Dead Game (18 page)

Shauf and Cairo had to be wondering too. Marquez edged closer to Alvarez’s truck, rode up near him and took over the lead at first light.

“What’s the gas mileage on those hybrids?” Alvarez asked.

“Two and half times what we’re getting.”

“That’s why I’m asking. I’m there. I’m at a quarter tank.”

Alvarez pulled off at the Mobil, Shell, Chevron signs up ahead. He was just getting back on the freeway when the first sunlight came through the passenger window of Marquez’s truck.

“Right lane at sixty-five,” Marquez called out. “Sitting on sixtyfive.”

He felt sunlight touch his face and heard Alvarez say he’d picked up two cups of coffee. “One for you, Lieutenant, unless I finish this one before I catch you.”

“Catch me, I could use it.”

As the sun rose, Marquez dropped back, putting more space between himself and the hybrid, his mouth dry, heart racing, though nothing had changed in the last hour. But there was daylight now, the shape of a head, a cap coming off, Roberts said. Dark brown hair, and, from behind her, Roberts used her binoculars to look at the reflection in the rearview mirror.

“It’s a woman, for sure,” she said, and the focus on the gender was really only about one thing. “Want me to get closer?”

“Yes, but let’s hang on a little longer.”

The dark hair was right, head and shoulders were what he remembered, and Roberts was close to saying something. Up ahead was open country, soggy with the rains, fields brown and stubbled, hills in the gray early light in the distance. Before Chico there were olive groves, dusky blue-green, riding the hills off to his right, and Alvarez had closed in behind Marquez.

They made a quick stop, Marquez handing Alvarez a photo, a snapshot he’d run a copy of, and Alvarez handing him the coffee and pastry he’d picked up when he’d gassed up.

“That’s her face?” Alvarez asked.

“Yeah.”

The hybrid still rode in the right-hand lane, the blue color of the car bright against muted hills of olives, sky white since sunrise.

“I’m coming up alongside her,” Alvarez said. “I’m tailing a pickup, and the pickup just passed her, and here I come.”

Then he was silent, likely not sure yet or not wanting her to see him talking, not that it mattered like it used to, given all the “hands-free” devices.

“Okay, I’m past her.”

“Did you get a look?”

“I got a good one, and I’m just double-checking now. I’ve got her in my mirror.”

He knew Alvarez well enough, knew already from his tone. She’d gone as far as to ask him about what it took to become a Fish and Game warden, asking whether someone with her river experience and time outdoors could become a warden. He’d taken her seriously, told her he’d see what he could do to help. She’d burned him the whole way.

“It’s definitely her,” Alvarez said.

“Are you that sure?”

“It’s her, Lieutenant, and yeah, I’m that sure. I’ll move well ahead now.”

Marquez fell farther back, and, briefly, it was almost as if he lacked the strength to push down the accelerator. He figured he’d seen just about everything in twenty years of undercover work and was surprised how much this affected him. He opened his log and found where he’d stuck Selke’s card.

“Who’s this?”

“John Marquez.”

“I don’t know anything new, and I’m in a meeting. Can I call you back?”

“We’ve just ID’d a female suspect we’re following north on I-5, coming up on Redding.”

“I can only think of one female suspect you’d be calling me about.”

“You’re right. It’s Anna.”

It was simple enough,
wasn’t it? They sent her in and she burned you. You were too eager for a lead and a break and didn’t check her out enough. They stayed loosely with her now. Anna didn’t push it, kept her speed steady. There was new snow on Mount Shasta and winds on the summit that blew streamers of powder off the cornices. The SOU leapfrogged, pulling off to get gas, use a restroom, then close the gap again. They drove through Yreka and neared the Oregon border, Marquez making the calls as they did to clear them to continue the pursuit. He talked to a sergeant he knew and liked on Oregon’s Special Investigations Unit, told him what they had going on.

Anna’s window was partway down, hair catching in the wind flowing in. Shauf passed and turned to study her, Shauf’s face stolid behind dark glasses as she took her in and then talked to Marquez. He polled the team when they were well into Oregon.

