Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) (37 page)

“I don’t know enough to be of much help. All I recall was a guy who skied almost daily at Homewood.”

I pulled out the photo of Flynn and showed her. “Is this the man?”

“Yes. Although now he’s a lot heavier.”

“Do you have a phone number or address?”

“No, nothing like that. I don’t even know his last name.”

“Did he ever say where he worked?”

Sophie shook her head. “I got the impression he didn’t work. He just played.”

“Is he a trust fund baby?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. More like a bum.”

“How did you meet him?”

“He was just always around, eating his lunch outside at the busiest deck on Homewood mountain, chatting with anybody who would listen. A few times he maneuvered himself in the ski lift line so that he could ride with me on the chairlift. That was excruciating. I don’t think he ever showered. He smelled of patchouli. It was awful.”

“Do you know any of his friends?”

“I don’t think he has any friends. Who would want to be around someone who doesn’t bathe and smells like that?”

“Any idea where he lives?”

“No. Oh, wait. Perhaps one could deduce a general location. I once was teaching a mogul class up on Bonanza when Flynn showed up. He kind of hung around as if to check out my teaching moves. He struck up a conversation with two young guys who were in the class, totally interrupting my teaching. I heard him say that he was a true backwoods man who skied every day and lived in a converted garage just walking distance to the lifts. He was talking to the young men, but I think his real motive was to impress me. What a joke.”

“So I should look for a converted garage near the mountain. That’s a good tip. Thanks. Anything else you can think of?”

“Not unless you can convince him to move to another ski area.”

“You have some animosity for Flynn.”

Sophie gave me a look of disgust. “I believe in live and let live. In other words, don’t move into my space, literally or metaphorically, unless I invite you, and I won’t move in on you, either. But people who dip themselves in patchouli or, for that matter, women who douse themselves in heavy amounts of perfume, are like people who bring their music to a public area and play it loud. These are the fringes of humanity who have no capacity for self-critique.”

“Flynn was like that,” I said.

“More than I can say.”

I handed Sophie my card. “If you think of anything else useful, please let me know. Thank you very much for your time.”

She nodded, turned, and walked into the Tahoma Market.

FORTY-NINE

I got back in the Jeep. Spot was sprawled across the back seat. I should have him run with Blondie every evening before bed. Maybe then he wouldn’t wake me in the early morning, cold nose to my face, tail thwacking the bedside table like a drum, demanding attention from the impossibly somnolent human.

I motored north a couple of miles to Homewood and turned into one of the neighborhood roads closest to the base of the ski area. Crawling along, I looked at every garage for signs of human habitation, not sure of what would be the best indicators. Perhaps lights on inside, a barbecue out the garage’s side door, a garage door that had been replaced with a picture window and siding, a wood stove smoke stack protruding from the garage roof.

There weren’t many streets that were adjacent to or even very close to the ski area, but it took a surprising amount of time to cruise them all. There was nothing that fit my imagination of a converted garage. I realized that the garage where Flynn lived could look ordinary in every way. If so, the only way to find out if a garage was actually a lodging room would be to knock on the house and speak to whomever was inside. Even that would be unsatisfactory, because most of the houses were vacation homes, empty much of the year, with no one to answer the door. If Flynn left no indication of his presence, I wouldn’t be able to find it.

When I’d finished with the streets that were closest to the ski lifts and ski runs, I moved out to the next tier of roads. After another fifteen minutes of slow driving, I came to a dead end and was backing around to reverse direction when something caught my eye. There was a single story house with an attached garage on its right side. Everything about it looked vacant. Its windows were dark. There was a phone book lying on the side of the drive, moist, wavy pages flipping in the wind as if it had been delivered there weeks before. Just another typical vacation home waiting for its owners to come up in July, the average start of the Tahoe summer.

Yet on the far side of the garage was a plastic garbage can. The lid was slightly crooked as though just one side had snapped into place. Near the bottom of the can were three aluminum beer cans. Maybe a bear had pried the other side of the lid loose only to find that it was full of recycles, and in the process three of the cans had fallen out.

What struck me was that most homeowners keep their recyclables inside their garages instead of outside for the simple reason that recyclables are worth money, and people don’t want the trash pickup service hauling them away.

