Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (11 page)

The life ring pulled the body toward the surface, hands first. As the body rose, the water pushed the free leg down. It looked like a swimmer had pushed off the bottom, hands outstretched above her head, and feet together. Like a slow torpedo, the body made a long, graceful, coasting trajectory toward the surface.

After long seconds, the life ring popped out. Inertia brought the body’s hands out of the water. As the hair broke the surface, the body stopped rising, then slipped back beneath the surface. Freed of its anchor, the body now hung from the life ring.

There was a gentle splash to the side as the diver surfaced. He kicked with his fins and came over to the side of the boat. He lifted up his hand and held the end of the line. I bent down, took it from him, and began pulling up the heavy tire, reeling the line in, left hand, right hand, over and over.

The diver swam over to the life ring and towed it to the boat, moving slowly because of the drag of the body. Diamond came over and took it from him. The diver removed his fins, tossed them in the boat, then climbed in.

I stopped reeling in the tire and tied the line off on a tie-down cleat. Diamond bent down and lifted gently on the life ring until he could get hold of the woman’s arms. He pulled the body part of the way out of the water. Then the three of us hoisted the body into the boat and laid it on the floor of the boat. The life ring was still tied to the body’s hands. It looked old and faded as if it had hung in the sun for thirty years. Water ran from it, sparkling in the sun and trickling across the boat floor to join the much larger stream coming from the body and its clothes.

“This the woman you told me about?” Diamond said.

I nodded.

The wet clothes looked to be the same black jeans and shirt Amanda had worn when she followed Nadia. Her skin was now blue-white, and she looked oddly beautiful, like the good ghost in a movie. Whatever terror had stricken her in the moments before she died was gone now. Her face was placid, as if being interred in Tahoe’s ice water was relaxing.

“Doesn’t seem like this senorita would be good at putting the squeeze on anyone. Very slight of build.” Diamond paused. “I never thought much about my image of bad guys. But I see her and I realize that I’ve been indulging in stereotypes.”

“No way to know if this woman was an effective predator,” I said. “But Nadia was certainly shaken. Simply having someone follow her made her feel pressured and scared.”

“You said she was carrying?” Diamond said.

“She had a pocket Glock, but no permit. According to her driver’s license, her name was Amanda Horner. Age thirty-two. The license looked like a forgery.”

Diamond turned to the diver. “See anything down there?”

“Just wavy sand in all directions. The life ring and the cable to her ankle are here.” He turned and pointed to the cut cable attached to the body’s ankle. “The rest of the cable is attached to the tire.” He looked over the side where the tire cord stretched from the cleat down into the water.

I un-cleated the cord and continued to reel in the tire. When I got the tire to the surface, it was too heavy to pull out by the line alone without the line cutting my hands. I bent down and grabbed the tire to lift it aboard.

One side of the tire was filled with concrete. It probably weighed 50 pounds, and it made an effective anchor even if it didn’t have anchor plates to dig into the bottom. Certainly, no one could swim with such a weight tied to their ankle.

“An old Goodyear,” I said to Diamond. “Standard size. Probably only ten thousand like it in the basin.”

Diamond looked over. “Right. Maybe concrete has a chemical finger print. If we could identify it, maybe we could learn where the concrete was bought.”

“Concrete DNA?” I said.

“Yeah. Better yet, look for a fingerprint in that concrete.”

“No prints that I can see,” I said, angling the tire, trying to get it into the light. “But here’s a creepy crawly that might give up some secrets.”

“What?” Diamond asked.

“A really long bug,” I said. “Stuck in the concrete. Dried. Well, totally soaked, now. But it looks like it died and dried out when the concrete was poured.”

“And now it’s reconstituted?”

“Practically,” I said.

“What kind of bug?”

“I don’t know. It’s got legs, wings, creepy little antennas. Looks like a giant black wasp.”

Diamond came over and looked. I pointed.

“Think Street would know?” Diamond said. “She could do that forensic entomology thing, figure out that the concrete was poured into the tire in some distant place, the only place on the planet where the bug grows.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m going to lean this tire against the rear seat. If we’re careful, maybe we can get this to Street before it self-destructs.”

“Probably should keep it moist,” Diamond said. “I don’t know that bugs can be repeatedly dried, moistened, and dried again. Could be, if this guy dries out, he’ll turn to dust and blow away.”

“Good point,” I said.

“But you slosh water into the tire, I bet it washes him away,” Diamond said.

“Tricky business, bug stuff,” I said. I wondered how long we could keep ignoring the corpse lying on the floor of the boat.

Diamond leaned over the woman’s body and felt the pockets of her jeans. “Too tight and wet to feel inside the pockets,” he said. “But I don’t feel anything from the outside. ’Course, it sounds like you already took what she carried.”

“And gave it to Mallory,” I said.