“Alvarez?”

“I’m still good, but I’m hungry.”

“You haven’t slept.”

“Yeah, I have. I slept for an hour or so right around Shasta.”

A few laughs. “Cairo?” Marquez asked.

“I’m doing fine.”

“Roberts?”

“I need gas and a restroom.”

“I’ll take point,” Marquez said. “Go ahead and break off.”

“Shauf?”

“I’d like to wring her neck. That’ll keep me going another thousand miles.”

“We’ll be talking to her soon enough.”

But it was Ehrmann he talked to next. He figured it was the right moment to push for information.

“We found Anna Burdovsky. We’ve followed her from the delta into Oregon. She picked up what we think is caviar in jars being moved in Raburn Orchards boxes. Four boxes were loaded into the back of a Toyota Prius a little after four this morning. She showed up in the delta at a building we had under surveillance. It’s a southern Cal vehicle. Could it tie into what you’ve got going?”

“Read me off the plates.”

Marquez read them off.

“Burdovsky has made deliveries for people working for her ex-husband, the Karsov we’ve told you about. It’s possible this is the overlap we’ve been wondering about, Lieutenant.”

“Is Karsov here?”

“Why are you asking that?”

“You said he travels, and obviously something is up.”

“As a matter of fact he may be in the country. We’ve learned something this morning that suggests he might be. Under no circumstances should you make contact with Burdovsky.”

Marquez knew that was coming. It didn’t surprise him.

“We’re going to join you following her.”

“We don’t want to lose track of what’s she’s carrying.”

“I’m sure you’d like to have a conversation with her also.”

“That can wait.”

He gave Ehrmann their position, then hung up. Two hours later Anna finally pulled over for gas. “She’s got an iron bladder,” Shauf said, and they watched her move through the gas station store. She was in line at the cash register and came out with bottled water, hot chocolate in a white Styrofoam cup, and a sandwich. Her face looked calm. She chatted with the employees. You wouldn’t know looking at her she’d been driving for eight hours. She yawned, talked to the kid who pumped the gas, and then got back in her car.

Marquez was across the street parked in a Burger King lot on the phone with Ehrmann again, answering more questions about how they found her. He was starting to figure out what Ehrmann wasn’t saying.

“When did the FBI lose track of her?”

“A week ago.”

Marquez watched her pull out and then back onto the freeway. They could expect to start spotting Feds any moment now.

“We’ll take over when she gets to her destination,” Ehrmann said.

Anna drove harder as they neared Portland, but when it started raining she slowed and not long afterward exited and drove up to a diner. In the diner it looked warm. The windows
were steamed, and outside the rain turned to sleet. Roberts went in and ordered food to go for everyone, including the extra sandwich Marquez asked for and now took down the street to where an FBI agent had nosed his car in between trees. He got the agent to lower his window, but he wouldn’t accept the sandwich, said regulations wouldn’t allow it.

“No one will know,” Marquez said. “How long have you guys been on her?”

“I don’t even know who she is. Maybe you can fill me in.”

“We’re following her on a sturgeon poaching case, but you’re on an organized crime car theft ring.”

“I didn’t even know that. They just gave me a list of vehicles to look for.”

“Which one did you spot?”

He smiled. “Yours.”

The agent was young, clean-cut, hard-eyed, wouldn’t touch the sandwich Marquez had handed him until he was alone and driving. Marquez left him as Anna got up to leave.

It was a thousand miles from the Sacramento/San Joaquin delta to Seattle, but she didn’t go all the way to Seattle proper. She held a cell phone to her ear as she veered from the far left lane over to the Seattle airport exit, then drove to the Southwest gate and pulled over at the curb and got out. Before an airport officer could tell her she couldn’t leave her car alone a man stepped off the curb, took the keys from her, slid onto the driver’s seat, adjusted the seat, and pulled away. The whole exchange took less than a minute. Anna headed into the airport, and Marquez watched the airport doors slide shut behind her.

“What do we do?” Shauf asked.

