Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (16 page)

There were several pages showing designs, most of which featured dock posts with tire anchors for bases rather than posts that had to be sunk into the lake bottom. Once the posts were set out into the water, the posts were attached to each other with X braces.

I scrolled down and found the address of The Dock Artist. It was located in Carson City not far from where the new 580 freeway crossed Highway 50. The posted hours said The Dock Artist was open until 5 p.m. There was still enough time to make the 40-minute trip.

“Okay Spot, time for another ride.”

He scratched the floor with his nails as he jumped up and ran the two steps toward the door.

We went up and over Spooner Summit, then dropped down 3000 feet to the desert floor and Carson City. As I drove, I tried to puzzle out the reasons why someone might have a dock business in the desert.

The cross street on Highway 50 was easy to find. A block down was a small sign attached to a chain link fence that surrounded The Dock Artist’s outdoor show space.

I pulled over, parked, stepped around a white cargo van that was parked in front, and walked in through the open gate.

It was like walking through a junkyard, stepping on crusted snow, winding through piles of materials. Metal posts, white pre-assembled dock sections, what looked like treated wooden posts, an open shed sheltering stacks of concrete bags, tires. In the rear, right corner was a building sided with corrugated metal sheathing. The front wall had a walk-in door and a garage door. Three drooping power wires ran from a utility pole to the corner of the garage. Music thumped loud enough to be heard outside.

Outside the door stood a metal sculpture as tall as me. It was made of metal pipes and automobile components welded together. It was both crude and effective and clearly showed a man standing on one foot, his other leg kicking out and up as if in a karate move. The man’s hands were fists in front of his face.

I stepped past the sculpture, opened the door, and went inside. Heavy metal rock boomed in my ears. It sounded like Black Sabbath.

The garage was dark with only two four-foot fluorescent light fixtures. Above them were four panels of skylights. They probably provided great lighting most of the time, but they were currently covered with enough snow to block out most daylight. The dim surroundings were punctuated with staccato flashes of strobe light. A large man was in the corner using an arc welder. He wore a heavy leather shop coat and a big helmet with a darkened face plate. The electrical arcing hissed and snapped and popped. The flashes reflected in his face mask.

I didn’t want to startle him, so I waited. In the corner of the garage was an open area covered with a padded floor mat. Hanging over the middle of the mat was a large punching bag of the type that I’d seen used for kickboxing practice.

After a minute the man turned off the welder and lifted his face mask to look at his work.

“Afternoon,” I called out.

“Oh. Didn’t see you,” he said with a very slight accent. He lifted off his helmet and gave me an unusual look. I couldn’t immediately tell what it was. Recognition combined with wariness, maybe. After a moment, his face shifted to something more pleasant, like one that a businessman would use with a potential customer.

“I’m Dan the Dock Artist. What can I do for you?”

He shrugged off the big shop coat and hung it on another sculpture. Without the coat, he was still large, and his hard muscles were thick under a tight sweatshirt.

“I’m Owen McKenna, a private investigator from up at the lake. Sorry I’m not here for a dock,” I said. “We’re trying to track an anchor we found that may have been purchased from you. May I bring it in for you to look at?”

He looked at me for a bit longer than is normal when you first meet someone. “I’ll come out,” he said.

I turned and walked out to the Jeep, wondering if the man following me was Mikhailo the fighter and killer. I wanted to open up the Jeep’s back door and let Spot out. But that would be awkward, and if in fact Dan the Dock Artist was really Mikhailo, letting my dog out would telegraph that I may have figured out Mikhailo’s identity.

 The man followed me out to the Jeep. I opened the rear hatch, reached in past Spot’s probing nose, and lifted the tire out. The man looked at it.

“Yep. That’s my tire.”

“I don’t suppose it’s easy to tell who got it from you,” I said.

“I go through a lot of tires,” he said. “People think, what’s a Dock Artist doing out in the desert? But we have lakes and reservoirs and man-made waterski parks. This one is a buoy anchor. I have two kinds. The ones that are fully prepped and filled are for small boats. But they’re too heavy for some people who need to pull an anchor up and down frequently. For my light anchors like the one you have, I only fill those with concrete on one side. Of course, with less weight, they won’t secure anything that takes heavy stress from waves or wind. I always tell clients that even a small dinghy can get blown away with a light anchor.”

