I said, “I just saw Bill Esteban at the supermarket. He watched a young girl with a child come out of the store. When she drove away, he followed at a distance, then watched from a distance as she unloaded her baby and groceries into her trailer apartment. After she was inside he drove away.”

  “What’s your read?” Bains said.

  “The girl didn’t know he was there. Maybe they know each other, maybe not. But he didn’t just follow the first girl who came out of the store. He was watching and waiting for her.”

  “So if he knows her, he could be checking to make sure she got home okay,” Bains said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Or he could be a stalker.”

  “That, too,” I said.

  “If he’s a stalker and the girl hasn’t had any contact from him, that’s a problem for us, huh?” Bains said.

  “Yeah. No crime watching someone in public. No crime following someone in public.”


  “Anything you notice about her?” Bains asked. “She a hottie or something?”

  “No. Only thing that strikes me is she’s tiny. Like Lori Simon, the girl in the avalanche.”

  I gave Bains the girl’s address and description and we hung up.

  Spot and I made a quick trip to Carson City for some

  things you can’t get in Tahoe, then went to Street’s condo for dinner. Spot lay in front of her fire. I’d brought a Fat Cat cab that I got at Trader Joe’s. I opened it and poured half the bottle into Street’s fancy wine glasses, the ones that hold about sixteen ounces each.

  We sat in front of the fire and tasted the wine while I told Street about April calling me and oozing grief-stricken, angry-young-woman frustration. Then I told her about Esteban following the girl from the grocery store.

  “You’ve got two people dead in an avalanche and maybe more in the Sand Harbor slide and a stalker client whose remaining niece is estranged from him, and she’s yelling at you for calling and saying you care. Great business, this detecting.”

  “Yeah.”

  I moved to one of the barstools in her kitchen when Street began to cook. She was sautéing chicken strips in olive oil with garlic. “I’m making chicken stir fry,” Street said, glancing at the Fat Cat cab. “Some people think a cab is too hearty for chicken.”

  “Those are the same people who think you can’t go out running unless you’re wearing a shiny skintight running uniform.”

  “But I wear a shiny skintight running uniform when I run.”

  “Something I’ve always wondered about,” I said.

  “You want me not to wear it?”

  “No, you should definitely wear it,” I said.

  “Why, if it’s part of the conformist world of uniforms?”

  “Next time you put on your uniform, look in the mirror.”

  “Are you saying that people who look, uh, trim, should wear shiny skintight uniforms even as you demean their use? But that’s ageist and sexist and fatist.”