“I’m watching for you.”
Marquez ignored him, instead watched Bobby Broussard, who stood in front of one of the cops and kept pointing down the street. Nyland’s keys got handed over to Bobby, and Marquez realized that must have been what the conversation was about. After Nyland was in the back of the patrol car, Marquez moved close to Petroni. One of the cops walked over. He asked Petroni, “Are you going to press charges?”
Petroni shook his head. “I’ll take care of it.”
“What do you mean, warden?”
“I mean, I’ll deal with it.”
The officer looked to Marquez. “And who are you?”
“A friend of Bill’s. I was at the bar and saw Nyland or whatever his name is cross the room and start the fight.”
“And how did he do that?” The cop started writing.
“He came up from behind and yanked Bill off his chair.”
Marquez gave terse answers and then his alias as a name. The police cruiser pulled away.
Petroni’s voice was thicker, his nose clogged with mucus and blood as he explained. “Nyland used to be her boyfriend. They lived together for years.”
“Is that his truck Bobby’s driving?”
A Toyota pickup went past on Main Street, and Petroni nodded, touched his lip, and looked at the blood on his fingers.
“He’s got dogs in the truck. That’s why they let him take it,” Petroni said. “Nyland’s close with the Broussards, and he used to go out with Sophie. That’s what that was about.”
“How long have you been going out with her?”
“She’s not one of them if that’s what you’re thinking. She left home when she was sixteen.”
Petroni turned to face him, his nose still bleeding, teeth streaked with blood, the tissue paper in his hand saturated. He forced a strange pained smile, and Marquez didn’t think it was the pain of the blows.
“This isn’t over,” Petroni said.
Marquez left it alone. Petroni was angry, humiliated, and he needed to cool down. He ought to go down to the station and press charges, let Nyland sit in a cell for a month.
“Want me to run you by the clinic and get your nose looked at?”
“No.”
“Where does Nyland live?”
“I’ll deal with him.”
“I’ve got a different problem with him.”
Marquez got directions to Nyland’s place before Petroni went back inside to Sophie. Shauf was waiting for Marquez near his truck. As they got in he told her.
“Nyland was at the wheel the other night. That’s the truck that followed me.”
10
The next morning Marquez took an early run with Shauf, then sat at the kitchen table in the safehouse, cooling down, talking with Roberts and Cairo while Shauf showered. Shauf came back out, and her wet hair dripped onto the Crystal Basin Wilderness map as they talked about the day ahead. Marquez would make his first trip home in over a week, combining that with a reinterview of Kim Ungar at Ungar’s apartment in San Francisco today. While he was gone, Shauf would start the team on a systematic sweep of the fire and logging roads in the Crystal Basin. Get the keys to all the gates and look for any signs of bait piles. He didn’t yet know how he wanted to deal with last night’s buy, but after finding the poached sow and cubs it made sense to look for other bait piles.
An hour later he grabbed his gear and left for the Bay Area. Traffic bled slowly across the Central Valley, and every year it seemed there were more strip malls and stucco houses alongside the freeway. The orchards were all but gone. He drove past Vacaville and Fairfield, climbed the dry rounded hills before Vallejo, making phone calls, still juggling thirty cases or leads, one in particular that sounded promising, a sturgeon poaching tip coming from a bait shop owner in the delta. Then Kendall called.
“I heard you ran into Eric Nyland last night,” Kendall said. “We’ve got a file on Nyland you might want to take a look at, and I’ve got a story for you, if you want to hear it.”
“I’d like to see the file, and, yeah, anything you know about Nyland I’d like to hear.”
“Petroni could tell you all about his girlfriend.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“This happened about five years ago, just after I started here. A Tuolumne County sheriff’s deputy showed up looking for help locating Nyland-this was in the fall, September the year I was hired. This Tuolumne deputy had traced Nyland through a partial license plate after a road rage incident in Yosemite where a camper went off the road and an older fellow was killed. The old boy’s wife survived. She got a partial license plate and gave a description of the truck and driver. She and her husband had been on their way home to Lee Vining after staying in Yosemite Valley, so they were climbing toward Tioga Pass. I’m sure you know Yosemite.”
“Yeah.”
“A pickup came up behind them and got aggressive about passing, and the old boy got angry, started swinging wide when the truck tried to go around him. Eventually, Nyland, and I’m sure it was Nyland, got around him or rather, came alongside, lowered his passenger window, and shot a hole through the camper’s windshield.
The old boy swerved, lost control, hit a tree, and was DOA. So this Tuolumne deputy comes into the sheriff’s office, tells us this story, and we all drove out to where Nyland still lives at the end of Six Mile Road. There’s a meadow where a subdivision project went bust. Do you know where that is?”
“I know the road.”
“Then you know where it ends. Do you know the story with the Miwoks?”
“No, but let’s stay on Nyland.”
“Remind me to tell you the local legend sometime about the Miwoks who got slaughtered out there. People claim their ghosts still haunt the area. There are three house foundations in that meadow that never got built on, and out past that are trailers the construction crews lived in. Nyland worked on the subdivision briefly as a carpenter, and the bank let him stay on because the bank officer was a friend of his dad’s. Deal was he’d trade rent to watch the property, and believe it or not, his dad was respected around here, a lawyer that even the cops liked.”
“Where’s his dad now?”
“Heart attack when Nyland was nineteen. Probably having a kid like Nyland killed him. Okay, so we go out there in a couple of patrol cars and drive up to the first trailer, the one he lives in, and she answers the door, not Nyland.”
“Sophie?”
“See, you know where this story is going. You know her better than you let on. Anyway, Nyland is standing behind her, and she’s wearing a thin T-shirt, and I mean thin and tight, a pair of ragged jeans and is barefoot. Looked like she’d just pulled the clothes on as we drove up. She got right in my face, said she’d been in the sack with Nyland all night and they’d had sex, and we could swab her right there in the doorway if we wanted. I’m not kidding. She started unzipping her jeans, and there weren’t any panties underneath.
Then she told me I could be the one to do it.”
Kendall paused, waiting for his reaction, the image of her opening her jeans, the place to make a comment. But what caught Marquez was not her body exposed, and she had a nice one, but rather, the aggressiveness, same thing he’d seen at the Creekview.
“Nyland came in for questioning and we worked on her separately, but she never wavered on the alibi. I believe Nyland was the pickup driver in Yosemite, and I can promise you she’s damaged goods. That’s who your warden is head over heels about. We’ve also suspected Nyland’s involvement in meth manufacture and a burglary ring, but never been able to pin anything on him. He may look like a pinup for the steroid crowd, but he’s a schemer and smart. Knows what he can get away with. Did Petroni tell you Nyland works for a hunting guide business?”
“No.”
“Sierra Guides out of Placerville-they’ve got an office off Main Street.”
“I know where it is.”
“That’s where Nyland’s truck came from. The owner there loaned him the money to buy it.”