Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) (7 page)

NINE

I took Spot outside, wary of the forest. As an ex-cop, I knew to take all threats seriously. But all I could do was be careful. I walked Spot in the shadows, then let him into the Jeep, and we headed to the SLT impound lot.

As I slowed for the sharp curve entering the southbound tunnel of Cave Rock, I noticed a black pickup some distance back. Later, as I crossed the state line into California, I saw it again, although it may not have been the same vehicle. Black pickups are common in Tahoe. Just before I parked near the impound lot, there was yet another large black vehicle far back. But when I turned to take a careful look, it was gone. It was the kind of coincidence I didn’t normally pay attention to. But after being shot at and getting the threatening note, I was more vigilant.

I got out of the Jeep as the impound lot attendant walked out of the office, stepping around puddles of melted snow. The spring sun came through the trees and hit the pavement here and there, making it steam. The man wore faded jeans and a faded jean jacket and his brown-gray hair was pulled back into a long, thin ponytail.

“Paperwork?” he said from the other side of a chain-link fence.

“No paperwork,” I said.

He gave me that hardened look that all impound lot attendants get after two months on the job and they’ve learned that half the people showing up haven’t paid their fine and they beg or lie or spin some story about having to get their car so they can drive their dying grandmother to the hospital.

“No vehicle release without paperwork,” he said. He stood facing me, his thumbs tucked into the waistband of his jeans.

“I’m Detective Owen McKenna, here to look for a dark blue Toyota belonging to a missing person name of Sean Warner. I don’t want to take the car. I just want to see if you have it.”

He squinted at me. Letting me in without paperwork was probably against the rules. “You try to lock yourself inside and start the engine, I’ll cut the tires.” He tapped a pocket on his jeans, the bulge of which suggested a large knife.

“I just want to look. There could be evidence in a murder case.”

The man stopped squinting and frowned. “Sounds like BS, but okay, have a look.”

He unlocked the gate and opened it. I stepped through. He locked it behind me.

“There’s a dark blue Toyota at the far end of the fourth row.” He pointed.

I walked toward it. The man followed me. Maybe to keep me from doing something devious. Maybe just to talk.

“People don’t save for a rainy day,” he said. “Somethin’ happens, they get behind. Then surprise, the bank takes their ride. Or the cops, depending on. Me, I’ve got five hunnerd in the kitty. Well, almost five hunnerd. I could pay the fine. But no cop is gonna take my ride, ’cuz I figure if you got no cash for the meter, don’t park. That’s my motto for life. You gotta always have cash for the meter.”

“Good motto,” I said. “World would be a better place, we had more people thinking like you.”

“Damn straight,” he said.

The blue Toyota was unlocked, so I opened the door and leaned inside. There was a vague stink of old beer mixed with marijuana smoke. On the seat was a gray hoodie sweatshirt with dark stains around the edges of the hood and the cuffs. On the dash was a torn magazine with pictures of buxom, leather-clad women on motorcycles. Under the brake pedal was a single glove, dark enough to be almost invisible against the dirty carpet. The cup holder held an empty, dented Budweiser can. The steering wheel was thick with black grime. Hanging from the rear view mirror, looking out of place above the motorcycle mamas, was a string of purple rosary beads. Hanging from the rosary was a gold locket that held a picture of the Virgin Mary.

I opened the glove box and pulled out the vinyl car manual folder. Tucked in with the manual was the DMV registration. The car was in the name of Sean Warner, and the registration was two years overdue. I put it back and got out of the car.

“Any chance you have a key or a way to open the trunk?” I asked.

The man looked at me. He bent into the car and pulled the trunk release. The lid popped up. He grinned. One of his front teeth was missing.

I looked in the trunk. There was nothing revealing. I shut the lid.

“Can you do me a favor please and look up the paperwork on this car and tell me where it was towed from?”

The man thought about it. I could tell he was wondering if it was a trick question or if there was some aspect to the request that would bite him. He turned slowly and walked back to his office, which was a weather-beaten shack about ten feet square. I lifted the glove from under the brake pedal, stuffed it into my pocket, shut the car door, and followed the attendant.

The man pushed open the door of the office and, without even stepping over the door sill, reached in and lifted a clipboard off a hook on the wall.

He flipped through some sheets, stopped at one in the middle of the pile, frowned as he read.

“Snow dump,” he said.

“Snow dump?” I repeated. “What’s that mean?”

