Tahoe deep, p.14
Tahoe Deep, page 14
part #17 of An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Series
“Can you direct me to their house and Harly’s farm?”
The sheriff’s deputy looked at me with a stone face. “And you would go out there and try to find them, and if you did, you would try to get them to talk?”
I shrugged. “You know that’s what we investigators do. Shake trees. See what falls out.”
The woman made a little grin. “Only thing that falls out of our trees is lemons.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Tanna Havlick said, “Let me draw you a little map.” She pulled a piece of copy paper out of her printer and drew on it with a ballpoint pen. “This is where you are now. Over here is Main Street, which runs the entire one-block stretch of downtown Lemon Hills. At this end of Main Street is a biker bar called Reds, no apostrophe. The road you want is a left turn at that bar. You take it about two miles out. Where the pavement turns to dirt, there’s a Y. Take the left fork and drive another mile. You’ll come to a rise, and there’ll be lemon orchards as far as you can see. In a little valley are Harly’s farm buildings. Now, if instead of going left at the Y, you went right, you’d come to The Ranch Estates, which is the subdivision where the Bosstro boys grew up and still live. The development is twenty-four two-bed-one-bath houses on a half acre each and set in dirt so tough you can’t tell the driveways from the front yards. Unless, of course, you’re visiting one of the estates that has old tires marking the driveway.” She made an X with the pen. “Here, at the left-rear corner of the estates, is a house once painted red but now faded to pink. It’s missing part of the roof from storm damage a few years back. Harly never had it repaired. The boys just cover the opening with plastic held down with tires. They replace it every year or so when the sun turns the plastic to crispy chips. I think the house is probably rotten where the rain seeps in. But it dries during the summer.”
She handed me the paper.
“Any advice before I go out there?”
“Bring your sidearm with a round in the chamber.”
I nodded. “Thanks much.”
“One more thing,” she said. “Let’s just say you were to roust a Bosstro. Neither them or their biker friends would hesitate at using you for target practice.”
“So I should be careful,” I said.
“Very.”
“Of their biker friends, is there anyone in particular I should know about?”
Tanna shook her head. “No one is close to the Bosstro boys. But everyone wants to court favor with them, if only to avoid their wrath.”
“You said their mother and maternal grandmother and father are all dead. Do they have any other relatives? Aunts? Uncles?”
“The only other sort-of relative I’m aware of is a foster step brother. Because of what happened, the Bosstro family was a regular topic in town around the time when I graduated from high school. I remember some of the details. Back when Bosstro’s mom was selling cigs and sodas at the gas station, her hours were reduced to part time. So she and grandmom talked the foster care placement folks into certifying them to take on a male child. The extra eight hundred a month made up for mom’s lost wages. They were given a boy who was maybe six. According to the state rules, the foster boy was supposed to have his own room in the house. But of course, that was not an option in a two-bedroom house with two other boys and a mother and grandmother. There was a little pantry-type room off the kitchen. When the social worker went out to check, mom had made up the pantry to look like a miniature bedroom. The social worker thought it was window dressing and that the foster boy was sleeping on the floor in the same bedroom as the other two boys. She was going to remove him from the house, but the mom had a little talk with her, and the social worker retracted her concern. Don’t ask me what kind of threats that talk may have consisted of.”
“Got it. What happened to the boy?”
“I never heard. If I recall correctly, he was there less than a year before the Bosstro brothers killed mom and grandmom. The foster boy was taken away, and I never heard about his whereabouts.”
“Less than a year in the Bosstro home is enough time that he could have bonded with the brothers, right?”
“Maybe. More like, he could have been twisted by the brothers. The thing is, the foster boy was strange in his own way. He never spoke. It was something that people talked about around town, people who’d never even met the boy. They referred to him as The Silent One.”
“Was he real shy? Or deaf?”
“I don’t think he was deaf,” Tanna said. “If so, people would refer to that. They’d say, ‘He’s deaf, so he doesn’t talk.’ Right? As for being shy, even the shyest people still talk. So there was something else going on.”
“Maybe he was nonverbal because of some kind of brain damage?”
Tanna shrugged. “Maybe. The armchair shrink in me would say that he had witnessed things so traumatic, he went silent for psychological reasons. Maybe the women beat on the foster boy just like the brothers. Or maybe he watched Chinless and Flyboy beat the mom and grandmom to death. That would chill a boy’s soul.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“No. It’s probably in the foster records somewhere. But that was - let’s see - about 30 years ago. Unless you could find a teacher or someone who happens to remember the boy’s name, it would be very hard to extract it from official records. You’d have to know just where to look, and get a court order, and be a diligent investigator.”
“Did you ever meet the foster boy?”
“Not that I recall. I was heading off to cop school. I had my first boyfriend. There was a lot of excitement in my life at the time. Foster kids were not something I paid attention to.”
“Would anyone you know have met the silent foster kid? Or remember his name? Or where he was sent after the mother/grandmother murders?”
“I doubt it. I’ll keep it in mind. If something comes to me, I’ll call.”
