Authors: Kirk Russell
“Nyland or somebody else.”
Kendall nodded and Marquez saw he understood. “Sophie told us she took them from the place she and Petroni were housesitting.
She gave the clothes to Nyland. It was all part of a plan to frame Petroni.”
“A plan like that is over Nyland’s head, but I don’t have to tell you that.”
“She says Nyland wore those clothes to kill Stella. He told her about it later. He thought she’d enjoy hearing how he stomped her face because Stella had come into the Creekview earlier this summer and insulted Sophie, called her a whore.”
“I’d bet he got paid to kill her, and I’ll bet he got money to kill Vandemere.”
“Then why is she here today?”
“With her I think it’s hard to know, but if Durham is behind this, he might have good reasons to get rid of Nyland. Rescue him, then lose him out on the lake, put a bullet in him and push him overboard. She might be here for that.”
“That’s just more speculation.”
“I know.”
Kendall moved toward his car and the radio there. She had to be across the lake. The truck she was driving couldn’t be that hard to find. But there was also something off here that the realtor had revealed. Ben Karin was likely another alias for Durham, yet the realtor was sure his build was different and his hair darker. He’d waved to her from the boat the day she’d come down to meet him.
He’d worn sunglasses and talked to her from his cell phone, but he hadn’t motored into shore despite assuring her he wanted to say hello. She’d said that it had hurt her feelings, which made her all the more likely to remember him.
Shauf touched his arm, “Ready?” Marquez glanced over at Kendall, saw his car was already rolling, and looked back at Shauf. “The realtor,” he said. “She didn’t describe Durham.”
“But it’s Durham in the boat. Melinda is certain.”
“Who did it sound like the realtor was describing?”
“It was a pretty sketchy description. She never saw his face without sunglasses and it sounded like she was looking at his body. Besides, he was on a boat a hundred yards from her. How much could she have seen?”
“Who came to mind?”
“I don’t know, didn’t really match with anybody.”
“But who did you think of?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“Try me.”
“Ungar.”
“It’s him—we’ve got to get a call off to Nevada Wildlife.”
“Then let’s do it from the van.”
“I’ve lost visual,”
Roberts said. “He moved in closer to the shoreline and I’m up here on this road.” Her tone was plaintive. “Where’s the plane? Where’s the patrol boat?”
The patrol boat was on its way from the north shore. A spotter plane had just lifted off from Truckee Airport and would fly over the lake within the next few minutes. Police were on the alert all the way around the lake. Everyone who could be notified had been. Marquez focused binoculars on the mountains behind the north shore. He saw a black shape cross low and fast above them and relayed it onto Roberts.
“I see the spotter plane.”
He watched it bank toward the lake, the outline of its wings sharper. He kept the binoculars up and heard Shauf working the radio, then the chatter of the pilot filled the van. Now Roberts directed the pilot and they heard his terse, “Lone male at the wheel of a boat running toward Glenbrook. Is that your man?”
Roberts’s voice crackled on again. “Boat should be a Colbalt with blue trim.”
“I’m taking it down lower,” the pilot responded.
The patrol boat checked in. They had the boat in view and expected to intercept it at Glenbrook. Alvarez communicated with the Nevada Highway Patrol, who dropped toward Glenbrook. Marquez watched the plane come low across the water. He lowered the binos and turned to Alvarez.
“Is Nevada clear that her truck should be there and that this is an armed situation?”
“Very clear.”
In the van they raced toward Glenbrook and the pilot confirmed blue trim, wasn’t sure about the make of the boat, wasn’t a boater, but definitely it was a lone male who’d reacted hard as the plane came in low. But who wouldn’t, Marquez thought, with a plane diving on you.
“Can they catch him before he docks?” Marquez asked.
Before that was answered a Nevada highway officer reported a woman in a Chevy Blazer backing down the boat ramp. Alvarez glanced at Marquez, answered the previous question, saying, “They say it’s going to be close.”
There was too much radio chatter and back-and-forth to ask for a description of the woman. The patrol boat closed in and used a bullhorn. The patrol reported that the man had stopped short of the dock as ordered and they were boarding.
“All right,” Alvarez said, and Marquez used his cell to try to reach Roberts.
It turned out the only thing the startled man would admit to was being late pulling his boat from the water. His blonde-haired wife was out of the Blazer now, and Marquez heard enough from the radio to know it was a fiasco.
