Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) (25 page)

In my most reassuring voice, I said, “Not to worry. This isn’t unusual for some schools. You can provide valuable documentation. What you should do is stay at your post, stay calm, and make notes of what happens. Who comes in, who goes out, what time it is. What people say. Anything else that happens. You’ll be responsible for documenting the events as they happen. Does that make sense?”

She nodded. “Yes, but I’m scared.”

I reached over the counter and patted the back of her hand. “You’ll be a huge help,” I said as I turned and left.

When I got out the Administration door, I used a fast-casual walk to hustle out to the Jeep in a manner that wouldn’t look strange on the security cameras. I got in, started the engine, and again drove away at a fast-casual speed. They might make notes about the private investigator whose timing coincided with the bomb threat, but I didn’t want to become an object of special attention. Nor did I want to be stuck at the school for five hours while the Reno cops went through their laborious interviews with everyone before letting them leave.

When I got to the gate, the cop had left his post and was over looking through the window of a parked Chevy Malibu. He was talking on his radio and looked stressed. Then he turned to look out at the street as he talked, looking east, then west, rising up on tiptoes, leaning his head sideways to get a better view. I gave him a short wave, coasted out the gate, and drove away.

THIRTY-ONE

I headed toward downtown and turned into the parking lot at the main library. Inside the library, I found another information desk, this one staffed by a young man who wore black pants and a black long-sleeved shirt with the buttons buttoned all the way up to his collar. He had a chubby neck to match his chubby body, and as the tight collar edge pressed into his neck flesh, I wondered if he was getting enough oxygen.

“Any chance you keep yearbooks of high schools in Reno?” I said.

“Well, of course,” he said in a haughty tone as if to suggest that I was a fool to consider that it might not be so. “I can think of lots of them off the top of my head. Damonte Ranch, North Valleys, Wooster, Galena, Spanish Springs, Reno High, Washoe Wolf, and others.” He paused.

“Wilson High?” I asked.

He wrinkled his nose. “Well, that’s more of a maybe,” he said. “Are you a Wilson High alumnus?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well you should know that Wilson has problems to say the least.” He rolled his eyes. “In the last ten years, they’ve only done three or four yearbooks. They’re the black sheep of Reno Sparks schools. Of course, I went to one of our finer schools, so I know what those poor students are missing. I suppose they do as well as they can with such limited resources, both financial and intellectual. For most schools, doing a yearbook every year is standard stuff. Get a group of kids together to play with Adobe Illustrator, and out comes a yearbook. But at Wilson High, trying to find a group of kids who are computer-fluent enough to produce a yearbook is pretty much out of their league. For all I know, they might not even have a computer with a graphics program. Just my take, of course.”

“Can I look at what you have?” I said.

He nodded and came out from around the counter.

I followed him as he walked down the stacks. He made a left turn, then a right, moving with incisive purpose and obvious skill, paused, his forefinger out, tracing the spines of books, his hand position just so. He moved a yard to the side, scanned the shelves, moved another foot, then said, “Here we are. Five books. One, two, three, four, five. Wilson High’s total yearbook production from the last – let’s see – twenty years. Are you looking for a particular year?”

“About eight years ago,” I said.

The young man touched a book, turned his head as if to see the spine better in the dim light, then pulled out a volume. “This one is nine years ago. That’s the closest we have. I don’t know for certain, but it appears that Wilson High didn’t produce a yearbook for the year you want.”

I took the volume from him. “Thanks. I’d like to look this one over, if I may.”

He pointed to the big library tables. “Have at it,” he said.

I walked over, sat down, and opened the book. Maybe Wilson High wasn’t producing gold-embossed volumes to make the alumni proud, but the book did the job. It had all the usual features, articles on the year’s great moments, pictures of the kings and queens and princes and princesses of the various festivals, and photos of the football players and other sports jocks.

I turned to the pages where all, or at least many, of the students had provided their picture along with their name and nickname and membership in sports and clubs. Because this book was a year before the time the robber would have likely finished school, I turned to the pages that showed the students who were juniors.

I pulled out the slip of paper on which I’d written the robber’s names. I flipped through the book to the Js. Lucas Jordan was partway down the page. He had short brown hair, swept up and cut in a flat top like from the 1950s. He wore a sweatshirt with a camouflage pattern. Unlike the other students in the yearbook, Lucas wasn’t smiling. He looked angry and mean. Maybe his juvenile parole officer required him to sit for the class picture. Under Lucas Jordan’s photo, where most of the students listed sports and clubs and favorite activities that they participated in, it said ‘Hunting’ and ‘Target Practice.’

