Tahoe Chase (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (19 page)

“How is it that her heart is still beating when she can’t breathe?” Joe asked.

“It is common in these situations. Heartbeat is controlled by the brain stem. It is one of the last things to go.”

Joe said, “What is the brain death exam?”

“I already mentioned the EEG, the electroencephalogram. Brain activity is manifested by electric signals between the cells. An EEG shows whether or not the basic function is there. There are also a variety of other tests we do that reveal whether or not a person’s brain is functional at basic levels, even if the person is in a deep coma.”

“Such as,” Joe said.

“Vestibulo-ocular reflexes, for example.” Wells paused as if searching for an easy way to explain something to a layperson. “People have a built-in system that keeps our eyes moving opposite to the rotation of our heads so that we can focus on an object. For example, when your head turns to the right, your eyes tend to automatically turn to the left so that you can keep focusing on whatever you’re looking at. If I look at you and shake my head left and right, my eyes keep looking at you. This is so important for basic activity, that it’s hard-wired in the brain.”

“A person in a coma has the reflex?” I said.

“Yes. If you shake their heads, their eyes move opposite to the shake. Even in the dark. If a person doesn’t have the reflex and their eyes stay fixed in their head, we say they have doll’s eyes, and it suggests severe impairment of the brain.”

“Rell doesn’t have it,” Joe said.

“No, she doesn’t.”

“What else?” Joe asked.

“People in a coma respond to cold water in their ears. Their eyes turn toward the cold. Such patients also react to direct touch on their eyes. If you touch a cotton swab to a comatose person’s corneas, they respond. People in a coma also show significant activity on their EEGs. Your wife has lost all these brain functions.”

Joe looked down, then raised his head again to look at Dr. Wells.

The doctor said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this, Mr. Rorvik.”

“Understood. Thank you.”

“We will beef up our security,” the doctor said. “Jeanine is putting a guard on this floor. He will be stationed near your wife’s room all night long.”

“Thank you,” Joe said. “I will be in touch with you in the next few days regarding disconnecting the life support.”

The doctor nodded, his face long and solemn.

We left.

“I’d like you to meet Rell,” Joe said when we were back in the hallway.

“I’d like that,” I said.

Joe led me into her room. “Rell, this is Owen McKenna. I’ve hired him to find out who pushed you off the deck. He’s a good man, and he’s making progress.”

I looked at Joe. He gestured toward the bed.

Rell Rorvik was as tiny as her friend Simone. She lay under a white blanket. The hospital bed was tilted up at an angle. A breathing tube was inserted at the base of her throat, and the sheet curved around it and went up to cover shoulders that were as thin and narrow as those of a child.

Rell’s eyes were closed. There was no movement except the soft rise and fall of her chest as the machine air was pushed in and out of her lungs.

Her skin was almost as pale as off-white wall paint, and it appeared to be paper thin as it stretched over prominent cheekbones and eyes that were pronounced in their sockets.

She had a high forehead, with soft, straight white hair that flowed down the sides of her face. It was thick enough that I imagined her to be one of those women who can proudly wear a pony tail all of their lives. On the upper left side of her head was a large bandage where they had probably operated. Below the dressing was a blue-brown bruise seeping under the skin of her temple.

In spite of the bruising, she was beautiful, and the lack of extra flesh on her face made me think that she was like an elegant bird, regal in life and graceful as she approached death. Joe’s little hummingbird.

I’d seen many dead bodies during my cop career. As I walked through the door, I expected that seeing Rell would be another one of those experiences. But it was different in a significant way. Her brain might be nearly dead, and when it was, she would be declared legally dead. But having her living body before me gave me a sense of the Rell that once was.

There was a chair next to her bed. Her arm stretched under the covers so that her hand, still under the blanket, was close to the chair. I imagined that Joe had held her hand.

So, for Joe’s benefit, I sat in the chair and reached under the edge of the blanket. As I wrapped my fingers around her tiny, warm hand, I felt a profound connection to the woman. I had been talking to Joe and Simone and others about her. I’d been learning something of her life. Now, holding her hand, I felt something of her spirit, a woman who fed the birds and searched out and befriended the abused girl, a woman who possessed a kind of magic such that everyone I had met said they felt they could say anything to her.

It is a strange connection we make between the personality and the vessel in which it resides. I knew her brain was gone, which meant her personality was gone. And yet, as I held her hand I could sense something of the woman who’d once existed in the body before me.

In many ways, touch is the greatest sense, the most intimate sense, the truest sense. Rell was mostly gone, but we shared touch.

