Night Game by Kirk Russell Page B

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 Vacavilleand 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