PROLOGUE

 

March Carrera was twenty yards from his pickup, leaning into the wind of the blizzard, when he heard a deep bass rumble that seemed to come from the earth and sky at once.

The sound grew like rolling thunder, and he suddenly remembered the spring storms that terrorized the tiny trailer town on the bluff where he was raised in Texas.

Two or three times every spring during his childhood, the cry shot through the neighborhoods.

Muerte Cielo!

Death Sky.

It was a phrase the town paper once used after a thunderstorm killed March’s friend Peter Dunnel and Peter’s dog. When the cry echoed through the village, the residents who weren’t at work in the meat packing plant ran to the edge of the bluff and scrambled like ants in a disturbed nest down into the cracks and gulches where the bluff had been eroding for eons toward the plain below. Women clutched their babies and dogs ran with the older children as they filed deep enough into the earth’s wrinkles to be safe from the tornadoes, but not so deep that the flash floods would sweep them away.

March Carrera glanced at the sky as he scrambled up the frozen highway toward his truck, shielding his eyes against the driving snow. But there was only swirling gray clouds.

 

Just minutes before, March had been driving at a crawl, sipping his latte, listening to his favorite rap group as he inched his way north around Emerald Bay. It was 5:00 p.m. on the second Thursday in January and already dark.

The wind and the blinding snow in his headlights let up for a moment. March thought he saw a light just ahead in the blizzard. But then the wind came back, stronger than before, and the light disappeared. He touched his brakes as gently as if an egg were taped to the pedal. Despite his care, the old Toyota truck swerved to the left, wheels skidding on the buildup of freezing slush. He let up on the brakes, corrected to the right, then eased down onto the pedal again as his pickup straightened out and the tires found some purchase on an area of rough ice.

The highway pitched down at a steep angle as it descended toward the head of Emerald Bay. Again it seemed that a light appeared in the driving snow, yellow and dim, and again it vanished. It looked like a vehicle was stuck in the road, its hazard lights caked with snow. The driver would need help.

March worried that he’d have trouble stopping in time as gravity and the weather worked against him. But he managed to slow to a stop. The light didn’t reappear, but the blowing snow was so thick, it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead.

March eased his front wheel into the edge of the snowbank to help prevent a runaway and set his parking brake. He left the engine running so the defrost blower could keep a steady stream of heat on the windshield and got out of his truck.

The storm raged. March pulled his cap down and his hood up and turned his head against a wind that was so filled with ice flakes it would abrade exposed skin. He hurried down the steep road, careful not to slip.

Once more, he thought he saw a light, but the blowing snow blotted it out as a deep rumbling sound seemed to grow from within the earth.

March stopped for a moment and listened. Then came a roar of wind that accelerated to a gale. The wind increased exponentially until it became hard for March to stand up.

He realized in a moment what was happening, and the sudden adrenaline rush made it hard to breathe. March burst into a run. If he could make it back to his truck, he’d have some protection. Muerte cielo.

He’d taken only three running steps when the gale seemed to explode. A shockwave of wind as hard as a board swatted March off the highway and into the air. He was blown over the guardrail and out over the drop-off above Emerald Bay. The wind, squeezed before the avalanche and suddenly expanding at 200 miles per hour, blew March’s pickup into the guardrail, breaking it off.

The frozen slab pushing the wind was the size of a large office building, and it moved at 80 miles per hour. The avalanche hit the truck, flipped it end over end into the air. The truck slammed into a Ponderosa pine, breaking the top off and leaving the trunk standing, a bare wooden column fifty feet high and three feet in diameter.

March was blown into a red fir, twenty yards out from where the land dropped away from the highway. The wind wrapped his body around the tree trunk like a limp leaf. When the avalanche hit the tree, it snapped the tree off at its base and sent March and the tree through the air toward Emerald Bay.

With a huge whumping thud, the roaring avalanche suddenly stopped. The only sound that remained was the howl of the blizzard and the metallic clinking of a million twigs and branches that came from the sky, shrapnel from trees that were destroyed by the explosive avalanche.

 

Fifty yards down the highway, safely out of the avalanche path, sat a vehicle. After the avalanche subsided, the driver turned off the emergency flashers, pocketed the small transmitter and drove away.

 

 

 

ONE

 

I was up Friday at dawn. My morning paper wasn’t at my door. My intrepid paper girl, a grizzled, rough-talking, sixty-something mountain woman named Maureen, was reliable enough. But her antique International Harvester four-wheel-drive might not have been up to climbing my neighbors’ road with two feet of fresh snow on it.

The latest storm of a record season was just giving up its assault, and only a few light flakes drifted down from the purple morning sky. After coffee and a toasted bagel with cream cheese, Spot and I got in my Jeep and headed down the unplowed river of white. It is a wondrous whooshing sound a vehicle makes floating through deep powder, road noise absent, engine sounds muffled, wheels silent as they make a futile attempt to grab at the road beneath the thick, cottony blanket of snow.

I picked up a paper at the shopping center in Roundhill and scanned it as I walked back to the Jeep.

 

MASSIVE AVALANCHE AT EMERALD BAY

Vehicle Found In Tree

 

A Caltrans employee found a huge snowslide at Emerald Bay yesterday evening. The worker, Greg Zendal, had closed the highway gate near Camp Richardson and was making his check run up to the north gate near Bliss State Park. Zendal turned back when he encountered an avalanche that had buried the road.

When the blizzard let up for a moment, Zendal spotted something dark down below the highway. “It looked like a strange tree with a bare trunk leading up to a big chunk of metal, all caked with snow and frozen solid,” Zendal said.

The Caltrans worker got out and hiked up onto the frozen slide debris that buried the highway. As he got closer to the tree with the strange crown he discovered that it was a pickup truck. The truck had apparently left the highway at high speed, flown through the air and hit the tree. The impact was so forceful that the rest of the tree was broken off and the truck was impaled on the remaining tree trunk.

Another Caltrans truck responded to the scene with a powerful searchlight, which they trained down through the blowing snow onto the truck. Although uncertain, both men thought it appeared that the pickup in the tree had no occupants in it. By late in the evening, enough snow had fallen that Caltrans vehicles could no longer get out to Emerald Bay. Authorities called off further searching until daylight when snowmobiles could be used to access the site.

 

The article concluded by saying that the authorities would not speculate as to whether the truck’s driver had lost control, or if the avalanche itself could have hurled the truck onto the tree. At press time there was no news of the driver.

I remembered that I needed a few groceries, so I tossed the paper in the Jeep. Spot still had his head out the window despite the snowfall that had resumed. His only acknowledgment of the snow was his regular head shaking to get the tickle out of his ears. I gave him a vigorous head rub and headed to the store.

“Owen McKenna?” The voice sounded muffled and distant through the heavy snowfall, but still I could hear its deep and raspy resonance. The man needed to clear his throat.

I turned and scanned the parking lot, but saw nothing except white mounds of snow that indicated parked vehicles.

“Owen McKenna?” the voice said again. This time it was closer, behind me to my right.

I turned.

A big man with a complexion like a rusted fender was coming toward me on metal crutches, his fingers clutching the handgrips. The leather sleeves of his expensive coat were gathered in wrinkles where the metal rings of the crutches encircled his lower arms. He shifted his weight to his left and held out his right hand, the crutch hanging from his arm.

“Bill Esteban,” he said. “Sorry to chase you down like this.” Behind him was the open door of a pearlescent Escalade, its engine running, wipers sweeping the huge windshield. The sweet happy rhythms of the Buena Vista Social Club harmonized from the speakers hidden among the tucks and folds of the leather interior. On the roof was a scant two inches of white stuff. Unlike me, he must have had a garage at home or office or both.

I shook Esteban’s outstretched hand. He hung onto my hand a full five seconds too long, one of those awkward people who never figured out personal boundaries.

“I went to your office but you weren’t there. I was going up to visit a friend in Zephyr Cove and saw you just as you were pulling into this center. One of the cops I talked to this morning said you had a Harlequin Great Dane. When I saw your giant dog hanging its head out the window I figured it had to be you. Am I right?” He turned and looked at Spot. “He’s a big fella. Probably takes up the whole back of your car, huh? Steams up the windows in this weather, I bet?” He stared at me through thick glasses with circular metallic rims the color of dull steel. His eyes were black and hard-looking and set close together. Rimmed by the dark metal they reminded me of the business end of the antique double-barreled shotgun that my friend Diamond owned. The gun’s firing pins had been removed, but the sight of those barrels made me aware of the power it once possessed.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Esteban said. “I’ll park my truck and come with you inside. Just give me a sec?”

Before I could answer, he turned back to his Cadillac SUV and shoved his crutches across to the passenger seat. Teetering on unstable legs, he propped the heel of his left hand on the armrest of the door, grabbed the steering wheel with his right hand and boosted himself up into his luxury boat-on-wheels. Esteban gunned the engine and slid into a spot halfway down the row. I waited and he hobbled up a minute later. We walked at a slow pace toward the supermarket entrance, his crutches making creaking sounds as he shifted his substantial weight from side to side.

“Sorry to intrude on your shopping like this,” he said. When we got to the entrance, he stamped his feet to try to shake off the snow. There were metal bars that rose from the soles of his shoes, past his ankles, and up alongside his legs under his slacks. In spite of the metal bracing, his shoes looked sophisticated and expensive. In such weather, they indicated tourist or wealthy vacation homeowner.

“What can I help you with, Bill?” I stopped near the racks of real estate booklets and turned to face him.

“Don’t let me stop your shopping,” he said. “I’ll just tag along.”

“We can talk here.”

He stood three inches shorter than my six-six, and when he looked up at me, his eyes searching my face, I thought that in spite of his hard countenance, he looked like he was about to cry.

“It’s about my nephew. March Carrera. He’s gone missing. I think he died in that big avalanche last night.”

 

 

 

TWO

 

“I didn’t hear that any victims were found,” I said.

“They haven’t really looked,” Esteban said with a rising voice.

“Yet.”

“Right. But I don’t see why not. The weather eased off hours ago. I stopped at the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department and made a missing persons report. I asked if there was a way to speed up a search and they told me I could try you. Then I called the U.S. Forest Service and the CDF and Caltrans.” Bill was cranked up, emotion in his words. “All they said was that they’re using those big rotary plows to dig their way down the road. They said there’s been no indication that anyone had been buried in the slide. But they found a truck in a tree. What more do they want? March drove a truck. I wanted to go out there. See if it was his. But they wouldn’t let me. So I gave them my number and told them...”

“Easy, Bill,” I interrupted. His rough face was red with stress. “They’ll eventually figure out whose truck is in the tree and then you’ll know one way or the other.”

“How hard can that be? All you have to do is take a look to know the model and the license plate.”

“Maybe it’s covered in snow.”

Bill thought about it. “Anyway, March left me a note, yesterday. I brought it with me.” He leaned against the wall to stabilize himself. With both crutches swinging from his lower arms, he pulled out his wallet and removed a small piece of white paper and unfolded it. It was about 4 x 6 and was ripped along the top edge where it had been torn off of a tablet. He handed it to me.

The lettering was scrawled in blue ballpoint pen.

 

‘Uncle, heading out to Tahoe City. The Guru of the Sierra is going to be at a little group there. I’ll stay overnight. Back tomorrow early, weather permitting. March’

 

I refolded the paper and handed it back to him. “This seems a weak reason to think your nephew was in the slide.”

Bill swallowed and said, “That and the fact that he didn’t call and didn’t answer his cell.”

“It’s still early in the day.”

“Yeah. But I know my nephew. He would have called first thing this morning.”

Maybe I gave him a look.

“I’m not saying he’s some kind of perfect kid. But he wouldn’t make me wonder. He’d call.” Then, after a pause, Bill said, “I’d like to hire you.”

“Hire me to do what?”

“Look into it. Find out if he died.”

“Bill, aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? A nephew gone missing for a day does not necessarily mean he died. Even if he did die in an avalanche, it would be an accident. What would I do?”

“I just want to know what happened. That kid was everything to me.”

“Was everything to you? Isn’t that a little premature?”

Bill frowned so hard, you could store toothpicks in the folds of his brow. “You do that, right?” he said. “Track people down? Find out where they went, what happened?”

“Yeah, but first we need to wait to find out if the truck in the tree was his. If he is in it, that will answer the question. That note doesn’t mention him going to Tahoe City with anyone else. Do you think he went by himself? If not, you could talk to the people he might have ridden with. Or people he may have told his plans to. See if they know whether he made it through or not.”

“I called the few friends of his that I know. His buddy Will Adams was March’s main ski partner. Will thought that March probably drove to Tahoe City alone because he didn’t think any of their South Shore group knew the people March was visiting.”

“Does March have a girlfriend?”

Bill shook his head. “No. March doesn’t want to be tied down.”

“Is he dating anyone?”

“Not that I know of. He used to see a girl from Reno, Samantha Peachtree. I called her. She said she hasn’t heard from March in a year.”

“What about the guru of the Sierra that he mentions in his note?”

“I don’t know who that is. I asked Will if he’d heard of this guru guy, and he said he had no idea who March was referring to. So I asked him who else I should call. He said I should try Paul Riceman and Carmen Nicholas. I called them, but they didn’t know March was going to Tahoe City.”

Bill’s face was contorted with worry. A Cuban drumbeat came from his coat. He pulled out a cell phone.

“Hello?” Bill said.

