Shell Games (2 page)

“And he was here for you today. He hiked up the creek last night on a mission for Fish and Game.”

“We don’t run missions.”

“He talks like he’s on a mission and he’s an ex navy SEAL, did you know that?”

“Yeah, he told me once.”

“He reported in to you and maybe you said you’d handle us. You’re fighting a war to save the abalone and he’s on the front lines.”

“I think I already saw that movie, Ruter. Why don’t you cut to the chase?”

“All right, I will. You ought to be full of apologies for giving the killer or killers an extra three hours to get away, but you’re not and Davies talks like what he did was the right thing to do, calling you first. So I’ll be calling your chief this afternoon and asking him when shellfish became a higher priority than murder.”

“I’ll give you his phone number and my cell. That’s the best way to get ahold of me.”

“You’re not leaving yet. You stick with your picnic table a little longer.”

Marquez made phone calls. He picked up his voice mail and listened to a message from Jimmy Bailey, a ponytailed informant out of Pillar Point, near Half Moon Bay, thirty miles south of San Francisco, a man his team had nicknamed “Docktalk.” Next, he called Fish and Game dispatch and ran the Supra, got the name
Peter Han and a Bay Area address, Daly City. He asked dispatch to check Stocker’s and Han’s names for boat registration and they came up negative. It was another hour before Ruter came back to him.

“What kind of money is in abalone?”

“Roughly fifty dollars a pound.”

“What do poachers take a year? Give me a dollar value.”

“Ten million.”

“And what do these divers make on urchin?”

“A dollar fifty a pound.”

“Fifty a pound for abalone, a dollar fifty for urchin,” Ruter repeated. Marquez nodded. Ruter continued, “I guess you do need help if you can’t keep a lowlife like Stocker from pulling that many abalone. You’re not covering the base and you’re worried about it? Is that it? Davies called and you jumped in your truck without thinking about procedure.”

Marquez let it slide and Ruter pointed at the camcorder lying on the picnic table.

“Did you take pictures of the victims?”

“No.”

“You don’t mind if I look at the tape, do you?”

“Go ahead.”

Ruter talked as he watched the video playback. “I wish we had equipment like this, but we had to fight just to get cell phones. That’s our big victory this year.”

Marquez knew what tight budgets were about. The SOU budget had been halved this year. His team had been cut to six. He watched Ruter run through the video, then lay the camcorder down.

“Thank you,” Ruter said, hitched his pants, and walked down to his partner.

Marquez waited a few minutes then drove down to where they had Davies. Both rear doors of a county car were wide open and Ruter sat next to Davies with one arm up on the seat back. He was a short, bullet-headed man, salt-and-pepper hair parted on the left
side, red in the face from walking up the slope repeatedly in the heat. He sat with his trousers hiked up, one foot out the door, left hand covering his inside holster.

“I’m taking off,” Marquez told him.

“Stay available,” Ruter said. “Don’t get too far undercover.”

Marquez touched Davies’s shoulder, said, “Give me a call, I want to talk to you more about this.”

“Where are you going to be tonight?” Ruter asked.

“In Fort Bragg.”

“If I want to talk to you, where do I find you?”

“Use the number I gave you.”

Ruter turned back to Davies. “Is that the number you called this morning?” he asked, and Marquez never heard the reply.

A couple of hours later, he was driving between Mendocino and Fort Bragg. The sun was low on the horizon, its last light streaking the water. His phone burred softly and he looked at the number showing on the screen, then matched it to Ruter’s card.

“Your friend killed them,” Ruter said, his voice hoarse now. “And this isn’t about abalone. Stocker was suing him and Davies saw a way to use the poaching as a cover and take care of the problem.” Ruter paused, waiting for a response, but Marquez had gone as far as he was going to go with the detective today. “Davies went berserk in that bar and Stocker was going to win the lawsuit. Stocker’s lawyer says the case was a no-brainer and Davies was going to lose his boat.”

“Everything is a no-brainer for a lawyer.”

“Davies told me this afternoon that someone should have turned Ray Stocker’s lights off a long time ago.”

“I don’t think Davies is your man.”

“You’ve got a lot of opinions for a game warden.”

