by Kirk Russell
“Where is he now?”
“He’s gone.” She touched her eye and winced.
“Let me have a look in the light.” He guided her over and looked at the bad eye. “You need a doctor.”
“I can’t afford a doctor.”
“A blow like this can detach the retina. It ought to be looked at. I can drive you to the clinic.”
He remembered Eli Smith sobbing, saying it was Sophie’s idea to poison his dogs. She was much brighter than Smith and probably knew the insurance claim would never be collected. She pointed up at the overhead light.
“Can we turn that off?”
Marquez turned on the nightstand light and turned off the overhead. Drinking tequila might have blunted the pain but she had to hurt. He went to the coffeemaker and offered again to take her to a clinic. He asked again where she thought Eric was tonight and didn’t get an answer.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“I’d rather have something to drink.”
“I don’t have anything.”
“Don’t you want me to talk?” Said that almost coyly, if that was possible after being beaten as she had.
“Were you really thinking of killing him?”
“He’s lucky he didn’t show up there. What do you want to know about? Ask me anything you want.”
“Are you here to get even?”
“Seems like you’d want me to talk.”
“Okay, tell me about Durham.”
“He likes to sleep with me and I pretend to like him. He loaned Eric money so Eric could be a partner, and all Eric has done since is work to pay it back.”
“So why sleep with him.”
“He’s taking off part of the debt. That shocks you, doesn’t it? Well, I don’t really care.”
“You’re doing it for the guy who just beat you?”
The smell of coffee battled the other odors now. He washed a cup, asked when Durham had entered their lives.
“Eric met him at a gun swap in Reno. You know what he told Eric after he got arrested this time?”
“What?”
“He said the partnership is over if the charges stick and he’ll want the money he put up for Eric’s truck and some of his guns.”
“Even though he was in on it.”
“See you know everything already.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“That’s right, I forgot, that’s what you said when you came into the Creekview that night, that you don’t know anything.”
“Did I put it like that?”
“No, you pretended.”
“So my cover has been blown for a while.”
“Well, yeah.”
Marquez poured coffee, showing little reaction. He offered her a cup.
“Durham also told Eric that if he did everything right he would take care of him afterwards. They’d start all over again somewhere else.”
“What’s ‘doing everything right’ mean?”
“Leaving him out of it.”
“Will Eric do that?”
“I don’t really care what happens.”
He caught her looking at him, studying him as he poured more coffee, an almost feral look of cunning, assessing him, and he realized despite everything she might be here to try to get Nyland’s truck freed. The idea blew him away, but it was possible Nyland had sent her. The only thing he’d heard so far that he didn’t doubt was that his cover was blown.
“Does Durham ever hunt?” he asked.
“Haven’t you seen all his big boy photos?”
“Does he hunt now?”
“He’s not even a good shot.”
“How good a shot is Eric?”
“Very good.”
“Durham’s lawyer contacted us. He’s working another angle, wants to help us prosecute Eric. It’ll get Eric away from you for a long time, but do you think we can trust Durham?”
“Did a lawyer really call?”
“This afternoon.”
“I knew it.”
He let her think about that and asked, “Where would I find Durham tonight?”
“I don’t know where he stays when he’s here. Some old rundown place is what Eric told me.”
“You’ve never been there?”
“When I meet him it’s at a motel or his office.” She touched her eye. “Eric is talking about killing one of you, taking you out in the woods somewhere and gutting you, field dressing you and leaving you hanging from a tree. He talks about it with Troy. I really am warning you.”
“Has he ever killed anyone?”
“Now we’re getting really heavy and I need a drink. Do you think the night manager has a bottle? Can we go wake him up?”
“I don’t think we should.”
“We could go somewhere.”
“Will it help you remember?”
“Maybe. One time Durham put his finger on my eye, right on my eye, not the eyelid, and he said he’d killed a man once and felt the life go out of him through his eyes. He said he could feel the energy and it made him kind of high. He told Eric it made him stronger, and now Eric does these bullshit ritual things like burning bones. He has a fire pit and he gets old bones. It’s all supposed to make him stronger so he’s a better hunter. He drinks blood. He drank some of my blood once.” The one eye stared. “If he killed you, he’d probably drink some of your blood.”
Marquez smiled, couldn’t help himself. He had a lot of images of Nyland but none as a vampire. Neither did he believe her, though there was something chilling in her account of Durham’s touching her eye. That had the ring of truth. He decided to give the Durham questions a rest for a moment and come back to them.
“No one has seen Bill Petroni,” he said.
“I’m sorry if I hurt Billy, but he was the one who wanted to keep it going. I’m not really sorry about his wife though. She came into the Creekview looking for me, and it was pretty raw. She wanted to blame me for her marriage so I told her she could have him back.”
“Where do you think Petroni is?”
“Everybody is asking me and people are blaming me, but Billy was freaked out over the money and because of the detective. He probably just split.”
“Did he ever say anything that made you think he might hurt her?”
“He was real angry because she was screwing him out of his money. She was trying to take his house.”
