Tahoe Chase (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (33 page)

FIFTY-THREE

I fetched a tire iron from one of Joe’s cars and borrowed a pair of gloves from his front seat.

The street was empty, the vertical snow walls, fresh-cut by the rotary plow, were turning blue in the approaching twilight. I hustled my way down to the end of the block, turned at the corner, went down a steep street, turned another corner, and walked to Dwight’s house.

The Subaru was not in the drive. The Tahoe was at a junkyard. Maybe Dwight had a third car in the garage.

I used Dwight’s ski binding knocker to rap on the wall next to the door of his darkened house. He didn’t answer. No lights showed in any windows. I knocked again and waited. After no response, I considered climbing the snow-walled driveway and trudging through the deep snow to check the doors at the back of the house. I remembered Dwight’s fear of everything. I was certain he’d have the back door and deck slider locked.

I walked over to the garage door. Even on homes with heavy deadbolts on the front doors, the garage doors often have no locks at all. The door is held down by nothing other than the lightweight chain that raises and lowers it.

I remembered that Dwight had to turn off his alarm the last time I visited. I hoped the garage door wasn’t wired.

I wedged the end of the tire iron under the bottom of the garage door and pulled up on it. The garage door shifted and moaned. I lifted harder. The bottom panel of the door bent inward under the strain. It appeared to be made of fiberglass, light and strong but easy to bend with the leverage of a length of steel. I put more energy into it. The lowest roller slipped out of its track on the left side, and the bottom panel twisted up and in.

I didn’t want to destroy the door, so I stopped lifting, lay down on the drive, and snaked my body through the opening. No audible alarm sounded. But it could be a silent alarm.

I stood up in the dark, raised my arms out in front of me like Frankenstein exploring the castle, and hurried toward the back wall of the garage. I moved fast, worrying about Simone. My elbow bumped something that clattered to the floor.

After a minute in the dark, I found the light switch.

There were no cars in the garage, a sign that Dwight was out.

With the light on, anyone from the street could see that the bottom of the garage door was jimmied. I trotted over to where I’d popped the garage-door roller out of the track. I twisted it, and the roller popped back in place.

The hinge that held the bottom door panel to the one above was broken from my prying and bending, but it looked like the door would still work.

On a heavy-duty metal bracket near the garage door hung four heavy tire chains.

The junkyard man had told Diamond that Dwight’s tires were bald. But with chains on all tires, the vehicle would have good traction. It would have been easy for Dwight to push Manuel’s little Prius off the mountain at Emerald Bay. Manuel wouldn’t have had a chance to stop, but Dwight would have stopped easily. His front bumper might have revealed hints of the Prius, but the guy said it was mangled.

The inner door from garage to house looked solid and did have a deadbolt. It could be jimmied, but it would be wired.

It would be better to get in without going through the door.

Sheetrock is great stuff for making walls. It’s cheap and strong and fireproof. It’s also great stuff for burglars. I punched the iron through the sheetrock on the garage side of the wall, levered it sideways to give some horizontal dimension to my hole, then moved my tire iron a couple of inches to the side and repeated. I went as fast as possible. I panted with effort, inhaling sheetrock dust. My arms got sore. When I hit a stud, I moved back the other direction. I continued until I hit the next stud. Now that I knew where the studs were, I could make a nice opening.

It was a great way to circumvent a burglar alarm assuming that there were no motion detectors or webcams broadcasting to the internet or loaded shotguns set on tripwires stretched across the rooms a foot above the floor.

I’d have to take my chances.

Once through the garage-side layer, I started again on the second layer of sheetrock on the inside of the studs. The destruction went well, and I was inside in a few minutes.

Still no audible alarm went off, a good sign. But I moved fast in case an unseen detector had already sent a signal to the security company.

Rarely were El Dorado Sheriff’s officers in the upscale Angora Highlands neighborhood. Assuming the closest patrol unit was down near Lake Tahoe Blvd, I probably had ten minutes before the first flashing lights would come up the streets.

I hurried through the house, looking for anything unusual. There wasn’t much. It was a three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath, well-made spread. There was a wet bar in the great room that looked unused. The kitchen had the standard island with its own sink. One bedroom had a comprehensive workout station, part of the exercise equipment that Dwight said he was forced to take when he bought the house.

I found what I was looking for in the third bedroom.

It was set up as an office of sorts, a big desk set from IKEA, three computer monitors, two printers, a scanner, stacks of Staples copy paper, and several devices with blinking green lights, internet connections perhaps.

As always, I looked for what was out of place. The room had an armoire, a large walnut-stained, freestanding closet.

Why an extra closet?

I opened the armoire. There were some clothes and some boxes of computer printouts and a stack of old phone books.

I turned to the built-in closet, which had mirrored, sliding doors. I slid one to the side. There were some coats and robes and shirts hanging on the rod. They were spread out in an even fashion. Too even.

I pushed them all to the side. The closet was shallow, the rear wall closer than would be normal. So I pushed at it, and it moved. I realized that it was on a slider.

I slid the right half of the panel sideways and found that it was a large walk-in closet disguised to look like a shallow one.

I reached in, and felt around for a light switch. I felt the other wall. Nothing.

I turned and felt something brush my face. I swatted at it with my hand and felt it move away. Swatted again and found a string. Grabbed and pulled.

A light came on.

It was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. When I saw what it illuminated, I inhaled.

I was in a secret shrine.

A shrine dedicated to Nedham Cavett.

In the center was a large framed picture of Ned. He was about thirteen or fourteen years old, dressed in a white football uniform. He was holding his helmet in his hands, and he was smiling, radiating the movie-star looks that were already manifest at that young age.

