Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) Read online

  “Someone is following Gertie,” I said.

  “What? Someone bad?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Someone bad.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “She called me and told me.”

  “She called you, not me?” Nadia sounded whiny.

  “Yeah. I need you to call Merrill and tell him to give Gertie money for a taxi. If you need to, send him money immediately. Whatever it takes. I also need him to make sure she has the phone numbers for two or three taxi services. She can no longer walk anywhere by herself. Either she gets rides, or she stays home. Do you understand that this is serious?”

  “Yes, I get it.”

  “And you will call Merrill right now?”

  “Um, yeah. I will.”

  We hung up.

  Gertie worried me. I went over everything I’d said, wondering if I’d sufficiently impressed her with safety concerns. I paced back and forth. There were bills to pay and other desk work I needed to get done. But I couldn’t concentrate.

  I took Spot down to Diamond’s pickup and we left.

  A block down, I saw that Street’s VW Beetle was at her lab. I pulled in and stopped. Street was the world’s most supportive person, but I didn’t want to stress her out about possible danger to Gertie, so I took a moment to calm down before I got out.

  THIRTEEN

  Spot and I walked up to the door of Street’s lab. I made my secret rap against the door.

  Street opened the door.

  Spot wagged and pushed past her through the doorway.

  Street saw Diamond’s pickup. She raised her eyebrows.

  “Where’s your Jeep?” she asked.

  “I traded the Jeep for Nadia Lassitor’s BMW. But it blew up when I pressed her key fob lock button.”

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just did. It happened late last night.”

  I heard the sound of a vehicle behind me. I turned to see a Douglas County patrol unit pull off Kingsbury Grade and come to a stop next to the pickup. For a short moment, the patrol unit’s Christmas bar flashed blue and red LEDs and the siren began the briefest bleep before it was truncated. All went silent. The driver’s door opened, and Diamond got out. He looked at his pickup as if checking to make sure it was still okay. Once again, he reached over and smoothed down the errant piece of duct tape.

  “Running okay?” he asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Gonna invite me in, or do I have to find some fine print building code infraction to gain admittance.”

  “Help yourself,” I said. “But keep your sidearm close. There are bugs in there that take at least two nines to put down.”

  With his left hand, Diamond raised his flashlight alongside his temple and flipped it on. He put his right hand on the butt of his gun and walked into Street’s lab.

  “Watch out for the large hound,” I said.

  Street and I came in after him. I shut the door behind me.

  Spot ran up to Diamond, sniffing and pushing and leaning and wagging.

  “Hound has a casual, carefree insouciance insufficient to his stature,” Diamond said.

  “What I think every morning at my point of deepest slumber when he wakes me by sticking his nose in my face,” I said. “But he’s rebounding from the slight of not being allowed to sniff a woman who indulged in excessive makeup while he looked on. So we may need to extend him some tolerance.”

  “What kind of woman would say no sniffing to Spot?” Diamond said.

  “The Beemer lady, Nadia Lassitor.”

  Diamond walked over to a counter and looked at a terrarium, standing a safe distance away. Inside were dirt and twigs and leaves that looked like fresh spinach and lots of bugs, the make and model of which were unclear.

  One of the bugs in the terrarium leaped an inch or more. Diamond jumped back, his right hand moving back to the butt of his sidearm.

  “You think the woman tailing her was for real?” Diamond said.

  “Amanda? You’re wondering if Nadia might have made up the blackmail scheme to deflect questions about whether she arranged her husband’s death in order to get the insurance payout. And then she might have hired Amanda to give her story a sense of legitimacy.”

  Diamond nodded. “Vanishing email threats have a high threshold of proof.”

  “That’s what I thought. But Amanda seemed like an actual dirtball. Of course, hiring Amanda would be a great setup to make it seem real.”

  “Lot of work for some verisimilitude,” Diamond said. “And then there was Amanda’s supposed boss, the guy who said you were going to get dead. Nadia could have arranged that, too.”

