Nevada held Ungar while they tried to sort out the situation with the help of the California SOU. The ranch was owned by a Marion Stuart aka Durham, and Durham couldn’t answer questions, might not ever be able to. He had yet to regain consciousness and according to doctors attending him, suffered an as yet undetermined degree of brain damage due to oxygen deprivation. One doctor suggested in private to Marquez that Durham’s future, if he had one, was in a vegetative state in a nursing home. He was, the doctor added, perhaps unlucky to have been rescued.
Marquez returned home, asked Bell for a week’s vacation, and worked on the case against Ungar from there. Without testimony from any of those directly involved it was particularly difficult, and they had yet to obtain a warrant to search Ungar’s apartment.
Nothing had been found in his car or on his person.
Alvarez and Shauf also requested a week off, and for the same reason, one Marquez had yet to inform Bell of. Then a call he’d waited two days for came from Kendall. His voice was hoarse, said he’d been battling a fever.
“The knife you found in the barn was used to kill Petroni. The fingerprints on it are Ungar’s, but the DA doesn’t like the chain of evidence. He’s got a problem with you finding it alone after we’d already made two thorough searches of the barn. He sees a defense attorney tearing into us, you on the stand.” He coughed and added, “They’d come after you personally.”
“That’s all right.”
“That’s what I say too.” Kendall coughed again, apologized for having a cold, then said, “But you see the problem.”
“Sure, but aren’t there enough other pieces?”
“The problem is Ungar will claim he didn’t do the actual killing. In fact, he didn’t even know what the knife was. He saw the dried blood on it, picked it up, asked Durham or Nyland, and got told it was used on a bear. With those two out of the picture he’s free to say whatever he wants.”
“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 start 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.”