Shell Games (18 page)

“Hey, buddy, we’re trying to back up.”

“You just got here. Why don’t we talk first?”

“Move your vehicle, please. We’re late.”

He shut the passenger door and after a few seconds the woman in the driver’s seat honked again, but she wouldn’t make eye contact when Marquez walked up along her side. She wouldn’t look up. She already knew they’d blown it and Marquez flipped his badge and then pulled out his phone. He watched the agents as the number rang through.

“Douglas here.”

“Marquez.”

“What can I do for you today, John?”

“I’ve got two of your finest trapped alongside a curb in Marin.”

“Put one of them on. Put Harkin on.”

Marquez looked at the agent getting out of the car, his face reddening with anger. “Harkin will call you back on his phone because we’re taking off, but maybe you want to explain?”

“Why don’t you come here for that?”

Marquez hung up and looked at Agent Harkin. “Call home. Your dad is pissed off.”

“What if I can’t get ahold of them?”
Heinemann asked. “What if they won’t deal with me anymore? What if I call the number and no one answers?”

“You go find Bailey and tell him you’re back. If you can get Bailey to talk to you, we have something.”

“Basically, you want me to try to burn Jimmy.”

“Basically, what we want is to get to the people buying the abalone. Let me make an analogy to the heroin trade.”

“Come on, man, give me a break, ab ain’t heroin.”

“Bailey is like a poppy grower to us. We’re after the real traf-fickers, the people who move the product. But, yeah, you’d be in a courtroom testifying against Bailey.”

“I wouldn’t be any good in a courtroom.”

“We talked about this yesterday. If you’re getting cold feet, say so. If you want to think about it more, that’s fine. I can get some-one to walk you back to your cell.”

But he didn’t seem to need to and late in the afternoon they watched him drive away from Richmond in Meghan Burris’s Datsun pickup. A GPS transponder had been magnetically attached to the engine block and tied off to the alternator so it wouldn’t drop loose on a rough road. Another was buried in the cab. Security people at PacBell would monitor the pin registry of Heinemann’s cell phone, allowing them to identify the phone number of anyone he talked to. The cab was wired for sound so they could listen to phone conversations.

Heinemann made the first phone call now. It was sooner than they’d asked him to, his nervousness obvious in a break in his voice, and Marquez worried about that. He’d watched Heinemann closely as they’d handed him the keys to his truck, had watched him cross the parking lot, all confidence gone from his face. The worn engine of the Datsun pickup had coughed blue smoke and Heine-mann had the phone in his hand before he’d reached the highway.

Now, he was on the Bay Bridge, moving slowly in traffic. He’d turned on his radio to some station called Alice that Marquez rec-ognized because Maria listened to it. He’d changed channels, then turned the radio off again and Marquez talked to him now.

“You doing okay?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I know how it feels to be waiting for the call back.”

“Yeah.” Heinemann was quiet and then asked, “Should I call Jimmy now?”

“If you’re ready, but you want to be yourself.”

“I’m not nervous, at all.”

“Remember, if it doesn’t feel right we can back out.”

Heinemann made the call to Bailey. They had a mike clipped to Heinemann’s collar so they could hear the conversation, could hear Heinemann’s breathing. Bailey faked concern that he’d been in jail, saying, “Dude, those assholes were at my house. I know what it’s like. You didn’t say anything to them, did you?”

“Fuck, no.”

“You gotta hang.”

“No problem. Hey, have you seen Meghan around the dock? I’m heading home, I’m done with this shit. You got me in way out of my league, man.”

“Haven’t seen her, but I’ve been like laying low except for the Fish and Game pricks kicking my door in.”

The team drove ahead and behind Heinemann’s pickup. A lap-top was set up on Marquez’s passenger seat, its antenna picking up a satellite signal. They didn’t have the real-time capabilities of the CIA or FBI, but as long as Heinemann worked with them they’d be able to keep track of the Datsun. Marquez listened to the next phone call as Heinemann drove past Candlestick on 101.

“You made bail,” a male voice said.

“Yeah, I had to put up my boat.”

“What did they charge you with?”

“Stealing a boat, commercial trafficking in animal parts, a whole bunch of shit. I get arraigned in a couple of days. I didn’t give them anything. It was fucking hard to get out and my attorney says I might have to plea-bargain.”

Marquez shook his head. That wasn’t the line they’d fed him and he shouldn’t have said anything about a plea bargain, and yet, it was ordinary enough.

