It didn’t take long to hike out, and Shauf picked him up in the parking lot. He ate a ham sandwich, an apple, and drank coffee that Shauf had in a stainless Thermos. He felt better almost immediately and wished he could comfort Shauf more about her sister, but she seemed to want to focus on what was at hand.
Lake Tahoe is twenty-one miles long, twelve wide, with the state line separating California and Nevada running through the middle. If the boat worked its way very far up the east shore, Marquez knew it would be harder to track where the road climbed away from the shoreline. They could call for help and get a patrol boat out, but he was reluctant to call unless they had more to go on, and so far, the Colbalt pilot was just a guy who’d motored into Emerald Bay and was dogging through the waves to wherever he was headed back to. Then Alvarez called and said they’d gotten through to the boat owner, Schultz, a doctor in Atherton. Marquez shifted the coffee cup and listened.
“They have a condo they rent in Richardson Bay. It’s leased right now to a man named Ben Karin. He’s got permission to use the boat because he’s thinking of buying it. Schultz bought a new one.”
“This Karin leases their condo in Richardson Bay and docks the boat there?”
“That’s right, and there’s no boathouse. They pull it out in the winter and park it in a garage at the condo. It’s one of those condo developments set up for boat owners. You know, with the big garage and heated just enough to keep things from freezing. Karin is a nature photographer doing a calendar on Lake Tahoe.”
“So he’s probably legit.”
“Could easily be,” Alvarez acknowledged. “But he’s the one who caught our eye this morning. If he was there to get a good photo of the first snow on the mountains, seems like where he was didn’t have that angle. ” Richardson Bay wasn’t far south of there and with the lake as rough as it was, Karin wasn’t out for a pleasure ride. But then, maybe he was testing the boat to see how it handled rougher water. Marquez turned to Shauf, asking Alvarez to hang on because Shauf had Roberts on the line.
“She’s got him in sight still and says he’s still getting pounded,” Shauf said.
“He’s going somewhere,” Marquez said, and Alvarez told him now that the Schultzes had called the realtor who handles the lease. She was going to call back in a few minutes.
Half an hour later they met the realtor, a middle-aged woman in a baby blue parka and bright red lipstick, at the condo complex in Richardson Bay.
“I have another appointment soon,” she said. “What’s this all about anyway?”
“We don’t know yet,” Marquez said. “How well do you know the tenant?”
She pointed out the condo, a corner unit up a flight of stairs, and when they asked about boat storage, she pointed at the high garage doors. She’d done the original lease but hadn’t seen Ben Karin in four months. She checked her watch again.
“Shall we go up and knock?” she asked, after no one answered the phone. “I have the owner’s permission to go in.”
“Hold for just a second,” Marquez said. “We want to show you some photos.”
Alvarez slowly flipped through six photos, including Durham’s face, and she fingered Chief Bell, said he looks most like him only with very black hair.
Marquez touched Bell’s photo and said, “We’d like to lock him up, but he’s not the guy we’re looking for today.”
“I admit I’ve only seen him from a distance. Oh, well, this man’s is too old anyway. Mr. Karin has a different build. He’s bigger in the shoulders. He wrote on his application he was thirty years old, but we did everything by mail and he prepaid for a year.” She added, “There’s maid service that comes in once a week.”
Shauf took a call from Roberts as Marquez went upstairs with the realtor. She knocked twice, unlocked the door, and called for Karin. Marquez followed her in and didn’t see any personal belongings.
While the realtor was talking he started looking around and in the bathroom found a wastebasket and in it wadded bloody bandages. He unfolded those, saw the quantity of blood, then flipped his phone open and called Roberts, told her to stick with him no matter what and they’d call for all the help they could get.
Marquez put the call out to all the locals and reached Kendall, who was close by on his way back to South Lake. Kendall drove up as they were trying to figure out how to get the garage door open.
The realtor thought she had a key for the side door, but complained about it not being keyed the same as the main door, about people subletting their garage spaces when they weren’t supposed to. She went to her car to get an extra set of keys.
Durham had staged out of here, Marquez thought. From here it was easy to drive over Echo Summit and down to the Placerville area. He had run the buys they’d done at the lake from here.
“Okay, I have it,” the realtor said. “But now I’m late for my appointment.”
When the garage door rose they were looking at Sophie’s Ford pickup. No one said anything until Kendall muttered, “I’ll be damned.” Marquez walked in first and saw the truck was locked. Then a woman came out of a nearby condo and told Alvarez that the pickup had arrived a couple of hours ago with a dark-haired young woman driving, and that she’d left in another truck, a green one with a camper shell. She didn’t know the make, but it was definitely a “snow car,” a four-wheel drive.
“When did you see her last?” Marquez asked Kendall.
“Late yesterday afternoon. We had her with us to try to talk to Nyland.”
Marquez looked inside the truck and then felt the hood. It was still warm. Judging from the cold in the garage it hadn’t been a couple of hours, more like an hour, he thought. Then he put it together.
“She’s Durham’s ride. He’s taking the boat somewhere, she’s going to pick him up. He was supposed to get Nyland at Emerald Bay, and she would have picked up both of them.”
“All right, I’m going to tell you all some things you need to know. Yesterday, Sophie gave me everything else we need to charge Nyland. We had someone from the DA’s office there to assure her we’d work out a deal with her. What she explained is that she’s been scared to come forward, but Nyland bragged to her he’d killed Petroni and sewn him into a bear skin. He told her all about it and that’s when she called him stupid and he beat her.
Nyland said he’d stabbed Petroni once for every time the warden had fucked with him. Sophie was shaking and crying and talking about the things he’d done to her, and now her truck is here.” Kendall turned to Marquez, a look of open surprise on his face. “I don’t get it. On top of that, we had surveillance on her. She must have slipped away.”
“Did Nyland kill Petroni?”
“Are you going to tell me you believe Nyland’s story?”
“I’m asking you how reliable Sophie is. You wanted a confession from her that she knew how Vandemere got killed and you got it. You cut your deal with her and got your star witness, but now she’s screwing everything up by fingering Nyland for Stella and Petroni as well. She’s got answers for everything.”
“How do you know about Stella Petroni?”
“I’m making a guess.”
“Well, you’re right. We recovered bloody clothes and boots that belonged to Petroni. They were there with the rifle in the old sales office. Nyland hadn’t decided what to do with them yet.”
“Nyland or somebody else.”
Kendall nodded and Marquez saw he understood. “Sophie told us she took them from the place she and Petroni were housesitting.
She gave the clothes to Nyland. It was all part of a plan to frame Petroni.”
“A plan like that is over Nyland’s head, but I don’t have to tell you that.”
“She says Nyland wore those clothes to kill Stella. He told her about it later. He thought she’d enjoy hearing how he stomped her face because Stella had come into the Creekview earlier this summer and insulted Sophie, called her a whore.”