“He’s out of the car,” Kendall said, “getting something out of his trunk.”
“He’ll probably cross the creek and come through the orchard.”
“Half an hour ago I was freezing my ass off. Now, I feel like I’m on fire. Let’s just hope he’s not headed somewhere else in the woods because he’s got something buried. Hold on a second.”
When Kendall came back on, he said, “It might have been a shovel he got out of the trunk.”
Marquez, Shauf, and Alvarez crossed the creek and came up alongside the old farmhouse, seeing it all, the orchard in moonlight, trees skeletal and bone-colored. Marquez saw Ungar first, pointed him out, a dark figure moving, almost floating through the grass. The Bearman. He crossed the orchard to the barn, then disappeared around the back, and they heard boards being pried off, nails wrenching. Light shone through gaps in the siding. A ladder banged against the barn wall, scraped as it slid up to the rafters, and then light climbed the wall, shone through cracks. Along the orchard perimeter the SOU and county officers moved into position.
Ungar descended the ladder, the flashlight marking his progress.
He dragged the ladder back, and the groundhog cameras Marquez and Kendall had buried recorded it all.
They heard boards pounded back into place. When his flashlight went out they waited for him to show at the corner of the barn, but after a minute he still hadn’t. Marquez heard Kendall’s worried “Shit, please no.” There was a chance he’d leave via a different route, climb into the rows of overgrown Christmas trees or come around the front face of the barn. He might even bury it up there and create new evidentiary problems.
Then they saw him leave the corner and start through the orchard, and they let him get out in the middle before lighting him up. He took two steps, froze, and abruptly threw the bundle holding the knife he’d retrieved. Marquez’s flashlight caught the knife that had killed Petroni spinning through the air. It landed near the base of a gnarled apple tree, and Ungar made one dodging move to his left, dropped to his knees, calling, “I surrender, I surrender.”
“Sonofabitch,” Kendall said, “sonofabitch, we’ve got him.”
51
The next morning Marquez drove to the mini-storage with Kendall. The manager got up from his couch and clicked off the TV when he saw Kendall’s badge. He walked them down and unlocked the unit Ungar rented. Inside, they found a strange scene with candles and a rug and cushions, where it looked like he sat.
There were cardboard boxes they started going through, Marquez taking two, Kendall two, both slipping on gloves first. Kendall lifted a black leather wallet, showed him Jed Vandemere’s face on a California driver’s license, and after Marquez had studied it, dropped it into an evidence bag.
“Must have had Nyland bring him the wallet,” Kendall said.
“Nyland called him Bearman. I don’t think he was lying when he said he’d never met him. Same with the pair we did the buys from. They’d never seen him face-to-face. They’d pick the bear parts or bile products up somewhere remote, and then get an envelope from a bartender somewhere later.”
“What have we here?” Kendall said quietly, almost to himself.
He lifted an ornate wooden box, something made of teak and other hardwoods. For jewelry, Marquez thought, and watched him open it, heard him say, “Marquez,” knew from his tone it was important.
Resting on the velvet lining in the box was a California Fish and Game badge and even after all that had happened, seeing the badge affected Marquez. It turned him quiet and he worked through more of the boxes without saying anything. Crime techs arrived and Hawse. Marquez read through a journal of Ungar’s, his ramblings, what he called essays.
“He’s got tapes here,” Kendall said. “I’ll bet he recorded his conversations with you.” He added, “I don’t know if I told you last night, but we found a voice changer in his car.”
Marquez read Ungar’s tiny script, each letter made perfectly. Pages of writing, entries of things he’d done to people who’d crossed him. There were cases, some Marquez was familiar with, one, a poacher they’d busted last year, that Ungar noted, “Lost good supplier. Need to do something about them.” He read Petroni’s name, notes about Petroni’s patrol habits, where he liked to eat, buy coffee, drink, then the line “S successful.” A short sentence fragment after it, “Same old ursus,” and further into the notes and ramblings saw it again. This time it jumped out at him as a simple code for SOU. Ursus was Latin for bear, and Ungar used “Same old ursus” after Petroni’s name to indicate he thought Petroni was SOU. He read the name Mark Ellison, and it clicked that he’d read that in Petroni’s log, said so to Kendall now.
“There’s more than enough here,” Kendall answered. “It’s over. We can build the case.”
“I remember this name from Petroni’s log.”
“You’re thinking Petroni had some dealings with this Ellison?”
Marquez held up the journal he was reading so that Kendall could see it. “There’s a lot written on Petroni in here. He followed Petroni for months, wrote notes on his habits, where he ate, what he ate, meeting Sophie, Petroni and Sophie going up to the hunting shack. He must have shadowed him. Reads like he was sure Petroni was with the SOU.”
“We think Petroni told Sophie he was.”
“That’s what she told you?”
“Yeah, and stuck by it. Maybe he missed being undercover.”
Marquez read on about Mark Ellison, things written about selling gall to Mark Ellison. He looked through the rest of the box and another that had only clothes, and then Kendall suggested they back away and let the crime techs do their work. When Marquez stepped out of the unit he turned to Kendall.
“I’m going down to talk to the manager again,” he said.
In the manager’s office Marquez asked to see the list of everyone who rented here. The manager was a heavyset bearded fellow, from his tattoo, former Navy man. He pulled on his beard for a moment, then turned the computer screen so Marquez could scan the names.
“Where is unit 76 on the map?” Marquez asked.
“It’s around back from the one you’re looking in.”
“Opposite side?”
“Yep.”
Marquez read the name Mark Ellison again, made sure he’d read it correctly the first time. Now he looked at the map.
“Do you ever see this Mark Ellison?”
“I can’t say I remember him.”
“We need to open up that unit.”
With Kendall and the manager, Marquez walked down the row of storage units, all with metal roll-up doors, cinder block faces, but simple sheetrocked partition walls inside separating the units. He didn’t have to tell Kendall what he was thinking. Kendall was already there.
“It would account for him taking the bribes,” Marquez said.
“And explain some of the things he said to me.”
The manager took hold of the chain and rolled the door of the unit up, the door rattling loudly. They turned the light on and as they saw the setup, Marquez knew Mark Ellison was Bill Petroni. He’d rented the unit exactly opposite Ungar’s, and the manager explained how that was possible. This whole row hadn’t rented out until early summer, some units were still empty. The complex was new and still gaining traction. He kept talking but neither Marquez nor Kendall was listening, Marquez studying a couple of fiber-optic lines that fed into the wall separating Ungar’s unit from this one. He looked at the recording equipment and then at what else was in the unit.
Off to one side was a stack of belongings, not a lot of them, but what Petroni owned, what he’d had to store after the divorce.
There was also a small metal storage box of a type Marquez had seen on construction sites. It was new, bought at a Home Depot, the tag still on it.
“That’s going to have the bribe money it and everything else that relates to the case,” Marquez said. “Petroni was onto Ungar and building a case on his own.”