Voodoo Ridge (29 page)

From cold water to scalding hot, I soaped and scrubbed from my scalp to my toes, then rinsed off, my skin tingling, toweled dry, and lay back in bed, waiting for the sun to come up. I knew more ways to kill a man than I was willing to count. In Preston Kavitch’s case, if my investigation proved fruitful, all I’d need was one.

C
ONSTANCE
,
MY
friendly divorced librarian, seemed genuinely pleased to see me again.

“I need some help,” I said. “I’m doing some research on a local resident.”

“Of course.” She licked the tip of her index finger and slid a slip of scratch paper out from a small plastic bin sitting atop her desk. “What’s his name?”

“Preston Kavitch.”

“Any relation to the Kavitches who own that nice bed-and-breakfast across from the lake?”

“Their son.”

Constance wrote down his name with the nub of a pencil, the kind you find in any library.

“Do you know how old he is, approximately?”

I told her.

“If you told me what kind of research you’re doing, the purpose,” Constance said, “I might be able to help you more.”

“It involves a murder investigation.”

She looked up at me slowly, with eyebrows raised and a slight downturn of her mouth that conveyed a sudden awareness of who I was.

“I read about you in the paper. Your wife was killed. She was pregnant.”

“Ex-wife. We were going to get remarried.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I nodded.

“And this Preston Kavitch, he’s a suspect?”

“Maybe.”

Constance nodded, drawing her own conclusions. She typed on her computer. After about a minute, her desktop printer spit out a few pages.

“Can’t find much on him, I’m afraid,” she said, handing me the pages. “A couple of stories in the newspaper about him being arrested for this or that. Here’s one about him being in a play at the high school. Ah, speaking of which, follow me.”

She led me to a bookshelf crammed with South Lake Tahoe High School yearbooks, arranged chronologically. Constance picked out the one with 2006 printed on the spine, the silver cover featuring the image of a horned Viking hat. She flipped through the book until she found what she was looking for: two opposing pages of color photos highlighting the high school theater club’s annual spring play—a production of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail.”

Even disguised as a medieval knight, Preston Kavitch was hard to miss. Same stringy body. Same long, greasy hair. What caught my eye, however, wasn’t so much his picture as it was the name that appeared directly above Kavitch’s in the play’s cast of characters—a schoolmate whose bullet-ventilated body would be found eight years later lying in the mountains high above South Lake Tahoe, beside a crashed, twin-engine Beechcraft:

Chad Lovejoy.

“Mind if I make a copy of this?”

“I’m sorry. Patrons aren’t allowed to make copies of reference materials,” Constance said, then smiled empathetically. “However, as head librarian, I can do whatever the hell I want.”

U
NLIKE VICTIMS
of random terrorist attacks, most murder victims die at the hands of someone they knew personally. I read that somewhere. Chad Lovejoy knew Preston Kavitch. Their shared history was one more nail in Kavitch’s coffin, as far as I was concerned. And yet, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether meting out my own personal brand of payback for Savannah’s death was the way to go. Perhaps it was the Buddha talking to me, or some newfound maturity in the wake of my grieving over Savannah that compelled me to realize I’d likely spend the rest of my days in prison were I to take the law into my own hands. Whatever the reason, it stopped me from stalking, beating a confession out of him, then killing Preston Kavitch.

I called Streeter instead.

“It’s a small town,” he said after agreeing to meet me at Steve’s, the same coffee shop where we’d met the morning Savannah vanished. “So they went to high school together. It means nothing.”

He slid the copy of the yearbook page Constance had copied for me at the library back across the table.

“So you’ve ruled Kavitch out as a suspect?”

“I told you. Kavitch wears an ankle monitor. And that monitor indicates he’s never been within five miles of that downed airplane.”

“He could’ve tinkered with the monitor.”

“We would’ve known. The computer would’ve shown it. The bracelet he wears is state of the art.”

“Such as that is in El Dorado County.”

Streeter leaned back in his chair and folded his arms indignantly. “Despite appearances to the contrary, Mr. Logan,” he said, “this isn’t Mayberry.”

Ruby the waitress shuffled over to take our order.

“I know what he’s having,” she said, tilting her head with affection at Streeter. “What about you, sugar?”

I ordered oatmeal—hold the raisins—and waited for Ruby to move on. I still wasn’t convinced that the weirdo from the B&B was anything other than guilty, but I let it go for the time being.

“So, if it wasn’t Preston Kavitch,” I said, “who was it?”

“We’re still operating on the assumption that it was someone Lovejoy did state time with,” Streeter said.

I asked him if he’d contacted Jethro Murtha, the ex-con in Los Angeles who’d told me about Lovejoy’s uncle, Gordon Priest, and Priest’s supposed sketchy business dealings with members of Lake Tahoe’s Iranian community.

“Not yet.”

“What’re you waiting for?”

Again, Streeter folded his arms and gave me that look.

“I don’t mean any disrespect, Mr. Logan. I appreciate that you’ve lost someone very close to you. But I have to be honest and tell you, I resent your suggestion that we’re not doing all we can to close this case as quickly as we can. We’re moving as fast as we can, with the resources we have available.”

My impulse was to tell him that his best wasn’t good enough, though on some level, I suspected he knew that already.

“I want to know what you
do
know, where it stands,” I said. “I think I have that right.”

