Voodoo Ridge (27 page)

“We’ve had some burglaries in the neighborhood,” Woo said. “Just remember to lock the front door and turn down the heat before you leave.”

“Will do. Thanks for letting me stay.”

He nodded, his affect flat, and left.

I curled up on the futon without taking my shoes or clothes off, pulled the quilt up around me, and closed my eyes. For the better part of an hour, I lay there, unable to sleep. Too tired. Too tortured, my brain filled with thoughts of Savannah. For lack of anything better to do, I decided to get up and get myself something to eat.

The stove looked like it had never been used. The refrigerator housed a variety of condiment bottles and jars—mustard, catsup, steak sauce—a quart of milk, a six-pack of Miller Lite, various vitamins, a deli package of mold-covered ham, and a Styrofoam takeout container with a leftover enchilada slathered in a congealed goo of green sauce and sour cream. A refrigerator for bachelors. Clearly, no women lived there. I grabbed the milk—miraculously not past its “use by” expiration date—found a box of Shredded Wheat in the cupboard above the dishwasher, a clean bowl and a spoon, and ate standing up over the double stainless steel sink.

I wondered about the emotionless, enigmatic Deputy Kyle Woo.

Chad Lovejoy had been shot with a .40-caliber Glock. Woo packed a .40-caliber Glock. When we’d first met, at the South Lake Tahoe Airport, Woo said he had often gone camping in the mountainous area where I’d spotted the downed Beechcraft, and where Chad’s body was found the next day. Woo’s sheriff’s uniform included military-style tactical boots. Somebody had left tread prints of military-style tactical boots in the snow at the scene.

None of that, of course, would’ve come close to explaining why Woo would’ve had any reason to murder Chad Lovejoy. And I knew of nothing even remotely to suggest that he’d disguised his voice, passed himself off as Australian, and that he was the killer who’d dubbed himself Crocodile Dundee. But that didn’t stop the cogs in my head from grinding in Woo’s direction. When you’re a hammer, as they say, all the world’s a nail.

I walked upstairs and down the hall, past Streeter’s bedroom, to Woo’s room.

A neat freak Woo was not. The bed was rumpled and unmade, cluttered with boxes of pistol ammunition, gym clothes, and a pair of thirty-five-pound dumbbells. A wet towel was draped over the brass headboard. The beige carpeted floor presented an obstacle course of running shoes, boots and more free weights. The only other piece of furniture was one of those pressboard, put-it-together-yourself dressers from Ikea that even Einstein would’ve found all but impossible to assemble without leaving parts out. On the dresser was a Bluray disc player. A flat-screen TV rested atop that.

The top drawer was crammed with underwear and socks. The middle drawer held boxes of ammo, a collapsible police baton, handcuffs, two holsters, and four pornographic DVDs, including one entitled, “An Officer and a Genitalman.” T-shirts were stuffed haphazardly into the bottom drawer.

Two of the T-shirts bore logos from pubs in Sydney, Australia—Lord Nelson and the Bavarian Bier Café on O’Connell Street.

Somebody probably gave him the T-shirts as gifts. Or maybe he picked them up as souvenirs on vacation. They don’t mean anything, Logan. Why can’t you ever give people the benefit of the doubt?

I put the T-shirts back, closed the drawer, and moved on to Woo’s closet.

Several uniforms hung in dry-cleaning bags that obscured the back of the closet. I pushed them aside to find propped against the wall an M-4 assault carbine with a laser site and collapsible stock. On the shelf above the carbine was a small plastic box with the word, “Glock,” stylishly embossed on it. I took the box down, set it on the bed, and opened it. Inside was a .40-caliber, semiautomatic identical to the Model 22 Woo carried on his hip. I grabbed a corner of the top sheet and, careful not to leave any prints, lifted the pistol out of the box, ejected the magazine and pulled the slide back to make sure that the firing chamber was clear. It was. I swabbed the muzzle with my little finger and held the finger to my nose: cordite. The weapon had recently been fired.

