Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) (34 page)

“A good rule,” I said.  “I’ll be in touch.”

She made a small nod, and I gave her a little wave as I turned to leave. As I was going out of the room, I glanced back.

Evan had lifted her elbows to the counter and dropped her head to her hands.

A guard came and tapped his fingers against her shoulder.

FORTY-FIVE

As I drove home, I thought about what Evan looked like as I left the jail, her elbows on the counter and her head in her hands. Her last words to me were brave. But her posture was a picture of despair.

I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. It reminded me of a Van Gogh painting. I remembered it as an old man sitting on a chair, elbows on his thighs, his head lowered into his hands. I didn’t remember the title, nor did I remember any information about when Van Gogh painted it. But I recalled that the man was rendered in blue pants and blue shirt, and the painting had always stood out to me as a masterful depiction of depression and despair.

After I got home, fed Spot, and got a fire going in the wood stove, I fetched a couple of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales from the fridge, went over to my shelves of art books, and pulled out my monograph on Van Gogh. I scooted the rocker up to the wood stove, set the beers on the floor next to it, and flipped through the book until I saw the painting.

It was called Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate). Van Gogh painted it in 1890, two months before he committed suicide.

I stared at the painting as I drank one of the beers. The subject’s face was not visible, just his head in his hands. The impact of the image was almost as potent and undeniable and heartbreaking as my memory of Evan at the jail, her head in her hands.

I took a long pull of beer as if to bring myself back to the here and now, as if to force a redirection of emotion, a negation of the pain of depression. But the painting still seared. And as I drank beer and stared at the painting, the Sorrowing Old Man morphed in my mind into Evan Rosen at the jail, despondent at a situation that offered no escape.

I closed the book, sat, and finished the beer.

Spot was sprawled sideways on his bed nearby. For some reason, he wasn’t snoozing. He rolled up onto his chest, elbows spread wide, right front paw crossed over the left, and looked at me with droopy eyes.

“Sorry if I’m telegraphing stress, Largeness,” I said. “That girl you met is in big trouble. I’m worried about her, and I’m powerless to make it better. Worst of all, I put the trouble onto her. Probably, some bad guy somewhere set it up for her to take the fall on a couple of murders. But I brought in the cops and pointed them at her like I was aiming artillery at a helpless child. Now she’s in a place with no cover and no serious hope of defense. They’re going to come and tie her to the stake and light the torches while they call for her to confess her witchcraft. It won’t matter whether she professes her alliance to evil or refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing. When they touch the torches to the pyre, she’ll go up in flames. At the last moment, I’ll probably try to intervene. But it won’t be like in the grand stories, Lancelot riding in on his steed to rescue Guinevere while the rejected King Arthur secretly hopes for his success. No, I’ll fall off my mount, and the king’s knights will throw a line around my neck and drag me off behind galloping horses. The girl’s going to burn, and there’s nothing I can do.”

Spot shifted forward, doing a little two-step elbow shift toward me so that he was now within reaching distance. I pulled the opener out of my pocket, opened the next bottle, and drank deeply. Spot and I both stared at the flames through the wood stove window. I reached out and pet him while I drank.

“She’s no Guinevere,” I said. “She doesn’t scintillate. There’s no gorgeous sparkle. She’s like Street was as a runaway trying to escape the abusive, deadly father. But unlike Street, who could blast through the multiple barriers with sheer force of intelligence and will and no responsibilities slowing her down, this girl has a sister to take care of. The sister is sweet and loving and deserving of all the girl can give her, but it still sucks up the girl’s mental and physical resources. The girl has no one to help. There’s no fairy dust to make it all better.”

Spot, with new frontal exposure to the heat of the wood stove, started panting. But he was somber. He understood that my tone wasn’t happy.

I drank more beer, guzzling it down harder now. I got to the end, drained the last drops, and set the bottle down on the floor, a hard impact, not unlike the way Evan had dropped her head to her hands.

“Even still,” I said, “the girl’s got her own fire down in there, tamped down, half-starved of oxygen, but a fire nonetheless. From the outside, she appears to be an ordinary kid trying to make her way through life and doing a lackluster job of it. But when you get in up close, you see she’s someone who never really had a break, never got to stand at the round table and make her pitch, never got to show the knights what she could do if someone would just help get the wind in there to fan her desires.”

FORTY-SIX

It took two calls to get the name of the Assistant DA who was handling cases in South Lake Tahoe. I called his office.

“Steve Ditmars’s office,”a man said.

“Owen McKenna calling for Mr. Ditmars.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Ditmars is unavailable. Would you like to leave a message?”

“Please. I’m the private investigator who provided most of the information that led to the indictment of Evan Rosen. I have new information about the case that Mr. Ditmars will want.”

“Hold on, please.”

I waited to music that had been designed as torture. This particular selection featured a male singer trying to sing with a baby girl voice and then channeling it through an echo chamber. The song had no discernable melody and unintelligible lyrics. It was an effective technique that would make most callers on hold give up. I, too, had almost succumbed when a voice came on.

“This is Steve Ditmars.”

“Owen McKenna. Thanks for taking my call, which is about Evan Rosen, a woman you have in custody. I have new information on the case. As you probably know, the search of Evan Rosen’s apartment revealed two thousand plus dollars in cash hidden under her garbage. The assumption was that it may have come from the armored truck robbers who were murdered. I’ve since learned that the money appears to be legitimate.”

“Why don’t you come to my office and we’ll talk. I also have a development you’ll want to know. Something serious. Can you meet me today? Eleven a.m.?”

