Dead Game jm-3 Page 9

  “What did Perry say to you?” he asked her.

  “That he was the gentleman who’d sent the beer.”

  “Did he tell you I was the gentleman who paid for it?”

  “No, because I told him I hadn’t noticed any gentlemen in the room.”

  “Come on, how can you say that? You must have seen me down there.”

  She laughed, and he liked hearing her. The last cutback, the one that took out Roberts and Alvarez, had been the worst. They used to have a pretty good time together even on the long surveillances.

  “Now he wants to go home with you.”

  “Yeah, lucky me.”

  But nothing about them trailing her was funny. Roberts worked her way through the outskirts of Sacramento, and they were quieter because the opportunity was there for Torp and Perry to catch up. She moved into a part of town with more traffic and stoplights, and they got ready in case the Le Mans closed on her. But other than race lights a couple of times to avoid losing her, Torp and Perry hung back. When Roberts turned onto 80 eastbound toward Reno, the heavy Le Mans swung onto the on-ramp behind her, its engine a deep roar as it accelerated onto the freeway.

  “Take the Roseville exit,” Marquez said.

  “Roger, that.”

  Half an hour later Roberts did a slow figure eight through a large shopping center off the freeway in Roseville. She stopped briefly, went into a store while the Le Mans idled in the lot, waiting. Then she got back on the freeway and ran it up to eighty-five as the CHP unit dropped down alongside the Le Mans. Torp and Perry kept glancing over at the CHP officer, waiting for him to go ticket her, but the officer just rode alongside them, his sunglassed eyes turning from time to time to return their stares. Eventually, they slowed even more to get away from him. When they did that they had to let Roberts go.

  In Sacramento Roberts switched vehicles, then caught up to Shauf, who was with the Le Mans at a Sacramento McDonald’s, watching Perry and Torp eat in their car in the McDonald’s lot.

  “You’re on your own with them,” Marquez said, “I’m going to stop in at Lisa’s Marina and see if I can find her.”

  He figured Selke had already blown his cover with the owner of Lisa’s Marina, so why not come clean with her and find out if she saw anything? If Anna’s vanishing act was schemed, then she would have needed to know he was at Lisa’s before going forward with it. That had caused him to wonder about the fishermen who’d been at the bar that night.

  When he walked into the marina bar it was empty. The tall windows looked out across the river, and this part of the building was one story with a high ceiling. But there was a second story that covered half of the building and held Lisa’s office and apartment. He thought about calling from the bottom of the stairs, then spotted her out on the deck.

  “Hi,” she said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. I was cleaning. Do you need a room tonight?”

  “No, I’m here to talk to you, Lisa, if you have a few minutes.”

  She brushed a strand of hair back from her forehead.

  “I wondered when you’d come explain, or whether you ever would. The detective came by and asked a lot of questions about you and the woman they’ve been searching for. I haven’t been able to sleep through a night since that happened. I think about Anna all the time.”

  “You know her?”

  “Sure, it’s the delta. There aren’t that many of us.”

  “She’s probably fine.”

  “That’s what the detective said. He thinks she faked it. But why would she do that?”

  “Do you have time to sit down?”

  They took a table out on the deck, and it was warm in the sun. The mention of Selke’s name conjured the body last night, an image he pushed away when Lisa asked if he wanted coffee. Now he watched her come back outside with two coffee mugs. She had rose spots on her cheeks from cleaning the rooms. She had a wisp of hair that kept falling over her forehead and she kept pushing it back.

  “Sometimes at night I just like to sit here and listen to the river,” she said. “I’ve been here twelve years this coming March. I moved here from Florida after my husband died in a boating accident.”

  “Is he the one in the photos on the wall inside?”

  “He’s the one driving the boat.”

  Marquez knew she’d been a waterskiing star in Sarasota, Florida, when she was younger. Photos of her cutting through slalom courses, trick ski shots, and jumps were framed and on the walls outside the restrooms near the pay phone.