“We stay with the car; we follow the caviar.”

Now they were parked
down the street from a condominium project in Seattle. The new driver had glanced continually at his rearview mirror after he left the airport, boxing several streets when he left the freeway. Then he’d pulled into the garage beneath the condos, parked close to the elevator, and got on his phone. Two men came down the elevator. They unloaded the boxes, and the hybrid driver backed up, tires squealing on the smooth concrete of the garage as he started forward again and bounced onto the street.

“Let him go,” Marquez said. “The Feds have him covered.”

They watched the hybrid round the corner and disappear. The boxes went up the elevator. Both the garage and elevator had security cameras, so there were multiple shots of the two men and the boxes. But the information came secondhand to the SOU. The FBI asked that they not go into the building, said they were in contact with the building owners, who, after the first conversation, turned
the situation over to their lawyer, waking him at home. They watched the lawyer drive up half an hour later.

“He doesn’t look too happy to be here,” Shauf said, and Marquez got out and walked up to within earshot. He heard the lawyer’s peevishly aggressive tone as he informed the FBI agents what liability the government would take on if they interrupted any of the security cameras in operation. But the problem was the cameras were on a loop and eventually the tape would play over itself and the images of the men could get lost or become difficult to recover. The lawyer wanted everything to wait until morning. He wanted to go home, didn’t want to deal with this tonight. No one had told him exactly what was in the boxes, yet they were clear they didn’t believe it was stolen property or drugs, so why couldn’t it wait until morning? And the building owners were opposed on principle to providing any information regarding the individual condo owners.

A manager showed up. He stood next to the lawyer and faced the two FBI agents. Marquez was called over to answer the lawyer’s questions.

“How do you know they brought illegal substances here?”

“We watched it loaded and followed them from California.”

“Did you see what was in the boxes?”

“No.”

As he said that, Marquez caught a look from the apartment manager that worried him. The manager watched him intently as the lawyer launched into a quasi sales pitch.

“These are expensive units, and the owners are professionals who value privacy and security. Access to the building is restricted—”

“The security cameras show what floor they got off,” Marquez said. “Why don’t we knock on some doors? We know what they look like.”

The lawyer looked like he’d swallowed battery acid. “That’s exactly what doesn’t happen here.” He addressed Marquez now as though explaining manners to trailer trash. “Nobody knocks on doors here. People make appointments, and we can’t begin to ask owners at this hour of the night, without any warrant or proof of anything illegal having been brought into the building, to open their doors.” He really got warmed up now. “I believe this is still America and the Constitution is still in place.”

The apartment manager drifted away, and Marquez watched him go in the keyed entrance and disappear into the building. He had a bad feeling about the guy, and the sense the opportunity was slipping away. The FBI agents continued to politely engage with the lawyer, but Marquez walked away. He pulled his cell phone and broke down the team, sent all but Shauf to go find food and a motel.

Shauf moved her van, reclined her seat, and closed her eyes while they waited. The lawyer had left. No one’s privacy would get disturbed tonight. The street cleared off, and it started drizzling. He kept watching the concrete mouth of the garage on the possibility the men who’d taken the boxes up the elevator would come back down, ready to move them to their next stop. His bad feeling about the manager intensified, but maybe the guy was actually inside trying to figure out which unit the boxes had gone into. It became harder to look through the blur of the drizzle, and still, he continued to watch, turning over the things Ehrmann had told him as a way to stay awake.

Anna had done things here for her ex, though not necessarily willingly. Coercion and extortion were sacred values etched deep in the granite pillars of organized crime, so maybe it all strung together, Anna delivering stolen cars or running caviar a thousand miles because she felt she didn’t have a choice. He debated what the implications were to their investigation. If there’d been any lingering question about Anna’s compromising them, there was no question anymore, and he was mulling that over when Katherine called. She was so upset her voice quavered.

“Maria didn’t come home after school and now she’s called and says she’s moving out.”

“Moving where?”

