Free Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) by Todd Borg

said.
    “Inside, they fed him and gave him a warm place to sleep. There was no insecurity about trying to keep a job and pay the bills and not be homeless. Of course, most people who go to prison think the experience is pure hell. But a few people are well-suited to it. I think Tom Casey is one of them, and he would be happy to go back permanently. Especially if he can exact vengeance first.”
    We were both breathing hard.
    Street reached for my hand and squeezed. The move was sudden and indicated a level of desperation. She turned to me. The tear tracks on her cheek reflected the moonlight. “I need you, Owen. It’s like the core of my childhood is a corrosive acid, and it’s coming back to torment me. I need your help fending it off, please.”
    I leaned over, put my arm around her, and hugged her. “I’m here,” I said. “Always with you.”
    “I tried to trade in my past,” she said, “and get rid of all the painful memories.” Street looked out and up at the night sky, away from the moon, toward the endless stars. “If I could undergo a complete metamorphosis, like a butterfly, I could be free. I would be able to jettison Tom Casey from my mind, my life.”
    “Anything I can do to help… I’m here for you.”
    She squeezed my hand.
     
     
     
     
    NINE
     
     
    The next morning, I pondered Jonas Montrop’s kidnapping while I drank coffee. With no clue about the father’s killing and no hint of where the ransom money went, I had no lead to follow.
    I took Spot and headed south to my office on Kingsbury Grade. The AM station on the Jeep radio began a news squawk about some robbery, the DJ using that excessive sensationalist tone that would only be appropriate if a monster asteroid were about to wipe out the planet. So I again turned the dial to NPR, and the speakers filled with some wonderful orchestral stuff that, a few miles down the road, I learned was Edward Elgar. I turned up the grade and stopped at my office, feeling even more cultured than when I woke up.
    Spot pushed past me as I went in the door. He trotted up the stairs to my second-floor digs. When I opened my office door, Spot immediately walked over to the new splotchy black-and-white throw rug that Street had gotten him. She’d put a thick pad under it. The rug was custom designed in a Harlequin Great Dane pattern. Spot sprawled across it with enthusiasm. It was hard to see the outline of his body. Maybe his affinity for the rug wasn’t about the comfort of padding but the comfort that there was now one place on Earth where he was hard to see. All creatures, prey and predator alike, like the way camo allows them to hide. Polar Bears on the ice flows. Deer in the sun-dappled forest. Lions on the Serengeti grasslands. Great Danes on a Great Dane rug.
    Spot shut his eyes and appeared to instantly sleep while I assessed my coming workload.
    I first established that the answering machine wasn’t blinking, no UPS or FedEx notices or packages had been pushed through the door slot, and when I dialed up my email, there was nothing in my inbox but spam.
    Nobody cared about me and my perspective except a dead guy who thought I’d killed him. I leaned back in my desk chair, which caused it to make a loud screech as if metal were ripping. Spot was flopped on his side. He opened his eyes a moment and lifted his head two inches to look at me, his disdain at my noise obvious. His eyelids drooped, and the jowl on the lower side of his head hung down, exposing the pink of his gums and the white of his out-sized fangs.
    “Sorry to interrupt your somnolence, Largeness. The noise to which you object is merely the sound of a perspicacious detective leaning back in his chair and training his weighty and considerable thoughts on the state of the world.”
    Spot lowered his head to the floor and sighed, the outrush of breath a dismissive punctuation to my statement. Maybe it was because I’d used a big word.
    I said to him, “I learned the word