Free The Alchemical Detective (Riga Hayworth) by Kirsten Weiss Page A

the retired Marine said.
    It was the first really interesting thing Riga had heard from an interviewee all day.  She’d spent the morning shuttling with the TV crew around west Lake Tahoe, standing on frozen piers and interviewing witnesses who described Tessie sightings from decades past, and itching to return to the south shore, where the more recent sightings had occurred.    
    Finally, in the late afternoon, they were where she wanted to be: interviewing one of the recent witnesses, Walt, a no-nonsense ex-Marine.  He stood with a tall, erect posture, his arms folded across his broad chest. His steely blue eyes looked out from a leathered, outdoorsy sort of face. 
    They filmed in Walt’s three story lakeshore home, perched on a hillside overlooking the lake.  A picture window revealed a sky blazing tangerine, the clouds rimmed with gold, the mountains a violet haze.  And then the sun dipped lower and the lake flashed crimson fire.  Riga’s breath caught from the beauty of it.  The trick of light faded and with it, the lake turned dull silver.
    Walt pointed down the wooded slope, towards a small pier on a neighboring property.  “I saw something moving in the water over there.  It was dusk, the light about like it is now, and the view was clear.  Whatever it was, it was too big to be a fish and it moved wrong, coiling about itself.  And then it flipped a tail as big as my arm in the air and took off, leaving a wake like a motor boat.”
     “Still, that’s a fair distance from here,” Riga said.  She stood with her back to the fire, enjoying the heat upon her legs.  “How did you spot it?”
    “It was the light, just a flash out of the corner of my eye, coming from the trees above the shoreline.  Sometimes hikers cut through here to get to the lake and we’ve had a couple of break-ins around here.  I was suspicious because my neighbors aren’t home.  And then the motion in the water caught my eye.”
    It was the first Riga had heard of a light.  “What did this light look like?” she asked sharply.
    “Just a flash, bluish-white.”
    Riga looked at him appraisingly and wondered why he’d reported it at all, or had agreed to be interviewed by her, for that matter.  “What made you call the police?” she asked.  “Why report it?”
    His jaw set and he looked out over the lake.  The mountains darkened to deep purple and the waters to the color of cold steel.  “Tessie is a children’s fable, something for the tourists.  It isn’t real.  But I saw something out there.  I won’t call it a lake monster but there was something and I thought the Sheriff should know.”
    Riga sympathized.  It had been his duty, even if he looked like a fool executing it.  “What did you do afterward?  Did you find any tracks the next day?”
    “I didn’t wait for the next day.  I grabbed my flashlight and headed down to the beach.  But the stench was so god awful I turned back, figured whatever it was could wait until daylight, when I’d be less likely to step in it.”
    “What did it smell like?” she asked.
    “Shit and rotting garbage, pardon the language, ma’am.”
    Riga felt a prickle of fear.  He’d described the stench of demon.  No wonder he’d retreated.  There had likely been other things in that scent as well: oppression, terror, and death.
    “I checked out the beach again the next morning,” he continued.  “Didn’t find any unusual tracks.  There were some footprints that couldn’t have been more than a week old, but tracking was never my strong suit.”
    “Mind if we look around on the beach?” she asked.
    “Go ahead.  Just keep off my neighbor’s property.”
    “That’s the Gonzalez home, isn’t it?”  Riga jerked her chin toward the window.
    “Yeah.  You know them?”
    She drew her cell phone from the pocket of her pea coat.  “I used to spend summers up here.  Let me give them a call now.”
    Mr. Gonzales answered on the third ring and it was the