I could hear a faint tinny voice talking between Bill’s sentences, but I couldn’t make out the words.

“Yeah, this is Bill Esteban...Yes, Sergeant. What did you find out?...Yes, that’s what he drove. A red Toyota...You could see the plates?...He was thrown out?...I don’t understand.”

Bill listened for a time, then said, “Call me when you learn something more? Thanks.”

He hung up and looked at me, his face grim. “That was Sergeant Bains with the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department. They had a climber who got up the nearest tree. Took some pictures. They ran the plate. It’s March’s truck perched on the broken tree. But March isn’t inside.”

“March was thrown out in the impact?” I said.

“It looks like he wasn’t inside when the avalanche hit. Both doors were caved in. Sergeant Bains said the driver’s door was probably caved in from the avalanche. The passenger door’s got marks that look like they match a guardrail. He said that stretch of road has guardrails, but they can’t check them because they’re buried under fifteen feet of snow that’s set up like concrete.”

“So the truck got smashed between the avalanche and the guardrail before it was hurled into the tree,” I said.

“Sounds like it. But March is nowhere to be seen.”

“Suggesting that March was not in his truck when the avalanche hit.”

“Yeah,” Bill said. “Maybe March got stuck on the road. He got out of the truck, sensed the avalanche coming and ran to safety.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Possible,” I said.

Bill’s face got darker. “Or he got out of his truck and was swept away just like the truck.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Either way, I’d like to hire you to look into it. The cop I talked to in South Lake Tahoe said you’re good. I’ll pay whatever your rate is.”

I shook my head. “I investigate crimes, not accidents,” I said.

Bill looked wounded. “Why not? Can’t you just give me one day? Make some calls, ask around or whatever it is you do?”

“Sorry. There’s meat in investigating crime. A bad guy to catch. But accident investigations are always about trying to establish negligence, even when common sense says there isn’t any. It always leads to a lawsuit, and I won’t be part of that.”

Bill had picked up one of the real estate booklets and was rolling it into a tight tube, wringing it hard enough that his knuckles were white. He shut his eyes a long time, took a deep breath, held it, then breathed out slowly. “I’m not interested in suing anybody, Caltrans or otherwise, you have my word on that.”

I didn’t say anything.

Bill slumped a little against the wall, taking some of the weight off his arms and crutches. His eyes suggested a lot more age than his driver’s license would probably show. Weariness and sadness and pain.

Bill turned and looked at me. “I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said. “If he’s buried, what do I do? Do they have a way of finding bodies in the snow? Or do the bears get to him first, like carrion, like rotting venison? Do I just wait until spring and hike around looking for his bones?” Bill’s eyes were red and puffy.

“You’re not from here, are you?” I said, glancing at his city shoes and coat.

“No, I live in Houston. But I have a house in the Tahoe Keys. I come whenever I can. March lived at my house.”

“You have a card?”

He fished one out of his wallet and handed it to me. “Addresses, phone numbers, it’s all there. I wasn’t going to go back to Texas ’til Saturday. Maybe I won’t at all, now.”

“Let me make some calls,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

 

 

 

THREE

 

I went to my office on Kingsbury Grade, called the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department and was put on hold for a long time.

I had left an art book from the library on my desk. It was about East Asian art. I didn’t know anything about art east of the Ural Mountains and west of San Francisco, but I’d paged through it at the library and was fascinated by the way the Chinese made fog and clouds and rain and snow with a wash of ink off a brush. I paged through it now, courtesy of the county’s phone system, and saw that the stormy Tahoe landscape had already been painted a thousand years ago in a country on the other side of the planet. Eventually, Sergeant Bains picked up the phone.

“I’ve heard of you,” he said. “You were with San Francisco PD, right? Now you work private?”

“Yeah. I was talking to Bill Esteban a half hour ago when you called him about the truck that belonged to his nephew March Carerra.”

“Was that something or what?” Bains said. “Who ever heard of a truck on top of a broken-off tree? Must have been one hell of a slide to throw that truck out into space like that.”

“Any word on the owner, March Carerra?”

“Nothing. But the whole area is covered by frozen snow from the avalanche. Ten or more feet deep everywhere. If Carerra is buried under there, who knows when we’ll ever find the body. Caltrans has a rotary on it. But it could be a day or two before it punches through the slide. Those rotaries take a bite six feet high, but the slide is twice that deep in places. They’ve got a front-end loader helping to break it up. Hate to think of what happens if a rotary hits a body. But then, considering what the slide did to the truck, it figures Carrera’s body would’ve been thrown way down the mountain. Might be a long time before we find him.”

“Any plan to bring in search and rescue dogs?” I asked.

“Several of the county SAR team members have dogs, but at this moment they’re working a search on the West Slope. A couple of backcountry skiers were caught in the storm. They called in on their cell, and we got a good read on their location off the cell GPS. But we still haven’t got to them yet. The skiers are alive and this pickup driver at Emerald Bay probably isn’t, so I don’t think the SAR team will be bringing their dogs this way anytime soon.”

“Mind if I bring in a dog and do my own search?”

Bains paused before answering. “I’m thinking you wouldn’t get in the way and cause any further problems, so be my guest. If you can find the body, it’ll save the taxpayers money. I’ll clear it with Caltrans, get you past the gate.”

I thanked him, hung up and dialed Ellie Ibsen.

While Spot had some search training, it would be much faster to get professional canine help. Which meant calling on the most famous dog trainer in the West.

“Ellie, darling, Owen McKenna,” I said when she answered.

She hesitated, her brain no doubt scrambling to place my name, not surprising for a person not far from ninety. “Owen! Where have you been? I’ve gone months without hearing your voice. Do you think I’m going to live forever?”

“If not you, Ellie, who?”

“And you only call when you want to use my dogs,” she kidded me. “Let me guess. You’re calling about that avalanche at Emerald Bay. I saw it on the news. They showed pictures of a truck up in a tree.”

“Yeah. Our hope is that the driver got out of the truck before the avalanche. Maybe he got a ride from someone. But he may have been buried in the slide.”

There was silence on the line. Finally, Ellie spoke in a subdued voice. “Avalanche victims who are buried rarely live more than fifteen minutes, so if he was buried, he’s almost certainly dead. My best avalanche dog reacts badly to that. I try games and such, but not much works to cheer him up.”

“What about a live find?”

“Yes, that helps.”

“Then I’ll arrange it if necessary.”

Ellie didn’t respond immediately. I knew she was remembering all the times over the years when her dogs had been out on search and rescue missions in the Sierra or even flown to earthquakes or other disasters around the globe. There had been many times when people had been found too late. Some dogs experience depression when their enthusiastic search work results in a body instead of the reward of finding a living person.

“Which dog is your best in avalanches?” I said, trying to redirect her thoughts.

“I have a couple. You remember Natasha, of course. You worked with her on that forest fire. She’s great in snow, but she’s laid up with a torn tendon. My newest, however, is going to be a star. Honey G is only two years old, but you won’t believe how that dog works a territory.”

“Honey G?”

“Yes. Stands for honey-colored Golden Retriever. I’ve had him out on many searches now, and he’s amazing. I’ve never seen a dog air-track a scent better than Honey G.” She paused, then said, “When will you pick us up?”

“First thing tomorrow morning? Say, six o’clock?”

“You should know it’s supposed to start raining down here again tonight. So that will slow you down even after you get out of the snow.”

“I’ll leave extra early.”

“Will you bring his largeness?”

“If he found out I visited you and didn’t bring him along, there’d be repercussions.”

“Good. I’ll be waiting,” Ellie said, eager as a Central Valley kid coming up to ski the mountains.

“Ellie, this slide is large and very deep, and by the time we get there it will have been set up for thirty-six hours. It will be like sending Honey G out to sniff through acres of concrete. Is there much hope of finding a scent in that situation?”

“Maybe not. But we still have to try.”

“Right. See you in the morning.”

 

I called Bill Esteban and told him I would work his case for a day or so, and I’d report tomorrow night. He was appreciative and said he’d wait to hear.

 

I left the next morning at 4:30 a.m. Spot sat up in the backseat as we drove through the darkened town. Caltrans had a long row of dump trucks occupying one lane. At the head of the line a rotary was eating the huge snow berm that the graders had deposited in the center of the four-lane road. The driver angled the chute to fill the lead dump truck. It took only twenty seconds. Then the truck pulled away and the rotary operator paused as the next dump truck pulled into position. Snow removal on this scale is a large, expensive operation, but it is the only option in Tahoe where most snowfalls are measured in feet, not inches.

Spot’s ears were forward, his huge panting tongue flipping drops of saliva here and there around the backseat. He stuck his nose on the window and made a big smear across the opaque condensation.

“It’s snowing outside,” I said. “Most pets would be glad to be in a warm, dry car.”

Spot licked the window.

“Your choice,” I said. I hit the button to roll down the rear window just as another snow squall swept down the highway.

Spot stuck his head as far out into the snowstorm as he could, staring at the dump trucks. If he didn’t have 170 pounds of ballast and studded paws gripping the seat fabric, I’d worry that he’d fall out. Instead, I put the windshield wipers on high, turned up the heat on the defroster, ignored my dog and concentrated on driving.

I went through town and climbed up the thousand vertical feet to Echo Summit. Eventually, Spot pulled his snow-encrusted head inside and went to sleep.

It was very slow going around the big curves down to Twin Bridges. At Strawberry the snow became slushy and stuccoed the windshield. The wipers began to ride up over the ice rather than scrape it off. I rolled down the window and reached out to scrape the buildup off with my hand.

Because this storm off the Pacific was relatively warm, we drove out of the snow and into cold rain when we came down to 4000 feet at Kyburz. The rain never let up as I followed the tight curving highway. Eventually, the road left the American River and climbed back up the ridge to Pollock Pines. Once again at 4000 feet we popped up into heavy snow, but then re-entered the rain as we wound down to Placerville. I turned north on 49 and headed toward Coloma where the gold discovery in 1849 started the mad rush. The turnoff to Ellie’s Three-Bar Ranch was only a few miles ahead.

Spot somehow knew where he was, and he was standing, excited, in the back seat as I pulled down the perfect drive to the perfect ranch home. It was still very dark and the short post lights lining the drive reflected on the wet asphalt. I parked where the drive looped around, got out and opened the back door. Spot charged out and zoomed around like a puppy on amphetamines.

Ellie came out wearing a raincoat and a backpack and carrying an umbrella in one hand and snowshoes in the other. With her was a Golden Retriever. The retriever ran to meet Spot and the two of them sniffed each other, tails high and wagging, then ran around for a couple of minutes.

We loaded Ellie’s snowshoes and pack into the Jeep just as the rain began to let up.

“Owen, I want you to meet Honey G,” she said to me as her Golden Retriever jumped into the Jeep, smelling, as all wet Goldens do, so ripe that I wondered how he could possibly sniff out any other scent. I reached around and gave Honey G a pet.

“You said Honey G is male, right?”

“Yes,” Ellie said. “You think it is a feminine name?”

“Well, it does sound like an NFL cheerleader. He doesn’t have gender confusion?”

Ellie touched my shoulder. “A little gender confusion is good for males of most species. Keeps them sensitive.”

“Ah,” I said.

“You could probably learn something from Honey G.”

“No doubt,” I said.

 

Ellie and I talked of old times as we drove. She asked about Street Casey. I asked about her dogs.

Winter moisture off the Pacific often comes in waves. We found ourselves between two waves and we followed the serendipitous lull in precipitation all the way back to Tahoe.

“Do you need a break?” I asked Ellie as we came over Echo Summit at dawn and coasted down the cliff edge toward the big lake that shimmered deep blue between rolling storm clouds. “Or should we go directly out to Emerald Bay?”

“We should get to work, don’t you think?” she said. “We can rest tonight.”

I drove out the Emerald Bay Highway and stopped where the Caltrans worker was stationed at the gate. He stared past me at Ellie as I explained who we were. He was no doubt wondering what a tiny old woman was doing on a search and rescue. “Sheriff’s Department said you’re okay,” he said as he let us through.

 

 

 

FOUR

 

I drove out the highway through four inches of fresh snow. We powered up the switchbacks in four-wheel-drive and stopped near the Emerald Bay overlook. The parking lot hadn’t been plowed, but I parked at a wide spot on the highway where a grader had pushed snow to the side.

We put on our snowshoes and I pulled on my small just-in-case backpack with the windproof anoraks, space blanket, energy bars and water, then grabbed my shovel.

We headed down the road, the dogs running loops around us. The slide loomed like a glacier that flowed down the mountain toward the lake and completely covered the highway.

There was a narrow channel cut into the slide, following the highway. At the far end of the eight-foot-wide groove was a rotary plow looking like a giant insect chewing its way through the snow and belching diesel smoke. It spit out snow like a thousand snowblowers combined, its locomotive roar muffled by the walls of compacted snow on either side of it. A huge arc of snow shot 100 feet out of its chute, up and over the rest of the slide.

I helped Ellie up off the road and onto the roadside snowbank. From there we headed into the woods off to the lower side of the highway where the mountain dropped away in a steep plunge.

The dogs loped through the deep powder, Honey G having particular difficulty with the snow depth. I slogged ahead, breaking trail, and Ellie followed in my tracks. The deep snow was still work for her, but manageable. If her age or the high altitude made it more difficult, one would never know.

