Night Game
Authors: Kirk Russell
A JOHN MARQUEZ CRIME NOVEL
KIRK RUSSELL
In memory of my father, James Kirkendall Russell
Beneath the trees the light faded
and wind cut through his coat. He climbed the steep trail, hiked through another long switchbacking turn, then saw them standing near an outcrop, silhouetted by red-orange sky. Both men turned to watch him. Even from here he could tell it was the same pair.
When he reached them, Marquez looked first at the bearded man, then at the bullet-headed kid. “Tell me again, why it is we can’t do these deals in a warm bar?”
“Let’s just get it done,” the beard said and clicked on a small flashlight.
Earlier this afternoon their seller, the man Marquez’s undercover team couldn’t seem to get close to, had lingered on the line, a voice changer mechanically flattening his tone as he bragged about being better than the Chinese at bear farming, though the Chinese had been at it for more than a thousand years. Marquez had seen photos of bears living out their lives in cramped cages. He’d
watched videos on the Internet of bears banging their heads against cage bars, catheters running from their abdomens to milk bile juices. The traditional method was a knife gash to open the bear’s abdomen. Bile dripped through cage bars onto collection plates. Ounce for ounce, the bile on the plates was worth more than cocaine. But until this seller Marquez had never heard of bear farming in California or anywhere in the States.
The beard produced a couple of small, dark glass bottles and sprinkled bile powder onto Marquez’s palm. The thin flashlight beam caught the powder sifting. The fiber-optic line feeding the camcorder sewn into Marquez’s coat recorded everything.
“I need to meet the man you’re working for,” Marquez said. “I want to see these bear farms.”
The beard shook his head. “Come on, man, let’s not do this tonight.”
Bullet-head said, “This is bullshit.”
Marquez turned to him. “Look, I’ve got clients with cancer.” “It matters that these farms are clean. I’ve got to know it’s not coming out of some backwoods rat hole.”
The beard answered for him. “He means we don’t know where he keeps the bears. Like we told you last time.”
Marquez got the money roll out, snapped the rubber bands off. He’d done five deals with this pair and believed them when they claimed they’d never seen the man they worked for. He recorded the beard pocketing the cash, then pulling a CD from the same pocket.
“What’s this?”
“Supposed to give it to you.”
“Yeah, but what is it?”
Neither answered.
Bullet-head started drifting away and the beard followed him. Marquez put the CD in his coat and cut back to the main trail. After rounding the first bend he called Carol Shauf, one of the wardens
on his Fish and Game undercover team. She was hidden near the gravel road running over Barker Pass, positioned to cover his exit.
“I’m dropping down the trail.”
“Hold up,” she said. “I’ve got movement on the slope up off to your right.”
“I’m less than a hundred yards from the car. I’ll be there in under two minutes.”
“I see you, but hang on, Lieutenant. There’s someone up on the slope in the trees to your right. Wait until I get another look.”
“Probably a hiker.”
Her voice tensed. “It’s not.”
“Okay, I’m moving into the trees and I’ll come down through them.”
“I’ve got him again and he’s looking your direction.”
The “show car” used for buys, a Ford Taurus, sat in a dusty clearing near the trailhead sign, its white paint ghostly in the dusk.
“All right,” he said, “how about you go to your van and come back over the pass with your brights on. That’ll get his attention, and I’ll drop down to the car and follow you out.”
He waited. There were dark clouds stacked over Lake Tahoe, purple an hour ago, almost black in the dusk. First snow wasn’t far away. When Shauf was seconds from cresting the pass, her headlights touching high in trees swaying in wind gusts, he came down across the exposed face to the car. He started the engine and bounced through the ruts toward the gravel road, glanced up the treed slope and then at a red laser dot on the dashboard. It danced across under the windshield, skipped over the face of the radio, and started crawling up his arm like an insect. He jerked the wheel left, scraping the underbody as he hit the road at a bad angle, bottomed out, and then kicked up gravel as he accelerated away. His tires squealed through the first turn. His heart hammered. He had the feeling if he could hear across the distance the sound would be laughter.
