Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) (12 page)

SEVENTEEN

Diamond was outside my cabin when Street dropped me off. He told me that, if I insisted on staying at my cabin, he thought I’d be okay if I had Spot inside with me and I kept the doors and windows locked and blinds closed. But he stressed that it was my decision.

“You don’t want me to take your advice, then die, then blame you,” I said.

“Right,” he said with a straight face.

I looked at Street. “Do you have a preference?”

“I’d rather you weren’t at the place where you were shot at. But it also makes sense that the shooter would not come back here.”

“Okay, I’ll go on record as saying that I prefer to stay in my own cabin, and I accept the risks.”

“Sounds good,” he said.  

I kissed Street, and they both drove away.

The next morning my eyes, my face, and the inside of my mouth were even more red and swollen than the night before. Every surface, inside and out, felt like 60-grit sandpaper. As I swallowed my morning coffee, it seemed that the liquid was filled with a fine abrasive.

When I stepped outside with Spot, I was a little wary. It had been less than 12 hours since someone had taken a shot at me. They could be anywhere on the mountain above me, waiting for a second chance. But I saw two Douglas County vehicles up the road and Diamond’s men exploring the mountainside. I relaxed.

I let Spot into the Jeep and drove myself into town to see the ophthalmologist for my second appointment. Once again, she muttered and murmured and grunted from behind the monster glasses as if I weren’t in the room. I wasn’t a person so much as an interesting specimen.  

“Large pieces of glass show up on radiography or ultrasonography,” she said. “If we can find it, we can extract it. But I think I’ve gotten most of the bigger pieces.”

“What about all the little shards?”

“They don’t even show up on imaging. So we don’t worry about them.”

“You don’t worry, but I do,” I said.

“Mmm,” she mumbled as she blinded me with her headlamp.

“What will happen to them?”

“Some will mostly stay where they are. Some will eventually come out and irritate you as they do so. Others will work themselves in deeper.”

“Where they will poke me and hurt me inside,” I said.

“Right.”

“You weren’t supposed to say ‘right.’ You were supposed to protest and convince me that my future was glass-free.”

The doctor leaned back away from my face, swiveled several lenses away from her eyes and said, “Sorry. I thought you wanted the truth.”

“I do,” I said.

“The truth isn’t pretty,” she said. “But it isn’t frightening, either. If you had embedded organic matter, then the likelihood of infection would be high. The problem with glass is simply that it irritates. But it is also inert, so if it doesn’t bother you, it is often better to leave it in place. Removal causes more problems than it solves.”

“But, is the glass that’s inside going to make me eventually go blind?”

“No.”

“Is the glass in my face and mouth going to screw up my health in a major way?”

“No.”

“So it’s basically all good news,” I said.

“If your goal is to have vision and still be able to eat, yes.”

“But,” I said.

“But you won’t be pain free. This will bother you for some time.”

“How long?”

She thought about it. A month, a year. Maybe several years.”

“More good news.” I thanked her and left.

Diamond had given me the addresses of Adam and Felicite’s burnt house as well as where they were staying at Simms’s neighbor, Ronald Baumgarter. I turned off the highway just south of Zephyr Cove, the home base of the M.S. Dixie sternwheeler. I climbed up and around on a twisting street and found the number on a house that perched just back from the street. Behind the house, the land dropped away. Highway 50 was somewhere out of sight down below. On both sides of the house were big Jeffrey pines, straight trunks two feet in diameter and rising up 40 feet before the trunks were interrupted by the lowest branches. Behind the trees was the blue backdrop of Tahoe, not unlike the view from my cabin although from a lower angle.

To the left of Baumgarter’s house was the carcass of the house that had burned down two nights before. I left Spot in the Jeep and walked around its perimeter. The damage the fire caused was amazing. There was almost nothing recognizable left. I saw some blackened items I recognized, refrigerator, metal bed frame and bed springs, long metal strips that may have once been component layers inside of skis, a metal blade from a snow shovel.

Only a small portion of the house remained to suggest its former size and shape. The rear wall and one of the side walls were still standing although they were charred black. Part of the front porch remained. Everything else had been destroyed.