But if someone were living in the garage, he might, on the days when the trash service doesn’t come, leave the recyclables outside for convenience and more space inside the garage.

I pulled over, parked, and walked over to the garage. There were windows in the garage door, but they were dark. Leaning up close and using my hand to shade the glass, I saw that there was some type of dark curtain or shade pulled over the glass. I moved around to the side door near the recyclables can and knocked.

There was no response. After a second knock and 30 seconds wait, I pulled out my shirt tail and gently used it to try the doorknob. The knob was locked, but the pressure of my touch made the door flex a bit. I gave it a light push. The door moved. I saw some folded paper fall to the floor, and then the door swung in with no added pressure.

I reached in and swiped my hand at the wall, catching a light switch.

An old fluorescent fixture on the ceiling flickered, then came on, bright and harsh and buzzing like a trapped hornet.

The garage apartment reminded me of Jonas Montrop’s cabin. At my feet were scattered remnants of the broken door frame along with the tightly folded copy paper that had been wedged between the door and jam to temporarily hold the door shut with friction.

Everything was a mess, furniture askew, a small wooden table tipped over. There was a counter with a two-burner stove top and microwave. Next to it was a sink that was similar to what Evan had in her motel apartment, only this sink was full of dirty dishes. Above it was a set of cabinets. One of the cabinet doors had been mostly pulled off and was hanging, upside down, from its bottom hinge.

On the rear wall of the garage was a bed, unmade, the top sheet pulled much farther to one side than typical for a person sliding out of bed. A heavy metal cooking pot lay next to the pillow. In the middle of the bed was a man lying face down, a ski pole protruding from his back near his left kidney. The bloody point projected three feet into the air.

Perhaps his assailant had struck him hard enough to drive the spear all the way through until the flared end was at his chest. Or maybe the spear hadn’t gotten its final thrust until the victim fell face down and the bed drove it flush to his chest.

The man was small in stature. He had a thick crop of black hair. His face was turned sideways, one cheek mashed down into the bedding. The one eye I could see was wide open, as was his mouth, frozen in shock and surprise.

Although I couldn’t see his whole face, I thought I knew who he was.

It was the person who was in the third photo in the Wilson High yearbook, the one where Evan Rosen could barely point at it because her finger shook so violently. Evan’s third attacker from nine years ago as described by the Assistant DA.

Gavin Pellman.

FIFTY

I pulled out my phone to dial 911, but realized I didn’t even know the address. So I walked out and around to the front of the house and got the number off the wall by the front door. Then I headed down the street past the Jeep. Spot was now awake and staring at me from the back seat.

Once I had the street name from the sign at the nearest intersection, I got through to the 911 dispatcher. I went through with the routine and then explained that I thought Placer County Sergeant Santiago would want to know about the crime. As always, the dispatcher asked me to stay on the line. But I said I was certain that enough time had elapsed that the murderer would not be in the area. I told the dispatcher that I would wait at the scene, and I hung up.

I went back to the garage and did another visual search of the apartment.

In the corner of the garage was a compact bathroom, its door open. In another corner was a closet of sorts, formed by a curved bar that held up a drape. I eased the fabric aside and saw some clothes on hangers and more piled on the floor. I flipped through the hangers, sliding them from one end to the other. When the clothes were moved, the end of the clothes rod became visible. Up against the wall, hanging from the rod by one of its straps, was a hockey goalie mask. Although the face openings had different shapes from the other masks, it looked equally hostile and venomous.

On the floor near the wall with the garage door lay some kind of wooden paddle about four feet long. I squatted down to look at it. Half its length was handle and the other half a paddle blade that was formed into a shallow scoop reminiscent of a shovel. The paddle was carved and inked with designs, swirls made of dots and a writhing snake pattern up one side. The wood was sanded and oiled smooth and looked a hundred years old. Or maybe hundreds of years old.

At the bottom center of the paddle blade was a nub of wood about the diameter of a carpenter’s pencil. It was pointed and stuck out half an inch from the surface of the blade. It was a peculiar design that could be approximated by imagining one’s palm and outstretched fingers as a paddle blade and then bending the last joint of the middle finger to represent the nub.

