Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) (44 page)

I realized that I’d missed the obvious about the killings. The misdirection. Even the motive for murder was probably not what we’d thought. Flynn was a sociopath as Dr. Morrell had described. He was the kind of person who committed crimes of passion. Not someone who was a planner.

The real killer was a true psychopath. A careful planner. An actor with no empathy. A Machiavellian manipulator. A narcissist who would plan the ultimate revenge and never have a second thought about morality.

I said to Flynn, “I now realize that the whole point of framing Evan was so that, when I realized that she’d been framed, I would turn my focus on you as the killer.”

“You’re not making sense, man. I don’t know what you’re saying.” His spear gouged deeper into Mia’s throat flesh.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Diamond tensing, his gun becoming more rigid in his hands. He was close to shooting. But I hoped he would sense that I was in the process of discovering something important, something that might be lost if he killed Flynn.

I said, “When I first thought that Evan had been framed, it seemed obvious that you were the likely perpetrator. You knew her from way back in Reno. You could have easily discovered where she lived and worked. You could have stolen her car and gotten it stuck near Montrop’s house. One of the dead robbers had a shirt button in his hand, a button like those on Evan’s shirt in the picture of you and Evan. It would have been so easy for you to get into her apartment, get one of the buttons and put it there in the dead man’s hand. You’d be thinking that someone like me would eventually see those same buttons on Evan’s shirt in the yearbook photo. And while you were in the apartment, you could have put one of the spears in her closet.”

I paused to breathe.

“Believing that Evan was framed by you made you the perfect suspect. After all, you owned a woomera. You would be the one person to know how to file the ski poles so they fit a tennis racket. That made it look like she had the murder weapon. You knew all of the truck robbers from way back. You had the history with Jonas Montrop. You knew that his father had money and could be extorted by kidnapping Jonas. You’d probably met the gardener Kang. There was a decent chance that he told you about Reno Armored and their cash runs. The evidence that pointed at you blinded me to the truth that you weren’t the killer, either. I never even considered that you might have been framed, too.”

Flynn was frowning and shaking his head as if he couldn’t track what I was saying.

“You never had the money, did you Flynn?” I asked, raising my voice. “You were set up to believe you’d get it, but it isn’t going to happen! Don’t you see, Flynn? The plan all along was that you’re going to die, and you will still look like the killer. Meanwhile, the real killer will escape with the knowledge that he exacted the ultimate punishment on the people who wronged him. He gets to keep the money, too. If Diamond kills you now, you make the perfect murderer. You’re holding a spear against Mia’s throat.”

“No! That can’t be!”

“If Diamond doesn’t kill you now, the plan was probably for you to die in an accident. We’d find your body and more evidence of your guilt. We’d all assume that you were the killer from the beginning. And we’d assume that you stashed the money, but we’d never find it. It’s a perfect frame, Flynn. Look at you, holding a spear to Mia’s throat! How’d the real killer manipulate you into that?”

Flynn yelled back, “The only person who...”

Flynn jerked and he made a little choking cough accompanied by a strange noise I didn’t recognize, a noise like the snap of breaking twigs. Flynn’s face showed wide-eyed shock, and he looked down as a bloody ski pole point suddenly protruded from the base of his neck, poking out and up, the point just in front of his chin. Flynn’s face didn’t lose its shock as he dropped his little spear.

I leaped forward and grabbed Mia, pulling her back as Flynn fell face first to the floor of the boat, the Hades-flared end of the shiny, oiled ski pole sticking up into the air.

SIXTY-THREE

Mia screamed through her nose and fought me, but I held her hard and close, backing the two of us up and then sitting her down on the settee. Diamond fired his gun at the little door with the angled slats, two of which had broken as the ski pole had been thrust through. He shot four times. The booming explosions were like bombs going off in the enclosed space.

I visualized another dead body in the sleeping berth, wondering if it was Kang.

But intruding into my thoughts were other things I’d seen, things I hadn’t made sense of until now.

