Authors: Kirk Russell
The next morning
Marquez took an early run with Shauf, then sat at the kitchen table in the safehouse, cooling down, talking with Roberts and Cairo while Shauf showered. Shauf came back out, and her wet hair dripped onto the Crystal Basin Wilderness map as they talked about the day ahead. Marquez would make his first trip home in over a week, combining that with a reinterview of Kim Ungar at Ungar’s apartment in San Francisco today. While he was gone, Shauf would start the team on a systematic sweep of the fire and logging roads in the Crystal Basin. Get the keys to all the gates and look for any signs of bait piles. He didn’t yet know how he wanted to deal with last night’s buy, but after finding the poached sow and cubs it made sense to look for other bait piles.
An hour later he grabbed his gear and left for the Bay Area. Traffic bled slowly across the Central Valley, and every year it seemed there were more strip malls and stucco houses alongside the freeway. The orchards were all but gone. He drove past Vacaville
and Fairfield, climbed the dry rounded hills before Vallejo, making phone calls, still juggling thirty cases or leads, one in particular that sounded promising, a sturgeon poaching tip coming from a bait shop owner in the delta. Then Kendall called.
“I heard you ran into Eric Nyland last night,” Kendall said. “We’ve got a file on Nyland you might want to take a look at, and I’ve got a story for you, if you want to hear it.”
“I’d like to see the file, and, yeah, anything you know about Nyland I’d like to hear.”
“Petroni could tell you all about his girlfriend.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“This happened about five years ago, just after I started here. A Tuolumne County sheriff’s deputy showed up looking for help locating Nyland—this was in the fall, September the year I was hired. This Tuolumne deputy had traced Nyland through a partial license plate after a road rage incident in Yosemite where a camper went off the road and an older fellow was killed. The old boy’s wife survived. She got a partial license plate and gave a description of the truck and driver. She and her husband had been on their way home to Lee Vining after staying in Yosemite Valley, so they were climbing toward Tioga Pass. I’m sure you know Yosemite.”
“Yeah.”
“A pickup came up behind them and got aggressive about passing, and the old boy got angry, started swinging wide when the truck tried to go around him. Eventually, Nyland, and I’m sure it was Nyland, got around him or rather, came alongside, lowered his passenger window, and shot a hole through the camper’s windshield.
The old boy swerved, lost control, hit a tree, and was DOA. So this Tuolumne deputy comes into the sheriff’s office, tells us this story, and we all drove out to where Nyland still lives at the end of Six Mile Road. There’s a meadow where a subdivision project went bust. Do you know where that is?”
“I know the road.”
“Then you know where it ends. Do you know the story with the Miwoks?”
“No, but let’s stay on Nyland.”
“Remind me to tell you the local legend sometime about the Miwoks who got slaughtered out there. People claim their ghosts still haunt the area. There are three house foundations in that meadow that never got built on, and out past that are trailers the construction crews lived in. Nyland worked on the subdivision briefly as a carpenter, and the bank let him stay on because the bank officer was a friend of his dad’s. Deal was he’d trade rent to watch the property, and believe it or not, his dad was respected around here, a lawyer that even the cops liked.”
“Where’s his dad now?”
“Heart attack when Nyland was nineteen. Probably having a kid like Nyland killed him. Okay, so we go out there in a couple of patrol cars and drive up to the first trailer, the one he lives in, and she answers the door, not Nyland.”
“Sophie?”
“See, you know where this story is going. You know her better than you let on. Anyway, Nyland is standing behind her, and she’s wearing a thin T-shirt, and I mean thin and tight, a pair of ragged jeans and is barefoot. Looked like she’d just pulled the clothes on as we drove up. She got right in my face, said she’d been in the sack with Nyland all night and they’d had sex, and we could swab her right there in the doorway if we wanted. I’m not kidding. She started unzipping her jeans, and there weren’t any panties underneath.
Then she told me I could be the one to do it.”
Kendall paused, waiting for his reaction, the image of her opening her jeans, the place to make a comment. But what caught Marquez was not her body exposed, and she had a nice one, but rather, the aggressiveness, same thing he’d seen at the Creekview.
