by Kirk Russell
“We’ll find him,” he heard the boat’s pilot say, but he knew they wouldn’t. He’d lost the money and they had nothing. He leaned over the side looking down into the dark water. Who was the diver? Was it Kline?
36
“You’re a stand-up guy,” Douglas said outside Mar-quez’s house, and Marquez waited for the reason Douglas had driven up here. His heart had jumped when Douglas pulled into the driveway, afraid Douglas was here to deliver bad news in per-son. Marquez hadn’t gotten home until dawn and this was where the FBI insisted he be, as though Kline would contact them again. “You probably came pretty close to buying it last night. Good thing you got on that ledge.”
“What about the Irishman’s comment she was on a boat?”
“Do you believe him?”
“I want to believe she’s alive. How much money was in those bags?”
“$200,000. A lot of one dollar bills.”
That brought a rush of anger in Marquez. He squinted against the sunlight, his eyes tired, his mind veering off from how Kline would react to the short money.
“Tell me. You shorted him, so what was your plan?”
“To be there, John, and I think you know that. He didn’t bring Petersen; he wasn’t ever planning to make a trade, which probably means he doesn’t have one to make.”
It was Alvarez who’d figured out that the man on the Zodiac had gone off the side wearing dive gear and swum to shore. The Zodiac steering had been locked and it had run out to sea drawing all but the vehicle surveillance with it. The FBI theory was that he’d floated the money ashore with him and met his ride.
“There was a last image on the Web site before it went down,” Douglas said. “You’ll see it soon enough. Her head was tipped back and she had a knife at her throat. The facial contusions were deeper, more colored. I’m told they took at least forty-eight hours to develop the color they had. It means that not all the images were shot the same day, but whether that’s good or bad we don’t know. I don’t want her husband to hear any of this. He doesn’t know about it now and doesn’t need to.”
“I won’t be the one to tell him.”
“How computer literate are you?”
“Not as literate as my fifteen-year-old stepdaughter.”
“I hear you on that. The site is down, but he may come back up, and if he does and keeps the same sequencing going, it may not be a very happy ending.”
“You’re talking around the edges of whatever you have to say.”
“What I’m getting to is, it’s our opinion there’s nothing more that can effectively be done. We need to let him make the next move, because we don’t have one.”
“I think the Irish bastard was telling at least part of the truth; she’s alive on a boat somewhere. We can check every boat over sixty feet in California.”
“And if you get close you may cause him to kill her. Better for your team to sit tight, hard as that is, and we’re all over the boats anyway.”
“I’m not going to have my team stand down.”
“Then, if you find a boat, don’t do anything except call me.”
“We’re going to come up with a list of boats.”
“And we’ll work together. Here, I brought you another one of these.” Douglas fished a telelocator out of his pocket. “Don’t lose this one.”
He watched Douglas drive away and then turned to Katherine. She’d been here when he’d gotten home and he figured the FBI must have called her, must have alerted her though he hadn’t asked. Now he talked to her about his fears for Petersen, his sense of loss and responsibility, the terribleness of having her taken this way. She touched his face, her fingers cool and smooth. She said he ought to get some rest, but what he did after she left was lay out how the team was going to check all vessels over sixty feet. Had to be at least that big, he thought, or at least they’d work from that point. He’d have to get Baird to lend wardens. He took a call from Stuart Petersen, and the conversation was very hard, Stuart saying repeatedly that they had to try to contact the kidnappers, go out to the media in a new way, that the FBI was stonewalling. Marquez could feel Stuart’s hope dying. After he hung up he closed his eyes, thought back over each thing he could remember from last night.
Somewhere in the late afternoon he fell asleep, waking at dusk with a blanket over him and hearing Katherine and Maria talking, taking comfort from the murmur of their voices before closing his eyes again. An hour later he rose and walked into the kitchen. Maria was there alone, her mother was in the shower.
“What’s going on, Maria?”
“I’m making dinner tonight.” Maria hugged him. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
“Count me out on dinner,” he said.
“Oh, you have to eat or you’ll lose weight.”
“I lost too much weight once. I wouldn’t want to do that again.”
“Maybe there’s a message there for me.”
He smiled at her sarcasm. You were only young and self-centered a particular way once and then life showed you otherwise. But he had a lot of tolerance for that. He hadn’t been that fun to talk to as a kid, himself. “How much weight did you lose?” she asked.
“About thirty-five pounds. Some people on my undercover team were killed and I had a hard time with it. I felt guilty and unworthy, and there was suspicion thrown my way because I’d been the only one who’d made it. And I didn’t handle that very well, couldn’t handle my integrity being questioned. It made me very bitter and angry and I had to walk it off in the mountains and when I did, I didn’t eat enough.”
He told her more. He told her of a moment of change, of self-awareness that had happened to him, a dawn on San Francisco Bay, watching the sunrise from a boat. The light on the water had been particularly beautiful, like a thousand prisms reflecting that morn-ing. Hoping he wasn’t sounding too corny, he tried to tell Maria how he’d realized what he loved and what mattered and what it meant to embrace the positive.