A high school photo is hard to connect to a murder victim nine years later, especially one whose eyes had been eaten by crows, but I guessed that Lucas Jordan was the man I’d found at the home plate position on the tree island near Baldwin Beach.

I turned more pages in the yearbook and, as I suspected, came to the other victim.

Carter Remy was dressed like a prep student. His shirt had thin blue vertical stripes and a button-down collar. There were two pens in his shirt pocket. His thin hair was parted far down on the right side and neatly combed. While Lucas radiated a malevolent personality, Carter’s face was vapid, and his eyes looked dead. I’d seen those eyes on a serial killer. There were no activities listed. The photo of Carter Remy looked vaguely like the body in the tent albeit with the tent body having gained about forty pounds of additional weight since the yearbook photo was taken.

I studied each picture again, looking for similarities. It seemed there were none. Yet the robbers were bonded in some way that brought them together for a major crime nine years after the yearbook was produced.

Of the two, Carter Remy looked the most dangerous because he exhibited no emotion at all.

The robbery had involved four men. Because these two had gone to the same school, it seemed there was a good possibility that the other robbers would also be in their class. But because these two were so unlike each other, I couldn’t imagine how I might identify the others, one or both of whom possibly killed the other two.

I started at the beginning of the book, flipping through one page at a time, looking at every photo for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I looked for any possible connection to Lucas and Carter. I saw students of a dozen ethnicities, wearing all kinds of clothes and listing every imaginable activity. But nothing seemed notable. No one else listed hunting and target practice as activities. No one else had a flat top haircut. No one else had dead eyes.

Judging by which subjects had the most number of pages in the book devoted to them, football and basketball loomed as the most important part of the high school experience. By contrast, the lack of pages focused on educational activities suggested that academics was of no account in this high school. But of course, on reflection, and from personal experience, it seemed that academic learning was of little account in many high schools.

Near the end of the book was a collection of casual photos taken at various events throughout the year. I scanned them fast, turning pages in a desire to be done. I’d just turned a page when I had the thought that maybe I’d seen something. I turned back.

There were several photos from what looked like a costume party. Kids were dressed in superhero costumes, laughing and holding up clear plastic glasses with colored drinks. One photo showed a boy standing next to a girl. He had his arm around her neck, the crook of his elbow bent at her throat, pulling her sideways and a bit off balance. The boy was thin and tall, the girl thin and short. The boy radiated confidence, the girl insecurity. The boy looked happy and dumb. The girl looked intelligent but frightened.

Under the photo was a caption that said, ‘Flynn and Evan chillin.’ If the words matched the people above them, Flynn was the boy, and Evan was the girl.

I looked closer. Two things stood out.

The first was that the girl was Evan Rosen, the house cleaner who cleaned for David Montrop, the murdered man in Incline Village.

The second thing that jumped out was the style of buttons on Evan’s shirt. They were hard to see in detail. But they weren’t the standard, simple plastic buttons. They appeared to be made of metal, and they had some kind of intricate pattern on them.

I leaned in closer, squinting my eyes to see more detail. The photo wasn’t sufficiently detailed enough to be sure, but the buttons looked like the one we’d found in the hand of one of the murder victims. The symbol of an eagle with arrows and an olive branch.

THIRTY-TWO

I went back through the yearbook, checking every photo and name to see what class Flynn was in. I was careful not to go too fast. I determined that his photo was nowhere else in the book.

Evan’s official photo was in with the sophomores. The caption said ‘Evan Rosen.’ The Activities section was blank.

I asked the librarian to direct me toward a copier.

He said they’d been having problems.

I said, no problem, I’d just check the yearbook out.

He said yearbooks were reference books that didn’t circulate.

I said that I respected his concern and his allegiance to library protocol, but that the yearbook was important evidence in a murder case.

“I’m sorry. We have these rules for a reason. I can’t make an exception for you. If I did, what would I say to everyone else?”

“Please understand that this is an important case, and I need you to make an exception. I will bring the book back soon.”

The man stood up just a bit taller, puffed out his chest, and said, “No. What don’t you understand about no?!”

I knew I could pull out the fake sheriff’s badge I’d purchased years before in a Virginia City tourist shop. I knew I could lean over the counter and intimidate him by telling him a story that would suggest that he’d be on the receiving end of legal action and civil lawsuits if he didn’t cooperate. I knew I could make it so he didn’t sleep at night if he didn’t acquiesce.

