Authors: Kirk Russell
Kendall was sitting
at a redwood picnic table facing the road, cleaning his fingers with paper napkins. No one else was at the food stand so Marquez brought the camcorder to the table and left Kendall with it. He ordered a black coffee and a hot dog, glancing at Kendall while squirting mustard and ketchup on the dog, then took a seat across the table. Kendall lay the camcorder down and pointed at the hot dog.
“You ever hear of a place called Charlie’s Serious Chili Dogs?”
“In Rohnert Park?”
“Yeah, you know it?”
“Used to stop there all the time.”
“So where’s this hunting shack?”
“There’s a dirt track running up to it near that abandoned diner along the highway.” Marquez, knowing what he might set in motion here, wondered if his imagination was running away with him. “What do the watch and ring mean to you?”
Kendall didn’t really answer until they were in the truck on their way.
“Vandemere owned a watch his parents believed was a Seiko.
We searched the area where his body was found but didn’t find it.
Of course, his parents didn’t know the model. They’d bought it on sale for cash at a shopping mall.”
“You don’t like Vandemere Sr. much, do you?”
“I don’t like what he told the newspaper.”
Marquez knew from talking to Petroni that in an interview in the
Mountain Democrat
Vandemere Sr. had been critical of the way the county had handled the search for his son. Petroni backed up the criticisms, said he knew for a fact that Kendall got tired of constant phone calls from Vandemere Sr. and would put him on hold until Vandemere hung up.
“How does bear baiting work?” Kendall asked, as they left the highway.
“You feed bears in a particular spot until they get accustomed to showing up there. Build a blind to shoot from and then wait for your bear.”
“Lure them, then kill them when you’re ready.”
“Basically.”
“Is there more to it?”
“No, that’s it.” Marquez slowed and eased off the shoulder. He pointed at the broken ribbon of asphalt ahead.
“I hate this off-road crap,” Kendall said.
“You’ll want to put your seatbelt on or we can walk, but it’s about three miles and steep.”
Kendall swore as they slid down the other side and bounced onto the dirt track. The ride up the ridge felt even rougher, and Marquez was unable to answer his ringing phone as he negotiated tight gaps in the trees. On top he saw it was Shauf that had called, decided he’d wait until it was easier to talk privately, and led Kendall out the ridge, then down through the trees.
“A Unabomber starter cabin,” Kendall said, as they came into the clearing. He turned and added, “You know Nyland was on this ridge, but you can’t place him at this shack.”
“Yeah, we saw lights on the ridge and we knew he’d gone up here. There’s some work still to match him to the shack and the bait pile, but we buried groundhog cameras. You and I are being recorded right now.”
“Is that right? Well, I’ve got to tell you that later today I might have to bring crime scene techs up here.”
“Take it slow, we’ve got a lot riding on this and our breaks don’t come easy.”
Marquez took the hinges off the door again, and Kendall pulled on latex gloves, treating the interior like it was a crime scene. As Kendall pulled the canvas packet down, Marquez reminded him that he and Alvarez had been all over in there.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Marquez asked.
“This isn’t our first look at Nyland. But anything we do, we’ll do unobtrusively. Don’t worry, Marquez, I’ll be gentle.”
“You and I could be headed to a problem.”
“No, we’re not. Look, you’ve been up all night, you’re tired, and you’re making more of what I’m saying than you need to. But don’t forget this is a murder case first.”
“You’re telling me you’ve been looking at Nyland for Vandemere’s murder.”
“Yes.”
Marquez walked outside, unsure how much of this he believed.
If Nyland was a suspect, Kendall had been awful quiet about it. He stood outside thinking over the sequence of events, and when Kendall finished they put the door back on, did a search of the trees for any more evidence of drug manufacturing, then drove down.
“I want to look at something with you,” Marquez said, as they got around the gate. He parked and got out, waited for Kendall, then pointed out where their tires had dug into the dry soil. “When
he comes back he’ll see this because he’ll be watching for it. We’ve been up here twice today, and he’ll notice those tracks. You can bet he put a lock on that shack because he knew somebody could be coming up. If a jeep or two goes up around the gate, that isn’t going to bother him. Kids go four-wheeling. But if he starts seeing a lot of tire tracks, he’ll get squirrelly and won’t come back.”
“We didn’t need to get out of your truck for you to tell me that.”
“If I’m hearing you correctly, the watch and ring don’t mean much in the way of evidence yet. They might, but you’re not sure.
