Voodoo Ridge (26 page)

“Chad’s dead,” I said.

He paused in midgulp and chuckled, like he thought I was kidding around.

“Sure he is.”

“Outside Lake Tahoe. He was shot. A little more than a week ago.”

Murtha studied me.

“Are you bullshitting me? He got
shot
?”

I nodded.

“Shit.” Murtha downed the rest of his drink, refilled it, and settled into his red recliner, making a face like his lower back hurt. “I should’ve seen it coming, man.”

I said nothing.

More than a month had gone by since they’d last spoken, Murtha said. Chad had called to tell him that he’d been hired by his uncle Gordon at minimum wage, catering to rich assholes at the Lake Tahoe airport. Chad had said he hated the work.

“I told him, ‘Hey, at least you got a job,’ ” Murtha said. “Steady work for ex-cons, that don’t come along every day, you know?”

I nodded.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Murtha said, “Chad wasn’t complaining none. He said his uncle was letting him sleep on a cot where they keep the airplanes or some shit. Wasn’t even charging him nothing to stay. Free rent. Beer money. Sounded like a pretty sweet setup to me. But, like I said, I didn’t see it coming. Should’ve said something to him. Only I didn’t, goddammit.”

“Tell him what, Jethro?”

“To watch his back. His uncle Gordon? The dude’s dirty as they come. Up to all kinds of nasty shit.”

“How do you know that?”

“Chad told me.” Murtha propped his hands behind his head and his feet on the floor in front him, facing me directly—body language that conveyed openness. “I’ll tell you something else he told me, too. You know Iran?”

“I’ve heard of it a time or two.”

“Yeah, well, Chad’s uncle, he’s running some kind of scam with some hardcore Iranian dudes living up there in Tahoe. It had Chad freaked the fuck out.”

“What kind of scam?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. Too scared.” Murtha lit a Camel, exhaled smoke through his nose, and eyed me through blue tobacco haze. “So what
are
you doing here, anyway, Mr. . . . Logan, is it?” he said, glancing at the business card I’d given him. “Chad worked at an airport. You’re a flight instructor. That tells me something.”

“It tells you nothing.” I got up and headed for the door. “Thanks for your time, Jethro.”

“I’m definitely interested in taking flying lessons,” he said. “Soon as I make some bank.”

“Or rob one.”

“Exactly.”

He grinned as I left.

S
O
C
HAD
Lovejoy’s Uncle Gordon was up to no good. I’d wondered about him all along. Murtha’s insights gave me new direction, new hope, a viable lead to follow. Walking to my truck, I was feeling reenergized, almost exuberant, when my phone rang.

“Logan.”

“It’s Matt Streeter.”

I could feel my pulse quicken.

“What’s up, Deputy?”

He asked me where I was.

“I’m in LA. Why?”

“How soon can you make it up to Lake Tahoe?”

His voice sounded different, an odd flatness to it.

“Why?”

“I’d prefer we talk in person.”

“I’d prefer we talk now.”

Streeter paused, as if gathering his courage.

“We’ve located some remains.”

SEVENTEEN

W
ith the
Duck
still suffering electrical system issues and out of commission, I drove through the night as fast as my truck would carry me from Los Angeles to South Lake Tahoe. Four hundred and eighty miles. Nearly seven hours, excluding two brief pit stops for octane and caffeine. I focused on the far reaches of my headlights and fought to keep submerged the anguish that threatened to overwhelm me.

The drive was no scenic tour. The Golden State Freeway, which constituted more than three quarters of the route, runs the length of California’s semiarid Central Valley like a concrete spine. In daylight, it is a featureless, litter-strewn highway upon which most everyone flagrantly ignores the posted speed limit, anxious to escape as fast as possible the wasteland surrounding them. Driving the route in darkness might seem a blessing—but not when the eyes and brain are denied distraction. A man can keep his thoughts in neutral for only so long before his mind automatically slips back into gear.

Please God, Buddha, Allah. Don’t let it be my woman.

I passed a tractor trailer, a Kenworth, hauling a load of lemons. The lemons reminded me of the time a few weeks after we were first married when Savannah decided to bake me a meringue pie and left it in the oven too long. It looked like something left over from Hiroshima. She laughed at my teasing, a good sport, then went into the bathroom, locked the door, and sobbed. It was the last time she ever baked me anything.

I shouldn‘t have said what I said. You were doing something nice for me and I was a complete jerk. I’m sorry, Savannah. For what I did. For everything I didn’t do.

The road ahead seemed to blur. For a second, I thought the windshield had fogged up. Then I realized I was crying. I wiped away the tears angrily and drove on.

A light snow was falling as I turned off the freeway near Elk Grove onto US 50, south of what was once Mather Air Force Base, and began climbing into the rising sun. The highway remained ice-free for the most part, even as the weather turned colder. Air temperature lapses an average three and a half degrees for every thousand feet of altitude gained. I can’t say how cold it was on the valley floor a mile below me, but by the time I reached South Lake Tahoe a little before 0700, the digital thermometer outside Alpine Bank and Trust on the town’s far western approach showed eighteen degrees.

Streeter wanted me to contact him as soon as I pulled into town. I called from the bank’s parking lot. He was there inside of five minutes. He got out of his Jeep and into my truck with a manila file folder under his right arm, his expression grim.

“Thank you for coming up. I know it’s a long way on short notice.”

I nodded.