  She took a sip of coffee. “So you’re not a research biologist.”

  “No, I run an undercover team for California Fish and Game called the Special Operations Unit. Our mission is to stop the commercialization of wildlife. Right now we’re working a sturgeon poaching operation. Anna was working as an informant for us.”

  She moved the strand of hair off her forehead again.

  “What’s your real name?” she asked.

  “John Marquez.”

  “So it is John.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Marquez Spanish?”

  “My grandfather came here from Barcelona. My grandmother was English. They met in San Francisco.”

  Undoubtedly, she had Selke’s voice in her head and was evaluating him as they talked, wondering about the things Selke had asked her. When she finished with questions about him, he brought out his mug shots and photos. He reconstructed Friday night, the three men sitting at the bar while he was outside on the deck with a beer. When she couldn’t tell him much about the fishermen he brought out photos of August, Crey, and Ludovna. She picked up Ludovna’s photo, black-and-white, grainy.

  “He’s been here, though not in a while. He drives a white BMW, or a friend of his does. I remember that because I’ve always wanted one of those.” She tapped August’s face. “I don’t know about him.” Her expression changed, remembering something, a fingernail moving to Ludovna’s face. “This guy I think is a Russian immigrant. He said he was going to buy the marina from me, give me a big price, but he was drunk that night.”

  “What would he do with it?”

  She laughed, moved the strand of hair off her forehead again. “Lose money, I guess. Sit up nights trying to figure out how to get people to come here. Give free power and water to the boats that stop to use the bathrooms, but I’m whining.”

  “Would you sell?”

  “At the right price.”

  “Did he know that?”

  “No, I don’t have anyone to talk to, and I don’t gossip at the bar, but I was born in the Keys and I miss Florida. I’m ready to move back.” She seemed to feel she owed some further explanation. “I was towing my husband waterskiing, and he hit a piece of waterlogged lumber that was submerged.” He saw her take a breath. “It broke his leg and the bone severed the femoral artery. He died before we got to shore, and I just couldn’t stay in Florida after that.” She touched Ludovna’s face again, almost tenderly. “He is Russian, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, but he became a U.S. citizen in ‘97.”

  “And I know Richie Crey,” she said. “I mean, there aren’t that many people in business in the delta. He brings his sport boat here sometimes, you know, with the fishermen. I’m supposed to let him drink for free in return, but he sure can run up a bar tab. Sometimes it works out for me, but Richie can drink a lot. He’s still got problems. He’s not real happy, sort of like a big kid with tattoos and a record. It’s like he can never get away from some types of people he shouldn’t associate with anymore. But this guy, the Russian, scares me. I don’t mean he scares me like I’m afraid he would do something to me, but there’s something cruel about him. He kind of looks right through you.”

  “Looks through you?”

  “I mean it.”

  Marquez nodded. “Lisa, I want to give you a number to call me at if any of these men come back here.”

  “Then, what? What are you going to do if I call you?”

  “We’re just trying to put some pieces toge
ther and keep track of them.”

  “Is Richie getting in trouble again?”

  “He’s trying to.”

  “That’s too bad. I’m not surprised, but it’s too bad.”

  Marquez thanked her for the coffee and told her he’d be back to stay soon. He talked with Shauf and Roberts as he drove away, checked in to see where they were at with Torp and Perry.

  “They’re in about the seediest bar in south Sacramento,” Shauf said. “So maybe they’re on their way home to Sherri La Belle’s in Stockton. Or maybe this is home. This place is called Tommy’s. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “Yeah, I know Tommy’s.” He heard her say to Roberts over the radio, “He knows it. What did I tell you?” Then Shauf was back, talking to him. “Are you coming here now?”

  “No, I’m on my way to headquarters.”

  “What’s going on there?”

  “Bell called while I was meeting with Lisa and wants me to come in.”

  When Marquez walked into a conference room at headquarters he was surprised to see Ehrmann talking with Bell and Baird.

