by Kirk Russell
He met with the team and gave them everything he’d gotten from Douglas, then talked it over with Keeler and sent three war-dens back to Pillar Point and Cairo and Petersen to Fort Bragg. They’d stay on Bailey and wait for Heinemann and check out some recent tips. Marquez called Katherine and she invited him over. When he got to her house the front door was open and he could hear Katherine and Maria in a sharp exchange. It was the same thing again, the same pattern.
“I’m having dinner in my room tonight,” Maria was saying. “I have too much homework.”
“What are you having?”
“Tomato soup.”
“What else?”
“Toast.”
“That’s not enough.”
“I had lunch; I’m not hungry for anything else.”
“What did you have for lunch?”
“A sandwich, and it’s none of your business. I’m not having this soup anymore.” Through the open deck door, Marquez watched Maria slosh a pot of soup into the sink and fling her toast into the garbage. She saw him and said, “I’m not eating anything tonight and no one can make me. I’m sick of this.”
“Go to your room,” Katherine said, “I’ll talk to you there.”
Marquez heard her door slam and Katherine stood with her hands on her hips glowering at him. She picked up the soup can, slammed it into the garbage, held up a little plate of peanuts, no more than ten scattered across it.
“Look at this,” she said, “and I’m supposed to let the doctor handle it.”
“Can you force her to eat?”
“I’ll spoon-feed her like a baby if I have to. Her period has stopped and her bones are going to be as brittle as sticks in a few months. This is going to stop now and that stubborn little will of hers isn’t going to prevent me from making her eat. I will not let her destroy herself because she wants to look like one of these emaciated godforsaken models. You could cut paper with the hip bones of some of those women.”
“Didn’t her doctor set a goal of a pound every four days?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“She told me she’s going to make that.”
“Guess what? Anorexics lie. They deceive. It’s part of the game. I’ve got two friends who started down that path twenty years ago and they’re still skin and bones. They exercise constantly and they actually think they look good, but they look like they just walked out of Auschwitz and they don’t fool anybody. That isn’t going to happen to my daughter.”
“You’ve got to give her a chance.”
The conversation went down from there and he didn’t end up having dinner with Katherine. He drove home. That night he fell asleep in a chair on the deck with a blanket wrapped around him. He dreamt of Africa and his first wife, Julie, a morning out in the bush. He smelled the early morning coffee and the acacia trees and grass. They held tin mugs and crouched, smiling at each other, watching the black silhouettes of elephants move across a plain in the dawn. Julie sat close to him again in the night and he felt what he’d felt that morning, that the world was open and theirs to make and the life ahead was going to be grand. Her hand had slid under his shirt and around his back and he’d held her tight against him after they’d made love.
The sensation was so real in memory that as he awoke he felt as though he’d violated his marriage with Katherine. His face was wet with dew and his neck kinked from sleeping in the chair. He rose clumsily and a deer bounded away in the darkness downslope. He laid the blanket on the chair, walked in the house, and fell asleep again in the bedroom, a hand on Katherine’s pillow, his mind still floating in the dream.
Later, it was a call from Douglas that pulled him back from his personal problems. It was early, a red sunrise, and Douglas said a male body had washed up at the base of cliffs near Daly City. A hang glider pilot who’d been scratching low along the cliffs yesterday had spotted a corpse but inexplicably had waited until midnight to call 911. The rough description was close enough to be Davies, and Douglas was offering Marquez a ride down.
“Unless you want to follow us,” Douglas said.
“I’m going to continue south, so I’ll meet you down there.”
A Coast Guard helicopter was in the morning sky alongside the cliffs. When he met up with Douglas, another FBI agent, and local detectives, it became clear they wanted him there to help ID the body.
“We’ve got a way to get you down there,” the detective said, “But I’ve got to warn you it may not be pretty. They don’t always float and a lot of times the decomposition gasses will leave them standing on their heads and bumping along the bottom. Was this a friend of yours?”
“Someone we’re looking for missed a meeting and his boat was abandoned.”
“I got a feeling you’re just the man I want to talk to.”
The detective grinned, showing yellow teeth, and they walked out the half mile. Marquez belayed down on a rope that had been set up. Douglas came down the same way and the other agent stayed on top. The detective got lowered in a basket by the helicopter and then they were on the small beach, moving across the black rocks.
The hang glider pilot had launched and scratched his way north, trying to find enough lift to make a good day of it. He thought at first that it was a dead seal, and now, seeing the body wedged in the rocks, wrists tied and arms bound behind the back, ankles bound, and the head facedown and still hidden, Marquez could understand why. The pilot had bagged up his kite and gone home. Later, his conscience got the better of him.
The body was swollen with gas. They backed up for a wave that lapped halfway up the corpse and the detective talked. “The rescue people hate this. They want to come in, pick up the body and go, but they leave stuff behind when we let it happen that way. This one is naked, but we might find something down here in the rocks.” He pointed at two exit wounds in the back without commenting on them. “I’ll bet they had him take his clothes off before they bound him. Let’s get him turned over.”
