At dawn Marquez stepped over crime tape at the fishing access with a tightness in his chest he hadn’t felt since his DEA career ended more than a decade ago. The tape sagged with condensate from the fog. The sandy path out to the water was dark, the morning cold. He walked the parking lot and then out to the river, as though seeing it again would provide a reason for Anna to stage an elaborate scam to disappear.
After he left the fishing access he stopped at a diner in Isleton and ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast soggy with a commercial butter spread that dripped through his fingers onto his pants. Later in the morning when he walked into Chief Bell’s office, Bell’s eyes went immediately to the stains the butter had left. Bell didn’t like undercover work, didn’t really like the idea of wardens out of uniform, and equated neatness in appearance with clear thinking.
It was Saturday, the rest of the floor empty, the building quiet, Bell making the point he’d come in just for this. He made a second point, that he’d talked with Selke and understood Burdovsky had burned them.
“Where do you think your operation goes now?”
“We’ve got one suspect I want to try to flip. If he’ll work with us we can make several arrests in the next few weeks and then it doesn’t all go to waste.”
The faintest smile started on Bell’s face. “Lieutenant, all August has to do this morning is pick up the phone. Won’t he call everyone he’s bought illegal sturgeon or roe from?”
“We don’t connect all of the suspects with August. There are other people.”
“You don’t know if August is working with or buying from these other suspects, and in fact, what you don’t know has been highlighted in the last eighteen hours. Let’s face the music, Burdovsky identified you for August. She blew the operation. It’s over. You’re done. I’m meeting with Chief Baird in an hour to discuss the SOU because I think we’ve also reached that door.”
“What door is that, Chief?”
“Last night was an embarrassment.” He paused so the importance of that wasn’t lost on Marquez. “The question I’ll raise with Chief Baird today is whether the SOU is viable in its current configuration. I don’t believe this would have happened if your team had been at full strength. You would have known she was staying with August. Keep your phone with you today. I’ll call.”
Marquez left Sacramento and drove back into the delta on Freeport Road. He talked to Shauf and Cairo, told them where to meet before taking a call from his stepdaughter, Maria, who was with her mom in Boston. Though his wife, Katherine, and his stepdaughter had been gone on a college tour only a single day, it felt like weeks.
“What colleges have you seen?”
“Boston College and Tufts. We’re on our way to Harvard Square. We’re going to BU this afternoon. Mom wants to see it.”
“You don’t?”
She breathed hard into the phone as she walked. He tried to picture them in Boston, white sky and cold when he’d checked Boston weather on the Internet.
“Dad, this trip is more about her.”
“Have you told her what you told me?”
“Not yet. Where are you this morning?”
“In the delta on a sturgeon poaching case, but don’t change the subject.”
A month ago, Maria had lightened a streak of her hair from dark brown to a pale gold sheaf falling down her left temple, similar to her mother’s streak of white hair. She’d done that despite arguing nearly continually with Katherine for the past six months. What she’d talked to him about on Thanksgiving was her plan to take a year off before college.
“I’ll talk to her today or tomorrow,” she said. “She’s going to get really upset.”
Katherine had gone one semester to a college in Vermont twenty-five years ago and had loved being away from home and in college. Then her mother had been diagnosed with ALS and she’d had to drop out, return home to help care for her and get her younger sister through high school. She’d signed herself up at the local junior college. Now what she hadn’t had she wanted for Maria.
After hanging up with Maria he drove into Freeport and parked across the street from a restaurant the SOU used occasionally as a rendezvous point. He bought three coffees to go, walked up to the levee road, then down the wood stairs and around the old building to the marina dock. Gusts shoved two plastic chairs around, and he caught one to sit on. He propped the other so it couldn’t move and rested the coffees on a splintered dock board at his feet. He tried to drink his but found his gut was already churning.
He looked out over the river. The fog was gone and cirrus clouds were running ahead of the forecast storm. Shauf and Cairo were still fifteen minutes away, and he thought back to the first contact with Anna and his first meeting with August. Because of the smaller size of his team he’d done something he wouldn’t ordinarily do, made direct contact with the suspect, visiting August at his San Francisco store under the guise of opening a catering business.
