Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) (16 page)

“Nevertheless, if someone saw an opportunity to borrow a rotary, use it as a murder weapon, and then put it back where he found it, it’s possible that no one would even know. Someone could have even taken it out of this yard, for example. Right?”

Crosen was shaking his head. “You’re suggesting something that is technically possible. But practically, I don’t buy it. You’d have to have a lot of stars lined up to get away with it.” Crosen’s voice had risen, his agitation pronounced.

I was thinking about the timeline for the rotary murders. The previous day, Sanford Burroughs had told me that Darla had gone to work four days before and didn’t return. I said to Crosen, “Can you look at your schedule for the period of three to five days ago and see if there were any rotaries near the snow dump?”

“Probably,” he said. He turned and walked to a little metal shed that was tucked under a corner of the big open-sided pole building. I followed. We went inside. He pulled a homemade schedule pad off his desk and flipped back two pages. “Yeah, we had a rotary near the snow dump on each of those days. We also had a grader doing cleanup on the streets near the snow dump.”

“What’s cleanup?”

“After a storm, we attempt to clear all streets within twenty-four hours. If no other storms are on track for a follow-up dump, we go out and scrape the streets a second time to pick up ice and snow that’s loosened in the sun, and we move the berms over another notch to widen the streets. When the streets are cleaned and the snow is bermed as high as the graders can push it, then we send out the rotaries. Only after the rotaries go through is our city back to the way we want it.”

“Could one of your rotaries have been left unattended near the snow dump?”

“Sure, although that would be unusual.”

“How hard is it to drive a rotary?”

“I know what you’re really wondering,” Crosen said. “Could your average Joe hop up into the cab on one of these things and drive it away? The answer is that it wouldn’t be easy. Someone who has heavy equipment experience could figure out how to start the engines and shift. But learning how to drive and steer and run the blower and control two engines is a specialty skill. You would either need experience, or you’d have to have someone explain it in great detail.”

“Could one research it? Study it online or something?”

“I suppose it’s possible, but it seems unlikely. Here, take a look for yourself.”

He walked me over to the parked rotary. “Go ahead, climb up the ladder and look inside. The door’s open.”

So I did. The only thing I recognized was the steering wheel. There were knobs and levers and sliders and switches and dials and gauges and odometer-styled readouts.

One item looked especially foreign.

I called down to Crosen. “What’s this lever?” I pointed and leaned sideways so he could see.

“That’s your rear steering joystick. You use it to set your crab angle. Four-wheel steering.”

Despite the cockpit’s complexity, it looked primitive. The machine was obviously very old. The glass on two separate dials was broken, fogged by a wavy bead of silicone glue. One switch was held in place with duct tape, another with yellow filament tape crispy with age. The metal dash had torn as if from flexing deep within the interior of the machine. The vinyl seat was cracked with exposed foam shedding yellow powder like dander.

I backed out of the door and climbed back down.

Crosen was gone. I looked around and saw him going back into the office in the metal building.

Over on Emilio’s boombox, Frank had switched to “What Kind Of Fool Am I?”

I walked over and stuck my head in the door. “One more question, please. You ever hear of a woman named Scarlett Milo?”

“No,” Crosen said, not paying much attention. He was bent over the desk, looking at a yellow slip of paper, like what you get on a triplicate form where the top copy is white, the next is yellow, and the last is pink. He was frowning.

“Find something?” I said.

“Rotary number four, the one Fred’s got up on Keller.”

“Yeah?”

He held up the yellow sheet. “This is a repair order. I remembered that this took place during the time you were talking about. When your urban legend victims supposedly died.”

“What about it?”

“Rotary number four was sidelined over by the snow dump.”

“What happened to it?”

Brann Crosen looked down at the yellow sheet. “One of the gauges showed no oil. Our driver assumed that there’d been a leak, and he worried that without oil, he’d burn out either the drive engine or the blower engine. On this order, it doesn’t say which oil gauge was affected. But either engine would cost a fortune to replace if it was destroyed by running without oil. So he left the rotary on the side of the road.”

“What happened?”

“It turns out that it hadn’t sprung a leak. The sensor was down. The engines were okay.”

“Which means,” I said, “that someone could have borrowed the rotary, then put it back in the same place, and possibly no one knew what had happened. Passersby or local residents wouldn’t have paid attention. The only people who would know the rotary was being borrowed were just your drivers, none of which were in the area.”

Crosen didn’t speak. He stared at the yellow sheet.