But he could see that Maria had lost more weight. When they ate dinner an hour later, she cut a couple of small slivers off a chicken leg and counted out the string beans she put on her plate. She finished and asked to be excused.
“Mom, will you clean up since I made dinner?”
“Sure.”
“Is it okay if I do my homework with the TV on?”
“Don’t turn it on too loud.”
She turned the TV on before going down the hall toward her room and Katherine got up quickly from the table. She walked over to the edge of the kitchen wall where she could see Maria’s bathroom. When Katherine went around the corner he figured Maria was in the bathroom and knew Katherine was listening. A few minutes later, Katherine was back.
“This is her routine now.”
“Let me try to talk with her again tonight.”
“She’s going to tell you she’s got to do her homework and right after that she’ll say she’s too tired to talk and has to go to bed. John, I know you can’t possibly think about this right now. Was there any news at all today? Did they find anything in the caves?”
“No, but we’re going back tomorrow.”
At a little after 11:00 Maria came out of her room. Marquez was out on the deck with Katherine. Maria waved a hand good-night from the deck door and Katherine coaxed her out and hugged her, then stepped around her, leaving Maria with him. As she left, Maria said sharply, almost bitchily, “What was that about?”
“She loves you.”
“She shouldn’t try to control me then.”
“You’re the one in control.”
“Tell her that.”
“I haven’t said much to you about it yet, have I?”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to start tonight?”
“Why don’t you sit with me a few minutes?” She sat on the picnic bench and wouldn’t look directly at him. “If we didn’t say anything, we wouldn’t be worth anything as parents. I told you the mess I got myself in. I let things go too far, sometimes. Maybe you’r
e a little like that, too.”
“Oh, so now we’re alike.”
“We might have that in common. You ate and then went straight to the bathroom, right?”
“So you’re accusing me, too?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Why would I want to throw up?”
“Maybe you want to control your body, because maybe the rest of your life doesn’t feel like it’s under control.” She didn’t give a sign one way or the other. “Mine feels that way right now, too. What’s going on in your life?”
Maria deflected the question. “Mom says you shouldn’t be leaving tomorrow and should do what the FBI says.”
“Then I wouldn’t be in control.” That got the slightly crooked shy smile that was hers only, that was there when he’d met her when she was four. “But that’s not really it, either, Maria. Sue Petersen is missing and I have to do everything I can to try to find her. I stayed here today and shouldn’t have.”
“Mom says she might already be dead.”
“She might be, but if she’s alive she’s got to believe I’m look-ing for her.”
“Well, mom is always wrong.”
“She’s not wrong about you.” He paused a beat. “I know you, Maria, the lying has got to be making you feel lousy. You’ve got a problem here and you’ve got to face it, and if anyone has the will and the strength to do that, it’s you.”
Maria didn’t answer but something was happening. He saw her shoulders shaking and tears starting in her eyes. When she looked up the tears were streaming down her face and she cried silently, then shook her head, sobbing, confessing something he couldn’t make out initially. Her voice wavered, talking now about problems with her friends, feeling like an outcast, people ignoring her, calling her a freak behind her back.
“You don’t look like a freak.”
“Everybody says I do.”
“You don’t. You were bringing your weight down and maybe it got a little away from you and went further than you hoped. It’s the kind of mistake I would make.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“The thing about friends is you only have a few true ones in a lifetime, and I wouldn’t sweat the rest. If I hadn’t been there last night, then I wouldn’t have been Petersen’s true friend.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Talk to me, talk to your mom, start there. We’re your friends. She’s all over you because she loves you, but she’ll back off when she sees you turn it around.”
“I mean at school.”
“You’re beautiful and bright, Maria. You’ve got it all going your way and you’re going to have to use that great will of yours to work this problem out. That’s what got you into this and that’s what’s going to get you out. But first you’ve got to try to figure out where it started.”
“I already know that.”
“Then go back to where it started and unravel it. Take it a day at a time. Two good days and maybe a bad day, then three good days in a row. Four good days. I’m having a real hard time with Petersen missing, but I’ve got to keep on with the SOU team. And you’ve got to keep going forward with school and what you have going. I’ll make a deal; I’ll tell you how it’s going for me and you tell me how it’s going for you. Can we make that deal?”
She nodded and got awkwardly to her feet. He followed her inside. From the hallway she turned and looked back to him, her face a vulnerable cross between child and woman.
The next morning he made coffee and stood on the back deck as high clouds to the east streaked with color. He drank a second cup, calling everyone in the unit, talking over the plan for the day, then called Chief Keeler.
“Douglas told me yesterday that Kline doesn’t experience ordi-nary emotions,” Keeler said, his voice strained and raw. “He doesn’t have any conscience, at least not in the way that we think of one.” Keeler added that he’d been up since two in the morning, thinking about Petersen. “Nothing like this could have ever happened when I started here thirty years ago. We couldn’t have imagined it. Every decade or so a state ranger or warden would get killed by poachers during a confrontation, but nothing like this cat and mouse with poachers who have better equipment than us. That goddamned Internet has done more to help criminals than anyone else.”