  “I don’t like this,” Street said. “It’s possible that this is all real. You could be in real danger.”

  I thought of Gertie’s phone call about a man following her. But I didn’t want to alarm Street further.

  “Amanda said she was going to get dead, right?” Diamond said. “All because she let you relieve her of her gun and ID and phone.”

  “Time to change the subject,” Street said.

  Diamond nodded as he moved around Street’s lab. He stopped at another large container not unlike an aquarium. Inside was an impressive beehive and a fair number of bees that were buzzing their wings if not flying around with energy.

  “You collecting honey?” he said.

  “No,” Street answered. “It’s winter, so this hive is dormant. I’m joining with a thousand scientists to try to find out what ails bees worldwide.”

  “With enough ailing, they’ll go extinct and we’ll no longer get stung?” Diamond said.

  “You Luddite,” Street said. “Bees are the most important...” She saw him grinning. “Oh, you’re kidding. But this isn’t something to joke about. Bees pollinate a huge portion of human food. If we lose all the bees, our species will be stricken. Imagine a world with almost no fruits or vegetables or nuts. Bees have reached a tipping point. They are dying off in record numbers.”

  “Sorry for joking,” Diamond said. “Do we know why they’re dying?”

  “We know some of the reasons. At first we thought that a couple of the diseases they suffer from were the primary causes of death. But when we dissect a bee, in addition to opportunistic viruses that attack weakened bees, we find an average of six or more different pesticides and herbicides. And when we look at the landscape where they range, we find thousands of acres of a single crop that all blossom at the same time and that have been bombarded with pesticides and herbicides. By comparison, the natural landscape of bees consists of hundreds of plant species that produce flowers at different times. The single crop landscape gives bees a poisonous feast for a week or two. The natural, multi-crop landscape feeds them healthy food all around the year.”

  “So you think bees are dying because we’ve destroyed their habitat?”

  “Yes,” Street said.

  Diamond moved around the honey bee aquarium, peering through the glass. “But we still need them.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  Diamond stepped to the far side. There was a snapping sound at his feet. He looked down.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve stepped on a mousetrap.” He bent down and picked up broken pieces. “Apparently, you don’t want to save all of Mother Nature’s creatures.”

  Street grinned. “I want to save mice, too. But not the ones that are making nests in my lab. That was my last trap. And the hardware store is out.”

  “You could use a Paiute Deadfall,” Diamond said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “You know of the Paiute,” he said.

  “Kinda,” I said. “The Native Americans from the Nevada territory. Ferocious fighters. The Pyramid Lake War of Eighteen Sixty.”

  Diamond nodded. “And they were some of the most famous Native Americans. Sarah Winnemucca, who published the first Indian autobiography. Wavoka, the spiritual leader. The Paiute were also ingenious hunters and trappers. One of their clever inventions was a
kind of trap called the Paiute Deadfall. It was designed for catching small rodents to eat, from mice up to squirrels. The simplicity and effectiveness was something to see. It’s basically a universal trigger device that can be used in lots of different ways. Kind of the same principle as a mousetrap. But instead of a spring supplying the power, the Paiutes used a heavy rock and let gravity supply the power. All it requires is four little sticks of wood, a piece of cordage, a...”

  “What is cordage?” I interrupted.

  “A cord made from fibrous plants. Dogbane, milkweed, the inner bark from cedar or basswood, wild hemp, reed grass. I was just reading about it last night. Here, I’ll show you how it works. It’s really cool.”

  Street and I had often seen Diamond’s enthusiasm in the past. He’s always learning something new, and then we get a show-and-tell lesson. It had made for many interesting discussions.

  We’d also learned that when Diamond gets excited about something new, there’s little chance of postponing his song and dance.

  “Gimme a sec,” Diamond said. “You’re gonna love this.” He went outside. I watched out the window as he reached into a small tree and broke off a couple of dead sticks. He brought them inside, got out his pocket knife, and shaved the end of a stick to a point. He looked around Street’s lab.