Marquez had bought tiny olives imported from a boutique Spanish producer, capers from the Aegean Islands, ghost shrimp from the delta that August advertised with the old line, “So fresh you can’t see them.” He’d bought Caspian caviar that the Ashland, Oregon, wildlife lab had tested and come back negative on for Pacific white sturgeon DNA, though the SOU was fairly sure August was buying poached sturgeon roe from the Sacramento/ San Joaquin delta and repackaging it as Caspian beluga, or mixing it with Caspian beluga. Unfortunately, “fairly sure” was as far as they’d gotten with August, which was why Anna had seemed like such good luck.
He’d given August his card with the name John Croft, told him he was a cook going into business on his own, starting a catering business called Three Bridges Catering, meaning he’d go anywhere in the San Francisco Bay counties. You build a cover story, make it whole enough to stand up, make it so it wears like a comfortable shirt.
August sold walnut oil, honeys, tins of sardines, dried fishes and seaweed, balsamic vinegars, olive oils, a whole vocabulary of artisanal products. He spoke seven languages, made a point of telling Marquez that, eyes glittering, the kind of guy who needs you to be impressed by his credentials, wants you to think he’s superior to you. He claimed to travel the world looking for “what was left,” and Marquez didn’t doubt that. Some of the best of what was left of sturgeon was in the Sacramento/San Joaquin delta, and August certainly had been there.
Marquez had stood on the polished chestnut floor of August Foods, handling tins of Iranian caviar, talking business, August memorizing his face while explaining that he was working through his stock of the 2003 harvest of Caspian caviar. He didn’t know what he would do next, because the UN through CITES had banned any commercial trade in sturgeon roe from the Caspian Sea. They’d shut down the 2004 harvest, blaming the poaching for decimating sturgeon stocks. But that was in September. By October CITES had reversed itself, and the ban was lifted. Go figure.
Now Shauf and Cairo walked around the corner. Marquez handed out the coffees and Shauf freed the other plastic chair. She sat across from him in the chair, the wind at her back, and Cairo sat on the dock.
“So when do we get the word?” Shauf asked.
“Bell told me to keep my phone close this afternoon.”
“We may as well go home.”
“No, with Baird there’s a good chance he’ll want to think it over this weekend, so I’m thinking we’ll go see Raburn tomorrow, and see if we can flip him. It’ll shock him hard when he sees my badge.”
Shauf shook her head, saw the reasoning but had a hard time with it. She’d handled the surveillance of Abe Raburn. She had him nailed for commercial trafficking in sturgeon, and they’d hoped to take him down along with the rest once they’d built the full case.
“This is all so wrong,” she said. “If it turns out Burdovsky is alive I want to see her do time.”
Marquez looked to Cairo, who’d been quiet through all this. Cairo nodded. He was for giving it a try with Raburn.
An hour later Marquez was on the phone to Jo Ruax, the lieutenant who ran the DBEEP boat. They’d worked in pieces with the Delta-Bay Enhanced Enforcement Program crew. He figured from the way Bell had talked this morning he’d already called DBEEP, possibly Ruax directly. He followed Ruax’s directions and parked along a road on San Pablo Bay, then walked down the trail and found her sitting between trees, binoculars focused on a boat on the bay. Her lips were chapped, her cheeks red from the cold wind. She smiled a tight smile, handed him the glasses, and behind her the horizon carried the dark gray band of the approaching storm. She was a hard-charger and had wanted to direct the surveillance on the sturgeon operation. She’d argued against bringing in the SOU.
“I heard this morning you’re going to get shut down,” she said.
DBEEP was funded by both the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources. Their focus was the fisheries, and Ruax knew a lot more about sturgeon than he did. What she didn’t know more about was undercover work. “If that happens we’ll get together, and I’ll make sure you’ve got everything on everyone we’ve been watching. Did my chief call you?”
“He did. He wanted to know if I’d ever met Anna Burdovsky and what I thought of her. I told him what I told you.”
“That you think she’s a flake?”
“Yeah.”
In a lot of ways he liked Ruax, and he had a lot of respect for DBEEP. They had an identity, knew who they were, and Ruax was tough and serious and good at what she did.
“We’re supposed to get the word this afternoon, Jo. If we go down, I’ll call you.”
“What happens otherwise?”
“We’re going to try to flip Raburn and take another run at it.”
He caught the faint shake of her head. “Good luck,” she said. “He’s just about the last guy I’d want to have to rely on.”