Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) (27 page)

“It’s okay, Jonas,” I said. “You’re safe now.”

He turned his head sideways on the pillow, the frown more intense. His eyes started to open, wavered, closed again. His left arm started to reach up toward his face, then stopped.

“Ow! My shoulder...”

The rope burn on the left wrist was even more pronounced, with areas of crusted scabs. He’d have scars after it healed.

He opened his eyes, stared at me for a moment as if I were a monster, then looked past me, elsewhere around the room. “Who are you?” he said, his voice shaky with fear.

“Owen McKenna. I’m the guy who found you tied up on the boat.” In my peripheral vision, I saw the cop at the door turn his head toward me.

“What? How did you find me?” His voice was less worried as if fear was replaced by curiosity.

“I’m an investigator helping the cops. I found you three days after your kidnapping.” I didn’t want to immediately tell him about his stepfather’s death for the same reason that Sergeant Lanzen didn’t want to give the news to Evan until after we’d asked most of our other questions.

Jonas reached up his other arm, stopped as before, then moved the side of his face against his pillow as if to wipe away an invisible spider web filament that was tickling him. Or maybe he was trying to clear the fog from his brain. He blinked hard several times, like a person waking up.

“A nurse told me I was tied up,” he said, his voice clearer. “I can see pictures in my mind. But I can’t tell what are memories and what are the things she said. I was in my boat. I remember that.”

“Where did you get the boat?”

“My stepdad gave it to me. I just sold it to a friend. But the boat got a leak, and he didn’t want it anymore.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Flynn.”

“What is Flynn’s last name?”

“I never knew. He just went by Flynn. Like Prince or Sting. It was always just Flynn.

“How did you know Flynn?” I asked.

“I’ve always known Flynn. He goes all the way back in my memory.” Jonas frowned. “He was a kid in the neighborhood. We were both outcasts, so we kind of hung together.”

“What neighborhood?”

“We lived in the projects.”

The reference didn’t fit for where his stepfather David Montrop lived in Incline Village, because the entire town was upper middle class or richer.

“What city?” I asked.

Jonas had turned his face to rub his cheek on the pillow again, up and down like a horse scratching its cheek on a fence post.

“Incline Village. That was my stepdad’s joke. We were up off Mt. Rose Highway. There was a townhouse project that went in. Smallish units. My stepdad thought it was funny to call it the projects.”

“Why were you and Flynn outcasts?”

“The usual reasons. We’re skinny, awkward kids who don’t know how to talk to girls. We always got pushed around by the bigger kids.”

“How old are you, Jonas?”

“Twenty-three.”

“And Flynn?”

“I don’t know. Older than me. Twenty-seven, maybe.”

“I was told that Flynn lived in Reno during high school.”

“Yeah. His mom moved down there for some job.”

“Where does Flynn live now?”

Another frown.“I don’t know. Someplace on the West Shore, I think. He’s never told me where. Flynn keeps getting more secretive as he gets older, like he’s turned into a spy or something.”

“Why did you sell him your boat?”

“Because he asked me to. He said he’d always wanted a boat. And I needed the money. My stepdad said I could have the boat. The house where it was moored was owned by one of his bands.”

“You refer to the bands like they were your dad’s bands,” I said.

“Well, they weren’t really his bands. He just managed them. Booked their venues. Watched over their houses. He told them he was like a caretaker, making sure everything stayed in good shape. But the reality was that he used their houses for his own purposes.”

“How many are there?”

“Why don’t you ask him? Three that I know of. West Shore, South Shore, and East Shore. He parties at those houses. Uses their cars. Goes out on their boats. That’s why he got sick of his own boat. Why hassle with a boat that was old and leaked when you have use of a new cruiser?”

“These bands that own the houses and boats, they must be really successful.”

Jonas’s eyes got wide, and he nodded. “You have no idea. But I can never tell anyone the names of the bands because then their houses would be vulnerable. My stepdad says that if people knew about the houses in Tahoe and then they saw the band on TV performing a concert in London or something, they might break into the houses. So everything was designed to obfuscate. That’s my stepdad’s buzzword. He always says obfuscation is fortification.”

