Voodoo Ridge (21 page)

I honestly didn’t know what else to do, Savannah. Please forgive me.

“Mr. Logan?”

Standing over me was a burly Latino police officer in his fifties. He wore silver captain’s bars on his collar and a salt-and-pepper crumb catcher on his upper lip. With him was a compact, clean-shaven man of about thirty-five with dark, movie-star features and perfect hair. But for the pistol bulge under the right armpit of his well-tailored gray business suit, he could’ve passed for a bank executive.

“This is FBI Special Agent Pellegrini from the Santa Maria field office,” the captain said. “We’ve asked the justice department to come aboard for obvious reasons.”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Pellegrini said.

“Whatever you need.”

“I’ll leave you two to it,” the captain said, shaking the fed’s hand and walking off.

Pellegrini sat down in the chair beside mine, removing a small digital voice recorder from his breast pocket and clicking it on.

“You realize,” he said, resting the recorder on the arm of my chair, “that you violated any number of federal statutes, flying the contents of that suitcase in here, without proper notice or authorization.”

“So nice to meet you, too, Agent. So glad we could establish a warm and trusting rapport before you tried to bend me over.”

“I just want to let you know where I’m coming from, that’s all.”

I wasn’t in the mood to be bullied. Especially for no apparent reason.

“Look,” I said, “maybe the news hasn’t filtered down to the hinterlands, where Quantico typically parks its underachievers: J. Edgar Hoover’s dead. They buried him in a pleated skirt. So why don’t you knock off the old school, cooperation-through-intimidation G-man routine. Because right now, truthfully, I could give a rip about your ‘proper notice and authorization.’ ”

“I understand she’s your former wife,” Pellegrini said, “the party who’s missing?”

“We’re divorced. We were getting remarried.”

“I’m told she comes from money.”

“Meaning what? That I had some kind of financial motive to do her harm?”

Pellegrini looked at me evenly and said nothing, a standard interrogation tactic: wait for the interviewee to compulsively fill the silence with some inadvertent revelation.

“If I were going to hurt her,” I said, “wouldn’t logic dictate that I wait until the ink dried on our marriage certificate? California’s a community property state. That way, I could legally claim half her assets, no?”

“I don’t know,” Pellegrini said, “you tell me.”

“I just did.”

“How did you come to acquire the uranium, Mr. Logan?”

I’d had enough of the guy and his pointless questions. I stood, ‘accidentally’ brushing his tape recorder on the floor. The back cover fell off and two batteries flew out like victims ejected from a car crash.

“I’m not the bad guy here, Agent Pellegrini. Either read me my rights and hook me up, or this conversation’s over.”

He stooped to gather the pieces of his recorder and glared at me.

“I’m just doing my job, Mr. Logan.”

“If you were doing your job, Agent Pellegrini, you’d go find her.”

I
REFUELED
and flew back to South Lake Tahoe that afternoon to assist Streeter in the search for Savannah. Gordon Priest, the manager at Summit Aviation Services, was gone for the day. Marlene, Priest’s receptionist, welcomed my return with a heartfelt hug and fresh oatmeal cookies. They were all out of four-wheel-drive vehicles, she said, but I probably wouldn’t be needing one; there was no snow in the extended forecast. She rented me a white Ford Focus at 60 percent off the normal daily rate because, she said, she felt bad for me. The car had an infant seat in the back. I put it in the trunk.

Savannah’s disappearance made the local paper that morning, along with a hangdog photo of me holding up my photo of her. Every network affiliate in nearby Reno picked up the story. No mention was made of the stolen uranium. The FBI decided that the information was a matter of national security and squelched any public disclosure about it. When reporters in Santa Maria asked what the hubbub had been about at the airport, they were told that a multiagency training exercise had taken place there. Hotel employees and other civilian witnesses were made to sign nondisclosure agreements and threatened with arrest if they talked.

“Have You Seen This Woman?” notices and pictures of Savannah went up in store windows and on telephone poles throughout the Lake Tahoe area. Platoons of volunteers scoured the surrounding forests, while I knocked on doors and law enforcement personnel interviewed dozens of prospective witnesses. But after putting in twenty-hour days for more than a week, and sleeping four restless hours a night at the Econo Lodge, I realized that faint progress, if that, had been made. Streeter conceded that he and his fellow detectives could find no trace of Savannah and were no closer to identifying the killer who’d called himself Crocodile Dundee than they’d been at the outset of their investigation.

In the interim, I’d become a celebrity of sorts. Residents recognized me on the street. They weren’t shy about approaching, offering me encouragement.

“Keep the faith.”

“Don’t stop believing.”

“We’re all praying for you.”

I tried to respond appreciatively, but I felt undeserving of their moral support. Savannah had vanished because of me. I was entitled to no one’s sympathy.

“You doing OK, doll?”

Reeking of tobacco, Ruby, the ancient waitress at Steve’s Coffee Shop, patted my shoulder as she refilled my coffee mug.

“Hanging in there,” I said.

“If you need anything else, you lemme know.”

“Thanks, Ruby.”

I stared down at the half-eaten plate of bacon and eggs sitting on the pine table in front of me. My eyes felt heavy from exhaustion. My shoulders ached down deep. I checked my watch for lack of anything better to do: 0649. Another futile day loomed ahead.

“I know you. You’re that guy.”

I looked up slowly.

Standing beside my table, headed for the register, was a tall man with his breakfast check and a ten dollar bill in his hand. He was wearing a battered straw cowboy hat.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t.”