  “This is about an officer named Jo Ruax,” Ehrmann said. “I understand she runs the DBEEP boat.” Ehrmann said that like he knew what it was, so maybe he did. Maybe the FBI was working in the delta. “We’ve had wiretaps in place on individuals who have referred to Ruax in their conversations. Some of the conversations are disturbing, and we know her residence has been cased. There’s a lot of chatter about an undercover team of wildlife officers that they think she runs. Take a look at these, Lieutenant.”

  Ehrmann walked a transcript over, acted like he’d worked here all his life. He laid an inch-thick record of conversations down in front of Marquez and watched him start flipping through. A lot of blacked-out sections in the first pages and then whole sections twenty, thirty pages blacked out.

  “Can I read the blacked-out sections?” Marquez asked. “Because there’s not much else here.”

  “Keep turning pages. The sections I want you to look at are highlighted in yellow.”

  He flipped through five more pages and was looking at a conversation.

  “Donny will come see you.”

  “He didn’t show up last time. He called and said he was coming and then didn’t show, the fuckhead.”

  “There was a problem.”

  “Ah, there’s always a problem with him. He makes the problems and we take care of them. Now he’s all worried again.”

  “He says you’re the problem.”

  “Fuck him. He doesn’t know anything. Tell him to stay in his store. Besides, we’ve information on some of the others. We’ll deal with it.”

  “Then back off Donny. It’s working so leave him the fuck alone.”

  “He made the problem with her.”

  “No, he didn’t and anyway it’s over. Forget about it because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about anyway.”

  Marquez read the conversation twice and flipped through the next stretch of blacked-out pages. He glanced at Ehrmann.

  “There’s too much blacked out.”

  Ehrmann shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Another one of them is a woman. The unit is called DBEEP.” “What does that mean? Besides, how do you know it’s about caviar and not LA?”

  “Because they work off a fucking boat.”

  “What’s going on in LA?” Marquez asked and then flipped through another run of blacked-out sections. The transcript might be an inch thick, but it could be five inches thick and with this much blacked out he still wouldn’t be able to tell what the conversations were about. But, of course, Ehrmann knew that.

  “In LA?” Ehrmann asked, and Marquez glanced at him, wondering why he didn’t just say. “In LA it’s car theft, but let’s talk about DBEEP.” He addressed his next comment to Chief Baird. “You should consider pulling that team for a while,” Ehrmann said. “This is a bad group.”

  “Are we talking about organized crime?” Marquez asked.

  He was sure everyone in the room knew they were, but Ehrmann hadn’t said it, and he wanted to hear him say it. Ehrmann gave a faint nod, and Marquez put one piece together.

  “You’ve known for a while they’re buying sturgeon roe.”

  “We’ve had some idea, yes. What I’m here about today is to communicate that Lieutenant Ruax and possibly her crew are in some danger. We think you should shut that unit down.”

  “Shut it down for how long?” Baird asked.

  “I can’t answer that, but I will say we intend to move soon.” He nodded toward Marquez. “You may want to pull your team back as well.”

  “Do we show up in the transcripts?”

  “Not unless they’re referring to a different woman warden than Ruax. They’re concerned about an undercover team they think Ruax is part of. They’ve done the work to find out where she lives, so that means they’re serious about her. It may be they think Ruax is connected to you.”

  “But now you’re speculating?”

  “Yes.”

  They went back and forth on that for a few minutes, and then Ehrmann got tired of it. He looked at his watch, must have figured out he was done here. He picked up the transcript and thanked them.

  After Ehrmann left, Baird closed his eyes as if meditating. When he opened them he asked, “Should we pull the SOU?”

  “Absolutely,” Bell said.

  “No,” Marquez answered. “The SOU isn’t mentioned.”

  “Just that Ehrmann has come here to warn us is reason enough to pull back and evaluate, I think,” Bell said.

  Marquez didn’t respond. He kept his focus on Baird, waited for the chief to decide.