Car lights swept into the motel lot, and he heard an engine outside the window. He motioned to her to stay out of view and pulled the curtain back after she went into the bathroom. He saw Kendall and Hawse get out of the car, and opened the door before they could knock.
“You’re working late tonight,” Marquez said to Kendall.
“You know how I like the early morning.”
They looked past him at Sophie, who’d opened the bathroom door and was wrapped in a towel. She walked across the carpet to them and touched Marquez on the shoulder as she opened the towel. She was naked and there were welts along her lower back and side that she turned to show him.
“This is what Eric did to me today.”
She kept her eyes on Marquez until Kendall cleared his throat.
“Okay, Sophie, cover up,” Kendall said, “and we’ll take you down and get you checked, and we’d love to press charges against your boyfriend.” When she went back into the bathroom, Kendall said, “I can’t believe this.”
38
“Let’s not bullshit around,” Kendall said, “you don’t get home much.” He stared at Marquez. “Was she here for sex?”
“No, after you drove up she went into the bathroom and stripped.”
“You’ve got to be straight with me on this.”
“That’s what happened. She told me she followed me from a bar.”
“Sure, back to your motel.”
“I didn’t invite her. She tailed me.”
“And you’re going to tell me she’s so good at surveillance you didn’t notice?”
“I knew someone was following.�
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Kendall shook his head, hid his disbelief by looking at his car, where Hawse was helping Sophie into the backseat.
“You let her follow you here?”
“Believe whatever you want.”
“About an hour ago she left a message with a 911 dispatcher that she knew the whereabouts of a gun used to kill somebody in the Crystal Basin. She gave her name and told the dispatcher I’d want to know and to wake me up.”
“Nyland beat her up pretty good. She’s angry.”
“The dispatcher tried to keep her on the line but she said she’d call back. She called back two hours and thirteen minutes later and gave this motel room, said she’d be here with you.” Kendall opened his arms wide. “And here she is.”
“She got here forty minutes ago, knocked on my door. I was in bed, went to the window, saw it was her, and let her in. She told me she wanted to talk.”
“Knew you were Fish and Game.”
“Yeah, my cover is blown.” Marquez looked at the back of Sophie’s head. She’d pulled the sweatshirt hood up around her again. “She needs a doctor. She took a bad shot to her eye.”
“We’ll get her eye looked at.”
“She wanted me to think she was worried about things Nyland might do to me or one of my team now that the word is out who we are.”
“Like what?”
“Like kill one of us. I questioned her about Durham and Petroni and didn’t get anything in particular that’s news, other than she says she hates Durham. She didn’t say anything about a rifle and we didn’t finish our conversation before you drove up, but her ostensible reason for knocking on my door was to warn me that Nyland is looking for a chance to get even with the undercover Fish and Game officers who wrecked his life.”
“You had a close call up there on Weber Mill. Maybe that was Nyland shooting at you. Maybe it’s time to pull your team out of here.” Kendall pointed at the back of the sedan. “What you’re looking at in the back of that car is a rat deserting the ship. She knows the whole damn story, and she’s in the process of switching sides, testing to see how far she can make that work.”
“Could be.”
Marquez walked back into the motel room. He got his toothbrush and razor out of the bathroom and threw them in his gear bag. He packed the rest of his clothes with Kendall standing at the door. As he zipped the bag, Kendall said, “You’ve been in two bar scrapes since I’ve known you.” When Marquez didn’t respond, Kendall asked, “Why did Sophie drive from the Crystal Basin Wilderness to a little bumfuck bar and then park outside and not go in?”
“After a beating maybe she didn’t feel sociable, or maybe as she says, she was going to shoot Nyland.”
Or she took some inner comfort from being near the lights and the people inside. He remembered fifteen cars and trucks, and maybe she’d pulled in among them and he hadn’t noticed her truck because of the state he’d been in.
“Okay, so you’re saying she followed you when you walked out. Recognized you and followed you, didn’t know you were in there. That is, it was a coincidence.”
“I’m not saying it was coincidence.”
“We’ll ask her.”
Marquez picked up his bag. Kendall was still in the doorway.
“You know someone has followed you back here and you respond by going to bed. I haven’t known you long, but that doesn’t jibe. Where are you going now? Are you done here? Going home?”
“Soon.”
Marquez woke the night clerk to check out and then ate breakfast at the Waffle House. Near dawn he called each of the team and told them to take the day off and clean their gear, get some rest. When he told that to Shauf she said she was already on her way to him. Her sister had gone down to the medical center at Stanford with her husband, and the kids were with the grandparents.
“I’ll meet you in Placerville,” she said.
While he waited a call came in from Kendall. “I felt like I owed you the call. Sophie was in a confessional mood. We took a drive with her out to the trailer park, and she led us to a rifle doublewrapped in plastic and hidden beneath the floorboards in the former sales office. We’ll start running tests on it today. Nyland never exactly told her why but he showed it to her one night, wanted her to know it was there, and she got the impression he’d shot Vandemere with it. This was recent, after they got back together, kind of bragging to her. It’s starting to unravel, Marquez. He told her why. She just isn’t telling us yet, but it’s eating at her. She may even have had a role in the killing.”
