Shell Games jm-1 Read online

  “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.”

  “Whoever he is, John, we’ll take him down.”

  Marquez looked out at the ocean. He thought of a Mexican Federale captain who’d told him about rumors in the mountain pueblos that Kline wasn’t really a human being, that he was the devil himself. “Diablo,” the officer had said, and then smirked.

  7

  When they got back to the safehouse in Fort Bragg, Marquez sat down with Melinda Roberts. She’d work with him tomorrow as he met with Jimmy Bailey, the Pillar Point informant. It would be a chance to work one-on-one with her, something he hadn’t done enough of, a casualty of budget cuts. But with Petersen leaving in a month there was more urgency. Integrating a new warden into the team was easier when the SOU was a ten-person unit, but he didn’t know when those days would come back, if ever. Roberts was a natural for covert work, very observant, very aware, and blended easily-very quick to assimilate, but she was also will-ful and there was a perspective issue that showed itself again now.

  “Bailey is a flake,” she said.

  “He is, but we’re not going after his parents.”

  She frowned at the obscure humor, not finding anything funny in it. A lot of their informants were flaky and had no more ambition than to leach CalTip dollars for beer money, get even with an ex friend, or take out a competitor. Tomorrow he’d meet Bailey, alone, but figured Roberts would drive down to Pillar as well and they could evaluate together what to do with the information Bailey delivered, if he delivered anything. From the numerous messages he’d begun to believe Bailey might have something, but he didn’t say that now, and didn’t really want to allow himself that hope yet. They left it that Roberts would meet him in San Francisco and they’d drive tandem down the coast.

  Marquez left Fort Bragg, cut through the coastal mountains on Highway 20 and followed 101 back to the Bay Area. He was tired and the ride felt longer than usual, the glare of headlights hard on his eyes. When he got close to home he called Bailey. A young woman answered.

  “Jimmy is here, but he’s partying,” she said.

  “Any chance he could take a break? I really need to talk to him.”

  There was a long delay and he heard her ask somebody nearby if they knew where Jimmy was. Then she came back on.

  “He’s in the hot tub.”

  “Tell him it’s Banner. He’s been trying to get me all day.” The name was an alias he used with Bailey, but it sounded odd tonight, like the name of somebody’s dog. The phone dropped on the counter and he didn’t really know whether she’d gone for Bailey or not, but he stayed on the line, listened to Santana playing in the background. Five minutes later, as he was coming across southern Marin and close to hanging up, Bailey coughed into the phone, said he was getting water everywhere and couldn’t talk right now anyway. Marquez confirmed 8:00 tomorrow morning. He’d found that you had to make these final phone calls with Bailey or you got a shit-eating grin and an excuse about forgetting the next time you saw him.

  Now he exited into Mill Valley and climbed the steep road up Mt. Tamalpais. His house was two bedrooms and a study and looked like a cedar-sided cabin from the outside. It had a stone chimney and a deck on the backside and the gravel driveway was narrow and dipped and then rose to the knoll where the house sat. A wooded shoulder of Mt. Tam fell away to the right of the house and below there were stands of trees, open flanks of dry grass and folded ravines with oak and brush, then the ocean. In winter he watched the leading edge of storms approach and in the clearest months, April and November, there were mornings when the ocean was the blue of a sapphire. He had a partial view of the top of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and the pinnacle of the Trans-America building and the taller buildings of the city, and still, it was dark enough at night up here to where you could see the stars.

  His grandfather had deeded ten acres of the land below to the county in exchange for permanent release from property taxes and on the agreement that it would never be built on. Marquez had inherited the house but there was a funny disconnect to that because it wasn’t property that anyone with his job could afford. The joke within Fish and Game was they always backed the wrong candidate for governor, so their budget increase requests typically got blue-lined and their pay now was well below w
hat a highway patrol officer made. He never forgot the luckiness of having this house or the perseverance and hard work of his grandparents. It was his thought that he’d leave the house to Maria one day, and had made a will to that effect and had resolved that if the separation from Katherine turned into divorce he’d still leave the will alone.

  He parked and reached for the light switch as he got inside the door. Six months ago Katherine and Maria would have been home, the lights would have been on, and maybe he would have heard them talking or Maria’s laughter as he walked up. He felt the emptiness and wished he could have the moment back and could talk it out with Kath. He wished he’d been more open-minded and less stubborn and hadn’t withdrawn hurt and angry so fast.

