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

  It was easy to drown someone by tying a weight to them and dumping them in the lake. It was easy to drop them in the middle of the lake where the bottom was in permanent darkness 1600 feet below and where no one would ever find the body. But someone had decided they wanted this body found, and he had gone to extra trouble to use a float to arrange the body for maximum visual impact.

  For a brief moment, the water’s surface became calmer and the image of the body stopped jumping around. I got a glimpse of the face. Although it was a long way down, the water was very clear. It looked like the woman who was pursuing Nadia, the woman whose ID said her name was Amanda Horner.

  If the news media reported the death, that would suit the killer well because it would increase the chances that Nadia would see or hear about it, likely hastening her delivery of the insurance money when she got it.

  The diver pulled on his swim fins, picked up the scuba tank, and slid the harness straps over his shoulder. He pulled a neoprene hood over his head, then picked up his face mask. He spit on the inside of the glass and rubbed it around with his finger, a common way of keeping a mask from fogging up when diving. He pulled his gloves and the mask on, put the regulator into his mouth, took a breath from the tank, then looked toward the bolt cutters, which was with the coil of rope on the seat near Diamond.

  I handed the diver the bolt cutter and the rope.

  The diver raised one knee, carefully lifted his swim fin through the small transom door and stepped onto the little swim platform. He shifted his weight, lifted the other leg, and then did a kind of sideways fall into the water. He put one hand to his face mask and twisted as he went so that he was back first when he hit, avoiding any impact that would knock off his mask.

  We watched as he descended, his fractured image jumping around as it appeared through the waves. The bubbles from his exhalations rose in groups as he descended.

  When the diver got to the body, he first tied the coiled rope to the tire. When done, he put his arm through the rope coil. We saw him reach out with the bolt cutter. The body came free.

  The life ring pulled the body toward the surface, hands first. As the body rose, the water pushed the free leg down. It looked like a swimmer had pushed off the bottom, hands outstretched above her head, and feet together. Like a slow torpedo, the body made a long, graceful, coasting trajectory toward the surface.

  After long seconds, the life ring popped out. Inertia brought the body’s hands out of the water. As the hair broke the surface, the body stopped rising, then slipped back beneath the surface. Freed of its anchor, the body now hung from the life ring.

  There was a gentle splash to the side as the diver surfaced. He kicked with his fins and came over to the side of the boat. He lifted up his hand and held the end of the line. I bent down, took it from him, and began pulling up the heavy tire, reeling the line in, left hand, right hand, over and over.

  The diver swam over to the life ring and towed it to the boat, moving slowly because of the drag of the body. Diamond came over and took it from him. The diver removed his fins, tossed them in the boat, then climbed in.

  I stopped reeling in the tire and tied the line off on a tie-down cleat. Diamond bent down and lifted gently on the life ring until he could get hold of the woman’s arms. He pulled the body part of the way out of the water. Then the three of us hoisted the body into the boat and laid it on the floor of the boat. The life ring was still tied to the body’s hands. It looked old and faded as if it had hung in the sun for thirty years. Water ran from it, sparkling in the sun and trickling across the boat floor to join the much larger stream coming from the body and its clothes.

  “This the woman you told me about?” Diamond said.

  I nodded.

  The wet clothes looked to be the same black jeans and shirt Amanda had worn when she followed Nadia. Her skin was now blue-white, and she looked oddly beautiful, like the good ghost in a movie. Whatever terror had stricken her in the moments before she died was gone now. Her face was placid, as if being interred in Tahoe’s ice water was relaxing.

  “Doesn’t seem like this senorita would be good at putting the squeeze on anyone. Very slight of build.” Diamond paused. “I never thought much about my image of bad guys. But I see her and I realize that I’ve been indulging in stereotypes.”

  “No way to know if this woman was an effective predator,” I said. “But Nadia was certainly shaken. Simply having someone follow her made her feel pressured and scared.”

  “You said she was carrying?” Diamond said.

  “She had a pocket Glock, but no permit. According to her driver’s license, her name was Amanda Horner. Age thirty-two. The license looked like a forgery.”

  Diamond turned to the diver. “See anything down there?”

  “Just wavy sand in all directions. The life ring and the cable to her ankle are here.” He turned and pointed to the cut cable attached to the body’s ankle. “The rest of the cable is attached to the tire.” He looked over the side where the tire cord stretched from the cleat down into the water.

  I un-cleated the cord and continued to reel in the tire. When I got the tire to the surface, it was too heavy to pull out by the line alone without the line cutting my hands. I bent down and grabbed the tire to lift it aboard.

  One side of the tire was filled with concrete. It probably weighed 50 pounds, and it made an effective anchor even if it didn’t have anchor plates to dig into the bottom. Certainly, no one could swim with such a weight tied to their ankle.

  “An old Goodyear,” I said to Diamond. “Standard size. Probably only ten thousand like it in the basin.”

  Diamond looked over. “Right. Maybe concrete has a chemical finger print. If we could identify it, maybe we could learn where the concrete was bought.”

  “Concrete DNA?” I said.

  “Yeah. Better yet, look for a fingerprint in that concrete.”

