Tahoe Skydrop (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 16) Page 8

  “I am real, Mr. McKenna.”

  “Most robots just call me Owen. You can have Lucy call me at this number. Of course, robots don’t have feelings, so at this point you’ll probably just decide to hang up on me. Either way, I’m sure your skills include capturing the number from incoming calls. Or you can have Lucy email me at...”

  The line went dead.

  How rude and very unlike an unflappable robot. This is where artificial intelligence needs to go if it wants to fool us. Making robots that get huffy and flustered. Future robots should make lots of mistakes, then yell at you, and then hang up on you.

  I hung up my phone and it rang. Wow, that was robot-fast.

  “Owen McKenna,” I answered.

  “Mr. McKenna, this is Lucy LaMotte calling. My husband’s secretary says you are quite rude and that I shouldn’t return your call.”

  “Sorry. Marie was, how shall I put it, not overly solicitous.”

  “She was designed that way. Yardley’s business is focused on replicating human behavior.”

  “Marie is a robot?” I said, revisiting what I’d said and thought.

  “That’s what I just said.” Now it was Lucy who sounded brusque. “I’d like you to tell me why you wanted to reach me,” she said. “And trust me, if this is some kind of sales call, you’ll want to hang up right now or you’ll regret it. I have certain… resources.”

  “Thanks for calling, Lucy. Don’t worry, I’m not selling anything. I got a little brusque with your, um, secretary because she wouldn’t let me talk to you. I’m sorry. I’m an ex-cop-turned-private investigator working on a case that intersects with your husband’s disappearance. The key to his disappearance may also be the key to my case.”

  She paused. “You and the other police still don’t know where Yardley is?”

  “Correct.”

  Lucy didn’t immediately respond. “I’m still listening,” she eventually said.

  I said, “From the evidence, it’s possible that Yardley was last seen in a helicopter flying near Job’s Sister, one of the mountains at the South Shore. A couple of hours ago, that chopper was found sitting in a field on a ranch in Alpine County just south of the Tahoe Basin. The chopper was in good shape, but it had been wiped of fingerprints. There was no sign of your husband or the pilot.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “A cop friend at the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office told me. Sergeant Diamond Martinez.”

  “Is Douglas County where that mountain is?”

  “No. Job’s Sister is on the border of El Dorado and Alpine Counties. But cops talk. It’s common to share information.”

  “And how could your case connect to my missing husband?” She was wary. Always a characteristic of a smart, sensible person.

  “I have no specific idea unless your husband had dealings with the Brödraskapet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A Swedish prison gang.”

  “You’re joking, right? Yardley is a robotics techie. He doesn’t operate in any circles that would bump up against a prison gang.”

  “My case involves some men who recently spent some time on the summit of Job’s Sister. We think they might be involved in the gang. We assume, but don’t know for certain, that they were involved in a crime of some kind.”

  “What kind of crime?”

  “I don’t know. May I come and talk to you?”

  “Can you give me names of actual police officers who would vouch for you?”

  “About a hundred, yeah. Cops from all the Tahoe counties, plus Reno, Truckee, Carson City. Cops dating back to my time as a cop in San Francisco.”

  Lucy was silent for several seconds. “Do you know the Tahoe Donner neighborhood?”

  “Yes, I was there on a case a couple of weeks ago.”

  Lucy gave me her address and said she’d be around for the next few hours.

  I told her I was on the East Shore and it would be an hour or more before I could get there.

  We hung up.

  I called Street.

  “I know you’re always looking for new places to run, so I thought I’d call. I have an appointment in Tahoe Donner. It might take awhile. But it’s a beautiful day for a drive.”

  She paused. “Yes, I think that would be good. Blondie can use a run as well.”

  As we drove toward the North Shore, I told Street about my morning, filling her in on Vince’s hike with the men but leaving out some of the more stressful details, or at least my conclusions about what the men were doing.

  “The wind didn’t stop them?”

  “No. But it blew one of the men down the west slope of Job’s Sister.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “I don’t think so. But it will probably be a long while before anyone finds him.”