As the roof had burned, it collapsed into the house so that what was once a two-story structure was now a black pile of water-soaked rubble, eight feet high. I could tell that the house had contained a large room by the remnants of heavy timber-frame trusses. One had broken in two, the burnt, broken ends of the wood showing that it had been constructed of four-by-twelve lumber. And below the collapsed roof, the concrete foundation was cracked through, perhaps by the falling structure above and made worse by the temperature stress of cold fire-hose water dousing a searing hot base.

Tendrils of steam emerged from multiple locations. Outside of the burnt house was a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape secured to trees and several stakes driven down into the snow. I guessed the distance from the burned house to Baumgarter’s as less than thirty feet. Baumgarter was lucky that his house hadn’t caught on fire.

I pressed Baumgarter’s doorbell. The door opened a short time later.

“Hello?” The man speaking was skinny, in his sixties, gray and balding, and wearing wire-rims that seemed held in place not by sitting on the slender bridge of his nose but by hanging from his giant, black eyebrows.

“Hello. My name’s Owen McKenna. I’m an investigator looking into the fire at your neighbors’ house.”

The man nodded. “I’m Ronald Baumgarter. Terrible thing, a fire is. Terrible.”

“I understand that Adam Simms is staying with you. May I speak with him, please?”

The man looked at me as if he were an art forgery expert studying a painting of questionable authenticity. Probably, he was trying to understand the strange, swollen, red glow of someone whose face and eyes had been augmented with glass shards.

“Yes, Adam Simms is staying here,” he said. “It’s like having royalty in my house. Come with me.”  

He led me through an entry and into a living room with a wall of windows to take in the western view. The windows had a sheer drape to reduce sun glare in the afternoon, but the filtered view of the West Shore mountains was still spectacular. To the side was the smoking wreckage of the burned house.

“Mr. Simms,” he said, “you have a visitor.” Baumgarter held out his arm like a waiter showing me to a table. “Adam, I have to leave for a couple of hours,” he added. “Will you be okay? Is there anything you need?”

“No thanks,” Simms said, his voice as deep as that of James Earl Jones.

“Then I’ll leave you two to talk.” Baumgarter nodded at me, then left.

Adam Simms was huge. I knew that from seeing him on TV years ago.   But in person, he was a black mountain, parked in an over-sized chair in the corner of the room, seemingly unmovable. I tried to visualize him running the 40 in 4.75 seconds as the records claimed. But it wasn’t comprehensible that anyone of such size could get moving so fast.

He held a small sketchbook in his monstrous lap, a mechanical pencil poised above a page. It looked like a toothpick in a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. Simms’s eyes turned up to me, white flashes in the dark face. In just a glance, he seemed soulful and lonely and confused. He glanced down at his sketchbook, then lay it open-faced over the broad arm of his chair like a saddle on a horse.

At the man’s feet lay a yellow Lab, small enough and with a soft enough face shape that I thought it was a female. The dog jumped up and trotted over to me, tail wagging vigorously, friendly like all yellow Labs. I bent down and pet the dog while I talked to Adam Simms.

“My name’s Owen McKenna,” I said. “I’m investigating the fire that burned your house.”

“Mr. McKenna,” he said more to himself than to me. He added, “It was my sister’s house.”

He stood up in a single, fluid motion and took three large steps over to me. It wasn’t a fast, spry movement, but he clearly wasn’t suffering the mechanical problems so many of his contemporary football players had. That his knees still worked was a miracle considering his past job and the weight involved.

Looking at my chest, he reached out his hand to shake. “I’m Adam Simms.”

We shook. Rarely do I feel small, but next to Adam, I felt delicate. At six-six, I was five inches taller than Adam. But Adam probably carried 360 pounds, which made him 145 more than me on a shorter frame. Imagining him coming toward me at full speed and hitting me with his singular, head-down tackle technique, was like imagining stepping in front of a charging bull. He was short compared to most pro football players, so he went under them, flipping them up and to the side as he desired.

“Good to meet you,” I said. “I’ve long admired your skills on the field.”

Adam glanced at my eyes, then went back to his chair, standing in front of it. I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem like my glass-infused eyes and skin put him off. It felt more like he was simply shy.  

“Would it be okay to talk a bit?” I asked.  

“Sure.”

Adam’s dog pushed her head into my hands as I pet her, then walked a circle around me and leaned against my leg. I pet her some more.

“That’s Blondie,” Adam said. “World’s greatest dog. She was a rescue pup. She took to me like I was her long lost mama.”

