Tahoe Avalanche Read online

  “Fatist?”

  “Okay, awkward word,” she said. “Anyway, people should be able to wear whatever they want.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “But you...” Street stopped. “Oh, got it. You wear a baggy old sweatshirt when you run and you drink a hearty cab when you eat chicken stir fry. And the people in the uniforms are the ones who make up rules about behavior.”

  “Always been my observation,” I said. “But you should stay with the uniform even if you eschew the rule-making.” I drank some more Fat Cat. I gave it an eight on my taste-to-cost scale. Street had touched her wine with her lips and maybe even her tongue, but I couldn’t see that the level had dropped in her glass.

  She added strips of green pepper and red pepper and yellow pepper. She arranged the strips in a decorative pattern in the pan, then held it out for me to look at. The food was a culinary kaleidoscope and smelled like heaven. Then she stirred in the strips.

  Street began talking about April’s phone call.

  “Many discomforts between people are the result of a structural problem, not ill will,” Street said. “April was obviously hurting and feeling alone, and she snapped at you on the phone. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. And it doesn’t mean she is a bad person.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Casey.”

  “Okay, so my specialty is insects. It doesn’t mean I can’t pronounce on topics outside my field.”

  “But I’d pay more attention to your pronouncements if you put on the uniform.”

  “So you could take it right off? Men don’t make any sense.”

  “Never said we did.”

  SIXTEEN

  Heavy snow was coming down at a 30-degree angle when I creaked and groaned my way out of bed. My deck had accumulated another foot of snow on it since I’d shoveled the night before. My world’s-greatest-view across Lake Tahoe had been reduced to the deck railing.

  My breath made clouds in the frigid air of the living room. My indoor wood supply was down to two pieces of kindling and one split log. All the rest of my fuel was outside, relishing the frozen storm.

  I decided I wasn’t that brave first thing out of bed. So I bunched up a pile of newspaper in the woodstove, criss-crossed the two sticks and munched the chunk of Lodgepole pine onto the pile. I struck a wooden match under the newsprint, then swung the stove door so that it was open only one-half inch. My insufficient pile would fail any Boy Scout survival-fire merit-badge test. But what the Boy Scouts don’t tell you is that a stove with good draft and a not-quite-shut door will turn damp newspaper and a green log into a blast furnace in a few minutes.

  With the growing rush of air fueling the fire, I took the three steps to my kitchen nook and pushed the button on the coffee maker I’d loaded the night before.

  Spot hadn’t budged. He was curled up in his corner. His nose was under his right front paw, just visible under the edge of the big polyester sleeping bag I’d flopped over him the night before. He hadn’t moved since.

  “Hey, largeness,” I mumbled.

  I thought I could hear him breathing, but otherwise there was no sign of life. Great Danes have short hair and belong in large houses with central heating, not 500-square-foot log cabins with woodstoves. I knew Spot would eventually unfurl when the temperature in the cabin climbed from Tahoe to Tahiti.

  I poured coffee into a mug that Street had given me. The mug had lettering that said, “Bugs Love Global Warming.” Spot probably would, too.

  I drank coffee. Spot slept. Someone knocked on the door. Spot didn’t budge. Great watchdog.

  I opened the door.

  Diamond stood in a ski parka, hood pulled down to his eyes, drawstring tightened under his chin. “I grew up in Mexico City,” he said, shivering. “If you were to take me in out of this weather, I might be your friend for life.”

  I held up my mug for him to read the lettering.

  “Me, too,” Diamond said.

  Diamond sat with me at my little kitchen table. I gave him coffee. He never took off his jacket, or even his hood, as he drank it. The snow on top of his hood was melting. It dripped into his coffee.

  “On duty?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Can’t see your uniform under the parka.”

  He nodded again. “Can’t see your dog under his sleeping bag. They make heaters. Burn natural gas or propane. Keep entire houses warm at night.”