  I also explained about the helicopter, originally hired by a robotics company, now sitting on a ranch in Alpine County.

  “Why do you think the helicopter came to rescue the other two?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to meet Lucy LaMotte, the wife of the robotics company owner. Hopefully, I’ll learn something from her.”

  It was a gorgeous sunny day for a drive. Despite the high wind at high altitude, there was very little wind at lake level. We passed several long lines of parked cars on the edge of the highway a few miles south of Sand Harbor. The road is a long way above the lake and is separated from the water by many acres of steep forest. There are no obvious trailheads signalling access down to the water or up to the Tahoe Rim Trail along the ridgeline at the top of the mountains to the east.

  Street said, “Look at the tourists going by us. They’re craning their necks as they drive, looking for the source of attraction.”

  “Anyone would wonder why so many people have parked in what seems like the middle of nowhere. But of course they don’t put up signs pointing toward the nude beaches down below.”

  “One of the lesser known aspects of the Nevada State Park system,” Street said. “It’s a don’t-ask-don’t-tell, and keep-your-phone-camera-in-your-bag system.”

  There was a clear dichotomy among the people getting out of their vehicles. The locals know to slather sunscreen on everywhere and wear hiking boots and shorts until they get down to the water. The tourists, who are merely following rumors, get out of their cars wearing flip flops and bikinis. And they’re the ones who show up at Urgent Care that evening or the next day hoping for relief from sprained ankles, bleeding lacerations from Manzanita leg scrapes, and second-degree, high-altitude sunburns in places where most people never get burns.

  I went around the North Shore to Kings Beach, turned right on 267, and went up and over Brockway Summit. When we got to Truckee, I drove west out Donner Pass Road, turned north on Northwoods Blvd., and drove up into the Tahoe Donner subdivision, which holds the unusual distinction of being one of the largest homeowner associations in the country. It includes thousands of houses in the Sierra forest, mostly vacation homes, empty most of the year.

  The house that belonged to Yardley and Lucy LaMotte was not notable, even though it was larger than most of the Tahoe Donner houses. It had a simple roofline and water conservation landscaping of stones and cobbles and sparse plantings. The drive was lined with bushes and some lights on two-foot-tall posts, obviously designed by an architect who didn’t know that they wouldn’t be visible during the five or six months of snow season each year. While nice, the house was very modest by the standards we’ve come to expect from our tech wizards. Perhaps Yardley and Lucy had yet to achieve the gold strike of an Initial Public Offering that would throw hundreds of millions of investor dollars their way. Or maybe they were too busy to engage in the expected, ostentatious material world.

  We parked, and Street let Blondie out of the back.

  “Probably best to leave His Largeness to sleep. He already put in several miles of hiking this morning. Do you have a plan?”

  “A few years ago, I ran on some of the trails around here with a friend.
I’m planning to explore them again. If you come out and don’t see me, call my cell and I’ll tell you where I am.”

  “Got it.” I kissed her, and she took off running. Blondie, like so many rescue dogs grateful for their new owners, kept perfect pace at Street’s side.

  “Behave, Largeness,” I said as I left Spot. I knew my words would serve no real purpose. But I always clung to the hope my dog would be more inclined to make good choices if he knew I was paying attention to his presence.

  The doorbell struck a couple of grand chords of a choral group singing Mozart’s Requiem. I was impressed but then realized that for the generation that makes sport of choosing ringtones for their phone, a doorbell in a smart house could be programmed the same way.

  The door had no peephole. But of course tech people had hidden webcams that were probably sending images of visitors’ faces to facial recognition software. A synthetic voice would probably announce my presence to the home’s occupants. Marie’s cousin, perhaps.

  There was a whoosh of weather stripping as a woman in her twenties opened the door. She emanated intelligence and cynicism and something else that seemed negative. Anger maybe.

  “You must be Owen McKenna,” she said.

  “And you, Lucy LaMotte. Pleased to meet you.”