“Wrong man,” Roberts said, as he got through to her. “He must have put in somewhere farther north. I’m just getting to
Glenbrook. Do you want me to stay and deal with this or look for him north of here?”
“Keep searching. We’ll ask the patrol boat to go up the coast and get Nevada to redirect the patrol.”
But no agency likes a wild goose chase, in particular one based on loose information to begin with, and Marquez took over trying to communicate that they still needed help and that every minute mattered. He got the patrol boat to start north hugging the coast as best they could, though it meant skirting large shallow areas and working with binoculars, searching for a remote place he might have put in. Talk of the boat’s capsizing started. They looked for a hull and reported waves of four feet, and on land the search widened for the green Chevy pickup with the camper shell. Reno police went alert, watched the road over Mount Rose.
About an hour later the boat was found beached between rocks along a remote stretch, partially covered with a camouflage tarp the wind was removing. In Shauf’s van they drove toward it, and Marquez closed his eyes momentarily. He listened as the patrol reported their problem.
“We can’t put in here, and we don’t want to anchor too close to shore. Too many rocks.”
GPS coordinates got relayed, and Shauf found a place on the road shoulder to park the van along the road above the lake. On the other side of the guardrail was forest dropping steeply toward the lake. The boat was down there. Roberts pulled up and then Cairo behind her.
“You’re done hiking, Lieutenant,” Cairo said. “We’ll go down and check it out.”
“He may be hiding in the woods,” Marquez said. “Could be he panicked when he saw the plane and beached short of where he was supposed to meet her.”
It was a different sort of predicament. Three of the team went down, Marquez leading, and they didn’t find anything in the boat.
The hull had been damaged when the boat beached, and it wasn’t going to be simple to extricate. They hiked back up and found what might be his tracks as he climbed toward the highway and his ride. Roberts started trying to line up a dog team. Nothing had been removed from the condo in Richardson Bay yet, but a piece of the bloody bandages could be taken from there to scent the dogs. One of the team would have to make a run over there, the realtor contacted and found, this stretch of highway secured, and yet, Marquez doubted they’d find anything.
Still, with the differing police agencies on the lookout for the pickup, there was little else to do. Marquez left Roberts in charge of the area search, and with Shauf and Cairo he conducted a sweep of the lake towns on the off chance they’d spot the pickup and Sophie. He talked to Kendall, who’d followed things as far as Glenbrook and since returned to his sheriff’s office.
“Where are you taking it now?” Kendall asked.
“We’ll start searching for this other bear farm.”
“Are you going out there today?”
“We’re on our way there now.”
“It’ll be dark in a couple of hours and more than likely, Nyland lied to you. This is what murder suspects do. They concoct fanciful stories that explain it all away.”
“We saw other tracks in the barn. You took castings, what have you done with those?”
“Nothing yet.”
“A truck big enough to move the bear cages was probably something like a Ryder rental.”
“All right, we’ll check the rentals. We’ll run the list of names by them.”
“What do you think about the idea Petroni’s car was brought back to Johengen’s in the same rented truck as a way to keep it from being spotted on the road?”
“Petroni in the backseat already dead?”
“Yeah.”
Kendall grunted, didn’t really respond.
“Either way, there were other bears,” Marquez said. “One got shot and was probably sick, the others got moved. I’m going to take another run out to Johengen’s tomorrow and look for what we missed.”
“You were going to come in this afternoon and sit down with me.”
“It’ll have to wait.”
Later, Marquez talked to Katherine from his truck cab, sitting outside a restaurant where Shauf and Alvarez waited inside. The initial search in Minden had turned up no obvious buildings, and they’d driven back to Placerville after dark. Roberts had reported that the dogs keyed on the scent of a piece of bloody bandage. Almost certainly, whoever’s blood that was had been in the boat and hiked up to the road. The trail had ended there, and the dog handler eventually got nervous about his bloodhounds searching along the edge of the highway. They’d held traffic for a while, then concluded the man driving the boat had gotten picked up along the road shoulder.
“And now you think it’s a different man?” Katherine asked.
“The informant that started us on this case.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, and we’ve got the same problem with our house. You and Maria are going to need to stay in the city.”
“Then we’re going to rent a hotel room and start using the construction money.”
There was a mixed message in that, one he’d have to think about. When he hung up a wave of depression mixed with exhaustion swept over him. Ungar was Nyland’s Bearman, but where was he? San Francisco police had gone to his apartment an hour ago and he wasn’t there, and not only that, they said there weren’t any computers anywhere inside, so he had to be moving one step
ahead of them again. Marquez went in and ate with Shauf and Alvarez, registered Shauf’s sober face and Alvarez’s questioning look as he told them he wanted to make another search of the barn out at Johengen’s before leaving for Nevada tomorrow morning.