  “No prints that I can see,” I said, angling the tire, trying to get it into the light. “But here’s a creepy crawly that might give up some secrets.”

  “What?” Diamond asked.

  “A really long bug,” I said. “Stuck in the concrete. Dried. Well, totally soaked, now. But it looks like it died and dried out when the concrete was poured.”

  “And now it’s reconstituted?”

  “Practically,” I said.

  “What kind of bug?”

  “I don’t know. It’s got legs, wings, creepy little antennas. Looks like a giant black wasp.”

  Diamond came over and looked. I pointed.

  “Think Street would know?” Diamond said. “She could do that forensic entomology thing, figure out that the concrete was poured into the tire in some distant place, the only place on the planet where the bug grows.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m going to lean this tire against the rear seat. If we’re careful, maybe we can get this to Street before it self-destructs.”

  “Probably should keep it moist,” Diamond said. “I don’t know that bugs can be repeatedly dried, moistened, and dried again. Could be, if this guy dries out, he’ll turn to dust and blow away.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “But you slosh water into the tire, I bet it washes him away,” Diamond said.

  “Tricky business, bug stuff,” I said. I wondered how long we could keep ignoring the corpse lying on the floor of the boat.

  Diamond leaned over the woman’s body and felt the pockets of her jeans. “Too tight and wet to feel inside the pockets,” he said. “But I don’t feel anything from the outside. ’Course, it sounds like you already took what she carried.”

  “And gave it to Mallory,” I said.

  “The coroner might learn something,” Diamond said.

  The diver sat with Diamond up front, and I sat on the rear seat as Diamond drove back to the boat launch. The day was spectacular, the chop making the waves a deep indigo with the snow-capped peaks as a 360-degree backdrop. It was hard to appreciate the scenery out of the boat with
a dead woman lying in front of me, staring open-eyed toward the sky. She’d been in the water long enough for her corneas to fog a bit. Except for a series of scratches on her left jawline like those a gnawing fish would leave, it looked like scavenging water creatures had left her alone. With no specialized knowledge, I guessed that she’d been under just overnight. In warmer water, the body would have been in much worse shape. In the icy cold of Lake Tahoe, bodies tended to stay relatively preserved.

  It was disconcerting how thoroughly lifeless a dead human body was. Bodies don’t look like people without animation. They look like strange objects, a new kind of cold plastic. I’d often seen sculptures of people, most of which had more life than a dead body, even those sculptures made of bronze or marble. I didn’t know how it worked, a sculptor imbuing a hard lifeless material with some essence of life when an actual body had no essence of life. It was the inscrutable magic of art.

  Diamond was driving the boat at medium speed, just enough to be up on plane. He took a sudden turn to port. Probably avoiding some floating debris. Just as quickly, he took another turn back to starboard. The boat leaned one way, then the other. The turns made Amanda’s head roll back and forth as if she were shaking her head. ‘No, no, no, don’t do it,’ she seemed to be saying.

  Diamond cut the power as we approached the Cave Rock boat ramp. Denell was ready with the boat trailer. We hooked the tow cable onto the prow of the boat, then winched the boat up onto the trailer.

  I leaned over the edge to look inside the cockpit and see if the body should be secured in some way before we drove off. Her head lolled again. I put my foot on the trailer tire and boosted myself up higher. I reached over and in and took the life ring that was tied to her wrist and propped it to hold her head in place. The line made her arm move, and I noticed some discoloration just visible below her sleeve. I pulled the cold wet fabric up.

  There was writing on the inside of her arm. The letters looked to have been written with an indelible marker. The handwriting was scrawled, but the words were clear.

  “The American Dream”

  “Diamond,” I said.

  He looked at me. I gestured toward the boat’s cockpit.

  Diamond pulled a little step stool out of the back of the patrol unit, set it on the pavement next to the boat trailer, and stepped up to look inside.

  He saw what I was pointing at.

  “I’m guessing she didn’t write it,” I said.

  “No.” He pointed. “The letters are on her left arm. If she’d reached over with her right hand and written them herself, they would be facing the other direction. Unless she’s good at writing upside down, somebody else must have written them.”

  “A murderer’s calling card?” I said.

  “Could be.”

  “Do you have anything we can use to cover the body?” I asked.

  Diamond thought about it, then shook his head.

  Perhaps a few curious people would notice the sheriff’s vehicle towing a dripping boat in the middle of winter, but unless we pulled next to a tall truck, none of them would know that lying on the floor of the boat was the body of a young woman, staring at the clouds, about as far from experiencing the American Dream as possible.

  SIXTEEN

  Spot was excited to see me as I approached the pickup. He wagged hard enough for me to hear his tail smacking the back of the front seat, then the dashboard, then the seat again. The rhythm was syncopated like the padump of a heartbeat. I’d never noticed that before, his right wag a bit faster than his left wag.

  When I opened the door, he wagged harder as he sniffed me. His tail slowed, then stopped. He kept sniffing, but his enthusiasm was gone.

  It seems that the default emotion of most dogs is happiness. But they are very sensitive to the smell of human death. It runs a hard counter to their enthusiasm for all things connected to people.

