Free Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) by Todd Borg

both got out before the house was consumed.”
    I thought about how I too had been up, unable to sleep, as the Glenbrook Fire trucks raced south to help fight the fire.
    “Any idea whose house it was?”
    “No. They’re currently at the neighbors. I’m on my way there now, so I’ll know more soon.”
    “What about the missing persons report?” I said.
    “A man named Malcolm Warner called from San Francisco. Said his twenty-seven-year-old son Sean went up to Tahoe for a last weekend of spring skiing. The dad said the boy always checks in every couple of days, but it had been several days since they’d heard from Sean. The dad is very worried.”
    “So it would have been about the weekend before last?”
    “Sí.”
    “Why did the dad call your county?”
    “Because Sean was staying in our territory,” Diamond said, “a studio condo up near the Stagecoach chairlift at Heavenly.”
    “What was Sean’s last communication to his parents?”
    “He texted his mother that he was taking some unused vacation days and staying on in Tahoe for a bit. That text was five days ago, and neither the parents nor any friends have heard anything since.”
    “You turn up anything on the case?” I asked.
    “Just one little thing. Sean’s been working on his sheet. One for grand larceny. One for possession of a firearm without a permit. And two priors for burglary. Both were houses where he went in a window on an upper floor, giving him a rep as a second story man.”
    “He do time on any of these?” I asked.
    I heard Diamond snort into the phone. “Father Malcolm has a lot of money. It’s amazing what sufficient legal firepower can do. Sean did some probation, community service. Never spent a single night in the lockup.”
    “So our missing boy is another example of how the dregs of humanity get just as attracted to the excitement of Tahoe as the rest of us.”
    “Unfortunately, yes. We found the condo where Sean stayed. The manager said he never checked out. He just disappeared.”
    I was trying to think like a parent with a missing child. “The parents call the kid’s workplace?”
    “Yeah. The kid works at a tire store. He hasn’t turned up there since he left for Tahoe. No one’s heard anything.”
    “Maybe Sean met a girl up on the ski slopes.”
    Diamond paused. “I can remember a time when I might have gone AWOL had I met the right girl.”
    “Ha,” I said. “You’d do that now.”
    “Have to be a really right girl.”
    “They’re out there,” I said.
    “At least one, but you got her.”
    “I only got her three-quarters of the way. Any chance you found out what kind of car Sean drives?”
    “A blue Toyota. His dad said it’s dark blue. His words were, ‘navy faded to dull dark blue.’”
    “You check the Douglas County impound lot to see if it got towed in?”
    “Yes I did, and no it didn’t.”
    I thanked Diamond and asked him to let me know if he learned anything interesting about the Zephyr Heights fire.
    I next called Santiago in Placer County. He said there’d been no other suspicious deaths either before or after Scarlett Milo’s. He added that Milo’s death was enough to satisfy any cop’s appetite for crime solving for the next ten years.
    I didn’t have a current close contact at Washoe County, and Carson City County’s claim at the lake consisted of a narrow slice of East Shore land that was mostly uninhabited. So neither was on my priority list.
    I called Sergeant Bains of El Dorado County and asked him the same question. He said they’d had no recent unnatural deaths or missing persons report, but added that his records didn’t include the city of South Lake Tahoe.
    I dialed Commander Mallory of the SLTPD.
    “Nope,” he said in answer to my question. “We did have a woman go missing, but missing doesn’t seem flashy enough for your shooter’s style.”
    “Diamond just told me they had a missing person. Could he be referring to the same person?”
    “A woman named