“Where the city dumps the snow from the main drag. You know, when the rotaries shoot the berm into dump trucks, the trucks haul it to the snow dump. Off Barbara Avenue. The Toyota was towed from there.”

Then I remembered. “Does it say where at the snow dump that the Toyota was found?”

The man looked at the sheet, then shook his head.

“Thanks for your help.”

“You think you can catch a murderer with what you seen?”

“Maybe,” I said as I left.

Back in the Jeep, I took the glove from Sean Warner’s Toyota out of my pocket and stuffed it under my seat. Spot would have already smelled it in the air and on me, so it wasn’t an ideal scenting situation. But that didn’t eliminate its potential usefulness.

My next stop was Darla Ali’s triplex apartment. The address Mallory had given me was in a neighborhood by the “Y” intersection where Emerald Bay Road heads north out of South Lake Tahoe.

I parked nearby. Because it was the middle of the day, I figured that both Darla and her roommate Sanford might be out. I left Spot in the Jeep and walked over to the house.

It appeared that the main floor had been divided into two apartments. I went around the side to a flight of rickety outdoor stairs that climbed up the back of the house. I went up and knocked. The door opened. A large man in his late twenties stood there. He wore a muscle shirt and khakis. His black hair was greased straight back. He had a mustache and a Van Dyke beard, also black. The beard glistened with grease shine as well.

“Hi. My name’s Owen McKenna. I’m looking for Sanford Burroughs.”

“I’m Sanford.”

“Commander Mallory of the SLTPD gave me your address. I’m an investigator looking into Darla Ali’s disappearance. Mallory said she lived here.”

“Yes. I’m so worried about her.”

“Mind if we talk a bit?”

“Not at all.” He glanced behind him at the apartment. It was a worried look that I’d seen many times.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t care if you’ve got contraband lying around. I just want to ask a few questions about Darla.”

“Okay, dude, I’m taking you at your word. C’mon in.”

TEN

Sanford let me into a small apartment that was neat and clean but had the rich smell of pot in the air.

There was a small living/kitchen area. In the living section was a conversation area made up of four tall bar stools and an even taller, small, round table There was no bar in the place. If you wanted a back rest, you’d have to sit on the floor and lean against the wall. Sanford perched on one stool, his boot heel hooked over the cross bar. I took another.

“You have any idea about Darla’s disappearance?” I asked.

“No. She went to work like normal. Four days ago. But she didn’t come home. I couldn’t sleep that night. I still haven’t slept. The next morning, she still wasn’t home. I was frantic. I called the restaurant, and they said she hadn’t come in. I went to the police and told them she was missing. They had no clue as to where she went. I know something is terribly wrong. And now you’re looking for her. Why? That’s a bad sign, right?”

“I’m working on a case that probably doesn’t connect to Darla. But it suggests that I look into any suspicious disappearances.”

“Darla’s dead, isn’t she! That’s why you’re here, because you think she’s dead. God, I can’t stand to think of it!” Sanford hugged himself.

“Sanford, I’m only here because you filed a missing persons report.”

“So I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. That’s what you’re saying, right?”

“Right. Where does Darla work?”

“At the Elevation Seven Thousand Cafe on lower Kingsbury Grade. It’s the new one.”

I knew of the restaurant. It was across the highway and up a bit from my office. “Did you have any contact with her during the last day you saw her?”

“No. None at all. Except that morning. We talked over coffee and a banana, and then she went to work.”

“What time did she leave?”

“She’s been working the early shift. Normally, that means she leaves at five-forty to be on shift at six. But that day she left at five with me. She said she had to be there early. But when I called the cafe later, they said she didn’t have to be there early. And anyway, she didn’t show up.”

“The Elevation Seven Thousand Cafe is quite new. Do you know where she worked before that?”

“Well, she was unemployed for awhile. And before that, she lived up on the North Shore and worked at the Cal Neva Hotel. She had to quit when they closed it for remodeling. So she moved down here because there are more jobs on the South Shore.”

“Does Darla drive to work?”

He shook his head. “No, she doesn’t have a car. It’s at the top of her wish list, but she needs more money, first. She gets rides to work. Around town, too. Sometimes she takes the bus, although the schedule isn’t real comprehensive. I give her rides, too, when I’m not at work.” He pointed out the window. “I got a used Subaru Outback when I moved here. Best snow car there is. So Darla’s happy to have me drive her.” There was a silver Outback parked on the street next to a snow wall as tall as the car. On the roof of the car was a rack that held two pairs of skis.

