“You’re kidding, you really called him?”
“He calls Kendall once a week. He wants to know where things are at.”
“But it must be very hard for him to talk about. What did you ask him?”
“I introduced myself, told him what my Fish and Game team does, and then asked if Jed had ever mentioned anything in conversation or emails about bear poachers.”
“Because you don’t trust Kendall?”
“How do you get there from what I said?”
“I know you.”
“In a way you’re right. I asked to read the emails his son sent him this summer.”
“Oh, my God-I could never ask someone to do that.”
“I think he was glad to get the call, Kath. His twelve-year-old daughter is taking it very hard, and I get the feeling his wife is hurting too much to talk. He said over the years he did a lot of backpacking and fishing with Jed. He blames himself in some ways for Jed being up there in the Crystal Basin alone.”
Marquez could understand feeling that way and thought briefly about Julie, his first wife. A terrible image came back to him as they returned to the sandy parking area and got in the truck. He and Julie had gone to Africa after the wedding, planning to travel and live on the cheap, camp wherever they could. She’d been abducted from their campsite, and for days he’d ridden around with a constable looking for her. They’d found her by watching the vultures, her body in brush not far from the campsite. A month later he’d thought he’d found the men who’d raped and killed her, and he’d felt something akin to elation at the prospect of killing them, been so ready to do it. But among their belongings he couldn’t find her ring or any of the other things he needed as proof before pulling the trigger.
Long ago, he’d told Katherine about searching for Julie’s kidnappers and what he’d felt when he found their camp, but you don’t tell your second wife about your continuing dreams of your first. And he didn’t have to tell Katherine about the empathy he felt with Jed Vandemere’s father. She knew.
He’d brought Julie’s body home to her parents and buried her where she’d grown up at the base of the Bitterroot Mountains. It had been a long time later, almost fifteen years, when he’d fallen for Katherine. Theirs was a soft, warm-rounded, gentle love, a comfortable easiness together. It wasn’t a lesser thing, but different.
When he’d gone to Africa with Julie he’d been so in love that the world felt completely open. That was youth and this was middle age and the two were different, even for those that liked to say they felt the same inside.
“Give me something I can call reassurance or tell me you can’t,” Katherine said.
“This guy seems to be carefully checking me out. He sent a couple of aggressive guys out on the last buy and called me today to apologize, to keep stringing it along. He wants to keep the money coming.”
“What’s his trip then?”
“I don’t know.”
“But not like Kline?”
“No.”
Kline had been a drug smuggler, a contract killer, a career black marketeer who’d branched into abalone because they brought fifty dollars each and he could gather thousands of them.
Breaking that ring had been violent.
“He’s using guys he hires to do these buys with you?” she asked.
“He insulates himself.”
“Someone must know him.”
“That’s what I’m betting, Kath.”
Marquez turned up the mountain road and they began to climb away from the ocean. They could see the moon over the water, a long line of reflected light.
“You’ll take him down,” she said and smiled at her own use of those words. She lived a totally different urban life, running her two San Francisco coffee bars. Her friends called her Cappuccino Kathy. She laughed and recovered the earlier mood of the night.
“And I’m going to take you down when we get home,” she said. “You’re going down tonight.”
12
Katherine and Maria were asleep when he climbed into his truck. A couple of deer bolted through the darkness down the slope into the brush and trees, and a few minutes later he was on the road, holding a coffee cup in one hand, adjusting the heat and defroster fan with the other. He liked the early mornings, the quiet chance to think. The conversation with Ungar yesterday disturbed him, was on his mind this morning. When he finished his coffee he talked with Shauf, listening closely to her report of the search for bait piles and her plan to return to the Crystal Basin.
“We’ve heard fresh reports of off-road vehicles at night and we’re checking those areas today,” she said. “Where are you?”
“On my way to Nyland’s trailer park.”
“You heard they kicked him loose, right?”
“Yeah, Kendall called me.”
“Hey, he’s our new best friend.”
Marquez didn’t want to get into a Kendall conversation this morning. “I’ll call you after taking a look at Nyland’s place.”
Ducks lifted from the rice paddies along the Sacramento River flood plain as he crossed the causeway. He drove through Sacramento and then into the foothills and an hour later exited onto Six Mile Road, remembering Kendall’s wry “There should be a road sign for peace officers that reads 5.7 miles to the Nyland trailer overlook.”
Marquez stopped short of the ridge, turning down a dirt track and following that until he could hide his truck. He walked back out the dirt road, smelling oak, pine, and brush, dry and waiting on rain. Near the ridge he cut left into the trees and found a place where he could see the meadow below. He saw the flat gray house foundations in the middle, the abandoned sales office on one end, a broad deck off it layered with brown pine needles. On the far end were three aluminum-skinned trailers, one of which Kendall had told him Nyland lived in. The trailer with the propane tank. Nyland’s Toyota and an older blue Ford F-150 were parked nearby. A hound sat on the Toyota hood.
Nyland’s trailer had a window like an opaque eye facing the meadow, the interior hidden from Marquez’s binoculars by curtains, iron stairs running down from the trailer door to the dry meadow grass. Behind that one and up the slope were two other trailers, these resting on cinder blocks. The door of the second was padlocked, and the last trailer, the one bordering the trees, missing its door. He watched a dog hop out and guessed the dogs slept there.
He brought the glasses back to the Ford pickup, jotted down its license plate. Nyland had a pretty good setup out here, a lot of wooded country and no one around to question anything he did. He could skin a bear on one of the slab foundations, and no one would be the wiser.
Before Marquez had reached the highway he’d learned the blue Ford F-150 was registered to Sophie Broussard. He drove back into Placerville and passing the Waffle House saw Petroni’s Fish and Game truck. He doubled back and pulled in alongside it.
Petroni was in a booth wearing a neatly creased uniform though it was Sunday morning.
“Saw your truck when I drove past and couldn’t pass up the chance to talk to you.”
Petroni’s look was morose, distant, but he gestured. “Have a seat.”
After Marquez had slid into the booth and ordered scrambled eggs and coffee, Petroni volunteered, “I’ve got a special meeting at the sheriff’s office this morning. I’m meeting Kendall and his partner in fifteen minutes.”
“What do you have left to say to him?”
“Nothing he doesn’t already know.”
“Then maybe today will end it. I just came from Nyland’s place. There’s a Ford pickup parked out there that’s registered to Sophie.”
“He owes her money, and he’s supposed to fix her truck to pay her off. She says that’s the only way she’ll get paid. She’s been driving the car of the people she’s house-sitting for, but supposedly he’s got it fixed now. What does Sophie have to do with you?”