Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) (28 page)

I kept my face low, trying to breathe the cleaner air next to the floor. I swept my arms as I moved, reaching left and right, trying to feel for Joseph.

Maybe there was a light switch somewhere, but I’d quickly succumb if I stood up to search the walls for it.

“Joseph!” I yelled again, knowing it was futile.

The smoke got worse as I crawled back and forth across the floor. I had to stop to put my lips right next to the floor to suck air, then hold my breath as I continued my attempt at a grid search in the dark.

I ran into a hard piece of furniture, striking it with my shoulder. Running my hands over it, it seemed to be a table, perhaps the desk Joseph had referred to. But I could find no desk chair.

Still sweeping my hands back and forth, I continued to crawl around the desk, counting the sides so that I could resume my grid search in the same place.

In the distance below me came the crash of breaking glass. Maybe someone else was coming to help. Or maybe the heat of the fire had broken a window. A steady noise began to grow, like a sudden wind. It grew to a roar. I felt vibration in the floor beneath my hands and knees. A sudden rush of hot air swirled around my head.

The draft I feared had started. The house was turning into a chimney of fire. If I wanted to survive, I had to get back out the window immediately.

But Joseph was here. Somewhere. Unseen. Unconscious. About to die if he wasn’t already dead.

I crawled faster. Hit the far wall. Turned back. Raced on hands and knees to the opposite wall. Turned again. Sucked air off the floor. Crawled faster. My lungs burned. I put my lips directly on the floor to breathe air. But the smoke still made me choke. I didn’t think I could make it. Even if I gave up on Joseph, I would still die from smoke inhalation.

Lips to the floor again, I sucked more air. Wheezed. Hacked. Felt a soft brush of fabric on my left fingertips.

I spun. Rushed toward the feeling.

A man. On his side. I felt his position. His arms were rigid, tied to the arms of a chair. My fingernails were claws as I found the duct tape, ripped it into pieces. I got Joseph free from the chair. Started to drag him. Got confused as to where the window I’d broken was.

I pulled Joseph to the wall. Went along the wall. Hit a corner. Lowered my lips to the floor as close to the corner as possible. Sucked multiple breaths. Turned and went down the next wall, pulling Joseph with me.

The roar of fire wind was an assault on my ears.

Yellow light appeared in what seemed like the middle of the room. A plume of sparks and embers shot up into black smoke from a hole in the floor.

I kept dragging Joseph.

The fire air and smoke blew across my back as I crawled. I stopped. That meant the smoke was exiting out an opening.

The window.

I backed up. I’d crawled right past the broken window.

I sucked more air off the floor. Three lungfuls. Four. Then held my breath.

Determined not to breathe, I stood up into a blast of smoke hot enough to singe my eyelashes. I lifted Joseph, got my arm around his waist. My movements were blind as I reached my leg out through the broken glass shards and felt for the ladder.

It wasn’t there. I moved my leg sideways. Then down. I braced my free arm against the inside of the window frame and lowered my foot farther.

My foot touched the ladder. I found the rung, shifted my weight, held Joseph tight to my body as I got myself through the opening.

The fire blast blew hard into my face, searing my skin.

But I was on the ladder, and the moment I stepped down two rungs, we were back into clean cool air. I kept one arm around Joseph and used my other hand on the ladder as I carried him down to waiting firemen and paramedics.

FORTY-FOUR

The next morning, I was still hacking, but I could breathe better. The cold mountain air out on my deck was clear and clean, a gift for which I had new appreciation.

According to the doctor I got on the phone, Joseph was in rough shape with a broken arm and singed lungs. But the CPR had revived him, and they thought he’d eventually make a complete recovery. He was in Intensive Care, and he wouldn’t be speaking for at least a couple of days or more. There was nothing anyone could do but wait.

I checked back in with the Carson City County sergeant I’d spoken to the night before. He had little to add to what we already knew. The Victorian was abandoned and had been tagged for demolition. The fire was so intense that they didn’t think the fire marshal would find any clues.

We agreed to speak again if we learned anything more.

I realized that the killer must have followed me, saw me talking to Joseph, and decided that Joseph had information about the diamond. It was because of me that Joseph was attacked.

I thought again about Scarlett calling me for help. Then I remembered the terror on Felicite’s face when the killer shot out the window at her neighbor’s house, a shot that was no doubt intended for me. It seemed that I continued to make everything much worse instead of better.