I asked, “When did you move to the South Shore?”

“When my stepdad kicked me out of his place in Incline.”

“You say that like you’re still angry at him.”

“Of course I’m angry. I hate him. He’s the biggest jerk I’ve ever met. When I was little, we lived in San Francisco for a year. Then he got in trouble with the cops. You know what he did? He blamed me. He said that having me around made it impossible to be a businessman, that I tied him down. How was I responsible for him breaking the law or whatever he did? He was always a cheat. I knew it from the time I was a young kid. All my life I’ve been trying to distance myself from him.” Jonas frowned. “Why are you asking me all these questions about my stepdad? And why am I saying all of this private stuff? It must be these drugs they’ve got me on.”

I said, “Can you tell me what happened when you were kidnapped?”

Jonas jerked as if the memory were searing.

THIRTY-SEVEN

“I don’t remember much about the kidnapping,” he said. “I was sleeping. There was a crash. Somebody grabbed me and pulled me out of bed. There were two guys. They were wearing hoodies and hockey masks. That was the scariest moment of my life. They didn’t say anything. I tried to grab at the bed and the chair I keep nearby, but I couldn’t get a grip. They were really strong. Of course, probably any guy would be strong compared to me. They put duct tape over my mouth and dragged me outside. I had my underwear on, but nothing else.”

Jonas was breathing hard. He turned and reached for a plastic cup by his hospital bed, groaning at what I assumed was shoulder pain. The cup had a lid and a straw. As he picked it up, he shook so hard, I worried he’d drop the cup. But he managed a sip.

“What else do you remember about your kidnapping? They took you away in a vehicle?”

Jonas nodded. “They had an old van. A third guy got out of the van. He wore a mask, too. They threw me inside the back door, and two of them sat on me. Then they taped my wrists and ankles together. One of them leaned down and whispered in my ear. He said he’d cut my throat open if I made another noise. So I went silent. I just lay there and shivered. It was really cold. I felt like I would freeze to death. The van started up. So I guess the third guy must have gotten in the driver’s seat. They drove awhile. I couldn’t see anything. After a few minutes, I realized that I should have been paying attention to their turns. But I didn’t have the focus to notice. They looked like aliens with their hockey masks. It was terrifying. And I was shivering. Lying on the metal floor of the van was like lying on ice.”

Jonas paused to breathe. It seemed like the memory had him shivering now.

I asked, “When the guy spoke to you, did his voice sound familiar?”

“No. He whispered. You can’t tell a person by a whisper. Right? At least, I can’t.”

“What happened next?”

“After a while, the van stopped.”

“How long had it been driving?”

“I don’t know. Ten minutes. Fifteen. The back door opened. They put a tarp next to me on the floor of the van and pushed me onto it. One of them whispered again, telling me that if I struggled or made a noise, they were going to drown me in the ice cold lake. So I didn’t do anything. They rolled me up in the tarp. I freaked out even though I was trying not to move or say anything. It was just like when I was little, and some bullies at the Judgment Sunday School in San Francisco rolled me up in the church’s stage rug and left me there. I would’ve died if Father Duncan hadn’t forgotten his briefcase and come back late that night to retrieve it. And this time it was you. That makes twice somebody saved my life. I guess I should say thanks.”

“You’re welcome. What happened next?”

“They picked me up, and one of them put me over his shoulder and started walking. It was like I weighed nothing to him. The next thing I knew, the guy carrying me started swaying, and I realized I was on a boat. After a while, they moved me to another boat, and I thought it was my boat – the boat I sold to Flynn – because I smelled kerosene. I’d broken a kerosene lamp in the cuddy cabin right after I’d agreed to sell the boat. No matter how I washed the flooring, I couldn’t get the smell out.