The man on the other end grunted. “What’s this lawyer’s name?”

Heinemann tripped up now, getting confused, giving one name, then pulling it back and saying the lawyer was named Grimwald.

“Grimworld?”

“No, like John Griswold.” Heinemann spelled it out and it was the wrong name, didn’t match the card they’d given him.

“Your girlfriend is with us and we’re going to meet you on your way home. You give me your lawyer’s card when I see you.”

“What do you mean Meghan is with you? She has nothing to do with any of this.”

“It’s just how it worked out tonight and she’s like us, she wants to see you.”

“I did what you told me, but they must have had that old Chi-nese guy set up.”

“We know that and everything is cool. Don’t worry so much. I’m going to give you directions you need to remember, so maybe you want to write these down. You want to make this meeting. You don’t want to fuck up any more than you already have.”

“Why do you have Meghan?”

“Don’t worry about it, she’s having a good time. She likes to party.”

“This isn’t right, man. She doesn’t have anything to do with this shit and I did what I was supposed to do.”

“We’re going to talk to you and I want to know about the peo-ple that interviewed you, the game wardens, who it was and then you and your sweetheart will be together again.”

“It doesn’t have to be so heavy.”

“It’s not heavy. You just fucked up, that’s all.”

“There were two of them. One was a big guy with kind of short blond-brown hair. He’s like six-foot-three or something and the other was a blonde woman and stocky.”

“I want names.”

“I don’t have them. He’s a lieutenant, I guess. She called him Lieutenant.”

“You’re starting to sound stupid, kid.”

“What’s the big deal with the names?”

Good, Marquez thought. Hit back at him. The only chance of keeping this going was Heinemann pushing back.

“They offered you a deal, didn’t they?”

“Sure, and I strung them along. That’s why the charges are still hanging. They think I’m going to do something for them.”

“Oh, yeah, what’s that?”

“Look, all I want to do is get back to my boat and then we can meet or whatever. If you want me to dive a couple more days, that’s cool.” The man didn’t say anything in return until Heine-mann asked, “You there?”

“Keep driving south and go through San Jose. At 7:00 call this number.”

He recited a number, had Heinemann read back what he’d written down, then hung up. Marquez cued his radio, talked to the team before calling Heinemann. “It’s over,” he said, “a no go. We’re going to have to find out whether they’ve really got Meghan Burris and we may have to ask the locals for help.”

He took a call now from the phone company. They had a cell number on the caller, a name and billing address. He called Heinemann.

“We’re done, Mark. They know something is up. Do you have other numbers to call Meghan at?”

“Yeah, her house. She shares a house.”

“Start making calls.”

“And then what? Keep driving south like he said?”

“We’ll play the game until we know she’s okay. Are you good with that?”

“Yeah, totally.”

“But you’ve got to do just what I tell you because it may get complicated, and we’ll probably have to ask for help taking them down if it turns out they have her.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Marquez called the CHP, gave them a heads up they might have a problem they’d need help with. They drove past San Jose and toward Morgan Hill. Heinemann made the 7:00 call and got instructions to exit the freeway fives miles up the road. He drove east into dry hills that climbed toward a reservoir and a park. Beyond that was ranch land, a lot of it steep terrain, hills of rye
grass that folded into ravines dark with scrub oak and brush, all of it dry as kindling this time of year.

Shauf and Alvarez went ahead, their headlights cutting the dark a mile apart. Marquez followed, reading the GPS on Heinemann’s truck and relaying the info.

“He’s off the paved road. He’s on one of the dirt roads in those hills. When he slowed down someone must have been there on the road and directed him.”

They found the cutoff, a cattle rancher’s dirt track, a chain cut, a gate that swung open when Alvarez pushed it. Marquez looked up at the black outline of the hills and couldn’t see headlights, but GPS said he was up there, back about two miles. This was someone’s ranch. He reconfirmed the readout with Alvarez looking over his shoulder, double-checking him. The blue glow showed the Datsun had stopped and they debated their next move. Then it started moving again and accelerated rapidly, then stopped again, and he wondered if there was a problem with the GPS transponder.

“What was that about?” Alvarez asked.

“I don’t know.”

Nothing more happened for several minutes, then a flicker of light showed way up in the hills and they backed away and then a van came down the dirt road and ran through the gate without slowing. It hit the asphalt, turned back toward 101, and there was only Roberts and Cairo on that end. Marquez talked to them, told them to follow initially but to ask the locals to move in and help pull the van over if they couldn’t get a CHP response.

