Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) (8 page)

On the way home, there was a delicious Mozart piece on the NPR station. I pulled off at an overlook on the East Shore. There was a first quarter moon above the lake, its reflective stripe shimmering on the water. The snow fields on the distant peaks were spectacular.

“What is this?” Street said as I came to a stop. “My knight is looking for a nightcap?”

“Would that I shine my armor such that you should want to help me out of it.”

“Working on a poem?” she said.

“No. Mere mumblings of a man besotted with love.” I put my hand on her thigh.

“You mean lust.”

“One leads to the other.”

Street didn’t respond.

“I sense the trouble is back,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Over the last few weeks, you’ve been distracted. This morning, especially, you seemed introspective.”

“I’m always introspective.”

“This time it’s different.” I rubbed my hand down her leg to her knee and cupped her kneecap. “I know something’s bothering you, but I can’t figure out what.”

Street was silent, her face staring ahead, at the lake, at the reflected moon stripe. In time, I heard her inhale and then slowly let the air out.

“I haven’t talked about it because I haven’t known what to say,” she said. “Yes, I’m troubled. But just thinking about it makes things worse. It’s a subject that worries me at best and terrifies me at worst.”

“No pressure,” I said. “Anytime you want to talk, I’m here.”

Mozart had given way to one of the romantic 19th century composers. Anton Bruckner maybe.

“Three months ago,” Street began, “I got an email from the Missouri Department of Corrections. I’m on their victim notification list.”

I knew what that meant. “Your father is coming up for parole?”

“Yes.” Street took some heavy breaths. “Missouri law allows me to make a statement at the parole hearing. But I couldn’t bear the idea of seeing him in person. So I made a video statement on my computer. I hated having to do it. Just thinking about him or talking about him is the essence of misery. Recalling how he beat up my brother…”

She breathed some more.

She continued, “The idea that Tom Casey would eventually be listening and watching my video statement made me sick. I could imagine his snide, mocking grin. I’ve never forgotten the last words he spoke to me.”

“What did he say?”

“It was over two decades ago, so I was very young. Fourteen years old. But the words are chiseled into my brain. After he was pronounced guilty of second degree murder in the beating death of my brother, and they led him out of the courtroom in shackles, they walked him right past where I was sitting. He turned to me and said, ‘Someday, you’ll be sorry you testified. You have no idea how sorry.’ His tone was sinister, a sick, breathy whisper. It was the most threatening thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“I can’t believe he said that to his daughter. What an evil bastard.”

Street paused and sat silent for a time.

I didn’t speak. As painful as her thoughts were, it might be better for her to work through them than to have them interrupted.

Eventually, she said, “I didn’t tell you when I made the video statement because I couldn’t bear to bring those memories into my current life any more than absolutely necessary. You are my safe zone. I’m not a naturally bubbly, happy person, and my time with you has always been the happiest that I’ve ever experienced. I didn’t want to jeopardize that. I know you’re okay with such talk. But not me. Now, I’ve finally brought it up. So I’ve transformed a wonderful evening into a topic of misery. I’m so sorry.”

Street’s voice was thick, trying not to cry.

“I’m the one who’s sorry for you. What kind of father would be so sick as to want bad things for his daughter?” I said.

“That might be the real issue.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I suspect I’m not really his daughter.”

“Your mother…” I dropped the statement.

“I was born into a lovely situation,” Street said, her voice thick with sarcasm. “My brother might not have been his biological kid, either. The moment I first had the thought a few years ago, it explained several things about my childhood. My mother wasn’t mean like him, but she was devious and untrustworthy and more than a little promiscuous. Tom Casey probably relished hearing about her death from the overdose.”

I squeezed her knee again.

“What’s next?” I asked.

“A few weeks ago, I got a letter from my aunt May. She said that the parole board had the hearing as planned. She was at the hearing. She said that when my video statement was played, the hearing room was very focused and quiet. When it came time for her statement, she told the parole board that my father was a twisted man who had played the prison guards like pawns in a chess game and was now playing the parole board. She said his good behavior in prison was just an act so he could get out and seek retribution.”

“What did they decide?”

“We don’t know, yet. They take eight to twelve weeks to decide. It’s been eleven weeks. They will be making their decision any day. I can’t sleep, I’m so worried they’ll let him out.”

“What do you think will happen if they let him out?”

Street didn’t hesitate. “I think he will come for us.”

“Who is us?”

“The people he thinks put him inside.”

“Including you,” I said.

Street nodded. “Aunt May. The prosecutor at his trial. Me.”

“But even if you’re not his biological child, you’re still the closest thing he has to a child. I would think that might keep him from a premeditated action against you.”

“As a scientist, I know that in the animal world, infanticide is common. Males of many species will kill offspring that are not theirs. If that offspring helped put him in jail for decades, that’s only going to make matters worse.”

“He’ll be aware that if he left the state of Missouri and came to Lake Tahoe, that would no doubt violate the terms of his parole. Won’t that temper his actions?”

“I don’t think he cares. I think he only wants to punish those of us who testified against him.”

“Even if it means they put him back inside,” I said.

“Inside, they fed him and gave him a warm place to sleep. There was no insecurity about trying to keep a job and pay the bills and not be homeless. Of course, most people who go to prison think the experience is pure hell. But a few people are well-suited to it. I think Tom Casey is one of them, and he would be happy to go back permanently. Especially if he can exact vengeance first.”

We were both breathing hard.

Street reached for my hand and squeezed. The move was sudden and indicated a level of desperation. She turned to me. The tear tracks on her cheek reflected the moonlight. “I need you, Owen. It’s like the core of my childhood is a corrosive acid, and it’s coming back to torment me. I need your help fending it off, please.”