Vince Russo was easy to find, but his voicemail said he’d be back in his office tomorrow. I hung up without leaving a message. Despite the voicemail message about being out of town, I found his house in the Keys and knocked on the door, but there was no answer.

I left and drove up to the safe house and spoke to Adam.

He was having one of his bad days. He still didn’t remember me. Then, gradually, he showed some recognition. His eyes went from unfocused to focused and back, as if he were fading in and out like a weak radio station. Adam gripped Blondie as she lay on his lap. Most yellow Labs are too big to curl up on their owner’s lap, but Blondie was small against Adam’s massive bulk. It was clear that her presence reassured him.

In time, I asked Adam to let me look through more photos on his phone. He looked puzzled, then handed it to me.

Before I clicked on his photo roll, I clicked the email icon to see if it was TahoeBlueFire, but it was password locked, so I couldn’t tell his address. I didn’t want to ask him because it could cause him to cut me off from his phone photos or any further information.

I started scrolling through his photos. After a few minutes during which Adam and Blondie didn’t move, I came to a photo of a group of people. It was taken in dim light, as if indoors at night. The photo caught my attention because the person on the right side of the group was Scarlett Milo. And next to her was a young woman who looked like the photo of Darla Ali that her roommate Sanford Burroughs had printed out for me. To the left of them was a guy I didn’t recognize, one in his late twenties. Sean Warner?

“Take a look at this photo.” I showed it to Adam. “Do you recognize these people?”

He shook his head. “No. Photos d...”

“Don’t?”

“Don’t seem to help my memory,” he continued.

“What about the woman on the far right? Recognize her?”

“No.” He squinted at the phone, then shook his head. “I’ve never seen her before. I think.”

“Does the photo remind you of any particular place?”

“No.”

I looked at the photo details. “It was taken three weeks ago at eight p.m. Does that tell you where you might have been?”

“I can’t remember what happened five minutes ago.”

“Do you keep a calendar?”

“No.”

“Then how do you remember to go to appointments?” I asked.

“The only appointments I have are at the d...”

“Doctor?”

“Doctor’s office. I give them my phone, and they set the time and date in the appointment app. My timer song goes off two different times before the appointment. Once in the morning as a reminder and a second time a half hour before I’m supposed to be there so I know it’s time to get in my truck and drive down to South Lake Tahoe.”

“Can you show me how it works?” I handed him the phone.

He pointed to an icon on the screen. “When it plays, I click on this app and then hit this button. That way they know I heard the message. This is the song that comes on.” He tapped another button, and Jackson Browne sang ‘Doctor My Eyes.’

Adam handed me his phone. I brought back the picture of the group. I pointed at Scarlett’s picture. “The woman in the photo was the first person who died. She was shot and killed in Squaw Valley. Her name was Scarlett Milo. Does that information trigger any memories?”

“No. I’m no help to you. Something really bad is happening.” Adam was gripping Blondie so hard, she squirmed.

I said, “Adam, have you ever met an older gentleman whose name is Old Man Joseph?”

Adam shook his head.

“He lives on the North Shore and hangs out at the Tahoe Biltmore.”

“No. I never heard of him.”

I resumed scrolling through Adam’s photos. Adam sat patiently and waited. He seemed to fade away a bit as if unaware of my presence. There was nothing else that caught my attention. I turned off his phone and handed it to him.

“What are you doing with my phone?” he said, frowning.

“I was looking at your photos. You gave me your phone so I could look at your photos.”

“No, I didn’t. That’s my phone. You have no right to look at my photos.”

FORTY-FIVE

Adam began to get more tense and confused, so I said goodbye and left.

Back in the Jeep with Spot, I drove down Kingsbury Grade to my office. There were no phone messages and no email from the TahoeBlueFire email, so I sat at my desk and made some notes, trying to process what I’d learned. There were no clear indications for where I should look next. The picture in Adam’s phone that showed Scarlett and Darla was possibly my biggest single clue yet, but Adam’s failing memory made it a dead end.

I wondered if his step-sister Felicite might be helpful. She knew him better than anyone else.

I called Felicite, and she agreed to meet me at her house in San Francisco at nine o’clock in the evening. It was 4 p.m., which meant I’d miss the rush hour in both Sacramento and the Bay Area.

“Hey, Largeness, wanna go to the ocean?”

He jumped up from the rug in front of my desk, wagging.

