Voodoo Ridge (9 page)

None of that, however, gave me as much pause as what I saw next, and left me wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

Lying beside the wreckage, just forward of the airplane’s crumpled nose, was the dead body of a young man. His arms and legs were outstretched, like he’d been making a snow angel.

Lifeless green eyes stared up at a cloudless sky. Around the torso was snow dyed black with blood. Goose feathers poked out from three dime-size bullet holes in the front of his down-filled, shiny black parka.

“Anybody recognize him?” Wood asked.

“His name’s Chad,” I said, staring down at the young man’s face. “He worked at the Tahoe airport.”

FIVE

T
he terrain wasn’t flat or clear enough for the El Dorado County sheriff’s Jetranger to put down, so the helicopter pilots landed in a meadow about a quarter mile to the west. The homicide investigator assigned to the case hiked in the rest of the way.

Wood showed him where he’d found fresh prints of climbing boots that tracked across a crusty patch of snow, away from the crash site, then accompanied him to Chad’s body.

The investigator walked slowly around the corpse, pausing periodically and squatting on his haunches to assess it from different angles, like he was lining up a putt. He was in his mid-thirties, on the stocky side, with sandy, close-cropped hair and a requisite cop moustache that hadn’t quite grown in yet. He wore jump boots, green uniform pants bloused at the calves, a tan uniform shirt, and a green tactical vest under a green sheriff’s parka. A badge was stitched in gold on the chest, just below his name tag: Streeter.

He snapped on a latex glove and tugged gently on the kid’s left hand, which was bent awkwardly inward at the wrist, palm up, fingers outstretched. There was little give in the fingers indicating Chad had probably been dead at least twelve hours—the time it takes humans to reach maximum stiffness after death, depending on their individual physiology and ambient air temperatures. Yet one more thing you learn hunting terrorists.

“Anybody touch anything?” the investigator wanted to know. “Move anything? The body? Inside the plane? Anything?”

All three search and rescuers adamantly shook their heads no.

“Good. Let’s keep it that way. We’ve got patrol units scouring the area for suspects. I’ll get the forensics team up here A-SAP.” Streeter stood, rubbing his chin with the heel of his hand, and peered in through the broken cockpit window at what was left of the pilot. “Whoa. I’d say this dude’s definitely been up here awhile.”

“Since October, 1956,” I said. “I’m guessing the plane was somewhere out of the LA area.”

Streeter turned and gave me a “Who the hell are you?” look.

“This is Mr. Logan,” Wood said. “He was the pilot who spotted the wreck yesterday.”

“Why 1956?” Streeter said.

“There’s a bunch of old newspapers wadded up in the rear of the plane—copies of the
Los Angeles Times.
All the ones I saw were from October ’56. ‘Cincinnati’s Birdie Tebbetts Named National League Manager of the Year.’ ‘Soviet Troops Invade Hungary.’ ”

Streeter wasn’t happy with me. He asked me my name again. I told him.

“You went
inside
the plane? You contaminated the crime scene, Mr. Logan.”

“I touched nothing, disturbed nothing. All I did was take a look. I’d suggest you do the same, Deputy. There’s something you really need to see.”

I pointed out the side of the plywood crate, lying on the ground outside the fuselage door, and the nongalvanized box nails jutting from the wood, their tips bent and shiny.

“The nails aren’t rusty,” I said.

“Which means what?”

“Which means they haven’t been outside long enough to get rusty. And the plywood’s not warped. Somebody pried open that crate and tossed out that piece within the last day.”

He looked inside the fuselage door at the crash-damaged crate, sitting open and empty, save for hundreds of balled-up pieces of newspaper scattered in and around it.

“They used the wadded-up paper to pad whatever was inside the crate,” I said. “Whatever the shooter found inside that crate was so valuable, it apparently was worth pumping three slugs into that kid over there.”

Streeter wouldn’t admit it, but I could tell by the way he rubbed the side of his face that I was talking sense.

“What kind of plane is this?” he said.

“A twin-engine Beech 18. Also known as a ‘Twin Beech’ because of the twin tail. Beechcraft started building them before World War II. Cranked ’em out for more than thirty years. Great airplane. They were the Lear jets of their day. The FAA should still have a record of it on file based on the tail number. They’ll know who owned it back in the day. They’ll also know when it was reported missing.”

Streeter exhaled and said he’d check it out. He clearly didn’t like anyone telling him how to do his job.

I
T WAS
past 1630 hours by the time the sheriff’s helicopter flew me back to the South Lake Tahoe Airport, then took off again almost immediately, airlifting two crime scene analysts to the crash scene. I watched the chopper lift off, grateful at not having had to hike all the way back out. I checked on the
Ruptured Duck
, making sure he was securely tied down on the flight line, and patted his nose like the trusty mount that he was. Then, feeling tired and hungry, my knee throbbing, I walked into Summit Aviation Services.