The nub was worn and abraded as if the paddle was designed to be displayed on a wall, hung up by poking the nub into a hole in the wall.

I left it where it lay and stood up.

It seemed clear that there had been a struggle, people grappling, knocking furniture around, throwing things. I imagined a home invasion similar to what happened when Jonas was kidnapped. Maybe Gavin Pellman kicked in the door and surprised Flynn, possibly in bed as had been the case with Jonas. But this time, Flynn had gotten the upper hand and killed his intruder with a spear.

As they fought, they bumped into nearly everything in the one-room space. It appeared that the only items that were untouched were three wooden boomerangs that hung together on one wall. Like the strange paddle, they too were decorated with patterns. The designs looked, to my naive eye, like aboriginal art, so maybe the items were Australian as well.

I looked again at the strange, carved wooden paddle. The little pointed nub at the end of the blade was a darker wood than the rest of the paddle.

Most of the paddle was the color of teak or cherry, its grain imbued with oil from back when it was first carved and finished. The nub point was as dark as black walnut. At first, it seemed apparent that the difference in color was just a natural variation in the wood, as if from sapwood to heartwood. But as I bent down to look closer, I thought I saw moisture on the dark nub. After time, water will seep into wood and darken it. I looked around for tipped water glasses or leaky plumbing, and saw none. Which made the moisture on the paddle nub especially curious.

Placer County law enforcement had yet to make an appearance, so I dialed Diamond. In a dark situation, he can usually distract me.

It rang four times. I thought it switched over to voicemail, but suddenly he was on the line.

“Busy?” I asked.

“Always,” he said.

I said, “Too busy to apply your intellect and never-ending curiosity to a conundrum at another murder scene while I wait for the local coppers?”

“Who died this time?” he asked.

“A guy named Gavin Pellman, as seen in a nine-year-old yearbook from Wilson High School in Reno. I was looking for the domicile of the missing Flynn, a young man who shared a photo op with Evan Rosen in the same yearbook. A tip about Flynn led me to a garage over by Homewood Ski Area. It’s been converted into a one-room apartment. But instead of finding Flynn, I found Gavin Pellman.”

“Another ski pole assault?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What’s the conundrum?”

“On the wall of the garage are three boomerangs that appear old and hand-carved and painted with Australian aboriginal designs, dots and circles and writhing snakes.”

“Australian decor,” Diamond said. “Always liked that stuff.”

I continued, “Flynn was possibly Australian, so it makes sense he would have them. Anyway, on the floor is an unusual paddle of sorts, about three feet long. Half the length is a handle like on a regular paddle, the other half is a narrow blade that is scooped enough that it would really grab the water as you paddled. Or you could pour soup into it and use it to eat your dinner. It looks like it was hand carved a long time ago, and it too has the same kind of decorations.”

“An aboriginal canoe paddle?” Diamond said.

“Maybe.”

“Then what’s the conundrum?”

I tried to describe the little pointed nub of wood at the end of the paddle blade. “I figure it was something to hang the paddle with. Or maybe it made the blade a much nastier weapon. If someone were to swing the blade at an enemy, that would make a mean club. But with the nub, it would tear away flesh.”

“Still no conundrum from my perspective.”

“The nub is wet,” I said. “Shiny and dark, but it doesn’t look like blood. I’ve looked around, and there is no spilled water in the garage. If I knew something about the canoe paddle...” I heard a siren. I looked outside. A Placer County patrol unit pulled to a stop.

“Your Placer County colleagues have just arrived,” I said to Diamond, “so I gotta go. But it would be fun to have you call and solve the paddle mystery while I’m still talking to Sergeant Santiago. Not that you county boys have any rivalry, of course.” I hung up.

Two deputies got out of the patrol unit, one in her late thirties and one in his late twenties.

We introduced each other. He was Sergei, and she was Pam. Sergei was a big guy, and just the way he walked telegraphed self-importance in front of the much smaller, slightly older Pam. Without any evidence beyond gut instinct, I guessed that his chest puffing implied that she had more seniority and he didn’t like it. I thought I should help him deal with it. So when Sergei asked a few questions, I spoke to Pam as I answered.

