As he drove the route Maria had taken through Mill Valley he remembered two men in a dark blue Chevy Suburban driving slowly down a residential street in Phoenix twelve years ago. They’d bounced two wheels up on the sidewalk and run over an eight-year-old boy on his bicycle, then backed up over his skull, dropped back down onto the street, and slowly drove away. The slow drive away was meant to convey power, not the killing. The killing of the boy was the lesson, the slow drive said they weren’t worried about the justice system. Cartels had no problem going after families of law enforcement officers.
“I was watching the guy following me like you taught me to do, but I got scared,” Maria said. “I know you and Mom don’t believe me. I know it sounds like the perfect story.”
“It doesn’t sound perfect to me.”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“No.”
She showed him where the cop had pulled her over and how she’d turned and watched the other car go by. She craned her neck looking behind, and he pictured the cop’s description of her crying as he’d told her he was going to give her a ticket. Marquez doubted she’d been very focused on the vehicle following or that it had been anywhere nearby at the point the cop walked up, but he felt she was telling the truth about thinking she was being followed.
“How would you feel about missing a week or so of school and going down to stay with your grandmother?”
“Missing school would suck.”
“Let’s go get a cell phone for you.”
She picked out an inexpensive phone, and they went through the deal of signing up for a phone plan, the salesman talking as though they were buying a house. She got to choose her phone number from a list, and Marquez had no doubt she’d go over her monthly limit, or plan, as the phone company called it. The “plan” was to take all your money. As they left the store, Maria high on her new phone, he took the conversation back to visiting her grandmother and how unsure he was about the suspect they were trying to find. He tried to give her the information in a balanced way.
“What, like I drive down to Grandma’s?”
“Your Mom would ride with you.”
“This is insane.”
He turned and looked at her. “Yeah, you’re right, Maria, this is insane. But I think it’s what we’ve got to do.”
He dropped her at her car in the center of town and wished he could drive up the mountain behind her. That he had to worry about her safety stirred a much deeper anger inside, and he drove away with that. When he reached the freeway he called an old friend at U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Though they’d already talked to Fish and Wildlife about Durham, he asked a favor, asked her to check again to see if there was anything anywhere in their system with Durham’s name on it, and also the name Marion Stuart.
Pulling Maria from school might be an overreaction. He held the phone in his hand, second-guessing himself, debating calling Katherine and changing plans. Instead, he punched in Vandemere Sr.’s number. When he answered, Marquez told him he’d be in Orinda in forty minutes.
28
Marquez hadn’t been in the town of Orinda in a long time, but it didn’t seem much different. He followed a residential street into hills surrounding a golf course, drove past tennis courts and a country club, then around a small lake where the slopes above the driveways were grown over with ivy. The Vandemeres’, a three-story Spanish-style stucco house, had a black iron gate left open this afternoon to let him in. A tall white-haired man came out, walked over, and offered his hand as Marquez got out of the truck.
“Pete Vandemere,” he said.
Marquez liked the man immediately but couldn’t have said why. Upstairs in Jed’s room he looked at the posters on the walls, a lacrosse trophy, framed photographs, the things in the room that bore some stamp of Jed’s personality, though Pete told him Jed hadn’t lived at home for five years. Pete had wanted him to see the room, perhaps to get a sense of his son. Now he led him down to a room where a TV played. A young girl got up from the couch and clicked the TV off as soon as they came in.
“My daughter,” Pete said, after she’d left. “She’s the one who has had the hardest time of all. We still find her in his room asleep on the floor some mornings. She idolized him.”
Marquez sat in a stuffed chair and read the emails of Jed’s that Pete had printed for him. He felt Pete watching him and read two that were just bantering with a college friend, then one that started with “I’ve met a girl named Sophie that I like a lot. She knows every trail up here and has been showing me places.” He read on, then looked up at Pete’s eyes. “Does Kendall have copies of these?”
“I gave him copies the day I filled out the missing persons report. He asked for more recently. I think he lost the others.”
There were several emails mentioning bear poachers, a reference to high school, the Bear Initiative he’d worked on, one to his dad, suggesting he might be in the area poachers were working and had talked to the local warden about it.
“He went up to support the Bear Initiative in Idaho when he was in high school. Saved all his money and rode a bus up there but came home a little disillusioned, didn’t feel like he’d really accomplished anything but spent all his money. I told the detective this the first time we met.”
“He mentioned it to me.”
“I didn’t know he wrote it down. Didn’t seem like he wanted to listen at all when we first reported Jed missing, and I know all kinds of people go missing. But he didn’t acknowledge that we knew our son, and, of course, it was in the wilderness area, not his territory.”
“But it’s his case now.”
“It is, and it wouldn’t have made any difference.” His voice quavered. “My son was already gone.”
“I’m very sorry.”
Pete raised a hand, didn’t say anything, then, “I’m not doing well with this.” He picked up a manila envelope off his desk. “These are copies for you. All the emails he sent this past summer. He was an enthusiastic young man, had a great life ahead of him.”
He looked up and stopped talking about his son. “Do you know this Sophie Broussard?” he asked.
“I know who she is and I’ve met her. Has Detective Kendall talked to you about her?”
“No, he won’t talk to us about the case. He says he’ll keep us apprised of real progress. Well, you should know this, he got angry with me because I tried to do my own investigating when I didn’t feel anything was happening. I asked the wrong questions too early, before Jed’s body was found.”
“Did you talk to Sophie?”
“Yes, I talked to her and another young man named Eric Nyland. He was quite helpful and she was unfriendly. She works at a bar in Placerville and wasn’t the person I expected at all.” He paused, studying Marquez’s eyes. “The detective has told me not to speak to anyone about this, but I’m going to tell you. She told me she had a short fling with my son and it didn’t mean anything to her, said she could barely remember his name.”
“When did you have that conversation with her?”
“In late August. That’s hardly three weeks after that email in your hand where he’s talking about what they’re doing together. So you can imagine the things that have gone through my head. I know from emails that he met her in June and the relationship went on longer than she claimed. Jed wouldn’t lie about something like that, or anything else. Whether she wanted to shock me or cover something up, I don’t know.”