You’re just hoping at this point. A bait pile he’s going to feed regularly, so while you run DNA tests the only gamble is he’ll reach up there and find the watch and ring missing and then back away, but meanwhile those groundhogs will film him and we’ll both get what we need. It can work for us both that way, and he’s likely to return in the next few days. Why don’t you let the bears help you?”
Kendall smiled at the cheesiness of the idea that bears would help him. As they drove back to Placerville, Kendall reassured Marquez that his moves would be very calculated because he didn’t want to tip his hand either. Yet his excitement was palpable. He couldn’t wait to get out of the truck.
Marquez called Shauf after dropping Kendall at the food stand.
He felt mixed about having taken Kendall up there, and he bounced it off Shauf, who had a predictable take on it.
“There’s nothing we’ll ever do that’ll ever mean anything to him,” she said. “He’ll walk all over our operation if we let him.”
Then she asked if he’d talked to Chief Bell in the last hour.
“No.”
“A tip came in this morning that he’s all excited about. He wants you to call him right away. He’s been trying to reach you.”
“What’s the tip?”
A woman had called, talked to one of the dispatchers, and asked for Chief Bell. She’d told him she knew of an illegal bear hunt that would happen this week in the Placerville area and said the hunter would be someone well known.
“Bell is going to meet with her today,” Shauf said.
“I’ll call him when I get to the safehouse.”
“He says he’s been calling you.”
Marquez would be at the safehouse in ten minutes, and he wanted to think more about how to work with Kendall before he got there. Last night he’d felt a rush of hope, felt the case moving again as they’d trailed Nyland, but that effort would be wasted if Kendall wasn’t careful. Shauf was right about Kendall, and the idea that Kendall’s moving too fast could wipe out what they had set up with the groundhogs left Marquez feeling low. He took the exit toward the safehouse and drove down the street under a white cold sky.
When Marquez walked
into the safehouse Shauf was just hanging up the phone.
“That was Bell, says he hasn’t heard from you.”
“I left him a message as I pulled into the driveway.”
“Then I must have been talking to him when you called. He’s really wired up about this. He thinks this woman is for real.”
“When’s he going to meet her?”
“This afternoon. She works for a state senator.”
“In Sacramento?”
“Yeah.”
Marquez sat down on the couch, fatigue weighing on him. He unlaced his shoes as Shauf moved around too fast and close in front of him, talking, wearing a green fleece coat, a T-shirt, and jeans. He was tired enough to where he needed a little more space.
“The senator she works for is planning an illegal bear hunt,” Shauf said. “Somewhere near here. Supposedly, this senator has
always hunted big game. He spends his vacations doing guided hunts.”
Marquez lay back on the couch, and Shauf’s voice carried from the dining room table. The bear-hunting state senator would hold for a couple of hours. Besides, all tips sounded better than they were, three-quarters were just talk, let Bell go meet with her first. She could easily be a crackpot looking for CalTIP money.
The long night weighed in, and it seemed to Marquez that he’d lost some of the resilience he’d always been able to count on. He could remember going for a couple of days awake on a fast moving operation, but it didn’t come as easy now and maybe that increased his desperation to make a difference, or maybe desperation was just a romantic word to make it seem more than it was.
More like fear they weren’t making enough of an impact. They hadn’t gotten close to the bear farmer and were feeding him money. Shauf was still talking when he fell asleep.
He dreamed he was in Siskiyou County with his SOU team and they’d found a grizzly, an impossibility in California, where the last grizzly had been exterminated more than fifty years ago and lived only on the state flag. In the dream he swam in the Eel River alongside a giant silver-tipped male. His strokes kept pace with the bear, and the grizzly didn’t turn to attack or seem to have any problem that he was nearby. Water rippled in smooth waves from the bear’s shoulders, and he didn’t know where they were going, but ahead he saw a line of men filing down on the left side of the riverbank. He watched them raise their rifles and aim. Bullets peppered the water around him, and dark weaving strands of blood trailed from the bear. The grizzly roared and bit at the air as one slug, then a second struck its head. It stopped swimming, its body rolled with the current as the riflemen packed their weapons and ascended a trail in single file, their job finished.
“You were making all kinds of noises in your sleep,” Shauf said.
Marquez checked his watch, saw he’d slept four hours. He glanced out the window at the late afternoon and got heavily to his feet. He showered, changed clothes, drank coffee, ate a peanut butter sandwich while leaning against the cabinets in the kitchen.
“Turning into a strange day,” Shauf said. “The Stockton police called while you were asleep. Dispatch put them through because whoever called from there said you’d called them.”
That got Marquez’s attention, awakened him more than the coffee. He turned and looked at her more closely.
“Yeah, I called a list of departments in the valley after I met with Kim Ungar. He told me his cousin had moved to the Central Valley. What did Stockton have to say?”
