Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (3 page)

The phone still had an open-air sound in my ear. The person on the other end hadn’t yet hung up.

“If you want to meet, I’d be willing to sell this phone back to you,” I said. Still no response. “Of course, it won’t be cheap. If you don’t want to meet, I turn Amanda in along with this phone and the Glock. Incidentally, you should know that they’re pretty good these days with cell phone forensics. If you don’t talk to me, maybe you can look forward to a visit from the FBI or whatever law agency you’d like to ignore you.”

“You’re gonna die, McKenna,” a man with a deep voice mumbled, then hung up.

It was a pompous statement, but that didn’t make it untrue. It corroborated what Amanda already said. The fact that the caller knew my name was McKenna when I hadn’t told him gave his threat some gravitas. Not that there was much I could do about it. It was unlikely that I could find her without a lot of work. It was also unlikely that her real name was Amanda Horner. It would be more difficult to find the man who called. His voice had some kind of accent that I couldn’t place.

I had seen the name of the local company that towed her vehicle. I gave them a call.

“I saw one of your guys tow a black Buick SUV at Heavenly Village a few minutes ago,” I said to the guy who answered. “I’ve got a friend with a car like that. I tried to reach her to ask if it was hers, but haven’t been able to get through. I wonder if you can tell me the plate. I’ll recognize the number if it’s hers. It’ll speed up the recovery time, and you’ll get paid faster.”

“Hold on,” he said. I waited. He came back and read off the number. I wrote it down.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll call my friend and double check.”

“Tell her it’ll be at the city impound lot out by the airport. Tell her to bring some bank ’cause the fees have gone up.”

We hung up. I dialed SLT PD and asked for Commander Mallory. He was unavailable.

“Maybe you can help me,” I said to the woman who answered. “This is Owen McKenna.”

“The private cop.” The woman said it with a judgmental tone.

“I’m at Heavenly Village,” I said. “A woman just pulled a Glock Twenty-six on me. I relieved her of it. Her driver’s license says Amanda Horner. She doesn’t have a carry permit, her ID looks fake, and the gun is probably stolen. She got out of a black Buick SUV that was just towed out of the bus stop. I have the plate for you. My guess is it’s stolen. I’m hoping you can check on that.” I read off the plate number.

“Hold on,” the woman said.

I waited on hold for five minutes. From all directions, skiers streamed toward the gondola station. When people stopped to pet Spot, he sniffed at their backpacks, no doubt determining what kind of lunch they carried. Periodically, he wagged. I’m pretty sure that meant roast beef.

The phone line clicked.

“McKenna? Mallory. Just got in. Edith said you gave her the plate off a Buick? It was taken at a gas station in San Rafael last evening.”

“Like I figured,” I said. “I’ll swing by and turn in the thief’s sidearm and fake ID.”

“Maybe turn in the thief, too?”

“Wish I could. She saw an opportunity to claim I was assaulting her, and two young guys intervened, allowing her to run away.”

“She,” he said, his voice flat.

“ID says Amanda Horner,” I said. “I assume it isn’t her real name.”

“You let a woman get away.”

“I could have sent Spot after her, but he’s reluctant to chase down women.”

“Obviously takes after you,” Mallory said. “Then again, maybe you figured you weren’t fast enough to catch her.”

“Probably true,” I said.

“I’ll be here if you swing by soon.”

Ten minutes later, I parked at the police department on Johnson. I told Spot to be good, walked in, and asked for Mallory. He came out holding a can of Coke, switched it to his left hand so he could give me the shake that could crush river cobbles. He took me to his office. I gave him the gun, its magazine, the cell phone, and the woman’s ID. He set them all on his desk, then pointed to the gun.

“Did you check this for prints?”

“I was kinda busy removing it from the wannabe shooter. She wasn’t wearing gloves, so it probably has prints. But they’ll be mostly covered up by mine.”

Mallory picked up Amanda’s driver’s license.

“Photo look like her?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“She certainly doesn’t look like most car thieves,” he said. “You got any idea if this woman is working solo or if she hires out?”