  He walked into Maria’s room. She lived or had lived in the study, the room that had been his office before he married Katherine. A lot of her stuff was still there and they had an awk-ward thing going where she was still spending a certain number of nights here as he and Katherine tried to get things worked out. On the nights they’d been able to pull it off they’d have dinner together, and then the next morning he’d drive her to school. They’d gone along okay that way in the spring, but since school let out in the summer she’d been here less and not at all, lately.

  He poured rum in a tumbler, dropped in a couple of ice cubes, then wrote his report to Chief Keeler on his laptop and e-mailed it. When the rum was finished he searched around for something to make a sandwich, settled for peanut butter, poured another drink and sat out on the deck and thought about tomorrow. He felt tired, tense, too wound up from lack of sleep and hoped the rum would loosen him, free him for a couple of hours, maybe even help him see things differently. His team thought he should have taken Li down sooner and that unspoken judgment weighed on him tonight. They’d had Li on commercial trafficking, which in addi-tion to impounding his boat, dive equipment, and car, allowed a judge to fine up to $40,000. They should be able to get him to talk.

  Now he turned on the TV, looking for late-night local news, and found a report on the drowning and then a longer piece on the Huega murder, including a headshot of Huega, whom they de-scribed as having a minor criminal history and known drug ties. They all but called it a drug killing, didn’t name Davies, but said police had a man in custody they were questioning. The report ended and he flicked through other stations. His nerves hummed and yet he knew he should get some sleep. He thought of the younger Li boy’s face pale in death, his blue parka rising on a swell before the ocean took it. The TV reporter had cited the unusual weather, the thunder cells on the north coast, an area that didn’t usually see that. He clicked the TV off and went out the front door with a flashlight.

  Low on the western side of the house was the crawl space door. He unlatched it and stepped over the foundation grade beam. There was maybe five feet of clearance underneath and he had to stoop below the floor joists. Cobwebs brushed his face as he made his way over to the base of the stone fireplace his grandfather had built out of rocks gathered from the property. He’d mixed aggregate, cement, and sand in the old iron-handled wheelbarrow that Marquez still stored under here. He’d hated banks and had embedded an iron box in the base of the fireplace. A stone concealed the face and for years this was where his grandfather had kept his money and the land deed and the things he’d treasured, the vault of the Bank of Marquez, not a very big bank, but an honest one run by the truest man Marquez had ever known, a Spanish immigrant who’d married a native San Franciscan with English roots. He moved the rock, opened the box, and took out the Kline file.

  Back inside he laid the file on the dining room table and opened a beer. If Katherine had been home she would have tried to stop him and maybe it was the rum and tiredness, the thrumming of his nerves, but the file and the grainy face looking up from a poor photo seemed to have a presence that he could feel. It dis-turbed the space in the house, but, of course, that was all in his head. It was the emotion of the day and accepting that Kline could be in California. He turned the pages and didn’t need to reread words he remembered. A few witness statements. Photos of torture executions. He looked at the wavery ink lines of his own hand-writing in the year after he’d left the DEA-or more accurately, been offered the chance to extend his leave of absence into resig-nation. A polite way of saying something else, and yet, he hadn’t challenged them. He’d taken it because he’d bent their rules enough to where they could have done more.

  He remembered the urgency with which he’d interviewed people, chasing leads, coaxing the frightened to talk, the long drives, always armed, gun lying under a newspaper on the passenger seat, watch-ing the headlights behind him, the cars that passed on the other side of the road. A particularly hot night in Texas came at him now, boiled up through the rum and he remembered the feeling of para-noia. Was he inviting it back now? He turned another page. He should show Ruter this photo, he thought, a concrete telephone pole with two men chained to it, one Federale, one DEA agent, a very good friend he’d talked to that same night. A chain was around their necks, ratcheted the same way, hands bound, feet bound, gut slit. The knife had been wired to the concrete pole by its hilt. It hung above the head of the DEA agent, Ramon Green. He touched Green’s image, whispered, “He’s here, Ramon. I can feel him.”

