“You don’t strike me as the provocative, renegade type,” I told her at the time.
“You want provocative?” she said alluringly, both of us naked. “I’ll show you provocative.”
And then, to my great pleasure, she did.
I held up the photo of the leg and looked closer:
There was no tattoo. I suddenly felt light-headed.
“This isn’t Savannah.”
“Are you sure?”
I explained to Streeter why I was.
He sat back and exhaled. He seemed almost more relieved than I was, but I doubted it.
It was possible, he said, that the woman in the photographs hadn’t met with foul play, that she’d simply lost control of her car on a patch of ice and rolled into the ditch where her car caught fire. It happens all the time in winter, in the mountains.
“I’m sorry you had to go through this,” he said. “It’s just, we had to know.”
I told him what Jethro Murtha, the ex-con, had passed along to me about Chad Lovejoy’s uncle, airport executive Gordon Priest, and Murtha’s assertion that Priest was involved in some sort of scam with Iranian immigrants living in the Tahoe area.
“Did he tell you that Priest or these Iranians killed Chad?” Streeter asked.
“All he said was that Chad found out what Priest was up to and that Chad was spooked. I’m pretty certain he didn’t know the kid was dead until I told him.”
“I do not want you approaching Gordon Priest. Let us do our job. Is that understood?”
I nodded.
The deputy dug a phone out of the pocket of his green sheriff’s jacket and asked me for Murtha’s telephone number, along with the ex-con’s address. He typed them into the phone with his thumbs while telling me about the weapon that had been used to kill Chad Lovejoy.
Forensic examination showed that the bullets had been fired from a .40-caliber Glock, among the more common handguns on the market these days. The rounds, Streeter said, had been checked against ballistic databases in both California and Nevada to determine if the Glock had been used in any other crimes. No matches came up.
“Have you made any progress in finding Savannah? Anything tangible?”
“We still have plenty of people left to talk to,” the cop said, “but I think it’s safe to say at this point there aren’t any arrests imminent.”
I was rapidly coming to dislike anything and everyone, including Deputy Streeter. I was exhausted and hungry. My shoulders ached. My knee ached. The pounding pressure inside my skull felt like I was diving on a shipwreck.
“Did you get any sleep last night while you were driving in?” he asked me.
“No.”
“You’re more than welcome to crash at my place if you want. I’ve got an extra bedroom.”
Considering the depth of my exhaustion and the fact that motels don’t usually allow check-in before midafternoon, I thanked him for his hospitality.
“The least I could do,” Streeter said, taking a slip of paper out of the file, jotting down his home address, and handing it to me, “making you drive all the way up here for essentially nothing.”
Streeter roomed with Deputy Kyle Woo. He said he’d call to see if Woo was home, and to let him know I was coming over.
The two cops lived not far from the airport in a rented, three-bedroom, chalet-style house with a steeply pitched cathedral roof and a floor-to-ceiling moss rock fireplace. Their guest room, cluttered with moving boxes and exercise gear, was on the first floor, off the kitchen. The bed was a futon outfitted with a patchwork quilt that Woo said his grandmother had sewn.
“There’s towels on the shelf in the bathroom,” he said. “Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge, assuming you can find anything that’s not moldy. We don’t do much cooking around here.”
“Sounds good.”
He was getting ready to go to work, strapping on his holstered Glock and sliding a hammerless .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, his backup weapon, into an ankle rig under the right leg of his uniform trousers.
“We’ve had some burglaries in the neighborhood,” Woo said. “Just remember to lock the front door and turn down the heat before you leave.”
“Will do. Thanks for letting me stay.”
He nodded, his affect flat, and left.
I curled up on the futon without taking my shoes or clothes off, pulled the quilt up around me, and closed my eyes. For the better part of an hour, I lay there, unable to sleep. Too tired. Too tortured, my brain filled with thoughts of Savannah. For lack of anything better to do, I decided to get up and get myself something to eat.
The stove looked like it had never been used. The refrigerator housed a variety of condiment bottles and jars — mustard, catsup, steak sauce — a quart of milk, a six-pack of Miller Lite, various vitamins, a deli package of mold-covered ham, and a Styrofoam takeout container with a leftover enchilada slathered in a congealed goo of green sauce and sour cream. A refrigerator for bachelors. Clearly, no women lived there. I grabbed the milk — miraculously not past its “use by” expiration date — found a box of Shredded Wheat in the cupboard above the dishwasher, a clean bowl and a spoon, and ate standing up over the double stainless steel sink.
I wondered about the emotionless, enigmatic Deputy Kyle Woo.
Chad Lovejoy had been shot with a .40-caliber Glock. Woo packed a .40-caliber Glock. When we’d first met, at the South Lake Tahoe Airport, Woo said he had often gone camping in the mountainous area where I’d spotted the downed Beechcraft, and where Chad’s body was found the next day. Woo’s sheriff’s uniform included military-style tactical boots. Somebody had left tread prints of military-style tactical boots in the snow at the scene.
None of that, of course, would’ve come close to explaining why Woo would’ve had any reason to murder Chad Lovejoy. And I knew of nothing even remotely to suggest that he’d disguised his voice, passed himself off as Australian, and that he was the killer who’d dubbed himself Crocodile Dundee. But that didn’t stop the cogs in my head from grinding in Woo’s direction. When you’re a hammer, as they say, all the world’s a nail.
I walked upstairs and down the hall, past Streeter’s bedroom, to Woo’s room.
A neat freak Woo was not. The bed was rumpled and unmade, cluttered with boxes of pistol ammunition, gym clothes, and a pair of thirty-five-pound dumbbells. A wet towel was draped over the brass headboard. The beige carpeted floor presented an obstacle course of running shoes, boots and more free weights. The only other piece of furniture was one of those pressboard, put-it-together-yourself dressers from Ikea that even Einstein would’ve found all but impossible to assemble without leaving parts out. On the dresser was a Bluray disc player. A flat-screen TV rested atop that.
The top drawer was crammed with underwear and socks. The middle drawer held boxes of ammo, a collapsible police baton, handcuffs, two holsters, and four pornographic DVDs, including one entitled, “An Officer and a Genitalman.” T-shirts were stuffed haphazardly into the bottom drawer.
Two of the T-shirts bore logos from pubs in Sydney, Australia — Lord Nelson and the Bavarian Bier Café on O’Connell Street.
Somebody probably gave him the T-shirts as gifts. Or maybe he picked them up as souvenirs on vacation. They don’t mean anything, Logan. Why can’t you ever give people the benefit of the doubt?
I put the T-shirts back, closed the drawer, and moved on to Woo’s closet.
Several uniforms hung in dry-cleaning bags that obscured the back of the closet. I pushed them aside to find propped against the wall an M-4 assault carbine with a laser site and collapsible stock. On the shelf above the carbine was a small plastic box with the word, “Glock,” stylishly embossed on it. I took the box down, set it on the bed, and opened it. Inside was a .40-caliber, semiautomatic identical to the Model 22 Woo carried on his hip. I grabbed a corner of the top sheet and, careful not to leave any prints, lifted the pistol out of the box, ejected the magazine and pulled the slide back to make sure that the firing chamber was clear. It was. I swabbed the muzzle with my little finger and held the finger to my nose: cordite. The weapon had recently been fired.