“Why would someone need a light anchor?”

“Lots of reasons. For example, swimming instructors like to put up a perimeter of colored, floating markers to keep students inside a certain shallow area. Party hosts like to put up a line of markers to mark the boundaries for water volleyball and other games. A light anchor is perfect for that.”

“Have you sold any of these lately?” I asked.

He shook his head, then looked down, as if thinking. “But two were missing when I got here... Was it two, no, three days ago. The marks in the snow were as obvious as can be. Here, look. They’re still here.” He walked over to the corner of the fence and pointed. “See? Someone climbed the fence, walked across here, and took them right off the top of the pile.” He pointed to some vague footprints that had been degraded by sunshine. “Maybe the anchor you’ve got in your Jeep is one of the stolen ones.”

“Yeah, you might be right. I’ll give it back to you as soon as I finish my investigation. You don’t have an alarm here?”

Dan pointed over at the garage. “Sure. On the garage. But out here in the yard? Everything is too heavy to be worth hauling up and over the fence. At least, that’s what I thought before that theft. The fence is ten feet tall. Even that light anchor you’ve got, it would take a real big guy to hoist that over the fence.”

“And you’d need a ladder to get over a fence that tall,” I said.

Dan nodded, then pointed at the cargo van. “Or a van like mine to climb on top of.”

“I assume you don’t have a surveillance camera,” I said.

“No, but look at the convenience store across the street.” He pointed. “They’ve got cameras everywhere. Inside, out at the pumps, at the corner looking back at the store. You could check with them.”

I thanked him. “Oh, one more thing,” I said. “Do you ever see tarantulas around here?”

He frowned. “Not much. This is a city. But I’ve seen them twice. Two different summer evenings. It makes an impression on you when you see a spider that big. So I told people about it. And this one guy I told said that the boy spiders go cruising for girls on summer evenings. Isn’t that a hoot? Just like us. Why do you ask?”

I pointed at the Jeep. “When we found this tire anchor, there was a dead wasp stuck in the concrete. We showed it to an entomologist. Turns out those wasps prey on tarantulas. They’re found where tarantulas hang out.”

The man nodded.

“Of course, tarantulas aren’t crawling around in the snow,” I said.

“That tire anchor you’ve got?” Dan said. “I poured that concrete last summer. It sat in that stack until it was stolen.”

“Thanks again.”

I went across to the convenience store, flashed my license to the manager, explained that the Dock Artist had been robbed, and asked if they had a surveillance camera that pointed toward the Dock Artist. The woman came out of the store, walked around the side and looked across the street. Then she went over to the dumpster and looked up at a camera.

“Could be our dumpster monitor catches the street at the edge. Let’s go look.”

We went back inside and into her office. She sat down at a desk and worked a computer, clicking through different screens. “Here we are. This is the dumpster. This uppermost corner kind of shows the Dock Artist across the street. Down here in the corner of the screen is the time scroll. What time are you wondering about?”

“I have no idea. Could be any time during the night after he closed three days ago.”

The woman glanced at a clock on the wall. “Look, I have to run my register tape every hour on the hour. You sit here. You click here for fast forward, here for fast reverse, here for regular forward and here for regular reverse. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said. “Thanks.”

She left me in the office. I went back and forth, slow and fast. Nothing happened at the dumpster or in the uppermost corner.

Five minutes later, the manager came back. “Find what you’re looking for?”

“No. Sorry. But I haven’t gone through the whole time frame, yet.”

“Here, let me sit there again.”

We switched places.

She started clicking on menus. “The owner thinks this neighborhood is real bad, so he got all these cameras and this software upgrade that allows you to automate a search, skipping by any section without movement and stopping whenever something happens. But I’ve never used it because the neighborhood is a lot safer than he thinks. We’ve never been held up, rarely been shoplifted, either. If only I can remember how to use it.” She kept exploring.

“Here we are,” she finally said. She found a menu, used the mouse to draw a rectangle around the area in the uppermost corner, then hit enter. “There. Anything moves in that corner, it should stop at that point.”

