by Kirk Russell
“Any luck with Troy?”
“Sticking with a story that Nyland drove him and showed him the inside of the first Quonset hut on a day when no one else was out there. He just wanted him to know where it was and what the Bearman was doing.”
“Why’d he want him to know?”
“He wouldn’t say. What’s your guess?”
“That Troy supplied some of the bears. Yearlings. Cubs.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Ungar needs to stay behind bars.”
“I hear you. What’s going to happen in Bishop with your daughter and her grandmother?”
“They showed Lillian photos and she can’t pick him out. Her memory of the whole thing is still hazy. Maria is scheduled for a lineup tomorrow.”
“But he wore a mask into the house?”
“Yeah. There was some blood recovered out front but it could be argued it was contaminated, and it’ll be weeks if not months before it gets analyzed. If there’s enough corroborative evidence, he may argue he came inside because Lillian had tripped and hurt herself. That he never meant any harm.”
“Same problem I have.”
“Basically.”
“What’s the judge like?”
“Law-and-order type, a ball breaker, or so they tell me. The hope is he’ll set a high bail, or if we’re lucky, continue to hold him pending DNA and blood results.”
“Can your daughter pick him out of a lineup?”
“Based on what I’ve heard her say, I doubt it.”
“Then it’s like you said, hope for a high bail. You going to be there?”
“Yeah, I’ve taken some vacation time and so have a couple of others on my team. I’m also going to come see you. I’ve got an idea I want to run by you.”
“Good. There are a couple of things I want to show you, including Sophie’s journal.”
“Kept a journal?”
“She did. She was a lonely woman. There’s a few entries with Vandemere, one that got me thinking. I’ll show it to you when I see you. Listen, before we hang up, will you tell me what you’re planning?”
“I’ll come see you tomorrow.”
After Marquez hung up with Kendall he made some coffee and worked at the picnic table out on the deck. An hour or so later he heard the front door open, leaned around, and saw Kath was home.
“I took off work early,” she said, paused, “to be with you, because if you remember we were never going to let this happen to us again.” She straddled the picnic bench, sunlight on her face and bright on the ghost streak of white hair that ran from near her temple. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
They’d been separated, come close to divorce, and found their way back, done as much as they could to put it behind them. He closed the file, rested his coffee cup on it to keep the breeze from lifting it, and went inside with Katherine, talked with her for hours. Maria was staying at a friend’s house tonight, and toward dusk they made love on the throw rug in the living room. Now he lay near her, the light fading through the windows as they talked about dropping down to town and getting some dinner. She turned toward him, and he took her in his arms and held her tight. She spoke to him with her voice pressed against his chest.
“You can’t catch all of these guys,” she said.
Later they did go down into town and ate, then came back up and sat outside under the stars with a couple of drinks. The next morning he drove to Placerville, met with Kendall out Howell Road, then drove south. He was in the courthouse at 10:00 the following morning as Judge Faribault set bail for Ungar. A collective murmur of approval went up from Lillian’s friends when the amount was $250,000, but only Marquez and the team had anticipated that Ungar would make bail that day. They knew the money he’d been making, just didn’t know where he kept it. They waited outside for him. With Alvarez’s help Marquez had illegally attached a GPS unit to Ungar’s car, and they watched now as Ungar walked out and scanned the parking lot and the street.
“Looking for us,” Marquez said. “He knows.”
They could hold their breath and hope, but it was up to Ungar.
He walked to his car, got in, started south on the highway out of Bishop, went almost to Lone Pine before turning around and coming back. They watched the satellite readout as he did a number of backtracking moves on his drive north on 395. It took him nearly ten hours to get back to Placerville, though a straight drive would have put him there in five.
Shortly after 9:00 P.M., Marquez made another call to Kendall.
“He just pulled into Placerville,” he said. “He’s buying gas.”
“Christ, I hope you’re right.”
“You ready on your end?”