“Is there some other related info on that paper?” I asked.

After a time, he nodded. “Yeah. The notes by the repairman say that the wire to the sensor was severed.”

“Meaning cut on purpose.”

Crosen looked at me. “Yeah,” he said.

TWENTY-TWO

When I was back in my Jeep and about to drive away from the city’s yard, I got a call.

“Owen McKenna.”

“This is Sanford Burroughs calling. Darla Ali’s roommate.” The man’s voice wavered with what sounded like nervousness.

“I remember.”

“When we talked yesterday, you asked me to call if I thought of anything else that might help you find Darla.”

“Are you at home? I’m close to you. I can stop by in five minutes.”

“Okay. See you soon.”

As I drove to the house Sanford shared with Darla, I thought about whether I should give him the news that we believed we’d found evidence of her murder. I decided it wasn’t appropriate to tell him until we knew for certain. I was willing to pass on the bad news, but only after Commander Mallory made it official.

I parked in the street and walked around to the stairway.

Sanford must have heard me on the stairs. He opened the door as I got to the top. I walked in. Sanford shut the door behind me, walked past me toward the barstool conversation area, about-faced, came back toward me, stopped. He didn’t sit. He shifted his weight from one foot to another.

He said, “I remembered overhearing something Darla said when she was talking on the phone. It was a few days or so before she went missing. At the time, it seemed a little unusual but no big deal. I thought she was talking to her boss. But this morning, I realized it might be something entirely different, something that might connect to her going missing. I’ve been freaking out about this, trying to examine it like, you know, the way a detective would think about it. So I called you.”

“What did she say on the phone?”

“Well,  I don’t remember her exact words. But it was something like, ‘I don’t want a fee, I want a percentage. I’ve worked hard at this. I deserve it.’ Then, she said something like, ‘If you don’t agree to that, I might change our agreement. I don’t care what you say. My contribution is worth it.’ At the time I heard it, I just thought it was a conversation about work. Like she was, in effect, asking for a raise. But I was in my own world, plotting my takeover of the microbrew world in South Lake Tahoe. But when you stop to think about it, what waitress gets paid on a percentage basis? When I realized that this morning, it seemed obvious that she wasn’t talking to her boss at all.”

“Do you think this could have something to do with her going missing?”

Sanford hesitated. “I don’t know. It’s just that it seemed like she was disagreeing with the person on the phone, right? She wanted a percentage of whatever, and the other person just wanted to pay her a fee. So what if the disagreement was a bigger deal? Then maybe that other person did something that caused Darla to run away or get in trouble?”

“You look like you’ve got more to say,” I said.

“Well, I told you before about how Darla liked to read about sunken treasure. About how she had fantasies of getting rich?”

“Yeah?”

“As soon as I thought about it, it seemed like what she said on the phone could have been about finding a treasure. I mean, doesn’t it seem that way to you? The whole percentage thing?”

“Maybe.”

“If she and this other person had found a treasure, and if they fought over how they would share the proceeds, then maybe it escalated into something big. Maybe Darla got hurt. Does that make sense?”

“I don’t know, Sanford.”

“I learned from Darla that sunken treasure is real. They find it all the time.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “I’m glad you called me.”

“Do you think that could help you find her?” There was a lightness to Sanford’s tone that suggested hope. But something about him seemed disingenuous. Maybe he was purposefully sounding hopeful. If so, that would suggest that he was trying to convince me that he didn’t know she was already dead.

“Every bit of information is helpful,” I said.

I thanked him and left.

TWENTY-THREE

After I left Sanford, Diamond called. “Wondering what happened with Adam Simms,” he said.

“Simms woke up after his seizure, adjusted to his new surroundings with the help of Blondie, ate pizza with me, and told me that maybe God was punishing him for doing bad things.”

“What bad things?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Are you concerned?” Diamond asked.

“Yeah. In the meantime, I just learned how the killer of Darla Ali and Sean Warner got the rotary plow he used on them. I should tell you about it.”

“You want to meet?” Diamond asked.

“Yeah, let me check in with Street and Mallory. I’ll call you back.

I started with Commander Mallory. He couldn’t meet, so I told him that Brann Crosen found out that one of their rotaries had been sidelined near the snow dump around the time of the murders of Darla Ali and Sean Warner.

“Crosen say why? Mallory asked.

“Someone cut the wires to the oil gauge. Made it look like the machine couldn’t be driven when, in fact, it could.”

“Very interesting. Good work.”

