Shell Games Read online

  He got out of the jeep and the wind stripped her words as he left the shoulder and started picking his way down, keeping his eyes on the boat, wary still, not wanting Li to spot him, then realizing it didn’t matter anymore. He told Petersen he was going to get down there as fast as he could and to call the Marlin; tell them to close and not worry about whether Li saw them or not. Just get here.

  He scrambled onto the black shore rock, all of it slick with rain and he slid down, fell, got up again as the Zodiac stalled and one side rose against the rocks. He saw the younger boy catapulted face forward out of the boat and tried to keep his focus on where the boy went. His head showed briefly, a blue parka rose on a wave, then Marquez was sliding again, tearing his palms open on the drop down the last steep face to the sand. He couldn’t lose sight of the boy’s parka. Had to spot his head again. He kicked his shoes off and the Zodiac rose against the rocks and flipped as Marquez ran and dove through a breaking wave, swimming hard underwater as the cold hammered his chest. When he surfaced he swam toward where the parka had been, eyes blearing with salt water and rain as he scanned the sea. But the parka was gone and the boy nowhere on the surface. He looked toward the Zodiac trying to see if a kid was hanging from a gunwale rope, couldn’t tell and swam toward it, circling wide of the rocks, fighting the swells and aware the current would take him, but seeing Petersen on the beach, trusting she had an eye on him. He spotted Li now, close to the rocks.

  The Zodiac slid along the surface as though greased, Hansen finally bringing the Marlin in close, nosing into the debris that floated away from the Zodiac. A cooler top and plastic bottles went past as Marquez swam out. The cold reached deeper into him, he felt time going and kept hoping that somehow the kids were hang-ing onto the boat, off the rope ringing the gunwale, that the older boy had gotten a hold of his brother and that somehow they’d stayed with the Zodiac. He swam for the Zodiac, was close enough now to see two then three sides, and as it spun, the fourth empty as the rest, and then Hansen’s voice came over the bullhorn as the Marlin’s lights washed over him.

  “John, grab hold.”

  They pulled him on board and continued searching, Hansen running as close as he dared to the rocks and beach. They could see Tran Li onshore with Petersen and then the lights picked up a swimmer and Marquez saw it was the older son, fifty yards off-shore and struggling to get in.

  “I need a wetsuit and flippers,” Marquez said. “I’ll go get him.”

  Hansen pointed at an approaching Coast Guard boat. “They’re closer,” Hansen said.

  “Keep the light on him, let him know we’re coming for him,” Marquez said, and he took the bullhorn. “Joe Li, hang on, we’re coming for you.” He had no idea whether his words carried, but kept at it, and then they saw the kid stop fighting the current and let the tide carry him as they kept the light on him.

  “He heard you,” Hansen said.

  Marquez scanned the water again for the other boy as the Coast Guard reached Joe Li. Petersen reported Tran Li was with her, but injured, had a possible broken collarbone and she was having trouble controlling him. He wanted to go back in the water and look for his younger son, and had told her that the boy couldn’t swim. She needed assistance holding him and Hansen confirmed that help was on the way. Marquez put on a weatherproof coat. His pants stuck tight to his skin and he’d started shaking so hard it was difficult to talk. He heard a helicopter, saw it coming at them with a spotlight on the water. It was too late but they kept search-ing with the Marlin, as well, Marquez working the light.

  A half hour later, Hansen turned the wheel over and crossed the deck to Marquez. They were too close to shore and the Marlin was his responsibility. He had to make the call, but that was hard with Marquez on board, something about the presence of the guy, Marquez still acting like they’d find him alive. He put a hand on Marquez’s shoulder.

  “John, we’ve got to back away,” and Marquez nodded, but didn’t take his eyes from the ocean. “We’re going to run you back. You did all you could.”

  “The boy is dead.”

  “You did what you could to save him.”

  But Marquez didn’t see it that way, at all.

  6

  Li’s wife was in her car, sitting at the end lot out near the mouth of the harbor when Marquez and Roberts drove past the construction equipment assembled under the bridge. Two Fort Bragg police cruisers followed and parked nearby, but it was Marquez who walked across the wet asphalt to her car. His body trembled with cold though the wind felt strangely warm. As her pale face turned toward him he read her apprehension and fear through the rain-streaked windshield. His heart hurt for her, but he didn’t show it now, raised his badge instead as she opened the door. He couldn’t find it in himself to tell her so bluntly.

  “Mrs. Li, your husband is down the coast on the beach. There’s been an accident and we’ll take you down to him.”

  She pointed past the rock jetty out into the opening of the harbor. “He come soon.”

  “He’s already onshore.”

  “No, no, he come now.”

  The Fort Bragg officers walked up to help and Roberts stayed in the van, scanning the cliffs, trying to find who else might be watching this. They escorted Mrs. Li to a patrol car, helped her into the backseat as her limbs went weak, and Marquez and Roberts waited until the police units crossed under the highway bridge, then followed, climbing back up to Highway 1.

  The memory of another woman came at him, the wife of a federal prosecutor, her expression freezing in horror and disbelief as Marquez told her that her husband had been murdered. He remembered a beautiful woman on the cusp of middle age, the lines beginning to deepen around her mouth and eyes, a word forming and reforming on her lips but no sound.

  “They’ve found the boy,” Petersen said, sighing. “I’m rolling with them. He’s on a beach about half a mile south of where they flipped.”

  When Marquez and Roberts got there firemen and Coast Guard personnel were grouped together on the rough-pebbled beach. Li and his wife arrived a few minutes later in the back of a CHP cruiser. Marquez watched Mrs. Li run down across the rocks to the beach, to her son. She dropped to her knees, pressed her face to the boy’s, cradled his head, wiped sand from his face, ignored the hands reaching to restrain her, the voices trying to be firm with her as tears streamed down her cheeks at what had been taken so unfairly. She straightened her son’s clothes and scolded him, admonishing him to get up off the sand, and Marquez had to turn away.

  When he looked back, a fire captain had squatted near her and put an arm around her shoulder. A white coroner’s van was just arriving and turning off the highway onto the tiny parking lot. Li was still up in the CHP car, had never gotten out. His head was bowed, unmoving. Marquez looked back at Mrs. Li, saw her rise to her feet and two firemen grab her arms as she crumpled to the sand. He felt Petersen touch his arm.

  “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 s
ome 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.”

  “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.”