10 Tahoe Trap (22 page)

I tried to look where he pointed. Maybe there was a bit of something in the trees. Something light-colored. Maybe not.

“What did you see? I didn’t see anything.”

“A shoe,” he said. “It’s Cassie’s.”

If only I could go slower.

“How do you know it’s hers?”

“She has Nikes with a red swoosh.”

I made another circle and came back for another flyby.

I edged the throttle back a bit, slowing the plane a touch. Too slow would be dangerous if we hit a down draft or wind shear. But Ben Rashid had told me that the Skyhawk’s stall speed was 54 knots. I still had some margin for error.

I came in just above the treetops.

As I approached the rocks, I studied the forest below. I scanned back and forth, looking into the rocky crags.

There were trees and rocks and dirt.

Paco pointed again. This time I saw it. A white athletic shoe with red stripe, lit by a lucky beam of sunlight shining through an opening in the forest canopy.

I turned away from the mountain, throttled up and circled around, climbing like a soaring raptor. I went around twice, climbing back to 500 feet Above Ground Level, scanning the ground below continuously.

I saw no van.

Paco was still facing the window, but I don’t think he was seeing anything outside.

Pioneer Trail was the closest paved road, but it was unclear from my position where the dirt trail turned off.

I circled again, climbing up to 1000 AGL. From that altitude I could see the turnoff in relation to other streets I knew.

Then I headed back to the airport, entered the pattern on final, and landed. After I settled up with Ben Rashid, Paco and I rejoined Spot in the Jeep, turned left out of the airport, took Elks Club over to Pioneer Trail, and drove toward the part of the forest where we’d seen the lost shoe.

TWENTY-THREE

The dirt turnoff from Pioneer Trail was unmarked and faint enough that the Forest Service hadn’t erected their standard barrier of boulders and logs to prevent unauthorized driving in the woods. Respecting their desire to prevent unnecessary soil compaction, I left the Jeep at the side of Pioneer Trail, and we hiked in.

After being cooped up in the Jeep at the airport, Spot ran around, excited, sniffing out the mysteries of squirrels, bears, and coyotes, and the less common Tahoe residents like mountain lions.

The trail wound back through a Jeffrey pine forest that the Forest Service had recently thinned. Hundreds of cut tree stumps showed a laudable effort to reduce the disastrous fuel buildup that was the result of 100 years of misdirected fire suppression. If they could multiply that thinning by ten thousand times, they might make the Tahoe Basin relatively fire safe. But no amount of mechanical thinning can bring the forest back to its natural condition where small, regular lightning-caused fires not only clear out the underbrush but open the cones of fire-dependent pines and let the seeds out to germinate in fire-cleared soil. Instead, the Forest Service burns the slash of the thinned-out trees, and hand-plants new trees, an ironic effort to restore some semblance of nature to a forest that managed itself for eons before Smoky Bear’s arrival.

At occasional intervals, I saw tire tracks on the trail. The varying marks appeared to have been made by multiple vehicles. The only information I could infer came from the softness of the marks. There were no skid marks and no areas with dirt thrown up. It appeared that all recent vehicles had been driven at a slow crawl, by drivers who were calm.

I paused now and then to keep Paco from falling too far behind. His face was toward the ground.

A quarter mile in, where the land began to rise up toward Heavenly Ski Resort, I saw rock projecting up above the forest canopy.

When I approached the rock, I tried to visualize where the shoe would be, based on what we’d seen from the air. I only knew that it was toward the back side of the rocks.

I turned around. Paco looked at me. Spot was not in sight.

“Spot!” He appeared in the woods to the side, loping toward us.

The trail with tire tracks went up a gentle slope toward the rock outcropping.

“Are you coming up this slope with me?” I asked Paco.

He shook his head.

“Then stay there where I can see you?”

He nodded.

I hiked up the slope. Spot bounded past me. The woods became thicker, but I could still look down and see Paco and the open woods around him. No one could approach him without being obvious.

I scanned for the shoe that we’d seen from the air. This was an area the Forest Service had not thinned, and the forest was so dense that I could see very little distance up into the trees.

Spot ran ahead. Near the outcropping, he made a sudden turn, trotted to the side and stopped.

As I approached, I saw him sniffing a shoe.

 It was a Nike athletic shoe, left foot, nearly new, with a red swoosh.

I picked it up by the laces to minimize damaging any evidence. It was large for a women’s shoe, and it had a number 9 printed inside of the tongue. Assuming it belonged to Paco’s foster mother, Cassie was a good-sized woman.

I turned, studying the woods for any other signs. As I’d already seen from the air, there was no van or anything else of interest.

In a few places were marks that may have been made by boots or shoes, but they were inconclusive. The ground was dry, and the granitic grus, with its lack of cohesiveness, was among the worst materials for picking up tracks. It took only the vaguest of impressions.

Without walking on the tire tracks, I stood in several places trying to reconcile the tire marks with the description Paco had given me. He said he looked out the van’s windows to see a pickup against a cliff. Then he ran from the van to the pickup, saw no escape around the rocks, and hid inside of the pickup.

It took some imagination to make the rocks before me seem like a cliff around which there was no escape.

I walked down to Paco, held up the shoe.

“Does this look like Cassie’s?”

He nodded. I couldn’t quite read the look on his face. Not so much sadness as significant fatigue. Like pictures I’d seen of the faces of starving children.

I pointed at the rocks. “Could these rocks be the cliffs you saw in the dark?”

Paco looked up at the outcropping. He shrugged.

Spot walked over to me. He sniffed the shoe. Then he lifted his head, turned a bit, raised his head farther, his snout pointing toward the forest.