We talked some more, then hung up. I called Street, and she said that she was at a meeting on the West Shore, so we agreed to meet at the Beacon at Camp Rich on the South Shore, one of the few restaurants in Tahoe directly on the beach and a place that was central to our current locations. I called Diamond back, and he said he’d join us.

We three sat out on the deck and shared an order of calamari. Despite the cool air flowing off the lake, the spring sun of late April was still warm as it lowered toward the West Shore mountains. With the sun’s rays on our faces and the beach free of snow, we could imagine the coming summer, something hard to do when up in the deep snow of higher elevations.

I brought Street and Diamond up to date on what I’d learned about Adam Simms and the rotary plows.

“So Adam Simms is a poet,” Diamond said. “You get a chance to read any of his stuff?”

I shook my head. “No. But Felicite sort of quoted some lines from one of his poems. I can’t remember them, but it seemed like real poetry. Not that I would know. It didn’t rhyme.”

Street smiled. “Nothing wrong with free verse. But it’s harder to write because one has to make word music without the crutch of a rhyme structure.”

I sipped beer. “Artists always need to make something new.”

“Ain’t new,” Diamond said. “King James Bible was free verse. And when the Whitman dude wrote Leaves Of Grass, he supposedly used Biblical cadences.”

“Shows what I know,” I said. “What’s the point of rhyme, then?”

“That’s just one kind of structure,” Street said. “Rhyme, meter, and other sound patterns.”

“Simms talked about that,” I said. “He called it prosody, the way prose sounds. It’s more than just the meaning of the words. I guess you can get all that without rhyme.”

“Rhyme’s coming back, anyway,” Diamond said. “Garrison Keillor’s latest book of poems has a whole lotta rhyme.”

Street took the tiniest bite of calamari and followed it with an even tinier taste of beer. Not that I minded because I usually got to eat and drink what she didn’t finish.

“I tried to get Adam to talk a bit about his poetry, but I don’t think he lets anyone read it.”

Diamond said, “What did you think of his story about Scarlett calling him to warn him?”

“I can’t make sense of it.”

“The killer will try again, right?” Street’s forehead was creased with worry. “He was probably shooting at you, not Felicite.”

“I imagine so. Thanks to Diamond and his patron, Adam and his dog are currently in the safe house on upper Kingsbury. And Felicite is presumably safe down in San Francisco. If I’m careful, I’ll be safe, too.”

“You’ve found a correlation between the two women victims,” Diamond said. “Both had interest in the Italian Renaissance. What’s next?”

“I don’t know.”

Street spoke. “Any chance you asked Mr. Simms about the note Scarlett wrote you?”

“Yup. No luck. He’d never heard of a medic’s BFF. Neither had Felicite.”

“Can I see your copy of the note again?” Diamond said.

I pulled it out.

“Medic’s BFF,” he said as he read it. “What’re these blackish smudges?”

“There was blood on the original.”

I saw Street wince.

Diamond handed the note to Street.

She looked at it, then carefully smoothed it out on the table as if pressing it might reveal its secrets.

I looked up and saw Diamond staring at Street and the note, which was upside down from his perspective.

I looked back at the note. Something about it gave me a new thought.

“Let me see that again,” I said, reaching out my hand.

Street handed it to me.

I turned it around. “Her handwriting is a hybrid of sorts, printed letters with little embellishments,” I said. “But this apostrophe...” I pointed at the apostrophe in the word ‘medic’s.’ “This is just a copy, but even so, when I look close, the apostrophe doesn’t seem to have even a hint of a curve at the top.”

Street said, “Lots of people just make a short, vertical mark for an apostrophe.”

“Right.” I pointed to the note. “But look at the little entry curve as she wrote the letter M. And the exit curve on the D. The style of the other letters would suggest a curved apostrophe like a small, cursive, numeral nine.”

Diamond was staring at the note. “What’s your point?”

“I’m wondering if Scarlett wasn’t making an apostrophe at all, but some other letter that she didn’t finish. A letter that begins with a short downstroke.”

“She’d had her neck shattered by gunshot,” Diamond said. “Makes sense her handwriting wouldn’t be very polished.”

“Of course. But the rest of the letters are completely formed, even if shaky.”

“If not an apostrophe, what unfinished letter might she have intended to write?” Street asked.

“Considering the context,” I said, “the little mark may not have been an apostrophe at all but a truncated I.”

“You’re thinking that she may have meant to write Medicis.” Diamond pronounced the last syllable like ‘cheese.’