I remembered that even petite, well-meaning Evan Rosen had said that she and others had picked on the nerds when they were in high school. Such common harassment can be humiliating. And that might have put Evan and the robbers on someone’s revenge list.

In that thought came the realization of what this case was really about.

It wasn’t about money at all. It was about bullying.

Kids had done what kids do. They’d picked on a kid who was probably younger, smaller, and weaker.

What they never could have imagined in their youth was that the kid they picked on, the nerd they thought was so uncool, was smarter. And he grew up to be a psychopath who convinced the guys who bullied him to participate in a robbery to get a huge amount of money. Then he killed them off in the most violent, punishing way possible. It was all done in a manner to make the motive look like money, and pin the crime on someone else by using a double frame.

Pick on the wrong kid, and you might suffer a payback beyond anything you can imagine.

As Diamond was reaching to open the broken door, we heard movement. Thuds and bumps. Then came footsteps on the roof above us. The killer was still alive. He’d scrambled up through the sleeping berth hatch and clambered onto the deck above the main cabin, the deck that was our roof.

I called out in a loud voice. “You don’t have to do this, Jonas. You’ve demonstrated that you are superior to all these dirtballs who tormented you as a kid. You’ve proven it to me, to everyone.”

As I spoke, Diamond opened the broken door to the sleeping berth, leaned in and looked up.

There was another grunt. Then came the explosive sound of crunching material as a ski pole spear plunged down through the roof above my head. The pointy spear missed my shoulder by a foot. As it stopped, held in place by the grip of the roofing material above, its point was an inch above Mia’s head.

Diamond ran up out of the main cabin and through the pilothouse out to the aft deck.

I pulled Mia off the settee, and we followed Diamond up through the companionway into the pilothouse. Spot joined us. The roof over the pilothouse was taller, giving a bit more room in case Jonas thrust more ski pole spears down from above.

Mia squirmed in my arms as I forced her down onto the bench where Evan lay beneath the mound of yellow rain slickers. I realized that she still had tape over her mouth. I pulled it off in a single, fast jerk. She cried in pain and shock.

“Evan is here!” I said at Mia’s ear. “She’s frozen, and I need you to warm her up.” I lifted up on the pile of coats. Evan was still unconscious, and I still couldn’t detect any shivering, a very bad sign. “Do you see, Mia? Evan is very cold, and she needs you to warm her up.”

Mia realized it was Evan and began shrieking. Her cries were both joyful and fearful.

I gently pushed her down next to Evan. “Hold her, Mia. Warm her up. I’ll put these raincoats over both of you.”

Mia draped herself over Evan and held her hard, and I covered them both with raincoats. “Don’t move until I come back,” I said.

Spot looked toward the door where Diamond had run out, then looked down at where Evan and Mia lay under the pile of raincoats.

“Spot!” I said. I took his collar and pulled him over next to the heaped pile of yellow raincoats. I pointed at Evan and Mia and said, “GUARD THEM.” I lifted the pile of coats to expose Evan and Mia’s heads and directed Spot’s nose to them. When I was certain he’d gotten a good whiff of them, I said, “GUARD THEM!” once again.

I shut the door down to the cabin, then ran out of the pilothouse, shutting the door behind me so that Spot wouldn’t be tempted to abandon his station. With the doors shut, Spot would stay better focused. If the killer should attempt to enter the pilothouse, Spot would be on guard.

I found Diamond on the port side of the pilothouse. He had his gun up, pointing toward the bow. Standing on the foredeck at the tip of the bow was a figure in the darkness.   He was wearing dark pants and hoodie with the hood pulled up. So the only easy thing to see was the bright white hockey mask, an angry, scary design that looked like Hades himself. It was made of hard plastic and had angular, menacing eye openings. There was a pointy nose with narrow slit nostrils. The mouth was a vertical grill of dark stripes that gave it a Hannibal Lecter look.

Perched over his shoulder was a large tube, a quiver for ski pole spears. In the opposite hand was a tennis racket. Because the rest of his body was dark, the mask and racket and quiver seemed to float in space.

