10 Tahoe Trap (21 page)

Ben put me through some basic maneuvers, then had me do two touch-and-goes before he asked me to land and drop him off.

“It’s like you fly every day,” he said as he got out of the plane.

“In my dreams,” I said.

“Good luck with your search.” He made a little wave.

We helped Paco move from the rear seat to the right front. Then I taxied back out to the runway, and took off once again.

 
TWENTY-TWO
 

I kept the plane at the best angle of climb for our altitude, which held the airspeed to 66 knots despite full throttle. As I approached the south end of the Tahoe Basin, I was up to 7000 feet of altitude, 700 feet above the ground. I turned the yoke, pulled it back, and put the plane into a climbing turn to the left.

The Cessna creaked over the wind noise as the ailerons grabbed at the air and banked the plane, but the plane dutifully executed my commands. I came around in a big sweeping turn in front of Trimmer Peak 3000 feet above. Behind it, another thousand feet up, was Freel Peak.

Paco was curiously indifferent. He looked out, but he had no reaction. No exclamations about his first plane ride, no remarks about how things looked from up in the air, no comments about the tiny cars. The kid was shut down. I didn’t think that his emotions were stunted and undeveloped. They just seemed locked in a vault.

I kept up a running commentary in an effort to get him to loosen up. I pointed out the lake, the mountains, and other landmarks. I showed him the cliff road coming down from Echo Summit, a road he’d traveled on many times.

When he still expressed no interest, I turned my attention to my search task.

It made sense that on the morning that Paco’s foster mother was assaulted, she had driven at least some distance past the farmers’ market, enough that Paco had fallen back asleep. Although Paco had said that she’d parked near a cliff, no particular cliff came to mind. I thought I’d head out from the center of town and see if I noticed any remote areas that were accessible by car and had a cliff or two nearby.

I leveled off 1000 feet up, what’s officially called Above Ground Level, and I brought the Cessna toward the center of town. The landing approach to the airport comes out of the north, over the lake and across the center of town. At 1000 feet AGL, I would possibly be in the way of aircraft approaching from the north, so I stayed to the east side of town.

The weather was clear, with visibility in the high mountain air nearly unlimited. The lake stretched out 22 miles to the north, an improbable blue, an improbable size, and, for a giant lake, an improbable elevation.

I pointed down. “See that main road? That’s Lake Tahoe Boulevard. And see the lumber yard with the big piles of lumber? Across the road and down a bit is the parking lot where you used to sell your produce at the farmers’ market.”

Paco looked, but he didn’t react.

I didn’t have a flight plan other than to check out areas northeast from the farmers’ market in the center of South Lake Tahoe. Paco had said he’d fallen asleep after seeing the farmers’ market. A kid can fall dead asleep in a minute and wake up five minutes later, not having a clue about how long he’d been asleep. So it could be that the location I was looking for was as close as five minutes from the center of town.

I could estimate the other end of the time range. Paco had said that they’d driven up from the Central Valley and that they’d left at 3 a.m. A little arithmetic could give me a time range.

The drive from Stockton up the west slope of the Sierra takes roughly three hours, getting them to the South Shore at approximately 6 a.m. So Paco had seen the farmers’ market area at about that time. Then he called me at 6:30. Which left approximately 30 minutes during which Cassie drove someplace while Paco fell back asleep. Paco woke up and witnessed her assault, and the men drove off in their pickup with Paco hiding in the back.

If the assault took ten minutes, the place where Paco’s foster mother was assaulted was somewhere within a 20-minute drive from the center of South Lake Tahoe. Because they were going northeast past the farmers’ market when Paco saw it, the likelihood was that Cassie drove someplace up off Kingsbury Grade, or possibly up the East Shore, maybe as far as Cave Rock.

When Paco escaped the pickup, he came running down the gondola lift line. So the pickup had probably been in the nearby neighborhood. But it could have driven from anywhere. When Paco called, he said the pickup was going fast. There were only a few places in Tahoe where you can drive over 40, but it indicated that Cassie could have been shot in a wide range of places. The only hope was to look for cliffs and/or the van.

I wanted to fly low above the ground. But Tahoe has many tall rocky outcroppings that can be dangerous in a low-altitude search, so I decided to come down from the slope above. It is easier to suddenly pull up above an obstruction when you’re gliding down slope than when you’re angling up and already using most of your engine power.

 I put the Cessna into a climb. When I got up to 8500 feet, I began my search in the area surrounding Daggett Pass at the top of Kingsbury.

The Cessna was about 30 years old, with a sun-bleached instrument panel and cracked, ripped fabric seat covers. The cockpit glazing was abraded and slightly fogged. It was hard to see clearly as I reached altitude and once again approached the mountains. But the low stall speed allowed me to glide down at a comfortable 65 knots.

I did a zig-zag search pattern, always heading down at a gentle angle like a skier traversing back and forth to descend a mountain. I watched for cliff faces and a dark-colored van as well as for a dark pickup with a light topper. I stayed within a perimeter that seemed the maximum distance from the center of town that someone could drive in twenty minutes.

Paco kept his face turned to the window. He said nothing.

After an hour, we’d covered all of the areas adjacent to Kingsbury Grade. I even followed some dirt trails that looked like they’d be accessible by a van. But there were only a few cliff areas that fit what Paco described, and none of them had a van nearby. I also saw four different pickups with toppers over the beds, but in each case, the toppers were dark in color.

I wanted to begin a new search above the East Shore, taking the same approach, gliding down from above. I pushed the throttle all the way forward and pulled back on the yoke. The engine roared like an old VW Beetle with the accelerator floored. Although the plane’s rate of climb was not fast, it ran smoothly. I stayed away from the mountains as I gained altitude.