Now Shauf’s taillights were visible ahead, and he wound down the steep canyon behind her, ran the seven miles out to the lake road thinking about what had just happened. In Tahoe City the rest of the Special Operations Unit was waiting. Brad Alvarez and Melinda Roberts had picked up Chinese food, and the team met up near recycling bins outside a Raley’s supermarket. Sean Cairo pulled in alongside Marquez’s car. They opened the doors of Shauf’s van, and Marquez went through the sequence of events while they ate. When he finished, Alvarez spoke for the others.
“This changes everything, Lieutenant. It’s going to make it harder to trip with this guy.”
Going without backup, staying with the suspect, “tripping with him,” was all they’d been able to pull off. Marquez looked around at the faces of the SOU. For over a decade before coming to California Fish and Game, he’d worked undercover for the DEA, making drug buys where guns were flashed routinely. Sometimes a seller would run a test before a big buy. That could be what was happening here. Might be the sign they were getting close to the takedown, but no way to know tonight. They talked it over some more, then broke up. Most of the team would finish the night at the safehouse outside Placerville, roughly eighty miles away.
Marquez sat in the dark car talking with Shauf after Roberts, Alvarez, and Cairo had left. He pulled on latex gloves, took the CD case out of the evidence bag, and cut the tape with a razor.
“Let’s see what we’ve got.”
“You sure you want to handle it?”
“I think we need to know.”
He slid it in the CD deck, and there was loud crackling, then abruptly a toneless filtered voice. He reached, turned the volume up.
“I’ve downloaded all Fish and Game personnel records. I know about the SOU. I’ve got names, addresses, and phone numbers for every single one of your undercover team. Lieutenant Matt Fong, 23 Yolando Road, Sacramento, California, wife, Lisa Fong, home
phone number as follows.” He read Matt’s home number and then a cell number. “Lieutenant John Marquez, patrol lieutenant heading Special Operations, lives off Ridge Road on Mount Tamalpais in Mill Valley. A couple of phone numbers, here.” He read the numbers off. A sound like a chair sliding, some words lost, then much louder, “Marquez has a wife named Katherine, stepdaughter, Maria, age sixteen. If that’s you, better disappear, better lose yourself before I kill you.”
The CD ended abruptly, and Marquez stared at his right hand, pale latex reflecting the dash lights. His family, his wife and stepdaughter, were often home without him. From time to time his team got tailed by poachers trying to discover where they lived, and threats got made in the field or left anonymously on the CalTIP anti-poaching line. Most were vague, and SOU records were supposed to be bombproof, though, of course, they weren’t. Still, he’d never worried too much.
Fong was no longer with the SOU team. He’d made captain, was behind a desk, but their seller didn’t seem aware of that, so that was a clue to the timing of whatever computer hacking or bribing had been done to get the information. He heard Shauf sigh and looked at her profile in the darkness as she stared at the CD player.
“Let’s hear it again,” he said. He pushed play and the voice filled the car.
The next morning
when Marquez walked into headquarters in Sacramento, Chief Bell was waiting. He took a seat, glanced at the chief’s new nameplate, a heavy brass plaque mounted on a dark-stained piece of oak. The nameplate reflected another bureaucratic change, reading assistant chief rather than deputy chief, as the department aligned its ranking system with the California Highway Patrol. For a while a rumor had circulated that the CHP would take them over, despite having little in common with them other than an interest in roadkill.
“They want everything we have on him and that isn’t much, is it?” Bell asked.
“Who’s the ‘they’ we’re talking about?” “The CD will ship to an FBI lab this afternoon and they’re going to do everything they can, but they’re also asking me about our procedures, specifically your training. They want to know why you opened and listened to it, why you didn’t wait.”
“Because we’ll hear from our seller before we have lab results.”
Bell shook his head, let him know that answer didn’t come close. But they weren’t going there yet. Bell’s priority this morning was the breach of computer files.
“I want the whole operation,” Bell said, “everything. Start at the beginning when we first heard from this seller, brief me on all of it.”
Marquez talked for two hours.