  “What do you need?” she said.

  “Something I can push a stick into the way you’d push it into the ground.”

  “How about this?” She handed him a flat piece of Styrofoam packing material about an inch thick.

  “Perfect,” he said. “This will be our ground. He pushed the back end of the pointed stick into the Styrofoam so that it stood with the pointed end up.

  “This point is the fulcrum,” he said.

  Then Diamond cut a notch in the other stick about one quarter of the way from the end. He balanced the stick like a seesaw, so that its notch rested on the point of the vertical stick and the long end rested on the Styrofoam ground.

  Diamond picked up the other sticks he’d brought inside.

  “Now we need to use this small, short stick and a twig and some cordage.” He looked at Street. “Do you have any cord of any kind?”

  She thought about it. “Would dental floss work?”

  “Sure.”

  She went into the bathroom and came out with a floss dispenser and handed it to him.

  Diamond took a piece of floss and tied one end to the lowered, long end of the seesaw stick. He tied the other end of the floss around the third, short stick. The fourth stick was just a twig, and he wedged it between the vertical stick and the short stick at the end of the floss. The floss was now stretched tight to the long end of the seesaw.

  “Next, I need something like a flat rock,” he said. “Big enough to squish a critter.”

  “I know just the rock,” Street said. She pulled her thick Random House dictionary off the corner of her desk and handed it to him.

  “Perfect,” he said. He set one end of the dictionary on the ground, then lifted the other end and carefully leaned it against the short, upper end of the seesaw. The dictionary’s balance on the seesaw seemed very precarious, but I realized that that was the point of the design.

  Diamond pointed to the twig. “This is the trigger,” he said. “The slightest bump to this trigger twig will release the short stick that holds the floss. When the floss lets go, the seesaw will tip, which will drop the rock, killing the rodent.”

  “This is one of those skills that makes Diamond irresistible to women,” I said to Street.

  “You joke,” he said, “but I have my ways.”

  We were intrigued, and we watched with focus as Diamond took an eraser off of Street’s desk and tossed it onto the trigger twig. The sticks collapsed and the dictionary fell onto the eraser with a solid thump.

  “A simple and effective way of getting some protein for your dinner,” Diamond said.

  “I’ll definitely use this the next time I get a hankering for a rodent dinner,” I said. “You think I should roll the mice up in tortillas and bake them? And what kind of cheese do you recommend I sprinkle on top?”

  Diamond gave me a withering look.

  FOURTEEN

  When I drove home and turned up the road to my cabin, I saw what Diamond meant about his pickup struggling up the steeps. The engine was so weary that I had to putt-putt at fifteen miles per hour to get up to my cabin.

  The next morning, I took Spot for a walk in the snowy forest. I came back to a ringing phone. It was getting so that if I wanted my phone to ring, all I had to do was to leave and come back.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Got something you might want to see,” Diamond said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The woman you told us about?” he said. “The one you relieved of gun and cell phone and wallet before she ran?”

  “Amanda Horner?” I said.

  “Yeah. This morning we got a call from an unhappy tourist on one of the cruise boats. Said there looked to be a woman’s body on the bottom of the lake, off Nevada Beach. Two of our deputies went out in a kayak and found it. Meantime, we trailered the Douglas County Sheriff’s boat to the boat launch. But after we got our diver down there, he couldn’t retrieve the body because it’s tied to an anchor with a steel cable.”

  “And a tourist spotted it,” I said.

  “Not the best advertising for a vacation in Tahoe,” Diamond said. “Wrong kind of photos to bring home.”

  “You think it might be Amanda?” I said.

  “Can’t tell from up on the boat.”

  “Sounds like she didn’t die of natural causes.”

  “Correct,” Diamond said. “Suicide is a possibility, but I doubt it.”

  “You got an ETA on retrieving the body?”