Three hours later, we crested the coastal pass on I-80. I turned west on 37 and headed around the north end of the bay, figuring that it would be fastest to drop into The City over the Golden Gate and take 101 through the Presidio and Golden Gate Park to the Sunset District where Felicite had said she lived.

Because we’d made good time, I drove to the west side of Golden Gate park, found a parking place on Ocean Beach, and let Spot out for an evening run down the sand.

There was a thick-as-sea-foam fog pushing in off the Pacific. As Spot charged north up the beach along the breakers, his feet splashing in the advancing and retreating waters, he disappeared into the twilight fog. I continued to walk. After a time, he reappeared, an apparition in the mist that morphed into a Dane charging straight toward me. Spot raced past, close enough to threaten an injurious collision, then disappeared again.

When he slowed, I coaxed him back into the Jeep. He smelled of sea salt, and he tracked a half bucket of sand onto the back seat.

Felicite’s house was a small bungalow in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset. The Sunset District was mostly sand dunes in the 19th century, but it had been gridded off and paved with a regular network of north-south, east-west streets. The Sunset District was known for the fog pushing in off the Pacific, but the Inner Sunset was the least foggy part.

Except when I showed up.

The atmosphere was more liquid than gaseous and so opaque that I had to get out of the Jeep three different times and walk halfway up to a house and use my penlight to read house numbers.

I found Felicite’s modest little terra cotta-painted bungalow two houses in from a corner. It faced west, so one would hope for occasional late afternoon sun. But on this night I might as well have been on the planet Venus so thick was the fog. It was 9 p.m. when I walked up to her door.

There was a small doorbell button that glowed a dim yellow in the late evening. I pressed it but heard no chime from within. I waited. Eventually, the door opened. Felicite smiled and ushered me in, standing aside as I walked into an entry bathed in soft light coming from a big spherical paper lantern with a single bulb at the center.

Felicite shut the door behind us, then walked past me and brought me into the small living room. She had a spare decor, a few simple pieces of furniture, two paper-shade lamps on little tables, and an old floor rug that looked Persian to my ignorant eyes. Felicite sat on a low-slung chair made of muslin fabric panels draped between the bars of an oak frame. She pointed me to a futon couch that was probably more comfortable for sleeping than sitting.

I got to the point.

“I think your brother Adam is somehow connected to the case I’m working on.”

“You mean the murder of that woman?” Her voice was high-pitched and shrill. Her fear was obvious.

“Two women and one man.”

Felicite looked horrified.

“You know that Scarlett Milo was shot. I don’t know if you’re aware that Sean Warner and Darla Ali were killed by a highway snow blower.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean, a highway snow blower?”

“What Caltrans calls rotary plows. When the snow in Tahoe gets too deep for the graders to push it, they use the blowers. You should be familiar with them having owned a house in Tahoe for several years.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. I’ve seen them a couple of times. I…” she hesitated. “I just didn’t understand for a moment. I’m afraid to ask, but how would a person be killed by a blower?”

“Someone drove into them with the blower. It must have been a very scary way to die.”

Felicite looked like she was going to get sick.

“You must also know that your brother Adam spent some time working at the South Lake Tahoe yard where they park and repair the rotaries.”

The woman shut her eyes against a sudden flood of tears. She put her hands to her face, her palms covering her eyes like a child trying to block out the image of a boogeyman.

“You’ve worried about Adam,” I said.

Felicite breathed short, gasping inhalations followed by staccato exhalations.

“Tell me what you’ve been thinking,” I said.

I waited a minute, then another, while her breathing gradually slowed. She wiped her face with the backs of her hands. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and soft.

“I was eight years old when they brought Adam to our group home in New Orleans. He was younger than me by two years, but he weighed more than twice my forty pounds. I never knew why he was an orphan, nor did I know why I was. But I felt sorry for him. At the age of eight, I felt like the wise, older sister. I sort of adopted him. I showed him how to act, what to do, what to say. I helped him dress, taught him how to hold his fork, explained how to behave around the adults, everything. I guess I always had a desire to be in control, and with Adam, I was pretty much in control of his entire life. Like me, he had no one. But within a couple of weeks of him coming to the home, we had each other by mutual agreement. By the time Adam was eleven, he was the biggest kid in the home, two hundred pounds and strong as a man. It’s not like I needed protecting, but all the other kids knew not to mess with me because Adam had my back. Like the other kids, we were misfits, and we had our problems, but we looked out for each other.”

