I dropped Jennifer at Street’s. I winked at Street while I explained that I couldn’t stay. The two of them would get comfortable with each other much faster with me gone. Jennifer gave me a look of betrayal, but seemed resigned to her lack of alternatives.
Back in my log cabin I placed a call to the pager of Diamond Martinez, a friend and Douglas County deputy on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. I didn’t know if his schedule put him in bed or on the highway at two in the morning. I hoped that he had the pager turned off if he was asleep. The phone rang two minutes later.
“Diamond, I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Late for a gringo like you to be working,” he said. “Maybe you’re getting smart and taking a siesta during the heat of the day.”
“Not much heat at this altitude,” I said.
“Altitude alone won’t do it. Gotta have latitude.”
“What?” I asked.
“My home town Mexico City is even higher elevation than Lake Tahoe. It’s how far north makes the difference.”
“Ah,” I said. “Just a quick question. Couple of your boys responded to a nine-one-one at the Salazar place last night. Find anything?”
“Found a very excitable girl. That’s all. If you’re working for the family you should be watching more closely. They’ve got enough bank to hire every baby-sitter in California and Nevada. Yet they leave that girl alone.”
“Your boys left her alone when they were done checking the house.”
“She refused to come. What would you have them do, kidnap her and lock her in the station house? The Salazar lawyers would sue us off the map.”
“Anyway,” I said, “there’s supposed to be a caretaker. Some disappearing act named Samuel Sommers.”
“The kid mentioned him.”
“You run his name?” I asked.
“Yeah, there’s a funny one. He’s got no sheet. He doesn’t even officially exist. DMV in both Nevada and California have no record of a Samuel Sommers. We’re checking Social Security. You believe what the kid is saying? About her sister being murdered?”
“I don’t know, Diamond. She seems sincerely afraid. She called me tonight, very upset. She was convinced someone was in the house just like last night. Spot and I checked the house.”
“You find more than we did?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “There was a window that was open that the girl said was previously shut. But I’m not certain of that. Nevertheless, she seems fixated on murder.”
“Speaking of which, we’ve had some of our own excitement in Douglas County tonight. I need to call your lady friend and ask her to do a time-of-death estimate on a decomposed body we found down below Spooner Summit.”
“When was this?” I asked, immediately thinking about the missing caretaker.
“A hiker found the body this evening at seven o’clock. He reported it when he got back from his hike. That was about ten-thirty. Two of my deputies followed the hiker’s directions. It was slow, going by flashlight. They found the corpse around midnight. It’s down in a ravine about a half mile from Highway 50.”
“Murder?” I asked.
“There were two bullet holes in the skull, side by side. From the look of the bone chips, they were both entrance wounds and there were no exit wounds. Small caliber, no doubt.”
“Close range, execution style?”
“Maybe,” Diamond said. “I’ve heard of Mob hits using twenty-twos. They don’t have the punch to pass completely through the skull. Instead, they ricochet around inside the brain causing more damage than a bigger round would going all the way through. But I don’t know that we’ve ever had Mob activity in Tahoe.”
“How long dead, do you think?”
“Hard to say. That’s why we need Street to do her thing. The body is mostly skin and bones. I’d guess death was a few weeks ago.”
“Which would rule out the missing caretaker,” I said, “because he only left on vacation a week ago or so.”
“The guy with no sheet? Right. Plus, these bones look to be female.”
“Unusual for a female to be killed execution-style,” I said.
“I agree with you there. But the bones are small and a bracelet on the wrist said, ‘to Maria, I’ll love you forever.’ Hey, what time does Street usually wake up?”
“I just spoke to her a few minutes ago,” I said. “I’m sure you could still call.”
“It won’t ruin her night, calling about a corpse?”
“No,” I said, thinking of the demons that Street wrestled with on a regular basis. “Unless she knows them, bodies aren’t the kind of thing that bother Street.”