After another minute of silent touch, I let go of her hand and turned to Joe.

He had left the room and shut the door without my knowing it.

I turned back to Rell Rorvik. “I’ll do right by him, Rell. And by you.” I stood up and joined Joe out in the hallway.

THIRTY

We were quiet on the drive back up to the lake. It was dark by the time I dropped Joe off at his house.

“I’m glad I got to meet Rell,” I said as he got out of the Jeep.

“Me, too.”

“I’m learning some things on this case. I’ll call as soon as I know more.”

He nodded, closed the door and went inside. I waited until I saw lights go on, then left.

“I know you’re hungry, largeness, but hang in a bit longer, eh?” I said, reaching into the back seat to rub Spot’s head.

Once again, I turned on Sierra Blvd, parked a block down from Ned and Simone’s house, got out the binoculars and settled in to a boring evening of watching.

It was the same as the previous evening. Lights on downstairs, dark upstairs, no movement outside other than the occasional vehicle going by. At one point, I was getting drowsy, and I set down the binoculars to turn on the radio. When I raised the glasses back to my eyes I saw a person moving in the street in front of Ned’s cabin. The darkness obscured any details, but the person looked to be male. He was thin and appeared to be wearing baggy jeans that bunched up around his shoes. It’s one of the more reliable qualifiers. You see baggy gangsta jeans with the waistband hanging at the bottom of their butt, you know it’s a guy between the ages of twelve and twenty-eight.

Gangsta-wannabe turned into a different driveway, shuffled up to the door, knocked, and someone let him inside. I went back to watching Ned’s house.

Simone’s Toyota was in the drive in front of the garage, which had its door lowered. Ned’s tropical fish truck was at the end of the short drive, parked in the street, blocking Simone’s car so that she couldn’t leave without his permission and help. His truck was still sans bumper. This time, it wasn’t up on jack stands, so its roof was only eight feet high.

I imagined them in the cabin, Ned sprawled on the couch watching a game, the volume turned up high, beers lined up on the couch arm, periodically shouting for Simone to bring him food or more beer, smacking her if she didn’t jump fast enough. Simone would be in the kitchen, maybe reading a magazine or cooking a pie so that Ned would be so stuffed with food that maybe he’d hit her just a little bit less.

The evening rebroadcast of Fresh Air on NPR came and went. Then came an hour-long jazz program with the über-laid-back announcer periodically talking about the other side of Coltrane, whatever that was. Next, we were plunged into the classical triumphs of the Baroque period, too stuffy and formal for a romantic guy like me. When the news break came, I decided it was once again getting too late for Ned to have a visitor.

I turned on the lights, put the Jeep in drive, and cruised on past Ned and Simone’s. A casual glance in my mirror showed a vehicle come down a side street, pull in front of Ned’s place and turn off the lights.

I drove around the block, parked in the same place where I’d just spent three hours starving both Spot and myself. Looking through the binoculars, I saw that the car was a cab. Its lights were off, but I could see the silhouette of the driver.

The house showed no change. Whomever was visiting was already inside.

The upstairs light turned on. I couldn’t hear the music, but I assumed, based on Simone’s report, that it was playing loud downstairs.

Ten minutes later, the upstairs light went off. In little more than the time it would take to walk down the stairs, the front door opened. A man walked out and got into the cab. The cab’s lights came on, and it pulled away.

I waited until it turned the corner, then I started up, turned on my headlights, and followed. Although it is hard for someone to detect a tail in the dark, I stayed back. Two turns later, the cab pulled out onto Lake Tahoe Blvd heading northeast. A few blocks down, the cab turned left on San Francisco Avenue and drove into the Al Tahoe neighborhood. Despite the snowy streets, I stepped on the gas and got to the intersection just before a knot of traffic would have cut me off. I braked, skidded into the turn, and went through the intersection.

The cab wasn’t far ahead, so I slowed to let it gain some distance on me. When the cab was a block down, I sped up and followed. The cab drove all the way to the end of San Francisco before its brake lights lit up. It came to a stop. I kept going until I was a block behind the cab, then pulled over and parked.

Through the binoculars, I could just make out a dark shape getting out of the cab. The cab turned around and drove back toward me. I ducked down as it went by.

I told Spot to be quiet, knowing that it was a command that he wouldn’t obey if he didn’t feel like it. I got out of the Jeep, eased the door shut, and walked down the edge of the road in the dark.

San Francisco Avenue is lined with houses, most of them modest in size and style. Many are remodeled cabins from decades ago. At this time of night, most were dark on the street side. A few had lights on over their doors or garage doors. But it was not enough to see my mark. When I got near the end of the street, I tried to see tire tracks or footprints, but it was too dark.