A tenth of a mile down we walked up onto the compressed snow of the slide and, although it was a very steep slope, it was like stepping from water onto land. Hiking was much easier, with a hard surface cushioned by the carpet of snow that had fallen over the last day. In places, the wind had blown the new snow off the slide, leaving the exposed hardpack slippery enough that if you fell, you’d slide a long way down. But our snowshoes had cleats, and they kept us from slipping.

The dogs charged ahead, toenails digging in, glad for the mobility provided by hardpack snow.

“Look,” Ellie said. She pointed down the mountain.

I followed her line of sight and saw the truck sitting on top of a tree trunk. The truck sat well below the highway, and was firmly perched on a smooth straight Ponderosa pine trunk that had broken cleanly off. It looked like a post-modern, post-apocalypse tree-house, three stories high. The ground below was solid with the compacted snow left by the avalanche, much like a ski run that had been groomed multiple times. The nearby trees that survived the slide were devoid of all branches from the ground up to maybe fifty feet in the air. Clouds raced by above. A snow shower gave way to a fast-opening vertical tunnel with gray for walls and blue sky at the top. In seconds, the tunnel folded and collapsed and another burst of snow came where sunlight had stabbed down to the earth a moment before.

“Where should we start our search?” I asked.

Ellie stopped and surveyed the landscape. “Assuming that the boy was out of his pickup when the avalanche hit, his body could be nearly anywhere.” She pointed up toward the highway. “I suppose it’s possible that someone swept off the highway could have been rolled under the slide and deposited just below the guardrail with the bulk of the snow rushing by overhead. But it’s more likely that a person would have been carried far down the mountain, maybe even most of the way toward the beach at Emerald Bay.” She pointed down to the blue water, so beautiful and so deadly cold.

“In an avalanche search,” I said, “what works best for a dog trying to find a scent? Starting at the top and working down, or going from the bottom up?”

Ellie was shaking her head. “It’s not about the lay of the land. It’s about the wind. When a victim is buried in snow, there is no trail for a dog to track. It is an air-scenting exercise. The best strategy is to start with the dog downwind, which provides the best chance that the dog finds a scent.”

We both stopped and lifted our heads to the breeze.

“The wind is out of the west or southwest,” I said. I turned and pointed northeast down the slope toward where the Vikings-holm Castle sat hidden in the trees. “Somewhere down there, at the farthest point of the slide, would be the downwind point. Should we hike all the way down before we start?”

“That would be best. A buried victim gives off a scent that percolates up through the snow. Once the scent comes out of the snow it moves out with the wind, gradually expanding, in the shape of a cone. We need to get the dog into that scent cone.”

We started down the mountain. I looked across the slide, a surprisingly hard river of snow. “Seems like this snow is so compacted and dense that no scent would come through,” I said.

“The deeper and denser the snow, the slower the percolation rate of the scent,” Ellie said. “But the nose of a dog is an astonishing thing. Dogs are often able to pick up smells where common sense would suggest no smell exists.”

“What about a victim that’s dead compared to one that’s alive?” I asked.

“I don’t know of any scientific studies that have been done on that,” Ellie said. “But anecdotal evidence suggests that dogs are almost as good at finding the dead as the living.”

“They just don’t like it as much?” I said.

“No, they don’t.”

We hiked in silence for a while, the dogs running ahead.

Ellie was huffing a little as she stepped her snowshoes with care to avoid falling. I stayed a little downslope from her, just in case she slipped and fell and slid.

“An interesting bit of search and rescue trivia,” Ellie said, “is that when a dog alerts on the scent of a buried human and digs toward the person, they often go directly to the person’s head. We don’t even know what, exactly, the dogs are smelling.”

“Could it be the scent they track only comes off the head?”

“Seems like it. Or maybe our entire bodies radiate the scent, but the strongest concentration comes off our heads.”

Fifteen minutes later we were at the lowest reaches of the slide. A little above and north of us the river from Eagle Lake spilled over the falls before its last rush to Tahoe’s only bay. Past the river, hidden in the huge pines, was the Vikingsholm Castle, dark and quiet until the onslaught of next summer’s tourists.

Ellie looked up the mountain. “This is a good place to start.” She turned toward where Honey G and Spot were running through a stand of fir trees.

Ellie whistled, then called out in her very small voice, “Honey G, come!”

It was amazing to watch the response as Honey G immediately stopped and charged up toward Ellie. Honey G stopped in front of Ellie, his wagging eager, his panting like a happy smile.

Ellie, as limber as I am, kneeled down in the snow in front of the retriever. She turned him to face up the mountain, then put one gloved hand on the back of his neck and the other hand on the front of his chest.

She spoke loud, her voice intense and excited. “Honey G, there is a victim in the snow!” she said, passing her excitement on to Honey G. “I want you to find the victim. Do you know what I want?” She vibrated her hands on his body. “I want you to find the victim.”

Ellie stood and turned toward the vast area of the slide. She made an obvious pointing motion with her arm. “Find, Honey G! Find!” She tapped him on his back, and he took off.

Honey G ran across the snow at medium speed, his nose in the air. Spot loped along after him, aware that Honey G had a mission but not quite knowing what it was. I’d done some search training with Spot in the past, but always gave him a human scent to start with. Searching for a buried human without a starter scent was new territory for him.

Honey G went up at an angle to the right, his head still high, swinging back and forth. In thirty yards he came to the edge of the slide and plunged into the deep undisturbed snow. He stopped, turned and looked at us. Ellie made an exaggerated pointing motion with her arm. Honey G ran the way she directed him, back up onto the slide residue, and he ran to a point directly above us. He looked to Ellie again. She made another hand signal and Honey G zigzagged his way across the slide, gradually moving up the mountain. Ellie and I hiked up after him, taking a gentle angle up and across the mountain.

“When I give Spot a scent off clothing,” I said to Ellie, “I can send him on a fairly effective search. But I’ve never tried a search without a starting scent.”

“But he does have a scent to search for,” Ellie said. “In our training he’s learned that the command ‘find the victim’ means to find any human scent that isn’t what’s coming from the people he’s with. It’s actually quite easy to train a dog in that way. You just set up the standard situation where a person hides under the snow and you use the command ‘find the victim.’ A smart dog figures it out after his first successful find. He doesn’t even have to think about it. We don’t technically know if the dog searches for a scent that is distinct from the scents of the people around him or not. But it is easy to see that as soon as he gets the command, he knows what his job is, to find the scent of a person who’s lost or buried.

“And when you give Spot a scent off someone’s clothing,” Ellie continued, “he may not be as focused on that particular scent as much as you think. Don’t get me wrong. Dogs can certainly distinguish individual human scents. A blind-folded dog can easily pick his owner out of a group of people without any voice to help him. But in most search situations, it may be mostly that the clothing just lets him know that you want him to find a human scent.”

“Ah,” I said. “I could have him scent any hat, then send him onto the avalanche area and he’d go find the buried person whether the hat belonged to the person or not?”

“Right. Remember when the arsonist was setting the forest fires? We gave Natasha the scent of a drop of gasoline. We wanted to prime her to search for any fire accelerants. She understood that any similar smells were her target. Gasoline, kerosene, or any other volatile organic compounds. The point of having her sniff gasoline in the beginning was just to let her know it was an accelerant search and not another lost person search.

“With an avalanche dog, we train him to do the search without using any scent as a starting point. It’s like when you get up in the morning and tell your dog to find the Frisbee. The dog finds it without being given any advance smell.”

Ellie paused to watch Honey G. He’d turned yet again and was coming back across the slide when he stopped again. He looked down at us. Ellie pointed to the left and he went in that direction, slower now. Spot had stopped below Honey G and watched, no doubt catching his breath.

“Looks like Honey G’s interest is waning,” I said.

“No. He’s winded, but he’s a real worker. Even as a puppy, if I told him to search for his tennis ball, he’d never give up until either he found it or a different tennis ball or I called him off. He’s even more dedicated when searching for a person.”

Ellie and I had been traversing the slope at a gentle angle. We came to the edge of the slide, turned and started back across. “Good to turn,” Ellie said. “It’s hard on my ankles and knees to always lean one way.”

“Me, too.”

Honey G came back across the slide again, his focus intense.

Spot continued to watch him, but after Honey G’s fifth or sixth zigzag across the landscape, Spot figured it out. When Honey G struck out on yet another circuit across the mountain, Spot ambled straight up the slope and then stopped. Sure enough, Honey G’s next circuit brought him right to where Spot was waiting.

More than most dogs, Spot was at home in the snowy mountain woods, familiar with its secrets and surprises. But watching him observe Honey G was like watching the street-smart kid on the playground who is unable to understand the drive and purpose of the class valedictorian.

Ellie and I continued to follow Honey G and headed up the mountain. Straight up the mountain above us sat the truck in the tree.

“Should we rest a little?” I asked.

“That would be good,” Ellie said. She was breathing hard, and I realized I’d waited too long to stop.

“What about Honey G,” I said. “Does he need to rest?”

“Honey G is an overachiever,” Ellie said. “He doesn’t rest. He just keeps working. The job is what gives him purpose.”

Above us loomed the mountains that wrap around Emerald Bay. Storm clouds encircled their peaks, but the 3000-foot icy rock walls sheltered the bay from the wind. A gentle drift of flakes came quietly, muffling the distant sound of the rotary up above us on the highway.

“The breeze is gentle but steady,” Ellie said, looking at the even drift of falling snowflakes. “If there is any kind of scent cone on this mountain, Honey G should have found it by now.”

“If we get back to the top and he hasn’t alerted yet, do you think there could still be someone buried here?”

Ellie was shaking her head. “I doubt it.”

“Even considering how thick and solid the slide is?”

“It’s possible, but I still doubt it. Honey G would find him.”

We started up the mountain again. Twenty minutes later, we were almost directly under the pickup in the tree. I was looking up at the mangled, ice-encrusted shape when Ellie spoke.

“Here we go!” she said. She pointed toward Honey G. The dog had his nose in the air, zigzagging across the surface with frantic intensity. “He’s alerting! He found a scent!”

 

 

 

FIVE

 

Honey G ran up the slope, moving back and forth, sniffing the air and narrowing in on an area thirty yards above us. He stopped abruptly, dug a couple of strokes with his paws, stuck his nose into the little hole and sniffed hard. He made a high bark and started digging furiously.

Ellie went up the slope with the energy of a teenager. She kneeled next to him. “Good boy, Honey G!”

Honey G dug like a trenching machine, snow flying out between his rear legs.

“The compressed snow is very hard,” I said as I unstrapped my shovel.

Ellie nodded. “Be careful not to hit his paws.”

I started four feet away. I had to swing hard with the shovel to penetrate the frozen surface. It felt uncomfortable to stab down with such fervor, because although I was certain that March Carrera would be dead, I nevertheless didn’t want to plunge my shovel into a body.

When I started digging, Spot, too, came over, no doubt remembering the couple of times he and I had done search training on snow. He moved around, sniffing at the snow. He must have found a promising scent for he started digging with vigor midway from me to Honey G.

While Honey G dug remarkably well, Spot’s size and his very long legs allowed him to go down twice as fast.

My shovel was even more effective. In ten minutes I hit a fallen tree about five feet down. The tree must have cast a kind of impact shadow, for the snow in the area below it and down the slope was much less compacted. Some loose snow fell away and my shovel went into a small space.

I called out, “Ellie? Can you get Honey G down here? I found a softer area, and I think he can go laterally from here.”

She appeared above me. “Honey G,” she said. “Down there.” She pointed down at me.

“C’mere, Honey G,” I said. “Take a sniff down here.”

Honey G looked at Ellie for reassurance, then jumped down next to my feet.

“Find the victim, Honey G!” I said.

Honey G turned around, sniffing the walls of my snow cave, then stuck his nose under the tree trunk. He made another yip and dove under the tree, digging frantically.

The space was too small to get my shovel in without hitting Honey G, so I worked on the sides of the hole, widening my snow pit, careful to throw the snow up and away from where Ellie was standing. Spot stood next to her, his brow furrowed as he stared at where Honey G had disappeared under the tree.

In a minute I heard Honey G stop digging. My snow cave was now wide enough that I could get down on my hands and knees and look under the tree trunk. It was too dark to see anything but a vague shape of Honey G. I pulled off my backpack, got out my small flashlight and shined it toward Honey G. He turned around to look toward me, his eyes flashing in my light beam. He whimpered.

“Honey G, come out of there.” I patted my thigh. He turned around and dug some more, then stopped and cried. “Ellie?” I said loudly. “Can you call Honey G? I think he’s found the body. I need him to move so I can have a look.”

“Honey G, come here,” she said.

Honey G crawled out of the hole, out from under the tree trunk and jumped out of the snow pit.

I didn’t look up toward Ellie because I wanted my eyes to adjust to darkness. I got down on my belly, held the flashlight in my teeth and squirmed under the tree trunk toward the dark hole.

It was a tight fit. I moved forward inches at a time, my jacket catching on the bark of the tree. I took the light out of my mouth and shined it ahead of me. My eyes gradually adjusted, and I saw snow and branches and more snow. There was nothing that looked like a body.

I belly-crawled forward until I could scrape away at the snow where Honey G had been digging. I dug through branches and twigs and snow until I hit something with a different consistency. Thin and solid, but flexible. Like a carrot. I scraped at more snow. It was hard enough that I could barely abrade it with my gloved hand.