“And you solve cases faster than any detective I’ve ever met.” He heard Ruter’s hard exhale. “Look, Ruter, I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner.”

“So now you’re sorry? I’ll tell your chief that for you. If I was your superior officer, I’d—”

Marquez pulled out his earpiece and clicked the phone off. He drove slowly north looking out over the darkening water as DEA memories invaded him again.

Marquez got into Fort Bragg
after dusk and met Sue Petersen at a pizza parlor in the old part of town. A red neon sign arched over the entry of Carlene’s and she was standing in the softer shadows to the side, wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and brown leather loafers. Her black hair was cut short, her face animated as she smiled. They’d worked together for eight years and she was the only warden left of those he’d started with in the SOU.

“You ironed your T-shirt,” he said, as he walked up.

“I figured you were buying dinner, so I went all out.”

Before Davies called this morning, Marquez had bought yellow onions, garlic, basil, canned tomatoes, and spaghetti. His truck smelled like wilted basil. It had been his night to cook at the SOU cold house in Fort Bragg, but after leaving Guyanno he didn’t have it in him and called Petersen suggesting Carlene’s. He dropped the basil in a trash receptacle on the sidewalk before they walked inside.

In the back was the cedar-paneled room Carlene’s called the party room, and they asked for a table there because it was empty. A waitress took their order of salad, pepperoni pizza, and a pitcher of beer almost as soon as they sat down.

“No beer for me tonight, John.”

The waitress was still there, but he didn’t change the order, and after she left, he asked about Tran Li, the Vietnamese immi-grant they were building an abalone poaching case against. They had more than enough to take him down, but so far, Li hadn’t led them to anyone else. Li had either outsmarted them or not sold any of what he’d brought home. He had a big freezer in his garage, they had a search warrant in place, but Marquez had been holding off because he figured Li was the best lead they had to the buyer working the coast. Li was diving every day, taking as much as he could, and it was Marquez’s gut feeling that Li was connected to their bigger buyer. He knew Petersen didn’t agree with the decision to wait. She thought Li would plea-bargain and give up the buyer and that they should have taken him down today.

But she gave him the day without comment. Li had gotten into Fort Bragg near dawn and dove with his older son for six and a half hours. The SOU had videotaped them in coves and rock gardens and then later in Noyo Harbor as they unloaded the Zodiac and loaded their car. The rest of the team was camped outside Li’s house tonight in Oakland.

“Li and son got gas at the Chevron and stopped at the Sea-Lite Motel on the way out,” she said. “We went in after and I talked to the manager. They ate in the little restaurant there. She remem-bered Li’s kid having a hamburger and she found the ticket and showed me.”

Li had stayed in the motel twice since starting this poaching spree and Marquez was sure the motel was a meeting place.

“The kid must have wolfed the burger because they weren’t there twenty minutes,” Petersen said.

Li was wearing the team out running, sometimes twice a day, between Fort Bragg and his house in Oakland, a three-and-a-half-hour drive. He’d get in the fast lane and sit on eighty miles an hour. He was a compact, hardworking diver who’d argued his own case in front of a Santa Rosa jury when they’d busted him three years ago. The jury had been barely interested in abalone poaching and the judge sympathetic to Li’s immigrant roots and his desire to better his family. He’d been lectured by the judge, given a suspended sentence and reduced fine. Marquez had hoped he’d never poach again.

A week and a half ago they’d recognized him at Noyo Harbor, like a bad bear coming back, Petersen had said. They’d tracked him eight out of the last nine days. Committing the same offense within three years would make him much more likely to get a prison sentence this time around. It would add to the leverage they’d bargain with.

The waitress arrived with a plastic pitcher and slid it onto the table, beer sloshing over the sides. She put down two salad bowls, wiped her fingers, and walked away. Marquez offered beer to Peter-sen again and when she shook her head he filled his glass. As he tipped his head back and drank he saw an image of Ray Stocker’s head and heard Davies’ drawling comment that Stocker was look-ing up at the sky for his home planet in the constellation of Orion. They’d run Davies’s name through NCIC, the National Crime Infor-mation Center, and had come up with two minor arrests, nothing significant. The drawl was Georgia. They’d have to find out more about him now.