His jaw muscles were tight. He wouldn’t make eye contact. He no more wanted to do what we were about to do than I did.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Just tell me.”

He nodded, appreciative of my straightforwardness, and gazed down at the file folder now resting on his left thigh.

“Some of these pictures may be very graphic in nature to you. I apologize in advance.”

“I’ve been to a few rodeos,” I said as evenly as I could.

He hesitated, then handed me the folder.

I opened it. I had to force myself to breathe.

The first photos were of a woman’s sweater, a bra, a pair of panties, and a pair of brown suede boots. They’d all been badly burned.

“Do you recognize any of those garments?” Streeter asked.

“No.”

After the pictures of clothing came autopsy photos, more than a dozen in all. They were of a dead woman. Like her clothes, she, too, had been burned. What was left of her hair appeared to be dark red, like Savannah’s. Her face was charred, unrecognizable. Her nose was gone. Her eyes were gone. The jaw was parted. The teeth were white and perfect. Like Savannah’s.

“Where did you find her?”

“Down a ravine, south of town. A car caught fire. She didn’t have any ID on her. We’re having some trouble getting good prints, given the extent of injury. I figured you’d want to know.”

I flipped slowly through the photos. Burned hands. Long, elegant fingers, like Savannah’s. Burgundy fingernails, like hers. Burned legs. Blackened arms. The limbs really didn’t look like Savannah’s. Or did they? I couldn’t be certain. Nausea floated up from my stomach. I let out a breath, struggling to remain focused, trying not to cry.

“Were you able to establish a cause of death?”

“Not yet.”

“Was she violated sexually?”

“We won’t know that until the coroner comes back with his full results.”

A photo of the left leg caught my attention. A patch of skin on the inside of her upper thigh had been spared from the flames that had consumed much of the rest of her. When Savannah was a teenager, long before it had become a social requirement that every young person in America get tattooed, Savannah had gotten inked—a small, delicate red rose that took me by surprise when I first discovered it, kissing my way up her leg.

“You don’t strike me as the provocative, renegade type,” I told her at the time.

“You want provocative?” she said alluringly, both of us naked. “I’ll show you provocative.”

And then, to my great pleasure, she did.

I held up the photo of the leg and looked closer:

There was no tattoo. I suddenly felt light-headed.

“This isn’t Savannah.”

“Are you sure?”

I explained to Streeter why I was.

He sat back and exhaled. He seemed almost more relieved than I was, but I doubted it.

It was possible, he said, that the woman in the photographs hadn’t met with foul play, that she’d simply lost control of her car on a patch of ice and rolled into the ditch where her car caught fire. It happens all the time in winter, in the mountains.

“I’m sorry you had to go through this,” he said. “It’s just, we had to know.”

I told him what Jethro Murtha, the ex-con, had passed along to me about Chad Lovejoy’s uncle, airport executive Gordon Priest, and Murtha’s assertion that Priest was involved in some sort of scam with Iranian immigrants living in the Tahoe area.

“Did he tell you that Priest or these Iranians killed Chad?” Streeter asked.

“All he said was that Chad found out what Priest was up to and that Chad was spooked. I’m pretty certain he didn’t know the kid was dead until I told him.”

“I do not want you approaching Gordon Priest. Let us do our job. Is that understood?”

I nodded.

The deputy dug a phone out of the pocket of his green sheriff’s jacket and asked me for Murtha’s telephone number, along with the ex-con’s address. He typed them into the phone with his thumbs while telling me about the weapon that had been used to kill Chad Lovejoy.

Forensic examination showed that the bullets had been fired from a .40-caliber Glock, among the more common handguns on the market these days. The rounds, Streeter said, had been checked against ballistic databases in both California and Nevada to determine if the Glock had been used in any other crimes. No matches came up.

“Have you made any progress in finding Savannah? Anything tangible?”

“We still have plenty of people left to talk to,” the cop said, “but I think it’s safe to say at this point there aren’t any arrests imminent.”

I was rapidly coming to dislike anything and everyone, including Deputy Streeter. I was exhausted and hungry. My shoulders ached. My knee ached. The pounding pressure inside my skull felt like I was diving on a shipwreck.

“Did you get any sleep last night while you were driving in?” he asked me.

“No.”

“You’re more than welcome to crash at my place if you want. I’ve got an extra bedroom.”

Considering the depth of my exhaustion and the fact that motels don’t usually allow check-in before midafternoon, I thanked him for his hospitality.

“The least I could do,” Streeter said, taking a slip of paper out of the file, jotting down his home address, and handing it to me, “making you drive all the way up here for essentially nothing.”

Streeter roomed with Deputy Kyle Woo. He said he’d call to see if Woo was home, and to let him know I was coming over.

T
HE TWO
cops lived not far from the airport in a rented, three-bedroom, chalet-style house with a steeply pitched cathedral roof and a floor-to-ceiling moss rock fireplace. Their guest room, cluttered with moving boxes and exercise gear, was on the first floor, off the kitchen. The bed was a futon outfitted with a patchwork quilt that Woo said his grandmother had sewn.

“There’s towels on the shelf in the bathroom,” he said. “Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge, assuming you can find anything that’s not moldy. We don’t do much cooking around here.”

“Sounds good.”

He was getting ready to go to work, strapping on his holstered Glock and sliding a hammerless .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, his backup weapon, into an ankle rig under the right leg of his uniform trousers.