I hung up, went into my kitchen nook and put my cold steak and potato in the microwave. It smelled good when it got warm, but the steak chewed like a rubber eraser. I gave part of it to Spot. The way he inhaled it, you’d think it came from Morton’s of Chicago. After I ate I sat in front of the fire and communed with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Only one was for enjoyment. The other three were purely medicinal.
I’d seen my share of psycho-pathology over the years, but I still couldn’t accept that some creep might be stalking Jennifer in her mansion at night. Harder still to think that the same creep might have murdered her six-year-old sister nine years ago. But one would explain the other now that Jennifer was running ads in the paper and inspiring a private cop to stir up trouble.
I got out the Hopper book and paged through it. The color plates of famous paintings flashed by. Sunlight In A Cafeteria. Office At Night. Sea Watchers. They each had two people in them, yet the people seemed alone, lost in private thoughts. They looked as if they wanted a bond but were unable to connect. I felt like there was something in the paintings that would illuminate my case, but nothing came to me. I finally went to bed with many questions and no answers.
I didn’t sleep so much as occasionally nod off only to awake at 3:00 a.m. with pounding heart and heavy breath. A dream about the way people prey on others was fresh in my mind. I opened the Hopper book again. I didn’t think I’d find any comfort. Maybe I was looking for a small measure of understanding of the human psyche. But if Hopper revealed these secrets, they were lost on me.
In the morning I took my coffee out to the deck where it steamed vigorously in the brisk air. The sun was dazzling on the snow-covered mountains across the lake.
From my deck railing I could almost see Street’s condo in the trees down the mountain. If the night had gone well for them they would still be asleep for hours. I showered and dressed in jeans and red plaid flannel shirt. Spot was particularly lethargic having only had a few hours of sleep, so I left him on the big braided rug and drove into town. I had an omelet and more coffee at the Red Hut Waffle Shop and then drove down the street to the Herald.
Glenda Gorman said she had nothing else to do so she helped me look for the ad. I told her what the ad would say and roughly when it ran, but I did not say who placed it. We sat in front of one of the microfiche machines, side by side on padded metal chairs. Glennie scooted hers sideways until it touched mine. I looked at her.
“I just need to be close so I can see the screen,” she said. She fiddled with the focus knob. “And so you can smell my new perfume.”
“Glennie, it’s a little naive, without any breeding, but I’m definitely amused by its presumption.”
She slugged me hard on my shoulder. “You’re using Thurber to mock me. Remember, I’m a trained journalist.”
I rubbed my shoulder.
Glennie was running the film on fast forward. “What is it anyway? That she’s got and I haven’t?” She stopped the film, backed it up, stopped it again.
“You shouldn’t ask such questions.” The page on the screen was the classifieds from a couple of weeks ago. I took the adjustment knob and slowly scanned the Personals column. “Anyway, you’ve got it backward,” I said. “It’s not just what Street has, it’s partly what she doesn’t have.” Jennifer’s ad wasn’t there. I fast-forwarded to the next day’s paper
and slowed to find the Personals. “Street doesn’t have your solid self-confidence. She doesn’t have your stable career. She doesn’t have your Cover-Girl face and your body that goes in and out so dramatically.”
Glennie turned and looked at me. “What do you mean? She has a great body. Skinny as a model and legs that won’t quit.”
“That’s what I said.”
Glennie noticed the way I was working the microfiche machine. “Here, let me do it. I’m practiced at this.” She took over the search. “Don’t you like confidence and career stability? Don’t you like my body?”
“Of course I do. But you’re too perfect a package. You’re the cheerleader who turned out to have brains and heart. For most guys, having you would be like winning the lottery. Someone hands you what you’ve always wanted on a platter and the ambition and dream to make it happen by yourself is blown apart.”
“You’re trying to flatter me.”
“No, I’m telling the truth. I’m attracted to you. But I’m more attracted to Street’s vulnerability, her incompleteness, her small share of insecurity.”
“Is it a challenge or something?”
“No. It’s more a connection to my own insecurities. Street and I share something dark.”