I was trying to inch forward when the top of my tiny wormhole tunnel collapsed. The snow buried my head and arms and my flashlight. I was trapped in the dark, my arms pinned. I felt like an idiot, remembering that compacted snow from a slide makes a good solid material for digging snow caves. Difficult to dig, but strong. Whereas the loose snow, protected from the slide by the tree I was under, hadn’t been compacted. The very quality that made this snow easy to dig through also made it dangerously unstable.

My butt and legs were still under the tree trunk. I wormed my way backward. I got just far enough that I could pull my arms free. Again, I held the flashlight with my mouth and used both hands to try to sweep the snow free.

There was less room than before. I moved my head to try to get the light angled just so. But I couldn’t see anything. The most sensible approach was to squeeze back out of the tunnel, climb out and dig down from above.

But I was so close. If I could just verify that it was in fact the body that Honey G had discovered, then we’d know that March Carerra hadn’t escaped the avalanche. I wouldn’t have to dig. I could leave him there, call the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department and let them do the hard work.

Once again I squirmed forward, gouging at the snow with my fingers, pulling it away, trying to compact it to the side so it didn’t fill my space. I made a little progress, then moved forward another couple inches.

My tunnel was nearly full, so I pounded at the snow with my fists, trying to compress it down and to the sides. I made a little more space. Inched forward. Dug some more.

The first thing I uncovered was hair, matted into the snow, glinting in the beam from my flashlight. I wasn’t eager to go further, but I had to be certain I hadn’t uncovered an animal. A mountain lion or a bear could get caught in an avalanche just as easily as a person.

I scraped away at the snow and found the carrot. It was a finger. The position of the fingers next to the matted hair suggested his hand was cupped around his face.

I twisted my head trying to angle the light with my mouth. I panted with effort and sucked air through my teeth around the flashlight. My breath made clouds of steam that filled my tiny space with fog.

By gently pulling on his head with one hand and using my other hand to push away at the frozen snow around his hand, I was able to expose his head.

The flashlight was still in my mouth. I shifted my jaw and got the flashlight beam to shine directly on his face.

Her face.

The body belonged to a young woman.

 

 

 

SIX

 

The body buried under the avalanche had a thin delicate jaw. The snow and ice had pressed one corner of her mouth back into a frozen half-smile. She had good teeth. Graceful arched eyebrows. One eye was shut, the other eye was peeking out as if trying to see what things looked like from the perspective of death. Now I understood why the hair had glinted in my flashlight. It was blond. I guessed her to be in her early twenties.

I wormed my way back out of the tunnel and climbed out of the snow pit.

It was obvious that Spot had smelled the death. He eyed me with drooping eyes and limp ears. His tail didn’t move, and he didn’t come forward to greet me as I got out of the snow cave. Honey G sat next to Ellie. His head hung low, his energy and enthusiasm gone.

“Honey G found the driver of the pickup, didn’t he?” Ellie said.

I walked to Ellie’s side and put my arm around her. “He found a body, yes, but it’s a young woman.”

Ellie gasped. “But you said they identified the truck as belonging to a young man. And the boy’s uncle said his nephew had driven off in it, right?”

I nodded.

“Then who is the young woman?”

“I have no idea, Ellie.”

I pulled out my cell. There was no reception.

“Let’s go up to the highway. I can try calling the Sheriff’s Department from up there.”

We hiked up slowly, drained after the depressing discovery. Spot stayed next to me, not looking around, walking like a refugee. Honey G hung back behind Ellie. Ellie tried to cheer him up, using her glove to entice him into a game of tug-of-war, but he wasn’t interested.

Back in the Jeep I started the engine and turned on the heat. I pulled energy bars and dog cookies out of my pack and handed them to Ellie. While she waited with the dogs, I walked down the highway until I found some cell reception and got Sergeant Bains on the phone.

“I’m out at Emerald Bay,” I said. “I brought Ellie Ibsen, the search dog trainer. Her dog found a young woman’s body buried about a third of the way down to the water. Not far below the truck in the tree.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You said woman?”

“Yes. Early twenties, I’d guess. Buried in the slide about eight feet down.”

“She have identification on her?”

“Don’t know. She’s still buried. I dug a pit, then the dog tunneled a little distance sideways. I went in and just managed to get to her head before I backed out. You’ll have to dig down from above to get her out.”

Forty minutes later I was snowshoeing back down the mountain with Bains and two deputies. Ellie had decided to stay with the Jeep and the dogs.

One deputy towed a toboggan behind him. On the toboggan were two shovels and a variety of gear. I showed the cops my snow pit and then walked over to where I thought they should dig.

Bains and I stood to the side while the younger men dug.

“You got a take on this?” Bains said.

“Not a clear one. The simplest explanation is that March Carrera drove off with the girl. He got stuck and they got out to walk. The slide caught both of them. We found her. Now we still have to find him.”

“Why do you say you don’t have clear take on this?”

“When I talked to the uncle he said March had no girlfriend and wasn’t dating. March’s friends didn’t know of anyone, male or female, who might have ridden with him to Tahoe City. Something about this feels wrong.”

Bains looked at me and chewed his lip. “You worked homicide for the SFPD, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Bains nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. Your warning lights are good enough for me.” He stepped over to where the men were digging.

“Boys, when you get to the girl, go slow and easy so you don’t disturb her. We’re going to treat this as a potential homicide.”

The men stopped digging and looked at Bains.

“I want a large excavation, photos at each stage. Bag her hands and feet. Any snow stuck to her goes into the body bag with her. Sift all nearby snow and dirt. You know the drill.”

It took ten minutes to reach her, another twenty to carefully excavate around her.

They were very thorough with the scene, carefully following Bains’ instructions.

I left as they were strapping the body bag onto the toboggan.

 

 

 

SEVEN

 

“We should go back for the boy,” Ellie said when I returned to the Jeep.

“We’re tired, the dogs are depressed, and it’s already mid-afternoon. You’ve put in a long day.”

“As you look at the slide below the highway, Honey G never searched the upper right quadrant.” Ellie said. She slouched with weariness, but her eyes were clear and intense.

“Shouldn’t I be taking you out for a hot meal?”

“We stopped where he found the girl. We never went past that point,” she said.

“I know a good restaurant with tables by the fireplace,” I said.

“If that young man is buried, Honey G will find him,” she said.

“Grilled salmon, a good pinot noir,” I said.

Ellie opened the back door of the Jeep and spoke to the dogs. “Okay, boys, nap time is over.”

On our way back down we passed Bains and his men. They’d hauled the toboggan almost up to their SUVs. The toboggan would just fit in the one with the rear seat folded down.

“Going back to look for March Carrera,” I said.

Bains looked at Ellie, then at me.

“At her insistence,” I said.

“You know where to call.”

 

Ellie was less effective at getting Honey G excited the second time around. But he did his job, hiking up the slide at an angle, nose in the air. Periodically, he turned and looked back for Ellie’s hand signals.

Without saying a word, she maneuvered him across the portion of the slide we hadn’t searched. He zigzagged his way up past the tree with the truck in it. Ellie and I hiked slowly up the slope. I was tired. Ellie’s stamina was amazing. Spot followed us.

In ten minutes, Honey G alerted.

He put his nose to the snow, ran several feet away and stopped so quickly it was as if he’d hit the end of a leash. Then he started digging.

Spot finally got interested, trotted up and again found his own place to dig a few feet away. I joined them with my shovel and we reached March Carrera fifteen minutes later. His body was smoothly curved around a tree trunk as if, like a rag doll, it had no bones.

Ellie tried to praise and reward the dogs, but they were listless. Again, we walked up the mountain until I got cell reception. Bains answered immediately.

“Found March Carrera’s body about six feet down.”

“The boys and I are in town. We just dropped off the girl at the mortuary where she can stay the night. I was making arrangements to have her brought to Sacramento. Now you want us to come back? You think we’re running a morgue shuttle service?”

“Something like that.”

“You have similar suspicions on this one?”

“Maybe.”

I heard Bains sigh. “Back soon,” he said.

 

 

 

EIGHT

 

“Time for a meal?” I said as we drove back to town.

“First, we have to cheer up the dogs.”

“Got it,” I said, my stomach growling.

I called Street Casey at her bug lab. I told her about our day and asked if she would get lost for the dogs.

“Of course, but I can’t bury myself in snow. I’d need help. And I’m not exactly dressed for it.”

“A variation would work. I’m thinking about that giant boulder out back of your lab. It’s got that overhang?”

“Good idea,” she said. “I’ve got my snowshoes in the car trunk. When should I head out?”

“Now?”

“Advance notice is so helpful. Okay, let me turn off the scope and put these samples back in the incubator. I’ll bring my cell and call you when I’m in position.”

Ellie and I were waiting in my office parking lot just up the street on Kingsbury Grade when my phone rang.

“It’s very cold and dark under this ledge of rock,” Street said. “The dogs better find me soon.”

“Three or four minutes, max,” I said.

We drove down the block to Street’s lab.

“In the interest of not breaking pattern, I’ll follow my normal procedure,” I said to Ellie. I knocked on Street’s lab door, called out her name, opened the door with my key, called Street’s name again. “She’s not here,” I said. Spot looked at me, puzzled. Honey G stood nearby.

Without turning, I said to Ellie, “She’s hiding in the woods about a tenth of a mile directly behind me. If you look at the big Jeffrey pine where lightning split the top, she’s just down to the left.”

“I see it,” Ellie said. “There’s no breeze over on this side of the lake, so it’s not clear what kind of scent cone he might find. But we’ll send him out. Honey G, come.”

Honey G obeyed as before, albeit with no enthusiasm. He sat and Ellie held his chest and gave him an intense vibrating shake. “Find the victim, Honey G. Find!” She pointed toward the boulder and sent him on a search. He did a kind of slow leaping canter through the deep snow.

I kneeled down and gave Spot the same command.

Spot acted bored as if the exercise were a waste of time. Nevertheless, he followed Honey G at a fast walk.

In a minute Honey G had veered far to the left and Ellie corrected him when he looked back. In another minute he stuck his nose straight up and stood up on his hind legs for a moment. Then he ran out into the woods, leaping like a deer through the snow. Spot ran after him.

Honey G’s enthusiastic sprint was 45 degrees off from Street’s location, and I worried that he had picked up someone else’s scent. But then he turned in a big gradual arc and homed in on Street’s boulder as if he knew exactly where she was.

Spot figured it out, too, and they both converged on the boulder and dived out of sight under the overhang.

Street emerged from behind the boulder, romping with the dogs, their moods completely changed.

Ellie turned to me. “Thank you.”

“No. Thank you.”

 

 

 

NINE

 

We drove back down to the foothills and finally found food at a roadhouse near Placerville, a comfortable five or six minutes before I would have expired. We dropped Ellie and Honey G at the Three Bar Ranch and headed back up the mountain. I called Sergeant Bains and volunteered to tell Bill Esteban about his nephew’s death. But it was late when we arrived home. It could wait.

The next morning I headed to the Tahoe Keys. Bill Esteban’s house was a big modern box on one of the inland canals, a short boat ride to the freedoms of the big lake. It had a three-car garage with all the doors open. Inside were his Escalade, a Seville and a snowmobile trailer with two machines on it.

It took Bill a couple of minutes to get to the door. He ushered me in and up the stairs. Many Keys houses have the bedrooms on the ground floor and the living area upstairs to take in the views of lake and mountains and sky. Bill had me go first.

The living room was huge and lavish. Teak furniture glowed against Prussian blue carpet.

We sat on two of six opposing chairs. Between the chairs were small tables. On the one next to Bill was a chessboard with a game in progress. The black king was well guarded. The white queen cavorted with the bishop while the white king stood like a lonely pariah in the corner.

From where I sat I could see out one window toward Heavenly with its network of ski runs and out another window toward Mt. Tallac. We were in a break between storm fronts, and the variegated clouds were sparse and high allowing a view of the mountain peaks. A plume of blowing snow streaked off the summit of Mt. Tallac into the blue sky. It was relatively warm down at lake level, but that plume indicated deadly weather at 10,000 feet.

A giant garish TV screen showed the Vikings butting heads with the Cowboys. The volume was turned down.

“You came unannounced,” Bill said. “I suppose that means you’ve learned something about March?” He braced himself, hands on the arms of his chair.

“Yes. I’m very sorry to say that he died.”

Bill looked like he’d been sucker punched. He exhaled hard and didn’t breathe back in for a long time. His eyes seemed focused somewhere far beyond the house. Then he suddenly inhaled and gasped for air as if he’d been a long time under water.

“I brought in an avalanche search dog and he found March’s body buried under six feet of snow. They got him unburied late yesterday. His body is at the morgue in Sacramento. Eventually, they’ll get the truck out of the tree. Perhaps there will be something more we can learn about what happened.”

“You think it was an accident?” Bill was sitting on the very edge of his chair, elbows on his bad knees, his eyes large and dark and wet and imploring behind his glasses.

“Hard for an avalanche not to be. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that March was careful. He took risks, but he was smart about it.”

“It wasn’t very smart for him to be out driving in the storm that night.”

“No.” Bill leaned back in his chair. He forced a deep breath in an effort to stay calm. “But I can’t see him stopping and getting out in the path of an avalanche. He was a backcountry skier. He knew the risks.”