“Exactly,” I said.

Street said, “The premier family of the Italian Renaissance!”

“Right,” I said. “Even a humble ex-Homicide Inspector knows of them. Scarlett Milo had lots of books on the Italian Renaissance, including some books on the Medicis.”

Diamond reached out for the note. I handed it to him. He stared at it. “Now that you’ve pointed it out, I can’t see this note as Medic’s BFF, I can only see Medicis BFF.”

“You’ve probably read about them, too, right?” I said.

“Everybody has,” Diamond said in an astonishing over-estimation of general awareness. “They were art patrons, bankers, and city leaders in Florence,” Diamond said. “They ruled the city for over a hundred years. And four of the Medicis were elected Pope. Without them, Italian history would be radically different. The Renaissance as we know it might not have even existed.”

“That’s a grand statement,” I said, fully aware that Diamond, more than anyone I knew, had the knowledge to make such grand statements with confidence. “I’m curious about that. The Renaissance was basically an explosion of art, right? How could a single family be so critical to that development?”

“Because the Medicis more or less invented secular art patronage,” Diamond said. “Prior to them, art was mostly done for the church or had other religious purposes. Artists were selected and paid by the church to produce art that glorified God, and, before Christianity, multiple gods. That was the main purpose of art. The idea that someone might enjoy art for a non-religious reason was rare. Along came the Medicis, who were the richest family in Europe. They asked artists to make sculptures and paintings that often had little to do with religion. They were narcissistic and wanted portraits of themselves, of course. But they also wanted other beautiful, non-religious art for their walls and gardens and places of business. This concept of leaving religion out of art was on par with the tenth century Chinese invention of making paintings without people in them, thus inventing landscape painting.”

Diamond finished his beer, then made another pronouncement. “The Medicis were as important to art as the greatest artists they promoted, Michaelangelo and da Vinci, for example. For without the Medicis, those artists and many others would never have been discovered or hired to make their art in the first place.”

“If what you are suggesting is true,” Street said, “that Scarlett was really writing the word Medicis, does that suggest any meaning for BFF?”

“Got me,” Diamond said. He looked at Street.

“If the Medicis had a best friend forever, who might that be?” Street asked.

“Ain’t that brushed up on my Medici knowledge,” Diamond said. “Botticelli, maybe. Did a bunch of portraits of the Medici dudes.”

Street pulled out her phone and tapped at it. We waited. “When I Google Medicis BFF without any apostrophe,” she said, “I get nothing specific that would pertain to this note.”

“Not surprised,” Diamond said. “BFF is current-day idiom. Even if the family did have a best friend, it’s likely no one has written about that using the BFF acronym.”

“It can’t be that hard to find a Medici Renaissance expert who might know,” I said. “I could go to UNR and ask. You think they have a Medici Studies department?”

Both Street and Diamond grinned.

“Maybe Renaissance Studies,” Diamond said.

“Wait.” Street was frowning, looking inward. “When I was in grad school at Berkeley, I knew a woman who was pursuing her doctorate in Classics. She worked as a teaching assistant in Greek and Latin literature classes. Her name was Olga Decker.”

We waited as Street worked her phone. By the speed of her finger motions, it was obvious that her tech skill set was closer to that of a kid than a slow adult.

Diamond commented. “Woman’s good with her thumbs.”

“Sure, but can she work an Underwood?” I said.

“Your specialty,” he said. “But the same stimulus that causes someone else to dial up their thermostat causes you to reach for a wood-splitting maul. Not sure you’re living in the appropriate century.”

“Definitely not.”

Street was still doing the thumb dance. Her rhythms were more like jazz than classical, I thought. It occurred to me that I’d never noticed if her other rhythms fit that mold. I started thinking about the activities where her rhythms were most pronounced.

“Okay,” Street said, interrupting my thoughts. “Olga Decker is currently on sabbatical but is spending it in the Berkeley area. She’s trying to reserve all of her Sabbatical days for writing, but she says you can always call and leave her a message.”

“Wait, are you saying you and she have just texted back and forth?”

Street gave me the grin that made me think of a certain king-sized bed in a Hawaiian condo with a large lanai out the slider and crashing waves beyond that. “There’s a lot you could learn from me,” she said.

“No argument there.”  

I found a pen and was going to write Olga Decker’s contact information on a paper napkin when Street said she’d already emailed it to me. So I thanked her and kissed her and stood up.

I put money down for the bill, and we left.