Marquez walked back into the house explaining why he was sending Alvarez back to check the Van Damme caves. The FBI hadn’t done their search for evidence at low tide and he wanted to do that. He picked a list of boats off the table, heard Katherine and Maria moving around in the back rooms.
“I got a list of boats yesterday, Chief, everything longer than sixty feet that has docked at a California port in the last month. I’m going to head up the coast this morning.”
“They asked that you remain available.”
“I’ll be back tonight and I’m available by phone.” Marquez paused a beat, unsure how Keeler would react, but he seemed okay with it. “The last place they had me go was up north. We lost a full day yesterday.”
Marquez hung up remembering a day years ago with Petersen when they’d been out at Point Reyes checking on an abalone bed. A tipster who was leaving her boyfriend but turning him in to Fish and Game first insisted he’d stripped it. Marquez had gone into the water and found the bed intact. Petersen had laughed when he’d surfaced and said the ab bed was there still. Then they’d sat in the warm sun along the beach and eaten sandwiches. She’d taken in the day and her fingers sifted the warm sand and they’d talked about what would come next and gathered up their lunch trash and headed on.
Marquez limped out of the house, one of his legs a little sore. He loaded equipment but was on the phone until after Katherine and Maria left. Now, he backed his truck around, registering that the new side window was the only one without dust. He saw a piece of folded paper under the windshield wiper just before taking off, and got out, picked it off the glass, and unfolded a lemon-colored piece of stationery.
“Thanks, John. I love you. Your daughter.”
He read it twice because there’d always been a careful accuracy to her signings, usually finishing any card or note to him with “your loving stepdaughter,” and he’d never asked her to pretend otherwise, although she almost never heard from her true father. Katherine had done the real child-raising and he’d helped out from the sidelines. With this current problem, Katherine had done the difficult part and he was just coming behind with some talk, and despite the note, there was no saying whether he’d made any dif-ference with Maria last night. Still, he folded the note and put it in his pocket, meaning to keep it.
Three hours later, Marquez left the coast highway and started up Guyanno Canyon. The road was narrow and laced with the tar used to repair cracks. He wound up through the trees, remembering the day he’d come to meet Davies and what had changed since then. He’d talked to Ruter yesterday afternoon and Ruter had volunteered that Davies was still his number one suspect in the Guyanno mur-ders and threw out an idea, that Davies had led Marquez down the coast to San Francisco, then ditched his boat before fleeing the country or at least California. Trying to make it look like some-thing had happened to him.
“You still think this is about abalone poaching, but it isn’t. I know you still don’t believe me,” Ruter had said. “I don’t know about Peter Han. He may have been the equivalent of an innocent bystander, but Davies definitely came to kill Stocker.”
“What more have you learned about Han?” Marquez had asked.
“Neither the ATF or DEA have any record of him, nor do the people we’ve interviewed up here. If he sold dope, the people he sold to aren’t around. His background is sketchy, but we know he was hanging with Stocker and Huega.”
Marquez mulled the conversation as he drove the canyon road, closing in on the campground now. Down to his left the oaks and bays grew thickly along the creek. Farther up the canyon he could see white sky above the mountains and the rock along the spine. It was beautiful country, yet the first story he’d ever heard abo
ut Guyanno Creek campground had been about a group of bikers who’d arrived late one night and then held hostage and repeatedly raped two young Swedish women who were on a trip across the United States, and he believed he could feel that same darkness now as he parked and stepped over the chain.
He limped up across the broken asphalt, stopping short of the creek trail. This had been a torture/execution, but what drew Kline here? What could two abalone poachers reveal to him and why were they worth so much effort? He might kill them for cheating him, but he wouldn’t come all the way up here to do it. Kline would send someone like Molina to straighten it out.
He weighed the idea that Davies had led Kline up here and somehow participated in the killings. He shook his head in frustra-tion. He was going down the wrong path again, it came back to the problem of what would motivate Kline to take these guys out. He tried to think clearly, tried to separate what he really knew from everything else, but his worry and anguish over Petersen kept clouding his thoughts. Why had Kline come to Guyanno Creek? Why kill these two?
He started up the creek trail and hiked to the clearing of dry grass and thistle, then crossed to the tree where they’d been killed. He touched the cut in the bark where the knife had been buried and where the chain had scraped as the men writhed. He saw the tracks of feral pigs, where they’d rooted the earth checking the dried blood at the base of the tree. Stocker here, Han there, and he touched where Stocker’s back had been, thought of the photos of Han sent to Billy Mauro that they’d assumed had a racial slant. Maybe they’d been wrong. Maybe no one had bothered to take any photos of Stocker. He turned and looked across the clearing and saw the moonlit night in his mind’s eye, heard Davies’s voice in his head, the account he’d claimed that Huega gave him, Huega who’d escaped in the truck. He saw them marched across the clearing, Stocker cooperating, Han breaking and running at some point. What could Han know that Stocker didn’t? He thought about that on the hike back down and called Douglas’s cell phone when he got to his truck.
“We’ve talked about your informant on the Emily Jane, but was the FBI also selling abalone to Kline’s network?” Marquez asked. “Were you supplying your informant with abalone so he’d be valu-able?” He heard Douglas breathing quietly on the other end.
