“I’ve lost visual,” Roberts said. “He moved in closer to the shoreline and I’m up here on this road.” Her tone was plaintive. “Where’s the plane? Where’s the patrol boat?”
The patrol boat was on its way from the north shore. A spotter plane had just lifted off from Truckee Airport and would fly over the lake within the next few minutes. Police were on the alert all the way around the lake. Everyone who could be notified had been. Marquez focused binoculars on the mountains behind the north shore. He saw a black shape cross low and fast above them and relayed it onto Roberts.
“I see the spotter plane.”
He watched it bank toward the lake, the outline of its wings sharper. He kept the binoculars up and heard Shauf working the radio, then the chatter of the pilot filled the van. Now Roberts directed the pilot and they heard his terse, “Lone male at the wheel of a boat running toward Glenbrook. Is that your man?”
Roberts’s voice crackled on again. “Boat should be a Colbalt with blue trim.”
“I’m taking it down lower,” the pilot responded.
The patrol boat checked in. They had the boat in view and expected to intercept it at Glenbrook. Alvarez communicated with the Nevada Highway Patrol, who dropped toward Glenbrook. Marquez watched the plane come low across the water. He lowered the binos and turned to Alvarez.
“Is Nevada clear that her truck should be there and that this is an armed situation?”
“Very clear.”
In the van they raced toward Glenbrook and the pilot confirmed blue trim, wasn’t sure about the make of the boat, wasn’t a boater, but definitely it was a lone male who’d reacted hard as the plane came in low. But who wouldn’t, Marquez thought, with a plane diving on you.
“Can they catch him before he docks?” Marquez asked.
Before that was answered a Nevada highway officer reported a woman in a Chevy Blazer backing down the boat ramp. Alvarez glanced at Marquez, answered the previous question, saying, “They say it’s going to be close.”
There was too much radio chatter and back-and-forth to ask for a description of the woman. The patrol boat closed in and used a bullhorn. The patrol reported that the man had stopped short of the dock as ordered and they were boarding.
“All right,” Alvarez said, and Marquez used his cell to try to reach Roberts.
It turned out the only thing the startled man would admit to was being late pulling his boat from the water. His blonde-haired wife was out of the Blazer now, and Marquez heard enough from the radio to know it was a fiasco.
“Wrong man,” Roberts said, as he got through to her. “He must have put in somewhere farther north. I’m just getting to Glenbrook. Do you want me to stay and deal with this or look for him north of here?”
“Keep searching. We’ll ask the patrol boat to go up the coast and get Nevada to redirect the patrol.”
But no agency likes a wild goose chase, in particular one based on loose information to begin with, and Marquez took over trying to communicate that they still needed help and that every minute mattered. He got the patrol boat to start north hugging the coast as best they could, though it meant skirting large shallow areas and working with binoculars, searching for a remote place he might have put in. Talk of the boat’s capsizing started. They looked for a hull and reported waves of four feet, and on land the search widened for the green Chevy pickup with the camper shell. Reno police went alert, watched the road over Mount Rose.
About an hour later the boat was found beached between rocks along a remote stretch, partially covered with a camouflage tarp the wind was removing. In Shauf’s van they drove toward it, and Marquez closed his eyes momentarily. He listened as the patrol reported their problem.
“We can’t put in here, and we don’t want to anchor too close to shore. Too many rocks.”
GPS coordinates got relayed, and Shauf found a place on the road shoulder to park the van along the road above the lake. On the other side of the guardrail was forest dropping steeply toward the lake. The boat was down there. Roberts pulled up and then Cairo behind her.
“You’re done hiking, Lieutenant,” Cairo said. “We’ll go down and check it out.”
“He may be hiding in the woods,” Marquez said. “Could be he panicked when he saw the plane and beached short of where he was supposed to meet her.”
It was a different sort of predicament. Three of the team went down, Marquez leading, and they didn’t find anything in the boat. The hull had been damaged when the boat beached, and it wasn’t going to be simple to extricate. They hiked back up and found what might be his tracks as he climbed toward the highway and his ride. Roberts started trying to line up a dog team. Nothing had been removed from the condo in Richardson Bay yet, but a piece of the bloody bandages could be taken from there to scent the dogs. One of the team would have to make a run over there, the realtor contacted and found, this stretch of highway secured, and yet, Marquez doubted they’d find anything.
Still, with the differing police agencies on the lookout for the pickup, there was little else to do. Marquez left Roberts in charge of the area search, and with Shauf and Cairo he conducted a sweep of the lake towns on the off chance they’d spot the pickup and Sophie. He talked to Kendall, who’d followed things as far as Glenbrook and since returned to his sheriff’s office.
“Where are you taking it now?” Kendall asked.
“We’ll start searching for this other bear farm.”
“Are you going out there today?”
“We’re on our way there now.”
“It’ll be dark in a couple of hours and more than likely, Nyland lied to you. This is what murder suspects do. They concoct fanciful stories that explain it all away.”
“We saw other tracks in the barn. You took castings, what have you done with those?”
“Nothing yet.”
“A truck big enough to move the bear cages was probably something like a Ryder rental.”
“All right, we’ll check the rentals. We’ll run the list of names by them.”
“What do you think about the idea Petroni’s car was brought back to Johengen’s in the same rented truck as a way to keep it from being spotted on the road?”
“Petroni in the backseat already dead?”
“Yeah.”
Kendall grunted, didn’t really respond.
“Either way, there were other bears,” Marquez said. “One got shot and was probably sick, the others got moved. I’m going to take another run out to Johengen’s tomorrow and look for what we missed.”
“You were going to come in this afternoon and sit down with me.”
“It’ll have to wait.”
Later, Marquez talked to Katherine from his truck cab, sitting outside a restaurant where Shauf and Alvarez waited inside. The initial search in Minden had turned up no obvious buildings, and they’d driven back to Placerville after dark. Roberts had reported that the dogs keyed on the scent of a piece of bloody bandage. Almost certainly, whoever’s blood that was had been in the boat and hiked up to the road. The trail had ended there, and the dog handler eventually got nervous about his bloodhounds searching along the edge of the highway. They’d held traffic for a while, then concluded the man driving the boat had gotten picked up along the road shoulder.
“And now you think it’s a different man?” Katherine asked.
“The informant that started us on this case.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, and we’ve got the same problem with our house. You and Maria are going to need to stay in the city.”
“Then we’re going to rent a hotel room and start using the construction money.”
There was a mixed message in that, one he’d have to think about. When he hung up a wave of depression mixed with exhaustion swept over him. Ungar was Nyland’s Bearman, but where was he? San Francisco police had gone to his apartment an hour ago and he wasn’t there, and not only that, they said there weren’t any computers anywhere inside, so he had to be moving one step ahead of them again. Marquez went in and ate with Shauf and Alvarez, registered Shauf’s sober face and Alvarez’s questioning look as he told them he wanted to make another search of the barn out at Johengen’s before leaving for Nevada tomorrow morning.
Alvarez sopped chicken gravy with a piece of bread and kept his eyes on his plate. His silence told Marquez he thought they were just spinning their wheels going back to Johengen’s. Marquez knew Shauf and Alvarez thought the right thing to do tomorrow was devote everything to searching for the Minden ranch.
Alvarez’s lean face betrayed another question, this one about Marquez’s judgment.
“Tell you what, I’ll go out there early alone and then we’ll go over to Nevada midmorning,” Marquez said.