“Seems well adjusted,” I said as I gave Blondie a neck rub.

“As long as she’s with me,” Adam said. “I’ve heard that she flips out when I’m away.”

“You go away much?”

“No. But the problem is that I never know much in advance. She can always tell just before I go, and it makes her stress big-time.”

Near Adam’s chair was a kind of a sidebar desk opposite the window wall. I walked over to the desk chair, swiveling it to face Adam. As I sat, he lowered himself back down into the big chair.

Blondie sat down in front of me and lifted her paw as if to shake. I shook it. Then she circled around next to me, sat down again, and lifted her head up so that her jaw rested on my leg. I pet her, and her tail wiped the floor.

“Sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“Owen McKenna.”

Blondie stood and trotted back to Adam. He patted his thigh, and she jumped up on his lap.

“Would it be okay if I took your photo?” he asked. “I have difficulty with recollection. My doctor says that photos are the best way to jog one’s memory.”

“Sure.”

Adam made a little nod. He pulled out his phone, took my picture, then tapped on the phone. “McKenna,” he said as he typed. It was impressive that he could hit the little buttons with his huge fingers. “Good name. McKenna. Sorry, but I’m slowly losing my brain. I forget names and other stuff. Most stuff, actually. They tell me to repeat names to myself. It maybe slows the effects of my growing… Why can’t I say it. D something. Demen… The word that means total confusion.”

“Dementia?”

“That’s it,” he said. “So I’m taking photos wherever I go. Then I look at them to see if I can remember taking them. Or remember the people in them. Mostly, I can’t. The last two years, especially. And now it’s getting worse fast.”

“Is that from football?” I asked.

He nodded. “They have fancy words for it. TBI. Stands for Traumatic Brain Injury. It comes from banging your head. You bang your head enough times, you lose your brain. I never had a concussion. Not once. I just hit the guys with my head for nine years in the pros and four years of college ball before that. I thought the helmet gave me protection. Twenty-five years later, I’m learning it wasn’t so much protection. Something about tau proteins running amok in my gray matter. I still have some good days. But eventually, it will all be gone.”

“How soon is eventually?” Maybe the question was a bit forward, but it seemed that Adam led me there.

“Depends on if I have Early Onset Alzheimer’s or if I have CTE. I forget what that means. With one, I’m supposed to last several years before I die. With the other, I have less time. They haven’t decided which I have. Some doctors think I have both. If that’s the case, I’ll probably be dead in less than a year. Maybe a lot sooner than that.”

EIGHTEEN

Adam’s words were bracing. But he spoke with casual intonation. It was something he’d come to accept.

He glanced at me, then looked down as before.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I may,” I said.

He nodded.

“You were awake when the house fire started.”

“Yeah.”

“I believe it was around three in the morning?” I said.

Another nod.

“Where were you at the time?”

“In the kitchen.” His voice was very soft.

“Why were you up?”

“I… I couldn’t sleep.”

“So you went downstairs to get something to eat or drink?”

He shook his head. Still didn’t look at my face. After a long pause, he said. “I was working on an idea, and I got up to write it down.”

“Would you be willing to tell me what your idea was?”

“I’m a poet. You probably wouldn’t understand. It was a poet thing.”

That was interesting. “I’m still curious,” I said.  

“If I tell you, you’ll just roll your eyes. The big tackle fancies himself a poet.” He picked up the sketchbook, glanced at the open pages, then closed it, holding the book with both hands as if it were precious and sacred.

“I won’t roll my eyes. Terry Bradshaw is an actor and author. Rosie Grier from the Los Angeles Rams does needlepoint. That old Purple People Eater Alan Page is a Minnesota Supreme Court Justice. Chicago Bears linebacker Lance Briggs writes comic books. The Ravens kicker Justin Tucker is an opera singer. Poetry kinda fits right in.”

“So you know about football players,” Adam said.

“A bit.”

Adam glanced right and left, shifting his weight in the chair. He rarely looked me in the eyes. “Okay. I was working on an issue of prosody,” he said.

“What’s that?”

He took a long breath. “Prosody is the flow of prose. The rhythms. Cadences. Beats. The meter. It’s also about the sounds of consonants, vowels. Alliteration. Harmonies and dis… Dis…”

I tried to think of what word he might be searching for, but nothing appropriate came to mind.