“Yeah, we’re good to go.”
Then it looked like Marquez was wrong. Ungar got back on the highway and headed westbound. It was Alvarez who voiced the fear tightening Marquez’s gut.
“Lieutenant, he could be driving to your house.”
Marquez hadn’t yet answered when Ungar exited the highway again. He drove into a new mini-storage complex alongside the highway. They saw him punch in numbers and then an access gate swung open. They got the number of which unit he visited, but couldn’t see inside.
“We thought Petroni had a unit there,” Kendall said. “Sophie was sure he had one. That’s the key we were looking for up at Wright’s Lake.”
Ungar was in the storage unit until after midnight. Then, his headlights came on. The car swung out of the lot and back onto the highway. He continued eastbound past Placerville.
Marquez heard the electric change in Shauf’s and Alvarez’s voices and felt it himself. He talked to Kendall, his voice tightening with urgency as Ungar’s car slowly exited at Howell Road. A quarter mile beyond Johengen’s barn he pulled off and parked in the trees.
“We’ve got him just beyond Johengen’s,” Marquez said.
“We’ve got him in view. He’s sitting in the car.”
“I’m starting down Howell.”
It took Marquez twenty minutes to get within a mile. Near Johengen’s the road ran straighter for a third of a mile, and he pulled over before then. He killed his lights, knew where he’d leave his truck and walk. Talked to Kendall again from his cell phone, told him Shauf and Alvarez had moved in from the other direction.
“He’s out of the car,” Kendall said, “getting something out of his trunk.”
“He’ll probably cross the creek and come through the orchard.”
“Half an hour ago I was freezing my ass off. Now, I feel like I’m on fire. Let’s just hope he’s not headed somewhere else in the woods because he’s got something buried. Hold on a second.”
When Kendall came back on, he said, “It might have been a shovel he got out of the trunk.”
Marquez, Shauf, and Alvarez crossed the creek and came up alongside the old farmhouse, seeing it all, the orchard in moonlight, trees skeletal and bone-colored. Marquez saw Ungar first, pointed him out, a dark figure moving, almost floating through the grass. The Bearman. He crossed the orchard to the barn, then disappeared around the back, and they heard boards being pried off, nails wrenching. Light shone through gaps in the siding. A ladder banged against the barn wall, scraped as it slid up to the rafters, and then light climbed the wall, shone through cracks. Along the orchard perimeter the SOU and county officers moved into position.
Ungar descended the ladder, the flashlight marking his progress.
He dragged the ladder back, and the groundhog cameras Marquez and Kendall had buried recorded it all.
They heard boards pounded back into place. When his flashlight went out they waited for him to show at the corner of the barn, but after a minute he still hadn’t. Marquez heard Kendall’s worried “Shit, please no.” There was a chance he’d leave via a different route, climb into the rows of overgrown Christmas trees or come around the front face of the barn. He might even bury it up there and create new evidentiary problems.
Then they saw him leave the corner and s
tart through the orchard, and they let him get out in the middle before lighting him up. He took two steps, froze, and abruptly threw the bundle holding the knife he’d retrieved. Marquez’s flashlight caught the knife that had killed Petroni spinning through the air. It landed near the base of a gnarled apple tree, and Ungar made one dodging move to his left, dropped to his knees, calling, “I surrender, I surrender.”
“Sonofabitch,” Kendall said, “sonofabitch, we’ve got him.”
51
The next morning Marquez drove to the mini-storage with Kendall. The manager got up from his couch and clicked off the TV when he saw Kendall’s badge. He walked them down and unlocked the unit Ungar rented. Inside, they found a strange scene with candles and a rug and cushions, where it looked like he sat.
There were cardboard boxes they started going through, Marquez taking two, Kendall two, both slipping on gloves first. Kendall lifted a black leather wallet, showed him Jed Vandemere’s face on a California driver’s license, and after Marquez had studied it, dropped it into an evidence bag.