  We shook. Her grip was strong but shaky as if she had a tremor of fear.

  “Come inside and we’ll talk,” she said.

  I followed her through an entry of terracotta ceramic tile on which lay a thick, eight-by-twelve foot rug with a pattern of blues, browns, grays, and greens, a likely abstraction of the Tahoe landscape. Like Reno to the northeast, Truckee identified with Tahoe even though it was a substantial distance from the lake.

  Lucy LaMotte walked into a large open room with a kitchen on the right side and a living room on the left. The living room had thick forest green carpet on which sat arrangements of overstuffed leather furniture. Centered on the left wall was a fireplace with a shiny black granite hearth and mantle. To the side of the fireplace was a built-in compartment, lined with stone and filled with split logs. The far wall was all glass facing the forest. To the right, the kitchen had more of the terracotta ceramic floor but was tied to the living room with black granite counters that matched the fireplace hearth and mantle.

  Between the living and kitchen areas was a casual dining area with reclaimed hard pine flooring coated in gloss so thick that the flaws in the wood looked great and not like flaws at all.

  “Coffee?” Lucy said.

  “Please.”

  She poured two mugs, set them on the heavy, plank dining table as polished as the floor, and then brought over a plate of cookies that appeared homemade.

  “Have a seat,” she said.

  I sat.

  Still standing, Lucy sipped coffee with an appraising manner as if to check taste or temperature. I sipped as well. But I’m not discerning. If it’s black and warmer than tepid, I’m happy.

  “Jean, the neighbor lady likes to bake,” Lucy said. “Jean is a widow and not in the best financial shape. So Yardley has the snow service do Jean’s drive along with ours. She repays us with cookies. I should decline them, but she’s so sweet.”

  Lucy was silent for a moment and looked awkward as she stood there. Then her face darkened, and her eyes brimmed with tears.

  “I’m so worried,” she said, her voice rising to a higher register. “This isn’t like Yardley. He has a lot of faults. And sometimes he goes away for most of a day and no one knows where. But he’s never just disappeared for days at a time.” She picked up a cookie and put it whole into her mouth. The move had a touch of desperation as if food might draw her focus away from her worst fears. She chewed and swallowed and drank coffee. Then, with no advance indication, she blurted, “Do you think he’s dead? It’s been three days, and he’s made no contact! I’ve read about missing people. After a certain length of time, the odds of them still being alive are very small.”

  As she said it, I thought about Jon Cooper, already missing for more than 24 hours.

  “Let’s not lose hope, yet,” I said. “There could be any number of explanations for his absence. For one thing, the helicopter was fine. The fact that there was no crash and the helicopter was set down in a remote area suggests that someone - Yardley or the pilot - made a specific plan for something that required a change in the flight plan. There was no sign of violence.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I feel like I’ve handled so many things badly.”

  “This is a very tough time for you,” I said.

  Lucy looked straight at me, her eyes seeming to harden. “I don’t want anything bad for Yardley. He’s been a good financial provider. At least, until recently. But the truth is he’s also a jerk. A self-focused bully. Unfaithful, too.”

  There was movement in the hallway that entered at the side of the kitchen.

  I turned to see an older woman appear. She had a pleasant countenance, with short, white hair and pronounced cheekbones. She looked very much like an older version of Lucy although much thinner. “Lucy! How dare you say that,” the woman said in a soft voice. But as she made her protest, something in her tone made me wonder of she didn’t partially agree with Lucy.

  “Face the reality, mother. Yardley may be generous to you, but he’s universally abusive and ungracious to me and to his employees. I don’t want him to suffer if he’s had some terrible accident. But that doesn’t change who he is. I’m just facing reality.”

  “You’re not looking at the big picture, Lucy. Yardley is a genius who’s going to change the world. You have to give people like him space. You need to be tolerant of their flaws in order to let them shine.”

  “Mother, stop at once! I will not hear any more of this.” Lucy lowered her face to her hands. “He even made me sign a pre-nup! And now he told me that he took out some kind of crazy loan and pledged our house as collateral. You know what his last words to me were when he left the house three days ago? He said the house was being foreclosed and we might lose it! What kind of a great man is that?!”