  “Woodstove has worked ever since Ben Franklin,” I said. “All I’m missing is fuel that isn’t caked with ice and snow.” I set about preparing a morning feast. Some days I have three cups of coffee for breakfast. Others, cold ones, I get serious at the cooktop. I put burger and onion into a fry pan and turned the propane burner on high. Diamond didn’t even glance at my efforts, unaware that my culinary dance moves could probably get me an audition for Rachael Ray’s TV show. A few minutes later I cracked two eggs and mixed them into the burger and onion.

  Then I spooned the mixture out of the fry pan and onto tortillas, added cheddar cheese and salsa and rolled them up.

  “Smells like Mexican cooking,” Diamond said.

  “Breakfast burrito?” I said. “Got an extra. You want one?” I put the burritos into the microwave.

  “Welsh, Scottish type like you,” Diamond said, “I’d think you’d be frying up some haggis with bashed neeps on the side and laver bread for your carbs.”

  “What’s all that?”

  “Sausage made of offal and cooked in a sheep’s stomach, mashed turnips on the side and seaweed pancake to give you energy.”

  “You mean offal like I think you mean it?”

  “Sure. Ears, lips, noses. Scots are frugal.”

  “I’ll stick with Mexican.” I pulled out the burritos, put them on plates and shoved one toward Diamond. “Coffee?”

  He nodded.

  I poured another cup and slid it toward him.

  Diamond attacked his burrito. His hood was pulled down so far I could barely see him eat.

  “You got that much enthusiasm for haggis and bashed neeps and laver bread?” I said.

  Diamond shook his head as he chewed.

  “Then why do you know about food from my ancestors’ part of the world?”

  “Like to eat,” Diamond mumbled. “Like to learn about food. Helps me find out which foods not to eat.”

  “More you learn, more you realize that Mexican food is better than most, right?” I said.

  “Born and raised in Mexico City. What do you expect.” Diamond finished his burrito.

  I was still on my second bite. “You eat like Spot,” I said.

  Spot lifted his head from his sleeping bag and looked up. His nostrils were flexing.

  “What did you find out about the avalanche at Sand Harbor?” I asked.

  “Not big, but brutal if you’re the guy driving the old Blazer.”

  “Somebody got squashed?”

  “May as well drop boulders on him,” Diamond said. “Those other burritos for the hound?”

  “I’ll use some to flavor his sawdust chunks.”

  “The rest?”

  I put two more burritos in the microwave, then slid one onto Diamond’s plate when it was done. He bent over it, his hood still obscuring his face.

  “They get an ID?”

  “Yeah,” Diamond said through a full mouth. “Guy in the Blazer was from Incline Village. Someone named Astor Domino. Funny names you gringos got. Sounds like the name of that football stadium.”

  “Learn anything about him?”

  “Just that he was a student at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Diamond left after breakfast.

  I called Bill.

  “Did March have a friend named Astor Domino?” I asked.

  “Never heard the name before, why?”

  “He died in a slide at Sand Harbor, yesterday.”

  “Christ. It’s murder, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll call you
when I know more.”

  I wanted to pursue Astor Domino, but Street and I had an appointment in Sacramento. Spot and I picked her up at her condo, and we were in palm tree country two hours later.

  We met the Medical Examiner in the Sacramento morgue, a modern building that looked more like the home of a high-tech medical company than a place to examine bodies.

  “Jack Kylie,” the man said, extending his hand. He had a small nose and narrow-set eyes that sat above and behind a jaw so broad and heavy, it was like looking at a super tanker head-on, with the bridge dwarfed by the ship’s prow.

  “I appreciate your coming down from Tahoe,” he said. “As you may know, El Dorado County lacks sufficient morgue facilities. So they contract with Sacramento County for morgue service when their facilities are full.”

  “Sergeant Bains said the young woman was suffocated,” I said.

  “Yes.” The doctor looked at Street. “You two aren’t squeamish, right? No, of course you wouldn’t be. Let’s go into the cooler. I’ll show you what I’ve found. And I have a forensic-entomologist question for Dr. Casey as well.”