“Who is the gun registered to?”
“Marion Stuart.”
“Durham.”
“He buys everything huntingwise that Nyland owns.”
“Did Durham ever report a missing gun?”
“No, and if we asked him he’d say he’d didn’t know it was missing, that it was a Sierra Guides gun in Nyland’s possession.
You can hear it, right?”
“Sure.”
“Is Durham your man?”
“He’s at least a piece of the puzzle.”
“But you’re done here, aren’t you? You said your cover is blown, even Sophie knows who you are.”
“It is blown.”
“Things are about at the point where we take over. Think about it and I’ll talk to you later.”
39
Marquez pulled up alongside Shauf’s van and she got out wearing sunglasses though the morning was cold and cloudy. Her face was ashen and she said little as they drove out Howell Road. When they passed the barn with the Nazi flag draped over the side she pointed at a skinhead standing near a motorcycle and he flipped her off. Shauf gave him the finger back. At Johengen’s, Marquez parked near the gate.
“When Sophie was in my room last night she said Durham stays in some rundown place she’s visited but couldn’t find her way back to.”
“She grew up here. She knows this road. If Durham sleeps out here, she’s probably slept in his bed.”
“Might have been her way of trying to communicate.”
“Manipulate is the word you’re looking for.”
Marquez got out a flashlight, and they climbed over the gate and walked down around the driveway bend. He saw the peak of the house roof with its curled and decaying shingles and then Petroni’s orange Honda parked in the flat area between the barn and the house. For a moment neither of them said anything or moved. He turned toward her.
“Why don’t you hang here and I’ll walk down and take a look first,” Marquez said.
“Is Petroni staying here?”
“As in hiding out?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems like he’d find someplace farther away.”
Marquez watched the barn and house and everything as he walked toward the Honda. When he leaned over and looked through the windows he saw a large bloodstain covering most of the middle of the backseat. Rivulets had run down to the floor carpet.
He waved Shauf forward, keeping his eye on the windows of the house as he dialed Kendall.
“I’m at Johengen’s tree farm. Petroni’s car is here. There’s a large bloodstain in back. You’d better come on out.”
“Don’t touch-” Marquez hung up and knocked on the farmhouse door. He stepped to the windows and tried to look past lacy yellowed curtains, waited, stepped away from the house, and went back to the Honda where Shauf stood now.
“Someone died in here,” he said.
Two slow-moving flies reacted to his shadow and rose off the backseat. The plaid material of the old seats was torn in several places, and he saw an old mug lying in the passenger well, saw some paper scraps. He felt the heart go out of him and stood a long minute staring before backing away, making himself walk to the barn. It was chained shut, would take bolt cutters, and standing near the barn doors he caught a waft of something dead. He looked toward the orchard. The breeze blew from that direction, and with Shauf he walked out among the old apple trees. Another smell, the vinegary sharpness of decaying fruit, and then as
the breeze strengthened again the decomp smell was stronger. His pulse bumped up, and he studied recent tire tracks in the orchard weeds. An odd pattern of crushed grass, something dragged out here.
He moved ahead of Shauf toward the thickening smell, the edge of the orchard where the embankment fell away, then spotted a carcass he feared was going to be Petroni, but it was a bear, recently skinned. A cloud of flies rose as he moved closer. He stooped and retrieved a piece of plastic tubing lying in the grass near the carcass. Studying the tubing, he put it together.
“We’ve got to get in the barn,” he said. “We’ve got enough for a warrant. Why don’t you call Roberts and ask her to get going on it while I talk to Bell?” He held up the plastic tube. “Tell her we found evidence of bear farming.”
“Why do we need a warrant with the county on the way here? Kendall will open the barn.”
“We may need it later.”
He looked at the barn, knowing Petroni could be in there. Petroni obviously knew this place, had put it in his log. Now Marquez called Bell, but the chief didn’t process it the same way.
Bell listened quietly, then asked, “Do you think he moved her in the car?”
“Stella?”
“Yes.”
Marquez realized how far Bell had gone toward accepting the idea Petroni had killed his wife.
“She never left her kitchen,” Marquez said. “They’re bringing bolt cutters to get into the barn here, and I’m ready to go into the house but we’ve been asked to wait.”
“Give me directions on how to get to you.”
Marquez and Shauf walked back across the flat open parking area to the orchard. A line of police vehicles rolled down the driveway and crunched through a glaze of ice over thin puddles.
“Protecting his crime scene,” Shauf said quietly.
Crime tape got strung and the front door of the house opened. Officers went in with guns drawn. Marquez wanted into the barn but all they could do was wait. Things moved carefully, yet steadily, and he picked up a new respect for Kendall, watching him direct traffic. Kendall quizzed them, went back to the Honda, and now came back to Marquez.