Dead Game (24 page)

The next morning
Marquez met Shauf at Mel’s in Walnut Grove, where they got coffee and sat in his truck and talked before heading toward Raburn Orchards. They drove slowly up the river road.

“Think anyone will be there?” she asked.

“Sure, they’ll be there and we may get another confession out of Raburn as he throws himself on the tracks to try to save his brother.”

“You really think he cares that much about his brother?”

“I do.”

When they turned off the road and came down the steep drop to Raburn Orchards Marquez spotted Abe’s truck under the high gable of the packing shed, so they went there first. The driver’s door was open, the truck parked at an odd angle, but no lights were on in back and they couldn’t find Raburn.

“His keys are in the ignition,” Shauf said.

“Let’s drive down to the house. They must be waiting down there.”

Isaac’s big dark blue Ford F-350 and Cindy’s Volvo were there. Marquez pulled in alongside the Ford.

“Cold this morning,” Shauf said as they got up on the porch of the main house and knocked.

The sky was white, and the lights glowing from inside the house gave the porch a feeling of dusk, though it was just 10:30. The kids would be at school. They knocked on the door again and waited for the sound of creaking boards as someone came to answer. Shauf’s breath clouded the air in front of her as they talked.

“Beautiful old house, but it sure needs work. Almost easier to tear it down,” she said, then asked, “Do you think he’s blowing us off?”

They checked the outbuildings and the rows of trees, looking for Isaac through the bare limbs. They checked the equipment shed because they’d seen day laborers come and go out of there. They drove down to the canning building, and the door was closed but the deadbolt not thrown. Marquez knocked and then pushed on the door. Behind him, Shauf spoke quietly.

“We ought to be careful how far we take it. We don’t have an active warrant anymore.”

The canning room door swung open, and Shauf’s questions died in her throat when she saw what he was looking at.

“Why the children?” was all that came from her.

Marquez reached and stopped Shauf and then walked over to their bodies. He didn’t really need to. He could see they were dead,
but leaned over and touched Isaac’s throat and then the girl. He went back for a flashlight and shone it into the pupils of the boy and then Cindy. They lay side by side, lined up, he thought, made to lie that way. Blood had dried, crusted in their hair. He moved the flashlight from one to the other, then turned it off.

Abe had several high wounds on his back as if he’d ignored an order and started to rise after they’d all been made to lie down. His brother had a wound at the temple in addition to two in the back of the head. All five of them had been shot in the back of the head. He moved toward the door, went to the truck and the radio, then changed his mind and flipped open his cell phone. He found Selke’s number.

“Great minds think alike,” Selke said as he heard “It’s John Marquez.”

“I was going to call you this morning. We’ve ID’d the body in the refrigerator. Her name is Sherri La Belle. I want to meet with you this morning, and I’ll come to you. Just tell me where you are. Where did Torp and Perry lose her car? Was that at the chop shop where the bust went down?”

“Selke, hang on, I’m at Raburn Orchards. Do you know where that is?”

“Sure.”

“One of the outbuildings here has a canning room. One of my team, Carol Shauf, is with me. We arrived at approximately 10:30 expecting to meet with Raburn, his brother, Isaac, and Isaac’s wife, Cindy.” He felt compelled to give Selke facts he could start with, some framework. “But we’ve just found their bodies as well as those of the two children in an outbuilding where they do canning. They’ve all been shot twice in the back of the head.”

There was a quiet, a rustling like leaves, and then a much quieter Selke.

“Are you absolutely certain they’re gone?”

“They’re gone.”

“Have you touched anything?”

“Isaac’s throat and the girl’s, feeling for a pulse. The door was ajar. I pushed it open, saw them and walked over to make sure.” He did not want to stay on the phone. “We’ll be out front.”

It felt much colder than it had earlier. He stood near his truck looking out across the bare orchards, and Shauf tapped him on the arm, said, “I’m going to let everyone know.”

Don’t assume the killing is about sturgeon, he thought. It could be an old debt, anything. He could not comprehend killing the children if it was about sturgeon. The boy was older, fourteen is what Raburn had said, wearing the same clothes he’d probably gone to school in yesterday, jeans and baggy T-shirt, but no shoes, no heavy sneakers. They were used to seeing him with his iPod, and he guessed now it happened last night before the kids had gone to bed. The girl was no more than eight or nine, long straight hair blown back alongside her head into pooled blood.