Marlene was sitting behind the reception counter, sobbing.

“One of the sheriff’s helicopter pilots said it was Chad they found up there. Please tell me that’s not true.”

“I’m afraid it is, Marlene.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, drying her eyes with a Kleenex. “I don’t mean to get all emotional. You look like a man who could use a hot cup of hot coffee.”

She started to get up. I insisted that she stay put and helped myself to both.

“Such a nice young man.” Marlene shook her head and took a deep breath. Her chin quivered. “It’s just so terrible. Why’d he go up there? For what? Why would anybody want to hurt Chad? I don’t understand.”

“Nobody does at this point. Except whoever did it.”

She said she’d been trying to reach Summit’s manager, Gordon Priest, to give him the bad news, but Priest wasn’t answering his cell phone.

“I know he’ll take it hard,” Marlene said, her voice cracking. “They bickered once in a while, but Gordon was Chad’s uncle. He really loved Chad. They were like two peas in a pod, those two.”

Priest, she volunteered without me asking, had gone to a big operational meeting at the FAA’s Flight Standards District Office in Reno. He’d left a message that morning on the answering machine saying he wasn’t sure he’d be back in the office that day before close of business.

“I know he’ll be devastated,” Marlene repeated.

The Buddha advised great caution when prejudging others, “lest you run the risk of being wrong.” That kind of blind, benefit-of-the-doubt benevolence doesn’t allow much maneuver room for the kind of gut instinct I was trained to follow when I worked for the government. My gut told me in this instance that it was more than coincidence, Gordon Priest being away at some out-of-town “business meeting” the day after the fatal shooting of his nephew. But if you’re a Buddhist, you do your best to let the bad stuff go. You embrace the good in everyone, however much in short supply good may be these days.

And so I tried. Who, after all, murders his own nephew?

“Y
OU WERE
busy, Logan. I understand that. But it would’ve been nice if you’d called to let me know you’d be up there all day.”

“I would’ve, Savannah, believe me, but there’s no cell service.”

She blew air through her lips and made a right turn off Airport Road, onto Emerald Bay, heading north toward our B&B, after picking me up. I turned on the Yukon’s radio to break the strained silence in the car. A country tune was playing. Some guy whaling on his guitar with great earnestness, “Get your tongue out of my mouth ’cause I’m kissing you good-bye.”

“Are you mad at me?”

Savannah shook her head.

“You seem mad.”

“You were doing what you had to do. I’ll get over it—but not if you don’t turn off that awful song.”

I turned off the radio.

“Thanks for picking me up.”

“Of course.”

More silence.

“We’ll get the license tomorrow,” I said, “assuming you still want to.”

Savannah glanced over and gave me a smirk.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

She almost smiled.

I reached across the seats of our rented Yukon and caressed her silken neck.

“So, what did you find up there? Anything?”

“An airplane.”

“Really? Just like you said.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Anybody alive?”

“The plane had been up there a long time.”

I debated filling in the blanks for her. About the skeletal dead pilot. About the mysteriously empty crate. About the dead young man we’d met at the airport the day before. But what purpose, I asked myself, would any of that have served, beyond unnerving the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with? We’d flown up to Lake Tahoe to get remarried. Tomorrow, we would. Nothing other than that mattered much in my opinion, not even a murder.

“Were there bodies?”

I looked out the window and didn’t say anything.

“I’m just curious, Logan. You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah. There were bodies.”

We rounded a curve doing fifty-five in a forty-five mph zone. A highway patrol cruiser was sitting on the shoulder of the road. Savannah braked, glancing down at the speedometer, then up anxiously in her rearview mirror as we passed by the cruiser. The cop didn’t stop us, though. Savannah said it was an omen of good things to come. I attributed it to blind luck. But that’s just me. I turned the radio back on to the same country-western station. The song that was playing, near as I could discern, was, “I’m Not Married, But the Wife Is.”

Savannah, a native Texan who was not keen on the music she was subjected to as a child, groaned. “What in heaven’s name are we listening to?” She reached down and changed stations: a smorgasbord of hip-hop, top-forty, Spanish language, then this:

“. . . said the wreckage was discovered below Voodoo Ridge, in a remote, mountainous area of the El Dorado National Forest, about eight miles west of South Lake Tahoe. There were no survivors. Officials said they believe the plane may have been missing for several years. Sources familiar with the investigation, meanwhile, told KKOH News that sheriff’s authorities are treating the crash site as an active crime scene. Meanwhile, in the nation’s capital today, congressional Republican leaders accused the White House of—”

I switched stations.

Savannah glanced over at me with a quizzical look on her face. “The plane’s been missing for ‘several years,’ but they’re treating it as an ‘active crime scene?’ That seems rather strange, doesn’t it?”

“Somewhat.”

She knew I was holding back.

A
S
S
AVANNAH
slowed and turned into Tranquility House’s small guest-parking area, I could see that the door of our bungalow was cracked open.