“There are at least two men and probably armed. We’re going up to look for Heinemann.”

They turned up the dirt road, dust kicking up behind the truck as they climbed. The road was well graded but steep and Marquez had to sit in second gear and take it slow as they wound through the ravines. As they crested a ridge and could look out toward the darkness of the Central Valley to the east, the readout showed they
should be close. But he didn’t see the vehicle and kept going up until the road flattened on an open shoulder of the mountain. He checked in with Roberts while studying the screen. Heinemann was about a half mile back, according to the GPS readout.

“We’ve temporarily lost them,” Roberts said. “We called the CHP and the sheriff’s office but they left 101 before any backup got here. They headed west on Springer Road and we had to give them room and we lost them around a curve. They’re here somewhere. There are some rural properties out here. We’ll have to go house to house.”

“You need local deputies for that.”

“10-4.”

They drove back down to where the readout said the transpon-der was and Marquez shined a flashlight off the side of the road, standing on the edge in the loose soil left after the road had been bladed. His light only shone partway down the steep ravine. He looked for marks and then saw broken grass and walked down to a gash in the dirt and realized the Datsun had rolled end over end. It had started straight and then the tracks through the grass ended and the next mark was where the front end of the truck had dug into the slope. He called back up to Alvarez.

“Stay up there and I’ll check it out.”

“Should I call anyone?”

“Not yet. They may have dumped the truck. Heinemann may have told them it was wired.”

The dry grass was slippery and he dug his heels in and still slipped several times. He kept checking ahead with the light, could see where the ravine bottomed well below, but there was brush there and the truck must have carried into it, because it wasn’t visible. He was finding parts now, glass, the hood folded like a discarded napkin, and he hoped Heinemann was in the van and had con-fessed to the GPS and the wire, and someone got the bright idea to lose the wired Datsun down this ravine.

Now he reached the brush and could see tires and realized that the rusted cab had collapsed. He smelled gasoline and heat from the engine and fought his way in through the brush. He leaned over, broke a piece of greasewood off and tried to shine the light in the driver’s side. He smelled blood before he saw it and then a hand that he knew wasn’t Heinemann’s. He climbed over the truck to the passenger side and when he got the light positioned it took him a moment to reconcile what he was seeing. Meghan Burris’s head was lying between her shoulder blades, pinned by the crushed truck cab. She’d been nearly decapitated, perhaps had gone through the windshield. He figured he’d seen enough over the years, but he had to turn and take a deep breath before cuing the radio, relaying the situation to Alvarez. They searched the slope for anyone else, wondering if they’d find Heinemann thrown from the truck.

They didn’t find him, and from the road learned that Roberts had hooked up with the sheriff’s deputies and was checking the houses along the stretch where they’d lost the van.

“How many houses?”

“Approximately ten,” she said, “and one of the deputies is say-ing there’s a dirt road that they might have taken but he thinks only the locals know about it.”

They took it, Marquez thought. “How far does it run?”

“He says ten miles. They’ve already got someone on the other side, but no luck so far.” She anticipated his next thought. “It picks up a paved road that works its way out to the coast and we’re look-ing at how we can intercept. Cairo is already headed out there.”

He waited with Alvarez for the fire department unit and then went back down the slope with two firemen. He gave a statement to the police from up on the mountain and much later, after Meghan’s body had been removed and searchlights set up with detectives combing the area, the conclusion was that she’d made the ride down the slope alone.

They’d lost the van and before midnight Marquez pulled the
team back, told them it was time to find a motel. He checked into a Best Western and tried to sleep, but most of the night his mind churned with images of what had happened, fragments of the phone conversation with Heinemann. He rebuilt the chain of his decisions. Was it arrogance that made him send Heinemann back out there thinking he could fool someone like Kline? Had Heine-mann watched her die or was his body up there somewhere? They’d do a daylight search. He’d leave part of the team down here. At 5:15 he got up and showered. The light was off in Alvarez’s room when Marquez checked out. He’d call the team from the road and started north in the darkness.

The next call he got was near dawn and from Ruter. “I hope it’s not too early,” Ruter said, “but you seem to be a morning guy. I’ve got abalone for you that came out of Huega’s girlfriend’s house and don’t tell me I was supposed to have called the DFG. This thing is a cluster fuck now. Your old friends at the DEA are involved and the FBI has taken over like you said they would. They send me for coffee.”