“Must have had Nyland bring him the wallet,” Kendall said.
“Nyland called him Bearman. I don’t think he was lying when he said he’d never met him. Same with the pair we did the buys from. They’d never seen him face-to-face. They’d pick the bear parts or bile products up somewhere remote, and then get an envelope from a bartender somewhere later.”
“What have we here?” Kendall said quietly, almost to himself.
He lifted an ornate wooden box, something made of teak and other hardwoods. For jewelry, Marquez thought, and watched him open it, heard him say, “Marquez,” knew from his tone it was important.
Resting on the velvet lining in the box was a California Fish and Game badge and even after all that had happened, seeing the badge affected Marquez. It turned him quiet and he worked through more of the boxes without saying anything. Crime techs arrived and Hawse. Marquez read through a journal of Ungar’s, his ramblings, what he called essays.
“He’s got tapes here,” Kendall said. “I’ll bet he recorded his conversations with you.” He added, “I don’t know if I told you last night, but we found a voice changer in his car.”
Marquez read Ungar’s tiny script, each letter made perfectly. Pages of writing, entries of things he’d done to people who’d crossed him. There were cases, some Marquez was familiar with, one, a poacher they’d busted last year, that Ungar noted, “Lost good supplier. Need to do something about them.” He read Petroni’s name, notes about Petroni’s patrol habits, where he liked to eat, buy coffee, drink, then the line “S successful.” A short sentence fragment after it, “Same old ursus,” and further into the notes and ramblings saw it again. This time it jumped out at him as a simple code for SOU. Ursus was Latin for bear, and Ungar used “Same old ursus” after Petroni’s name to indicate he thought Petroni was SOU. He read the name Mark Ellison, and it clicked that he’d read that in Petroni’s log, said so to Kendall now.
“There’s more than enough here,” Kendall answered. “It’s over. We can build the case.”
“I remember this name from Petroni’s log.”
“You’re thinking Petroni had some dealings with this Ellison?”
Marquez held up the journal he was reading so that Kendall could see it. “There’s a lot written on Petroni in here. He followed Petroni for months, wrote notes on his habits, where he ate, what he ate, meeting Sophie, Petroni and Sophie going up to the hunting shack. He must have shadowed him. Reads like he was sure Petroni was with the SOU.”
“We think Petroni told Sophie he was.”
“That’s what she told you?”
“Yeah, and stuck by it. Maybe he missed being undercover.”
Marquez read on about Mark Ellison, things written about selling gall to Mark Ellison. He looked through the rest of the box and another that had only clothes, and then Kendall suggested they back away and let the crime techs do their work. When Marquez stepped out of the unit he turned to Kendall.
“I’m going down to talk to the manager again,” he said.
In the manager’s office Marquez asked to see the list of everyone who rented here. The manager was a heavyset bearded fellow, from his tattoo, former Navy man. He pulled on his beard for a moment, then turned the computer screen so Marquez could scan the names.
“Where is unit 76 on the map?” Marquez asked.
“It’s around back from the one you’re looking in.”
“Opposite side?”
“Yep.”
Marquez read the name Mark Ellison again, made sure he’d read it correctly the first time. Now he looked at the map.
“Do you ever see this Mark Ellison?”
“I can’t say I remember him.”
“We need to open up that unit.”
With Kendall and the manager, Marquez walked down the row of storage units, all with metal roll-up doors, cinder block faces, but simple sheetrocked partition walls inside separating the units. He didn’t have to tell Kendall what he was thinking. Kendall was already there.
“It would account for him taking the bribes,” Marquez said.
“And explain some of the things he said to me.”