“You’re trapped, Jonas,” I called out.

“That’s what you think.”

“Psychopaths like you are tripped up by your arrogance.”

“Is that what you think? That I’ve been tripped up? Oh, but I have lots more surprises.”

“Too late,” I said. “You went too far, carried on a charade that was too elaborate and involved too many people.”

“McKenna, you don’t have a clue.”

“Your singular achievement was to fake your own kidnapping before the other crimes took place. You couldn’t be considered a suspect when you were supposedly strung up in the boat, right? That took impressive planning, killing your stepfather with his paddle board and then leaving the forged note about me on his desk. You knew that it would draw me into the case, and you hoped I’d find you tied up in your boat, thereby cementing your alibi.”

“And you fell for it all the way,” he said, laughing.

“What was your stepdad’s phrase? Obfuscation is fortification. The dirt decoy bag was obfuscation, right? If Kang had arrived earlier than normal to garden, he might have seen you in disguise. You would have shouted something about finding dirt instead of ransom money. Kang would never have thought it was you. And the cops would never think there was a connection between you and some strange sequence of events that left dirt in your stepdad’s car. A son would simply steal money or simply kill a father. The obfuscation made it look like something else.

“Then you created the rope burns on your wrists and urinated in your underwear to set up the timeline that convinced us that you were tied up for days, while you were actually out killing your stepdad and robbing the Reno Armored truck and then murdering your fellow robbers. Spearing them with ski poles using your tennis racket as a woomera to connect with Flynn’s Australian background was another brilliant move. It’s too bad I untied the ropes that bound you. If I’d simply cut the lines, that would have preserved the knots. We would have been able to see what kind of clever slip knot you’d used so that you could put your hands through loops of line and tighten them after you’d waded out to your boat.

“If I hadn’t found you, you would have released yourself and claimed you finally undid the ropes that tied you.”

Jonas laughed again, a cackle of delight as if I were admiring his genius.

“We never found any other clothes. Did you walk all the way from your house wearing nothing but underwear? Probably not. You must have had another boat to use for transportation. So much obfuscation. Well done.”

Several yards beyond Jonas, moored to the same buoy that held the pilothouse boat, was an aluminum fishing boat with an outboard motor. It was probably how he arrived from the South Shore, and it was his intended escape vehicle after he left a boat full of dead bodies.

“You’re demonstrating how little you know,” Jonas shouted. “You and the cop and the women will die, and Flynn will disappear at the bottom of Lake Tahoe. And it will be obvious to the world that Flynn was the killer and chief robber. You want obfuscation, just go through Flynn’s things. You’ll find the receipt for the purchase of a bunch of hockey masks. I showed them to Flynn, and he got his prints on them. People will think he was the source for all of them. There’s even one hidden in Randy Bosworth’s house and another one at my stepdad’s house. No one will be able to figure it all out.”

“We know that your stepfather didn’t buy his current house in Incline Village until five years ago. I’m guessing you didn’t really live in Incline before that,” I said. “You knew Flynn and the other kids at Wilson High in Reno. You referred to Flynn living in the projects. But it wasn’t a joke about some building in Incline Village. It was a poor neighborhood in Reno where you lived, too. Right, Jonas? You went to the same schools, getting bullied by the older kids, right? You faked everything about this case, the ransom phone call, all the suspects. You probably used stories of potential riches to shape the behavior of the gardener Kang.”

Jonas started to say something, then stopped.

I wanted him to confess to the murders, so I kept pushing.

“I bet you loved getting revenge on those jerks who pushed you around as a kid. They probably beat you up and humiliated you. So the only reasonable thing was to kill them, wasn’t it? It was an amazing strategy to get them all involved as actual robbers. How delighted they must have been to have you come to them with this opportunity for riches. Then, at the end, you made sure they saw you as you speared each one of them to death. That was the ultimate goal, to be certain they understood it was revenge.” I let the statement hang.