They had to drag him back and then flipped him. His nose and eyes were gone and a small crab dropped out of his beard. A lot of his scalp and one side of his face had rubbed off. It wasn’t Davies.
“Is this your man?” the detective asked.
“No, but I recognize him.”
Marquez looked at Douglas and then at the body again, remembering the phone call two days ago, the muffled voices, the gunshots. Heinemann looked like he’d been in the water longer than that, but maybe, just maybe. He turned to Douglas.
“I need to talk to you about a phone call I got a couple of days ago and there’s some information in my truck you’ll want.” He looked over at the detective. “We got him killed. We had him wired up and then lost him.”
Heinemann’s skin was the color of putty. He’d been stripped, bound, thrown overboard like a sack of garbage. That probably meant he told them everything first.
“He was working for you?” the detective asked.
“More like we were using him and he was using us. We’ve been chasing an abalone poacher.”
“This is about poaching?”
“Yes.”
Douglas cut in. “Let’s go up top,” he said, and to Marquez, “this was for you. He sent you a message.”
32
Marquez pulled what he had on Heinemann out of the truck and waited as the detective copied the parts he wanted. When they got to the murder of Meghan Burris a light seemed to go off in the detective’s head. He knew about it, more of the pieces connected for him, and Douglas took the conversation from there, his hands moving slowly in the air as he spun a story.
Marquez didn’t need to hear it and walked back over to his truck. He dropped the tailgate and called Petersen back. There was a light wind off the ocean this morning, not enough to generate any lift for the glider pilots, yet air junkies were arriving and a few had unfolded their gliders out on the sandy launch area. He watched them as he talked with her.
“I’ve asked around about the two Salt Point divers,” Petersen said. “
One guy I talked to thinks they have a rented house in Fort Bragg and they’ve been diving north of town. I got a street name and thought I’d check it out.”
“Do it, but take Cairo with you.”
“He’s down at Van Damme State Park checking another tip. There was a CalTip call last night that he—”
The clattering of helicopter blades drowned her response and he watched the body bag swinging in a metal basket beneath the hovering copter. They lowered the basket, slipped the bag out, and the helicopter rose into the fall blue sky and started up the coast. He heard Petersen clearly in the quiet that followed, about Cairo following up on a tip and finding nothing so far. She gave him the street name in Fort Bragg for the Salt Point divers and then said good-bye. He flipped the tailgate up and looked at Douglas, want-ing to talk alone with him before leaving.
Beyond the edge of the parking area, out on the flat sand and dirt along the top of the cliff, four hang gliders had been unfolded and their keels rested in the sand. He watched one of the pilots sliding ribs into the bright-colored sail to draw the wing taut and saw the awareness of what was going on over here, heads nodding toward the police vehicles at one end of the parking lot. He couldn’t look at the gliders without remembering the year that followed after he’d returned home from the hospital in Texas. After he’d exhausted his money and given up on finding Kline.
It had taken the winter to heal his body and the next spring he flew to San Diego and took a bus down to the Mexican border and began hiking north on the Pacific Crest Trail. In the week he’d lingered among the highest peaks of the Sierra, in Muir’s Range of Light, he’d watched hang gliders circling with hawks as they caught thermals rolling up the dry eastern face from the desert far below. He’d watched the pilots negotiate the turbulence and trash air over the great mountain faces while he sat high on the rock try-ing to figure a way to move his life forward again. He remembered hiking in moonlight the hundred switchbacks up from the meadow and lying on the summit of Whitney under the cold brilliance of stars, trying to find the motivation to return to society.
He looked from the gliders back to Douglas, still remembering the Pacific Crest, how he’d moved in the early and the dusk hours, largely avoiding people, but encountering bear and deer and then elk as he got farther north. Near the Washington and Oregon border, as the fall closed in, he’d helped a woman with a badly sprained ankle, carrying her pack, assisting her back to a trailhead, and that ordinary act had been the catalyst that brought him home.
Now Douglas walked over to him. “We’re going to assist on this one, but I’d like it if you gave us everything you know about or had going on with Heinemann.”
“Sure, but I think you’ve got everything at this point.”
“I’d also like a way to reach this Tran Li.”
Marquez wrote down Li’s phone numbers, tore the page out of his notebook, and said good-bye to Douglas.
“This one bothers you because you feel responsible,” Douglas said. “But you’re not. Heinemann got himself mixed up with these assholes.”
“I wish it was that simple.”
“Let him go, he made his own bed. Listen, I got a call on the way down here. Your Bailey is back in Pillar Point.”
“Thanks for that. I’ll go see him.”
Forty minutes later, Marquez was in Pillar Point, standing above the docks looking down at Bailey scraping paint on his boat. He talked to Petersen again before walking down. She’d seen dive equipment in the driveway of a little asbestos-shingle house in Fort Bragg. An old Chevy Nova, pumpkin-colored, was parked out front, matching what the retired ranger had remembered. It was probably the right house. She hadn’t seen any activity but had scouted several good places to watch the house from and was currently heading north to check a couple of other coves she’d heard these divers might be working.