“I’m sorry. Department policy—”

“—Ever been in love, Deputy? So in love that all you could think about was her? Every waking minute of every day? And when you weren’t awake, you were dreaming about her, because you knew that was it, the one?”

Streeter stared down at his coffee, cupping the mug with both hands, and nodded solemnly.

“This was the woman I planned on spending the rest of my life with. If the shoe were on the other foot,” I said, “I’d do the same for you.”

He rubbed his chin and the side of his neck. He exhaled, then told me that the investigation showed Savannah had been strangled at some other location, and her body dumped in the grave where it had been found. He said that boot prints at the scene matched those taken at the site of the downed Beechcraft where Chad Lovejoy had been shot to death, strongly suggesting that the same suspect had been responsible for both killings. The prints were of a man with unusually large, wide feet—size 13EE.

“Tire tracks from both scenes also matched,” Streeter said.

“What size were the tires?”

“I couldn’t tell you offhand. The measurements are in my file. Big tires. Like on a pickup.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing that comes to mind.”

“No arrests anytime soon.”

Streeter hesitated. “Probably not,” he said.

A good minute went by without either of us saying anything. Streeter sipped his coffee and methodically surveyed other diners, his eyes going instinctively to the bulges under their shirts and at their ankles where they might be concealing weapons. He was, I decided, a decent, if inexperienced, investigator merely out of his league.

I pulled a ten dollar bill from my wallet, laid it on the table, and angled for the door.

“I’m warning you, Mr. Logan, please don’t interfere with an active ongoing police investigation.”

“ ‘Active.’ Is that what you call it?”

I was out the door before he could respond.

The chill mountain air smelled of burning wood. A gray-brown smudge from hundreds of fireplaces clung to the tops of the pines. I sat in my truck. Maybe Streeter was right about Preston Kavitch. You learn while tracking terrorists that it’s easy to become myopic. You convince yourself that that unconfirmed shred of a lead from some illiterate goat herder is true because you want to believe it’s true. Soon enough, you’re racing down camel tracks in Somalia, ignoring intelligence assessments that say the killers are in Spain. Then, a bomb goes off on a commuter train in Madrid, killing and maiming dozens, and you spend what years you have left haunted by your own intractability.

Lesson learned.

My phone rang. It was Marlene, the receptionist at Summit Aviation. She was crying.

“I read in the paper they found her body. I’m just so very sorry. I can’t stop thinking about it.” She cleared her throat. Then she said, “There’s something I need to get off my chest.”

“What’s that, Marlene?”

“I wasn’t exactly being truthful with you.”

“About what?”

She hesitated. “You remember when you found Chad up near that plane?”

“Hard day to forget.”

“Well, Gordon, he was . . .” She broke down, sobbing like she was in pain.

“Gordon was
what
, Marlene?”

“I’d prefer not to discuss it over the phone.” She lowered her voice as though concerned she might be overheard—I assumed by Priest—and asked to meet in person.

“I’m here in Lake Tahoe. We can meet wherever you want.”

She told me she was waiting for a callback from her husband—they’d quarreled that morning again over what she said were “money issues,” and he’d stormed out of the house. She was hoping to hear back from him shortly and could meet me in thirty minutes.

“There’s a grocery store on Lincoln Avenue, just south of Apache.”

“I’ll find it.”

My old Tacoma didn’t want to start. I cranked the ignition for a solid five seconds before the engine finally caught, then turned southbound on Emerald Bay Road, while a solid stream of cars and trucks bearing skis and snowboards inched along in the opposite direction toward the slopes at Heavenly.

I glanced up in my rearview mirror and realized I was being followed.

TWENTY

M
ost rolling surveillances are intended to be clandestine. The best ones involve multiple vehicles rotated in and out of the point position, such that the person being tailed never sees the same car very long.

This was not one of those surveillances.

This one was meant to intimidate.

A black Pontiac Trans Am circa 1977 with tinted windows quickly closed the gap. We drove that way for more than a mile, me doing the speed limit, him drafting my back bumper the way it’s done at Daytona. A prudent driver might’ve put on his turn signal and pulled to the shoulder of the road to let the other driver pass and avoid a confrontation. Unfortunately, I’ve never been very adept at prudence.

I jammed on my brakes and he slammed into me. I cut the Tacoma’s steering wheel right, then, hard left, locking my rear bumper to his front spoiler. With his muscle car stuck to my less-than-muscular truck, he had no choice but to follow me as I pulled over. My intent was to introduce myself to the Pontiac’s driver by way of my fists to his face, before inquiring as to what he was doing, following me so closely. But it never got that far.

Deputy Woo threw open the Pontiac’s driver-side door and took cover behind it with his pistol leveled at me through the open window.

I raised my palms to show him I was unarmed. “Burt Reynolds just called. The Bandit wants his ride back.”

“Why’d you brake on me like that?” Woo demanded.

“Why were you following me like that?”

“To make sure you don’t do something stupid.” He holstered his weapon, closed his door, and walked forward to survey the damage. “Streeter texted me. He wants to make sure you stay out of trouble and stay out of the way as long as you’re up here.”

Cars speeded past in both directions without stopping.

“Sweet maneuver,” Woo said, inspecting the damage. “Where’d you learn to drive like that?”

“My previous employer. We learned all sorts of fun stuff.”