Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) (10 page)

FIFTEEN

I drove home thinking about the warning note that had been stuck in my door. I took Spot for a short walk on the trail that went north along the side of the mountain behind my cabin. Although the snow level on the mountain where my cabin sits had risen to about 6600 feet in the warm spring sun, the trail near my cabin begins at 7000 feet and quickly climbs up to 8000 feet. It was still heavy with snow. I didn’t put on my snowshoes because I’d continuously tramped down the snow on the trail over the course of the winter. It supported my weight without my hiking shoes breaking through.

Ten minutes after we’d started, the sun, already low in the western sky, went behind a cloud. The sky immediately turned a cool blue gray.

Several times, Spot stopped and listened and sniffed the air. For what, I didn’t know. He turned his head and looked up the mountain, but mostly it seemed that he was sampling the wind. I’d seen him do it many times before and in many different places. It always made me envious, and I marveled at the world of inputs available to dogs. I felt blind by comparison.

I followed Spot’s looks toward the mountain above us, but all I saw was the undulating snow-covered slope, surprisingly dark under the heavy tree canopy. It was a condition that would provide perfect cover to any mountain lion or other predator that wanted to sneak up on their prey.

After we were back in the cabin, there was a double rap at the door. Spot was on his bed. He lifted his head but didn’t bark. He wagged. Which meant friend.

I opened the door.

Diamond Martinez entered. Instead of his crisp, ironed, sheriff’s uniform with the badge and patches, he was wearing a red flannel shirt, faded blue jeans, and cowboy boots. I’d never seen him in cowboy boots.

I pulled beers out of the fridge, opened them, and handed him one.

Diamond took it.

Spot was watching Diamond from his bed, and he thumped his tail on the floor. Diamond walked over and pet him.

Spot stopped the tail thumping and breathed big, deep breaths, which indicated that he was finally getting the affection he thought he deserved.

Diamond gave Spot a final aggressive rub, then stood up, walked over to the slider and pulled it open. I followed him out onto the deck. Spot jumped up and joined us. The sun was just moving behind another cloud. The lake immediately turned slate-gray.

I handed Diamond the warning note.

“The cross hairs make sense,” he said. “Stop working the case or you’ll be shot. But I don’t get the star.”

Diamond leaned back against the deck railing. He took another sip of beer, set the bottle on the railing, crossed one boot over another, and stuck his fingertips into his pockets.

“You’re projecting an impressive Pancho Villa vibe,” I said. “Cowboy boots and a casual south-of-the-border masculinity. You ever see Maria anymore? I bet she responds to that, huh?”

Diamond shook his head. “She’s too focused on her improvements,” he said.

“Improvements to what?”

“Me.”

“Ah,” I said. “Hard to tolerate the softening influence of a woman with a big personality. Be like lotion ruining your rough hands.”

Diamond looked at me with cold, unflinching eyes.

“Like listening to opera,” I said. I sensed Diamond trying to hold his tough look. “Going to art museums. Reading a novel that contains no horses or guns. Watching the ballet on PBS, right?”

Diamond said, “I’ve always noticed that tall, pale-faced gringos with beautiful girlfriends tend to indulge in an excess of judgment.”

“Street would disagree in part. She thinks she’s too thin and that her acne scars seriously mar the picture.”

Diamond made a single head shake. “Common, negative self-delusion, something which many suffer and to which you seem immune. But lose the norte skin and ten inches of height, you might find yourself hanging onto what little defines you as a man. Mexican machismo is a gift of identity.”  

I tried to keep a straight face, but I couldn’t help grinning. “You take a risk, don’t you think, hitching your concept of masculinity to Mexican machismo?”

Diamond swigged beer. “As the novelist Carlos Fuentes said, ‘I live through risk. Without risk there is no art. You should always be on the edge of a cliff about to fall down and break your neck.’”

“Like Pancho Villa,” I said. “He tried to Robin-Hood Mexico away from the rich and give it to the poor and got assassinated for his efforts. Talk about risk.”