“Nyland came in for questioning and we worked on her separately, but she never wavered on the alibi. I believe Nyland was the
pickup driver in Yosemite, and I can promise you she’s damaged goods. That’s who your warden is head over heels about. We’ve also suspected Nyland’s involvement in meth manufacture and a burglary ring, but never been able to pin anything on him. He may look like a pinup for the steroid crowd, but he’s a schemer and smart. Knows what he can get away with. Did Petroni tell you Nyland works for a hunting guide business?”
“No.”
“Sierra Guides out of Placerville—they’ve got an office off Main Street.”
“I know where it is.”
“That’s where Nyland’s truck came from. The owner there loaned him the money to buy it.”
“Have you ever met the owner?”
“Never seen his face, don’t even know his name.”
Marquez didn’t say his team had already checked out the owner, a Joe Durham, who lived in Sacramento and worked as a lobbyist and consultant. As near as they could tell the guide business didn’t do much trade. They’d looked at all the local guide businesses, but they would backtrack now on Sierra.
When he hung up with Kendall he drove across lower Marin and into Mill Valley, up Mount Tamalpais and home. His house had been built by his grandfather in 1915 on a flank of Mount Tam when land was still cheap. It had a stone fireplace, redwood casement windows that had lasted seventy years, floors of quartersawn white plank oak pegged with mahogany dowels cut from wood his grandfather found on Muir Beach after a cargo ship had foundered. The house looked down along a forested ridge to the ocean. It was where his paternal grandparents had raised him and his sister, Dara.
When he unlocked the door and walked in he smelled the lime tang of the shampoo Katherine used and saw some of Maria’s schoolbooks stacked on the dining table. Both were comforting,
though the house felt empty without their presence. He pulled the clothes he needed from the bedroom, switched his gear into the old two-tone Explorer, and left.
He crossed the Golden Gate and went out Nineteenth Avenue through the park. Kim Ungar lived down this direction. Ungar drove a late model Lexus and lived in a drab white stucco apartment out in the avenues near the ocean in San Francisco. The apartment units had small decks with Spanish-style iron railings painted black, and Marquez drove past, checking for the Lexus or an open door on the apartment deck before parking around the corner. He didn’t see the car, and when Ungar didn’t answer a knock on his door he figured Ungar had blown him off, which wasn’t surprising. Ungar’s game was agreeing to meet, then not showing.
For a couple of weeks in the early summer they’d put Ungar under surveillance, despite his being the referring party and their informant. From watching him they’d learned his routine, so after Ungar didn’t answer his door, Marquez decided to run some of the route they’d followed him on when they’d had him under surveillance.
He checked a video arcade, a mall, and then in a parking lot next to the In-N-Out Burger where they’d seen him eat several times, he spotted Ungar in his car.
He parked and punched in Ungar’s cell phone number as he crossed the street, watched him pick the phone up, stare at the screen, and lower it again. That’s my guy, Marquez thought. He came up the passenger side, rapped on the window. Ungar’s startled eyes brightened, then flattened. His hand went reflexively to his mustache and the window lowered.
“Hey, I forgot, I’m sorry.”
“No sweat. Good to see you.” Marquez reached through the open window to shake hands, Ungar’s grip light, his fingers wet. “Why don’t we talk here?”
“How’d you know I was here?”
“Remembered you talking about the burgers and was hungry.
Lucky, huh?”
Of course, it wasn’t, and he watched Ungar’s face tighten.
When the lock released Marquez swung the passenger door open, and the smells of fast food, cigarette, incense, and dope sucked out into the salt breeze. Ungar moved wrappers off the passenger seat.
“I just spaced it out,” Ungar said. “Worked all night for a client. I’ve been sitting here listening to music, cools my mind down.”
“Busy.”
“Real busy. You ever work for yourself?”
“Only once and not for long.”
“Used to getting fed by the government.”
“Yeah, eating up your tax dollars.”
Ungar had a computer business that as near as they could tell he ran from his apartment and the trunk of his car, building computers for clients out of generic parts or problem solving, pretty vague about how he got his clients. But they had confirmed that he’d worked in Silicon Valley for years. He was a bright guy, he knew people, his cell phone ringing often when Marquez had sat with him. He was pushing through his thirties with no family. Both parents had died in a car accident. Ungar carried a newspaper clipping of their deaths folded up in his wallet. He’d showed it to Marquez.