A fire department rescue truck rushed down the road and behind it was a fire truck, once again the overblown emergency response.

Four firemen jumped out of their vehicles looking intense and focused.

I called out, “Sorry guys, no EMT services needed. We’ve got a murder victim, nothing more. Maybe you guys would like to wait around and carry out the body after the ME looks at it. But it’s going to be a while before they process the scene.”

They nodded.

I brought the two cops into the garage. Two of the firemen followed us while two stayed back.

Sergei made a show of looking as solid as a Sierra boulder when he saw the body, but I could see that it shook him. Pam was tense but didn’t posture. The firemen looked in from the door. They’d maybe seen burnt bodies, but a spear takes disturbing to another level.

All of them were respectful of routine and didn’t touch or move anything. Pam started taking pictures of the crime scene.

Another patrol unit showed up ten minutes later. I went outside. Sergeant Jack Santiago got out of the passenger side door, and a deputy got out of the driver’s seat.

Santiago nodded at the firemen, and he and I shook hands, and he said, “Victim in the garage?”

“Yup,” I said.

“Any thoughts about the crime scene?” Santiago said.

“From the side of the victim’s face, I’m guessing it’s a man known as Gavin Pellman, who was a high school companion to the truck robbers. He may have been one of the robbers, too. The likely renter of this garage is a man known as Flynn, who was also one of their school mates.”

“And you came upon this scene because…”

“The name Flynn and a photo of him during high school came up a few times in connection with my investigation of the South Shore spear murders and the Incline Village paddle board murder. A series of tips and hints had me looking for a converted garage near Homewood.”

Santiago made a little nod. “Let’s have a look at the victim.”

I led him into the garage.

As Santiago looked at the body, he turned to Pam. “You take pictures?”

“Couple hundred, yeah. But we haven’t touched him. So I don’t have pics of anything you can’t see from where we’re standing.”

“Establish rigor?”

“Like I said, we haven’t touched him.”

Santiago pulled on latex gloves, reached out and lifted on the body’s arm. “He’s in full rigor mortis. You check his ID?”

“We haven’t touched the body,” she said for the third time, weariness in her voice.

“Just checking.” Santiago said. He reached into the victim’s pocket and pulled out a wallet. He flipped through it. “One hundred, twenty, forty, forty-five, forty-six bucks. Guess our spear man wasn’t after money.” Santiago pulled out some cards, held up a Nevada driver’s license. “Here we are. Gavin Pellman, just like you thought, McKenna.”

Santiago was feeling in the man’s other pockets. He got a grip on something and pulled it out. “Hello,” he said. “A roll of cash.”

The roll had a thick rubber band around it, blue like what they put around bundles of asparagus at the supermarket.

Santiago hefted it. “This is a fair piece of bank.” He thumbed the corners. “Mostly hundreds. This might be eight, ten thousand. Why would spear man walk away from that kind of cash?” He turned to Pam. “Evidence bag?”

She pulled out a plastic zipper bag and held it open. Santiago dropped the money roll into it.

“So now that we know this isn’t Flynn,” Santiago said, “maybe Flynn is our spear man.” He turned to Pam and Sergei. “I’d like you to do a thorough inventory and document all, notes and photos. I don’t have a warrant, yet, but I’m pretty sure most of this guy’s stuff is visible, and you can do a look-see search without touching.” He walked over to a small dresser and used a tissue to pull open the drawers. “And these drawers were open, so it’s easy to look inside and see the contents.”

They both nodded. Pam pulled a small notebook out of her pocket. She handed her camera to Sergei. “I’ll write, you shoot and describe.”

Santiago got on his radio and said some words about the Medical Examiner. A woman’s voice told him to hold on. Santiago said, “The ME is down on the West Slope, and our local coroner can’t make it. But it’s not like we don’t know what killed the victim.”

“Who takes the body?” I said, when he clicked off the radio.

“The county has a contract with a mortuary in Truckee. They’ll make the pickup.” He looked at the firemen. “So you guys can go back to the station and resume your card game.”

With not even a hint of a grin, they turned and walked back to their trucks.