“The coroner might learn something,” Diamond said.

The diver sat with Diamond up front, and I sat on the rear seat as Diamond drove back to the boat launch. The day was spectacular, the chop making the waves a deep indigo with the snow-capped peaks as a 360-degree backdrop. It was hard to appreciate the scenery out of the boat with a dead woman lying in front of me, staring open-eyed toward the sky. She’d been in the water long enough for her corneas to fog a bit. Except for a series of scratches on her left jawline like those a gnawing fish would leave, it looked like scavenging water creatures had left her alone. With no specialized knowledge, I guessed that she’d been under just overnight. In warmer water, the body would have been in much worse shape. In the icy cold of Lake Tahoe, bodies tended to stay relatively preserved.

It was disconcerting how thoroughly lifeless a dead human body was. Bodies don’t look like people without animation. They look like strange objects, a new kind of cold plastic. I’d often seen sculptures of people, most of which had more life than a dead body, even those sculptures made of bronze or marble. I didn’t know how it worked, a sculptor imbuing a hard lifeless material with some essence of life when an actual body had no essence of life. It was the inscrutable magic of art.

Diamond was driving the boat at medium speed, just enough to be up on plane. He took a sudden turn to port. Probably avoiding some floating debris. Just as quickly, he took another turn back to starboard. The boat leaned one way, then the other. The turns made Amanda’s head roll back and forth as if she were shaking her head. ‘No, no, no, don’t do it,’ she seemed to be saying.

 Diamond cut the power as we approached the Cave Rock boat ramp. Denell was ready with the boat trailer. We hooked the tow cable onto the prow of the boat, then winched the boat up onto the trailer.

I leaned over the edge to look inside the cockpit and see if the body should be secured in some way before we drove off. Her head lolled again. I put my foot on the trailer tire and boosted myself up higher. I reached over and in and took the life ring that was tied to her wrist and propped it to hold her head in place. The line made her arm move, and I noticed some discoloration just visible below her sleeve. I pulled the cold wet fabric up.

There was writing on the inside of her arm. The letters looked to have been written with an indelible marker. The handwriting was scrawled, but the words were clear.

“The American Dream”

“Diamond,” I said.

He looked at me. I gestured toward the boat’s cockpit.

Diamond pulled a little step stool out of the back of the patrol unit, set it on the pavement next to the boat trailer, and stepped up to look inside.

He saw what I was pointing at.

“I’m guessing she didn’t write it,” I said.

“No.” He pointed. “The letters are on her left arm. If she’d reached over with her right hand and written them herself, they would be facing the other direction. Unless she’s good at writing upside down, somebody else must have written them.”

“A murderer’s calling card?” I said.

“Could be.”

“Do you have anything we can use to cover the body?” I asked.

Diamond thought about it, then shook his head.

Perhaps a few curious people would notice the sheriff’s vehicle towing a dripping boat in the middle of winter, but unless we pulled next to a tall truck, none of them would know that lying on the floor of the boat was the body of a young woman, staring at the clouds, about as far from experiencing the American Dream as possible.

SIXTEEN

Spot was excited to see me as I approached the pickup. He wagged hard enough for me to hear his tail smacking the back of the front seat, then the dashboard, then the seat again. The rhythm was syncopated like the padump of a heartbeat. I’d never noticed that before, his right wag a bit faster than his left wag.

When I opened the door, he wagged harder as he sniffed me. His tail slowed, then stopped. He kept sniffing, but his enthusiasm was gone.

It seems that the default emotion of most dogs is happiness. But they are very sensitive to the smell of human death. It runs a hard counter to their enthusiasm for all things connected to people.

“Sorry, largeness. It didn’t turn out well. You can probably smell death even when it’s been refrigerated in ice cold water.”

He sat down, leaning against the passenger door, and looked away.

I started the pickup and turned on the fan to begin to dry the window condensation from Spot’s breath.

I stretched the end of my sleeve over my hand and used it to wipe the inside of the windshield. Then I pulled out and followed Diamond and Denell as they headed south. They turned up Kingsbury Grade and pulled in at Street’s lab.

I parked next to them, got out, and lifted the tire with its concrete fill out of the back of the boat.

Diamond was frowning hard. “Looks like you should consider the threat to you to be serious.”

“Yeah,” I said. I thought about the body’s eyes, staring lifeless, and I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t to blame for her death. I bore no responsibility because I didn’t kill her. All I did was challenge her boss when he called on the cell phone.

Yeah, right.

Diamond and Denell pulled out fast, probably to eliminate any possibility of Street coming out and seeing the body of Amanda Horner lying in the back of the boat.

I carried the tire into Street’s bug lab. Spot followed me, his movements lackluster. I told Street about what we’d found. Her face went dark, but then she rallied.

“Bring it over here so we can see it in my exam light,” she said.