Alvarez sopped chicken gravy with a piece of bread and kept his eyes on his plate. His silence told Marquez he thought they were just spinning their wheels going back to Johengen’s. Marquez knew Shauf and Alvarez thought the right thing to do tomorrow was devote everything to searching for the Minden ranch.
Alvarez’s lean face betrayed another question, this one about Marquez’s judgment.
“Tell you what, I’ll go out there early alone and then we’ll go over to Nevada midmorning,” Marquez said.
Well before first light
Marquez drove out Howell Road. A light rain was falling and the road ahead dark. At Johengen’s the gate was open, but likely it was just someone with the county who’d forgotten to lock it. The dirt driveway was slick, and his headlights caught fluttering pieces of crime tape as he came around the bend. He saw where the backhoe operator had refilled the trench, soil humped and looking like a long grave. With the key Kendall had given him he unlocked the barn.
Inside, it felt another ten degrees colder, and the cold reached him. His body was still bone-tired from the hike and stiff from wrestling with Nyland. He located the light switch at the far end and lit the string of bulbs hanging from the rafters. A bat squeaked overhead and then the only sounds were the rain and wind, the big door creaking as the stronger gusts moved it. It was dank, the bear smell still strong. The barn had been cleared except for cages yet to be hauled away by Fish and Game. The stuffed and mounted
bears, the contents of the freezer, were gone, the freezer no longer running. The drying station was gone, even the racks of antlers that had been on the walls. What was left were old rusted garden tools and the carcass of an ancient pickup sitting on jacks in a dark corner.
He stood a few minutes looking at the cages, then turned his attention to the tire tracks. He studied the whitened areas where plaster castings had been taken. Kendall was checking out the rental agencies and trying to come up with a tire match, and Marquez had his team working on that now as well. He followed tire tracks toward the cages, saw where the DFG truck that picked up the bear had parked. Then, beyond that point he spotted a faint divot in the earth that he guessed was where one skid had rested as the Honda was rolled off and out into the yard after Petroni’s body had been dealt with.
That’s when you loaded the cages. That’s when you moved the bears to Nevada or wherever you moved them, and that’s how Petroni’s car got here with him in it.
It would have taken at least two people and a way to winch the cages up into the truck. The truck was probably rented near where the other farm was. As it fell together he contemplated calling Kendall, then decided to think it over more first. He called Shauf and suggested she and Alvarez get some breakfast and he’d check one more thing in the barn, then they’d drive tandem over the mountains and into Nevada.
“Find anything?” she asked.
“Looking at the tire tracks. I’m going to check one more thing before leaving.”
“What else are you going to do out there?”
“I had an idea last night that no one checked the rafters. There’s a ladder in the barn. It won’t take me long.” Before she could ask, he added, “Because of the hunting shack.”
There was a long wooden ladder, its round rungs worn smooth by years of boots. The ladder had two metal hooks that slipped
334 over the bottom chord of the roof trusses. He slid the ladder along the barn wall, climbed up the sixteen feet, and used his flashlight, scanning the top plate where the roof trusses rested. It wouldn’t take another fifteen minutes to cover the perimeter of the barn, and then they’d be on their way to Nevada. A stronger gust blew rain in through the doors, and the big door swung shut with a loud noise. So far he’d found only cobwebs and bat guano, but now, as he climbed the ladder in the area above the empty cages, he shone the light on what looked like a rag or a towel. He had to climb down again and move the ladder before he was close enough to see it well. The towel was bloodstained.
He climbed down and retrieved latex gloves from his truck. Peeling one corner of the towel, he saw a knife hilt and part of a bloody blade, then let the cloth fall and stood frozen on the ladder. Below were the bear cages, the dark floor of the barn, above the sound of the rain on the roof. In the pocket of his coat his cell rang as he tried to imagine the mind that put this here.
He came down off the ladder and lowered it, leaving the towel and knife up there. He had to throw his shoulder into the barn door to get it open. He called Shauf from the truck after he’d relocked the barn and was on the road.
“They’ve got her,” she said. “I just called you. Or they’ve almost got her. She’s in the Crystal Basin with a string of police cars behind her, doesn’t seem to be trying to get away, doing kind of an OJ thing, driving slowly with the police behind her.”