“Where’d you move from?”

“Wow, you’ve got more questions about me than about Darla.”

“Not really. In my business, I just automatically ask questions of whomever I’m around. The more complete a picture I can get of the world around Darla, the better I’ll figure out where and how she fits in.”

Sanford nodded, slowly, thinking. Maybe wondering if I had suspicions about him.

“I came from Vegas. That’s where I learned to toss pizza dough. But the weather there is hell during the summer. Tahoe’s perfect in the summer. I always wanted to try living here, so when I got passed over for a promotion, I thought that was my time to move.”

“Where’s work now?”

“I’m a prep cook for Pizza Pan International. They primarily do a lunch business. I do two half-shifts a day, making their pizza dough. You came here at the perfect time because I come home during the middle of the day and then go back to make more pizza crusts for the dinner crowd.”

“Unusual schedule,” I said.

“Yeah. Seven to eleven and three to seven. Most people would hate it, but it fits me perfectly. I can do errands during the middle of the day. Sometimes I ski a few runs, too.”

“So you and Darla are both in food service.”

“Yeah. That’s how we met. The Chamber of Commerce put on a restaurant show a few months back to feature all the local eateries. The Pizza Pan booth was right next to the Elevation Seven Thousand booth. I was the pizza demo man, and she was the breakfast demo girl. We were both doing practically the same song and dance on either side of the convention booth drape. It was pretty funny. We had some good laughs, and we stayed in touch. She called me a few weeks later when her roommate moved out. I was looking for a better place, and I’ve been here ever since.”

“Would she normally call you if she was going to be home late?”

“Yes, absolutely. We’re best friends. She tells me everything. But she said nothing. She gave me no warning. She just never came home.”

“What about her other friends?”

Sanford frowned. “Darla doesn’t really have many friends. She mostly hangs with people from work.”

“Do you mind if I look at her room?”

“No, of course not. You can look at anything. Just find her. Please.” He pointed.

On both sides of the main room were bedrooms, each under a separate roof gable. I walked over and through a doorway and flipped on the light.

Darla’s bedroom was about 10 by 12.   The bed was made, and on the pillow sat a stuffed teddy bear propped up in a sitting position. On one wall was a dresser and a closet. On the dresser, leaning up against the wall, was a framed mirror that had broken. There were still some large cracked pieces of mirror in the frame.

“What happened to the mirror?” I called out to Sanford.

“It fell over in the earthquake.” Sanford said from the other room. “Darla’s still using it until she can get it replaced.”

Draped over the top edge of the mirror was a rosary with a crucifix. It wasn’t the same design as the one I’d found in Sean Warner’s Toyota, but it struck me that I hadn’t seen any rosary beads in years, and now I’d seen two in different places in the space of thirty minutes.

On the dresser were four pictures in stand-up picture frames. I recognized the images. One was a picture of Michelangelo’s David, which looked magnificent even on a small card. The other three prints were of famous, old paintings. I picked up the frames and looked at the back. Darla - or somebody - had cut out the paintings’ titles and painters’ names and glued them to the back. One was Botticelli’s Primavera. Another was Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch. The third painting was da Vinci’s The Annunciation.

It seemed unusual to find such pictures in a young woman’s apartment. I would have expected the typical 24-year-old woman in Tahoe to have pictures of her boyfriend or girlfriends or family, or a selfie of herself skiing or hanging out at the beach. Instead, this girl had four prints of artworks that were each created hundreds of years ago.

I stopped and took another look at the backs of the frames. The dates ranged from the 1400s to the 1500s. Maybe it meant nothing, but the artworks were all created by Italian artists during the Renaissance. I thought of Scarlet Milo and her Squaw Valley house with shelves of books about the Italian Renaissance. It was an unusual coincidence, as unlikely as the two rosaries. Although coincidences happen, as an investigator, my job was to assume there are no coincidences.

On the opposite wall was a window and below it a chair and small table that was being used as a desk. There was a spaghetti sauce jar full of pens and pencils and next to it a pad of lined paper with some kind of to-do list. Get new insoles. Return shoes to Amazon. Transfer $100 to checking account. Pay Sanford for the utility bills. Get shampoo, toothpaste, fresh veggies, whole grain pasta, almond milk, free range chicken, brown rice. Call Tammy for the fried rice/pineapple recipe.  

Some of the items had been crossed off.

One item had been circled. It was an email address. [email protected].