Informants generally wanted money or revenge or to eliminate competition, but Ungar had told them his motive was concern for the environment. He’d had a cathartic moment while watching the Discovery Channel, where they’d run a show on bear poaching. It so disturbed him that he’d called Fish and Game to rat out his cousin’s connection, though not his cousin. That was the catch; he wouldn’t give them the cousin’s name. He’d spun a story for them about not being very connected with the Korean end of his family, but this third cousin and he had partied
together when they were younger, and family was family. He couldn’t give his cousin up.
So they’d figured there wasn’t any cousin and Ungar was worried about getting caught for something he’d done. Or maybe there was a cousin. What he’d given them was a phone number to leave a message for a man selling bear parts and bile products. In June they’d made their first buy after using that number. Marquez had continued to tell Ungar they’d never reached the bear farmer, but then, he knew Ungar was lying to them too.
“How’s that burger?” Marquez asked.
“Go get one. You don’t need to order fries if you don’t mind eating after me. You can have mine.” Marquez looked at the fries, saw a stubbed-out cigarette in them. “Oh, yeah, forgot about that,” Ungar said and pulled the cigarette out. “Guess you’ll want to order after all.”
“You don’t mind waiting?”
“No problem.”
Marquez looked back at him as he got out of the car, a cleanfeatured guy, a pleasant if bland face, black hair, small nose, gray sifting in, but keeping himself in shape, a single guy cruising toward forty with a pretty good idea of himself. They’d allowed him to smoke in the interview room because he’d insisted he had to if he was going to talk. He was that kind of nervous underneath.
Ungar would watch him order now, watch him through the glass, watch everything he did.
Today Ungar wore jeans and sandals, a wrinkled white shirt rolled up to his elbows, a beaded belt. It was another thing about him, some days dressed hippie nostalgic, smoking a joint, chilling with the music, a computer type working best at night; other times they’d seen him dressed in a suit, tie knotted close to his throat, getting out of his Lexus wearing Armani. None of which figured with the fogbound, middle-income apartment complex, yet it was something Marquez had seen before, both with Fish and Game
and the DEA, a guy showing just enough flash to enjoy the money he was taking in, but not so much as to get people really looking closely at him.
“Talked to your cousin lately?” Marquez asked when he got back with the burger, drink, and fries.
“You want to do the cousin questions right away?” His hand went to the mustache again, stroking it. “I talked to him yesterday. He’s been selling stolen cell phone chips, taking a break from bear parts, I guess, but he’s gotten a hold of enough weed he wants to sell me as much as I’ll buy.”
“Where’s he living now?”
“Somewhere out in the valley, Stockton, Sacramento, maybe one of those foothill towns like Placerville. I don’t ask.”
“You mentioned a woman once in Placerville.”
“You here about her?”
“Just wondering what you remember.”
“You’ve come across her.”
“Maybe.”
“You hoping to get laid or bust her?”
“You said her boyfriend was a bear hunter.”
“That’s on the tape?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t remember saying it.”
Marquez took another bite and remembered Ungar racing down Highway 1 earlier in the summer. After he’d come to them with the tip they’d put him under surveillance for a week. He’d shaken them by passing cars, which had only added to the idea that he was the “cousin.” Even now Ungar was checking his mirrors, probably looking for the rest of the team. Marquez ate some fries, another bite of burger, let the silence work.
“Let’s say we grant your cousin immunity.” Marquez pulled his phone out and laid it on the dash. “I mean, let’s say I make an offer.”
“Let’s fast-forward this conversation. Next comes the part where I say I don’t have his number. Then you ask, why not? I say I don’t want you to bust my cousin and then you insinuate I am the cousin. Okay with you if we just skip to the end, because I’m a little wired this morning. I’ve been staring at a computer screen all night, and now I’m watching you use my car as a kitchen table. It depresses me. Why don’t we deal with the rest of the predictable questions, then say good-bye?”
“What I’m saying is we won’t bust your cousin.”
Ungar smiled a tight-lipped private smile, kept his gaze through the windshield.