“You were looking for your lady. I was just finishing up a sewer cleanout over on Skyview. It was snowing to beat the band.”

“The Roto-Rooter guy.”

He extended his hand and said, “Dwayne.”

“Logan.”

We shook.

“Tell ya what,” he said, “it’s just a cryin’ shame they haven’t found her yet. I know everybody around here is pulling for you, putting out the positive brainwaves. Everybody.”

I thanked him for his concern and he stood there awkwardly with his hat in his hands, shifting his weight from one boot to another, the way people do when they feel the urge to say more but aren’t sure what to say, or how to say it.

“You mind me sitting down for a second?”

I gestured to the other side of the table. He took off his hat and lowered himself into the chair.

“Listen,” he said, leaning forward, closer, “I don’t mean to speak bad of nobody or anything, but if I was the cops, I’d be looking at all these registered sex offenders they got living around here. There’s hundreds of ’em. They’re everywhere. You can get their address on line.”

“Good to know.”

“It’s a real problem, and most people, they don’t even know about it. I got me one living two doors down. They let him out last year. Six little girls he molested and he gets what, three years? If it was me, I would’ve hung his ass.”

I nodded, in no mood to talk.

“Well, anyway,” Dwayne said, “good luck. I hope they find her and the scumbag who took her gets what’s coming to him.”

“Thanks.”

He walked to the cash register where Ruby was happy to take his money.

When I was in the air force, not long out of the academy, a squadron commander who’d earned a Silver Star flying A-1 Skyraiders in Vietnam told me that he could always find enemy ground forces by listening for them from the air. How, I asked him, can you hear the enemy from a Plexiglass-enclosed cockpit, with a big radial engine roaring in front of you and other pilots or air traffic controllers chattering loudly inside your helmet?

“You open your ears,” he said, “close your eyes, and just . . .
listen
.”

Years later, on tank-busting missions over Iraq, I did the same thing. I can’t explain why, but the tactic often worked.

Talk to me, Savannah. Where are you? Help me find you.

I closed my eyes and opened my ears, listening for her, hoping to
feel
her, but all I heard was the metallic scraping of forks and knives on breakfast plates, and the low murmur of conversations, punctuated by occasional laughter among my fellow diners.

My appetite was gone. I gulped a last sip of black coffee, deposited enough cash on the table to cover my meal and cigarette money for Ruby, and left.

Inn keepers Johnny and Gwen Kavitch, accompanied by their panty-sniffing son, Preston, were walking into the restaurant as I exited. We crossed paths without exchanging words. The elder Kavitches kept their eyes to the ground, pretending not to recognize me. But as Johnny held the door for his wife, Preston turned toward me and leered.

True Buddhists believe in the cultivation of forgiveness and kindness through love. Cultivate enough goodwill, they assert, and you can insulate yourself from the coldest of insults. I’d like to believe that someday I’ll get there. On that frigid morning, I restrained myself from wiping the grin off Preston Kavitch’s face and turning him into a human pretzel. Call it progress.

There was little left for me to do in South Lake Tahoe but drive around, dowsing as if for water, hoping divine intervention might somehow lead me to Savannah. It all felt so futile.

I headed to the airport to retrieve Savannah’s luggage and the duffel that I’d left behind with Marlene, and to head home.

“You’re not listening to me,” she kept saying into the phone, bent forward in her chair, rubbing her forehead. She glanced up as I walked in and raised one finger as if to say she’d only be a minute. “We can sell the house. It’s not about the bills, honey, it’s about making our marriage work. Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you back.”

I waited until she signed off.

“Problems on the home front?”

“Money issues.” Marlene forced a smile. “What else is new, right?”

She fetched our bags from a closet and offered me some cookies for my flight back to Rancho Bonita, which I declined. Sweets were the last thing on my mind.

FOURTEEN

P
iloting a small airplane is not unlike sex. If done well, both can be ecstatic, mind-blowing experiences. Done poorly, embarrassing disaster bodes. Do either long enough, and you learn to perform without consciously thinking about performing, satisfying the needs of the moment while your mind focuses elsewhere.

As I flew the
Ruptured Duck
home that morning, my thoughts remained focused on the man who’d taken Savannah from me. Who was he? Why did he do what he had?

I knew that he had to have been acquainted with Chad Lovejoy, and that he lived in proximity to Lake Tahoe. After all, the two of them on relatively short notice had hiked up to the crash site together. They’d found uranium, realized its potential value, and Lovejoy had lost his life for it. Streeter surmised that Lovejoy had told Dundee all about me, how I was a pilot, how I’d spotted the downed airplane, and how Savannah and I were staying at a local B&B, where Dundee subsequently abducted her to strong-arm me into airlifting his ill-gained treasure out of Lake Tahoe.

The problem was that Lovejoy had done time in state prison. He’d interacted with innumerable other inmates, many of whom, like him, had since been released from custody. Dozens lived in and around Lake Tahoe. Any one of them, Streeter believed, could have been Dundee.

“It’s going to take time,” Streeter admitted before I took off for Rancho Bonita. “I’d advise you not to get your hopes up.”

“What hopes?”

He didn’t have to tell me that the more time passed, the more likely it was that Savannah was dead.

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, contact Rancho Bonita Tower, one-one nine, point six.” The approach controller’s voice in my headset jarred me from the depths.

“Point six,” I responded. The GPS showed a twelve-minute ETA. I switched frequencies on my number two radio. “Tower, Cessna Four Charlie Lima, VFR descent.”

“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, descent, your discretion.”

One thought consumed me: that after I landed, I had to find a way to identify Dundee. And kill him.