Voodoo Ridge (33 page)

S
TREETER SEEMED
mildly interested when I called him about the possible van connection.

“Did anybody get a license number?”

“No.”

“We’ll check it out,” he said.

“When?”

“When time allows. We’re working a couple of new angles right now that look extremely promising.”

The FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, he said, now was actively involved in the investigation. I assumed that the feds were assessing such evidence as tire tracks and boot prints, but I didn’t ask. Streeter would’ve been reluctant to provide any details, given the ongoing nature of his investigation, and for once, I didn’t feel like pressing the issue. I was tired. Beyond tired.

I found a low rise overlooking the south end of Lake Tahoe and sat in my truck, the heater on low. The sky was clear. Whitecaps rippled the water, while the pines swayed fluidly on a stiff south wind. The trees reminded me of Savannah, the way she used to dance to samba music on the radio, her hips keeping perfect, seductive time to the beat, her arms snaking gracefully, always coaxing me with her hands and her smile to join her. I tried to block the memory from my head. I tried not to think of her. Only masochists seek that kind of pain.

I needed to focus and find that green van.

The kid who’d first told me about it, Billy, had said he’d get back to me if anything else about what he’d seen that night outside the Mexican restaurant bubbled up from the recesses of his adolescent brain. I never heard from him after that. Maybe it was time he heard from me.

B
ILLY WASN
’
T
home. His mother was. She stood inside the front doorway with her arms crossed, staring at me like I was trying to sell her a subscription to Pedophile magazine.

“Why do you want to talk to him?”

“It concerns a criminal matter.”

“
What
? What kind of criminal matter?” She was in her early fifties, short and busty, with glittery nail polish, and frosted, severely jagged blonde and black hair that appeared to have been cut by a stylist in a foul mood.

“He may have witnessed an abduction,” I said.

“An abduction. Yeah, right. Look, whatever you think my son knows, or ‘witnessed,’ he didn’t, OK? He has a very active imagination. Besides, if he saw something, he would’ve told me, or his father.”

“Billy may have information that could help identify the person who did it. Look, I’m not a cop.”

“Then who are you?”

“The victim was someone very close to me.”

“My son knows nothing.”

“If I could just talk to him for a—”

“—I told you, he’s not here, OK? We don’t want any trouble. Please don’t make me call the police.”

She shut the door in my face.

In most foreign places, you can’t simply hang out in a vehicle and wait for your target to show up. I tried that once with two other go-to guys in a Citroen along the Rue Charles de Gaulle in downtown Tunis. We were tracking a bagman working for a radical Salafist group, waiting for him to make a money drop outside the Monoprix supermarket. Several local men mistook us in our berkas for female Tunisians and began making what could best be diplomatically described as “amorous advances.” We broke off the surveillance and drove on, but not before one of my colleagues reached through the window and crushed the windpipe of one would-be suitor who’d gotten a little too fresh.

Waiting for a high school kid in South Lake Tahoe would be cake by comparison.

I parked a block up the street, affording a view of both avenues of approach, and settled in. Dozens of cars and trucks passed by, along with two dog walkers and several joggers. Nobody even so much as looked in my direction.

After about ten minutes, a primer-gray VW bug came put-putting down the street and passed by.

Billy was driving.

I fired up the ignition, made a hard right turn, and followed the VW into his parents’ driveway. Billy parked behind a fire engine red Dodge Ram pickup with chrome wheels and got out of the Volkswagen, lugging his trumpet case.

He didn’t see me initially as I pulled in, jumped out, and approached him.

“Yo, Billy, you got a sec?”

He turned toward me, brushing the hair out of his eyes. The expression on his face was a blend of surprise and fear.

“You remember me?”

“Yeah.”

“When we talked on the phone, you said you’d let me know if you thought of anything else you saw that night. Remember that?”

“Yeah. Pretty much.” He licked his lips. “All I saw is pretty much everything I told you.”

“ ‘Pretty much’ suggests to me there might be more.”

His eyes darted side to side. “Uh, no. Not really. That was pretty much about it. Can’t remember anything else. Anyway, I better get inside.”

I blocked his path.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, Billy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Clearly, he did.

I stood aside anyway and let him pass. As I did, the front door opened and a short, bald man with gray sweat pants, a black “Harley of Reno” T-shirt, and a Fu Manchu moustache came charging out, spitting angry, with a claw hammer in his hand.

“Get off my property.”

“It’s OK, Dad,” Billy said, grabbing him and holding on, trying to stop him from coming any closer to me. “He’s not the guy.”

In the wake of Savannah’s disappearance, I’d been attacked by a man with a gun, another with a knife, and now one with a hammer. What in the hell, I wondered, was going on?

“There’s no need for violence,” I said, which would’ve sounded mildly humorous had Billy’s father known my personal work history.

“I said get off my property!”

Billy looped his arms around his waist and dug his heels in like a rodeo cowboy wrestling a steer, struggling to hold on.

“Dad, stop! It’s not the guy!”

“It’s not?”

“No. I told you. This is the guy who showed me the picture.”

“Oh.” Billy’s father drew a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said to me. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“Which guy?” I said to Billy.

“Billy, no,” his father pleaded. “Don’t. Please.”