I listened for any sound that might indicate which house my man had disappeared into. There was nothing. Two of the houses at the end of the street had no lights on. If he’d slipped into one of them in the dark, there was no way for me to know.

The road ended at the Truckee River Marsh. Although it was a cloudy night, the snow cover glowed a dim white. I was looking for a trail around the last house when I sensed a flash of light.

I turned to look, but there was nothing but snow-covered meadow interrupted by stands of meadow grasses that had somehow stood up through the snow. Well out into the meadow was the Truckee River, dark undulating shapes as the water meandered toward the lake. In the distance was the black water of Tahoe.

As if I were doing a grid search, I looked over the landscape in a regular fashion, taking care to study each part of the meadow whether there was something interesting to see or not. Nothing appeared to move. The flash of light had not been significant. I assumed it was someone walking their dog, using a flashlight intermittently to look for obstructions and hazards. But if that were the case, the dog would have been obvious in the night, a darker shape running around, silhouetted against the snow.

Seeing no dog made me more interested in finding the source of the light. I found a little trail in the dim light of night and walked down it a hundred feet or so, wondering if I should explore the meadow or go back and look in house windows. I was about to give up when I saw a flashlight go on farther out, over by the shore. The beam silhouetted a man. I couldn’t tell for certain that it was the man at Ned’s house, but I assumed it was.

I jogged out onto the marsh, going as fast as I could on uneven, frozen snow that had a thousand holes punched into it by walkers.

As I ran, the man’s flashlight beam illuminated an object at the edge of the water. It was light in color and was about the size of a small rowboat. It was an unusual shape. The man bent down and appeared to lift up on it.

I trotted farther out the trail, then stopped and raised my binoculars.

The man had a type of boat I’d never seen before. It looked like an inflatable of some kind, but it looked high tech, with a center console that held a steering wheel. He pushed it into the water and jumped on. I heard the soft crank of a starter followed by an engine starting, an engine I couldn’t see. Such a small boat would typically have an outboard motor, but this was some kind of a quiet inboard contained within the center console. It was one of the smallest inboard boats I’d ever seen.

I jogged down the trail hoping to get closer before the boat took off. The footing was uneven. My foot landed at a sharp angle, tempting a sprain. Then I slipped off the firm prints of people who’d come before me, and my leg sank deep into the untrampled snow at the side of the trail.

The engine revved a bit. It had a hint of lower harmonics in its sound. A four-stroke with some power. When he gave it a touch of throttle, the sound of thrust was like that of a jet ski. No propeller on an inflatable hull meant that it was a very low-draft boat. Drive it up onto the beach. Drive it away with no fear of a prop strike.

The boat cruised away, angling to the northeast.

I ran until I got to the shore and raised the binoculars.

He cruised without running lights, a violation of the law. I was breathing hard, and the image in my glasses jumped around. Eventually, my breathing calmed. With the image in the glasses steadied, I saw where he was going.

In the distance beyond the inflatable, was a large dark boat with dim light coming from some windows down near the waterline. Even in the darkness, I could see that the boat, while big, was sleek and pointy. I guessed it at fifty feet or more, constructed like a very modern cabin cruiser built to look like a race boat.

As the inflatable got farther from me, it was harder to see details in my binoculars. The inflatable slowed as he approached the big boat’s stern. The man jumped out onto a tender deck, pulled on some kind of line and appeared to attach it to the bow of the inflatable. Then he stepped forward and reached for something.

A second later I heard the sound of a motor whining. At first I didn’t know what it was. Then the inflatable lifted up onto the tender deck, and moved forward as if it were being pulled into a cavity of some kind. The motor sound quit. The man used both arms to pull on something above the boat. The vague picture of the inflatable boat disappeared as a white partition blocked my view.

I finally realized what I’d seen. The inflatable was the yacht’s custom tender boat, a small, high-tech inboard designed to ferry people between the yacht and the shore. But unlike a dinghy towed behind or lifted off the water by a pivoting davit, this tender was simply winched into its own garage. With the garage door shut, no one could even tell the tender existed.

In a few moments, the deep rumble of the yacht’s engines started. Running lights turned on. I heard the RPM shift as the props were engaged, and the yacht headed away.

I watched through the glasses for fifteen minutes as the big boat motored at no-wake speed out into the lake. The dark shape on dark water soon disappeared.

I walked back to the Jeep where Spot, no doubt hypoglycemic from lack of food, showed little enthusiasm at my return.