“The woman said she has a boss and that messing with him was going to get her and me both killed. After she ran, the phone rang. I talked awhile with no reply. Eventually, a guy spoke, and he knew my name. He mumbled and had a bit of an accent. I’ve been trying to think of where it was from. It seemed like Russian mixed with the way they talked in the movie “Fargo.” He repeated what Amanda Horner said. That I was gonna get dead.”

“You think it was bluster?” Mallory asked.

“Hard to say. The woman also said that she thought her boss was connected.”

“The Russian Mob has moved to Fargo?” Mallory said. “I’ve heard stranger. Either way, he might be serious about killing you.”

“I’ll try to stay alert,” I said.

“How’d you get involved in this gig?”

I told him about the call from Nadia Lassitor, how she said she was being followed, and how she led her tail to me in the Heavenly Village ramp.

Mallory sipped the last of his Coke, making a slurping noise. With his left hand, he tossed the empty can into a waste basket as he reached his right hand into a mini fridge and pulled out another and popped the top.

“You’re like a smoker who lights a new cig off an old butt.”

“All that new info about sugar being bad,” he said, “makes me crave it that much more. This lady you’re working for, do you know about her husband?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“That’s the name of the guy who drowned in Hurricane Bay last week,” Mallory said. “His name is Ian Lassitor.”

I thought about it. “Hurricane Bay is West Shore, right?”

“It’s the one that isn’t on most maps. The first bay south of the one with the Sunnyside restaurant.”

“This guy was swimming?” I said, trying but failing to pull up a memory.

“Boating. He was wearing all his clothes along with a flotation vest. He was attached, more or less, to the front half of his boat. The rear part was missing. From what Sergeant Santiago of Placer County told me, it looks like he was struck by another boat. But that boat is nowhere to be found. Maybe it sank. There were no witnesses.” Mallory drank Coke and then pointed at the pocket Glock. “You gonna pursue this thing with Lassitor’s wife? Because I’d like to be in the loop on anything that connects all this to South Lake Tahoe.”

“If I sense that something’s going down in your happy hamlet, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Check with Santiago. He handled the Lassitor drowning.” Mallory picked up the gun, turned it over, hefted it in his hand. “Wimpy, but nice size for a woman.”

Back in the Jeep, I called Street.

“You had lunch, yet?” I asked when she answered.

“I figured that hauling a toboggan would make you hungry, but I didn’t know if you would still be speaking to me after losing so badly.”

“Ah. Well, I learned as a kid that real sportsmanship is embracing the winning team after you get trounced. And then stealing their technique so you can kick their ass next time around.”

“I’ll be careful what I say over cheeseburgers.”

We met at the Mott Canyon Grill on Lower Kingsbury. Diamond Martinez was pulling up as we got out of our cars.

“Sergeant,” I said. “We were just going to discuss tobogganing humiliation rules over lunch. Want to join us?”

“Who got humiliated?”

“Me.”

He smiled. “I’m in,” he said.

So we three ate, and we didn’t talk tobogganing. But I did tell them about Nadia, the woman being tailed, and Amanda, the Glock-packing tail, and the number of skiers who delayed their trip up the gondola in order to hug Spot and make him feel that I was a huge disappointment in how I dispensed my affection.

After lunch, I took Street’s half-burger leftovers in a doggie bag to the doggie in the Jeep. I let him out onto the parking lot.

Spot did the drool-anticipation thing followed by the black hole-devours-burger demonstration.

“Drool-flood’s impressive,” Diamond said. “But you know we have rules about unregulated run-off in the Tahoe Basin.”

“I’ll start carrying sandbags in my Jeep.”

Street headed back to her bug lab where she was working on a new honeybee study, Diamond went back to the wide-ranging Douglas County trails to keep them safe from bad guys, and my hound and I went back to the office where we would likely take a nap.

FOUR

The phone was ringing as Spot and I climbed up the stairs. I tried to hurry, which made me fumble the key in the door and take twice as long to get in.

Like before, it was Nadia Lassitor leaving a message on the machine. I picked it up and said my name.

“I can’t believe it was a woman following me!” she said.

“It happens.”

“Did you arrest her?”

“No. I’m a private cop, not an official cop. I can’t arrest people in the usual way. And it’s no crime to follow someone if you’re not threatening them.”

“But she had a gun!”

I ignored the comment. “We should talk. You could come to my office.”

She hesitated. “I don’t know where it is.”