“In with two of her friends who have an apartment in San Francisco. Wendy and Stacey. You’ve met them.” He’d met them but wasn’t sure which was Wendy and which was Stacey. “John, where are you?”

“In Seattle. We followed a suspect moving caviar from the delta.” He sketched for her quickly how they’d gotten here, then said, “I’ll call Maria, right now.”

Maria answered on the third ring.

“I can’t deal with it anymore.”

“What can’t you deal with?”

“Fighting with Mom, and I’m eighteen. I’m a legal adult. I can work and pay rent and still go to school. I can’t handle it anymore, besides it’s totally dysfunctional around there. You’re never home, and Mom is always working too much because you’re not home. It’s time for me to make my own life.”

“You need to finish high school first.”

“I will. And I’ll go to college when I’m ready.”

He heard resolution in her voice that gave him hope, a fierceness that caused him to smile. Nothing was said for a moment, and he looked into the blank fluorescence of the garage, stripes painted on the floor.

“I’m at Wendy and Stacey’s apartment.” Then she added for no obvious reason. “And Shane is going to quit if Mom doesn’t stop dissing him.”

He knew Shane worked at the Presto on Union because Maria had talked about him. But don’t question her about Shane. This thing has got to be unraveled a different way.

“Are you with Mom?” she asked.

“No, I’m in Seattle. We chased a suspect up here. Your mom called me a few minutes ago.”

“Did you drive to Seattle?”

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy. Is this on the sturgeon thing? Is it really worth it?”

Marquez heard a young man’s voice say, “Hey, babe, we got to go,” and he realized whoever had said that was so nearby that he must have been listening in and there was enough push to the voice to show he wanted to control the situation.

“I have to go,” Maria said.

“Don’t hang up yet.”

“Shane has to be at work early tomorrow morning. We went to dinner, and he just dropped me off. I’m at Wendy and Stacey’s, and I’m fine here, dad. I just can’t do it anymore.”

“Where is their apartment?”

“In the Mission.”

“What address?”

“You’re just going to say it’s a bad area.”

“Have you ever heard me say stuff like that?”

She didn’t answer. Behind her, “Come on, babe.”

“I’m going to hang up, Dad.”

He wasn’t sure what to say to her. He was very surprised she’d packed and left, but he couldn’t argue her home. He could order her home and she might obey, probably would, but it was already midnight and Katherine knew the two young women she was camping out with. This Shane figured in, but now wasn’t the time to try to figure that out.

“I’ll see you at home tomorrow night,” he said.

“What do you mean if you’re in Seattle?”

“We’ll talk tomorrow night.”

Not long after hanging up, Marquez had another conversation with the FBI special agents who’d given up on the lawyer and conferred with their supervisor, who’d then bumped the situation up to the S.A.C. running the Seattle Field Office. The Special-Agent-in- Charge was in contact with Ehrmann. The agent on the street with Marquez said, “You guys ought to pack it in. Looks like we’re going to deal with all of it from here.”

“Are you going to stake out the building tonight?”

“I’m going to do whatever they tell me. They’re going to get back to me. The S.A.C. is involved now. You stumbled into a big one.”

“We didn’t really stumble into it, and we don’t want to lose track of this caviar. If these two guys come down the elevator barehanded in the morning and drive off, you’ll go with them.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you get Ehrmann on the line?”

“No, he’s talking to my supervisor and my supervisor is talking to the S.A.C.”

Marquez had a pretty good idea how the fifty-six FBI field offices worked. Many decisions got made at the task force and supervisory level, and the S.A.C. got informed of the progress of operations and had to give approval for aspects, but he was also the bureaucracy fall guy if a fuckup had to be contained to a particular field office. That way the big guys back east were protected from blame. A great thing about the Bureau was if they really set out to make something happen, it went down fast, but most of the time when they started talking about supervisors and S.A.C.s you could forget about anything happening fast, particularly if you weren’t talking about Federal violations.

“You understand the problem,” the special agent said.

“Sure.”