  “Okay,” the older woman said. “I’ll just grab a glass of wine and melt back into my quarters, out of sight and out of hearing range.” She opened the cupboard, pulled out a glass, held it under the spout of a wine box I hadn’t seen, and pressed the button to fill it up. When she was done, she looked at me. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to meet you, mister.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “I’m terrible. Self-focused and vindictive. Mom, meet Owen McKenna. Owen is some kind of cop, and he’s looking into what happened to Yardley. Owen, meet my mother Emily Taylor.”

  I stood up and shook the woman’s hand.

  The woman turned and disappeared back down the hallway.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lucy stared down the hallway after her mother. “There is a woman who is blind to the ways of powerful men, her husband - my father - and her two brothers who are now all dead, gone to their graves with her full support in spite of their uncountable, never-ending transgressions. And now she’s blind to her son-in-law. She’s never faced the truth. She even supported Yardley when he said that getting really fat had the upside of setting himself apart from a world full of ordinary people. And what did my mom say? ‘Yardley, you do whatever it takes to focus on your genius.’ Can you imagine that? And then she started baking him pies. Every time we saw her, she gave him a fresh-baked pie. Apple. Pumpkin. Pecan. And after dad died and Yardley moved her into our house, she has baked him a pie every week.”

  Lucy started crying.

  I realized her tears weren’t just for Yardley. They were for the multiple downsides of life, the loss of innocence, the loss of youth, the loss of friendship. The potential loss of a husband and, maybe even more, the loss of the dream of what married life might have been.

  Lucy wiped her face with her palms and carefully ran her finger tips under her eyes.

  I waited.

  She finished her coffee, set d
own her cup, and looked at me, a steady gaze, pretty blue eyes peering out through puffy red eyelids.

  “You said you were working on something that might connect to Yardley.”

  “Possibly. I can’t talk about that case. Not yet, anyway. But I bring it up because it has the possibility of revealing what happened to Yardley.”

  “What do you currently think happened to Yardley?” Lucy frowned.

  “I don’t know. But I might be able to learn why he went missing. Once we know that, his whereabouts might become more clear. I have questions I’d like to ask you.”

  “I’d like to pay you.”

  “Thanks, but Yardley’s disappearance is something I want to find out about for the other case I’m working on. The client on that case is paying me.”

  “If you learn something useful or even if you don’t, I still want to pay you for your efforts on my behalf.”

  I made a single nod. “I’ll accept payment for anything I do that I wouldn’t do on the other case.”

  “It’s a deal.” Lucy seemed less upset as we moved toward solving the puzzle of what happened to her husband.

  “From what the helicopter charter company said, Yardley hired the helicopter. Why would he need a helicopter?”

  “He uses the helicopter to make digital scans of mountains. The data he acquires will one day help his robots to move around on those mountains, climbing them, or skiing them, or whatever else suits him.”

  “He’s really into mountains?” I asked.

  Lucy looked at me with disappointment. I’d obviously missed the point.

  “Scanning mountains is just one kind of what Yardley called demonstration technology. You dream up a new idea. Then you figure out a way to demonstrate the possibilities.”

  I nodded.

  “So let’s say you develop a new set of math formulas that allow a robot to study a surface and infer aspects of that surface that aren’t readily observable,” Lucy said.

  I nodded again.

  “You could tell people about it, and they would get it to some extent. But if you want people to really understand it, a better way is to demonstrate it. In Yardley’s case, his latest innovations allow a robot to look at a mountain cliff, make judgements about the size and scope of the cliff, the kinds of rock, the presence of other factors that might be relevant like weather or temperature, which might lead to slippery ice. The angle of the sun at any given time of any given day, which might melt the ice. From a lay perspective, if Yardley told about this analysis, it would be boring and hard to grasp. Maybe even from a scientific perspective as well.” Lucy paused and drank coffee.