“To show that anyone’s free to come and go.”
“You’re their defense in a lawsuit.”
“Listen, son, I’m not saying I don’t want to help you out. But I’m tired. I’ll be seventy-two in November. My dad died when he was seventy. I’m on borrowed time as it is. I’d like to enjoy what I have left. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I got some weeding to do.”
I thanked him and put down the phone.
I’d gone into Swann’s Flat. And hit a Swann.
Chapter 20
The database results on Leonie Swann were strange, and strangely thin.
She didn’t just look young to be Shasta’s mother. She was young — thirty-seven — with no criminal record, no professional licenses, and no addresses prior to 2009, when the mansion at 21 Beachcomber showed up. She paid the utilities but didn’t appear on the tax roll.
In a way that made sense. Al Bock’s intel suggested a kind of ownership/management structure, with the Swanns retaining title while Emil and Beau ran the show. And if the Bergstroms could teach Leonie anything, it was how to hide assets. She could have placed the house in trust, buried it behind LLCs, transferred it to a third party.
Any such collaboration could not have begun with her. The earliest lawsuits dated to the mid-nineties, when she was in grade school.
Kurt, on the other hand, had been almost twenty years Leonie’s senior. The right age for a budding entrepreneur.
I found his obituary in the North Counties Register.
SWANN, Kurt. 1/11/1969–12/06/2009. Kurt was born and raised in Swann’s Flat, a town founded by his grandfather, Everett. An avid hunter and fisherman, he passed at the too-young age of 40 among the hills that he grew up in. Kurt was generous, supporting the greater Humboldt community and working tirelessly to preserve the character of Swann’s Flat for the next generation. He loved Jack Daniel’s, playing his Gibson guitar, and listening to classic rock. He is preceded in death by his parents, Charlie and Sarah. He is survived by his wife, Leonie, and daughter Shasta.
“I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”
I googled the quote. Attributed to David Bowie.
Erroneous. The real quote ended I promise it won’t bore you.
I’d asked Jason Clancy: Bowie as in the frontiersman or as in the singer?
Singer. His full name’s Bowie Stardust.
You’re a fan.
I didn’t pick it.
Leonie had. Or Shasta, in memory of her father.
A fatal accident likely meant an autopsy.
I called the Humboldt County Coroner — Public Administrator and spoke to a deputy named Zucchero. He directed me to their public records portal. Four-to-six-week turnaround.
I told him I was a former Alameda County coroner. Any way he could speed things up?
“Former,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What do you do now?”
“PI.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“Pros and cons.”
“Let me ask you something...”
For the next half hour I answered questions about licensing, overhead, health insurance.
“I’ll get back to you soon,” he said.
I went to the databases on Jason Clancy.
Age thirty-four. His credit was fair. One DUI, in 2008. He didn’t have a pilot’s license, but he did own a boat, registered to the address on Beachcomber. Previous addresses were in Sacramento; he turned up in Swann’s Flat around 2017.
I was wondering if Leonie had put the house in his name. But he didn’t appear on the tax roll, either, and when I ran a title search for 21 Beachcomber Boulevard, the actual name on the deed leaped off the screen.
Shasta Swann Irrevocable Trust
An itch in my brain.
I searched again, this time for all titles held by the Shasta Swann Irrevocable Trust.
The results filled fifty pages.
She, a teenage girl, owned the bait shop.
The boat lot.
The boat launch. The marina itself.
Jenelle Counts’s name appeared on the hotel’s liquor and business licenses. The structure and the land beneath, however, belonged to the Shasta Swann Irrevocable Trust.
In addition to owning her mother and stepfather’s residence, Shasta owned the doctor’s home at 3 Beachcomber Boulevard as well as the Bergstroms’ at number 55.
She owned Beachcomber Boulevard, all four miles of it, including the lot at number 185, the prospectus for which I had open on my computer screen in another window.
This beautiful and historically significant piece of land has never been offered for sale.
Currently it is held in trust, with any sale or development subject to approval by the Swann’s Flat Board of Supervisors.
If Clay Gardner bought it, he’d be buying it from Shasta.
The Shasta Swann Irrevocable Trust owned Pelman Auto Service at 27 Gray Fox Run along with Dave Pelman’s residence at number 29. It owned the lots with the mailboxes and the empty lots next door. It owned the unoccupied homes and the homes on Airbnb, and I was willing to bet that if I dug deep enough into all those corporations and shells offering properties for sale, that if I traveled to all the courthouses in all the counties in all the states and pulled every file and read through every page, somewhere in the tangle of red tape, I would find Shasta, her trust, lurking behind all of them.
His truck went off the road.
Now she owns the town.
I’d thought Bock was referring to Leonie.
Wrong.
I hadn’t hit a Swann.
I’d hit the Swann.
The databases suppress information on minors.
Modern teenagers fill that gap themselves, on social media.
But Shasta’s Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok accounts were set to private.
A triathlon website had her winning the girls’ under-18 division at the 2023 Race for the Redwoods. She celebrated on the podium, cheeks flushed, hair plastered to her forehead.
That was it.
I swiveled my chair toward the wall, where I’d taped a printout of Nick Moore’s missing persons flyer.
Goofy grin. The puka shell necklace and the pendant.
Shasta’s social media profile pictures cut off below the chin. No necklace visible.
In the podium photo, her unisuit was unzipped three or four inches. No necklace visible.
I logged into Clay Gardner’s Instagram. The sparse feed implied affluence. San Francisco at night, a beach in Vietnam, a Warriors game, a sushi platter. Guys like him didn’t post very often. Too busy identifying opportunities and adding value and living in the moment. His five hundred followers had cost me $6.99.
I sent Shasta Swann a friend request.
I did the same from Clay Gardner’s Facebook page.
He didn’t use TikTok, and she didn’t use LinkedIn. A demographic mismatch.
Contacting her could easily backfire.
Who was I, other than some middle-aged rando?
Who’d nearly killed her.
And was now creeping on her.
Gross.
On the other hand, she might accept my requests reflexively.
Who didn’t want more followers, especially for free?
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System had no record of Nick Moore.
Nicholas Moore scored a hit in Santa Cruz County, along the central coast, some 350 miles south of Humboldt. The profile picture showed the same young man whose face was on my wall. Scraggly-haired, no necklace visible.