“What kind of problems?” I asked.

Felicite looked off toward one of the windows. Outside, the fog glowed yellow in the light from the door and the post light near the sidewalk.

“Adam had a temper. Normally, he was fine. But if he got frustrated trying to learn something difficult, something he didn’t see the point of, things could boil over. Of course, many kids have a temper, but with Adam, he was so big that when he erupted, everyone kind of scattered. I think he learned that there was power in that, and it reinforced the behavior. Act out and the world cowers at your feet. It sort of gave him the wrong message.”

“You think it encouraged bad behavior?”

Felicite nodded.

An ugly, unbidden thought came to me. “Let me guess,” I said.

Felicite looked at me with alarm.

I said, “Adam set fires.”

Felicite burst into tears for the second time, her hands back at her face, knuckles burrowing into her eyes and temples. She turned her head left and right as she cried. She turned sideways in her chair and drew her knees up to her chest, her sobs wrenching.

It took longer this time for her to calm. “I was there at my house in Tahoe, sleeping soundly, when Adam yelled up from the kitchen that the house was on fire. From the moment I woke up, it felt funny. He didn’t come up to shake me awake. He called from downstairs. It wasn’t like him. Adam wouldn’t do that, calling from a distance.”

“What would you have expected him to do?”

“The normal Adam would have run up the stairs and picked me up out of bed. I would have awakened in his arms as he carried me down the stairs. Instead, he was removed, awkward.” Felicite looked at me with reddened eyes, swollen and tormented with sadness. “From the moment I awoke, I worried that he had set the fire.”

We sat in silence for a minute.

“I’m so sorry,” I finally said. “Tell me about the arson.”

“I don’t think Adam meant any harm. I really don’t. He just lit a fire in the alley when he was a boy. He wasn’t trying to destroy anything. It was more about experimentation. Unfortunately, the fire spread. They got it put out before any serious damage was done.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No.” Felicite shook her head vigorously. “It was just a case of a boy playing with fire. But the authorities treated it like it was a real serious crime. Like Adam was trying to burn down the building. It didn’t help that he was so big. The authorities had a hard time visualizing a twelve-year-old kid in that big body.”

“What happened?”

“He went through the juvenile court system. He spent some time in a lockup. Eventually, he was allowed to come back to the group home under court supervision.”

“Does the idea that he could have burned down your house surprise you? Or does it merely disappoint you?”

Felicite shook her head again, repeatedly as she spoke, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Felicite looked at me with great worry, as if I were about to drop a bomb on her.

“Do you think Adam could have committed murder?”

“I don’t know! He’s not the type, I swear.”

“But…” I said, prompting her to continue.

“There’s something else.”

I waited.

“I don’t want to tell you, but you’ll find it out if you start looking into his past.”

“He got into more trouble?”

“No. In fact, it was something he did right.” She paused, thinking, deciding how to tell me. “The summer after Adam was in the eleventh grade, he applied for a scholarship to attend a summer camp. He submitted a poem as his entry essay, and he won. So he went off to this rural camp for three weeks. They had lots of activities like learning to swim, which he’d never done before. But when he came home, it turns out that his favorite activity was shooting.”

“Target shooting?” I said, a hollow feeling growing in my stomach.

“Yes. With rifles. Adam said they used air rifles, which were supposedly less powerful than regular rifles, whatever that means. A rifle is still a rifle, right? Anyway, Adam was very proud because he won the camp sharpshooter contest.”

“I understand why it is an upsetting thought,” I said.

We were silent a moment. “Let’s say that Adam did commit murder,” I said. “What would you imagine could drive Adam to do that?”

Felicite frowned. “You mean like, was it his temper and someone made him really mad? Or was he trying to cover up some crime? Or it was part of committing a crime? Like that?”

“Like that,” I said.

“Then I would say it was his temper. Adam has never been able to express anger in a normal way. He always just acts calm.”

“Unless someone pushes his buttons?” I said.

Felicite nodded. “Then he explodes. He once told me that was his secret to setting those sack records. He imagined that he was really, really angry at the guards blocking for the quarterback. So he would explode across the line and just blow through them.”

I thanked Felicite and left.

It was ten-thirty as I drove away and two-thirty in the morning as I turned up the mountain to my cabin. Spot had snoozed the entire way.