  His voice echoed off the oak flooring in the small living room. They die but you take them with you and you keep them alive by remembering. No alcohol-fueled melodrama, he thought, but touched the page near Ramon’s head again. What a terrible thing that had been. Could he explain someone capable of this to his team? He turned another page now and read through his attempt at a chronological bio on Kline. He’d made a trip to Thailand and wasted his money. At the time he’d had an FBI friend who’d kept him informed. He didn’t know what they believed now. His last attempt had been rebuffed.

  The Feds had learned that Kline was the son of Christian mis-sionaries, Elizabeth and Henry Kline from Dayton, Ohio, who were kidnapped and killed in the late sixties by communist rebels in Indonesia. He stared at a photo of the parents. You’re lucky you didn’t see how the boy turned out, Henry. You wouldn’t have liked it much. He’d even gone to Dayton, gone a couple of weeks believing he could find clues to Kline’s hiding places in the family history.

  The FBI believed that Kline had been sold or traded for weapons as an infant. Then until he was a teenager there was nothing. The year he turned sixteen a lurid story circulated in Indonesia of a young man with white blond hair who’d cut the throats of eight men in a jungle village. Villagers believed he could see at night. Allegedly, that young man had been allied with a communist guerrilla group and the FBI had spun it into a story, a bio that had gaps they couldn’t fill. Somewhere around his twentieth birthday he disappeared. He turned up in Africa with a new name and was out of politics and working for drug traffickers. His move to Mexico had coincided with the years when cocaine was the drug of choice in America. Was he still operating from there?

  He read on and then flipped the file shut. It had articles, it held analysis, some from classified government papers, the kind of thing they’d arrest you for in today’s climate. He’d leaned on people to help him, he’d called in favors. Everything in the file he’d pored over god knows how many times. He finished the drink and it was nearly 1:00. He’d communicate with the Humboldt detective tomorrow, swallow his pride and call Ruter, set up to meet him.

  He left the file on the table, then lying on the bed, the top blan-ket wrapped around him, eyes closed and the roar of the ocean in his ears again, felt a presence near him, pushed that aside, and thought about his last conversation with Katherine. The distance, the lack of spark. He heard the floor creak out near the kitchen and lay quiet, opened his eyes again. The sound had been distinct, not the house creaking as the night cooled, but someone inside, weight on the floor. He reached for his holster on the nightstand, lifted the gun slowly out, rested it on his chest over his heart. Then a scuffling, something moved on a counter, and he slid the blanket off, very quietly opene
d the nightstand drawer and removed the tiny flash-light Katherine kept there. He rose and heard the hinges of the old casement window in the kitchen squeak as he stood up.

  He’d had poachers follow him home before and the house had been burgled. You could come unseen at night up through the brush and trees on the downslope. The last burglar had jimmied the deck door slider-it was old and you could lift it right out of the track. Marquez had cut a broomstick to block the slider, but only used it when he was going to be away.

  He moved to the bedroom doorframe with the gun and flashlight. It got quiet out there and he had the feeling that whoever was there had just heard the floorboards squeak. A minute passed without any sound except an owl outside and he eased forward two steps, touched his heel down, rolled his weight forward very slowly, eyes adjusting to gray-black, looking for any movement at the end of the hallway. The faintest sound from the kitchen and he took another step and remembered that as he’d read the Kline file he’d opened the kitchen window for air. Another three steps, each one very slow, and now he was close and ready to come around the corner.

  He knew a weapon might be aimed where he’d appear and got ready, visualizing the kitchen layout. It was small, Mexican pavers on the floor, a little rectangle and then the counter looking into the dining room. His guess was that anyone in there would press up against the refrigerator. Whatever was there was waiting, staying very quiet. He hesitated a moment, listening, holding his breath, then quickly crossed the opening to the kitchen with the flashlight held out but not on yet, his gun up, tracking. He clicked the light on movement on the counter and lowered the gun as a big raccoon went out the kitchen window and dropped down, no longer hurrying as it crossed the moonlit deck. A torn box of Triscuits lay on the counter.

  He turned on the ceiling light, cleaned up the counter, and locked the window, feeling relieved and coming down off the adrenaline spike. It made him smile; it changed the night a little. He looked at the file on the dining table, walked around and opened it again after turning out the kitchen light. Moonlight reflected off the photos and he stared at the faces.