Air scenting.

“Spot, sniff the shoe, again,” I said. “Do you have the scent?”

I grabbed his chest and gave him a little shake, the sign that indicates he has a job to do.

“Find the victim, Spot! Find the victim.”

I gave him a smack on his rear.

He trotted off between some trees, stopped, sniffed the ground. Spot made a single paw-swipe at the dirt, sniffed again, then lifted his head and looked at me.

“Find the victim, boy!” I said again. “Find the victim!”

Spot swung his head around to look out through the forest. But he didn’t move.

“C’mon, Spot,” I said. I walked through the trees toward a clearing. Spot followed. In the open space, the breeze was more prominent.

Spot suddenly lifted his head.

He walked directly upwind. It was a low-grade alert. He had a scent, but he wasn’t excited about it. His tail was down. Paco and I followed behind, not distracting him. Thirty yards down the trail, there was a rise, and the trail turned. Spot went straight. Off the trail. Walking upwind.

He didn’t trot like an eager dog. But he went relatively straight, which told me his intent. An ambling dog looking for a scent leaves a track that goes this way and that and circles back. A purposeful dog with an air scent follows the scent as long as it’s clear.

I followed, keeping back, not wanting to distract him. Paco followed behind me.

Spot went around a boulder and came to a clearing. He stopped, did a kind of a point, holding his snout forward in a steady position. But his tail was down. It was an alert of the worst kind.

Then he lay down.

I walked past Spot. Five yards ahead of him was an area of dirt that bulged up just a bit. The dirt was mostly sand, which, after you pile it, dries fast and looks just like the ground nearby.

Had Spot not found it and reacted with sadness, I wouldn’t have noticed it. It didn’t stand out in any significant way. But his reaction made it clear that we had found a grave.

TWENTY-FOUR

I took Paco’s hand and put it on Spot’s collar. We walked back toward the Jeep. The sky had gotten darker. Rain began to fall. I saw Paco turn back and look for a moment toward the area where we’d found the grave.

 I checked my cell phone. There was one bar of reception. I dialed the South Lake Tahoe PD, asked for Commander Mallory, was put on hold, transferred, and put on hold again.

“McKenna, here,” I said when he answered. “Got a probable murder victim that is probably in your jurisdiction.”

“Probable and probably aren’t very concrete words,” he said. “You got a body?”

“Not yet. But Spot found a grave. I’m thinking that your boys might have a shovel.” I explained to Mallory where I was and what had happened.

“You say it may be in my jurisdiction. We’ve got enough problems in our city. Why don’t you call the county. Get Sergeant Bains to take care of it.”

“It’s probably yours,” I said.

I heard him breathing over the phone.

“Come down Pioneer Trail,” I said. “You’ll see my Jeep on the east side of the road. Bring a rain jacket.”

“On my way,” he finally said and hung up.

Paco and Spot and I were waiting in my Jeep, out of the rain, when Mallory showed up in his unmarked, followed by a patrol unit.

We got out. I pulled my spare rain jacket out of the back and draped it over Paco’s shoulders. It came down to the ground.

“I don’t want it,” Paco said, shrugging it off. “It looks like a dress.”

“No it doesn’t,” I said, putting it firmly back on him. “It looks like a cape. Makes you look like a superhero. Especially with those shades on the top of your head.”

Paco gritted his teeth, but left the jacket on his shoulders.

“You want to leave your sunglasses in the Jeep? It’s raining.”

He shook his head.

 Mallory got out, Coke can in his hand. His frown wrinkles were deep enough to hold nickels.

Two cops got out of the other vehicle. The one I’d met, Sergeant Tibbs, nodded at me, but I didn’t know the other. Mallory didn’t introduce us.

Mallory looked at Paco, then back at me. “I heard about a brief kidnapping at your place last night. Is this young man the subject of interest?”

“Yeah. Meet Paco. Paco, meet Commander Mallory.”

It was probably a pointless introduction. Paco and Mallory appeared to ignore each other.

Mallory spoke to me. “Diamond said that you foiled the perpetrators.”

“With the help of Street blocking the road. I also was lucky to find a handy battering ram nearby. Used it to momentarily subdue the kidnappers.”

“You think the men who took this boy are the ones who perpetrated this grave you’re talking about?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard from Diamond that these guys are bruisers,” he said.

“Paco says they look like superheroes.”

Paco flashed me a look of anger.

“And I thought superheroes were good guys,” Mallory said. “What’s your guess on why they took the kid?” He talked like Paco wasn’t standing right next to him.

I tried to think of how best to phrase it considering that Paco was listening. “He was a witness to a shooting.”

Mallory nodded. “Got it. So you’re sitting on the kid?”

Paco looked up at him.

I shrugged, using Paco’s affirmative version.

“I guess you’re pretty good protection,” Mallory said, “in spite of the kidnapping.”

“You want to volunteer?” I said. “We could take turns.”

“Well, I’m not...” Mallory glanced down toward Paco, then looked back to me. “My schedule’s real busy,” Mallory said. He held my eyes for emphasis.

“Right,” I said.

“Show me what you got?”

We started walking.

“Your dog found the grave?” Mallory said.

“Probable grave, yeah.”

“How’d he do that? He’s just in the habit of looking for graves?”

“He sniffed the shoe. Paco saw it from the air. He believes it belongs to Cassie Moreno, his foster mom. The shoe’s in the Jeep. You can take it when you leave.”

“You did an air search?”

“Nice day for a plane ride, so we went up looking for signs of the woman’s van or the cliffs that Paco described. Paco saw this shoe. We drove over here and found it. I scented Spot on the shoe, and he walked over to the grave.”