“Nyland tried to run me off the road the other night.”
“Then maybe your cover is still good.”
Petroni started to slide out of the booth, saying, “I’m late.”
“Do you want me to come along?”
“Why would I?”
“It might help to have another wildlife officer in the room.”
The offer was about more than helping Petroni out, and of course, Petroni knew that. Marquez wanted to know more about Kendall’s investigation, felt he needed to know.
“No, thanks.”
Petroni walked out of the Waffle House ahead of him, got in the truck without looking back, then stopped and lowered his window as he came alongside Marquez.
“About a year ago word got back to Kendall I’d told the sheriff he ought to fire him. This is his payback.”
“Wouldn’t hurt to have me there.”
Petroni stared hard before nodding.
13
After parking outside the sheriff’s office Marquez walked over to a small black Mercedes and looked through the windows, confirming what he’d already assumed. Bell’s wife’s car. In the slot next to it was a state car, an old Crown Vic with a soft black leatherbound book on the passenger seat, a Bible belonging to Charlotte Floyd, one of the department’s two internal affairs officers. He doubted Petroni knew that either she or Bell would be here.
Inside, Marquez asked where the meeting was, and they held him there until Kendall came out. “This is complicated enough already,” Kendall said. “You don’t need to be here.”
“We had breakfast together. He asked me to come.”
“Right.”
They stood close to each other, Marquez looking down in his eyes. He could feel Kendall debating whether he could trade it for something later. Kendall pointed. “If, and only if, you don’t say a word.”
The room held a long, scarred linoleum table and metal folding chairs. Hawse adjusted a video camera resting on a tripod in the corner of the room. A small tape recorder stood on end like a gravestone miniature in the middle of the table, Floyd and Bell sat next to each other on the right-hand side, next to them chairs for Hawse and Kendall, and across the table, Petroni sitting, with his palms on the table top, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead.
“Lieutenant Marquez,” Kendall said, “take the chair at the end of the table.”
Marquez looked from Petroni to Charlotte Floyd, smelled the perfume she favored and watched her jaw tighten as she acknowledged him, remembered how her hands had trembled as she’d leafed through pages of her Bible to prove him wrong when he’d questioned the accuracy of her quote from Ecclesiastes. She’d been right about the quote but wrong about him.
In a quiet voice Kendall explained his problem. He hoped the meeting would be brief, the confusion quickly cleared up. He paid Petroni a compliment as the area warden around here that everyone knew on sight, adding, “It’s Sunday morning, all of us have better things to do. My partner here has a football game he doesn’t want to miss.”
No one so much as smiled. Petroni’s eyes found a spot high on the wall behind Bell’s head, his face set as he waited for Kendall to finish listening to himself talk.
“Put bluntly, we have overwhelming evidence Warden Petroni lied to us and impeded a murder investigation.”
Kendall flipped through notes sequentially recapping interviews and misleading statements. He addressed Petroni directly for the first time.
“Do you understand that we’re going to ask some questions this morning that may later be incriminating?”
“Yes.”
“You can request that a lawyer be present-” “I’ve been in law enforcement twenty-two years, Kendall.”
Kendall listed the individuals in the room as the videotape started. He asked Petroni if he was uncomfortable with the format or felt coerced. Petroni looked across the table at Bell, as if for support, though at breakfast he’d referred to him as “No Balls Bell,” said he was the worst he’d ever worked under, an administrative hire, a climber who’d never spent a single day in the field.
“Did you have any contact with Jed Vandemere in June or July of this year?” Kendall asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that you’ve previously answered ‘no’ multiple times to the same question?”
“I ran into him in the Crystal Basin several times in the early summer.”
Petroni had brought in his logbook. He opened it and they waited, watching him slowly flip the pages.
“Union Valley Reservoir is where I first talked to him. I also saw him at Ice House Lake, Loon and Barrett Lakes.”
“Do you remember me asking you if you’d met with Jed Vandemere at Barrett Lake?”
“Yes.”
“So are you saying you previously lied to me?”
“Yes,” and it came out easily, as if it were normal in the course of a day that he’d lie to Kendall, or that anyone in their right mind would. Marquez read quiet satisfaction on Kendall’s face, caught the gleam in his eyes, victory over a liar after all the denials.
Kendall repeated the dates, reconfirming chronologically the times and places of Petroni’s meetings. Forty-five minutes later Kendall flipped the cassette in the recorder and asked if anyone wanted to take a break. No one did.
“Let’s go to early August,” Kendall said. “Did you see him on the first of August?”
“August third.”
“Where?”
“Ice House Resort. He’d approached me once before about gunshots he’d heard at night. He was concerned they were shots fired by poachers, and we talked about that. I investigated and didn’t find anything to go on, but I asked him to keep an eye out.”
“Did you like him?”
Petroni frowned at the question, said, “I didn’t like or dislike him. He was a college kid with a big imagination. He wanted to find something. There were men in and out of Barrett that he was sure were poachers, but when I questioned him he didn’t have anything I could work with.”
“People he thought were poaching bear?”
Petroni forced a big false grin, said, “I think that’s what we’re talking about.”
“Do you have dates on all your conversations with him regarding poachers?”
“You’re welcome to copy my log.”
Bell nodded approval, and Hawse slid his chair back, got heavily to his feet. He took the log and left the room.
“You were on a first-name basis with Jed Vandemere?”
“I barely knew him.”
“How many times over the summer would you say you talked with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Make a guess.”
“Ten.”
“Are they all in your log?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ever speak with him outside the Crystal Basin area?”
“Yes.”
“And where were those conversations?”
“In Placerville.”
“Do you remember denying you ever saw or talked to him in Placerville?”
“It really doesn’t matter.”
That got a stir out of the room, a shifting, but nothing from Kendall. He was cool with that. There was no hurry, no place left for Petroni to run.
“Did he say anything to you about arguing with bear hunters?”
“No.”
“Are you certain?”
“Look, Kendall, I heard the same story you did, so don’t make it sound like you’re trying to discover something.” Petroni’s voice hardened. “You talked to March Baylor, the same as I did. Bear hunters were out running their hounds, and Vandemere followed them. They got angry when he honked his horn and messed with them teaching their dogs. March was there, that’s what he told me, and I know for a fact that’s what he told you.”
“When did this incident take place?”
“End of the first week of August, and I tried to find Vandemere after I heard about it, but I couldn’t find him. I thought he’d left the basin.”
Kendall turned to Bell and explained, “Baylor is an old coot, a hunter who’s been here forever. He knows everybody.” He turned back toward Petroni, then paused purposefully before asking his next question.
“Are you saying you lied to me because you thought I’d heard the story somewhere else already?”