  “Sorry, largeness. It didn’t turn out well. You can probably smell death even when it’s been refrigerated in ice cold water.”

  He sat down, leaning against the passenger door, and looked away.

  I started the pickup and turned on the fan to begin to dry the window condensation from Spot’s breath.

  I stretched the end of my sleeve over my hand and used it to wipe the inside of the windshield. Then I pulled out and followed Diamond and Denell as they headed south. They turned up Kingsbury Grade and pulled in at Street’s lab.

  I parked next to them, got out, and lifted the tire with its concrete fill out of the back of the boat.

  Diamond was frowning hard. “Looks like you should consider the threat to you to be serious.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I thought about the body’s eyes, staring lifeless, and I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t to blame for her death. I bore no responsibility because I didn’t kill her. All I did was challenge her boss when he called on the cell phone.

  Yeah, right.

  Diamond and Denell pulled out fast, probably to eliminate any possibility of Street coming out and seeing the body of Amanda Horner lying in the back of the boat.

  I carried the tire into Street’s bug lab. Spot followed me, his movements lackluster. I told Street about what we’d found. Her face went dark, but then she rallied.

  “Bring it over here so we can see it in my exam light,” she said.

  I did as she said and lifted the tire up onto her counter.

  Street pulled the light over and angled it to illuminate the inside of the tire. The concrete in the tire was still a bit wet from the lake. At the edge of the concrete plug, where the concrete met rubber, the big, long bug was still visible. It looked mangled and soggy and scary as a bug gets.

  “Oh, my God, it’s a Tarantula Hawk,” Street said.

  “So it’s a regular bug,” I said. “Not some mutant, one-of-a-kind freak?”

  “Yes, of course, it’s a regular bug. They are common wherever tarantulas are found.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I don’t like to think that anything so large and nasty-looking could be common. Please tell me that Tarantula Hawks look worse than their bite.”

  “Yes, absolutely. They rarely bite humans.”

  “Good.”

  “But they sting,” Street said.

  “Now I’m unhappy. Is it a gentle, benign sting?”

  Street smiled. “Maybe we shouldn’t go further down this line of inquiry.”

  “Not gentle? Not benign?” I said.

  “On the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, the Tarantula Hawk is number two.”

  “Number two least painful, or number two most painful?”

  “Most. The Tarantula Hawk is a type of spider wasp. It has the second most painful sting in the world after the bullet ant, which feels like getting shot by a bullet. Justin Schmidt, the guy who created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, was actually stung by a Tarantula Hawk. I recall that he called the pain ‘blinding, fierce, and shockingly electric, as though a running hairdryer had been dropped into your bubble bath.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “Right. But you probably don’t want to know the details of what this wasp does.”

  I inhaled a deep, calming breath. Breathed out. Repeated. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “This specimen in the tire is a female Tarantula Hawk. She can smell a tarantula from a long distance. She attacks the tarantula and gets into a death battle. She usually wins by stinging the spider. The sting paralyzes the tarantula but doesn’t kill it. Then she drags the tarantula to her nest.”

  “Wait.” I pointed at the wasp carcass. “This girl is big, but tarantulas are huge. They must weigh many times what the wasp weighs.”

  “True. But she’s incredibly strong. She can drag a paralyzed tarantula up hills, over obstacles. It’s amazing to watch. When she gets the tarantula where she wants it, she lays an egg on its abdomen. When the larva hatches, it drills a hole into the still-living, still-paralyzed tarantula and burrows into the spider’s body. There the larva eats the tarantula f
rom the inside, voraciously consuming everything but the most vital organs, which keeps the tarantula alive for several weeks while the wasp larva grows.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I said. “It sounds like something out of a horror movie.”

  “Mother nature at her most inventive,” Street said. “Never underestimate insects.”

  I glanced at the big, dead wasp. “I may move to Antarctica, where it’s too cold for insects.”

  “Sorry, there are insects there, too. But none like this one.” She pointed at the Tarantula Hawk. “May I have this specimen? I’d like to check it for parasites. Parasitoids are often victims of parasites themselves.”

  “Divine retribution from an insect deity?” I said, feeling smart.

  “Maybe.” Street put on magnifier glasses and used a tweezers to pull the waterlogged insect body out of the tire. “It looks like it got one of its wings trapped in the concrete. I’m surprised it didn’t tear itself free. Oh, but here’s some damage to the thorax. That’s probably what did it in.”

  “You have an exciting profession,” I said.

  “Sarcasm hides insecurity,” Street said.

  “Ouch. But you’re probably right. I should get going. Will you be okay alone with your dangerous creatures?”

  “They’re dead, so unless they have ghosts, I’ll be okay.”

  “But the mice are still alive. At least for now.” She pointed to the Paiute Deadfall with the Random House dictionary weight. She’d rigged up Diamond’s sticks and re-balanced the dictionary on the stick seesaw.

  “I put some peanut butter on the trigger twig,” she said. “We’ll see if it works.”

  “It certainly looks like a medieval rodent-crushing device,” I said.

  “Diamond said the Pauites invented it long before the Middle Ages,” she said.