Instead, I said, “Okay. I’m sorry to hear that.” I turned and walked out with the book.

Behind me, I heard him huff and puff and call out that I was breaking the law. But I was gone before any gendarmes came. I’d return the book when I was done with it, and perhaps include a nice donation to the Reno Friends of the Library.

THIRTY-THREE

I arrived at Evan’s motel apartment just as she came back from her house cleaning.

“I’ve got a question for you, if you can spare a minute.” I held the yearbook at my side so that it wasn’t obvious.

“Let me set this stuff inside.” She opened the door, set the buckets by the closet, then came back out on the little walkway that stretched across the front of the motel apartment building.

“I’ve learned that you went to Wilson High School in Reno,” I said.

Her eyes widened with fear. “What does that have to do with my car getting stolen?”

“I’m not sure. But it might be connected. At least two of the suspects in the armored truck robbery also went to Wilson High. Those suspects are now dead. It’s quite the coincidence that you also went there.”

Evan tried to hide her fear behind a facade of toughness. “Wilson was a bad school in a bad neighborhood. I told you how Montrop said I came from a low station. Well, everyone at that school was from a low station. Kids without intact families. Kids with abusive guardians. Probably, you could find a hundred major crimes in the last ten years that were committed by kids who went to Wilson. Of course, most of them just started at Wilson and then dropped out.”

“You mentioned kids with abusive guardians. Interesting choice of words.”

Evan looked at me like I was dense. “It’s a catchall term. Some kids had actual parents, usually just one who was off at a job all day. Some kids were orphans being raised in foster families. Some kids lived on the street, bouncing from a friend’s couch to a shelter to sleeping in a car. Some guardians were great. They should get a medal. But you don’t want to know how often kids were abused. Evil stepdads. Evil foster dads. Evil real dads. Evil boyfriends of drug-addicted moms. And sometimes, evil moms. Women can be as bad as men. But the hard truth is that most abusers are men. And the victims, both girls and boys, grow up in a warped world. They don’t know what’s normal. So they get into situations where they become repeat victims. Worse, some of them go on to abuse others.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that Evan was probably talking about herself and was likely a victim of abuse. “I’d like to show you some pictures,” I said.

Her look of fear became more pronounced.

I opened the yearbook to the picture of Evan and Flynn.

“Where’d you get this?” she said, her tension obvious.

“It’s the Wilson High School yearbook. Nine years ago. You went there?”

“Yes. Worst time of my life.”

“This photo of you,” I said. “The shirt you’re wearing has unusual buttons. Do you remember the shirt?”

“Sure. In fact, I still have the shirt. But I should get rid of it because I never wear it. I wore it back then because my mother told me it belonged to my dad when he was a boy. So I used to wear it to feel closer to the idea of my dad. The dad I never met. The dad who was a deadbeat who abandoned us when Mia and I were very little. Why would I hang onto his shirt? I guess it’s just another way that I don’t have courage. I can’t even throw out a connection to my loser dad. I’m as bad as Mia, living in a Neverland world of silly hopes and dreams.”

“May I see the shirt?”

“Sure. What do I care?” She opened the apartment door, held it open for me, then walked over to the clothes rod in the corner, pushed some clothes back and forth. She found the shirt, lifted it off the rod, and carried it over. She handed it to me. “You can have it if you know someone that size.”

I took the shirt and held it up. It had metallic buttons like in the photo and just like the one I’d seen gripped in the dead man’s hand. The second button from the bottom was missing.

“Any idea where this button went?” I said, pointing.

“No.” She frowned. “It wasn’t missing the last time I looked at that shirt.” She leaned over and fingered the fabric where torn threads dangled.

“When was the last time you wore this shirt?”

“Probably when that yearbook picture was taken.”

“When was the last time you pulled this shirt out, a time when you might have noticed that the button was missing?”

“Years and years ago. I can’t remember. I’ve just kept it with my clothes, moved my clothes when I moved, hung onto it simply because I never made the decision to throw it out. When you’re poor, you just don’t throw things away without making a conscious decision about it.”

I nodded.

“Why are you asking about the missing button? How did you suspect it was missing?”

“We found two of the robbers from the armored truck robbery. They were dead, murdered. One of the dead robbers was clutching it in his hand.”

Evan jerked as if she’d been slapped. She turned red. Her eyes took on a look of shock.

“Someone is framing me for the murder of the robbers! Just like framing me for the murder of David Montrop!”

