Kirk Russell - Dead Game

“Are we talking about organized crime?” Marquez asked.

He was sure everyone in the room knew they were, but Ehrmann hadn’t said it, and he wanted to hear him say it. Ehrmann gave a faint nod, and Marquez put one piece together.

“You’ve known for a while they’re buying sturgeon roe.”

“We’ve had some idea, yes. What I’m here about today is to communicate that Lieutenant Ruax and possibly her crew are in some danger. We think you should shut that unit down.”

“Shut it down for how long?” Baird asked.

“I can’t answer that, but I will say we intend to move soon.” He nodded toward Marquez. “You may want to pull your team back as well.”

“Do we show up in the transcripts?”

“Not unless they’re referring to a different woman warden than Ruax. They’re concerned about an undercover team they think Ruax is part of. They’ve done the work to find out where she lives, so that means they’re serious about her. It may be they think Ruax is connected to you.”

“But now you’re speculating?”

“Yes.”

They went back and forth on that for a few minutes, and then Ehrmann got tired of it. He looked at his watch, must have figured out he was done here. He picked up the transcript and thanked them.

After Ehrmann left, Baird closed his eyes as if meditating. When he opened them he asked, “Should we pull the SOU?”

“Absolutely,” Bell said.

“No,” Marquez answered. “The SOU isn’t mentioned.”

“Just that Ehrmann has come here to warn us is reason enough to pull back and evaluate, I think,” Bell said.

Marquez didn’t respond. He kept his focus on Baird, waited for the chief to decide.

The Le Mans drifted north along a frontage road, then doubled back and drove into a residential area and parked down the street from an elementary school. They didn’t stay long, pulled away from the curb a few minutes later, and turned into a gas station about a mile up the road. Marquez watched Perry fill the tank and Torp walk down the street and go into a drugstore. Then they cruised by the school again as it was letting out.

Minivans and SUVs were lining up, kids getting on buses. Some of the kids started walking home, and a few of those were alone as they went past the two men in the car.

“So maybe one of them has a kid here and lost any custody rights when he went to prison, but I wouldn’t bet on it,” Shauf said. “I’m going to call the locals. What do you think?”

“Yeah, make the call.”

Not long after she did the Le Mans moved again. Torp and Perry drove north on 5 and then worked their way to west Sacra??mento and a failed industrial park called the West Sacramento Commerce Center.

Only a handful of the buildings had been completed. The three-story low-income units were framed and wrapped in lath, but stucco had never been applied and the black paper under the lath had faded in sun and storms, windows broken out. There’d been articles in the Sacramento Bee , a fraud indictment, new owners, an appeal for city money, and Marquez remembered hearing something about some of the spaces being leased. They were looking at one of those right now.

The Le Mans bounced across a wide asphalt lot and ran toward a long cinder-block building at the rear of the industrial park like a bad dog coming home. A sign on the building read Weisson’s Auto Body and Repair. The car pulled into an open bay, and Marquez looked at the twelve-foot, razor-wired fence surrounding the building and protecting the rows of vehicles with body damage waiting for repair. From here the fence looked like a moat.

“Maybe they’re going to get the Le Mans cherried out,” Shauf said. “They seem like classy guys.”

The building was at least two hundred feet long, twenty feet tall, paved all around, the chain-link fence standing away from it forty yards. Marquez spotted four police vehicles waiting for bodywork, so they had the right prices or an in with somebody at the city. The police vehicles suggested the place was at least legit. Shauf drove around back to check out what was there and found another road leading out and more open bays.

“It’s a big building,” she said. “A lot of bodywork going on in there. I didn’t even know about this place.”

Marquez checked out the rest of the industrial park again. The retail shops had never opened. Their glass faces were dusty, sterile. The big three-story low-income housing with its broken windows and unfinished exterior looked like it had already lived out its life rather than never having started it. Temporary fencing surrounded it. Fences seemed to be a theme.

He took a call from Selke while Shauf scouted the opposite side of the building. “It’s definitely not Burdovsky. We got Burdovsky’s dental records and blood type. No matches. She’s a Jane Doe at the moment, and though it doesn’t change the fact that somebody did that to her, it must make you feel better. I saw your face out there. I know you wanted a call. Thanks again for coming out last night.”

Shauf’s voice crackled over the radio. She was around the back side still, down near a PG amp;E substation, following a road she’d turned around on.

“Lucky thing I turned around. Perry and Torp switched vehicles and just pulled out this side in a white Econoline van. I’m behind them. You’re going to have to go around the building and come out this other road, unless you want to let them go.”

Her question was, was it worth still following them? Probably not, but Marquez decided they’d stick a little longer. They followed the van onto 80 westbound and an hour and a half later were in the Bay Area working through heavy traffic along the east shore of the bay.

Marquez took a position two lanes over, two hundred yards back. On the bay a kite surfer skimmed along. Ahead, traffic jockeyed for position in lanes that weren’t going anywhere fast. When the Spanish got here all this land close to the bay was marsh. They wrote of the skies darkening when millions of birds took flight. Grizzlies fished from pockets of water left at low tide. There were times when Marquez felt like his team, what the SOU was doing, was just part of the slow fading away of wildlife that had begun when we separated the wild from ourselves. The cities kept growing and every year got more complicated. Just the dance of traffic alone was a game of timing and nuance, but compared to the wild it was still simple stuff. None of what we’d ever made had the complexity of what we were giving up.

Torp and Perry crossed the Bay Bridge and dropped into San Francisco. No one said anything except to call out their own position or that of the van. Then, as they got closer, Shauf voiced it.

“Is this possible?” she asked. “These two spitballs.”

August Foods had Christmas lights up and a holiday display of Belgian chocolates and Italian cookies and breads in brown paper wrappers near the entry. Torp and Perry had pulled into a yellow zone, and Torp stayed with the van while Perry went inside. He spotted August in the middle of the store holding an olive oil bottle, talking to a couple, and began to move toward him. Marquez shifted his binoculars to August’s face, saw him raise a hand above the head of the woman he was selling olive oil to and stop Perry’s approach. When that happened Perry went back out to the van, leaned against it, and fired up a smoke. Inside, August had disappeared.

“We may have just caught our break,” Marquez said to Shauf. “Here comes August’s Porsche.”

The van side door slid open, and Perry lifted out a carry-on suitcase that he brought around to the passenger side of August’s car and rested on the seat. August pulled away. He drove south, and the SOU followed him off the airport exit and then into the short-term parking garage at SFO. He crossed to the terminal, checked in at one of the United computer stations, and was in the security line before Marquez reached anyone at SFPD who could direct him to their airport security chief. Meanwhile, August walked toward a gate with his carry-on, which had run through X-ray with some questions but no delay.