“They’ve arrested someone in a drug sting and found bear paws and what sounds like gallbladders in the trunk of a car.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
She handed him a scrap of paper with the Stockton vice cop’s phone number. After he’d finished the sandwich he punched in the phone number and walked outside into the cooler air to talk. He connected to a smooth-talking vice cop named Steven Delano, who told him they were holding a man with the last name of Kim.
Not every immigrant Korean family took on the Western habit of putting the first name ahead of the surname. Kim Ungar and this man with the last name of Kim could be from the same family, or it might even be Kim Ungar and he used both names. He listened quietly to Delano, mulling over the cousin conversations he’d had with Ungar. Delano said the Kim they were holding would probably make bail tomorrow.
“He’s got the money for a top lawyer, so what’s that tell you?”
Delano asked but didn’t wait for a reply. “If you want to drive down, we’ll pull him out for another interview this afternoon.”
“Will his lawyer let him talk?”
“I think I can get Kim to sit down with us.”
“You’ve got other stuff on him.”
“We’re working on it.”
“I can be there in an hour and a half. What’s this Kim look like?”
“Black-haired. Tall. Thin. Runs with gangbangers up here.”
“You’ve known him a while?”
“Oh, yeah, definitely, we’ve been trying to nail him. He comes complete with a street name. Tell you more about him when you get here. I’ve got another call holding I’ve got to get back to.”
Marquez thought a second. It wasn’t Kim Ungar out of San Francisco, who had a different build, stocky, a little above average height. Nor would Ungar run with gangbangers.
“I’m out the door when I hang up.”
“Good enough.”
He called Katherine on the drive to Stockton. She was behind the counter at her Union Street coffee bar, Presto, and mildly worried about a couple of calls Maria had answered at the house last night. She wanted his take.
“The caller ID read ‘Unavailable,’” she said. “So it was probably some smart-ass working for a telemarketer. Or it could be one of Maria’s friends messing with her.”
“What got said?”
“A man asked her name and stayed on the line trying to get her to talk about herself. He asked her what she looked like, if she’d started dating yet. Told her she sounded cute. She’s pretty sure the same guy called back about an hour later. She’ll tell you about it.”
“Where is she?”
“She went over to a friend’s house after school.” Marquez heard the light clattering of a cappuccino saucer and then the espresso machine running. “It’s probably nothing, John.”
“Which friend?”
“Bruce.”
“I’ll call her there.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“This is the boy she has the crush on. She’s over there with her friend Laura and if you call, you’ll embarrass her.” She added dryly, “This is her way of getting even with me for not letting her have a cell phone.”
Marquez knew Maria had wanted a cell phone and Katherine had told her she would have to bring her chemistry grade up first and then find a way to pay for the phone. After that Maria started being difficult about taking calls from her mother when she was at a friend’s house. Either Katherine would have to set her straight or he would, and he knew he’d been waiting for Katherine to do it.
“I think her imagination ran away with her, John. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal, so I’d wait to talk to her.”
“Will you tell her I’ll call her tonight?”
“We’re not going to see you?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Then I better tell you something else. She got a speeding ticket in Mill Valley yesterday.”
“Great.”
They’d been warned by their insurance broker to pay out of pocket for any fender bender that Maria got into in her first few years of driving. Insuring her and the old car they’d bought had been much more expensive than they’d expected and the bill had come with a second warning, if she got any moving violations, the insurance would jump.
“Forty-five in a twenty-five zone. I told her I was going to talk to you before we did anything.”
“What’s she saying?”
“Well, she figured out a good one. She claims she thought some guy was following her.”
“I’ll talk to her tonight. I want to hear about these phone calls.”
“Where are you now?”
“Driving to Stockton to talk to a vice cop.”
For a state agency like Fish and Game the phone companies charged up to a thousand dollars to check where a phone call came from. It didn’t cost them anything like that to do the trace, but never kill a cash cow. The Feds, the FBI, had the money and the equipment to go real time on calls, but at this level, particularly with the home number where Marquez would need Bell’s approval, the process was slower, the cost harder to justify. Still, there’d been the threat from their seller, and he could probably leverage that if there were more calls. He hung up with Katherine, saying he’d check back after 7:00. He took another call before reaching Stockton, this one from an upbeat Alvarez.
“We’re on,” Alvarez said. “I’ve got an appointment for tomorrow with Durham. Nyland returned my call, and he wouldn’t be too hard to handle. He’s eager to please. He wants the business.”
“Wants to be a hunting guide?”