“Here’s my number.” I handed her my card, took one of hers out of the plastic holder on her desk, thanked her, and left.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I drove out to Harly’s lemon farm and parked under another lone, malformed oak. Maybe it was a metaphor for my investigation.
This time, I turned off the engine, opened all the windows, and let Spot out.
He ran around, a loping gait I’d seen before. It’s a combination of stretching his limbs and gauging the heat along with a general reconnaissance.
When we see a dog doing a slow run, getting some air, investigating a new landscape, we think it’s just a dog running, making a simple assessment of the territory. But the dog perceives whether or not there are people around and, if so, how many and whether the people are clean or not. The dog knows what the people last ate and if their main focus is drugs or sex or beef stew. The dog can tell if this new world contains gunpowder or garlic. The dog smells fear or bravado and adjusts his attitude accordingly. In one of the most important perceptions of all, the dog understands the difference between encampments with only men and those that include women and children. At a base level, the dog is on hyper alert with the former group and is on casual observation with the latter group.
None of these perceptions is revealed in the dog’s manner. But all affect how the dog responds to play or stress or violence.
From the moment we got out of the Jeep, the place seemed unnaturally quiet. I looked around, visualizing snipers under camo netting over the nearby rises.
While Spot loped large ovals, I walked zig zags. I looked through windows into a dirt-floored pole barn that had huge, locked, sliding doors. Yet the windows, which were large enough for a horse to jump through, were wide open. All I could see in the barn were empty horse stalls on one end and a large open area on the other end. In the large area was a flat-bed trailer with wooden pallets on it. To the side of the pallets were stacks of flattened corrugated boxes. For lemons? I didn’t know.
At the end of the room was a workbench and on it several tanks. They looked like scuba tanks, except that unlike the scuba tanks I’d seen, these varied in size. There were also thin hoses and small metallic devices, like the components of scuba regulators for breathing. There was a machine that seemed familiar.
I realized it was an air compressor.
The various components looked like equipment for constructing compressed air devices.
Near the barn was a small shed surrounded by a perimeter of chicken wire. From what I could see, the shed had compartments that might be perfect for chickens. But there were no chickens.
It seemed clear that the farm used to be set up to house animals. Now, the farm was only for orchard produce. Or maybe the orchards had been retired. Maybe the farmer was too old to take care of animals and trees. Or maybe there was an easier way to make money.
Some distance away was an old farmhouse. I hiked over to it, the hot sun burning into the back of my neck. I knocked and got no answer. There were windows with no drapes. I cupped my hands around my face to see inside. There was some old furniture, some piled newspapers, an old TV on a rolling metal cart, and a wide-brimmed straw sun hat, the kind worn by old men who’ve had some cancerous growths nipped off. It was not a hat that dirtball enforcers wear.
I left and drove to the Bosstro house in the corner of The Ranch Estates.
I’d thought Tanna was exaggerating when she described driveways delineated by rows of old tires. I saw three such houses before I turned into the street that included the Bosstro home.
I parked in the street, at a bit of an angle, just far enough from the Bosstro house that the residents would not be able to easily see my license plate number. I pulled my baseball cap down low over my face, got out, and let Spot out of the back.
My goal wasn’t to be completely incognito. After all, a tall man with a Harlequin Great Dane arriving in a Jeep was easy to notice and remember. But that doesn’t constitute identification, should anyone try to prove it was me at a later date. It was a small distinction, but one worth paying attention to.
The house was as Tanna described, unkempt, with a storm-damaged roof draped in plastic that had darkened from the original clear to a chalky gray. The anchoring tire weights which once held the plastic in place had ceased to be useful as the plastic had been shredded into strips by the blowing wind. The strips now waved like streamers. In today’s calm air, the streamers drooped, almost motionless, down to the ground.
Spot and I walked up the red dirt drive. There was a sidewalk of sorts made of paving stones. Maybe they had a limited number and wanted the pretense of a walkway, so the pavers had been set with ten-inch gaps. If you walked carefully, you could step from paver to paver. But the red dirt between the pavers still came through, coating each paver and blowing up against the house so that the lower courses of the peeling pink siding were a deeper red.
I knocked on the door. There was no response. I listened for movement inside the house. But the only sound was a distant rustle of overly dried bushes in an arroyo behind the back yard.
I walked around the house, peering in through the few dirty windows. I could see almost nothing. When I came to a sliding glass door, the inside view was a little better, revealing some out-sized Nike shoes, one lying upside down, another tossed onto its side. There was a sweatshirt hanging over a chair.
The only interesting thing was a tattered couch. Someone had drained a Budweiser beer bottle and then stuffed it, base down, between the seat cushion and the back of the couch. When the person had drained a second bottle, they shifted a few inches to the side and then stuffed that bottle behind the cushion next to its neighbor. The person or persons were evidently fond of Budweiser, for they had proceeded down the couch. The result was a long row of 40 or 50 beer bottles all standing up like shiny brown soldiers at attention, guarding the boundary between the cushions and the seat backs. A person could still sit on the couch. But they couldn’t lean back without a row of bottles pushing into their back.
