Kirk Russell - Dead Game

The bartender tried again to take an order from Marquez and finally gave up, refilled the bread sticks, brought Baird’s meatball sandwich, and the chief couldn’t find a way to take a bite out of it. The meatballs were too big. He had to cut them.

An hour later Marquez had until Christmas to make whatever arrests he could, and he’d told Baird the focus would be on Ludovna, August, and this Richie Crey who’d bought Beaudry’s Bait Shop in Rio Vista. Leaving the restaurant with Baird, he felt a strange mix of gratitude and emptiness. Big picture, it was over, no more SOU. Three more weeks and then finished until new money could be found. That after a decade of running the team.

As they walked back toward headquarters Marquez asked for one more thing. “Let me get some of the old team back.”

“Who?”

“Brad Alvarez and Melinda Roberts. Roberts has been bouncing around, and she’s up in the Region IV office right now. Alvarez is back in uniform down along the central coast, but I know he’s got a vacation coming up that he’s planned for a while.”

“You want to talk him out of his vacation.”

“I’d like to talk him into postponing it. You’d have to give him the time off later.”

“All right, if they’re both willing, you can have them both.”

Baird slowed as they neared headquarters. He stopped and faced Marquez before going back inside the Water Resource Building and up the elevator, and for a moment Marquez thought he’d changed his mind.

“John, you are the finest field officer I’ve ever known. I want you to know that, and I don’t want you to quit when we close down the SOU.”

“I don’t know if there’s a place for me here, sir.”

“We’ll make a captain out of you.”

Marquez nodded toward the building. “You wouldn’t want me in there.”

He thanked the chief and watched him go inside. From his truck he called Alvarez, then Roberts.

“Sounds like fun,” Roberts said. “I heard these sturgeon poachers are kicking your ass.”

“Who’d you hear it from?”

“Alvarez.”

“He’s going to spend his vacation with us.”

“I guess the fun never stops.”

“We need you.”

“And I miss the SOU. Tell me where to be and when.”

“Pick up the gear you turned in and start with the computer. We’re trying to find out everything we can on a Nikolai Ludovna. We’re calling him N-I-C-K, but I think the Russians leave out the C, so you’re looking for a N-I-K L-U-D-O-V-N-A, or N-I-K-O-L-A-I. He may have been a former KGB officer. We haven’t had time to check that out.” He briefed her on what they had learned. “See what you can find out about former residences, what he did before moving here, who sponsored him, anything at all. Start there and we’ll meet at the Sacramento safehouse tonight.”

Marquez met Shauf now outside the dirty stucco apartment where Anna rented a two-bedroom unit. It was where she’d told him she was moving back to. They went in to meet the manager, a sarcastic kid who seemed annoyed at their presence, chattering about how many police officers had already been in her apartment as he walked them up a flight of concrete stairs. When he started to go inside with them, Marquez stopped him, told him they’d bring him back the key.

The apartment looked like it had been tossed. They found a window wide open in one of the two bedrooms.

“What did the county take from here?” Shauf asked.

“Selke told me he pulled a computer, photographs, and a record of bills she’d paid. He said he took everything he thought might help locate her, but I don’t see him leaving it like this.”

“I don’t either.”

Marquez started in her bedroom, a mattress on the floor, no sheets, no covers, but a sleeping bag and pillow. In the bathroom only a Crest toothpaste tube and a frayed toothbrush in a drawer. He heard Shauf in the kitchen opening cabinets, and he moved into the second bedroom, the one Selke had described as resembling a Big 5 Sporting Goods store. Where a bed might have gone were two kayaks, one bright yellow, the other green, each with significant scrapes along the sides and bows. Several sets of oars, an O’Brien water ski board, a wake board, snow skis, a snowboard, a backpack, cycling equipment, assorted helmets, and a whole lot of other equipment and clothing.

“This is some nice stuff in here,” Shauf said and lifted a ski. “These are new. I looked at them myself this fall.”

“Are you starting to ski again?”

“I would if I could afford to. Over six hundred bucks for these, and that’s a new board she’s got there too, not the surfboard, the snowboard. What sport doesn’t she do?”

They moved into the kitchen/dining/living area. Shauf had already been through the kitchen, but Marquez felt the need to work his way along checking the cabinets, listening to the hollow slap of their doors shutting again. He hadn’t told Shauf yet about the lunch with Baird and needed to tell her. Wasn’t sure why he hadn’t yet.

He checked the refrigerator. Empty, but the manager had told Marquez the Sacramento police had advised him to clear it out. There was a round dining table with a simulated wood top, a tired white sofa, a TV. The rest of the room was green-brown carpet and an aluminum sliding window without a drape. It was hard to picture a river rat like Anna living here. She’d told him the year she was twenty-six she didn’t sleep a single night under a roof. Either was in a tent in a national park or wilderness area or was under the stars, and that was the year her mother had died, the year she said she realized she had no one. Which in some ways was a connection between him and her, a feeling that he’d thought he understood. He’d once checked out of everything and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail alone, a long hike that hadn’t healed him but did give him the time he needed to figure out how to fit in again.

He walked back to the room with the sports equipment. Anna’s identity was in that room. There were trophies that he’d only glanced at on the first pass. Most of them were from playing in a softball league. He went through the contents of the backpack again, a couple of empty suitcases, knelt on the floor and shined a flashlight down each end of each kayak. The stop at the end of the flotation compartment in the bow was a different color than the one at the stern. Probably no big deal and from a repair, but since he was here to check everything he prodded at the bow compartment. He couldn’t reach it to touch it, but after shining the light on it and then studying the edges and the proportion, comparing it to the stern, he began to wonder if there was a false piece there ahead of the real flotation compartment. Shauf walked in, and he found an oar they could slide in and poke at it. It moved but didn’t pop free.

“Let’s flip the boat over,” he said. “You hold the bow end up, and I’ll reach up there.”

“You’re too big, better let me do it, but you know all that’s going be in it is more gear. This girl has more gear than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

Marquez gripped the bow and felt her weight as she leaned in and reached toward the bow. He heard something give, a scraping, and she came out holding boat booties. But also a waterproof pouch and, inside it, a package of documents they opened up and started going through. Anna’s face on photos. A different name and her face on a Russian passport. Photos taken of her at nineteen or twenty, he thought. Snow on the ground around her, a man next to her, the same guy who’d been in the photo in her wallet. The passport name was Anastasia Illyach.

“So an alias,” Shauf said.

“Or maybe her real name, her father’s name.”

There was a pale blue ink handwritten letter in Cyrillic that he unfolded, then another and more small photos, a few that were black-and-whites, faces that could be relatives though, from the clothes and age of the photos, probably were long dead. He studied the photo of a small boy standing on snow, with Anna’s hand resting on his shoulder. The photo was black-and-white, and they were both looking directly at the camera. He opened the passport while Shauf turned another photo in her hand. Passport stamps indicated Anastasia Illyach left Moscow in September 1994. In December she’d returned. She’d flown to Tokyo twice and Stockholm once. He looked at the rest of the stamps, guessing that she’d traveled to Moscow on an American passport, then traveled from there under this passport.