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Dark now, with only a faint lilac painting the sky, soft amber spilled through the windows of the cabin. Marvin was about to turn into the long driveway when he heard three loud bangs on the trunk of the car. When Marvin looked in the rearview mirror he saw Sandy Stamos pointing his gun through the back window.
The sheriff quickly came around to the driver’s side, keeping his gun trained on Marvin.
“Put your hands on the steering wheel!” Stamos yelled.
Marvin did not hesitate. Both hands went to the wheel. The sheriff opened Marvin’s door.
“Out,” he said. “On your knees.”
Marvin followed the directions and climbed from the car, quickly getting to his knees.
“This isn’t what you think, Sheriff.”
“On your stomach, now!”
Marvin lowered himself onto the pavement. He felt the sheriff quickly place a knee in the middle of his back and then pull his hands behind him. Marvin was in cuffs a moment later.
“Why are you following me?” Stamos asked.
Marvin closed his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t as good as he thought.
The sheriff pushed the revolver into the back of his head.
“Why!”
“Because I need to talk with you, and I couldn’t chance doing it in Cedar Creek.”
“Talk about what?”
“Baker Jauncey. That hit-and-run was no accident.”
Cedar Creek, Nevada
Wednesday, June 28, 1995 6 Days Prior . . .
SANDY STAMOS SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE OF HIS FAMILY’S CABIN. Marvin Mann was across from him. Bottles of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale sweated beads of condensation onto the table in front of each of them. Sandy had noticed the tail just north of town and decided he had two options. The first was to try to lose whoever was following him. The second was to lure them out to the cabin where Sandy knew the terrain and would have a tactical advantage. Because he was certain, some way or another, that whoever was following him was involved with the Baker Jauncey case—on which he was stuck in a stalemate with the Nevada state investigators—Sandy decided to bait the tail into the foothills.
When he arrived at the cabin, he turned on the lights, ducked out the back door, and backtracked through the woods—the trails of which Sandy had hiked hundreds of times. He found the car parked on the frontage road just outside his driveway. Now, he sat across the table from the man who was following him.
“Tell me what you know,” Sandy said.
“Baker Jauncey’s death was not an accident.”
Sandy took a sip of beer. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Marvin’s lips separated. “You know he was killed?”
“Yes. But that’s about as far as I’ve gotten.”
“Yeah, well, whoever ran him over did it on purpose.”
“I take that back,” Sandy said. “I know a little more than what the newspapers reported. Baker Jauncey wasn’t killed during a hit-and-run accident. Someone cracked him in the head with a baseball bat first. Only after he was dead did they run him over with a car.”
“What? Everything I’ve read about the case said he was killed in a hit-and-run.”
“Everything you’ve read is wrong. I met with the medical examiner in Reno and her unofficial opinion is that Baker died from a brain bleed caused by blunt force trauma to the back of the head. All the injuries from being run over by a vehicle happened after he was dead.”
“Christ on the cross. It’s worse than I thought.”