The pistol was still in my hand when I heard movement in the hallway and turned toward the doorway.

Woo was standing in a two-handed combat crouch, his semiauto leveled at my chest.

EIGHTEEN

“D
rop the weapon.”

“It’s not loaded.”

“Drop it NOW!”

“You got it.”

I lowered the gun to the floor.

“What’re you doing in here?” Woo demanded.

My impulse was to ask him what he was doing back home. But when you’re standing uninvited in a cop’s bedroom after perusing his personal possessions, and you’re staring down the business end of his service weapon, the only proper response is a contrite one.

“I’m hunting a murderer.”

Woo eyed me through his gunsights and asked me what in the hell I was talking about. I laid out all the circumstantial evidence that had left me suspicious of him.

“You think
I
shot Chad Lovejoy?”

“Did you?”

He holstered his pistol, strode past me, and picked up the Glock I’d dropped on the carpet.

“Either you got some balls or you’re the dumbest guy on the planet, Logan, tossing my room, then calling bullshit on me without a gun in your hand.”

He put the Glock back in the box and returned the box to the shelf in the closet where I’d found it.

“What’re you doing back home? Thought you were going to work.”

“I came to pick you up. Sheriff wants to see you.”

“About what?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Is it about Savannah?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Well, what
are
you at liberty to say, Deputy Woo?”

“That the sheriff’s waiting there,” he said, his expression giving away nothing.

“ ‘There’ meaning where?”

Woo looked at me blankly, his face an emotionless mask.

“Sorry, I forgot. You’re not at liberty to say.”

The sheriff’s waiting there.

Reading tea leaves and Woo’s words, I convinced myself that the only possible reason the sheriff wanted to see me was to deliver the good news personally: Savannah had been found. She was alive and unharmed!

Then I remembered how long she’d been missing, and how the chances of surviving a kidnapping begin to plummet the longer the victim’s been gone. Whatever optimism I enjoyed vanished instantly—only to rebound just as quickly.

Maybe, I thought, the reason the sheriff wanted to see me in person was because his investigators had identified Crocodile Dundee. They’d taken him into custody, prepping him for my questioning him. Suddenly, I was fired up and depressed at the same time—pumped because they’d caught the monster; depressed because I hadn’t caught him myself, before they had.

I envisioned the interminable, dragged-out trial Savannah would have to endure. To what extent would we be expected to testify? Would I be able to contain myself, staring at Dundee from across the courtroom, or would I lunge, bailiffs struggling in vain to restrain me, while I happily ripped out his windpipe with my fingers?

Woo followed me into the hallway and pulled his bedroom door closed behind him. I apologized for having gone through his stuff. He offered no response.

I grabbed my jacket and followed him outside to his Wrangler, parked in the driveway. The snow was coming down again, swirling like white cornflakes borne on a hard wind. The air had a bite to it, and I could feel the skin on my cheeks burning from the cold. I thought I caught the wisp of a sad smile on his poker face as the deputy unlocked the passenger door for me. I took it as anything but a hopeful sign.

In silence we headed south and west out of town on the same two-lane highway Woo had taken that morning more than a week earlier, when we’d driven up to the trailhead to rendezvous with the sheriff’s search and rescue team. I didn’t ask this time where we were going. Maybe I already knew.

Don’t ask how long it took to get there. It may have been fifteen minutes. It might’ve been twice that long. I was focused on the frost that had collected on the outside of the passenger window, trying to keep my rising fears in check.

We crossed over a cascading stream, its banks dappled with patches of ice—the South Fork of the American River, the sign said. Beyond the river, on our right, was an unmarked dirt road rising north into the snow-covered pines. Woo put his signal on and turned up the road. Another hundred meters or so and our journey came to an end. Assembled in the roadway was a collection of sheriff’s vehicles, grim-faced deputies, perhaps a dozen or more, including Matt Streeter, and a coroner’s van.