“Anyway, they carried me down into the cuddy. Then they unwrapped me. They still had on the masks. They took the tape off my wrists and tied lines to me, yanking up my arms and stringing the lines to stowage lockers on either side. I felt like I was crucified like Jesus, only without the cross. By then it was getting light out. They stayed there drinking this disgusting smelling liquor. Some kind of whiskey, I think. I don’t know. I’ve barely had a beer in my life.

“My shoulders were starting to scream with pain. Then they took the tape off my mouth. They said I might need to talk to my father to convince him I was still alive. So one of them called my stepdad. That person had a second phone. I don’t know how it worked, but it was like he had an app on the second phone that disguised his voice and made him sound like a woman. When he talked softly into the first phone, the woman’s voice came out loud and went into the second phone which was connected to my stepdad. Even though I was close, I couldn’t hear his normal voice, just the louder, fake, woman’s voice. So I leaned my head forward and shouted into the phone that was dialed to my dad. But two of the guys jerked me away and put tape back on my mouth. Meanwhile, the third person kept using the two phones, making it sound like a woman, telling my stepdad to get money from the bank and where to put the money. After a while I began to think that the third person really was a woman behind the hockey mask, and the second phone was just to disguise her voice.”

“Where did he or she tell your stepdad to put the money?”

“In a trash can in a parking lot. At first, I couldn’t understand what was happening. They were talking to my stepdad like they could see what he was doing, like they were there at the bank. But we were on the South Shore, and my stepdad lives in Incline on the North Shore. At least, that’s where I thought he was. Then I saw that the phone guy – that’s how I thought of him – the guy holding the phones had a third phone propped up on one of the stowage lockers. That phone had a moving picture on it of where my stepdad was.”

“Do you think there was a fourth person taking video of your dad and feeding it into the phone guy’s phone?”

“That’s what I thought at the time. But later, when I was alone on the boat, I started to fall asleep. My legs would collapse as I drifted off, and I’d drop down until the lines on my arms jerked tight. It felt like my arms were going to pull out of their sockets. Anyway, I had these visions. One was like I was looking out from inside the grill on my stepdad’s Mercedes. I realized they might have put a webcam or two on my stepdad’s car. Then they could watch wherever he was and see where he was going.”

“What happened after they made the call?”

“They left. They put another piece of tape on my mouth just to be sure I couldn’t push it off with my tongue. Then they took their whiskey bottle, climbed out of the cuddy cabin, and shut the door, leaving me tied up by my arms. I was all alone in the boat, unable to scream. My arms felt like they were being ripped off.”

“That would be scary,” I said.

“The thing is, I’m a classics major. I’ve read about all kinds of terrible stuff, but I don’t do stuff. Having someone torture me was so far out of my experience, I felt helpless. I cried for hours. Then things got foggy. All I can remember was struggling to keep standing so my arms wouldn’t be yanked off. But I kept falling asleep and dropping down.”

Jonas looked stressed and worried. I wondered if he was about to cry.

I said, “If someone knew your stepfather had money, he or she might single you out for kidnapping. But that doesn’t explain why someone would tie you up to die in a boat. Like you just said, that’s torture. It suggests a motive much different than money, almost as if the money were an afterthought. Can you think of anyone that might apply to? Someone whose primary goal was to inflict pain on you?”

Jonas was shaking his head. “I’m totally, like, no threat to anyone. There’s no reason why someone would torture me! I couldn’t be a threat if I wanted to. I have no enemies, just like I have no friends. I’m a nobody. I live alone, I go to community college. I don’t get together with anyone. I don’t even know anyone to play video games with except my internet group. So there’s no reason why someone would target me for any reason other than to get money from my stepdad. I think they just tortured me because they’re sick. They wanted to punish me for being the stepson of money.” Jonas was shaking his head. “All they had to do was look at my little rented cabin and my VW bus that doesn’t run. It’s obvious that I have no money. My stepdad never gave me anything beyond my school allowance of a thousand dollars a month. You can’t do anything on a thousand dollars a month! I’m having to take out school loans just to eat!”