When he finished, Bell said, “We’re going to take this up again this afternoon.” He gestured toward his office door. “There’s an El Dorado County detective in the conference room who’s been waiting to see you about a homicide in the Crystal Basin. He’s hoping you can help him.”
“Is this about the body found up behind Barrett Lake?”
“Yes.”
The detective was standing near the windows, hands on his hips, surveying the buildings below like a guy trying to decide what to do with his property. He was gangly, balding, and middleaged, wearing elkskin cowboy boots and a tan corduroy coat that pulled tight under his arms when he reached to shake hands.
“Jack Kendall,” he said, and Marquez realized Kendall’s skin had the tinged quality of a chemical tanning agent, an unusual vanity in a homicide detective.
“We had a similar murder a couple of years ago near Placerville,” Kendall said. “That case is still open, it’s how I got in on this one. But I’m not saying there’s any connection, though both victims were killed by rifle shots. In this recent killing the victim was a geology student doing research for a thesis out along the boundary between the Crystal Basin and Desolation Wilderness areas. Your warden up there, Bill Petroni, tells me your undercover team has been in the Crystal Basin on and off all summer.”
“We have.”
Kendall walked to the table, sat down, and got his briefcase, saying he had photos. Marquez took a chair beside him, and
Kendall pulled out a college graduation photo of the victim, Jed Vandemere, a brown-haired young man with a cheerful face, then a second photo, this one of Vandemere’s truck, a ‘99 Chevy with a camper shell.
“The truck was stolen,” Kendall said. “Theft is a possible motive.”
He ticked off a list of other missing items—laptop, telescope, the latest backpacking equipment—things that could be easily fenced. Then he handed Marquez the missing persons report Vandemere’s parents had filed in August.
“Who found him?” Marquez asked.
“His father.”
Marquez read the strong handwriting, then the father’s physical description of his boy, his love unmistakable even on this police form. Marquez knew what it felt like, knew from his first wife’s murder about the anguish and long emptiness that came after.
“For the first month the parents called me every day,” Kendall said, “but there wasn’t much we could do. We don’t have the resources to chase missing persons reports. You know that.”
“Sure.”
“For all we knew he met a girl and left. How long can you pick at rocks when you’re that age?”
Kendall seemed to need a response, but Marquez couldn’t assuage his guilt. He understood the dilemma though, knew Kendall was telling the truth about available resources.
“Do you recognize him?” Kendall asked.
“No.”
“These are more recent.”
He slid over photos of the body, Vandemere’s ribcage partially wrapped in a blue shell, a North Face logo visible. Other photos, black-and-whites of scattered bones. From the thin bright line of sky Marquez figured he’d been found near a ridge.
“We know he had an altercation with some hunters up there in July. They were running hounds, and he got in a shoving match with one of them. I have witnesses to that.” He paused, added, “There’s this—his parents tell me he was into environmental issues.
In high school he worked for something called the Bear Initiative in Idaho. He used his own money to take a bus to Idaho and help gather signatures.”
“I remember the Bear Initiative.”
“Tells you something about how he thought.”
“How he thought when he was a teenager, you mean.”
“Probably still spoke his views. The more years I put in, the more convinced I am that people don’t change fundamentally.”
Kendall surprised him now, rising partway out of his chair and leaning toward him. He pressed his fingers into the middle of Marquez’s spine. “We found a slug right about here, a .30-30 lodged between vertebrae. He also took an insurance slug from a .22 in the head at close range. Do you know the ridge back up behind Barrett Lake?”
“I’ve hiked through there.”
“There’s a gnarled stand of pine down the slope on the backside.
But from there it would have taken a good shooter, someone skilled.”
Kendall paused too long now, and Marquez got the feeling he was heading somewhere with this conversation.
“Has your team been in the Barrett Lake area in the last few months?”
“No.”
“Your chief thought you had.”
“That’s why he’s chief.”
Kendall smiled. “I’ve been questioning bear hunters. Everyone says the .30-06 is the caliber of choice and that a .30-30 is unusual, but what do you think?”