Diamond turned his head and looked down at the lake. He gave no hint of his mood.

“Making any progress?” he asked.

“I found your missing person, Sean Warner. He was killed.”

“I heard something of it on my radio. Where was it?”

I explained about finding his car at the South Lake Tahoe impound lot, using his glove for scent, and sending Spot on a search over at the snow dump where Warner’s car had been found.

“You really believe that someone chewed him up with a highway snowblower.”

“Looks like it. And they didn’t stop at Sean.” I explained about Darla Ali.

“Gives me a bad feeling,” Diamond said. “That M.O. is a long way from Scarlett Milo’s shooting.”

I nodded. “The deaths could be unrelated. But Darla and Scarlett both had interest in the Italian Renaissance. Or at least art from the Renaissance. What’re the odds of walking into a Tahoe abode and finding art from the Italian Renaissance?”

Diamond shrugged. “Not much. Now that you mention the Renaissance, the drawing on the warning note you got is kind of like the Vitruvian man.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ve seen it. Da Vinci’s famous man in the circle. The one that’s all about the proportions of the human body.”

“Ah, right. So if that’s what the note references, then it’s another Renaissance connection.”

Diamond nodded. “An inscrutable connection, but yeah.”

“I found nothing to suggest that Sean Warner had any interest in the Renaissance, but he did have purple rosary beads in his car, and they are similar to rosary beads I found in Darla Ali’s apartment. So we’ve got Darla and Sean with similar rosary beads and their bodies found in the same place. Then we’ve possibly got Darla and Scarlett connected by a common interest in the Renaissance. That possibly gives us a connection between three murders, but two M.O.s for the murders, shooting and death by snowblower. That’s pretty weak, don’t you think?”

“Tenuous linkage doesn’t mean no linkage,” Diamond said.

“You mentioned that the fire in Zephyr Heights was arson.”

“Yup,” Diamond said.

“When Scarlett called me on the phone, she referred to her potential murderer as picking her off or burning down her house.”

Diamond’s jaw muscles bulged. “So the question is, did she use the phrase as a figure of speech, or did she actually think someone might burn her house?”

“I don’t know.”

“We better take a closer look at last night’s fire.”

I said, “Have you learned anything more about it?”

“Not much. We have two victims who would have died but for some luck. You know the current Douglas County Fire Marshal, right?”

“Terry Drier,” I said.

“Right. This morning, he figured out that someone threw a jar of petrol onto the front porch and tossed a match.”

“A Molotov cocktail,” I said.

“Not quite. Drier found a burnt wooden matchstick along with shards of broken glass on a part of the front porch that hadn’t completely burned. It looks like the gas was tossed first. Then it was lit. A Molotov cocktail has a fuse that you light before you throw it.”

“I wonder why the arsonist didn’t use the lit-fuse approach?”

“I asked Drier that question. He said that it was probably because Molotov cocktails often blow up when they’re lit. They have a nasty habit of killing the person who uses them. I guess the right way to build a gas bomb you can lob is to use a fuse that’s soaked in kerosene, which is less volatile than gas. But that’s a hassle. Easier to just toss the gas, then light a match.”

“Houses burn fast when you put gas on them,” I said. “Whose house was it that burned?”

“Guy we all know. Although you maybe haven’t met him. I get the sense he’s somewhat reclusive.”

“Who’s that?”

“Adam Simms.”

“You don’t mean the famous nose tackle. Nine years on, what, three different teams?”

“All three hundred fifty-five pounds of him,” Diamond said. “Football legends living among us. Practically in secret.”

I thought back 25 years to Simms’s glory days. “I remember the famous four quarterbacks who seemed to bring out his greatest power.”

“Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Brett Favre, and John Elway,” Diamond said. “Each was hit by Simms so hard that the press called them the Sacked-by-Simms Club.”

“What happened to Simms’s house?”

“Mostly gone.”

“Simms got out of the house okay?”