  18

  The Le Mans drifted north along a frontage road, then doubled back and drove into a residential area and parked down the street from an elementary school. They didn’t stay long, pulled away from the curb a few minutes later, and turned into a gas station about a mile up the road. Marquez watched Perry fill the tank and Torp walk down the street and go into a drugstore. Then they cruised by the school again as it was letting out.

  Minivans and SUVs were lining up, kids getting on buses. Some of the kids started walking home, and a few of those were alone as they went past the two men in the car.

  “So maybe one of them has a kid here and lost any custody rights when he went to prison, but I wouldn’t bet on it,” Shauf said. “I’m going to call the locals. What do you think?”

  “Yeah, make the call.”

  Not long after she did the Le Mans moved again. Torp and Perry drove north on 5 and then worked their way to west Sacra??mento and a failed industrial park called the West Sacramento Commerce Center.

  Only a handful of the buildings had been completed. The three-story low-income units were framed and wrapped in lath, but stucco had never been applied and the black paper under the lath had faded in sun and storms, windows broken out. There’d been articles in the Sacramento Bee, a fraud indictment, new owners, an appeal for city money, and Marquez remembered hearing something about some of the spaces being leased. They were looking at one of those right now.

  The Le Mans bounced across a wide asphalt lot and ran toward a long cinder-block building at the rear of the industrial park like a bad dog coming home. A sign on the building read Weisson’s Auto Body and Repair. The car pulled into an open bay, and Marquez looked at the twelve-foot, razor-wired fence surrounding the building and protecting the rows of vehicles with body damage waiting for repair. From here the fence looked like a moat.

  “Maybe they’re going to get the Le Mans cherried out,” Shauf said. “They seem like classy guys.”

  The building was at least two hundred feet long, twenty feet tall, paved all around, the chain-link fence standing away from it forty yards. Marquez spotted four police vehicles waiting for bodywork, so they had the right prices or an in with somebody at the city. The police vehicles suggested the place was at least legit. Shauf drove around back to check out what was there and found another
road leading out and more open bays.

  “It’s a big building,” she said. “A lot of bodywork going on in there. I didn’t even know about this place.”

  Marquez checked out the rest of the industrial park again. The retail shops had never opened. Their glass faces were dusty, sterile. The big three-story low-income housing with its broken windows and unfinished exterior looked like it had already lived out its life rather than never having started it. Temporary fencing surrounded it. Fences seemed to be a theme.

  He took a call from Selke while Shauf scouted the opposite side of the building. “It’s definitely not Burdovsky. We got Burdovsky’s dental records and blood type. No matches. She’s a Jane Doe at the moment, and though it doesn’t change the fact that somebody did that to her, it must make you feel better. I saw your face out there. I know you wanted a call. Thanks again for coming out last night.”

  Shauf’s voice crackled over the radio. She was around the back side still, down near a PG amp;E substation, following a road she’d turned around on.

  “Lucky thing I turned around. Perry and Torp switched vehicles and just pulled out this side in a white Econoline van. I’m behind them. You’re going to have to go around the building and come out this other road, unless you want to let them go.”

  Her question was, was it worth still following them? Probably not, but Marquez decided they’d stick a little longer. They followed the van onto 80 westbound and an hour and a half later were in the Bay Area working through heavy traffic along the east shore of the bay.

  Marquez took a position two lanes over, two hundred yards back. On the bay a kite surfer skimmed along. Ahead, traffic jockeyed for position in lanes that weren’t going anywhere fast. When the Spanish got here all this land close to the bay was marsh. They wrote of the skies darkening when millions of birds took flight. Grizzlies fished from pockets of water left at low tide. There were times when Marquez felt like his team, what the SOU was doing, was just part of the slow fading away of wildlife that had begun when we separated the wild from ourselves. The cities kept growing and every year got more complicated. Just the dance of traffic alone was a game of timing and nuance, but compared to the wild it was still simple stuff. None of what we’d ever made had the complexity of what we were giving up.