Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“This is terrible,” she said.

“I want to get everybody to the house and meet,” he said.

“Now?”

“We’re not needed here anymore.”

“Okay, but I heard something we’re going to want to find out about.” She pointed at one of the Search and Rescue people. “They’re talking about a body a camper found this morning up near Gitchell Creek.”

“You just heard that?”

“Just before I walked over to you, the guy in the blue cap over there.”

He walked over to Search and Rescue to find out, asked if they wouldn’t mind getting on their radios and trying to get more information since their people were with the body. A call was made and he listened to the back and forth. It was an adult male, north of Abalone Point and Black Sands Beach, close to Horse Mountain Creek.

“You know where that is?” the Search and Rescue leader asked. Marquez said he knew the area and thanked the man. He drove back to Fort Bragg following Petersen, trying to call Ruter from the road and getting dumped into voice mail. But he’d gathered from the radio chatter that some cooperation between Humboldt and Mendocino counties was underway in identifying the body. He tried Ruter again as he got to the cold house, and someone answered the phone, then clicked off after Marquez identified himself.

Five or six cans of Campbell’s chicken soup bubbled slowly in a pot and the humid smell filled the living room. They pushed the couch back, brought a couple of chairs over from the dining table, and opened the slider to let in some air. Everyone was shaken by what had happened and they talked out the sequence of events first, and then about Li’s wife, what her role was today, whether it could have been her that Li was on the phone to when he made the decision to back away from the harbor entrance. Marquez was determined that they focus on what they’d missed.

He looked at Cairo’s lean, dark face. Cairo and Roberts had been in Noyo Harbor. They’d been positioned to watch.

“Can you account for every boat in the harbor?” Marquez asked.

“We tried to.”

“Tried to?”

Melinda Roberts cut in and he felt the same tension he got off her earlier in the van. “We know, Lieutenant, and we’re sorry we missed whoever was there. We picked up his wife as soon as she got there and we had every vehicle run.”

There was silence in the room, no sound but the soup bubbling, a chair scraping as Carol Shauf slid hers back. They were shell-shocked and Cairo and Roberts felt like he was laying it on them, because they’d been at the harbor in position watching everything. But one way or the other the team was getting burned and Marquez figured he had to push to find out how and why.

“Li was at the mouth of the harbor when he took the call,” Marquez said. “It may have come from the motel. It may have come from a car parked on the road or someone standing on the bluff.” He looked at Alvarez. “Brad, why don’t you and Carol see if you can find any witnesses, anyone working in one of these places that might have been looking down on the harbor?”

“He may have gotten scared on his own,” Roberts said.

He stared back at her, irritation starting in him though she was free to throw out any idea. He felt frustration at his own failure, anger at the pattern of the past two weeks. She was new to the team, relatively inexperienced, and he listened now without concentrating on her words as she defended Cairo and herself, exploring the idea that Li had turned away from the harbor on his own. Marquez knew he’d kept everybody too often in similar positions during the days Li had been out, and given the repetitive nature of Li’s diving he should have adjusted more. That was apparent now and should have been this morning. What he wanted from this meeting was the clue they’d seen but missed. He wanted someone to remember something they’d seen and dismissed. Most likely, that was Cairo and Roberts.

“We accounted for every boat and we’ve got a list of all vehicles,” Roberts said. “There were a couple of fishermen shooting the shit, that’s about all, and they weren’t watching us. There was one old boy scraping his boat.” She turned toward Cairo, broke eye contact with him. “We had a good view of Li’s wife and we had the harbor covered. She wasn’t on the phone.”

Marquez leaned forward. He sketched out the dock, the ocean where there’d only been one fishing trawler well offshore, and the slope across the harbor. He glanced back at Roberts, trying to take a different view of her input. She was heavily into tech and maybe that was the answer here. She was tuned into ideas he wasn’t, such as using sensor nets with cameras that could be strung along the abalone beds and would broadcast on the Internet, computer programs that let Net surfers become guardians. He wanted her to turn that part of her mind to considering how someone found them and how the other side might be tracking the SOU and pos-sess better tech than they did.

Brad Alvarez, who’d said little so far, spoke now. “There was a black BMW pulled over on the shoulder about the time the Marlin picked you up. It might have been a seven series model, I couldn’t tell, I wasn’t close enough. They were gone when I got there.”

Petersen nodded. She’d seen them, too, and figured they’d pulled over out of curiosity. She said the occupants were two middle-aged men and a young woman in the back seat. Marquez looked at Alvarez, his goatee, the wiry frame. Alvarez shrugged. There was nowhere to go with the BMW and none of them really believed they’d be followed in something as conspicuous.

They talked about Li now, Marquez saying they’d have to sit down with him sooner than later and it was likely to be rough. Roberts opened her notebook and ticked off a list of vehicles that had been in the harbor in the early morning. She wanted to make the point again that she and Cairo had accounted for every vehicle.

“You had it covered,” Marquez said, “but as a team we got beaten. Our problem going forward is to figure out who made us and where they were. Whoever they are, someone else saw them. Someone else must have seen them. Maybe they were in the motel, or parked on the road, whatever, but we need to get out and ask questions.” He paused a beat. “We’re up against an organization, a network. The murders of those divers could easily connect to who-ever made us. Don’t forget that when you’re out there.”

He ended the meeting by throwing out an initial list of places to check and those quickly got divided up, and then he looked at the faces around him. He knew they were stunned by the death of the boy and not much would get accomplished today.

Petersen rode with him to Gitchell Creek after they’d confirmed that police were still up there. They went north from Fort Bragg out to Highway 101 at Leggett and he drove hard to Gar-berville. Not far from there they turned back toward the coast and Shelter Cove. The little jeep didn’t handle well once they were on the beach, but Marquez stayed on the hard-packed sand, dodging the waves. He knew it was less than four miles to Gitchell, though the soft sand further up the beach could make it tough with the tires on the jeep. They weren’t near as wide as they wanted to be.

“You all right?” he asked Petersen. Her face was green.

They’d talked very little on the way up, both trying to figure out what had gone wrong and Marquez trying to come to terms with the drowning, at least temporarily. He couldn’t escape a feel-ing of responsibility, though rationally it had been Li’s decisions that led to the accident.

“I need to stop here,” she said. She opened the door, took a step out and vomited. He scrutinized what might be vehicles up ahead while he waited for her and as she got back in he handed her a water bottle and then started forward slowly. “Going to need to stop again now,” she said, and after he’d slowed to a stop he pushed his door open so the full breeze came in off the ocean. She had her eyes closed and tiny beads of sweat had formed on her forehead. For ten minutes they sat and then she opened her eyes again, smiled, and he started the engine. “Sorry, John.”