I did as she said and lifted the tire up onto her counter.

Street pulled the light over and angled it to illuminate the inside of the tire. The concrete in the tire was still a bit wet from the lake. At the edge of the concrete plug, where the concrete met rubber, the big, long bug was still visible. It looked mangled and soggy and scary as a bug gets.

“Oh, my God, it’s a Tarantula Hawk,” Street said.

“So it’s a regular bug,” I said. “Not some mutant, one-of-a-kind freak?”

“Yes, of course, it’s a regular bug. They are common wherever tarantulas are found.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I don’t like to think that anything so large and nasty-looking could be common. Please tell me that Tarantula Hawks look worse than their bite.”

“Yes, absolutely. They rarely bite humans.”

“Good.”

“But they sting,” Street said.

“Now I’m unhappy. Is it a gentle, benign sting?”

Street smiled. “Maybe we shouldn’t go further down this line of inquiry.”

“Not gentle? Not benign?” I said.

“On the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, the Tarantula Hawk is number two.”

“Number two least painful, or number two most painful?”

“Most. The Tarantula Hawk is a type of spider wasp. It has the second most painful sting in the world after the bullet ant, which feels like getting shot by a bullet. Justin Schmidt, the guy who created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, was actually stung by a Tarantula Hawk. I recall that he called the pain ‘blinding, fierce, and shockingly electric, as though a running hairdryer had been dropped into your bubble bath.’”

“That’s all?”

“Right. But you probably don’t want to know the details of what this wasp does.”

I inhaled a deep, calming breath. Breathed out. Repeated. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“This specimen in the tire is a female Tarantula Hawk. She can smell a tarantula from a long distance. She attacks the tarantula and gets into a death battle. She usually wins by stinging the spider. The sting paralyzes the tarantula but doesn’t kill it. Then she drags the tarantula to her nest.”

“Wait.” I pointed at the wasp carcass. “This girl is big, but tarantulas are huge. They must weigh many times what the wasp weighs.”

“True. But she’s incredibly strong. She can drag a paralyzed tarantula up hills, over obstacles. It’s amazing to watch. When she gets the tarantula where she wants it, she lays an egg on its abdomen. When the larva hatches, it drills a hole into the still-living, still-paralyzed tarantula and burrows into the spider’s body. There the larva eats the tarantula from the inside, voraciously consuming everything but the most vital organs, which keeps the tarantula alive for several weeks while the wasp larva grows.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said. “It sounds like something out of a horror movie.”

“Mother nature at her most inventive,” Street said. “Never underestimate insects.”

I glanced at the big, dead wasp. “I may move to Antarctica, where it’s too cold for insects.”

“Sorry, there are insects there, too. But none like this one.” She pointed at the Tarantula Hawk. “May I have this specimen? I’d like to check it for parasites. Parasitoids are often victims of parasites themselves.”

“Divine retribution from an insect deity?” I said, feeling smart.

“Maybe.” Street put on magnifier glasses and used a tweezers to pull the waterlogged insect body out of the tire. “It looks like it got one of its wings trapped in the concrete. I’m surprised it didn’t tear itself free. Oh, but here’s some damage to the thorax. That’s probably what did it in.”

“You have an exciting profession,” I said.

“Sarcasm hides insecurity,” Street said.

“Ouch. But you’re probably right. I should get going. Will you be okay alone with your dangerous creatures?”

“They’re dead, so unless they have ghosts, I’ll be okay.”

“But the mice are still alive. At least for now.” She pointed to the Paiute Deadfall with the Random House dictionary weight. She’d rigged up Diamond’s sticks and re-balanced the dictionary on the stick seesaw.

“I put some peanut butter on the trigger twig,” she said. “We’ll see if it works.”

“It certainly looks like a medieval rodent-crushing device,” I said.

“Diamond said the Pauites invented it long before the Middle Ages,” she said.

I’d stepped close to Street to give her a hug goodbye. I put my hands on her waist and slid them around her back. After being around death, I felt a desire for closeness and touch, an affirmation of life, of energy, of spirit, of everything that was the opposite of death.

“What’s this sudden affection?” she said.

“I don’t know. You seem very alive, and you have inordinate smarts, and your shape is a dream, and you possess a kind of woman’s insight that seems an utter mystery to me. I find the combination endlessly alluring.” I bent down and kissed her temple.

“You think a woman’s insight is more insightful than a man’s?”

“Of course. What does your insight tell you now?”

“It’s not telling me anything,” Street said. “It’s asking.”

“What?” I said.

“If I ever unloaded all those boxes that I stacked on my overnight cot in the back room.”

“I can unload them. Exercise is good.”

“But you weren’t thinking about that kind of exercise.” Street’s voice was a whisper.

“Well let’s check your back room and see what our options are.”