Bill started breathing hard again. “What do I do now? I feel like I’m responsible.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I should’ve done things different.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something.” Bill was panting, his chest heaving. “I was March’s closest family. Maybe his closest friend. He was buried and suffocating in that avalanche while I was oblivious. I should have been there for him.” Bill gasped like a drowning man. His face was red. He looked like he would have a heart attack any moment.

I walked over in front of him. “Bill, you’re hyperventilating. Hold your breath.”

Bill gasped harder than before.

“Bill, stop breathing and hold your breath!”

My shout startled him. He reached up and clamped his thumb and fingers over his nose like a little kid. His cheeks puffed out. There were bits of dried blood in the cracks of his cuticles. His fingernails were chewed back so far it was as if he had done it to inflict pain on himself.

“Good. Hold it a little while longer. That will calm you down. A little more. Okay, let your breath out slowly. Now take a small short breath.”

“I have anxiety medication,” he whispered. “In the cabinet in the bathroom. Brown bottle.”

I fetched the pills and brought him a glass of water. He shook one out and swallowed it.

“Sorry,” he said after a minute. “Death in the family... it’s something I...”

“What?” I said.

Bill didn’t respond.

“Death in the family is what?”

Bill hesitated. I waited.

“It’s very hard,” he finally said.

When he calmed, I said, “March have other family?”

“Just April, his sister, and me. No other relatives.”

“March wasn’t alone in the slide.”

Bill jerked.

“There was a young woman. Her body was also buried in the slide. We found her about fifty yards away.”

“Do you know her name? What did she look like?”

“Thin and delicate, with blond hair. I’d guess she was younger than March by a couple years. We don’t know her name, yet.”

Bill looked ill. “They’re going to do autopsies, aren’t they? They’ll want permission from March’s closest of kin. That’s his sister April. I don’t know how they can even reach her.”

“They will give April or you a courtesy call. But they don’t need permission to do an autopsy in California.”

In time, Bill calmed, got up on his crutches and moved around. “Get you something to drink?” Bill said.

“Whatever you’re having,” I said.

“I don’t touch alcohol, but I keep beer for visitors.”

“Sure.”

I looked out the windows while Bill fetched libations. Down in the drive, Spot had his head stuck out of my Jeep’s rear window. Snow was blowing off Bill’s roof onto Spot, tickling his ears. Spot shook his head. Snow and saliva flew and his jowls and ears flapped and he turned and looked up at me.

Bill came and stuck a tall glass of amber in my hand. He sat down on a different chair, sipped what looked like iced tea and, with a struggle, got his bad legs up on the matching hassock. He glanced at the TV, two rows of giant men lined up to trample each other into the turf, then turned back to me.

“Do you want me to keep looking into March’s death?”

“Yeah.”

“Even though I’m unlikely to uncover anything other than more details about an accidental death?”

“Yeah.”

“I will have lots of questions and it may take a long time.”

Bill looked at me and raised up scratchy misshapen eyebrows that looked like two-inch pieces of barbed wire. His face was still red.

“That’s okay,” he said.

“March lived with you?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“He spend much time with you?”

“Some. We ate dinner together a few times a week.”

“He confide in you?”

Bill frowned. “You mean, like tell me his personal problems? No. He was a man. He could figure things out himself.”

“So he slept here, ate a few meals here, but that was it. You didn’t really know him well?”

Bill stared at me, his rough complexion looking like 40-grit sandpaper in the morning sunlight. “Christ, this is what it turns into, doesn’t it? One minute, I’ve got a nephew who is everything to me. Then he’s dead and I need to talk about what he ate and who he knew and his personal habits...”

I waited for Bill to see the sense of it.

“Sorry,” Bill said. “No, I guess I didn’t really know him well. He was mostly here alone. I live in Houston.”

“You’ve had this place long?”

He looked around at the room. “I picked this up six years ago. It was built by another guy from Houston. A customer of mine. I came here a few times to vacation with him and his wife. I was always interested in Tahoe because I had a Washoe grandmother who visited my sister Maria and me when we were young. Grandma was an incredible basket weaver from Carson Valley. She told us stories about Tahoe, the sacred lake where her ancestors hunted and fished. I wanted to come to Tahoe just because of her stories.

“One thing led to another and my customer made me a good deal on this house. I thought, what the hell, I’ve got the money. It’s a nice place and I don’t need any more stocks. God, I can’t believe he’s gone.” He looked around in desperation, his eyes settling on the chess board, then on the TV. The Cowboys’ quarterback drilled a ten-yard bullet into the end zone. The receiver plucked it out of the air like he was catching a coasting butterfly.

Bill took a breath, staring at the receiver, then breathed out. “March asked to come out here while he was in college. He was a snowboarder. A rider, as he used to say. But he recently switched to skis. He said the new ones are amazing in junk snow.”

Bill drank some tea. He picked up the white queen and moved her diagonally one square, next to a group of pawns, even farther from the king. “March met some people here and came back several times. After college, he worked in Houston for a while, one of those IT companies, they make human resource software for other companies. But he didn’t like it. So he quit and asked me if he could stay here in Tahoe for a while. He wanted out of software engineering. He said he wanted to figure out his brain. I said sure. That was two years ago.”

“What did he do for income?”

“He worked for awhile at a snowboard shop. What they call a custom boot fitter, I guess. But he quit after a few months. He said there was some tension with the guys after he stopped riding and switched to skis. So he was back to living off his savings from his software job. There’s also a trust fund for both him and his sister. It’s not huge, but enough to pay for the basics.”

“What happens to the income now?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I guess it would go to his sister.”

“Where does his sister live?”

“April? Who knows? First, she’s in Houston right out of college, working as a secretary. It was the only work she could get because she majored in American History. What was she thinking? But she’s got a real thing for the Civil War. Always talking about Grant and Lee, Lincoln and Davis and Armstrong.

“She came and stayed with us last fall, then left a month or so ago. I don’t know where she is now. March talked to her, but he didn’t much mention it to me. He knew we don’t get along. Once, he said April was going to the Dominican Republic. Part of some charity group that builds shelters for women. I’ve tried calling her cell, but all I get is voicemail. She never calls back. I’ll call her again. She should know about March.”

“What’s her number?”

Bill told me and I wrote it on a business card. I wondered how many uncles would know a niece’s phone number by heart.

“March and April?” I said.

“Yeah, the names are kind of different. They’re twins. Born on either side of midnight, March thirty-first.”“Their parents?”

“Their mama was my sister. Maria Carrera. She died twenty-two years ago. The kids were three. Maria was sweet and kind and soft-spoken and beautiful...” Bill stopped talking and looked out the window. The snow had resumed falling. His dark eyes were moist. “Like I said, death in the family is hard.”

“What about their father?”

“Maria married a crook. John Carrera. He was around for a couple months, then left. I heard he went to Mexico and was involved in a chop shop. Cut up stolen cars to sell the parts. Probably in prison, now. Bottom line is the kids never had a father. He’d already been gone for half a year when they were born. Then, three years later, they didn’t have a mother, either.”

“Who raised them?”

“Maria’s best friend Gabriella Mendoza took them in. Gabriella was poor and single, but she has a good heart. She did right by them. I tried to help, but they were out in Dust Devil, Texas, and I was in Houston. And my business pretty much consumed me.”

“Are you retired?”

“No, I still have the nightclub, but I have a good team. I can get away, now. I couldn’t the whole time those kids were growing up. I regret that. But what can you do?” He looked at the TV, then outside as if searching for something calming. He squinted and blinked and found Kleenex in his pocket to blow his nose.

“Who paid the bills for the kids?”

“Gabriella is a frugal woman. I helped some. And the kids have the trust fund from my mother, bless her soul.”

“Why don’t you get along with April?”

“It could take some time to tell. She’s a hothead for one. Where March was calm, April flies off on every little thing. For example, I had a little party here about six weeks back. March and April and their friends. Everyone was having a good time. April started talking about when they cut all the trees in Tahoe to shore up the mine tunnels in Virginia City. She said that the silver from the Comstock Lode was part of how the Union Army was financed, so the trees of Tahoe were instrumental in helping the Union defeat the Confederates. Did you know that? That Tahoe lumber helped Lincoln hold the country together? I didn’t know that.” Bill picked up a black knight and moved it one square forward, two to the left, closer to the white king.

Bill continued, “So it was a real interesting party conversation. But then April blew it all apart.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“April was saying something about General Grant and Armstrong, and how after the war, Armstrong had something to do with the Carson City Mint. But Paul Riceman said he didn’t think Armstrong was important enough to even talk about. Then April said she could talk about Armstrong as much as she wanted. It was the silliest of disagreements. I don’t even know who Armstrong was. Then they got in an argument and April got up and stormed out and drove away. It was like some kid having a temper tantrum. Imagine that. You’ve got these young kids who are smart enough they’re talking about the Civil War for chrissakes. But they still get in a petty argument. Ruined my party.”

Bill turned his head and stared toward Heavenly, now obscured by clouds. Perhaps he was imagining the trails that March had ridden.

“Paul Riceman was one of March’s friends,” I said.

“Right. Works in construction.”

“How’d March react to the argument?”

“He acted like it was no big deal.”

“You ever witness Paul argue with April before?”

“No.” Bill shook his head.

“Paul and March do much together?”

“They were pretty good buddies,” Bill said.

“Who else was at your dinner party?”

“Let me think. Besides March and April and Paul, there was Packer and Carmen. Packer works in the same shop where March worked. They all have passes at the local areas. Except Carmen. She wants to learn to ski, but she’s afraid she’ll get hurt.”

“April and March get along?” I said.

“Everyone got along with March.”“And you think April is in the Dominican Republic?”

“Like I said, I don’t know. That’s what March told me.”

I heard the pain of rejection in his voice.

Bill looked back at the TV screen. The Vikings were in a huddle. They smacked each other on the butt and ran back to the line. The Vikings’ center snapped the ball, and the Cowboys ran over their front line and smashed the quarterback to the ground.Bill watched it, then picked up the white rook and moved it four squares to the left, taking out one of the black pawns. Bill handled the pieces with aggression as if he didn’t realize they were just pieces of carved wood.

“Your earlier comments,” I said, “sounded like you suspected that something bad might happen to March. He’d been gone barely twelve hours, and you wanted me to investigate. Why?”

Bill looked at me. He picked up a ballpoint pen off an end table and clicked it in and out. “Call it a feeling I had. Maybe it’s because he said something unusual about a month ago.”

I waited.

“He asked me if I knew any financial advisors who are good. So I said, ‘Sure, why?’ Because we both knew that March didn’t have any surplus of funds. His savings from his previous job was running low. And the trust fund is locked up. He can’t touch any of it other than his monthly check.”

“What did he say when you asked why?”

“He said something like, ‘I’m twenty-five and I was thinking I should make a plan one of these years.’”

“Why does it stand out?” I said.

“I’m not sure. I suppose it’s just that March wasn’t a planner. He lived a day at a time. When he asked me about a financial planner, it didn’t fit. I worried that he was into something bad. He also came home with a book on the stock market and one on coin collecting and Fortune magazine. It was strange, this sudden focus on investing.” Bill paused. “There’s another reason why I worried that something bad was going to happen to March.”

“What’s that?”

“You have to come downstairs to March’s bedroom.”

 

 

 

TEN

 

Bill hoisted himself to his feet and led me down the stairs, his pace labored, his crutches groaning. We went down a hall where Bill reached into one of the doorways and flipped on a light switch. I followed him in.

It was an unremarkable bedroom. The bed was unmade, and there were some clothes strewn about. A snowboard leaned in one corner next to a pair of snowboard boots. The closet door stood open, revealing some clothes on hangers and more piled on the floor. On the wall were topographical maps assembled to show the lake and surrounding mountains. In another corner stood a pair of skis.

“What made you worry about March?”

Bill pointed at the doorknob on the closet. A necklace of sorts hung from the knob. “He didn’t wear his star,” Bill said.

“What does that mean?”

Bill took it off the doorknob and handed it to me. “It is an amulet that brings the protection of the Guardian Spirit.”

It was a small circular pendent, about an inch in diameter and woven of some kind of grass. It had exquisite details and a design of interlocking triangles. Some of the grass strands were died black, some gray and some left natural buff. The pendant hung on a thin leather cord.

“It was woven by my grandmother. She called it the Washoe Star. She said it was a design that came from her mother, my great grandmother.”

“It looks a little like the designs I’ve seen on Washoe baskets,” I said.

“Yeah, except it isn’t a traditional Washoe design. Great grandma was a young woman when she met one of the Chinese laborers who came to the Sierra to work on the railroads and in the mines during the Nineteenth Century. She got close to this young man. They couldn’t speak each other’s language. But she showed him her woven baskets with her beautiful designs. Then he drew her several mandalas, which are concentric geometric shapes based on Chinese deities. Great grandma joined his designs with hers and wove what she called the Washoe Star. She said it would represent the Guardian Spirit, and she passed the design on to her daughter, our Grandma.

“Before Maria died she told Grandma how the storms in Texas were so bad that the paper called them Muerte Cielo, or Death Sky, and that her babies cried at the thunder. So Grandma wove a Washoe Star for March and another one for April so the Guardian Spirit would look out for them.”

“But March left his at home,” I said.

Bill looked at me, no doubt wondering what I thought about it.

I didn’t believe that a woven amulet could, by itself, protect someone from an avalanche. But I did believe that an amulet’s presence could make someone more self-aware and, in subtle ways too numerous to count, make them more careful and more inclined to better judgement, thus achieving the intended effect.