Marquez turned and looked at the door he’d pushed open. He saw the girl lying inside and knew the door had been open long enough after she was killed for her hair to blow into the pooled blood. The girl wore a sweatshirt. Someone at her school would remember what she’d worn yesterday. Someone had seen them yesterday.

Isaac’s arms were along his side. The right side of his face rested in blood. Marquez looked from Isaac, to Abe, to the boy on the far end and couldn’t say why, but saw Cindy and the boy shot first. Shot before anyone knew they were going to die. Then ques
tions asked of Isaac and Abe. Cindy’s hand looked as though it might have rested on her daughter’s back and slid off. Why the kids? On the risk that they’d overheard something?

“John, you look rough,” Shauf said. “Maybe you want to sit down.”

“This happened because I leaned on him.”

“Then he called somebody.”

“Yeah, he probably did.”

“I know it sounds hard but that’s one more mistake he made.”

Except that we don’t really know, he thought. He felt sweat start under his arms and along his spine. He was sure this had happened because he’d cornered Raburn and forced him to it.

“If we’d just taken him down like you wanted to, this never would have happened,” he said, then turned and asked her, “Where’s your camcorder?”

With Shauf he videotaped the scene inside the canning shed. He heard sirens now, heard leaves rustling in the wind through the grove, smelled the heavy mineral blood smell seeping from the door, and took everything he knew about the operation, Raburn’s face yesterday, a fleeting look of shame at shooting out the windows of his own boat. He saw August with his fine Italian leather coats, his black driving gloves, the meticulous Porsche, the goatee trimmed to try to make him look hip.

“They’re here,” Shauf said. “They just turned off the levee road.”

Marquez walked out in the road and caught the eye of the lead driver, stopped him from getting close to the canning room. He watched an ambulance turn down, then an unmarked county unit and a detective getting out. The detective had talked with Selke. He was waiting for Selke but walked in to view the bodies. He set up a perimeter and took statements from them.

At dusk, hours after the coroner had come and gone, Marquez drove away with Shauf. He drove home and plugged the camcorder into his TV and made two tapes. Later, in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep, he watched the tape again. Cindy’s long hair had blown the same direction as her daughter’s, and that fit the wind out of the east. The door had been open, the wind blowing, and Marquez could almost hear voices, the questioning. Not caviar though. Not this kind of killing. What possible threat were the Raburns? Not Cindy. Not with her routine of kids and school and work. Not Isaac who almost lived among his trees. It was Abe. What did you see, Abe? Was it something you saw, and you made the mistake of telling somebody or threatened to tell us? You called somebody after I came by, didn’t you? What did you say to them that brought them out last night?

In the late afternoon
Marquez waited for Selke on the deck of Raburn’s houseboat. He looked through the windows and saw the same disarray as last time, a man of modest means living alone with his habits. The bed was unmade. Magazines and fishing lures covered the table. A green Heineken can sat at one end. In the kitchen, smoked fish rested on a plate. A big pot sat on the stove, and he remembered Raburn talking about making chili. He’d never finished trimming the windows, and the same can of primer sat under the sawhorse. Paint had dried on the brush.
Honest Abe
hadn’t been bailed since the last rain and sat low in the water. It was impossible to look at the scene without wondering how much of what had happened was set in motion the rainy Sunday when they’d offered Raburn the deal.

The last sunlight was a pale gold-white on the water when Selke came down the path. Marquez got up from the chair. The cold had never let up today, and he felt it in his feet and hands.

“Raburn had keys in his pants. I forgot to bring them,” Selke said.

They didn’t need keys. He’d watched Raburn lift the door, then slide it over. He’d said the lock was a pain in the ass anyway, and people in the delta, or at least the old-timers, all knew each other and didn’t worry about theft.

They went inside. He wasn’t sure what he could do for Selke here but was in no hurry to go anywhere else, and there was a chance Raburn had written something down.