Santiago saw the unusual paddle on the floor. He pulled up on the front of his trousers and squatted down to look at it. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“Nope. It looks like some kind of Australian Aboriginal canoe paddle.”

My phone rang.

“Been spending some time researching on Google,” Diamond said in my ear. “The paddle you asked about? It’s called a woomera.”

I saw Santiago look at me. I pointed at the paddle on the floor. “I’m putting this on speaker so Santiago can hear you,” I said as I switched the phone. For Santiago’s benefit, I said, “It’s Sergeant Martinez, Douglas County. I had called him about the paddle. Diamond, you said it’s called a woomera.”

Diamond’s voice was clear. “Right. Like you thought, it’s an aboriginal tool that goes back thousands of years. You can dig with it, dip water with it, fight with it, display your art on it. Does that sound right based on what it looks like?”

“Yeah,” I said, staring at the paddle and envisioning everything Diamond said.

“But if you wanted to kill with it,” Diamond said, “a woomera is hard to beat. Because their main use is as a spear thrower. They make it so you can propel a spear four times faster than with your arm alone.”

“You’re saying the whole point of a woomera is to throw spears?” I said as I stared at the carved wooden paddle.

“Yeah,” Diamond said. “The wooden nub you mentioned. There’s two ways to use it. You can hook it into a leather loop at the tail end of the spear. Or you can carve a cavity in the tail end of a spear, and the nub fits into the cavity.”

“So a ski pole spear works perfect because the rear end is hollow,” I said.

“Right. You hook the spear onto the little nub, then hold the spear flat against the woomera so that your hand wraps around both the woomera handle and the spear at the same time. When it comes time to launch, you swing the woomera like a tennis racket. At just the right time, you open your fingers a bit so the point of the spear shaft comes free. The spear tilts out as you swing the woomera through the air. As you finish your swing with the woomera, the spear shoots away like a tennis ball off a racket. Apparently, bushmen are so skillful with a woomera that they can kill nearly any game, piercing their prey with a wooden spear at some distance.”

As Diamond said it, I thought of Evan’s tennis racket. It had excessive wear on the top of the rim. I thought the wear was from striking the court. But the flared end of the spear would hook onto the top rim of a tennis racket just as well as it would hook onto the nub of the woomera.  With repeated use, the flared end of the ski pole spears would abrade the tennis racket rim.

I was looking at the dark, pointed nub of wood. “Any idea why the nub would be wet? Oh, wait, never mind. I just realized that it’s not water on the nub. It’s olive oil from off the ski pole.”

“Santiago there?” Diamond asked.

Santiago spoke up. “I’m listening in.”

“My regards,” Diamond said.

“Thanks for the research,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

FIFTY-ONE

Santiago sent Sergei and Pam out to canvas the neighborhood, which consisted of just a few houses. He asked his other deputy to fetch his recorder. The man ran out, came back, and handed the recorder to Santiago.

“No ME means I do the honors for the time being,” Santiago said. He turned on the recorder and began talking. He began by stating the time and date, the house address, his own name and rank, and the names of us present, and the victim’s name and driver’s license number.

“The victim is in full rigor mortis. This garage is heated and thus has provided conditions for an accelerated pace of rigor mortis. The onset of rigor mortis usually occurs within three or four hours of death. Because of the warm ambient temperature, my estimation is that rigor for this victim began earlier than normal. It also appears that the victim and his assailant struggled. Exercise also accelerates onset of rigor mortis, sometimes creating a cadaveric spasm, or immediate rigor mortis. Because of the combination of temperature and exertion, I estimate that the onset of rigor mortis began within three hours from time of death, probably much sooner, and possibly almost immediately after death.

“Temperature and exercise also accelerate the pace of rigor mortis, which usually lasts twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Because of the temperature and exertion aspects, I estimate that rigor mortis will pass within twenty-four hours from onset, or twenty-four to twenty-seven hours from time of death. Thus the victim likely died...” Santiago looked at his watch, “after two p.m. yesterday, and perhaps much more recently.”

He turned off the recorder.

The two deputies came back from canvassing the neighborhood.

“Learn anything?” Santiago said.