“Did March wear his Washoe Star often?” I asked.

Bill nodded. “You know how objects can come to take on important symbolism and meaning?” Bill said.

“Yeah.”

“March wore his most every day. It was a prized possession.” Bill reached under his shirt collar and pulled out his own Washoe Star. “I’ll wear mine every day that I’m in this life.”

I hung March’s star back on the doorknob, and we went back upstairs to the living room.

“What about April?”

“April is a spoiled brat. I can’t stand to be around her. If she were more of a planner than March, I would never know it.”

“Did March spend a lot of money recently?”

“No. He was generous, but he didn’t have a lot extra to throw around.”

“He have any recent fights or disputes or disagreements with anyone?”

Bill shook his head.

“Does he hang out in bars or with guys you don’t like?”

“What do you mean?”

“Guys that make you worry. Guys who are unemployed and un-ambitious.”

“No.”

“Is he on good terms with ex-girlfriends?

Bill nodded. “There’s just the Peachtree girl, and they’re good friends.”

“What about drugs?”

“He wouldn’t even try coffee until he was in his twenties.”

 

 

 

ELEVEN

 

“You were asking about March’s friends. I forgot to mention Will. He was at the party, too.”

“Tell me about him,” I said.

“Will Adams is March’s main ski buddy. Lives over on the East Side. Zephyr Cove. He’s a computer guy. Fixes your computer when it crashes. He refers to himself as a rent-a-geek. He’s the guy I was going to see with my laptop the day I saw you at the shopping center.”

“Do you have any photos I can look at?”

“Of March and April? Sure. I also have a photo we took the day of my party. I’ll get it.” Bill hoisted himself up and hobbled over behind a couch to some shelves with electronic gear. He found some snapshots and was coming back when he caught his left crutch on the couch leg. He sprawled onto the floor, landing with a house-shaking thud.

I ran over and bent down to him. “Bill, are you okay? That was a helluva hard fall.”

Bill turned his head toward me, shock and confusion in his eyes. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he said in an airy voice.

“Let me help you up.” I reached for his arm.

“No. Don’t touch me.”

“Easy, Bill. Just trying to help.” I stayed bent, my arm in the air, wondering if he had major injuries.

“Get away. I’ll get up myself.”

I backed away. It was painful to watch Bill get to his elbows and knees, grimacing in pain. He scrabbled forward, braced ankles scraping the carpet as he worked his way to the end of the couch. He got his hands onto the couch and heaved himself over it, crutches flopping, grunting like a large animal. I turned away and went over to the window to look out. Spot had pulled his head inside the Jeep. I heard the clink of crutches and more grunting behind me. Eventually, came the sounds and sighs of someone sitting down after a grueling exercise. I turned and saw Bill sitting in his chair, his chest heaving as he breathed.

I sat down.

“I might be a crip,” Bill said, his voice an angry growl, “but I can do the crabwalk, fend for myself. You use crutches, the whole world divides into two groups. One group ignores you, looks right the hell through you like you don’t exist. The other group is falling all over themselves trying to open doors and helping you up stairs and spreading your damn peanut butter.”

“I won’t go near your damn peanut butter,” I said.

Bill stared at me. He was still panting. He looked up at the TV. It showed the scoreboard. It was a rout. “I played college ball at Texas A&M. I was good. Not pro material. Too small. But they gave me a scholarship.”

“That how you messed up your legs?”

Bill nodded vacantly. “Yeah. Got hit from the front when my feet were pretty well anchored.” He looked down at the chessboard. “Ripped out the knee ligaments and broke the head of my left tibia up like it was made of cheap pottery. Lots of pieces. The docs got some of them back in place, but they said I wouldn’t walk again without crutches. Here I am, decades later, still proving them right. Life can change in a big way in a very short moment. Most people don’t realize that until it happens to them. Surprise. One minute you’re a good athlete. The next minute the only game you’ll ever play again is something like chess. Then you can re-enact how easy it is to lose important pieces, pieces you can never get back.”

Bill was still breathing hard. When he calmed, he pulled the snapshot out of his pocket.

I took it from him. It showed six young people standing on Bill’s deck, snow piled high on the deck railing, the canal and a few snow-covered sailboats behind them. They were in a row with arms over each other’s shoulders, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, boy.

“Left to right, if I remember, is March, April, Will, Carmen, Packer and Paul.”

March was a big kid, trim and fit like a strong swimmer, a mop of hair over a square face, a smile suitable for toothpaste commercials. He radiated confidence. His arm around his sister squeezed her with enthusiasm.

His twin sister was the opposite. She was a foot shorter, not particularly fit looking, with a darker complexion and no smile at all. Her hair was stringy straight and most people would never notice her in a group. Yet I could see a fierce intelligence in her eyes. It reminded me of when you see a coyote staring out of the forest and you realize that nothing escapes its notice.

The next person was Will. “You said Will’s a computer geek. Is he self-employed?” In the picture he wore jeans and a sweatshirt, a scruffy haircut combed straight up and a grin like Honey G the retriever, happy and eager.

“I guess so, because when he fixed my firewall problem he had me write the check out to his name.”

“What’s he like?”

Bill thought a minute. “He’s the easy guy, everyone’s friend, no rough edges.”

“Like March?”

“Yeah, except March was more passionate. When they hiked up Mt. Tallac to ski the cross, March was very driven about it, focused on every detail of what to bring and exactly where to hike and what the best strategy was for skiing down. Then he raved about it afterward. Whereas Will acted like it was no big deal.”

“The image of a geek isn’t usually someone so athletic that they ski the cross,” I said.

“No.”

“Will have a girlfriend?” I asked.

“Not real close, I don’t think. I believe he and Carmen used to date. Now they’re friends.”

It was hard to see the details of Carmen’s face in the picture, because she’d been moving, but her smile was huge. She was short and stout and looked like she was having the best time of her life.

“Tell me about Carmen. What’s her last name?”

“Carmen Nicholas,” he said, his voice suddenly warm. “A real sweetheart. We only just met at that party. She’s been over here several times since and she’s brought me little gifts each time. Homemade cookies, a refrigerator magnet with a team picture of the Cowboys, a bottle of my favorite barbecue sauce.” He smiled. “I didn’t think I’d ever get attracted to anyone again.”

“She’s what, about thirty years younger than you?”

“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not stupid. I know she’ll never really love an old crip like me. But she likes me. And I can provide something for her. I have some money. That sounds crass, but it is a currency of relationships more often than people like to think.”

“Her job?”

“She’s a casino cocktail waitress at Harrah’s. I’ve never visited her there, but I’ve kind of wondered about it because they wear those skimpy dresses and, frankly, I can’t quite see Carmen like that. She’s pretty plump, and she’s got legs like Whitebark pines, thick and strong as hell. But who am I to judge?”

“What about Packer?” In the photo he looked like a punk rocker. Angular and sullen, with big bones and a heavy brow. He wore jeans so torn up it would be hard to pull them on without your foot going out the wrong hole. His black hair was greased straight back, and he had a pointed goatee below two lip rings.

“The guy at the snowboard shop. He used to be March’s riding partner before March switched to skis. Packer’s a rough kind of guy. Smokes a lot of pot, drinks a lot of beer, talks loud, doesn’t care if people don’t like him.”

“His last name?”

“Mills. Packer Mills.”

“Packer have a girlfriend?”

Bill frowned. “I don’t understand all the questions about girlfriends and boyfriends. What is that with you? Does this have to do with the girl in the avalanche?”

“Some,” I said. “But March’s disappearance bothered you immediately. When I looked into it I found March and a second body. I would normally assume both deaths were accidental. But your immediate worry when March didn’t come home makes me wonder otherwise. If either death wasn’t accidental, then the first place to start looking is friends and family of the deceased. You want me to stop?”

“No, no. If March didn’t die an accidental death, I want you to find out what happened.” Bill looked away. “I don’t know if Packer had a girlfriend. I don’t think he was the steady type. More of a one-night-stand kind of guy.”

“One-nighters with any of March’s friends?”

Bill shook his head. “Not that March ever said.”

“April?”

Bill flashed a look at me, fire in his eyes. “Absolutely, not.”

“Why do you care? You don’t like her.”

“Right. I don’t like her. Doesn’t mean I want my niece doing it with that jerk.” He grabbed a black pawn and moved it forward one square, setting it down hard enough that the rest of the pieces jumped sideways. “And don’t even think about Carmen,” he said with anger.

“You mentioned Paul,” I said. He was on the right in the photo. He was the only one with light hair, so light it looked like it had been triple bleached.

“Yeah. Paul Riceman. A contractor up on Kingsbury Grade.”

The TV, still silent, was showing a figure skating contest. Bill picked up the remote and turned it off.

“Paul and March ski together a lot?” I asked.

“Just now and then.”

“Does Paul do much with the others?”

“Not to my knowledge. I don’t think he’d even met Packer before he came to my party.”

“Who else should I talk to? People who weren’t at your party?”

“I invited all of March’s best friends. But I remember one other girl who is a friend of April’s. I guess she knows March, but not real well. Her name is Ada. I don’t know the last name.”

“She live in Tahoe?”

“I assume so,” he said.

“How’d you meet her?

“April brought her to the house. A real firecracker. Smart as they make ‘em.”

“How would I contact her?” I asked.

“Through April, but April doesn’t answer her phone.”

“Anyone else you can think of?”

“No one comes to mind. Hey, it’s getting late,” he said, “and you haven’t had any lunch. Can I make you a sandwich? I learned some good tricks in my club after all those years.”

I stood. “No thanks. I’ll save my appetite. Got a date with my sweetheart for dinner.”

“That would be Street Casey? You can always bring her over here, if you want. I’m even better at dinner than I am at lunch.”

“We’ll do that some time. How do you know her name?”

Bill looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I guess I must have heard it around somewhere. When I was asking the cops about you, maybe.”

We looked at each other. I tried to see past his eyes, wet and dark as a seal’s. I wanted to see the gears turning, servo-mechanisms whirring. Always, you look for the glitches, the grit stuck in the gear teeth, the broken connectors, the leaking pipes, the frayed cables, the stripped and shorted wires. But I couldn’t see past the dark eyes, past the weary sadness.

“I’ll give you a call when I learn something new,” I said and left.

 

 

 

TWELVE

 

I called Street at her lab while I drove home and asked if she’d like dinner at my place.

“What’s on the menu?”

“To be decided. But as you are a woman of elegant tastes, I should warn you that it would likely be humble.”

“Humble works.”

I next called the number Bill gave me for April’s cell. Her voicemail answered, a quiet voice that nevertheless sounded tough and angry. “If you want to leave a message for April, go ahead. Maybe I’ll call back.”

“April, this is Detective Owen McKenna. I am investigating an avalanche at Emerald Bay that March was involved in. I have some questions you can help me with. Please give me a call.” I left my number and hung up. I didn’t want to say anything in my phone message that would suggest that March had died. Best to do that in person. But maybe Bill called April as soon as I left his house. Or maybe April heard about the slide from someone in Tahoe.

I had a good hour before Street would show up, and I’d been thinking about Ellie’s perfectly trained dog.

“Spot,” I said as I pulled up to our cabin and got out of the Jeep. He jumped out and looked at me, anticipation mixed with boredom. I could tell he was making those calculations that dogs use to predict the chances that their owner is about to produce food. “Do you want to emulate Honey G?” I said. “Do you pine for search-and-rescue fluency? Are you plagued by feelings of inadequacy?”

I opened the front door. Spot walked in, went directly over to his bed and lay down, ignoring me. The food calculations must have given him a negative answer.

“I think we should brush up on your tracking skills.”

Spot didn’t move except to sigh.

I’d been thinking about hand commands like Ellie used with Honey G. I was also envisioning a scent tracking exercise. I found an old rag and tore it in two. For a distinctive scent I rubbed the pieces with deodorant. I could hide one and use the other to scent Spot on. I stuffed them in my pocket.

To get Spot’s attention I opened the cupboard over the fridge and pulled out my secret tube of potato chips. They were the manufactured kind, regular even discs of salty processed potatoes, perfect for edible Frisbee exercise.

Spot jumped up, suddenly alert. His eyes were intense and his ears made little adjustments like radar antennae tweaking their position for maximum reception.

“Outside before you drool,” I said, opening the door.

Spot raced out in anticipation. I shot a disc out across the snow and he went after it like it held the key to eternal bliss. I heard his jaws snap and the chip was no more. Several rounds later it was clear that, as with humans, a dog would never stop eating them until the source was taken away. I put the chips back in their hiding place.

I fetched my gloves and went back outside. Spot sniffed my gloves, just in case I still had a chip left.

I began to roll up large snowballs and built three snowmen outside my cabin. One was near the deck, one by the parking pad, and one on the corner of my small lot. It was a difficult project because Spot kept jumping on my snowballs as I rolled them.

The snowmen were each separated by fifteen feet or more, but all were in view from the front door. I wanted Spot to see them all together.

Despite their forked-stick arms, I was pleased to have achieved such an impressive human likeness, with indentations for eyes, pine cones for ears, and protruding lumps of snow for noses.

When I was done, I called Spot over.

Because we’d been doing search-and-rescue work, I thought we should expand to suspect work.

I called him over to my front door and had him sit like any good student.

“The critical thing to remember in suspect apprehension,” I told him, “is to get the correct person. Are you with me?”

