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 immigrant 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 remembered 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 Petersen 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 looking up at the sky for his home planet in the constellation of Orion. They’d run Davies’s name through NCIC, the National Crime Information 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 validates him. To keep you talking to him he has to produce information. 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 tomorrow. 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 memories 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 running 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 himself. 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.
After the surf shop they split up and worked the town. Marquez walked into the bar, Hadrian’s, where Davies had fought with Stocker. The bartender was a heavy-bellied bald man missing two fingers on his left hand who wanted to see ID before he’d say anything. Marquez flashed his badge, pocketed it.
“Sure, I knew Ray Stocker. I didn’t know his friend, but Stocker practically lived here. He drank and smoked every dime he made.”
“Were you working the night he fought with Mark Davies?”
“I called the police when Davies went nuts.” He added, “It’s mostly losers that come in here.”
“Is Davies a loser?”
“What’s he doing with his life?”
What are you doing with yours, Marquez wondered. He looked around the dingy room, a couple of salmon lacquered on planks on the walls.
“There are hundreds of abalone shells up at the Guyanno Creek campsite,” Marquez said, watching the bartender’s eyes. “We’re trying to figure out what boat Stocker was working off of.”
“I’d like to get those shells. My girlfriend makes jewelry.”
“See what you can do for me and I’ll see if I can get her some shells. Call the number on the back of the card.”
Marquez hooked up with Petersen again and they checked Noyo Harbor, walked the dock, and met with the harbormaster, who told them the Coney Island had pulled out early that morning. He’d heard that Stocker and Huega had both been staying down at Albion River Campground.
They dropped down the road to the campground and looked at the campers of the more permanent residents, an American flag flying from one, the river bridge holding the highway with its galvanized steel and concrete supports towering overhead. Scanning the field Marquez saw few temporary campers. He checked with the office and the young woman told him Danny Huega had stayed there until yesterday. She didn’t know where he’d gone and didn’t know who Ray Stocker was. As Marquez left the office he saw Ruter’s sedan dropping down from the highway.
“Called you twice this morning,” Ruter said.
“I haven’t had a chance to call you back yet.”
“Busy morning checking fishing licenses?”
“Something like that.”
Both detectives got out. Streatfield engaged Petersen, saying “I understand you’ve got a poaching problem along the coast.” Marquez heard Petersen take him up on it, and Ruter motioned him to walk over and talk privately.
“I’ve got that report I was going to fax you.”
Marquez took the copy of the police report and leaned back against the detectives’ hood. There were statements from Davies and Stocker and several from witnesses. He read a statement from a woman.
“My husband and I were at the bar seated three stools down from the man who started the fight. One minute he was sitting there and then he kind of jumped up and went straight over to a table where there were I think four men. He flipped the table over and hit one of them in the throat. I was watching because of the way he got up from the bar. It was very weird. I thought it was some kind of martial art or something the way he jabbed at his throat. Then he hit him in the eye with the leg of a chair. It was very fast and one of the other men tried to stop him and he started attacking that man. It was so out of control it was scary, but I couldn’t tell what was happening after that because my view got blocked. We just wanted to get out of there.”
“That’s your friend,” Ruter said.
Marquez glanced at the detective’s eyes, saw his pleasure in the reaction he’d gotten. Then he read the rest of the report.
“Does that sound like the man you know? Davies was sitting at the bar talking to someone about the Middle East. There’s a statement from that man, too,” Ruter said.
“I just read it.”
“He might have killed Stocker that night if he’d been allowed to.” Ruter paused. “This morning, when he came down to meet us we put him in an interview box and he talked for an hour just as calm as could be. He didn’t have a problem with anything, said he understood we had to do our jobs and agreed it didn’t look good, and by the way he said he was sorry he involved you. Then he wanted a bathroom break, but instead of going down to the bathroom he hauled ass out of there. That blue Econoline is parked down at Noyo. Must have driven there and got on his boat. Not charged with anything, but he’s the hell out of Dodge. What do you think about that? Where’s he headed, Marquez?”
“As far from you as he can get.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“No.”
“We need some of your time this morning.”
“Let’s get a cup of coffee and talk.”
“Not here. We’d like you to come in to the sheriff’s office. If you want, your warden can take your truck and you can ride with us and we’ll drop you afterwards.”
“We’ll follow you.”
“Your partner could be sitting around for a while.”
“Why are you doing this, Ruter?”
“Because like your friend, you’re not telling me everything you know and I’m going to be with you until you do.” Ruter smiled. “Does that make it clear enough?”