“Let’s say that’s true,” I said. “How do you imagine that this person, or these people, got into your apartment to steal the button and steal your car?”

“The car is easy to explain. The hide-a-key that I zip-tied under the fender was gone. Whoever took my car must have found it and cut it off. But I don’t know how someone got into my closet and found that shirt. It’s like… It’s like someone was very careful about breaking in so that I didn’t realize it had ever happened.”

“You never noticed anything strange? There was never an indication that you’d been burglarized?”

“No. Nothing.”

I didn’t say anything.

In time, Evan calmed herself. “You said you found the truck robbers dead?”

“Two of them, yeah. I’d like to show you their pictures and see if you remember them.”

“Okay.”

I opened the book and showed her Lucas Jordan’s photo.

Evan inhaled and stared at it.

I waited a bit, then turned to the photo of Carter Remy.

This time she gasped. “You said they were murdered?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure it was them? You saw their bodies?” The book in her hand shook so hard that the pages made a crinkling sound.

“Yeah. I found their bodies. They had driver’s licenses. The photos matched.”

She thought about it, then said, “Good.”

“Good? You’re glad they were murdered?”

She was quiet a long moment. “Yes.”

“Why?”

She hesitated as if she wanted to say something and then reconsidered. “They were bad. They didn’t deserve to live.”

“What did they do that was so bad?”

She looked away. Her eyes were moist.

“Please tell me, Evan. It could help us find the other robbers.”

Eventually, she said, “Bad stuff.”

“There were two other robbers,” I said. “But we haven’t caught them. Can you think of any kids who spent time with these two?”

“I don’t think these two were that close, but…” she stopped. She began turning pages. She flipped from one to the next, faster than a person could study the photos. It seemed that she was looking at the names, which were in alphabetical order. When she got to the Ps, she slowed and ran her finger down the page. She came to a picture labeled Gavin Pellman and tapped her finger on it.

“This guy,” she said. Her voice was tense, monotone, spoken through locked teeth. Her fingertip vibrated. The knuckles on the hand that gripped the book were white.

“Gavin Pellman hung out with the other robbers?” I said.

Evan was staring as if she could see through the book. “At least some,” she said. Then she spoke in a small voice that was mostly a hiss. “Maybe you’ll find him dead, too.”

THIRTY-FOUR

“You say that like you wouldn’t mind if Gavin Pellman is dead.”

Evan spoke in a whisper. “He didn’t deserve to live, either.”

“Did you ever see these three with a fourth person?”

Evan seemed in a kind of nightmare trance. Gradually, some of the tension went out of her face. It was several moments before she answered. “You know how high school is. There are some tight little groups, kids who are always together. These guys weren’t like that. You’d see them individually in the halls between classes. They were loners, mostly. But when there are lots of kids in the halls, you can never tell who’s in a group.”

I asked, “What did these guys care about?”

“Not school, I can tell you that. Gavin was a hustler. Three card shuffle, poker, any trick that he could rig and get other kids to bet on. Lucas was into guns and knives. He always brought them to school.”

“There’s a rule against that, isn’t there?”

Evan stared at me as if I were unimaginably dense. “No one paid any attention to the rules at Wilson High.”

“Right,” I said. “The third guy, Carter, what was he into?”

“Nothing. He was a total loner. All the kids in school could tell he was a psycho.”

I reached for the book, and she thrust it into my hands, glad to be rid of it. “I’d like you to think about whether anyone else hung around with these kids.”

Evan shook her head. “No one that I can remember.”

“I want you to look at this other photo again.” I flipped back to the photo of her and the boy named Flynn.

“Can you tell me about Flynn?” As I asked the question, I noticed that if you added a hundred pounds to the person in the picture, he’d look vaguely like Randy Bosworth at Reno Armored.

“Not really. He was from another school. But he sometimes hung out at Wilson. I think he lived right on the other side of the boundary between different schools. His neighbor friends went to Wilson, but he had to go to another school.”

“Did you know him well?”

“No. He was just around. Someone took a picture of us, that’s all.”

“What was his last name?”

Evan shook her head. “He was just Flynn. I don’t remember him or anyone else ever saying his last name.”

“Was he friends with the robbers, Lucas and Carter?”

“I don’t know.”

“If Gavin was the third robber, could Flynn have been the fourth robber?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But probably not. The other three were… bad. Flynn was more normal.”

“More normal. Not totally normal?”

Evan looked at me. “A totally normal kid would not hang out at Wilson High.”