Spot stretched his head forward and sniffed at my gloves again.

“Later, Spot. Now I want you to focus.”

Spot stood up, stretched his front legs out so that his chest lowered down, but kept his butt in the air. His eyes looked demonic. He had snow on his nose and between his ears. His tail was a high-speed metronome. He didn’t know what we were going to do, but he knew we were going to do something. Dogs like to do stuff.

“So watch me very carefully,” I said. I was going to work on directing him with a hand command.

Spot lowered farther so that his chest was down in the snow. He was about to spring on me.

I turned away, hoping to cool his excitement and lessen the chance that he would leap his 170 pounds onto me. One of the problems I’d always had in training Spot was that he thought everything was about having fun. Good to have enthusiasm, but I sometimes envied trainers who worked with Goldens, Labs, German Shepherds and other breeds that took their doggie work more seriously than do Great Danes.

I was aware, however, of a small advantage that Danes have when doing both suspect apprehension and search and rescue. Suspect apprehension requires aggressiveness. Search and rescue requires gentleness. Some breeds, after they’ve been trained as police dogs, are not suited to search and rescue because they may forget that finding the victim is not the same as finding the suspect. The last thing a lost hiker needs is a dog finding them and then holding them with his teeth until his handler comes.

Great Danes are inclined to think that both activities are a game. And they need almost no aggressiveness to intimidate a suspect. Their size alone does the job.

“Okay, Spot,” I said. I squatted down at the front door. It was still snowing lightly and the dormer over the door gave a little shelter. “Turn around,” I said. I reached my arms around his chest and with some effort shifted him 180 degrees. “Spot, do you see the suspect? Do you?” I put some excitement and tension in my voice.

Spot turned his head and looked at me, his eyes intense. Finally, we were going to do stuff.

Kneeling next to Spot, our heads were the same height. I put my arm around his neck, grabbed his head with both hands and pointed him toward the snowman on the right. “There’s the suspect! Do you see, Spot?” I tensed my hands on his head so that he was pointed directly at the right snowman. Then I extended my arm next to his head and pointed at the guilty snowman. I figured it would be obvious to him that I was indicating the snowman and not something near it because of the recent activity of building it. Even so, I was careful to make certain that Spot could not misunderstand which snowman I was pointing at. “Take down the suspect, Spot! Take him down!”

Spot shot away from me, his head pointed toward the snowman on the right. Three long fast leaps later he launched into the air on a rising arc. He opened his giant mouth and closed it on the snowman’s head, ripping it off the snowman. His chest hit the snowman in a full body block and the snowman was smashed into a sorry lump of snow.

I felt a momentary smugness with my training success, but only until Spot got up running, picking up speed in a wide arc and closed in on the next snowman. He repeated his attack, destroying the second snowman, and then attacked the third with increasing precision. After that, he raced around in circles, pleased with his accomplishment.

I walked over to the lump of snow that had been the correct suspect, beckoned Spot and praised him lavishly. Then we went to the second snowman and, using my scolding voice, I told Spot it was bad to kill innocent bystanders. Same for the third snowman, but I don’t think Spot believed me considering that these were snow people and not quite like the real thing.

Undaunted, I proceeded to rebuild the snowmen. This time I buried one of the deodorant rags in the neck of the center snowman.

Back at the front door, we faced away from the snowmen. I took the remaining portion of the rag and let Spot sniff it.

“Do you have the scent, Spot? Do you?” He didn’t seem to care.

I stuck the rag against his nose. “Smell it, Spot. Do you have the scent? Find the suspect!”

I made no hand signals. I just gave him a little smack on his rear and he took off. He shot straight for the center snowman, ripped off his head and crushed his body.

As he came around to ravage the second and third snowmen, I was already sprinting toward him, my arms out wide. I flapped them madly, feinting left, then right, pretending I could stop him if he wanted to make mischief.

I saw motion to the side and turned to see Street Casey pulling her VW beetle into the drive, tire chains on all four wheels.

Spot ran to meet her.

She got out, looking sleek and glamorous in her long black coat. She had on narrow-cut black pants and boots that were slim and stylish despite their non-skid soles for snow and ice. Her hair was pulled up and back in a bun and her gold earrings sparkled. She’d put on some makeup that emphasized her cheekbones. Her lipstick was the shade of red that said, kiss me, you idiot.

I dropped my arms to my side and stood panting.

Spot jumped around her, his greeting skills as enthusiastic as his other tricks.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Street said to me. “You were practicing for flight? You have such nice technique, but I think you need a little more plumage for proper lift.”

“We were practicing suspect apprehension,” I said.

“Of course. I’ve seen it on TV, right? Cops see a bad guy, first thing they do is run and flap their arms like flightless turkeys.”

“First thing. Scares the crap out of crooks.”

Street walked to the front door and stood under the overhang. She looked like the perfect enticement to come inside and get out of the snow.

“If you were willing to take a break,” she said, “from this flapping apprehension thing, we could go inside and have a glass of wine and commune with your fire before we commune with your dinner.”

“My fire? Or the fire in the woodstove?”

Street wrapped her arms around me, her hands exploring. “Both,” she said. She pulled the remaining deodorant-rag out of my pocket. She sniffed it, frowning. “Is this an apprehension accessory?”

“Bad guys often smell bad,” I said.

“And good guys smell good?”

“Always.”

“We better check,” she said, opening the door and dragging me inside.

 

Later, I pulled two wine glasses from my collection of four.

“The fire was hot,” Street said, “but we have a wine emergency.” She wore my old terry cloth bathrobe. It wrapped around her nearly twice and dragged on the floor like a wedding dress. “I noticed your wine rack when I came in. You are completely out. I thought of going to the store right then, but your ardor was, um, quite spirited. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“I can run to the store now if your post-coital needs are dire,” I said.

“They are.”

So I did.

 

 

 

THIRTEEN

 

First thing in the morning, Glenda Gorman from the Tahoe Herald walked into my office. She walked over to where Spot lay in the corner, gave him a pet, then sat down in one of my visitor’s chairs and did a staccato rat-a-tat with her boots on the floor. “Burrrrrr, it’s cold,” she growled through clenched teeth. She wore a fake fur coat, fawn brown, which set off her blond curls. The curls were just so, as with the little eyeliner that emphasized the blue of her eyes. She looked good and she knew it.

“Some places, Glennie, twenty degrees in January is considered warm,” I said.

“Where?”

“Bunch of M states. Minnesota. Montana. Maine. Michigan, Manitoba.”

“Masochists,” she said. “And isn’t Manitoba a province?”

I shrugged. “Hard for us Tahoe types to keep track of anything east of Reno.”

“Anyway, I’ve got some hot news. I received a phone call you’ll want to know about. A guy claims he set the avalanche at Emerald Bay.”

“Why do you think I want to know?”

“My business, ace reporter and all. You’re working for the kid’s uncle.” She put her boots up on the edge of my desk and rocked her chair back, balancing on its rear legs. “I have informants all over this metropolis.”

“You mean you’re nosy as hell.”

“Like I said, my business. I called Mallory, and he called the El Dorado Sheriff’s Department, and a sergeant named Bains called me back, and in exchange for info about my mysterious phone call, he told me that you went out with the dog trainer lady and her dog and found the bodies. Anyway, I gave Bains the number of the avalanche psycho off my caller ID. Then he pulled some strings or called in some favors and got a trace on the call in, like, five minutes. Amazing. Have you met this guy in person?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he cute? He sounds cute.”

“Ichabod Crane meets the Phantom of the Opera without his mask.”

Glennie stood up and glowered at me across my desk. Her eyes were just barely higher than mine were sitting. “McKenna, you are not the only handsome guy in this town.”

“You’re right. George Clooney meets Pierce Brosnan.”

“Better. Much better.”

“What did the phone trace show?”

Glennie sat back down. “The avalanche psycho called from a pay phone in Reno. Bains told the Washoe Sheriff’s Department. They dusted the phone, but it was wiped clean.”

I nodded.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what the guy said?”

“What did the guy say?”

Glennie pulled out a little notebook, green paper with a pink spiral binding at the top. “I take notes as I talk on the phone. I don’t think I missed more than two words of what he said.”

She flipped a few pages, then spoke. “The phone rang and I picked it up and said, ‘Glenda Gorman.’”

“He said, ‘I set the avalanche at Emerald Bay.’”

“I said, ‘Who’s calling?’”

“He said, ‘None of your business. All you need to know is there’s going to be more avalanches. Payback for ruining the pristine Tahoe landscape. Tahoe belonged to the Washoe Indians, and they kept Tahoe clean and pure for thousands of years. White man has nearly destroyed Tahoe in just a few decades. Now Tahoe will start destroying white man in a just a few weeks.’”

Glennie shut her notebook. “He hung up before I got a chance to ask another question.”

“Can I copy your notes?”

Glennie thought about it. She handed me the notebook. I got up and made copies.

“What did his voice sound like?”

“His enunciation was spotty and inconsistent. He was trying to sound dumber than he was. Emerald was two syllables and he didn’t pronounce the D. He just ran the words together. ‘Em’ralbay.’ When he said, ‘None of your business,’ he didn’t pronounce the word of. Your was yer and business was missing the middle S. Like, ‘None uh yer biness.’”

“You rattle that off like a linguist.”

“Like I said, it’s my job.”

“He’s trying to disguise himself,” I said.

“Yeah. But he’s doing a poor job. He sounds dumb but uses the word pristine. Just the kind of word that would be run-of-the-mill for a smart guy, so run-of-the-mill that he doesn’t think to edit it out. Same with the word nearly.”

“A dumb guy doesn’t know the word nearly?”

“Knows, but doesn’t use,” Glennie said. “The biggest giveaway that it is a fairly smart guy is the self-conscious couplet, ‘White man destroyed Tahoe in a few decades. Now Tahoe will destroy white man in a few weeks.’ A dumb guy wouldn’t think of that construction. He’d just say, ‘You wrecked Tahoe, so I’m gonna kill your asses.’”

“So we’ve got a smart guy trying to sound dumb. But he’s not really smart or he would have done a better job of sounding dumb.”

Glennie nodded.

“You study speech characteristics when you could be home baking cookies,” I said.

“Part of my business is to divine a person’s inner workings by the way they talk.”

“I like chocolate chip, if it matters,” I said.

“You think women can curry favors with cookies?”

“Curry? I didn’t think anyone under forty knew that word.

“It’s my favorite spice. I could put it in your cookies.”

“Maybe you should stick with linguistics. You think the payback thing is true? That he’s some kind of eco-terrorist, like the Earth Liberation Front group that burns down buildings around the country?”

“Could be,” Glennie said. “Could also be he just gets off making snow slide. Like a firestarter who tries to frame his kinkiness in some grander intellectual concept. I know that the Earth Liberation Front issues press releases taking credit for their burns. They haven’t said anything about this avalanche. For that matter, we don’t actually know that anyone caused the avalanche, do we?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to try to find out.”

“Let me know? I’m late. I gotta run.”

My phone rang and I answered it. It was Sergeant Bains.

“Hey Bains,” I said. Glennie was at my door. She stopped.

“You were right,” he said in my ear. “The girl in the slide was murdered before the avalanche ever started. By suffocation. But the guy was killed by the avalanche.”

“You got an explanation that fits?” I said.

“Not even close. Hey, I’m not far away. You going to be there? I’ll give you the details in person. Besides, I love to take my cruiser across the state line. It always tweaks the Nevada deputies when they see us on their turf.”

“I’ll be here.”

Glennie was still at the door as I hung up. “That was Sergeant Bains?” she said. “George Clooney meets Pierce Brosnan?”

I nodded.

She looked at her watch again. “Damn, I gotta go,” she said and hurried out.

 

 

 

FOURTEEN

 

The morning sun had risen enough that it was now shining on the left side of my desk. I took the little poinsettia Street had given me and slid it into the sunlight. Its leaves were as brilliant as fresh-polished fire engines. It shimmered with joy.

A tiny triangle of sun missed the desk and poinsettia and hit the bottom of the wall by the door. Spot spied it, got up, walked over and sniffed it. He lay down hard against the wall so that the patch of sun shined on him. My door opened. Sergeant Bains walked in and saw Spot. “Sorry to interrupt his nap. Not like he’s upset, though.”

“Like a poinsettia in sunlight, he shimmers with joy.”

Bains looked at me. “I don’t buy you’re a poet.”

“What was the giveaway?” I said. “Shimmers?”

“Probably got that word from your girlfriend. She’s the bug scientist, right? The medical examiner in Sac wants to speak to her. Some kind of bug question.”

“Did you ID the girl?”

“Yeah. A Lorraine Simon from San Fran. Lived in one of those mansions over by the Presidio. Twenty-two years old. The girl, not the house. I drove down last night to inform her parents. They were out. They have a baby-sitter, sits for their Pomeranians. I told him a white lie about some stolen property that belonged to his employers. In the fifteen minutes I waited for them to come home I learned more than you’d want to know about Lorraine’s parents.

“Girl’s old man is a guy named Samuel Simon. Wife is Clarice. Simple Simons they ain’t. They own a company that does hydro-dynamic research. Under contract to ship builders. Something about laminar flow. Don’t ask me what that means. They employ eighteen engineers. And I almost forgot. In their spare time, he’s a radiologist and she’s an attorney. And, oh yeah, she’s served two terms in the state legislature. Lunches with the Guv. And the doc is on the board of one of those cancer foundations.”

