Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“I already know that.”

“Then go back to where it started and unravel it. Take it a day at a time. Two good days and maybe a bad day, then three good days in a row. Four good days. I’m having a real hard time with Petersen missing, but I’ve got to keep on with the SOU team. And you’ve got to keep going forward with school and what you have going. I’ll make a deal; I’ll tell you how it’s going for me and you tell me how it’s going for you. Can we make that deal?”

She nodded and got awkwardly to her feet. He followed her inside. From the hallway she turned and looked back to him, her face a vulnerable cross between child and woman.

The next morning he made coffee and stood on the back deck as high clouds to the east streaked with color. He drank a second cup, calling everyone in the unit, talking over the plan for the day, then called Chief Keeler.

“Douglas told me yesterday that Kline doesn’t experience ordi-nary emotions,” Keeler said, his voice strained and raw. “He doesn’t have any conscience, at least not in the way that we think of one.” Keeler added that he’d been up since two in the morning, thinking about Petersen. “Nothing like this could have ever happened when I started here thirty years ago. We couldn’t have imagined it. Every decade or so a state ranger or warden would get killed by poachers during a confrontation, but nothing like this cat and mouse with poachers who have better equipment than us. That goddamned Internet has done more to help criminals than anyone else.”

Marquez walked back into the house explaining why he was sending Alvarez back to check the Van Damme caves. The FBI hadn’t done their search for evidence at low tide and he wanted to do that. He picked a list of boats off the table, heard Katherine and Maria moving around in the back rooms.

“I got a list of boats yesterday, Chief, everything longer than sixty feet that has docked at a California port in the last month. I’m going to head up the coast this morning.”

“They asked that you remain available.”

“I’ll be back tonight and I’m available by phone.” Marquez paused a beat, unsure how Keeler would react, but he seemed okay with it. “The last place they had me go was up north. We lost a full day yesterday.”

Marquez hung up remembering a day years ago with Petersen when they’d been out at Point Reyes checking on an abalone bed. A tipster who was leaving her boyfriend but turning him in to Fish and Game first insisted he’d stripped it. Marquez had gone into the water and found the bed intact. Petersen had laughed when he’d surfaced and said the ab bed was there still. Then they’d sat in the warm sun along the beach and eaten sandwiches. She’d taken in the day and her fingers sifted the warm sand and they’d talked about what would come next and gathered up their lunch trash and headed on.

Marquez limped out of the house, one of his legs a little sore. He loaded equipment but was on the phone until after Katherine and Maria left. Now, he backed his truck around, registering that the new side window was the only one without dust. He saw a piece of folded paper under the windshield wiper just before taking off, and got out, picked it off the glass, and unfolded a lemon-colored piece of stationery.

“Thanks, John. I love you. Your daughter.”

He read it twice because there’d always been a careful accuracy to her signings, usually finishing any card or note to him with “your loving stepdaughter,” and he’d never asked her to pretend otherwise, although she almost never heard from her true father. Katherine had done the real child-raising and he’d helped out from the sidelines. With this current problem, Katherine had done the difficult part and he was just coming behind with some talk, and despite the note, there was no saying whether he’d made any dif-ference with Maria last night. Still, he folded the note and put it in his pocket, meaning to keep it.

Three hours later, Marquez left the coast highway and started up Guyanno Canyon. The road was narrow and laced with the tar used to repair cracks. He wound up through the trees, remembering the day he’d come to meet Davies and what had changed since then. He’d talked to Ruter yesterday afternoon and Ruter had volunteered that Davies was still his number one suspect in the Guyanno mur-ders and threw out an idea, that Davies had led Marquez down the coast to San Francisco, then ditched his boat before fleeing the country or at least California. Trying to make it look like some-thing had happened to him.

“You still think this is about abalone poaching, but it isn’t. I know you still don’t believe me,” Ruter had said. “I don’t know about Peter Han. He may have been the equivalent of an innocent bystander, but Davies definitely came to kill Stocker.”

“What more have you learned about Han?” Marquez had asked.

“Neither the ATF or DEA have any record of him, nor do the people we’ve interviewed up here. If he sold dope, the people he sold to aren’t around. His background is sketchy, but we know he was hanging with Stocker and Huega.”

Marquez mulled the conversation as he drove the canyon road, closing in on the campground now. Down to his left the oaks and bays grew thickly along the creek. Farther up the canyon he could see white sky above the mountains and the rock along the spine. It was beautiful country, yet the first story he’d ever heard about Guyanno Creek campground had been about a group of bikers who’d arrived late one night and then held hostage and repeatedly raped two young Swedish women who were on a trip across the United States, and he believed he could feel that same darkness now as he parked and stepped over the chain.

He limped up across the broken asphalt, stopping short of the creek trail. This had been a torture/execution, but what drew Kline here? What could two abalone poachers reveal to him and why were they worth so much effort? He might kill them for cheating him, but he wouldn’t come all the way up here to do it. Kline would send someone like Molina to straighten it out.

He weighed the idea that Davies had led Kline up here and somehow participated in the killings. He shook his head in frustra-tion. He was going down the wrong path again, it came back to the problem of what would motivate Kline to take these guys out. He tried to think clearly, tried to separate what he really knew from everything else, but his worry and anguish over Petersen kept clouding his thoughts. Why had Kline come to Guyanno Creek? Why kill these two?

He started up the creek trail and hiked to the clearing of dry grass and thistle, then crossed to the tree where they’d been killed. He touched the cut in the bark where the knife had been buried and where the chain had scraped as the men writhed. He saw the tracks of feral pigs, where they’d rooted the earth checking the dried blood at the base of the tree. Stocker here, Han there, and he touched where Stocker’s back had been, thought of the photos of Han sent to Billy Mauro that they’d assumed had a racial slant. Maybe they’d been wrong. Maybe no one had bothered to take any photos of Stocker. He turned and looked across the clearing and saw the moonlit night in his mind’s eye, heard Davies’s voice in his head, the account he’d claimed that Huega gave him, Huega who’d escaped in the truck. He saw them marched across the clearing, Stocker cooperating, Han breaking and running at some point. What could Han know that Stocker didn’t? He thought about that on the hike back down and called Douglas’s cell phone when he got to his truck.

“We’ve talked about your informant on the Emily Jane, but was the FBI also selling abalone to Kline’s network?” Marquez asked. “Were you supplying your informant with abalone so he’d be valu-able?” He heard Douglas breathing quietly on the other end.