Kirk Russell - Redback

‘I don’t think so, Mom. There’s just too much going on.’

‘Even for a cup of coffee? I’ll come down to where you work.’

‘It’s just really a weird time.’ She looked at Marquez. ‘I didn’t mean to get angry or bring my problems here. I’m sorry about that, too. Bye. I love you both.’

Katherine walked out to her car with her and when she got back, she said, ‘This is about her breakup with her boyfriend. She’ll get over it. He treated her badly.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘You’re right, you don’t. You’re not around enough to know. What is the FBI offering you?’

‘A position on a task force to go after Emrahain Stoval.’

She bowed her head and covered her eyes with her right hand and Marquez sat down and put an arm around her shoulders. He didn’t try to sell her. He didn’t say anything and Katherine said very quietly without looking up, ‘If you chase that monster, you’ll bring him into our lives. How can you do that to us? I don’t get it. I don’t understand.’

The next morning Marquez met up with one of his team, Carol Shauf, to visit a concrete contractor they videotaped buying sturgeon roe from Holsing. The contractor was on the phone in his office telling a joke that they could hear from the reception area as if he was standing next to them. When he hung up and his secretary led them into his office they saw walls festooned with fishing gear and photos of him standing near his varying catches, a bluefin caught off Cabo San Lucas, a marlin in Antibes, a huge silver salmon hooked on the Copper River, and then his favorite, a sturgeon taken right here in the delta.

‘Do you wish you were Hemingway?’ Shauf asked as she studied a photo of him with the fishing pole and the beard.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Do you wish you were Hemingway in Cuba instead of a guy poaching sturgeon in Antioch?’

He looked puzzled then scared as he studied their cards, but managed to muster, ‘What can I do this morning for the Department of Fish and Game?’

‘Confess,’ Shauf said, ‘and we’ll hook you up and take you to jail. But I’d like to get a photo of you first so I can hang it on my wall.’

Marquez stepped in.

‘We’re here about sturgeon poaching as part of an ongoing investigation. We’d like to ask you some questions about Jeff Holsing.’

‘I’m not sure I know who that is.’

‘If I showed you photos of the two of you together would you remember him?’

Shauf had the photos and was delighted to show them. Then they sat with him for an hour and a half and decided he really didn’t know much about Holsing’s operation, though he did admit to buying illegal roe. His forehead dampened with sweat as Shauf brought up Judge Randall, a judge who liked to fish but never caught anything and blamed it on poachers. In northern California no one handed out tougher sentences. Shauf had a signed picture of the judge in his black robe holding a fishing pole. It was the first thing you saw when you came in the door of her house, but, in truth, nothing would happen to this contractor for buying illegal roe. An assistant DA would look at what they had and say, you’ve got to be kidding, so the only question was whether the concrete contractor could point them to another lead. He didn’t.

And so the day went, working links to Holsing. They let one fishmonger know he was likely to be charged. The surprise of being confronted with photos and wardens’ notes turned several denials into apologies and the fishmonger and another suspect agreed to make statements. At dusk, before calling it a day, he and Shauf bought sandwiches, chips, a six-pack of beer, and took it all down to the river. They sat on top of a picnic table, the beer between them.

‘So you,’ she asked, ‘what’s going to happen?’

‘They’ll conclude Brad was inadequately supervised and the team was spread too thin. They’ll recommend a reorg and I’ll be out.’

She took a pull of beer. This wasn’t news to her. She’d already come to the same conclusion and he didn’t doubt the team had talked it out. She reached for the potato chips and looked out over the river, saying, ‘If you go, I may go.’

‘Go where?’

‘DBEEP.’

They often worked with the Delta Bay Enhanced Enforcement Patrol and Shauf liked being on the rivers. He could see her doing that. Having offered that, she wanted an answer from him.

‘What will you do, John?’

He laid it out for her now. He told her about the FBI offer. Shauf took a pull from her beer and said nothing. There was sunlight on the river and seals out on the red buoys. Shore reeds moved in the wind but it was warm, and for a few minutes that was enough and then she said, ‘You’re going to do it, aren’t you?’

‘I’m talking with Katherine.’

‘But you’re going to do it.’

Shauf reached for the bottle opener. She opened one, then a second beer and handed him a full bottle. She raised her bottle and touched it against his in a toast.

‘We were good,’ she said. ‘We were the best and we had a long run.’ She clicked her bottle harder against his and toasted the river. ‘To the SOU.’

‘ I hiked back up there and found shell casings and I talked to the backpacker again,’ Muller said. ‘He said he talked to you yesterday also.’

‘Yeah, I called him.’

Finding shell casings up there must have been next to impossible and he turned the dark thought that Muller, after applying and failing to get into the SOU last year, came up with the idea of shooting a couple of bighorn, and then orchestrating an investigation that he would later solve. After all, he grew up in the area. He knew these mountains. He had sniper training and got someone to play the tipster, Terri Delgado. He listened now as Muller described finding 30.06 shell casings in country so big it had no problem swallowing the wreckage of small planes. He listened and then discarded the idea Muller planned this.

‘There’s a flat slab of granite I think he shot from. And something else.’

‘What?’

‘They built a rock cairn like you see as a trail marker. Built it on the rock and maybe that was so they could find it again or else like the radio collars, but that would be spooky.’

‘The rock cairn was where you found the shell casings?’

‘Yeah, they built it for us, I guess.’

The backpacker Marquez had talked to remembered two guys who came into Anvil Camp near dusk. The backpacker had an old Primus gas stove he was trying to light so was distracted, but remembered an older man who was taller with dark hair that had gone white at the temples. He was probably late fifties, early sixties. He walked like he was used to walking in the mountains.

Marquez had asked, ‘Could it have been a father and son?’

‘Could have, but I didn’t get that impression. The younger man was short and thick, sort of stocky. He was maybe five foot seven, one eighty, and the older man was six foot one or in that area and kind of rangy. I might have gone over and said hello after I made dinner, but I got a weird vibe from the older guy so I just left them alone. It felt like he was studying me and not in a friendly way. As if I was in their space or something, and I shouldn’t be there. But they were gone in the morning. That’s all I know.’

‘No shared whiskey, no compadre with a fellow hiker after a long climb into the mountains?’

The backpacker, who had turned out to be an attorney in Fresno, laughed.

‘Nothing like that.’

After hanging up, Marquez entertained the idea he’d danced around since first hearing the description of the older man from Terri Delgado and then quizzing Anderson – that the hunter was Stoval. There were only so many places to hunt bighorn in the States, so it wasn’t as unlikely as it sounded. His instinct said the older man would be the shooter, the younger stocky one the guide. He talked with Muller about who among the local guides would fit and the next morning Muller and Marquez drove out to talk to a watercolor artist named Alice Durrell who lived in the Round Valley.