Bains hitched up one trouser leg and perched his thigh on the corner of my desk. “Finally, they came home and I told them about their daughter.”

“How’d they take it?”

“Mom was pretty strong, dad went shaky and the dog-sitter had a meltdown. Dr. Simon had to give him a sedative. Then he popped some pills himself.”

“You learn what Lorraine was doing in Tahoe?”

“Only that she’d graduated from college and was taking a year off. Dad’s words. Snowboarding and mountain biking.”

“What does mom say?”

“I couldn’t tell. Mom talks like one of those life coaches. Who knows what it means. Stuff like Lori was self-actualizing her true potential, and she was flowering, and she was on a spirit quest.”

“You tell them how she died?”

“Earlier in the day, when I talked to the ME, he said his findings were preliminary, so I just told the parents their daughter’s body was found in an avalanche.”

“They say anything revealing?”

Bains shook his head. “Nothing. What about the uncle of the kid? Esteban. You talked to him more than I have so far. He seemed awfully tense to me.”

“Esteban’s wired tight as they come. He’d redline any kind of meter you strapped on him. I think it’s his frustration at being handicapped. He was an athlete as a young man and he was crippled by an accident on the gridiron. He’s still angry as hell. I think his handicap contributed to his reaction to his nephew going missing.”

“And now that he knows his nephew is dead, how’s he reacting to that?”

“He seems to blame himself. He said March suddenly got interested in investing, and he thinks that means the kid was into something bad. Esteban feels that he should have done something about it. He had an anxiety attack when I was there.”

“What’s the thing about investing?” Bains was fishing.

“He only said that March asked him about financial planners and it stood out as strange because March wasn’t the planning type.”

“You gonna share when you find out anything else?”

“Bains, never mind that I’m working a case in your territory, for twenty years I was a cop same as you. I know that I-help-you is the best way to make for you-help-me.”

Willie Nelson started singing On The Road Again out of Bains’s shirt pocket. Bains pulled out his cell phone.

“Bains,” he said.

I heard a woman’s voice talking.

“Thanks,” Bains said and hung up. He pulled his radio off his belt, inspected it and swore. He turned to me. “Radio isn’t working. Office called to say there was a big slide on the Nevada side. Hit a section of road near Sand Harbor. A witness said a car was buried.”

 

 

 

FIFTEEN

 

I called Diamond Martinez.

“Have you heard about a slide at Sand Harbor?”

“Yeah. A possible vehicle involved. The Washoe Sheriff’s Department will have more in the morning.”

“Coffee at my cabin?”

“If I can get up your road. Weather report says another foot by morning. How many is that this month? Twenty feet?” Diamond sounded disgusted.

“Good thing it keeps settling. You on duty in the morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Then your Douglas County SUV should be up to it.”

We hung up.

We were in one of those wet weather patterns. El Nino and La Nina were doing their courtship dance out in the Pacific. To impress the girl, El Nino hurled a blast of moisture at the coast of Northern California every twenty-four hours. The rain bumped across the coastal ranges, dropped down for a quick wet sprint over the Central Valley, then made the long climb up the west slope of the Sierra. Frostbitten by the ascent, the storm clouds got angry and lashed Tahoe with snow. I doubt La Nina even noticed.

 

I leaned back and put my feet up on the desk to think. The phone rang. I stopped thinking.

“Owen McKenna.”

“Mr. McKenna, my name is April Carrera.” She sounded tentative. Frightened. With stuffed-up sinuses like she’d just gotten over a bout of crying and cranked herself up to call me.

“Thanks for calling, April. Your uncle is worried.”

She took a moment to answer. “Uncle Bill doesn’t worry about me. He exudes anxiety about me.”

“Is that why you went to the Dominican Republic?”

“Did Uncle Bill tell you that’s where I went?”

“That’s what March told him,” I said. “Are you there now?”

Another pause. “Yeah. But don’t ask what town. You might tell Uncle Bill, the last person on earth I’d want to know.”

“April, have you heard about your brother?”

“Yes. March died in an avalanche. Uncle Bill said it on my voicemail. That’s sensitive, isn’t it? A real soft touch, ol’ Bill. ‘Hey, April, where you been, you never return my calls, by the way, March was killed in an avalanche.’” She started crying.

“I’m sorry, April,” I said. “If there’s anything I...”

“If there’s anything you can do... I guess I’ve heard that one before, haven’t I? Everybody’s sorry. Everybody wants to help. Yeah, well it’s too late for that, isn’t it?”

“I understand your anger.”

“No, you don’t! And don’t ever think you understand anything else about me, either! Do I make myself clear?” She hung up.

 

Later, I was driving past the shopping center near Stateline when I noticed an Escalade that looked familiar, so I pulled in. Bill Esteban was sitting in the front seat. The engine was running, and he was looking away from me, toward the supermarket. He made no moves to suggest he was going into the store or had just come out.

It seemed peculiar to me, so I stopped behind a large panel van and watched.

Bill continued to stare at the doors of the supermarket.

After a couple of minutes I noticed him shift. He moved his head as if watching someone. Then he shifted into reverse and began to back out of his space.

I pulled out and followed him. Spot was lying down sleeping in back, so I wasn’t obvious.

Bill drove down to the end of the parking row and stopped. I stopped where I could see him. The only person clearly in his view was a young woman who was loading a baby into a car seat in the back of an old beat-up Chevy. She shut the back door and began putting her groceries into the trunk. I couldn’t see her well, but she appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. She was very small, probably weighing 100 pounds. Except for her Asian heritage, her size and apparent fragility reminded me of Lori Simon, the girl whose body we’d found in the avalanche.

The girl pushed her empty cart through the snow and left it in the cart drop-off area, then got in her car. It started with a large puff of blue smoke. She backed out and drove away.

Bill followed her. I followed Bill.

The girl drove across Lake Tahoe Boulevard and took the back streets behind the motels to a small trailer park. There she transferred her baby and the groceries into a small trailer that had been badly remodeled into two half-trailer apartments, with a door for each side and a scar on the outside where a second bathroom had been grafted side-to-side onto the original bathroom.

I stayed well back, watching Bill as he watched the girl. When the girl was inside, Bill drove away. I followed him as far as Tahoe Keys Boulevard where he turned to go home.

I called Bains as I turned around.

When he answered, I said, “I just saw Bill Esteban at the supermarket. He watched a young girl with a child come out of the store. When she drove away, he followed at a distance, then watched from a distance as she unloaded her baby and groceries into her trailer apartment. After she was inside he drove away.”

“What’s your read?” Bains said.

“The girl didn’t know he was there. Maybe they know each other, maybe not. But he didn’t just follow the first girl who came out of the store. He was watching and waiting for her.”

“So if he knows her, he could be checking to make sure she got home okay,” Bains said.

“Yeah.”

“Or he could be a stalker.”

“That, too,” I said.

“If he’s a stalker and the girl hasn’t had any contact from him, that’s a problem for us, huh?” Bains said.

“Yeah. No crime watching someone in public. No crime following someone in public.”

“Anything you notice about her?” Bains asked. “She a hottie or something?”

“No. Only thing that strikes me is she’s tiny. Like Lori Simon, the girl in the avalanche.”

I gave Bains the girl’s address and description and we hung up.

Spot and I made a quick trip to Carson City for some

things you can’t get in Tahoe, then went to Street’s condo for dinner. Spot lay in front of her fire. I’d brought a Fat Cat cab that I got at Trader Joe’s. I opened it and poured half the bottle into Street’s fancy wine glasses, the ones that hold about sixteen ounces each.

We sat in front of the fire and tasted the wine while I told Street about April calling me and oozing grief-stricken, angry-young-woman frustration. Then I told her about Esteban following the girl from the grocery store.

“You’ve got two people dead in an avalanche and maybe more in the Sand Harbor slide and a stalker client whose remaining niece is estranged from him, and she’s yelling at you for calling and saying you care. Great business, this detecting.”

“Yeah.”

I moved to one of the barstools in her kitchen when Street began to cook. She was sautéing chicken strips in olive oil with garlic. “I’m making chicken stir fry,” Street said, glancing at the Fat Cat cab. “Some people think a cab is too hearty for chicken.”

“Those are the same people who think you can’t go out running unless you’re wearing a shiny skintight running uniform.”

“But I wear a shiny skintight running uniform when I run.”

“Something I’ve always wondered about,” I said.

“You want me not to wear it?”

“No, you should definitely wear it,” I said.

“Why, if it’s part of the conformist world of uniforms?”

“Next time you put on your uniform, look in the mirror.”

“Are you saying that people who look, uh, trim, should wear shiny skintight uniforms even as you demean their use? But that’s ageist and sexist and fatist.”

“Fatist?”

“Okay, awkward word,” she said. “Anyway, people should be able to wear whatever they want.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“But you...” Street stopped. “Oh, got it. You wear a baggy old sweatshirt when you run and you drink a hearty cab when you eat chicken stir fry. And the people in the uniforms are the ones who make up rules about behavior.”

“Always been my observation,” I said. “But you should stay with the uniform even if you eschew the rule-making.” I drank some more Fat Cat. I gave it an eight on my taste-to-cost scale. Street had touched her wine with her lips and maybe even her tongue, but I couldn’t see that the level had dropped in her glass.

She added strips of green pepper and red pepper and yellow pepper. She arranged the strips in a decorative pattern in the pan, then held it out for me to look at. The food was a culinary kaleidoscope and smelled like heaven. Then she stirred in the strips.

Street began talking about April’s phone call.

“Many discomforts between people are the result of a structural problem, not ill will,” Street said. “April was obviously hurting and feeling alone, and she snapped at you on the phone. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. And it doesn’t mean she is a bad person.”

“Thank you, Dr. Casey.”

“Okay, so my specialty is insects. It doesn’t mean I can’t pronounce on topics outside my field.”

“But I’d pay more attention to your pronouncements if you put on the uniform.”

“So you could take it right off? Men don’t make any sense.”

“Never said we did.”

 

 

 

SIXTEEN

 

Heavy snow was coming down at a 30-degree angle when I creaked and groaned my way out of bed. My deck had accumulated another foot of snow on it since I’d shoveled the night before. My world’s-greatest-view across Lake Tahoe had been reduced to the deck railing.

My breath made clouds in the frigid air of the living room. My indoor wood supply was down to two pieces of kindling and one split log. All the rest of my fuel was outside, relishing the frozen storm.

I decided I wasn’t that brave first thing out of bed. So I bunched up a pile of newspaper in the woodstove, criss-crossed the two sticks and munched the chunk of Lodgepole pine onto the pile. I struck a wooden match under the newsprint, then swung the stove door so that it was open only one-half inch. My insufficient pile would fail any Boy Scout survival-fire merit-badge test. But what the Boy Scouts don’t tell you is that a stove with good draft and a not-quite-shut door will turn damp newspaper and a green log into a blast furnace in a few minutes.

With the growing rush of air fueling the fire, I took the three steps to my kitchen nook and pushed the button on the coffee maker I’d loaded the night before.

Spot hadn’t budged. He was curled up in his corner. His nose was under his right front paw, just visible under the edge of the big polyester sleeping bag I’d flopped over him the night before. He hadn’t moved since.

“Hey, largeness,” I mumbled.

I thought I could hear him breathing, but otherwise there was no sign of life. Great Danes have short hair and belong in large houses with central heating, not 500-square-foot log cabins with woodstoves. I knew Spot would eventually unfurl when the temperature in the cabin climbed from Tahoe to Tahiti.

I poured coffee into a mug that Street had given me. The mug had lettering that said, “Bugs Love Global Warming.” Spot probably would, too.

I drank coffee. Spot slept. Someone knocked on the door. Spot didn’t budge. Great watchdog.

I opened the door.

Diamond stood in a ski parka, hood pulled down to his eyes, drawstring tightened under his chin. “I grew up in Mexico City,” he said, shivering. “If you were to take me in out of this weather, I might be your friend for life.”

I held up my mug for him to read the lettering.

“Me, too,” Diamond said.

Diamond sat with me at my little kitchen table. I gave him coffee. He never took off his jacket, or even his hood, as he drank it. The snow on top of his hood was melting. It dripped into his coffee.

“On duty?” I said.

He nodded.

“Can’t see your uniform under the parka.”

He nodded again. “Can’t see your dog under his sleeping bag. They make heaters. Burn natural gas or propane. Keep entire houses warm at night.”

“Woodstove has worked ever since Ben Franklin,” I said. “All I’m missing is fuel that isn’t caked with ice and snow.” I set about preparing a morning feast. Some days I have three cups of coffee for breakfast. Others, cold ones, I get serious at the cooktop. I put burger and onion into a fry pan and turned the propane burner on high. Diamond didn’t even glance at my efforts, unaware that my culinary dance moves could probably get me an audition for Rachael Ray’s TV show. A few minutes later I cracked two eggs and mixed them into the burger and onion.

Then I spooned the mixture out of the fry pan and onto tortillas, added cheddar cheese and salsa and rolled them up.

“Smells like Mexican cooking,” Diamond said.

“Breakfast burrito?” I said. “Got an extra. You want one?” I put the burritos into the microwave.

“Welsh, Scottish type like you,” Diamond said, “I’d think you’d be frying up some haggis with bashed neeps on the side and laver bread for your carbs.”

“What’s all that?”