I leaned over, put my arm around her, and hugged her. “I’m here,” I said. “Always with you.”

“I tried to trade in my past,” she said, “and get rid of all the painful memories.” Street looked out and up at the night sky, away from the moon, toward the endless stars. “If I could undergo a complete metamorphosis, like a butterfly, I could be free. I would be able to jettison Tom Casey from my mind, my life.”

“Anything I can do to help… I’m here for you.”

She squeezed my hand.

NINE

The next morning, I pondered Jonas Montrop’s kidnapping while I drank coffee. With no clue about the father’s killing and no hint of where the ransom money went, I had no lead to follow.

I took Spot and headed south to my office on Kingsbury Grade. The AM station on the Jeep radio began a news squawk about some robbery, the DJ using that excessive sensationalist tone that would only be appropriate if a monster asteroid were about to wipe out the planet. So I again turned the dial to NPR, and the speakers filled with some wonderful orchestral stuff that, a few miles down the road, I learned was Edward Elgar. I turned up the grade and stopped at my office, feeling even more cultured than when I woke up.

Spot pushed past me as I went in the door. He trotted up the stairs to my second-floor digs. When I opened my office door, Spot immediately walked over to the new splotchy black-and-white throw rug that Street had gotten him. She’d put a thick pad under it. The rug was custom designed in a Harlequin Great Dane pattern. Spot sprawled across it with enthusiasm. It was hard to see the outline of his body. Maybe his affinity for the rug wasn’t about the comfort of padding but the comfort that there was now one place on Earth where he was hard to see. All creatures, prey and predator alike, like the way camo allows them to hide. Polar Bears on the ice flows. Deer in the sun-dappled forest. Lions on the Serengeti grasslands. Great Danes on a Great Dane rug.

Spot shut his eyes and appeared to instantly sleep while I assessed my coming workload.

I first established that the answering machine wasn’t blinking, no UPS or FedEx notices or packages had been pushed through the door slot, and when I dialed up my email, there was nothing in my inbox but spam.

Nobody cared about me and my perspective except a dead guy who thought I’d killed him. I leaned back in my desk chair, which caused it to make a loud screech as if metal were ripping. Spot was flopped on his side. He opened his eyes a moment and lifted his head two inches to look at me, his disdain at my noise obvious. His eyelids drooped, and the jowl on the lower side of his head hung down, exposing the pink of his gums and the white of his out-sized fangs.

“Sorry to interrupt your somnolence, Largeness. The noise to which you object is merely the sound of a perspicacious detective leaning back in his chair and training his weighty and considerable thoughts on the state of the world.”

Spot lowered his head to the floor and sighed, the outrush of breath a dismissive punctuation to my statement. Maybe it was because I’d used a big word.

I said to him, “I learned the word perspicacious from Diamond, the man who feeds you Danishes, so you shouldn’t be dismissive.”

Spot didn’t respond. He appeared to be unconscious. The job of riding to the office in the Jeep must be exhausting.

I dialed Diamond’s number.

“I appreciate your vouching for me yesterday,” I said when he answered. “It turns out I used to know the dead guy back in the day. He was a defendant in a manslaughter case. Now he thinks I killed him.”

Diamond sounded amused. “Like a magician, he gets himself croaked and accuses you posthumously.”

“Croaked?” I said.

“Been learning more norteamericano slang. I like the word croak. ‘If I croak tomorrow’ is a lot more real than the breezy, euphemistic ‘If I should pass on soon.’ Or worse, ‘If something should happen to me someday.’ Croak says the truth. What did you learn about the croakee?”

So I told Diamond about David Montrop, and how death by paddle board wasn’t pretty, and how he left a note suggesting I might be his croaker, and how it appeared that his son Jonas had been abducted in South Lake Tahoe. “Sergeant Lanzen learned that Montrop made a twenty-five-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal from the bank yesterday morning.”

“So the perp snatched the kid, then went to dad’s house to collect the ransom and killed the dad.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“If the perp doesn’t mind killing the dad, then killing the kid would be no big deal, too. What do you know about this kid?” Diamond asked.

“Nothing. His front door was broken, and he’s gone.”

“Strange,” Diamond muttered. “Did you call because you think any of this is related to the stickup?”

“What stickup?”

Diamond went silent for a moment. “You do a good job at shutting off outside inputs. Here on the South Shore, early this morning. Biggest thing going down in Tahoe in years. I’ve already spent hours on this, doing the routine just a few blocks from your office. While you were, what, sleeping? Oh, I’ve got incoming. Gotta go.” He hung up.

Just then my phone also rang. I clicked the answer button. “Owen McKenna,” I said. Maybe it was Street, or at least one of the few people who’d be sad when I croaked.

“Owen McKenna the private detective?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Randy Bosworth, General Manager and Security Director at Reno Armored. You’ve no doubt heard about our situation. I believe the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office is well qualified to handle it. But my boss, Howard Timmens, wants me to get you in on this. He’s heard about you and says you’d be a good fit. You probably know how these things go. I do what Mr. Timmens says. He thinks you’re the best chance to catch the scum that did this. You are willing to come down and talk to us in Reno, right?”

“Certainly,” I said, wondering if I wanted the work. But it sounded like the boss man Timmens might be sad if I croaked, so that was a plus.

“Can’t beat a PI with his nose to the pavement,” I said. “I have a pretty good scum-catch average.” I didn’t know what scum or situation he was referring to, so I was just putting words on the line to take up space while my perspicacity struggled to reveal itself. Meanwhile, a little voice in my brain said that if I hadn’t gotten all dreamy about Edward Elgar, I would have heard about the scum on the news broadcast that I’d abandoned. Probably, it was the stickup that Diamond just referred to.