“Discordant phrasing,” he finally said. “I have the most trouble with D words. Anyway, the sensation you get from the cumulative flow of the words of poetry and prose is all affected by the prosody. Think of it as the music of words.”

“That’s what you were working on in the middle of the night?”  

“Yeah. I call the importance of prosody Langston Hughes’ law. My phrase. Hughes was a minimum daily required vitamin in the grade school where I grew up.”  

“He wrote Dreams, right?” I said.  

Adam raised his eyebrows for a moment, surprised. “I’ve been holding onto my dreams from the beginning. And this poem I’m working on pays homage to Hughes’ broken wing metaphor. Hughes was a master of prosody.”  

“And you were writing down an aspect of prosody,” I said.

“One doesn’t write an aspect of prosody. One writes something, anything, and then examines it for characteristics of good prosody or bad prosody. I’m working on a series of poems about wildness.”

“Wildness,” I repeated to make sure I heard him correctly. “Thus the broken wing metaphor,” I said.

Simms continued, “Wildness is that aspect of the world that is being lost as humans put their stamp on every square foot of the planet. Thoreau said that ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world.’ And John Muir wrote about wildness as where we find hope for the world. There is almost no place where we haven’t walked the ground at best, stomped and crushed the ground at worst. Almost all other species are under stress as a result of us and our lifestyle. Wildness is disappearing, and we can never get it back.”

“It doesn’t sound to me like you have any kind of brain injury,” I said.

“It’s like muscle memory. If I’m using the same circuits over and over, I remember. If not, my brain is on fast-evaporate.”

“Have you written a lot of poems?”

He looked at the sketchbook in his hands. “I’ve filled ten or twelve of these.”

I got a sick feeling. “I hope they didn’t burn up in the fire.”

Adam made a single nod. He held up the sketchbook. “This is all I have left.”

“I’m so sorry.”

We sat in silence for a long moment.

“Tell me what happened after you got up,” I said. “Did you hear the crash of the firebomb on your front porch?”

“No. Blondie heard it.”

At that, the yellow Lab lifted her head and looked at him. He pet her.

“And she barked,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes. She ran to the front room and barked continuously. I followed and saw the flickering light from the flames coming through the drapes.”

“What happened next?”

“When I saw the fire on the front porch, I knew the fire would go first into the overhang above the front porch. That’s where my sister Felicite’s bedroom was. So I shouted for her to wake up while I ran out to get the hose. But I couldn’t find the hose faucet because it was buried in snow. I went back inside to check on my sister. She was dialing nine, one, one. Before the firemen could come, the house was de… de…”

“Destroyed?” I said.

“Yeah. The kitchen was at the back of the house. If Blondie hadn’t heard the sound, the fire might have gotten into Felicite’s room before I was aware that the house was burning.”

I said, “Whoever tossed the bomb intended to burn the house down. The question is whether it was an act of arson or a specific attempt on your life or your sister’s life.”

Adam nodded slowly. “I’ve wondered that, too.”

“Can you think of any reason why someone might want to cook you and your sister inside your house?”

“No. Except, wackos target celebrities, right? I’m not that much of a celebrity, but I still get nasty emails from people who said I was too hard on the quarterbacks. So I don’t think Felicite was the target. And there is another reason why I could be a target.”

I didn’t expect that answer.

Adam could see that I was waiting for his explanation.

“I got a call from a woman,” he said. “I only know her first name, which was…” He frowned. He pulled out his phone, tapped a few times, and said. “A woman named Scarlett. She said that she thought I was in danger. She said there were other people who were also in danger and she was going to call them, too. She said I should be extremely careful wherever I went, whatever I did. Then she hung up. I don’t remember ever meeting this Scarlett. It was distressing. A stranger telling you that you and other strangers are in danger.”

“Did Scarlett say anything to indicate how she knew you? Or knew about you?”

“No. Maybe she’s a stalker.”

“Have you talked to her at any other time?”

“Not that I remember. To my knowledge, we’d had no contact before. And I don’t remember any time before the call when I might have met her. But I can’t constantly make notes of everything that happens. And even when I think to myself that I should make a note about something, by the time I get out my phone, I often forget what it was.”

“Any idea how Scarlett got your number?”

He shook his head.

I said, “There was a woman named Scarlett Milo who was shot and killed at Squaw Valley two days ago.”