Diamond nodded. “His sister, too. Felicite. Spelled with an E on the end. She’s actually the owner of the house. She’s had the place as a vacation home for years, and Simms has lived there for the last year or two. She lives in San Francisco, but she came to visit a few days ago. Their bedrooms were upstairs. The fire went into the front porch overhang and gutted the upstairs first. Odds are Simms and his sister would have died if he hadn’t been up. But it turned out that he couldn’t sleep, so he and his dog were downstairs in the kitchen when the fire started. They heard something hit the porch. The dog barked. Adam went to the front of the house and saw the flames. He yelled to his sister, then ran outside and turned on the hose. But the shut-off valve was off because it’s winter. He went back in to check that his sister was awake. She was downstairs dialing nine-one-one. Then they ran outside and waited.”

“The sister is normally in San Francisco?” I asked.

Diamond drank beer. “I understand that she isn’t his sister by birth. They just refer to each other as brother and sister. Apparently, they were foster kids in a group home in New Orleans, and they’ve kept in touch over the years. They make a real odd-couple pair. She’s a tiny little thing, probably weighs a fourth of what Simms weighs.”

“You said her name is Felicite?” I asked.

“Felicite Genoveva. I couldn’t understand what she said at first, so I asked. She said it’s Creole, that her ancestors were free people of color who came to New Orleans from Saint-Domingue in the early eighteen hundreds.”

“Where’s Saint-Domingue?”

“What is now Haiti in the Caribbean. Around the time of the American Revolution, Saint-Domingue was a small French colony that produced half of all the sugar and coffee sold in Europe. All grown on slave plantations.”

“And you know this because…”

Diamond shrugged. “Something I read somewhere.”

“Sounds like Felicite’s proud of her heritage, what with telling you that, but she grew up in a group home,” I said.

“We hang onto whatever gives us a sense of self.”

“Like machismo,” I said, grinning.

Diamond made a single solemn nod.

“Does Adam have the same background?”

“No idea.”

“They have any idea of why someone would torch their place?”

Diamond shook his head. “Logical answer would be someone who is targeting his celebrity. One of those deranged individuals who stalk and assault famous people simply because they’re famous. But Simms might be targeted for more reasons than just rubbing up against his fame,” Diamond said. “He infuriated a million sports fans over the years by hurting their heroes. Probably, some angry, sick fans might want to take him down as punishment.”

“What about his sister?” I asked. “Could she be the target?”

“I floated that idea, and Adam scoffed. He said the usual things. That Felicite is sweet and kind, and everyone loves her. And Felicite admitted that she’s basically invisible and unknown by anyone. She works at a tech company, but it’s a low profile job. Only a few people in her company deal with her. Adam believes that he must be the target, and if Felicite is hurt, she’s collateral damage. So he wants her to go back to San Francisco right away. She’ll probably head back to The City as soon as she’s done talking to us and the insurance company. If you want to talk to her, you should do it soon.”

“Where are they staying tonight?”

“Their neighbor Ronald Baumgarter took them in. He’s clearly awestruck by Simms. He’s got a big house with lots of bedrooms, so it’s logical that he offers space just because Simms and Genoveva are neighbors.”

I said, “When you said that someone could be after Simms for payback because he specialized in sacking the most beloved quarterbacks in history, did Felicite have any comment?”

“Yeah. She said that Adam has been out of the league for two and a half decades and that he hasn’t done any of the things that keep footballers in the limelight. He hasn’t been a commentator, hasn’t done anything controversial, hasn’t bought into a team or joined any team’s management. A lot of people have forgotten about him. Especially people under the age of, say, thirty, who were only five years old or younger when Simms ended his career. So the arson is very puzzling to her. She wondered if it was just a random event. Aside from the idea that someone tried to burn them up, I could tell that she was very upset about losing her house. She’s trying to keep it in perspective. You don’t want to focus on the loss of property when it may be that some demented fan is bent on killing your celebrity step-brother.”