“I can be dark. I can be insecure. Give me time. Practice makes perfect.”
“No, Glennie. You stay exactly the way you are. You’re perfect. You’re going to meet some guy who makes me look like a geek in a cowboy suit.”
“Right. Someone with your brains, your blue eyes, all in this little town.”
“You forgot my dog.”
“Best part about you. But I didn’t think it necessary to state the obvious.” Glennie pointed to the screen. “Here it is.”
I leaned over to look.
She read the ad out loud. “‘Reward paid for any information about an accident that killed a little girl August of nine years ago on the rock slide above Emerald Bay.’”
The ad had Jennifer’s phone number but not her name.
“That’s it?” she asked. “That’s what you’re investigating? I get it. Someone thinks the kid’s death wasn’t an accident. But if it wasn’t, then the only person who might have information would be the killer. If someone else had information, the killer would have killed them long ago. So the person who placed this ad is basically sending up a flare saying, ‘come kill me, too,’ right?”
“Glennie, you are saying some very disturbing things.”
Her eyes got a wild look. “Who is it? Who placed the ad?”
I was too disturbed by her premise to respond.
“Owen! I can easily look it up in the computer. Save me the time.”
“Melissa Salazar had a twin sister named Jennifer. Jennifer is convinced that Melissa was killed.”
“That was what you were looking up the other day. The story on Melissa’s death. I’ll go get that film. I want to read it.”
“There was nothing revealing in the story,” I said.
“Not to you maybe. But remember...”
“I know,” I said. “You’re a trained journalist.” I thought about what Glennie had said while she fetched the tape I’d reviewed earlier.
“Here we go,” she said, returning from the shelves with the tape. “August of nine years ago.” She put the film in the machine and found the story in seconds. She read it and immediately forwarded to the obituary as I had done.
“Did you find anything else besides the story and the obit?” she asked me.
“No. What else would there be?”
Glennie looked at me, disbelieving. “We always, always run a follow-up story on any unusual death.” She paged ahead. “Sometimes the next day. Sometimes two or three days later.” She worked the control. The screen blurred, stopped, blurred again. “Here it is. What do you think? We could be McKenna and Gorman Investigations.”
“I don’t think Street would be wild about the idea,” I said, studying the screen. The date in the corner was two days after the earlier story on Melissa’s death.
FREAK ACCIDENTS CLAIM
TWO LIVES IN TAHOE BASIN
Catastrophe struck in two separate hiking accidents this week. On Wednesday six-year-old Melissa Salazar, one of twin granddaughters of the late clothing magnate Abraham Salazar, was hiking with her sister and grandmother when she slipped and fell off the rock slide below Maggie’s Peaks.
Search and rescue teams from Eldorado and Alpine counties were brought in. Thursday morning a rescue dog found the body partway down the rock slide.
Preliminary investigation suggests that the young girl slipped on loose rock near the top of the rock slide.
On Friday afternoon across the lake on Mount Rose, Truckee hikers found the body of Penelope Smithson, wealthy North Shore socialite. Smithson, an avid hiker, was apparently hiking alone on a narrow trail that leads to the 10,600 foot summit of Mount Rose when she slipped on loose scree and plunged 1000 feet to her death.
Glennie looked at me to see if I’d finished reading. I nodded. She paged ahead to the obituary.
Penelope Smithson, aged 49, Reno arts patron and benefactor of a Truckee theater group, survived by husband John.
“Strange coincidence,” Glennie said.
“Yes, but every year several people die in Tahoe while engaging in some kind of outdoor recreation.”
“Sure. Usually it is skiers who hit trees, or snowmobilers who head into the back country and get caught in fierce Sierra storms. Rarely do hikers fall to their deaths.”
“Yeah,” I said. “To my knowledge, that was the only time two hikers ever died at nearly the same time.” I looked at my watch. “I better run. Got chauffeur duty. Thanks, Glennie.”
She stood and gave me a goodbye hug.
NINE