The guys upstairs might be tied into Ehrmann’s larger investigation. They might go down on much larger violations than trafficking in illegal animal products. Sturgeon was very low on the list, but this special agent wasn’t going to say it. The agent took a phone call and stepped away. When he walked back over he said, “Ehrmann will explain when you get back to California.”

“These boxes may move tonight. How many people have you got?”

“We’ll handle it from here. I mean it. The word is your team is to pull out.”

“If it doesn’t move tonight, we’ll pull out at dawn.”

“You’re just going to make a problem for me and you.”

Marquez was nonconfrontational but adamant. More phone calls got made and then it was agreed to. What could it hurt? He told Shauf to get some sleep and then sat awake in his truck. At
first light it was still drizzling and the streets were dark and wet. The streetlight near the van hummed. Marquez got out and walked around. He knocked on Shauf’s window and then went over to talk to the FBI before leaving.

Shauf followed him to the wharf. They found a place to eat, and Marquez ordered scrambled eggs with salmon and toast cooked dark and just barely touched with butter. Shauf ate a bagel and drank four cups of coffee. Then they woke up the team, and everyone headed south within an hour. As he left Seattle he saw the Olympic Range in his rearview, sunlight between the clouds reflecting off patches of snow high on the mountains. He drove slowly, fatigue heavy in him, and less than a hundred miles down the road he had to pull over and sleep.

Now he was driving again and approaching the Klamath River in southern Oregon. Ehrmann called and the reception was bad, but Marquez didn’t expect to learn anything. Ehrmann’s voice was dry, rasping, a cough interrupting sentences that crackled and stretched with the poor connection.

“We’re with her.”

“Is she in custody?”

“We’re not bringing her in.” Ehrmann coughed, and Marquez held the cell away from his ear. “We haven’t found your caviar.”

After hanging up, Marquez crossed the Klamath River, and the brief glimpse of the Klamath conjured memories of the largest die-off ever in the United States, thirty-two thousand Chinook salmon as a result of the ongoing struggle for water rights. Plenty of people on either side to tell you exactly why it happened and how the other side was in conspiracy to perpetrate a lie, but one truth that couldn’t be argued very far was that the fall run this
year of Chinook was down twenty-five percent. The biologists guessed it would stay down at least another couple of years. That assumed normal rainfall and no more water diversions that killed the young.

But even that was hardly news anymore. Perhaps we’d grow accustomed to eating salmon raised in pens. Only 2 percent of the salmon sold now was wild, and the pen farmers who fed their salmon dye to color it for market and fought regulating the antibiotics in the feed, they’d eventually get it figured out, wouldn’t they? Salmon had once swum in every ocean, but it didn’t need to be wild as long as we could build farms, pack them in ocean pens, and choose flesh colors like paint chips.

Besides, trying to live in balance with these wild creatures was a hassle. Farmed salmon was cheaper, simpler, and the only way to meet the demand. Problems of funguses and lack of musculature from living in crowded pens, those were solvable. Perhaps growth hormones would speed up the time it took to get them to market and bring the price down further. That should please the shareholders, and look at what the chicken farm factories and hog operations had faced and solved. Eventually, no one would remember what wild salmon tasted like anyway, or maybe they’d finally get sold on the idea that farmed salmon tasted the same, or even better. It was just a matter of the right ad campaigns.

The Lacey Act passed in the early part of the twentieth century was still the one law game wardens could count on, the strongest measure ever passed in the States to protect wildlife, but it hadn’t come from Congress’s desire to achieve a balance with the wild. It passed out of fear that we’d lose everything at the current rate of slaughter. We’d lose what we believed we rightfully
owned, and maybe that view was a big part of the problem. We didn’t really own the wild or the right to wipe out species. We’d beaten back our predators and just assumed the right to whatever we wanted with the rest of the creatures.

But fast forward a hundred years. A different battle was underway in the West for habitat and species survival. Whether it was economically feasible to preserve salmon runs for future generations, or fair to make hardworking businesses suffer to allow a species to survive, those were open questions. The debate wasn’t so much about how to live in balance with nature, but whether it was worth the effort, whether the wild meant anything to us.