“So did you come in to talk to me?” she asked.
“I came in looking for Bill. I know he’s going through a hard time with the divorce.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
Marquez shrugged.
“Do you want to know why Billy and I broke up?”
“If you want to tell me.”
“He got real angry because I slept with someone else this summer.”
She watched him intently. “Did you read about the guy who got murdered?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, he just disappeared in August.”
“Jed something.”
“Vandemere.”
“You had an affair with him.”
She laughed. “They don’t call it that around here. Anyway, now I’m sort of back with my old boyfriend.”
“Sort of?”
“Let’s just say he wants to get back together.” She smiled and made a quick hand gesture toward the other two men at the bar. “But I’m done with all these guys.” She reached and touched his hand, her fingers long and cool, one finger touching his wedding ring. “I’ve got to get these people at the end of the bar another drink. Do you want another one?”
“I’ve got to go meet a friend.”
“Then come back and see me sometime soon.”
“I will.”
When he got outside he pulled his phone from his coat. It had started vibrating in the bar and he saw there’d been three calls from Alvarez, called him back now.
“Show time,” Alvarez said. “He picked up some restaurant scraps behind that Italian place below town. Bobby Broussard’s Chevy is about a half mile behind him and they just went into the basin. Where are you?”
“On my way to you.”
“See you here.”
25
Then it was a lot of the same game again, Nyland driving through the Crystal Basin and Bobby trailing behind, Nyland making multiple stops, thirty-two by Marquez’s count, and Bobby reversing directions, roaring back down the road toward them, a fighter pilot in a beater pickup hoping to surprise the enemy. They dodged Bobby and kept track of Nyland’s GPS coordinates.
Whenever Nyland stopped they marked the coordinates and clocked the time. Gradually, he worked his way toward the lip of the basin, then instead of dropping down the steep road to the highway, he turned left onto Weber Mill Road.
“He just turned onto Shauf’s road,” was how Alvarez called it from his truck.
Nyland made three stops along Weber Mill, including one right above Shauf’s bait pile before driving home. Bobby continued down the highway toward Placerville, and Marquez followed Nyland out Six Mile Road, hustled out the ridge, and saw him back up to the second trailer, tailgate down, headlights shining into meadow weeds. If they were able to find bait piles at any of the GPS coordinates they’d marked tonight, then they would have enough for a search warrant. They would get into that trailer as well as the main one. The second must be where he stored equipment.
After Nyland coasted his truck back down to the flat meadow, Marquez started to leave, then stopped as Nyland walked back to the second trailer. He continued on up past the third trailer and disappeared into the woods. A chained hound bayed, and Marquez talked on and off with Alvarez while he waited for Nyland to reappear.
They speculated that he had a storage area somewhere in the woods he’d just walked into. Marquez looked down on the long oval meadow, the slab house foundations where they’d watched Sophie and Nyland, the faint aluminum luminosity of the trailers, and then from the direction Nyland had disappeared Marquez saw flickering that looked like firelight. It vanished as tall trees along the meadow moved with the wind, showed once more and burned for thirty minutes before winking out abruptly. And still Nyland didn’t reappear. He waited another half hour, and when nothing more happened he climbed through the trees back to his truck and drove to the safehouse.
The next morning as Marquez was having coffee he tried to make sense of it. They had a case building against Nyland for bear baiting, one that included Bobby Broussard and, very likely, Troy before it was over. But the disparate pieces, Sophie’s role, the watch and ring, the firelight, the strange triangle Petroni was in or had been in, Marquez couldn’t fit these things into a framework. He was turning the pieces in his head when Kendall called.
“Do you know where Petroni is this morning?” Kendall asked.
“No.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Yesterday afternoon. What’s happened?”
“I’m in Georgetown.”
“You’re at Petroni’s house.”
“I am, and you’d better come here,” Kendall said. “Stella Petroni has been murdered. A neighbor found her body this morning. I’ll tell them to let you through the tape.”
Images came, nothing coherent, Marquez asked, “Killed at the house?”
“Stabbed. Beaten. Kicked.” It was a different voice than he’d heard Kendall use before, no undertow of bellicosity or wheedling edge.
“When?”
“Let’s talk here.”
When Marquez turned onto Petroni’s street he saw the coroner’s van and a small crowd of neighbors who looked like mostly retirees, standing together, shock plain on their faces. They watched him walk up. Stella’s car was out front, Petroni’s Fish and Game truck in the garage. Marquez knew a number of calls had been made requesting that Petroni turn in his truck. Bell had authorized it impounded and towed but must have assumed Stella wouldn’t allow him to hide it here. Marquez’s guess was that Stella had gone along with it, that they’d come together on the issue of Petroni’s fighting his suspension because his state salary was the only source of income. Marquez lifted his badge when he got close to the first cop. Then Kendall walked out onto the porch, waved him up.
He followed Kendall in, past crime tape near the front door and a blood splatter that had reached up on the wallpaper and soaked into the side of an upholstered chair.
“We found a bloody axe handle,” Kendall said. “Neighbors tell us she was cautious about who she opened the door for, but we think she was attacked first out here. She may have turned and run, made it as far as the kitchen.” Marquez remembered Stella’s sliding the curtains, taking a look at him before opening up. “The phone was on the floor of the kitchen. She may have had it in her hand,” Kendall said, then stopped and turned to look at him. “Let’s say she recognized who it was and opened the door. Or her assailant had a key and she came out when she heard the door open. She gets struck but makes it back to the kitchen before he overtakes her.”
Kendall led him to the kitchen where Stella lay on her side on the floor, her face tipped up toward the ceiling.
“You see the boot prints,” Kendall said. “The killer stood over her, not to one side but over her, straddling her after she was down. Like chopping firewood, bringing the axe handle down on her head.”
Marquez made himself draw a breath. The bone structure of Stella’s face had been crushed.
“See what he was doing?” Kendall asked.
“Erasing her identity.”
“I wish I had a partner like you. You’re right, he was taking away her face.”
Blood was everywhere. They couldn’t step into the kitchen. On the upswing the axe handle had lined the walls with splatters.
Her nightgown was hiked up past midthigh, raising the question of rape. Kendall’s reason for showing him this was obvious, though Marquez didn’t accept it. A neighbor walking his dog before dawn, a retired gentleman in his seventies, ex-cop, said he’d shone his flashlight at the house, seen the front door open, and become suspicious. He’d seen blood on the floor when he’d looked inside the house, and when Stella didn’t answer his calls he’d tied his dog’s leash to a porch post and gone in to investigate. When he found her he called 911 from his cell. He hadn’t touched her, hadn’t seen a need to check for a pulse.