The manager took hold of the chain and rolled the door of the unit up, the door rattling loudly. They turned the light on and as they saw the setup, Marquez knew Mark Ellison was Bill Petroni. He’d rented the unit exactly opposite Ungar’s, and the manager explained how that was possible. This whole row hadn’t rented out until early summer, some units were still empty. The complex was new and still gaining traction. He kept talking but neither Marquez nor Kendall was listening, Marquez studying a couple of fiber-optic lines that fed into the wall separating Ungar’s unit from this one. He looked at the recording equipment and then at what else was in the unit.
Off to one side was a stack of belongings, not a lot of them, but what Petroni owned, what he’d had to store after the divorce.
There was also a small metal storage box of a type Marquez had seen on construction sites. It was new, bought at a Home Depot, the tag still on it.
“That’s going to have the bribe money it and everything else that relates to the case,” Marquez said. “Petroni was onto Ungar and building a case on his own.”
“Why didn’t he tell you?”
“He wanted to make the case on his own.”
“Wanted to show you up?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s here, look at this. Whatever he bought will be in that box, as well. Some of the bribe money might be in there, and the rest of it he probably used to make buys.”
“What was going through his head, not telling anyone?”
“I don’t know, but like you found out, the other wardens called him a real loner.” Marquez thought about it and then wondered something else aloud. “Maybe he told Stella. Or maybe somebody got worried that he’d told Stella.”
“Ungar knew and waited to deal with him, but he didn’t know about this. He didn’t know Petroni had this set up. It wouldn’t still be recording if he did.”
They could hear the equipment working, recording the crime techs on the other side of the wall. Neither of them spoke, thinking it out, then Kendall asked, “Have you ever heard of anything like this before?”
The only thing Marquez could relate it to was the drug world, where a drug cartel would sometimes keep selling to undercover officers just to take their money, not being worried about what came later. Ungar must have felt he could control the variables. Marquez talked it out with Kendall and knew it would be hours before the construction storage box was taken in and opened.
“How are you going to do this?” Marquez asked. “So far, he’s saying he’s not involved, right. Even after the knife last night. He’s got a story for that too, doesn’t he?”
“He did last night.”
“Why don’t you ask him if he wants to sit down with me this afternoon?”
“Why would he?”
“To try to beat me
one last time. To brag about what he had going. He’s that kind of guy and he’s way into bear.”
“He’s up for murder one.”
“Read his journal. Murder doesn’t mean that much to him, but he saw himself getting rich selling bile products.”
It was late that afternoon that Marquez’s hunch was borne out. He walked into an interview box and sat down across from Ungar, who was shackled, wrists chained down to the ring.
“You had an incredible operation going,” Marquez said. “Amazing what you set up out there in Nevada.”
“Are you here to flatter me into telling you something? I had nothing to do with killing anyone.”
“I’m a Gamer. Let’s just talk about bear.”
“The detectives think I’ll say something to you?”
“I don’t know what they think. I know they plan to charge you with murder, but that’s not what I’m here about. I’d like to know how long you’ve been bear farming?”
Ungar couldn’t stop himself. His eyes flickered over Marquez’s face, something triumphant in them. “Almost four years.”
“There must have been a vet involved.”
“I put in all the catheters myself.”
“You’re good.”
Ungar opened up a little, allowed he’d get the maximum sentence for trafficking in bear, but, “I’ll be out in under two years, at the most three.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Then I’ll come visit you.”
“And we’ll talk some more.” Ungar smiled, and Marquez said, “Let’s talk some more today about the operation because I’m curious, and I’m not flattering you, you really had it going on. The things you invented are impressive.”
They talked about the Nevada farm. Durham got a share of the profits, had owned animal operations himself, and knew the money to be made in bear bile and galls. Durham had been a good partner. The problem had been Nyland and the woman. Those were people that Durham had hired. The trough system Ungar had invented himself. He detailed how he’d figured out the systems and buying live bears, mostly cubs. His bile product sales were growing exponentially in Vancouver, San Francisco, particularly the San Jose area, and LA-LA was by far his best market. But he wouldn’t say what he’d cleared, wouldn’t talk about money.