“A name you’ll recognize and I won’t,” Selke said as they searched. He added, “I’d like to find something that helps us get a warrant for Ludovna’s house, but we’re not exactly going to find a diary, are we? Did Raburn have any girlfriends?”

“None that we ever saw.”

“What about boyfriends?”

“I don’t think so. He talked about different friends. A lawyer here in the delta that he threatened us with, but I don’t know whether that was real or not.”

“I’d like to talk to this lawyer. There’s got to be an address book or something. We didn’t find anything in his pickup.”

“I think he was close to his brother and otherwise largely a loner.”

The pot on the stove did have chili in it. There was more beer in the refrigerator and a vodka bottle, ice, and wrapped cuts of fish in the freezer.

“He didn’t own much in the way of clothes,” Selke said. “There’s no desk or anything. He had a cell phone on him, and it’s beeping that he’s got messages. I won’t know who those were from until tomorrow. I’d like to get from you a list of all the contacts he introduced you to.”

“Sure.”

“Who do you think killed him?”

He’d already answered this question earlier, told Selke that he thought Raburn had called the wrong person, that it somehow came back to the meeting that should have happened this morning with both brothers, Cindy, and Shauf and himself.

“His brother had unpaid debts and old debts that got negotiated down to pennies on the dollar after a near bankruptcy. You need to look there too. Let me ask you a question. Why would anyone kill the children?”

“Children are hard,” Selke said softly. “They’re hard. I’ve only seen it a couple of times in eighteen years as a detective, and both of those were for the same reason, a divorced husband deciding his ex wasn’t entitled to remarry and start a new life. But that’s not what we have here.” Marquez didn’t respond, and Selke said, “You’re quiet.”

“Like you say, the kids are hard.”

Selke found an address book and flipped through with Marquez watching. Mostly initials next to numbers. He talked as he examined the pages.

“The FBI will take this case. This is execution-style murder, and given what’s happened in the last week I’m surprised they haven’t already showed up. It’s got a caviar connection, and it’s too close in timing to Weisson’s. If we don’t solve it tonight, they’ll step in by noon tomorrow, and I don’t think we’re talking about a joint investigation either.”

He was probably right. Selke found the light switches and turned them on. He stepped out on the deck and came back in.

“We’ve got sightseers,” he said, and Marquez glanced up toward the eucalyptus and saw a handful of people, probably neighbors. By now, the word would have gotten around. The river
darkened, and the riprap, the rock lining the opposite bank, lost its reflection.

“The boy was barefoot,” Selke said. “Somebody walked him and his sister down from the house, possibly the wife as well. I’m guessing there were at least two shooters. From your end, what are the possible reasons to kill the kids? I mean from a poaching angle?”

“To get information.”

“Threaten to kill the kids if they don’t talk?”

“Something like that.”

“Do you think Raburn would hold back confessing he was working with Fish and Game and let the kids get killed one at a time?”

“Not a chance. He’d give the information up right away.”

“Even if it was going to get him killed?”

“He’d push it as far as he could.”

“He pushes it and, bang, one of the kids gets shot.”

Selke knew it was Ludovna who Raburn claimed to be afraid of. He knew Nike Man had shown a gun the first time Marquez had gone with Raburn to make a sale to Ludovna. They’d been over these things earlier in the afternoon, and Marquez didn’t feel like he had anything new to add. He watched the light leave the water and was sure the chain of events started when he decided to flip Raburn. He’d been wrong about Anna. He’d been wrong here. Shauf had argued against flipping Raburn, and maybe it was more than not trusting Raburn. Maybe it was intuition. He didn’t burden Selke with that theory, instead moved over as Selke began to look at photos on a laptop he’d powered up.

“Jesus Christ, this keyboard. Did he use this thing for a place mat?”

He poked at something stuck between the A and S keys. Looked like tuna fish mixed with mayonnaise and dried, but Selke
had been able to open photos Raburn had downloaded onto his computer.

“I’ve seen him take photos with his cell phone,” Marquez said.

There was a photo of Ludovna, Nike Man, and a black Mercedes in the background. A blurry shot, but it was them. Photos of the delta bridges. Drawbridges with concrete pilings and painted steel frames. A photo of Mount Diablo at the far end of a slough, the slough flat and still, the colors of sunrise above the mountain. Anna with sunglasses on and her hair blowing back, August alongside her with an arm around her shoulders.