“Turn up Kingsbury Grade. On the right. It’s the building with the nice new front entry.” I gave her the address.

I watched out the window. Several minutes later, the dark blue BMW pulled into the office lot. No one followed her that I could see. Nadia opened her door and got out. She stood between the open door and the vehicle and looked around, studying the territory, ready to jump back into the safety of the car if necessary.

Satisfied, she shut the door. I saw the Beemer’s lights flash as she hit the key fob lock button. She trotted to the office building’s entrance, doing that bent-knee stride peculiar to women in heels. Probably, there wasn’t another woman in all of Tahoe currently wearing heels outside of a bedroom or a showroom stage.

I opened my door and waited. She came up the stairs and down the hall. After she was in my office, I shut the door and turned the deadbolt with force so that it made a click loud enough to reassure her.

Spot’s tail wag was dialed up to medium high, the standard rate for women he’s seeing for the second time. He lifted his nose to sniff Nadia’s chin. She backed up until she hit the wall next to the door, her arms tucked behind her.

“My God, he’s huge. I saw him in the ramp, but up close, he’s...”

“If you give him a single pet, he’ll be happy. His name is Spot.”

The woman slowly reached out and patted the top of his head. Then she quickly wiped her hand on her pant leg.

“Spot, c’mere and sit.”

I took hold of his collar and pulled him back behind my desk.

“What’s with the ear stud?” she asked.

“He’s hip.”

The woman frowned at me, then looked at her palm. She looked down at her thigh. “Your dog sheds. There’s little white hairs on my clothes.”

“Yes, dogs do that. But it’s minor. Nothing like some dogs.”

Nadia reached into her little purse and pulled out a miniature sticky roller. She rolled it over her pant leg where she’d rubbed her hand after petting Spot. Her sculpted fingernails were large and dramatic, long blue arcs sparkling from glitter embedded in the varnish. Her skin was the color of a deep, permanent tan but so smooth that it suggested several layers of base paint, each one sanded before the next was applied. Assuming the resulting color was close to her natural color, and looking at Nadia’s face shape, I guessed her to be native Hawaiian.

Her pressed suit was the same blue as her nails and the blue leather purse. She wore a heavy coat of blue eye-shadow, more than needed to emphasize dramatic, wide-set eyes with arched eyebrows, plucked-thin. Her hair was black and shiny with a thick wave that made it undulate when she turned her head. A strong perfume wafted through the room. It smelled vaguely like pineapple on a Hawaiian breeze with an overlay of rubbing alcohol.

Although pretty, Nadia wasn’t a spectacular beauty. Yet it seemed that she thought it was achievable with enough cosmetics and expensive clothes. Everything about her had too much color, too much polish, and too much burnishing. She reminded me of a country music star in thick stage makeup, all of her features visible at 50 yards.

“I grew up with a German shepherd,” she said as she worked the lint roller. “In Honolulu. He shed enough every month to stuff a pillow.” It was the first sentence she’d uttered that didn’t radiate tension and fear.

“I bet he was smart, right?” I said, thinking it would be good to keep her on a more relaxing subject for a bit.

“Oh, Lord, his name was Señor Inteligente.”

“Spanish for Mr. Smart?”

“You speak Español?”

I shook my head. “You just heard twenty-five percent of my Spanish.”

“When we didn’t want Mr. Smart to know what we were saying, we started spelling the words, like walk in Spanish.” She glanced at Spot. “But Señor Inteligente learned what that meant. So then we mouthed the words without any volume. But Mr. Smart also learned to read our lips. After that, we had to hold up our hand to block his view of our mouths.” Nadia held her hand to the side of her mouth and turned her head slightly, away from Spot, blocking his view of her mouth. He looked at her, did a slow wag, knowing, probably, that she was playing some game about keeping him from knowing what she said.

 “But that didn’t work, either,” she continued, “because whenever he saw us hold up our hands, he knew we were talking about something that would get him excited.” She looked at Spot, then back at me. “Does your dog read lips?”

“Spot’s pretty smart,” I said, “but not like most German shepherds. Spot’s got some street smarts, but they’re mixed with low work ethic. Shepherds have classroom smarts and major work ethic. Even if Spot could learn to read lips, he’d think it was too much work.”