I started above the highest roads surrounding Zephyr Heights, flew back and forth, looking for cliffs, following obscure trails out into the forest.

Gradually, I moved north toward Cave Rock and on toward Glenbrook, scanning all of the areas one could reach by van. When I was certain that I was more than a half hour drive out of South Lake Tahoe, I banked around down slope, checking out every obscure corner, trying to think like a thug who planned to meet and shoot a woman farmer.

My search was fruitless. Either Paco had given me information that wasn’t accurate, or I’d made an error in judgment. Or, possibly, the men who’d shot Cassie had come back and moved or hidden the van and the shooting victim.

As I flew, I reconsidered the possibilities for where she could have driven her van. The vast majority of the Tahoe Basin is road-less wilderness. A high-clearance, 4-wheel-drive vehicle could access many of the old logging trails. But it was unlikely that the van fell into that category. It would be limited to normal roads, which made my search area relatively small. I felt confident that I’d done a thorough search, but I hadn’t seen anything.

Frustrated, I brought the Cessna back around and headed back south. I could take a shortcut across the lake, but I stayed over the shore, scouting the mountains, looking for any spots I’d missed. I was approaching the Stateline hotels when I saw a Dodge Ram pickup, dark brown, with a white topper.

I throttled back and got Diamond on my cell.

“What’s all that noise?” he shouted.

“Paco and I are doing an aerial search, looking for Cassie’s van. Where are you?”

“Coming down Kingsbury, lake side.”

“I’m the Cessna above the hotels.”

 We shouted over the roar of wind. I told him about the pickup.

“It’s traveling southwest on Highway Fifty, just passing the Kingsbury Grade turnoff.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “Can you watch him? Fly circles or something?”

“Will do,” I said as I put the plane into a tight bank to the left. I watched over my shoulder as the plane turned away. Then I caught a view of the pickup on the other side as we came all the way around.

“Turning into the Mont Bleu parking lot,” I shouted into my cell.

“Got it,” Diamond said.

“The truck is parking on the open lot, near the ramp.”

“I’m just now turning from Kingsbury onto Fifty,” Diamond said.

I was still circling counter-clockwise. With the pickup now stationary, I kept it at the center of my circle. I pushed in the yoke a bit to lose some altitude. When I was down to 500 feet AGL, I leveled off. I glanced to the northeast, saw Diamond’s patrol unit approaching.

“The driver’s door of the pickup is open,” I shouted. “A person is getting out. Wearing a black jacket, blue jeans. Looks like a woman. It looks like she’s carrying a bundle of flowers. She’s walking toward the hotel.”

As I completed my next revolution, I saw Diamond pulling into the parking lot. He parked behind the pickup and got out.

The woman opened the door of Mont Bleu and walked inside.

Diamond looked into the pickup’s windshield, then walked around back. He peered into one of the small dark windows of the topper, holding his hands next to his face. Then he reached for the handle of the topper gate. It was unlocked. Diamond lifted it up and looked inside.

Not exactly by the book. But I would have looked inside, too.

Diamond shut the topper gate.

I saw him raise his cell phone to his mouth.

“It’s from one of the local flower shops,” he shouted. “The back is filled with enough flowers for a wedding. There are flowers on the front seat. She’s obviously making deliveries.”

“Roger,” I said. “I’ll keep searching.”

 I continued to fly a search pattern until I felt I’d covered all possible areas Cassie could have driven to with the boy.

It was a good time to head back to the airport as the clouds coming in over the Sierra crest were getting thicker and darker.

I was on a flight path that would allow me to slip into the landing pattern on the final leg when I noticed some rock outcroppings close to town near the base of Heavenly Resort. They were just around the side of the mountain from The Face and Gunbarrel ski runs. It was the same area where the young autistic girl had fled a year before, lost in the dark until Spot found her.

I banked the Cessna and came around by the outcroppings. From the air they didn’t look like much, rocky projections only 50 or 60 feet tall. They wouldn’t be notable unless you were on the prairie. But from the perspective of a Central Valley kid looking out a van window at night, they might look like cliffs.

I pointed. “See those rocks, Paco? They kind of sit at a right angle from each other. Remember how you said that Cassie parked in front of cliffs? What do you think? Could those be the cliffs?”

Paco just stared down at them. He didn’t speak. I couldn’t tell if it was just another instance of his engagement being dialed down to the lowest setting. Or was he revisiting that early morning and the trauma of the shooting?

“I don’t know,” he finally said.

The rocks weren’t on a paved road, but they were near Pioneer Trail, and the nearby ground was grus, a kind of coarse granite sand. It looked packed as if high school kids regularly drove off-road to party in the shelter of the rocks.

I took a pass over the outcroppings, banked around 180 degrees, then came back again. The rocks were on a slope. I flew across the slope. I saw no sign of a van or anything else unusual.

It looked like there was a trail that went around the back, upper side of the rocks. If the woman had driven the van behind the rocks, I wouldn’t be able to see it from the air unless I flew very close to the trees above the rocks.

My flight had so far been calm. But even on calm days, there can be thermals and downdrafts in the mountains, especially with increasing clouds. Nevertheless, I thought I could get in closer without too much risk.

I lined up the Cessna so that I could again find a line that was like skiing a traverse, heading across the mountain at a slight downward angle.

My pass over the rocky projection revealed nothing, but I was still too far up and out to see clearly behind the rocks.

From Paco’s description, his foster mom was shot not far from the van. There was no van nearby, but it may have been moved. And if someone dumped a body, they would likely leave it where it would be difficult to see from an air search.

I banked in a large circle and came back around, close to my original track but picking a course that was much closer to the trees above the rocky outcropping.

“There,” Paco said, pointing. It was the first voluntary word he’d said since we took off.