Kirk Russell - Night Game

Nyland’s trailer had a window like an opaque eye facing the meadow, the interior hidden from Marquez’s binoculars by curtains, iron stairs running down from the trailer door to the dry meadow grass. Behind that one and up the slope were two other trailers, these resting on cinder blocks. The door of the second was padlocked, and the last trailer, the one bordering the trees, missing its door. He watched a dog hop out and guessed the dogs slept there.

He brought the glasses back to the Ford pickup, jotted down its license plate. Nyland had a pretty good setup out here, a lot of wooded country and no one around to question anything he did. He could skin a bear on one of the slab foundations, and no one would be the wiser.

Before Marquez had reached the highway he’d learned the blue Ford F-150 was registered to Sophie Broussard. He drove back into Placerville and passing the Waffle House saw Petroni’s Fish and Game truck. He doubled back and pulled in alongside it.

Petroni was in a booth wearing a neatly creased uniform though it was Sunday morning.

“Saw your truck when I drove past and couldn’t pass up the chance to talk to you.”

Petroni’s look was morose, distant, but he gestured. “Have a seat.”

After Marquez had slid into the booth and ordered scrambled eggs and coffee, Petroni volunteered, “I’ve got a special meeting at the sheriff’s office this morning. I’m meeting Kendall and his partner in fifteen minutes.”

“What do you have left to say to him?”

“Nothing he doesn’t already know.”

“Then maybe today will end it. I just came from Nyland’s place. There’s a Ford pickup parked out there that’s registered to Sophie.”

“He owes her money, and he’s supposed to fix her truck to pay her off. She says that’s the only way she’ll get paid. She’s been driving the car of the people she’s house-sitting for, but supposedly he’s got it fixed now. What does Sophie have to do with you?”

“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.

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.”