  “We’re coming back to get a bolt cutter as we speak. If you can come down to Cave Rock in about fifteen minutes, you can come with us on our second trip out. The body is positioned to be noticed. I’m guessing it’s a message to you and the widow lady you’re working for.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there in a bit.”

  Spot and I got back in Diamond’s pickup and drove down to the Cave Rock boat launch. I parked where the rotary plows had cut the snow walls a bit wider than normal. Even with the unintended ventilation from the rust holes in Diamond’s truck, there was enough sun to keep Spot warm on the blanket I’d spread out on the seat. I told Spot to enjoy his nap.

  The Douglas County Sheriff’s boat was idling next to the rocky breakwater to the side of the boat launch ramp. Diamond was standing at the captain’s chair.

  I put my hands on the boat’s gunnel and boosted myself up.

  The Douglas County Sheriff’s boat was a compact, classic inboard, designed with the prop and rudder just forward of the stern so that divers could use the small swim platform without fear of contacting the prop.

  I nodded at Diamond, then turned toward the stern.

  A man in a one-piece ski suit with large pack boots on his feet sat on the rear seat. He was bent over a scuba tank. Under the collar of the ski suit was the edge of a blue wetsuit.

  “Chilly for wetsuit diving,” I said.

  He nodded. “When that water first rushes inside the suit, it pretty much sucks the life out of you. I have a friend who has a drysuit, but I couldn’t get hold of him to borrow it.”

  On the bench seat next to him were swim fins and a face mask. The water drops on them looked to be frozen.

  Diamond said, “Here comes Denell with the cutter.”

  A county patrol unit came to a stop near the boat ramp. Denell got out carrying a bolt cutter and a coil of slim nylon rope like a water skier’s tow line. He trotted through the snow to the patrol boat. I reached out and he handed me the cutters and the rope.

  “You want me onboard?” he said to Diamond.

  “No,” Diamond said, pointing at the patrol unit. “You should go back to your office. Keep the county trails safe. I’ll call when we’re on our way back t
o the boat launch. I’m guessing a good hour or more.”

  Diamond shifted into Reverse and backed away from the breakwater. When we were 30 yards out, he turned, shifted into Forward, and sped up until the boat climbed up on plane, motoring south at maybe 20 knots. After three or four miles, Diamond slowed enough that the boat dropped out of plane and plowed water, bow high, stern low. The boat threw off a large wake. Soon, he slowed further, staring at the water off the starboard bow.

  There was a medium chop, which obscured the view down into the water. Diamond slowed further.

  “I’m guessing two hundred yards,” the diver said.

  Diamond nodded.

  After a minute, Diamond dropped the shifter to neutral. He pointed. “There’s the buoy marker,” he said. We coasted at no-wake speed, turning a bit to port as the boat slowed to the point that the rudder ceased being effective. The diver was frowning, staring at the water.

  Diamond shifted into Forward, brought our speed back up to that of a person walking so that he regained steering control, then pulled it back into neutral.

  Something caught his eye, and he shifted into Reverse for a second, just long enough to bring the boat to a stop. “Hard to work a crime scene when it’s forty feet under water,” he said.

  The diver unzipped his ski suit and pulled it off.

  I still couldn’t see anything under the water. The waves reflected sunlight like thousands of camera flashes going off at random. It was difficult to focus my eyes on the shifting dark areas of the water’s surface. There seemed to be nothing but light-colored sandy bottom.

  Then the corpse appeared like an apparition, far below us, but easy to see, fully clothed, tied ankle-to-anchor, and floating vertically, the arms lifted up by a float.

  FIFTEEN

  The body looked closer than it probably was because of the water’s clarity. One of the ankles was tied to a tire that stood upright on the bottom. The tire probably had some kind of weight in it. The body position was vertical, held up by a life ring that was tied to the body’s wrists. The life ring was buoyant enough to keep her vertical but not enough to overcome whatever weight was in the tire. The body’s free leg floated up and out at an angle. With her arms up, hands together, she looked like a dancer or a yoga practitioner in a workout position.