Kirk Russell: Night Game

“Keep searching. We’ll ask the patrol boat to go up the coast and get Nevada to redirect the patrol.”

But no agency likes a wild goose chase, in particular one based on loose information to begin with, and Marquez took over trying to communicate that they still needed help and that every minute mattered. He got the patrol boat to start north hugging the coast as best they could, though it meant skirting large shallow areas and working with binoculars, searching for a remote place he might have put in. Talk of the boat’s capsizing started. They looked for a hull and reported waves of four feet, and on land the search widened for the green Chevy pickup with the camper shell. Reno police went alert, watched the road over Mount Rose.

About an hour later the boat was found beached between rocks along a remote stretch, partially covered with a camouflage tarp the wind was removing. In Shauf’s van they drove toward it, and Marquez closed his eyes momentarily. He listened as the patrol reported their problem.

“We can’t put in here, and we don’t want to anchor too close to shore. Too many rocks.”

GPS coordinates got relayed, and Shauf found a place on the road shoulder to park the van along the road above the lake. On the other side of the guardrail was forest dropping steeply toward the lake. The boat was down there. Roberts pulled up and then Cairo behind her.

“You’re done hiking, Lieutenant,” Cairo said. “We’ll go down and check it out.”

“He may be hiding in the woods,” Marquez said. “Could be he panicked when he saw the plane and beached short of where he was supposed to meet her.”

It was a different sort of predicament. Three of the team went down, Marquez leading, and they didn’t find anything in the boat. The hull had been damaged when the boat beached, and it wasn’t going to be simple to extricate. They hiked back up and found what might be his tracks as he climbed toward the highway and his ride. Roberts started trying to line up a dog team. Nothing had been removed from the condo in Richardson Bay yet, but a piece of the bloody bandages could be taken from there to scent the dogs. One of the team would have to make a run over there, the realtor contacted and found, this stretch of highway secured, and yet, Marquez doubted they’d find anything.

Still, with the differing police agencies on the lookout for the pickup, there was little else to do. Marquez left Roberts in charge of the area search, and with Shauf and Cairo he conducted a sweep of the lake towns on the off chance they’d spot the pickup and Sophie. He talked to Kendall, who’d followed things as far as Glenbrook and since returned to his sheriff’s office.

“Where are you taking it now?” Kendall asked.

“We’ll start searching for this other bear farm.”

“Are you going out there today?”

“We’re on our way there now.”

“It’ll be dark in a couple of hours and more than likely, Nyland lied to you. This is what murder suspects do. They concoct fanciful stories that explain it all away.”

“We saw other tracks in the barn. You took castings, what have you done with those?”

“Nothing yet.”

“A truck big enough to move the bear cages was probably something like a Ryder rental.”

“All right, we’ll check the rentals. We’ll run the list of names by them.”

“What do you think about the idea Petroni’s car was brought back to Johengen’s in the same rented truck as a way to keep it from being spotted on the road?”

“Petroni in the backseat already dead?”

“Yeah.”

Kendall grunted, didn’t really respond.

“Either way, there were other bears,” Marquez said. “One got shot and was probably sick, the others got moved. I’m going to take another run out to Johengen’s tomorrow and look for what we missed.”

“You were going to come in this afternoon and sit down with me.”

“It’ll have to wait.”

Later, Marquez talked to Katherine from his truck cab, sitting outside a restaurant where Shauf and Alvarez waited inside. The initial search in Minden had turned up no obvious buildings, and they’d driven back to Placerville after dark. Roberts had reported that the dogs keyed on the scent of a piece of bloody bandage. Almost certainly, whoever’s blood that was had been in the boat and hiked up to the road. The trail had ended there, and the dog handler eventually got nervous about his bloodhounds searching along the edge of the highway. They’d held traffic for a while, then concluded the man driving the boat had gotten picked up along the road shoulder.

“And now you think it’s a different man?” Katherine asked.

“The informant that started us on this case.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, and we’ve got the same problem with our house. You and Maria are going to need to stay in the city.”

“Then we’re going to rent a hotel room and start using the construction money.”

There was a mixed message in that, one he’d have to think about. When he hung up a wave of depression mixed with exhaustion swept over him. Ungar was Nyland’s Bearman, but where was he? San Francisco police had gone to his apartment an hour ago and he wasn’t there, and not only that, they said there weren’t any computers anywhere inside, so he had to be moving one step ahead of them again. Marquez went in and ate with Shauf and Alvarez, registered Shauf’s sober face and Alvarez’s questioning look as he told them he wanted to make another search of the barn out at Johengen’s before leaving for Nevada tomorrow morning.

Alvarez sopped chicken gravy with a piece of bread and kept his eyes on his plate. His silence told Marquez he thought they were just spinning their wheels going back to Johengen’s. Marquez knew Shauf and Alvarez thought the right thing to do tomorrow was devote everything to searching for the Minden ranch.

Alvarez’s lean face betrayed another question, this one about Marquez’s judgment.

“Tell you what, I’ll go out there early alone and then we’ll go over to Nevada midmorning,” Marquez said.

Well before first light Marquez drove out Howell Road. A light rain was falling and the road ahead dark. At Johengen’s the gate was open, but likely it was just someone with the county who’d forgotten to lock it. The dirt driveway was slick, and his headlights caught fluttering pieces of crime tape as he came around the bend. He saw where the backhoe operator had refilled the trench, soil humped and looking like a long grave. With the key Kendall had given him he unlocked the barn.

Inside, it felt another ten degrees colder, and the cold reached him. His body was still bone-tired from the hike and stiff from wrestling with Nyland. He located the light switch at the far end and lit the string of bulbs hanging from the rafters. A bat squeaked overhead and then the only sounds were the rain and wind, the big door creaking as the stronger gusts moved it. It was dank, the bear smell still strong. The barn had been cleared except for cages yet to be hauled away by Fish and Game. The stuffed and mounted bears, the contents of the freezer, were gone, the freezer no longer running. The drying station was gone, even the racks of antlers that had been on the walls. What was left were old rusted garden tools and the carcass of an ancient pickup sitting on jacks in a dark corner.

He stood a few minutes looking at the cages, then turned his attention to the tire tracks. He studied the whitened areas where plaster castings had been taken. Kendall was checking out the rental agencies and trying to come up with a tire match, and Marquez had his team working on that now as well. He followed tire tracks toward the cages, saw where the DFG truck that picked up the bear had parked. Then, beyond that point he spotted a faint divot in the earth that he guessed was where one skid had rested as the Honda was rolled off and out into the yard after Petroni’s body had been dealt with. That’s when you loaded the cages. That’s when you moved the bears to Nevada or wherever you moved them, and that’s how Petroni’s car got here with him in it. It would have taken at least two people and a way to winch the cages up into the truck. The truck was probably rented near where the other farm was. As it fell together he contemplated calling Kendall, then decided to think it over more first. He called Shauf and suggested she and Alvarez get some breakfast and he’d check one more thing in the barn, then they’d drive tandem over the mountains and into Nevada.