Street turned, held my hand behind her back, and, tugging me past Spot, who was spread out in a serious snooze on her rug, she pulled me into her lair.

That evening, I called Nadia.

“You okay with the Jeep?”

“Aside from the dog smell and hair, I guess so. But I’d like to get a rental car. Would that be okay? I could call up one of the agencies that delivers cars.”

“I think that would be fine. Just keep a low profile. Have them bring the car into the hotel parking lot. I don’t want you out on the street. Then call me later tomorrow?”

She agreed. “Do you think Trud... Gertie will be okay?” she asked.

“If she keeps out of sight and doesn’t go out alone, yes.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I’ve thought about it, and I do love her. I just don’t know how to do it right.”

“Skill comes with practice,” I said.

We hung up.

SEVENTEEN

In the morning, I called Special Agent Ramos at the local FBI office.

“I heard from Sergeant Martinez that you helped him bring in a body from the lake yesterday,” he said.

“Yeah. She went by Amanda Horner. I gave her wallet, ID, gun, and cell phone to Mallory a couple of days before that. I’m calling about something that was written on her arm. Did Diamond tell you about that?”

“‘The American Dream,’” Ramos said. “It reminds me of something from way back, but I can’t remember. We’re running it down. If we find something, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” I said, and we hung up.

I called Street at her lab.

“Hey,” I said when she answered.

“Oh, my Lothario,” she said, “you are quite – how shall I say it – effective with your, um, physical attentions. But I really must work today. All day.”

“Attentions,” I repeated.

“I’m a scientist. I’m not sure you’d want me to compare you to the scent of a rose or a lovely summer’s day.”

“You’re right. I just have a question, darling, nothing more.”

“Ready.”

“I want to see if I can find out where that tire was filled with concrete. So I’m thinking of doing a search on used tires, and another search on tarantulas and/or Tarantula Hawk wasps. I could find the common areas and cross-reference them with areas proximate to Tahoe. Brilliant, eh?”

“Yeah, except that tarantulas are like tires, they are found nearly everywhere in California except cold, high-altitude areas like Tahoe.”

“Bummer.”

“But,” Street said, “when I was trying to remove the bit of wasp wing from the concrete, I wondered if you had noticed that little symbol.”

“No. What do you mean?”

“There’s a kind of logo stamped into the concrete. It could be accidental, like something got dropped and hit the concrete while it was still curing. Maybe it’s a fluke, but I think it was formed by pressing a shape into the concrete.”

“What’s it look like?”

“Sort of like a small circle inside of a larger, irregular ellipse. The ellipse is lopsided and dented on one side. The inner circle is round. And there are two straight lines.”

“I better come by and look,” I said.

“What happened to, ‘a question, darling, nothing more’?”

“Extenuating logo circumstances,” I said. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”

I hung up the phone. Spot jumped up.

“Largeness,” I said. “Why the sudden leap to your feet?”

He looked at me, his tail on medium. He made me think about Nadia’s description of her childhood dog, Señor Inteligente. “I’ve not used the word for perambulation,” I said to Spot. “Nor any of the words for tasty, canine ingestibles. I haven’t reached for the metallic instruments with which to start Diamond’s mobile rust experiment. I’m still wearing my indoor shoes and haven’t even glanced toward the Sorels. The front entrance to this manse is still out of my field of vision. Yet you wag. Please reveal the secret.”

He wagged more.

I gave up, walked over, and pulled on my snow boots. His wag ratcheted up to high speed.

We went out and drove Diamond’s pickup down the mountain through three more inches of snow.

Fifteen minutes later, we pulled up at Street’s bug lab.

Spot greeted her with excitement, doing the little bounce on his front paws as if he hadn’t seen her for months instead of only being separated overnight.

Street pet him first, kissed me second, then walked over to the counter where the tire still lay and turned on her light.

I leaned in for a look, and Street pointed with a pencil.

“It’s over here at the corner of the concrete.”

The wasp was gone, but the mark was easy to see once you looked for it. It was three-eighths of an inch long. It looked like it was made by taking an embossing tool of the type one might use on leather or wood and lightly pressing it into curing concrete. No one would ever notice it unless you looked very close with a bright light, as Street did.

“Does it mean anything to you?” Street said.

“No. But the shape looks like an artist’s paint palette next to a railroad track.”

“That’s it!” Street said. “I thought the palette part seemed familiar, but I couldn’t remember why. The hatch marks could be anything, but I guess a railroad track is as good a guess as any.”

“And I agree that it looks like an intentional mark. I don’t see how something so fine and clear could be an accidental impression.”

I gave her a kiss, picked up the tire, and turned to go.

“Wow,” Street said. “A brief visit. Affection voluntarily truncated after a mere kiss. A man who keeps his word.”

I carried the tire outside and put it into the back of the pickup.