Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“Unless you want to follow us,” Douglas said.

“I’m going to continue south, so I’ll meet you down there.”

A Coast Guard helicopter was in the morning sky alongside the cliffs. When he met up with Douglas, another FBI agent, and local detectives, it became clear they wanted him there to help ID the body.

“We’ve got a way to get you down there,” the detective said, “But I’ve got to warn you it may not be pretty. They don’t always float and a lot of times the decomposition gasses will leave them standing on their heads and bumping along the bottom. Was this a friend of yours?”

“Someone we’re looking for missed a meeting and his boat was abandoned.”

“I got a feeling you’re just the man I want to talk to.”

The detective grinned, showing yellow teeth, and they walked out the half mile. Marquez belayed down on a rope that had been set up. Douglas came down the same way and the other agent stayed on top. The detective got lowered in a basket by the helicopter and then they were on the small beach, moving across the black rocks.

The hang glider pilot had launched and scratched his way north, trying to find enough lift to make a good day of it. He thought at first that it was a dead seal, and now, seeing the body wedged in the rocks, wrists tied and arms bound behind the back, ankles bound, and the head facedown and still hidden, Marquez could understand why. The pilot had bagged up his kite and gone home. Later, his conscience got the better of him.

The body was swollen with gas. They backed up for a wave that lapped halfway up the corpse and the detective talked. “The rescue people hate this. They want to come in, pick up the body and go, but they leave stuff behind when we let it happen that way. This one is naked, but we might find something down here in the rocks.” He pointed at two exit wounds in the back without commenting on them. “I’ll bet they had him take his clothes off before they bound him. Let’s get him turned over.”

They had to drag him back and then flipped him. His nose and eyes were gone and a small crab dropped out of his beard. A lot of his scalp and one side of his face had rubbed off. It wasn’t Davies.

“Is this your man?” the detective asked.

“No, but I recognize him.”

Marquez looked at Douglas and then at the body again, remembering the phone call two days ago, the muffled voices, the gunshots. Heinemann looked like he’d been in the water longer than that, but maybe, just maybe. He turned to Douglas.

“I need to talk to you about a phone call I got a couple of days ago and there’s some information in my truck you’ll want.” He looked over at the detective. “We got him killed. We had him wired up and then lost him.”

Heinemann’s skin was the color of putty. He’d been stripped, bound, thrown overboard like a sack of garbage. That probably meant he told them everything first.

“He was working for you?” the detective asked.

“More like we were using him and he was using us. We’ve been chasing an abalone poacher.”

“This is about poaching?”

“Yes.”

Douglas cut in. “Let’s go up top,” he said, and to Marquez, “this was for you. He sent you a message.”

Marquez pulled what he had on Heinemann out of the truck and waited as the detective copied the parts he wanted. When they got to the murder of Meghan Burris a light seemed to go off in the detective’s head. He knew about it, more of the pieces connected for him, and Douglas took the conversation from there, his hands moving slowly in the air as he spun a story.

Marquez didn’t need to hear it and walked back over to his truck. He dropped the tailgate and called Petersen back. There was a light wind off the ocean this morning, not enough to generate any lift for the glider pilots, yet air junkies were arriving and a few had unfolded their gliders out on the sandy launch area. He watched them as he talked with her.

“I’ve asked around about the two Salt Point divers,” Petersen said. “One guy I talked to thinks they have a rented house in Fort Bragg and they’ve been diving north of town. I got a street name and thought I’d check it out.”

“Do it, but take Cairo with you.”

“He’s down at Van Damme State Park checking another tip. There was a CalTip call last night that he-”

The clattering of helicopter blades drowned her response and he watched the body bag swinging in a metal basket beneath the hovering copter. They lowered the basket, slipped the bag out, and the helicopter rose into the fall blue sky and started up the coast. He heard Petersen clearly in the quiet that followed, about Cairo following up on a tip and finding nothing so far. She gave him the street name in Fort Bragg for the Salt Point divers and then said good-bye. He flipped the tailgate up and looked at Douglas, want-ing to talk alone with him before leaving.

Beyond the edge of the parking area, out on the flat sand and dirt along the top of the cliff, four hang gliders had been unfolded and their keels rested in the sand. He watched one of the pilots sliding ribs into the bright-colored sail to draw the wing taut and saw the awareness of what was going on over here, heads nodding toward the police vehicles at one end of the parking lot. He couldn’t look at the gliders without remembering the year that followed after he’d returned home from the hospital in Texas. After he’d exhausted his money and given up on finding Kline.

It had taken the winter to heal his body and the next spring he flew to San Diego and took a bus down to the Mexican border and began hiking north on the Pacific Crest Trail. In the week he’d lingered among the highest peaks of the Sierra, in Muir’s Range of Light, he’d watched hang gliders circling with hawks as they caught thermals rolling up the dry eastern face from the desert far below. He’d watched the pilots negotiate the turbulence and trash air over the great mountain faces while he sat high on the rock try-ing to figure a way to move his life forward again. He remembered hiking in moonlight the hundred switchbacks up from the meadow and lying on the summit of Whitney under the cold brilliance of stars, trying to find the motivation to return to society.

He looked from the gliders back to Douglas, still remembering the Pacific Crest, how he’d moved in the early and the dusk hours, largely avoiding people, but encountering bear and deer and then elk as he got farther north. Near the Washington and Oregon border, as the fall closed in, he’d helped a woman with a badly sprained ankle, carrying her pack, assisting her back to a trailhead, and that ordinary act had been the catalyst that brought him home.

Now Douglas walked over to him. “We’re going to assist on this one, but I’d like it if you gave us everything you know about or had going on with Heinemann.”

“Sure, but I think you’ve got everything at this point.”

“I’d also like a way to reach this Tran Li.”

Marquez wrote down Li’s phone numbers, tore the page out of his notebook, and said good-bye to Douglas.

“This one bothers you because you feel responsible,” Douglas said. “But you’re not. Heinemann got himself mixed up with these assholes.”

“I wish it was that simple.”

“Let him go, he made his own bed. Listen, I got a call on the way down here. Your Bailey is back in Pillar Point.”

“Thanks for that. I’ll go see him.”

Forty minutes later, Marquez was in Pillar Point, standing above the docks looking down at Bailey scraping paint on his boat. He talked to Petersen again before walking down. She’d seen dive equipment in the driveway of a little asbestos-shingle house in Fort Bragg. An old Chevy Nova, pumpkin-colored, was parked out front, matching what the retired ranger had remembered. It was probably the right house. She hadn’t seen any activity but had scouted several good places to watch the house from and was currently heading north to check a couple of other coves she’d heard these divers might be working.