  He took us down a hall and through a door with a sign above it that said, “As you are, we once were. As we are, you will be.”

  We went into a room where we donned gloves and masks, hair covers, goggles and white coats. The doctor then took us through a series of large rooms that looked like those in a modern hospital. The floors were polished tile and the walls were painted white. There were many of the tools and instruments of a standard operating room. Everywhere were specialized machines from electronic and analytical devices to forklifts for lifting carts with bodies on them.

  “We have six autopsy bays plus an infectious disease room and,” Dr. Kylie paused with a little flourish as he opened a door, “a homicide room.”

  The area was chilled and was permeated with the sickly odors of death. There were two rolling carts draped with white sheets like a painter’s drop cloths carefully arranged over couches.

  Kylie flipped on some bright lights and rolled one of the carts out to the center of the room. He pulled back the cloth revealing the girl’s head and neck.

  Although she was grayish white and looked very much dead, I tried to imagine life in the thin fragile face, a musical laugh, a furious frown, the imperious arch of the well-shaped eyebrows.

  “Here’s where I began my investigation,” the doctor said, pointing to the girl’s mouth. “The young woman’s lips and nose show some abrasion and signs of nascent frostbite from when she was still alive.” He lifted her top lip. The girl had beautiful teeth. “Here, too, we see frostbite and abrasion on her upper gums. On her forehead are light contusions and what looks like faint marks on her temples. The marks would be consistent with an attacker wearing thick gloves.

  “The cause of death was asphyxia, and there was a small amount of water in her lungs. I believe someone held her down on her back in the snow, perhaps with a leg over her arms and chest to keep her from moving. He then held her head like this, with his left hand, fingers across her forehead, thumb gripping her temple.” The doctor demonstrated with his hand across the girl’s forehead. “I say ‘he,’ because few women have hands large enough to span this distance. With his right hand he held a glove-full of snow and smothered her.”

  I said, “An unsophisticated attempt to make it so he could put her body in the way of an avalanche and hope we’d think the avalanche killed her?”

  “Yes.” Kylie pulled the cloth back over her head and moved to her other side. He lifted the cloth to expose her arm. “I found contusions on her arm, such as the bruising that might occur from her struggles while she was being suffocated. The marks are very faint, no doubt because of the padding of the killer’s gloves and of her insulated jacket. The girl is quite small, five-three and one hundred ten pounds. A strong, average-sized man could have suffocated her easily.”

  “Were there other injuries?” I asked.

  “Yes, and they add credence to my scenario. She has two broken ribs on her back under her left scapula. Her jacket was ripped in that area and there were bits of bark in the fabric as if she’d struck a tree. But the breaks came postmortem. You know of course that our bodies don’t die all at once. Long after the heart stops and brain activity ceases, our digestive system is still working on our last meal, our fingernails and hair are still growing, et cetera. But these rib fractures show no physiological reaction to trauma in the bone or the surrounding flesh. No bruising, no blood clotting, no beginning stages of tissue repair. I think these ribs were broken in the avalanche, but I think she had been dead for at least several hours or even most of a day prior to the slide.”

  We were quiet a moment.

  “You said you had a question for me?” Street said.

  “Yes, yes, thank you, I almost forgot.” Kylie opened a cabinet and pulled out a small glass jar with a medium-sized bug in it. “I was hoping you could identify this.”

  Street held it up to the light. “It looks like a Boat-backed Ground beetle. A type of insect from the order Coleoptera and a member of the family Carabidae.”

  “Oh good,” Kylie said. “This is a gift to me that you recognize this. What can you tell us about it?”

  “I’m not positive of the exact species. But it is a predatory beetle. Many beetles eat plant material or decomposing matter or even dung, but this carabid is a carnivore. He attacks and eats animals.”

  “By animals, you mean other insects,” Kylie said.