“Exactly. Suggested we meet for a beer and tried to tell me I didn’t really need to meet with Durham, but I kept pushing for a meeting with the owner. Told me he runs all the hunting trips and Durham basically does the books and bankrolls the business.
Durham doesn’t like to meet with clients. He’s busy with other work.”
“How’d you leave it?”
“He wanted a couple of numbers to call me back on, not just a cell, so I gave him TreeSearch.”
Bear season opened in just a few days, and Alvarez could legally take one bear. He’d told Nyland he wanted to be damn sure he bagged one, no matter what it took, and not a skinny or sick bear or some gawky yearling, but a fat bruin he could get good meat from and a rug. That’s why he needed a guide who knew the
area. He’d told Nyland he would pay extra freight if they guaranteed him a bear.
“How far did you push it?”
“Not over the line, but I sent the signals.”
“Some of these guys tape their calls.”
The line between entrapment and setting up a sting could be razor thin, and they needed to be very careful how they approached this guide business. But this was a good first step.
“Where you at?” Alvarez asked.
“In Stockton and about to go in and meet a vice cop. They busted someone on a drug rap who had bear parts in the trunk and the last name of Kim. I’ll talk to you on the other side.”
Marquez went in, met Delano, sizing him up as confident and serious, but not as hard-boiled as he’d tried to sound over the phone. Delano sketched a street history of Kim.
“Kim is affiliated with a Vietnamese gang that’s branched into dealing drugs, mostly methamphetamine, which has put them up against the Hispanics who aren’t wild about sharing that market. In fact, the Hispanics are in the process of consolidating.”
“Kim is a hired gun?” Marquez asked.
“We’re pretty sure he hooked up with the Vietnamese because he’s willing to pull a trigger. Usually they keep to their own and when they don’t there’s a good reason.”
“Really, a shooter.”
“Of a kind. He’s known as Nine-O, like nine millimeter with a zero on the end of it, and don’t make any comments to him about it. All the good names like Fast Nine were already taken. The gang he works for used to specialize in carjackings and burglary. For break-in jobs they like to travel out of town. Their burglaries have included a number outside this jurisdiction. Two of them were arrested last month with property stolen from cabins in Kern County.”
“They’ve had similar problems in El Dorado County.”
“Everywhere up and down the Sierras.”
Marquez told him now about the guns stolen and dogs poisoned in Placerville, suggested he call Kendall about that one.
They talked about the similarities as they walked down the corridor to the interview room. No hunting rifles, but a shotgun and five or six handguns had been bagged when they busted Kim.
“You can go in alone with him or I’ll go in with you, either way I should start you off with him,” Delano said.
“Introduce me.”
“I didn’t tell you this over the phone, but Kim’s got two strikes already, a drug and a robbery charge that he did time for separately, neither of which has anything to do with the Vietnamese gang. He made the career move to hit man when he realized he couldn’t go down for a third strike.” Delano tapped his forehead and smiled. “He’s a thinker.”
“Why’s he willing to talk to me?”
“Probably trying to figure out what you’ve got on him, nothing more than that.”
Marquez followed Delano into the interview box and didn’t read any emotion in the eyes across the table, a studied flat blackness, a waiting this out, been here before look, and you cops are all pieces of shit.
“Nine-O, this gentleman is here about the bear parts in your trunk.”
“Nothing to do with me,” Nine-O said.
“We’re looking for the car owner,” Delano explained to Marquez.
“Right now, it’s open whether it’s a stolen vehicle. It doesn’t belong to Nine-O here. Maybe he stole it somewhere and it came with bear parts. You stealing cars out of the mountains again, Nine-O? Find the car in a campground somewhere you could take this officer back to?”
Nine-O shook his head, and Delano worked on him for a while before leaving as they’d prearranged. Delano said he’d be back in ten minutes.
“Where did the bear parts come from?” Marquez asked.
“Fuck if I know.”
“I’m here because they told me you wanted to talk to me.
Were they wrong?”
“Get them to drop this other shit and maybe I can find out something.”
“You give me the people who are trading in bear, and I can probably make the bear trafficking charge disappear. I can’t guarantee that, but otherwise, commercial trafficking is a felony. With two strikes down already you go up for life.”
“Not for fucking bear paws.”
“I’m not saying I think the law is fair.” Marquez didn’t. He thought the way the three-strikes law got blindly applied was immoral. “It’ll make you the first man to get life in prison for killing a wild animal.”
“Bagging a bear is no felony.”
“This isn’t killing a bear. Four gallbladders, the paws, that’s trafficking, and that’s a felony. I’ve got the code right here if you want to read it.” Marquez started to reach for his wallet.