The little hourglass symbol showed passing time. Then it stopped. In the uppermost corner was a white cargo van that hadn’t been there before. She cruised forward and backward until we’d seen the entire sequence. The van pulled up at the corner of the fence, its left side facing the camera. The top of the van was cropped off by the camera. If someone had climbed on top of it to get over the fence, it wouldn’t have shown in the video. Nothing happened for several minutes, then the van pulled away.

“How long total was it there?” I said.

The woman clicked on the time symbol, subtracted in her head. “Looks like three minutes. A little more than three minutes.”

I noticed that the van’s visit was shortly after 4 a.m.

“Thanks very much,” I said.

TWENTY-TWO

I called Sergeant Santiago.

“Do you have lunch plans for tomorrow?” I asked. “Maybe we could meet and grab a bite.”

“Sure. Where do you want to meet?”

“Tahoe House Bakery?” I said. “Noon tomorrow?”

“See you there,” he said.

I next called Agent Ramos.

“Do you know about a guy called Dan the Dock Artist in Carson City?” I asked.

“No.”

“He designs docks. He’s a big strong guy with a slight accent I can’t place, and he’s got a kickboxing setup in his workshop.”

“Interesting. Does he look like Mikahailo?”

“Hard to compare a steroidally-bulked grown man to a photo of a skinny young kid, but it could be him. Same eyebrows. He has a dock-design and installation business in Carson City. You will remember that when Amanda Horner was dropped into the lake, she was tied to an anchor made from an old tire filled with concrete? Diamond and I found a dead wasp stuck to the concrete. I showed it to Street. She said it was a tarantula wasp, and we thought that might help us find the origin of the tire anchor. But she also found a logo stamped in the concrete. That logo belongs to The Dock Artist. I showed him the tire anchor that helped drown Amanda Horner, and he says that he made it. He also says that two of the anchors were stolen from his place of business three days ago. He showed me footprints in the snow.

“So I walked across the street to a convenience store and looked at the security footage from their cameras during the night that the anchors were stolen. A white cargo van pulled up to the Dock Artist’s yard and stayed there for several minutes, long enough for someone to climb the fence and steal the tire anchors. Of course, every tenth vehicle on the road seems to be a white cargo van. Even Dan the Dock Artist has a white cargo van.”

Ramos asked for the Dock Artist’s address, and he said he’d check it out.

The next morning, the roads were icy, slowing traffic. I took it slow going north around the lake, through Incline Village and Kings Beach. In Tahoe City, I turned left at 89 and took Fanny Bridge over the Truckee River where it flows out of the big lake. About a mile south, I turned into the Tahoe House restaurant. Santiago was waiting in his patrol unit. I found a parking spot in the lot, told Spot to be good.

“Sergeant,” I said. He nodded as we shook hands.

Santiago and I chatted as we walked inside, scanned the menu board, then ordered gourmet sandwiches on fresh-baked bread.

We found a table.

“Creepy, the way that woman was tied under water,” Santiago said.

“Yeah.”

“Are you thinking that somehow she is connected to Ian Lassitor’s drowning?”

“It appears that way,” I said. “Turns out that Nadia Lassitor is being blackmailed,” I said. “Apparently, Ian had a life insurance policy worth two million, and Nadia is the beneficiary. Someone knows that and is blackmailing her for the two mil.”

“What’s the blackmailer’s leverage?”

“First, he said that Nadia would die if she didn’t pay him. Now, it looks like he kidnapped her daughter in Sacramento.”

“You haven’t been able to track the ransom demand?”

“His only communication was a vanishing email.”

“Great,” Santiago said. “Score another win for technology. They say there isn’t any privacy anymore, but when we want to find someone, good luck.”

“I could pursue a court order, try to pry open the email service that Nadia uses and work backward from there, but that could take months. Agent Ramos thinks our perpetrator might be a guy named Mikhailo who’s possibly been killing people for years.”

Santiago said, “Unfortunately, we found no evidence in the Lassitor drowning that would point one way or another. No one appears to have witnessed anything. The nearby houses are all vacation homes, vacant in the winter. We interviewed the only two neighbors who are ever around. One, a part-time resident who lives in Minden, Nevada most of the time, saw nothing. The other is a crazy lady who lives in a cabin across the highway. She gave us nothing.”