“That’s Burdovsky,” Selke said. “She’s gone on to celebrity status. Where do they have her locked up?”

“Keep going.”

Another shot of Nike Man and an odd shot down an embankment along a river or slough, a small man bent over holding his face.

“The man in the photo is bleeding,” Selke said, and Marquez told him the story of the Mexican fisherman and the treble hook. Then they both studied the photo in silence. Now a photo of Sacramento Fresh Fish and one of August Foods, and a topless shot of Anna sunbathing, lying on her back on boat cushions, dark nipples. Two shots of Crey. One on his sport boat with the captain’s hat. It looked like Crey had posed for the photo, whereas the others looked like they’d been taken without the people in them necessarily knowing.

“You’ve found his log,” Marquez said. “How’d you get past the password?”

“I tried his brother’s name for the password and it worked.”

Selke clicked to the next one. “That’s the DBEEP boat and its crew. Jo Ruax is at the wheel,” Marquez said. “Looks like he was on the water when he took it.” There were two more of the DBEEP
boat and a close-up of Ruax’s face. “They may have questioned him on the water and he pretended he was on the phone.”

“Give me a reason why?”

“Ruax may remember this and I’ll ask her. Maybe he took this close-up of her to email someone who wanted the faces of the local law enforcement.”

“So are we going to find you in here?”

“Keep going.”

There were various photos of sloughs. Photos of Raburn Orchards as the pear leaves turned with the fall. August’s Porsche outside the packing shed. A shot across vineyards to a sky-blue Victorian-style house. Two fishermen in their boat.

“I recognize those two. Raburn took me to meet them. Ruax knows that slough and she’s got a name for it, Camp Sturgeon.”

“These are guys he bought from?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not about a debt his brother owed, is it?”

“No.”

Individual shots of Perry and Torp. Perry leaning against the Le Mans. Then another shot, this one of the two of them.

“Bingo,” Selke said, and clicked to the next photo, a darkhaired woman trying hard to smile for the camera. Marquez didn’t recognize her. “Sherri La Belle,” Selke said, “and now I’m going to tell you something you can’t talk to anyone about yet.” He clicked back to Torp and Perry. “I’ll have murder warrants on these two tomorrow. I know where they got the refrigerator and what banding tool got used. They stole more than her car.”

Marquez answered the question before it came. “I don’t know where they are, but you know who to ask.”

“I do, and Richie Crey is going to find out he could end up back inside if he obstructs.”

They looked at the remaining photos and then returned several times to three shots, all taken through fog and with no way to make out the location exactly, but it was Anna’s car, a parking lot Marquez knew was the fishing access, then a second car, a white BMW, and a shot of a man standing near a woman who was probably Anna. The photos were taken from above, probably from the levee road. The tall man near her was not Ludovna, August, Nike Man, or Crey. Well, he might be Crey, he conceded, then added, “But I don’t think he is.”

Selke’s phone rang before he could answer. Marquez watched him study the number on his screen.

“That’s the Feds,” he said to Marquez. “They’re going to take my case away.”

He walked onto the deck to talk to them, and Marquez could hear enough to know that’s exactly what was happening. When he heard Selke describe what they’d found on the computer he backed out of the photos and clicked onto the Internet. Raburn was on dial-up, had a power and telephone line strung from the roof of the houseboat to a tree on the shore. The dial-up was slow, and he heard Selke starting to wind down the conversation. But now the Net came up, and he attached all of Raburn’s photos, then emailed them to an address he used only with the SOU. The file was still sending when Selke hung up and came back in.

“What’s the story?” he asked Selke.

“They want that computer tonight. They want me to bring it to them and there’s something more going on. It’s more than the Raburn murders.”

Marquez looked down at the laptop, saw the last green bar fill, and the icon disappear. He clicked out of the Net as Selke walked over.

“Want me to turn it off?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Marquez shut down the computer.

“I emailed myself the photos.”

“I figured that’s what you were doing. I want you to copy me.”

“Give me an address.”

He waited now as Selke wrote it down [email protected]. So Selke wasn’t going to chance sending it to the county either.