  “It’s true that many carabids eat insects. But in this case, I mean animals. Snails, in particular. He finds a snail, dives inside its shell opening and attacks and eats the resident. His larger cousins can actually crush the shells of small snails and eat them without crawling inside. Many of these eat slugs as well.”

  Street set the jar down. “Carabids are nowhere near as scary looking as huge beetles like the Elephant Stags, but they are nevertheless the T-Rexes of the beetle world. Even in larval form, they will hide in a burrow, and if an insect comes near, they will jump out, impale the creature with their knife-like mouth parts, and then eat it.”

  “Tell me,” Kylie said, his face showing some discontent, “not to segue from my questions, but are these beetles very rare?”

  Street laughed. “I hate to tell you, but they are everywhere. Fortunately, they focus on small prey. They won’t hurt you unless you poke a finger in their face.”

  Dr. Kylie was nodding without smiling. “I have another question about this beetle, although this is a bit of a reach. To me the beetle smells unpleasant, perhaps somewhat bitter and of course, now that it has been dead for some time, there is also the smell of decomposition. However, when I first found it, there was a very biting smell, very caustic. I couldn’t imagine that the beetle could have produced the smell, but if the smell came from something else, then I should really have a puzzle to solve. Have you ever heard about unusual smells from these carabids?”

  “Yes,” Street said. “In addition to vicious offensive techniques, certain carabids, the Bombardier beetles, for example, have a clever and effective defensive tactic. If they feel threatened, they will squirt hot acid at you from their anal glands. And, yes, the acid has a strong smell. The liquid vaporizes into noxious cloud puffs that are quite effective at driving predators off.”

  Kylie looked a little pale. “But you didn’t think this was a Bombardier beetle. Are you saying a Boat-backed Ground beetle would also squirt hot acid?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Then perhaps I’m missing something.”

  “Sorry,” Street said. “I should back up and explain something. Entomologists have no idea how many beetle species there are. We do know that beetles are the most common form of life on the planet. We’ve identified a few hundred thousand species. Based only on those, we can say that every fourth species of life on earth is a beetle. But here’s the catch. Many entomologists, perhaps most of them, estimate that there are ten or twenty times as many b
eetle species out there as what we’ve cataloged. If that is even close to true, then there are more kinds of beetles than all other kinds of life, plant or animal, added together. Maybe two times as many. Maybe four times as many.”

  “You’re saying that beetles are the most successful manifestation of life on the planet.” Kylie raised one eyebrow.

  “By numbers of species, yes,” Street said. “Where I’m going with all of this is that it leaves us with an important implication. If most of the species have yet to be identified, then it’s very likely that there are uncountable kinds of characteristics that we haven’t yet observed. So if you have a beetle that looks like a Boat-backed Ground beetle and it fires hot acid like a Bombardier beetle, I, along with many of my colleagues, won’t doubt you. We’ll just think that you’ve probably found a species that hasn’t been cataloged yet.”

  “Are carabids normally found in Tahoe?” Kylie asked.

  “Carabids are everywhere on earth, but I don’t think this particular guy is in Tahoe. Judging by his narrow mouth parts, I think he dives into a type of snail that only lives at lower elevations. Where did you find him?”

  “In the poor girl’s lungs.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “I hate to think of this bug crawling around inside the girl’s lungs,” I said. “You think she inhaled him?”

  “I’d guess not,” Dr. Kylie said. “If she had, she would have tried to violently cough him back out. There was no sign of that. I think he came postmortem.”

  “He crawled in?”

  “I think so.” The doctor turned to Street. “Would this kind of bug do that? Crawl into a moist dark tunnel?”

  “I’ve learned that there is no behavior that the odd bug won’t do. But I wonder why he didn’t crawl back out.”

  “She was moved. Her neck was flexed a little, collapsing his escape route. He died in her lungs.”

  “So the girl was killed with snow,” I said. “Perhaps there was sufficient snow at a lower elevation where this bug resides. But she could have been killed in Tahoe and then the body was brought down to a lower elevation. Street, are these bugs found relatively near Tahoe?”