The kid looked over at him like he was trying to make up his mind, then, finally, at me.

“The guy who took your girlfriend,” Billy said. “I saw him again.”

TWENTY-THREE

B
illy’s father, Gary, was an unlicensed contractor who’d recently been indicted for allegedly defrauding several residents of the Lake Tahoe area by billing them for home repairs that never were performed. Which explained, Gary said, why he’d sought to prevent Billy from contacting authorities about what he knew of the man in the green van.

“I didn’t want it jumbling things up and messing up my trial,” Gary said. “You know how juries are.”

I said I understood, even if I didn’t, and asked Billy to tell me what he knew. It went something like this:

Several days after Billy called to tell me he’d seen a man forcing a woman back into a green van outside the Los Mexicanos restaurant, he’d spotted what he was convinced was the same van outside an auto parts store in the town of Truckee, where he’d gone to price out a new muffler for his VW. He was standing behind the van, tapping the license plate number into his phone, when the van’s owner appeared and demanded to know what the hell he was doing. Intimidated, Billy couldn’t think of anything to say other than, “Nothing.” The guy snatched Billy’s phone away, demanded that the kid divulge his own name and address, which Billy did, then threatened to come pay him a visit if anyone, particularly the cops, contacted him for “any reason.”

Frightened, Billy promptly raced home and told his parents what had happened in Truckee. He also told them about me, how I’d first approached him the day Savannah went missing, and about what he’d seen that day after school outside Los Mexicanos.

“I swear I was gonna call you back,” he told me, “but . . .”

“His mother and me, we told him not to,” Gary said. “We don’t want any trouble from that man.”

“That man,” I said, “may be responsible for two murders.”

“Well, we don’t want to be number three.”

“I still remember the dude’s license number,” Billy said.

“No, Billy,” his father said.

“But, Dad—”

“I said no, son! Now, go inside.”

“I need that number,” I said. “And I’m not going anywhere until he gives it to me.”

“Do you have any children of your own?” Gary asked me.

His question stung like a punch. I could’ve told him about how Savannah was pregnant when she died, but I didn’t.

“No.”

“Well, maybe if you did, you’d understand better. It’s not that I don’t want to help you. It’s just that we can’t. My son should’ve never talked to you to begin with. Now, please, go away. Leave us alone.”

“But why can’t I give it to him, Dad?”

“Get in the damn house, Billy.”

The kid rolled his eyes and reluctantly headed for the house.

“Before you go, Billy,” I said, more to his father than anyone else, “you might want to consider your options. You can give me that plate number, and I’ll give you my word that I won’t tell another soul where I got it. Or you can call the sheriff’s department and tell them yourself. If you don’t tell them, I’ll tell them we had this talk, and they’ll arrest you for withholding evidence. And, if you
do
tell them, they’ll put it in their official file, where they got the number. When they arrest that dude with the van, it’ll all come out in open court, how the cops came to find him. And when the dude gets out of prison early—and everybody in California gets out of prison early—I guarantee, he’ll come looking for you.”

His father stood there in silence, blinking at me, unsure what to do, then at his son.

“Please, Dad.”

His father hung his head and nodded, then went back inside. Billy seemed almost relieved to give me the plate number, proud of himself for remembering it. I asked him if he remembered seeing any signs or stickers on the van when he was in Truckee, anything that might provide me a better notion of who drove it.

He said he didn’t.

Could he offer any more specific details about the owner himself?

“He was pretty big,” Billy said after thinking about it for a few seconds.

“You mean heavy?”

“More like, you know, tall.”

“How tall?”

“About your height. Maybe an inch more. Or two. Something like that.”

“Anything else you can remember?”

Billy looked down at his red Chuck Taylors and thought hard.

“Not really,” he said after awhile.

“You did good, Billy.”

He smiled shyly. We shook hands.

The sun was setting. The air was chilled. I zipped up my jacket and watched Billy head inside, then called Buzz. It was pushing 2100 hours on the East Coast. The phone rang four times before his machine picked up, with a personal greeting from the man himself:

“I’m trying to avoid somebody I dislike,” Buzz’s voice said. “Leave a message. If I don’t call you back, you’ll know it’s you.”

Beep.

I left the license plate number Billy had given me and asked Buzz to run it.

M
Y WALLET
held less than twenty dollars in cash. I was $105.43 short of maxing out the credit limit on my Visa card, according to the pleasant-sounding young Indian woman on the other end of the 1-800 customer service number printed on the back. She said her name was “Kimberly.”

“How may I assist you today, Mr. Logan?”

I kicked off my soggy hiking shoes and lay back on my bed at the Econo Lodge. I had enough credit for one more night’s lodging, and barely enough for gas to get home. Unless Mumbai saw fit to up my limit, I’d have no choice but to leave Lake Tahoe in the morning, surrendering any hope of finding Savannah’s killer on my own anytime soon, if ever.

“You can start off by telling me your real name,” I said. “Not the anglicized version you give out so that geocentric Americans won’t be quite so intimidated talking to a non-American. I like to know who I’m really talking to.”

A long pause.

“I am called Nirupama.”

“Pretty name.”

“Thank you. How can I be of service, Mr. Logan?”