It was an inspired decorating idea, and I imagined that a portion of visitors to the Bosstro residence would admire the concept and go home to see if they, too, could decorate their abodes with a spread of beer bottles.
When I’d circumnavigated the house and arrived back at the front door, I had seen no sign of occupants. I didn’t want to leave without checking out the inside. Because no one was there to let me in, it was necessary for me to let myself in.
I didn’t want to be too obvious to any cameras that might be recording.
So I made a show of knocking again, smiling all the while, then walked with Spot back to the Jeep and drove away.
This time I drove a half mile down to where the dry arroyo intersected with the street. Apparently enough rainwater periodically channeled through the ravine to feed many groups of tall bushes. I found a place to park my Jeep off the street in behind some of the bushes and under the shade of a wispy pine that was sage green in color. My vehicle wasn’t invisible, but it was obscured. This time I left Spot in the Jeep with the windows down. It would be too warm for him to remain there for long, but I didn’t intend to be long. If he got too hot, he would jump out the window and come calling. As it was, he seemed happy to snooze for the time being.
I walked back to the Bosstro house, keeping under the odd trees, and staying down among the bushes of the ravine.
My hat was still down low over my face as I came up from behind the house. I kept my head down and chose my path so that I wouldn’t be obvious to any cameras mounted under the eaves.
Normally, I’d take the time to use a home invasion technique that would cause the least damage to the building and, thus, to the occupants’ psyches, as well. However, I was thinking about how Deputy Tanna had described the abusive activities of Chinless and Flyboy. Without thinking about it much, I decided it was acceptable to act with a lack of respect for the Bosstro boys, considering their lack of respect toward the people they victimized.
So I picked up a rock that sat at the back of the house near the sliding glass door. I sensed something shiny under the rock, something I belatedly recognized as a key. But before I was burdened by that realization, I used the rock to smash the big sliding glass door.
Unfortunately, smashing tempered glass makes a large crashing sound not unlike a small bomb.
More unfortunately, an alarm went off, a shrieking whoop whoop whoop that could be heard from a half mile away.
CHAPTER TWENTY
When the burglar alarm went off, two or three neighborhood dogs started a commotion so loud they would alert anybody who may have been too deaf to hear the alarm. They would certainly alert Spot as well, and I wondered if he’d stay put. He was used to me leaving him in the Jeep, so he knew that I’d likely return soon. Perhaps that would keep him in place for a few minutes.
As an ex-cop, I had learned to pause before I had a dramatic reaction. During that short pause, I realized that running back to the Jeep and racing away would confirm anyone’s suspicions.
Instead, I took the time to do what a friend of the Bosstro brothers would do. Figure out how to turn off the alarm, which neighbors might interpret as demonstrating that I was a legitimate visitor rather than a criminal intruder.
Tempered glass is hard to break. But when it does break, it shatters into a million diamonds rather than shards. Except for bits of broken glass at the perimeter of the window, the door was now a large opening. I was able to step through into the living room.
I trotted toward the front door. There was no alarm panel that I saw. In one way that might indicate a good thing, because no panel possibly meant an unsophisticated alarm, maybe even a do-it-yourself installation. As I looked around at the doors and window edges, I saw no visible electrical contacts, and no wires that I could follow to the control box of the alarm system. Keeping my head down so my face wasn’t visible to any cameras in the upper corners of the room, I turned, trying to see the likely camera locations with my peripheral vision. I saw no cameras and no glowing red lights, which might indicate a motion sensor. But there had to be sensors somewhere...
The alarm was still shrieking at a decibel level that would damage hearing if left on for long. It was loud enough that I had a hard time thinking.
I tried to force a kind of concentration. The power for an alarm was electrical. Cut that power, the alarm would go off unless it switched to a backup power source, like a battery, which could be small and well hidden. I had to find both. Or, I could find the alarm noisemaker and cut the wires powering it. Then I would at least be in blessed silence even if hidden webcams continued to broadcast my movements to the internet and send messages to an alarm company and the police.
I looked in all the obvious locations. I found nothing. No panel. No humming laptop running the system. No obvious power source.
I started looking for the house power. It would probably be a gray electrical panel with a row or two of circuit breakers. I trotted through the house, the alarm howling in my ears, but found nothing.
I trotted out the front door and resumed my search.
The electrical panel was at the right front corner of the house. I opened it. There was one row of breakers, 20-amp on the upper half and 15-amp on the bottom half. At the top was the master, a 100-amp breaker. I flipped it, shutting off power to the house.
The alarm went silent.
The total time elapsed had been at least a minute. Maybe two. Too much time to come off as a legitimate visitor. But here I was. I heard no police sirens. May as well take advantage.
Back inside, I made a slower tour of the house. My heart was still pumping with vigor, blood pressure pounding in my head. I paused, took two deep breaths, and continued, my ears numbed from the alarm but somewhat tuned to possible sounds from someone approaching from outside, about to burst in through the front door.