“Tell me more about these killings,” she said. “You said on the phone Davies hiked up the creek canyon from the beach lot. That’s a long walk.”

“That’s what he claims he did. Parked his van at the beach and walked through the culvert under the highway and used night vision goggles to get up the canyon.”

“Why does that creep me out?” Petersen asked.

Marquez reached for his beer and knew what was coming.
Davies had made Petersen’s permanent list when he’d surprised her and another warden during a surveillance in Eureka five years ago. He’d thought they were planning to steal from a boat and had bumped the van they were hiding in with his truck. Petersen ended up with a bloody nose and wounded pride and had never forgiven him. She still claimed it had given her a chronic sinus problem.

“He’s a loner, John, he lives on that boat to avoid people. I’ll bet part of him misses military life. Not so much that he wants to go back, but enough to like the connection with you. He needs that action with purpose and wants your respect because it vali-dates him. To keep you talking to him he has to produce informa-tion. No information, no contact with you.”

Marquez scratched the poison oak rash on his left arm and ate a couple forkfuls of oily lettuce. Though he couldn’t generate a real appetite, it was nice to be with Petersen and to hear the voices of people out in the front room. Good to be near normal things after the killing scene.

“He gets a rush out of making a problem for poachers, which is not the same as protecting abalone,” she said.

“Leave it that we don’t really know that much about him,” he replied. The waitress slid the pizza and their check onto the table. He watched Petersen lift a piece of pizza, the strands of cheese stretching before she tore it with her fingers.

“Are you going to eat,” she asked, “or just drink beer?”

He drained the rest of his glass thinking about what came next. “Tomorrow, you and I will try to find this Danny Huega. We’ll go up the canyon first and I’ll show you where they were and what they had going.”

They left the pizza parlor and drove back to the cold house at the outskirts of town, a nondescript brown-painted house with a sizable back garden that had long gone to seed. The department rented the house from a relative of a warden and Marquez was careful how many wardens he had here at one time. Before the last
round of budget cuts, when his team had still been ten wardens, it was harder to control the flow. Now, with the SOU down to six, including himself, it wasn’t as hard to keep the neighbors from being suspicious, although they’d already had to decline a request from a schoolteacher neighbor who’d asked that one of them come to her third grade class and talk about the food chain because their story was that they were government biologists studying kelp beds. Lately that had become the joke. When you were late getting somewhere it was because you were teaching class.

Tonight was the first time in years he’d been here alone with Petersen. She made tea and walked into a bedroom, talking on her cell with her husband, Stuart. She was a long time on the phone and Marquez checked Shawn Cairo and Carol Shauf, two of the SOU wardens staked out down the street from Li’s house. Li was done for the night, had backed into his garage and lowered the door, but given the way he’d been at it, they assumed he’d dive again tomor-row. When he hung up, Petersen sat down across from him on the couch. She cradled her tea mug, leaning forward, her eyes on his, ready to say something but still hesitating.

“This is really hard for me.”

“Something happen at home?”

“In a way.” She smiled then looked down at the coffee table. “Stuart wants me to resign tomorrow.”

“Let’s catch this guy first.”

“John, I’m pregnant.”

He reacted slowly, then it began to hit him, and he smiled and felt genuine happiness for her. “That’s great. Congratulations. That’s really great. How much pregnant? When’s the baby due?”

“I know it messes everything up.”

“It doesn’t mess anything up.”

“The timing couldn’t be worse, could it?”

“There’s no good timing for having a kid.You just do it, I think.”

“What do you know about that?”

He remembered a conversation she’d had with him years ago, telling him she wanted to have two kids someday. That was before either had married and in the weeks when they’d slept together, and briefly imagined having those kids together. He’d never told anyone and doubted she had either. It had all come and gone one fall and what came after was a familiar banter and they’d avoided situations where they were alone together for a year or more. He tried to remember Petersen’s exact age. Thirty-two, he thought, and could see the emotion crossing her face. She didn’t need to explain. He knew how much her job meant to her and he knew already how much he’d miss her.

“I’m only ten weeks, but Stuart has been waiting five years, John. This life has been really hard on him and I’ve kept putting it off. He’s never liked me being away so much, never has liked the whole SOU thing.” She reached over and punched him on the arm. “Can you believe it, me, a mom?”