On the side of the desk was an old Apple laptop computer. I lifted the lid. The screen lit up. There was a box to enter a password.

“Hey, Sanford,” I called out. “Do you know Darla’s computer password?”

“No. She’s quite private,” he said.

“There’s an email address written here. It says TahoeBlueFire at Gmail dot com. Is that her address?”

“No. Hers is something like Darla and then some numbers at Yahoo dot com.”

“Does the Blue Fire address mean anything to you?”

“Sorry, no.”

I shut the laptop.

I opened the closet. It was a small space that didn’t hold many clothes. The only thing that stood out to me was that almost half of the clothes were purple.

I walked out of Darla’s room. Sanford Burroughs was in the kitchen. He had a teakettle of water on the stovetop. It was popping and beginning to throw off tendrils of steam.

“Would you like some herbal tea? It’s my own blend, very smooth,” he said, his voice earnest.

“Sure.”

He took the teakettle off the stove and poured it into a teapot. Then he lowered a tea strainer on a thin chain and shut the teapot lid. Behind him, lined up along the back of the kitchen counter were two long rows of empty beer bottles, every one a different brand of craft beer. On each bottle was a Post-it Note with penciled notes.

“It’ll just be a few minutes on the tea,” Sanford said. “Did you find anything?”

“Yeah. What was Darla’s interest in Renaissance art?”

Sanford frowned. “Oh, you mean those little framed pictures on her dresser top. She got those a few weeks ago. I asked her what they were about, and she just said she found them in a shop in Carson City and liked them. Nothing more than that, I think. Why?”

“Has she spoken about the Renaissance?”

“No. I should’ve asked. I don’t actually know what the Renaissance is. Something about art, right? But a fancier idea than just art. Artistic renewal?”

“Kind of,” I said. “The Renaissance was a period of a couple of hundred years when there was an explosion of art production in Europe. Mostly Italy. Mostly the fourteen and fifteen hundreds.” I knew it was a weak description that probably left out some of the most important aspects of the period.

I changed the subject. “Did Darla ever talk about leaving the area? Or traveling?”

Sanford shook his head. “You should know that Darla is just a down-home sweetheart. All she wants is to work her job, go skiing, say her prayers, and be good to her friends. She is a very good friend.”

“Is there anything unusual about her? Anything you wouldn’t expect?”

“No. Not at all. I mean, she has her dreams, of course. Everybody has their dreams, right?”

“What are Darla’s?”

“Oh, the usual crazy stuff. Meet Mr. Perfect. Get rich. Live on an island in an exotic country.”

“Does she ever act on those dreams?”

Sanford was shaking his head before I finished the question. “If you mean, does she look for Mr. Perfect on the internet or read books on living in another country, I don’t think so. But she does have little flights of fancy about money.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh, she’ll do things like go online and look up treasure hunting. It’s a kind of fantasy, I suppose.”

“What kind of treasure?”

“Well, there’s this author, Clive Cussler, who has some kind of operation where he looks for old sunken ships. I guess he’s found a bunch of them. And some of them have had treasure. Like right out of the movies. So Darla, when she found out about that, she got kind of excited. She read up about it. Turns out that there have been hundreds of ships that have sunk over the centuries, and a lot of them have never been found. Some were known to have major money or gold or whatever on them. But the others, even without treasure, had some valuables. For example, I didn’t know this, but Darla told me that all through history, most ships have had a safe on board so people could give their valuables to the captain and he’d lock them in the safe to protect them during the voyage. Well, Darla got to thinking about that. As she put it, that means that every sunken ship probably had serious valuables on it. So all you’d have to do is learn about ships that sank and then find them and go down and get the safe and bust it open, right? It wouldn’t have to be ships that were carrying the king’s gold. It could just be any ship.”

“Sounds easy in principle,” I said, “but the ocean is more than six miles deep in places. That would make finding a lot of sunken ships pretty tricky. And you’d only be able to search the ones that are close to the surface. Maybe a hundred feet or so. Much deeper than that, you would need specialized gear.”

Sanford raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right about that.” He pulled two cups off of a little cup tree, poured tea, and handed one to me.

“Do you think that Darla suspected there might be a sunken ship in Tahoe?” I asked.

Sanford shook his head. “I doubt it. I mean, she never said anything to suggest it. Besides, Tahoe never really had any ships, right? I read about the Tahoe Steamer. That was pretty big. But they sank that one on purpose. So they must’ve taken any valuables off it first.”