“Alone?”
“No, there’s a man in the seat next to her.”
Going home,
he thought.
Going to where she’d always sought refuge
. He stayed on the line with Shauf, telling her about the knife as he turned onto the highway and pushed his speed past eighty, heading to the Crystal Basin. By the time he got there Sophie was trapped by police vehicles on a dirt road outside Yellowjacket
Camp. Durham had been identified as the passenger and was possibly wounded. He wasn’t moving. Neither had responded to orders to get out of the truck, and a debate was underway about what to do next.
Marquez argued his way toward the front where Kendall was crouched down behind a police door. A marksman had moved into a position where he could shoot either Sophie or Durham, but he had just reported that Durham was either unconscious or dead.
Kendall talked to Marquez with his eyes still on the pickup.
“She’s armed. She showed us a handgun. Durham may be dead. They’re saying it looks like his head is taped to the headrest.”
“She killed him?”
“That’s my guess.”
Sophie sat straight-backed in the pickup. There was another bullhorn attempt to reach her, and her head didn’t move.
“Anybody try walking up?” Marquez asked.
“She held a gun out the window and fired into the woods. She almost got herself shot.”
“I’ve been out at Johengen’s this morning. I was thinking about Nyland’s hunting shack last night, the watch and ring.
There’s a ladder in the barn, and I worked along each wall checking the top of the wall between each truss. I found a bloodstained towel with a knife in it. It’s out there sitting on top of the wall above the bear cages.” Now Kendall took his eyes from the truck and looked at Marquez. “I left it and drove here from the barn.”
“On the wall above the cages?”
“Yeah, and I also found a mark that could be one of the truck skids they rolled the Honda down.” He didn’t add that he thought they loaded the bear cages at the same time.
Let Kendall come to that on his own
. “How long has she been sitting there?”
“Forty minutes. Her father’s on the way.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“He volunteered and no one had a better one. Someone monitoring the police band got a hold of him.”
He listened as Kendall called for a county unit to block off and guard the entrance to Johengen’s. Ten minutes, a bullhorn warned her, they were going to shoot her tires out and she still had time to get away from the truck. She didn’t move, and a marksman shot her rear tires out. The pickup sagged, then Sophie’s door swung open and she got out holding a rifle that must have been behind the passenger seat. She kept the barrel pointed at the road, though ordered by bullhorn to drop the weapon. Officers scrambled for better cover, but she didn’t move.
“I’ll go out there,” Marquez said, because she stood paralyzed as though guarding the road from intruders. “Troy’s the wrong guy, keep him back.”
“You’re a fucking nut,” Kendall said and picked up a bullhorn. “This is Detective Kendall, Sophie. I understand your situation and want to help you. But you need to put the rifle down.”
Instead, the rifle barrel rose slightly and Sophie stared in his direction. Officers near Marquez sighted on her, fingers on triggers.
“Do not lift the rifle any farther,” Kendall ordered, and clicking the bullhorn off said, “Oh, fuck.”
But it wasn’t Kendall she was looking at. Troy was coming up from behind them. He passed Marquez, muttering, “Goddamn her,” and with his booted pigeon-toed steps strode away from the deputy escorting him and toward her as though nothing could happen. “She’s mine, I’ll take care of it,” was all he said and stopped only when she ordered him to a second time. The steel and anger in her voice carried to where they were, and Marquez heard weapons adjusted again.
Troy raised a hand perhaps to try to convince or reassure her, and maybe she saw the hand that had struck her as a child or maybe she knew the bullhorn promises were lies. Her gun rose
abruptly and Marquez stood and yelled across the police line, “Don’t shoot her.” He yelled to Sophie, “Wait,” and stepped out in front of the cruiser onto the road. He raised his hands shoulder high to show Sophie and turned back at the police vehicles and lights, calling, “Don’t shoot her.”
Her eyes were on Marquez, watching his slow advance toward where Troy stood frozen. “Sophie,” Marquez said. “It won’t make anything better. It won’t change anything.”
He thought he heard her say, “It’s already over.” Her eyes returned to Troy, and Marquez heard her say, “I should kill you, you bastard.”
“Put the goddamn gun down,” Troy said.
“Shut up!” Her yell carried down through the police lines, the fierce anger in it unmistakable. Marquez saw it happening but before he could reach her she kicked the shoe off of one foot, dropped the rifle stock on the other foot, and put her mouth over the barrel. With the shoeless toe she found the trigger.
Blood and brain blew across the wet road.