Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“Don’t be,” he said, pointing ahead. “There they are.”

Marquez saw Ruter standing with an older Humboldt County detective, a white-haired man that Marquez thought he recognized as a Shelter Cove resident. He knew he’d seen him a few times before. Ruter pointed their direction and shook his head, but Ruter was out of his jurisdiction up here, he wasn’t making the calls. The Humboldt detective walked over, offered his hand and Marquez introduced himself and Petersen. The detective’s name was Al Fields and the name clicked. Fields was older with sun-leathered skin, a slow confidence about him, none of Ruter’s bluster.

The body lay on its right side near a low hump of sand, its face lying in shore weeds. A white male with black sideburns, a pug nose, overweight, wearing a frayed wetsuit that was too long for him, one that would fit Davies’s six-foot-plus frame. He looked more closely and recognized Huega, saw the birthmark. There was a long knife wound similar to Guyanno Creek and he was able to look at it more dispassionately, able to turn ideas with more clarity. Humboldt crime techs had made a plaster cast of vehicle tracks and he overheard Ruter saying Davies had docked his boat, driven up here with Huega and killed him.

“Walk me through the phone call you had with Davies,” Fields said, moving off to the side with Marquez, treating him warily but with curiosity in his eyes, wanting whatever Fish and Game had. “Why do you think he called you after dropping Huega on the beach, if he did drop him?”

“He knew he’d made a bad mistake and needed to talk about it.”

“Murdered him?”

“I wouldn’t go there yet.”

“Detective Ruter tells me that when you were undercover in the DEA you saw something like the Guyanno killings.”

“That’s right.”

“Willing to talk about it?”

Marquez realized that Fields and Ruter had worked out this routine before he’d arrived. He saw Ruter frown at being excluded, but it was an act, and Fields motioned him toward the body, for another look at it together.

Now, Marquez leaned over Danny Huega. The wetsuit had been unzipped before he was killed. His shorts had been lowered and the blade had touched only skin. He saw where the cut started on the lower abdomen and smelled blood and the stink of Huega’s organs, felt sweat start under his arms, and when he straightened he gave the Humboldt detective a shorthand version of his knowl-edge of Kline.

“Too much is familiar,” Marquez said. “This one less so, but definitely the killings at Guyanno.” He ticked off parallels on his hand now, giving Fields a verbal list.

“Did you ever talk with Mark Davies about these Kline killings, ever exchange war stories?” Fields asked. “I understand that once or twice you’ve had a beer on his boat with him. Maybe you talked about your DEA days.”

“I put my Kline file away. I don’t talk with anyone about Kline other than the FBI, and I don’t call them more than twice a year and they don’t call me back.”

“Kline’s not new to California,” Fields said, catching Marquez by surprise. “I was a lead investigator in San Diego for twenty-two years. He touched us there, too. But this Davies was around both circumstances up here. In my experience that usually means one thing and the simple answer is usually the right one.”

Fields stared as if he had another thought, but didn’t say any-thing. If Davies was telling the truth, Huega swam in and walked down the beach roughly ten miles. His body might show higher lactic acid levels and other indicators. Marquez asked Fields about that, then thanked him for letting them see the body and offered to help in any way he could. He’d seen what he’d come to see and had wanted Petersen to know what they might be up against. He made a point of shaking Ruter’s hand. He turned the jeep around and Petersen glanced in her side mirror as they drove away.

“He’s watching us.”

“Who is?”

“Ruter.”

“He’s thinking it over. He doesn’t know what to make of this anymore. No one does.”

She was quiet for the rest of the ride back down the beach and it was nearly dusk when they got close to Shelter Cove. Large cumu-lus clouds sat out over the ocean and the air was cooler, but his skin burned as though he had a fever. It felt like something was crawling on him. At sea the light seemed to reflect with a peculiar intensity.

As they hit the paved road, Petersen said, “It seems as if you’ve been expecting Kline. I don’t mean that exactly like it sounds, not that he was coming here specifically for you, but like you’ve been waiting all these years for him to come into your life again. Maybe that’s because it was left unanswered for you, John. You had to give up without finding him and you feel guilty about being the only survivor.”

“I agree everything points to Davies,” Marquez said.

“But you believe it could be Kline.”

“Like I was saying when we went up to Guyanno.” He realized she must not have taken him seriously at Guyanno. “About six months after I married Katherine she said that either the file left the house or she would. I put the Kline file in the crawl space under my house and stopped making calls. I thought I’d buried it.” With grim humor he thought about Katherine leaving anyway, and when he turned to look at Petersen the skin of his face felt tight as a mask. He went on. “The scale of this operation we’re up against fits with Kline. He was doing contract work for the cartels, mostly hits, when I was DEA, but he already had a criminal network by then. He was associated with kidnappings and drug running outside of the cartel sphere. That’s what brought him up here in the first place. He didn’t want to cross paths with any of his cartel clients so he moved dope out of Humboldt. I know he did some trade in animal parts in the late ‘80s. It wouldn’t surprise me if he kept at it.”

“He’s a businessman.”

“Yeah.” Marquez remembered a roundtable discussion where they had psychologists sit in and offer their opinions.”We thought the stylized killings were to make his name and instill fear and then later some of the experts began to think there was a sexual ele-ment, as well.”

“I believe that.”

He gestured at the ocean. “This is not a small deal we’re up against. It’s not a handful of former commercial divers disgruntled with DFG regulations, scheming to get rich. Divers are just the pawns in this. This is someone with a network and the experience, people, connections, equipment, the will to pull it off.”

“You talk like they’re going to.”

“Maybe we’ve got a situation similar to South Africa.”

Operation Neptune, a combination of South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs, the national defense force, and local police, fought Chinese triads and gangs, but was still losing. After South Africa the next best abalone was in California.

“Translate that from Marquezese for me.”

“It’s someone with a network who’s comfortable with violence and not intimidated by law enforcement, the type of organizations cleaning the abalone out of South Africa. If it’s Kline he’ll do every-thing he can to find out who he’s up against. He’ll try to buy his way into SOU computer files and once he finds any one of us he’ll try to find out where we live, about our families, everything he may need later. That might sound exaggerated, but I’ve seen it happen. That’s what happened to my DEA team.”

“You really believe he’s here? You’re looking at these murders and drawing that conclusion?”

“Something is too familiar.”

“Well, if he’s here we’ll handle him.”

The simple certainty in her voice reached him and he looked over. “That’s right.”