He could see the happiness in the back of her eyes and it touched him. It pushed the killings back. It held the DEA memo-ries at bay.

“And Stuart’s big case settled,” she said.

“The railroad thing?”

She nodded and he remembered her husband, whose self-employed existence as a lawyer had made their finances sometimes rocky. Stuart had confided to Marquez at a Christmas party that he had a case that was going to make them rich.

“Did it work out like he thought?”

“Better even. It totally changes everything.”

He started to ask again what the lawsuit had been about, then stopped himself because it didn’t matter. The railroad lost and Stuart’s client won. What mattered was she wanted to tell him it was time for her to move on and that she was pregnant and going to raise a family.

“You’ll have to name those kids after the railroad.” He looked
at her hands. She’d had to put the tea down and press her palms flat on her thighs because she couldn’t stop the shaking. “Yeah, how am I going to make this work without you?” he asked.

“Like you make everything work.”

Nothing was working lately, and he was waking at night having trouble breathing. Except for the case against Li, everything was run-ning hard the other way, and by now, they should have something. They should have a lead to this big buyer and they had nothing.

“I want to stay on another month and you need me to,” Petersen said.

He studied her face. They both knew that the department required a shift to light-duty status with pregnancy and keeping her on meant not telling anyone and assuming the liability him-self. As her direct supervisor it was his responsibility.

“A month from now it’s over for me. I’m not coming back as a uniform,” she said. He nodded but hadn’t answered her request, though they both knew he’d do it. “I don’t need light duty, at least not yet.”

Then, as if she had to because they were here alone or to even things up, she asked about his marriage, how it was going, were Katherine and he getting it worked out.

“We’re talking.” Tomorrow, it would be exactly five months since he and Katherine had separated.

She waited for him to say more and when he couldn’t find an easy way, she said, “I don’t mean to pry, John.”

After Petersen called it a night, Marquez put on a coat and took a walk. The murder scene had left him more emotional than he’d expected and he played it back in his head, the creek trail and clearing. He walked several miles and after getting back to the house wrote out details of the case that seemed too familiar to him. He read for a while trying to lose the uneasy feeling and went to sleep around one.

Before first light the next morning he headed down Highway 1
with Petersen. They bought coffee at the Chevron station in Fort Bragg and she was lighthearted and easy as though talking last night had lifted a weight from her. When they took the Guyanno Canyon cutoff the sky was streaked pink with dawn, the road empty and pale in the early light. A new lock secured the chain across the entrance. They stepped over it and over crime tape that had either been taken down or had fallen in the night. He walked up the creek trail with her and his chest tightened as they walked out the trampled grass across the clearing to the oak tree. He had to say something about what he was feeling, to Petersen, at least.

“This is going to sound hard to believe, but I’ve seen killings like this before, a lot like this, so much it’s kicking up memories.”

“Where?”

“In Mexico in the ‘80s when I was undercover with the DEA.”

“What do we do with that?”

“Nothing, right now.”

“But you’re telling me for a reason.”

“The man behind those killings was named Eugene Kline, a contract killer working for the cartels. As far as I know, he’s still operating and he used to run dope from Humboldt County up here.”

“He’s a dope smuggler, too?”

“He had an organization of his own. I’ve got some stuff at home I’ll show you.”

They drove back to Fort Bragg and into town, stopping at the convenience store first, asking for the clerk Davies had named as Stocker’s doper friend. He got a blank face from the woman behind the counter until they pressed her, then made it clear they’d keep coming back. At the surf shop, the owner and his friend standing near him had heard that Ray Stocker and Peter Han had been chained to a tree and gut slit. Marquez identified himself as Fish and Game and asked what they knew about Stocker diving. They didn’t know anything. They thought he dove occasionally. Or
maybe he didn’t dive at all anymore. They weren’t sure. If he did dive, he might poach a little ab, but he didn’t surf anymore and looking at each other, passing some signal about law enforcement, they remembered he’d given up diving and weren’t sure about him selling dope. Did they know what he did for a living? No, because they didn’t hang with him. In fact, they hardly knew him, but if there was any possible way they could help they’d like to because they were pro-environment.