“The aught-six used to be more of a standard than it is now, but anything .30 caliber or bigger will do the job. Bear aren’t hard to kill, and an aught-six will break the shoulder and punch through the chest cavity into the lung. A broken shoulder will bring a bear down, and with a pierced lung they drown in their own blood.
Smaller caliber guns are popular for shooting a bear out of a tree or bait hunting. That’s where a .30-30 comes in. It shoots flat and is easier to handle.”
“Your chief says you got a threat on a CD last night.”
“Yeah, it’s a first, a technological breakthrough.”
“You can understand why I wonder if there’s some overlap with my case. I’d appreciate anything you can tell me about your operation.”
Marquez explained what the Special Operations Unit was doing in the Crystal Basin. “We’re looking for a bear parts dealer we think is working out of El Dorado County.”
He gave Kendall a quick rundown on bile products and then related a claim their seller had made, that he’d killed a female Virginia game warden a decade ago, adding that the only Virginia warden murder case they’d found so far was a case where an estranged husband had been tried, found guilty, and was serving time.
“This guy sounds like a nut,” Kendall said.
“He’s paranoid.”
“Or worse. I’m confused why Warden Petroni doesn’t seem to know much about your operation. If he’s the warden out of Georgetown, doesn’t that make him the main guy in the area?”
“We cross a lot of jurisdictional lines and tend to keep to ourselves until we have something. We don’t always talk to the local wardens straightaway.” He added, as much for himself as for Kendall, “I’ll see Petroni tomorrow.”
That morning Marquez had talked to Petroni for the first time in a long while. A backpacker had called CalTIP, the Fish and
Game hotline, and reported a dead sow black bear and two cubs in a canyon in the Crystal Basin Wilderness. Petroni would hike up there with him tomorrow, and Marquez planned to brief him during the hike. He hoped to talk some other things out with Petroni and get beyond some of the acrimony of their past.
“We’re looking for a sow and cubs, but all we have is an anonymous tip.”
“And you’re involved because of this seller you’re looking for? Otherwise, it would be Petroni’s to deal with?”
“It would, but you’re not here to make sure Petroni does his job.”
“No, I’m not. But I am here to talk to you about him. Not in here though. What do you say we get lunch together?”
They rode the elevator down and walked out into a hazy fall afternoon. Marquez led Kendall across one of the capitol lawns toward a Vietnamese restaurant he liked, and halfway across the lawn Kendall stopped and fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the capitol dome.
“I’m ninety-nine percent certain Petroni lied to me. He told me he never had any contact with Vandemere, but I’ve got witnesses who saw Vandemere get into Petroni’s Fish and Game truck in the Ice House Resort parking lot in early August. I also have a statement from a fisherman out at Loon Lake who saw Petroni give Vandemere a real hard time one afternoon and not over a fishing regulation.”
“What kind of hard time?”
“A lot of finger wagging and getting in his face.”
“Are you telling me Petroni is a suspect?”
“Nothing like that. What I’m telling you is he lied to me and I want to know why.”
“I’m sure you’ve told him this.”
“I have and it hasn’t got me anywhere.”
Kendall flicked his cigarette out into the grass. It bounced and sank.
“One reason I bailed out of LA homicide was to get away from the bureaucracy. It was like the bad air down there, I couldn’t take another day of it. Your Chief Bell might be the greatest goddamned chief in the world, but if I told him what I just told you, he’d have an internal investigation going before nightfall, and I don’t want to have to deal with that. But I am going to make Petroni’s life miserable. I’m going to make it real miserable if he keeps stonewalling me, and I don’t give a shit how many dead bear are on his schedule. I’m going to give him forty-eight hours. You’re going to see him tomorrow, you tell him that.”
“I’ll tell him you’re looking for him, but you can handle your own threats.” Marquez smiled. “Send him a CD.”
“He may hear someone in his department more easily than he hears me.”
“I wouldn’t be the guy.”
“No?”
Kendall’s smile was cruel. He pointed out across the lawn vaguely indicating the direction of the mountains.
“You don’t want to stick up for him, do you?” he asked. He turned to face Marquez directly. “Nobody seems to want to. I wonder why?”