Marquez walked down to Bailey, who wore nothing but a pair of shorts that hung loosely on his hips and wraparound mirrored sunglasses. He held a two-inch putty knife that he’d been using to peel paint from the cabin door with and cleaned the knife as though Marquez wasn’t there, dropping a curled paint strip into a plastic bucket on the deck of the boat.
“We’re working on a way to charge you, Jimmy.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong except use a shit batch of primer that didn’t dry tight. This is going to be a bitch to repaint.” Bailey’s pupils were pinpricks, his eyes carrying a hardness Marquez didn’t know he had in him. “I knew you’d come by today.”
“You’ve done a pretty good job burning us, but we’re not far from bringing it down around you. You could be standing in a lineup tomorrow.”
Bailey flicked a large paint chip into the water. He scraped the knife blade on the top of the bucket and started on the door again, saying, “Did you drive all the way down here to dump shit on me again?” Bailey grinned at a thought, his chapped lips pulling back over his teeth. “If you go through my house again and you find another babe in the attic, you’re welcome to her. You can use my mattress. I know that’s what you were thinking last time and she was pretty fun when she was coked up.”
“I found her in the truck after your friends rolled it down the ravine. The cab collapsed on her and snapped her neck. Her head was turned around.”
“I never liked her face anyway, but she had a nice ass.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she had a nice tight little ass. Too bad you got her killed.”
“Did you get Mark Heinemann killed?”
“Last I heard he was up north.”
“Heinemann’s body washed up this morning south of San Francisco. I pointed the detectives toward you and said I’m sure you know what happened. I told them you’d played it both ways with us and we’re trying to take you down on something new now. We’ve got someone looking at a six-pack of photos with your face as one of them. We hope he’ll pick you out today and then we’ll haul you in.”
Bailey turned and wagged the putty knife at him. “You know, you’re total bullshit. I helped you people and you’ve treated me like garbage because I got scared. My lawyer says you’re frustrated by your own inabilities and that’s why you come after me.”
“The people I work with think you’re a beach rat, Jimmy. They think you don’t have much upstairs and the wind blows through empty rooms, but I think they underestimate you. You’re a lot more connected and a lot smarter. You were dealing successfully out of San Diego for years and I think that’s where you first hooked up with him. That’s how come he’s willing to hire you up here. You’re a known quantity and you’ve got your cover all worked out. You look like a sunburned dock toad living on gin and tonics, but that isn’t the case at all, is it? But, you know what, Jimmy? The fun is just starting.”
“Dude, I know that, and I wish I was going to be there when it gets to you. I really fucking do.”
“When was the last time you were in Mexico?”
“Fuck off.”
“You’re going to get on your new phone when I leave here, but that conversation isn’t private either. It’s closing around you, Jimmy. You think you’re riding on a former relationship with the man, but you’re way over your head. They’ll come for you just the way they did Heinemann because you’re a liability.”
Bailey turned his back and farted loudly as he started scraping paint again. “That’s the last word, dude,” and Marquez walked away. He heard Bailey call after him, “Fucking asshole,” but Marquez never turned again.
The call came from Cairo at two that afternoon when Marquez was crossing the Golden Gate after leaving a meeting with the FBI. He could hear the worry in Cairo’s voice. Cairo had lost touch with Petersen and when he’d last talked to her she said she had a vehicle behind her that she was unsure of.
“The reception was bad. You know how it’s okay along the coast for a while, then goes bad immediately after you turn in?”
Marquez did know. “What do you think she was trying to tell you?”
&
nbsp; “I couldn’t hear her well enough. I could hear her truck engine straining. I think she was on an uphill grade and pushing it.”
“How long ago?”
“Twenty minutes now.”
That wasn’t a lot of time, but Cairo didn’t spook easily. It must have been her tone. Cairo heard something, fear, maybe.
“When did you last try her?”
“Just before I called you.”
“What about her telelocator?”
“It’s not with her. I’m at the cold house. I just found it in the bedroom.”
“I’m coming to you.”
When he hung up, fear gripped him and his stomach knotted. But don’t think like that, yet. Cairo is going to call you back and say she just turned up. Twenty minutes is nothing. She could be in the Burger King; she could be anywhere. Maybe she’s lying above a cove with a video camera. He tried to hold that idea as he started north.
An hour later he had the whole team on the road headed to Fort Bragg and had called Keeler and Baird and asked for help from uniformed wardens and from the Coast Guard with a helicopter. He called the Fort Bragg police, gave them a description of her Toy-ota 4Runner and a physical on Petersen. When he got into Bragg, Marquez drove through town and continued north to where Cairo was.
The late afternoon sunlight had faded to an orange haze over the ocean. Cairo believed that Petersen had been somewhere in this area and Marquez left the coast highway and turned up Teague Ranch Road because he and Petersen had used spots up here on a surveillance a few years back. The road climbed steeply and he thought the steepest stretch would also have been the last place with clear phone reception. You could make calls from farther inland, but the reception sketched in and out on you and a lot of calls got dropped. The road climbed through grassland and hills that rose into coastal mountains, then folded back on itself and ran across forested slopes.