To the right side of the framed picture was a row of tiny school-picture shots of Ned, stuck to the wall with push pins, each one showing the progression from big-toothed little kid to high school heartthrob. On the left side of the big picture were several trinkets and medals, pinned to the wall. There were Boy Scout badges, a soccer-team group photo, a commendation from a drug rehabilitation program.

Under the framed photo of Ned was a small faded photo of two young boys and a woman. The older boy was Ned, maybe eight years old, looking cocky and insecure and telegraphing a false bravado. The woman looked weary and used-up like a meth-mom cliché of addiction and imploded dreams.

The other boy in the picture was about four. Unlike Ned, the young boy had hints of the mother in his face, but he looked nothing like the older boy. The relationship looked like that of step-brothers, brought together when their separate parents married.

The younger boy looked up at the older boy with a mixture of adulation and worship. Peter Cavett, also known as Dwight Frankman AKA Cameron.

Off to the side were more items on a shelf.

A small framed photo showed a group of young kids. Ned was off to the side. He was beaming at the younger kid in the center. The younger kid was holding an unusual trophy. It looked like a tiny computer. Written in calligraphy at the bottom of the photo were the words Inyo County Computer Club Champion Peter Cavett.

Another photo showed both brothers at a ski area with Lake Tahoe in the background. Their smiles were infectious, and their bonding was obvious in their matching clothes.

They both wore white jackets and white warmups.

There were other photos taken in a gym. Several showed Ned pumping serious iron. One showed him in a Mr. Universe pose. A smaller photo showed Peter/Dwight/Cameron holding a barbell over his head at the top of a clean-and-jerk maneuver. Ned stood behind him, arms out, spotting him. The barbell looked like it had two 45-pound weights on each end. With the barbell, it would have totaled 225 pounds. It wasn’t a lot of weight in weight-lifting circles. But it was a lot for a thin guy whose disguise was pretending to be a skinny wimp. His bulging shoulder and arm muscles were impressive. His abs were ripped, and his legs looked like those of a soccer player. He was as buff as thin guys come.

 Yet another photo showed Peter at bat in a baseball game. He looked athletic and ready to hit the pitch out of the park. Beneath his cap, his hair was buzz-cut and dark, nothing like the stringy red mop and stocking cap from when he had introduced himself to me as Dwight.

On a nail to the side hung a wig with long wavy hair, dark brown. Near the wig were pieces of paper taped to the wall. One was a note scrawled in pencil. The handwriting was almost illegible.

hey littel bro i used that oragamee yu sent me and i won!!!!!! not first place but third and got a thowsand and two hunderd and fifty thats enough to move to tahoe maybe that contest guy has a bunch more money i could take some and put to good use thanks maybe you’ll come to tahoe some day!

Another was a piece of graph paper. On it was a sketch of the scaffolding at my office. In neat printing it said, ‘Remove these bolts.’ There were multiple arrows pointing to intersections at regular intervals. More printing said, ‘This piece will serve as the trigger point for an origami-style folding collapse of the entire structure.’ Another arrow pointed to the piece of scaffold bar that I had jerked free. Presumably, Dwight planned to wait for me some night and pull that bar free as Spot and I emerged from the building.

The puzzle was beginning to make sense.

Simone told her abuse group about Ned and his continuous assaults on her. Unfortunately, Simone had no clue that Ned’s little brother was Rell’s neighbor Dwight, who chose the pseudonym Cameron when Rell invited him to join her hiking group. So as Simone told the group about the beatings she suffered at Ned’s hands, Ned’s worshiping stepbrother was listening and hating the fact that an entire group of people vilified his brother.

Perhaps the worst horror of all was that Ned fell prey to Dwight’s devious origami scaffold destruction, a scheme designed to kill the person who posed the biggest threat to Ned.

Me.

Dwight decided to kill the people who believed that Ned was evil. His rage at their perceptions overwhelmed any sense that they might be right. So he arranged murders that would look like accidents. It hadn’t yet worked with Rell and me. But Manuel and Jillian were dead. And Simone was likely next.

Now that I knew that the killer wasn’t Ned, the threat to Simone went from speculation to emergency. I had to find Dwight before he got to Simone.

I jogged through the house, looking for something that would help me catch Dwight before he could push Simone off a cliff.

In the largest bedroom was a queen-sized bed, the only bed in the house. The bed was made so tightly that it looked unused, but when I pulled the covers down, I could see the wrinkles in the pillowcase that indicated its recent use.

I pulled off the pillowcase, folded it small, and wrapped it in a plastic bag that I found in Dwight’s kitchen. I stuffed the bag into my pocket and left the way I came.

The streets were dark as I ran back up to Joe’s house.

Street pulled up in her little VW Beetle as I came around the corner. She got out, and I gave her a quick kiss.

The passenger window was open, and my back-country skis stuck out at an angle into the air. I pulled them out. My boots and pack with emergency food and clothes were on the front passenger seat. I set the pack on the hood of Diamond’s SUV and carried the boots and clothes inside.

“You’ve got news,” Street said as we hurried into Joe’s living room.

“Yes, Dwight is Ned’s brother Peter Cavett, as well as Cameron. He’s the killer. I found a shrine to Ned in the back of one of Dwight’s closets. There is lots of incriminating evidence.”

“Dwight is killing the members of the abuse group because they all were against Ned?” Street said.

“It looks like it,” I said.

“And Dwight’s gone,” Joe said.

“Right,” I said. “I think we can now assume that he may well be chasing Simone.”

“Better hurry,” Diamond said.

“We’ve planned a rescue mission based on a series of guesses,” Joe said. “That’s not good.”

“Best we have,” Diamond said.