Adam jerked. Blondie lifted her head off his lap. He made a severe frown.

“It was the middle of the afternoon. That night, your house burned down.”

“What do you know about her?” Adam asked.

“Very little. She believed she was in danger, and she called me. I was unable to prevent her murder. It’s possible that she knew a young woman from South Lake Tahoe named Darla Ali. Darla Ali is also dead.”

I watched Adam’s face as I said the name. He looked shocked. “Never heard of her, either,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Where were you at three in the afternoon two days ago?”

“Was that when Scarlett was shot?”

I nodded.

“You’re wondering if I have an alibi.”

“Do you?”

“No. I can’t remember my days. Maybe Felicite would know. But I don’t remember if she was around or not.”

I continued, “You might have been dead, had you not been up when the arsonist lit the fire. Someone also tried to kill me yesterday evening. Presumably because I’m investigating the crimes.”

“What happened? Did someone burn your house?”

“No.” I explained what had happened and pointed to my red, swollen face.

Adam’s alarm was palpable. “So Scarlett was right about everything she said.”

“It would appear that way. Do you recall a person named Sean Warner?”

Adam shook his head. “Is that another person who’s been killed?” He looked about to cry.

“Yes,” I said. “Do you have any memory of recently meeting a young man or a young woman?”

“No.” Adam looked sad and frustrated. “You said that Scarlett was shot. And you were shot at. How did the others die?”

“They were both run over by a rotary snow blower.”

Adam’s entire face seemed to fold into a mass of deep wrinkles.

“Were their deaths an accident?” He said it with a touch of hope in his voice, showing that universal belief that even though the result was the same, death by accident was somehow less bad than death by malice. It was what Diamond had said about Thomas Aquinas. Intentions matter.

“No, their deaths look intentional,” I said. “Let me change the subject,” I said. “Do you know what the phrase medic’s BFF means?”

Adam turned and stared at the wall. “I’ve heard of BFF. Or maybe I’ve seen it. I can’t remember what it means.”

“Some people use it as shorthand for Best Friend Forever. Does that ring a bell?”

Adam made a slow shake of his head. “I’m sorry, no. This is overwhelming. I’m getting very confused.”

“I’m sorry, Adam.”

“Me, too.”

Adam’s phone started playing the Jackson Browne song, Doctor My Eyes. “That’s my timer.” He picked it up and pressed a button. “It’s a reminder for my doctor’s appointment. I have to leave in five minutes.”

“Where is your appointment?”

“It’s in South Lake Tahoe. Near the hospital.”

“Who’s your doctor?”

He frowned again. “I don’t remember. But I know the building and I know where the doctor’s door is. Down the hall at the end. On the right. He does these tests on me. He says I’m helping the cause of science.” Adam gently set Blondie on the floor, then stood up.”

“Does Blondie come with you?”

“She goes everywhere with me. She’s a service dog. I keep her bib in the truck. I put it on her when I go places so she can get into buildings.”

“Ah,” I said. He didn’t volunteer what kind of service dog. Maybe he just meant it in a general sense. Or maybe his brain injury had given him a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and Blondie helped him stay calm.

I stood up. “Thanks for talking to me.”

He nodded. “Sure.” He looked at his phone, tapped on it. “Mr. McKenna,” he added.

“Right,” I said.

I followed him out. From the front door of Baumgarter’s house, Adam turned and walked over toward the burnt house. To the side was a garage that was singed, the paint on the siding bubbled and peeled, but it hadn’t burned. Adam lifted the garage door, walked inside and opened the door of a silver pickup. Blondie jumped inside, then Adam followed.

He started the engine, backed out of the garage, turned and drove away without seeming to notice me standing nearby. Maybe he’d already forgotten who I was. I watched Adam’s truck recede around the curve.  

I was about to lower the garage door when a black Audi drove up from the opposite direction that Adam had gone. The woman driver stared at me with concern. I stepped back to give her a wide space. She hesitated, then must have decided that I wasn’t dangerous. She parked next to the garage. A tiny woman got out. She wore stylish clothes, brand new as if she’d been shopping. She had unusual black eyes that seemed part Asian and part African. Her skin was lighter than Diamond’s. Her hair was cut very short and straight.

“Hi. I’m guessing that you are Felicite,” I said.