What happened beyond that remains largely obscured in my mind. I remember my heart racing. I remember how time slowed to a crawl.

A tall, older man wearing a green sheriff’s parka gripped my shoulder as I stepped out of Woo’s Jeep. I recall neither his name nor his title. He said something about how the hardest part of his job was having to convey bad news to family members of crime victims.

I remember Streeter and other deputies watching me with sad eyes as the tall man led me to a shallow ditch running along the east side of the road. I remember the tall man saying something about kids hunting rabbits and finding instead a grave.

I remember looking down, very briefly, and seeing Savannah’s nude body. She was curled on her left side, the color drained from her mud-strewn face, her red hair matted with snow and dirt, splayed about her head as though she were underwater, her exquisite mahogany eyes gazing serenely at nothing, the white sclera red with ruptured blood vessels, the dark bruising around her throat, suggesting she’d been strangled.

I remember the gray duct tape binding her wrists behind her back.

“Do you recognize her?” I remember the tall man asking me.

“Savannah Carlisle Logan Echevarria,” I whispered, the best I could do. “We used to be married.”

I remember him saying something about how very sorry he was for my loss. At least I think that’s what he said. I was listening more to several ravens, cawing in the trees above us. I remember thinking,
Those birds are trying to tell me something
.

Tracking terrorists through forests and jungles, it was the birds which always let us know when we were closing in on our targets. The closer the target was to us, the more agitated the birds grew, or the more silent. Whatever those ravens were saying was beyond my ability to comprehend. All I really fathomed amid my shock and grief at that moment was the crushing realization that the only woman I’d ever really cared about was gone forever.

T
HE BAR
on Lake Tahoe Boulevard was named McJ’s Irish Pub, but it was apparent that its owner had never set foot on the Emerald Island. McJ’s was a straight-up, ski-town beer hall with blaring rock music, antique toboggans on the walls, and two floors of tall stools and sticky tables packed with mostly twenty-somethings, all looking to hook up after a fun-filled day on the slopes. I’d gone there that night for two reasons. One, because it was an easy walk from the Econo Lodge, where I’d checked back in, too devastated to drive back to Rancho Bonita that night. The second reason was that I planned to get good and drunk.

I’d sworn off liquor after Savannah left me for Arlo Echevarria. Not even so much as a beer. That was more than seven years ago. But if ever there were a good time to nose-dive off the wagon, I convinced myself, this was it.

Camped out alone at a corner table, I stared down at the double shot of Cuervo the young waitress with the black lipstick had dropped off. I wanted so badly to feel the tequila burn all the way down my throat and into my stomach, to cloud my mind and help me forget as only tequila can, if only for one night.

I picked up the glass. I held it to my lips. I set it back down.

Over and over, the exercise repeated itself until sobriety ultimately won out. I never took a sip. Not because I feared that after so many years of being clean, I might end up in detox, and not because the Buddha warned that practitioners of his teachings should keep their minds clear and lucid at all times. No, what deterred me from getting smashed that night was unadulterated rage.

I couldn’t very well find and kill the man who’d murdered Savannah and Chad Lovejoy if I were inebriated.

“Hi.”

I looked up from my drink. Standing across the table, smiling at me, was a buxom, thin-waisted brunette in her mid-twenties. Gray-green eyes. Nice full lips. Black turtleneck. Black ski jacket. Jeans tucked into calfskin knee boots. She was no beauty queen, but nobody, as the old saying goes, would’ve tossed her out of bed for eating crackers.

“You mind if I sit here?” she said. “This place is crazy crowded.”

I gestured: have a seat.

“Great, thanks.” She pulled out the stool to my right and offered me her hand. “I’m Jessica, by the way.”

“Logan.” We shook. “You want some tequila, Jessica?”

“Sure.”

I slid my glass over. “Cuervo. Haven’t touched it.”

Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” was playing on the bar’s megaspeakers.