“Sure.”

The man told me where to find him in the El Dorado County government center on Johnson Boulevard, just around the corner from the jail in South Lake Tahoe. I told him I’d be there.

At the appropriate time, Spot and I parked in the lot off Johnson. I went in and found Assistant DA Ditmars’s office. A secretary took my name and waved me in.

Ditmars and I shook hands, said our how-do-you-dos, and made a little small talk about the weather. The man was maybe 28 years old at the outside. From just his first few words, he telegraphed an obvious, razor-sharp intelligence and substantial education. His youth might be a handicap in court. But his appearance would possibly scare jurors into doing his bidding. Ditmars was a thin, well-dressed man with a countenance so severe it would frighten children. His eyes were close set, his eyebrows angry black slashes not unlike the shape of the fright marks on the hockey masks. Ditmars had thick black hair combed up into a spiky look that had been set in place with so much goo that a saber-toothed tiger would rather take a chance on the La Brea Tar Pits than wander too close to Ditmars’s head.

He pointed me toward a chair, sat down at his desk, and gave me a long and very serious look before he spoke.

“You said you had information about the cash found in Ms. Rosen’s apartment.”

I made a single nod. “Yes. I visited her at the jail last evening. She explained that she learned from her mother to always keep an emergency stash of cash, just in case things go bad. She’s a house cleaner by trade, a job that doesn’t produce a lot of income. Yet she has periodically added one hundred dollars to the kitty and built it up to over two thousand. The woman takes care of her sister Mia, a woman with a disability, and she considers the cash an insurance policy for Mia, to help her in the event that something should interfere with her house cleaning income.”

Ditmars made the kind of nod that suggested he’d heard such explanations a thousand times over his long career in the legal profession. “Yes, I understand that this is possible. The specificity of the details make the story quite believable. But our main evidence is the button you and Sergeant Bains found in the hand of one of the victims.”

“A button that could have come from any number of places,” I said. “However, it very likely came from Evan Rosen’s shirt. It increasingly appears that someone is trying to frame Evan for murder. I believe that the frame was carefully planned, and the real murderer chose Evan because she knew the robbers back in high school. Then he broke into Evan’s apartment, took the button from her shirt, and planted the ski pole under her clothes, all before the murders took place.”

Ditmars rested his hands on the desk, the fingers of his left hand twisting a heavy ring, perhaps a class ring, on the ring finger of his right hand. “I understand that is a remote possibility. However, Ms. Rosen has withheld other important information, information that suggests a strong motive for the killings.”

“And what is that?” I asked.

“Nine years ago, when Evan Rosen was nineteen, she claimed she was sexually assaulted, possibly by multiple men. We’ve obtained a police report from the Reno Police.”

“You’re saying she was gang raped?”

“So she believed. She had gone to a dance rave in a warehouse area of Reno. She remembered having some drinks, dancing, and seeing some people she knew. Then she remembered nothing further until she woke up early the next morning lying on a couch at an abandoned apartment. Ms. Rosen had a shirt on, but her pants and underwear were off, the underwear torn. She was horrified and frightened. So she put on her pants and left, running two miles home to the apartment where she lived with her mother and sister. There, she took a long bath to calm herself and tried to remember what happened. She called a friend, and the friend came over and convinced her to report the crime to the Reno Police. The police took her to the hospital emergency room where they have a rape kit. Unfortunately, there was little to find. Because the woman had bathed and urinated and brushed her teeth and changed her clothes, direct evidence of any rape was gone. However, the hospital was able to get enough of a urine sample to test, and they found in her urine a drug called Rohypnol. It’s illegal in this country but legal in many other countries, where it is commonly prescribed as a sleeping pill. It is also commonly used as a date rape drug because it has little to no odor or taste and it easily dissolves in drinks. Newer supplies have had dye added because of this very problem. But the non-dye version is still available in some places. And even the version with dye can’t be seen if it’s put into dark beer or other dark drinks.”

I said, “I assume this stuff knocks you out like other date rape drugs?”

Ditmars nodded. “If someone drops it in your drink, it dissolves fast and renders you pretty helpless or even unconscious within fifteen minutes of consuming it. And of course, when the drug is combined with alcohol, it has an even more intense effect. When you awaken hours later, you feel like you’ve got a major hangover. And you generally can’t remember anything that happened during the time the drug was in your system.”

“A terrible situation,” I said. “But what does it have to do with your current case against Ms. Rosen?”

“As you might imagine, Evan Rosen had no memory of any assault. But in addition to waking up with her pants off, she reported feeling very hung over and with a sickening feeling that she’d had sex that she couldn’t remember. Nor could she remember anyone who’d been at the apartment with her or even how she’d gotten there.”

I stayed silent, waiting for the punch line that Ditmars had been working toward.

He said, “In the police report, she stated that she clearly remembered the earlier part of the evening at the rave. She said that three guys from her high school class had shown up at the dance. She didn’t dance with them, as she had always thought them disgusting, but as she was dancing somewhat provocatively – her words on the police report – with another young man, the kids from her high school catcalled her and made lewd suggestions. Later, they hung around her in a kind of triangle so that no matter which way she turned, one of them was always behind her. She said they were drunk and rude, and they scared her dance companion away. She said that she was distracted when they frightened her dance partner, and she believes it was probably at that moment that one of them dropped a pill in her drink. From that point on, she remembered nothing until she woke up in the abandoned apartment.”

“Did the police charge anyone?” I asked.

“No. There was no evidence and no witnesses.”

“So there was no case to bring,” I said.