Dead Game (3 page)

At dawn Marquez stepped over
crime tape at the fishing access with a tightness in his chest he hadn’t felt since his DEA career ended more than a decade ago. The tape sagged with condensate from the fog. The sandy path out to the water was dark, the morning cold. He walked the parking lot and then out to the river, as though seeing it again would provide a reason for Anna to stage an elaborate scam to disappear.

After he left the fishing access he stopped at a diner in Isleton and ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast soggy with a commercial butter spread that dripped through his fingers onto his pants. Later in the morning when he walked into Chief Bell’s office, Bell’s eyes went immediately to the stains the butter had left. Bell didn’t like undercover work, didn’t really like the idea of wardens out of uniform, and equated neatness in appearance with clear thinking.

“Take a seat, Lieutenant.”

It was Saturday, the rest of the floor empty, the building quiet, Bell making the point he’d come in just for this. He made a second point, that he’d talked with Selke and understood Burdovsky had burned them.

“Where do you think your operation goes now?”

“We’ve got one suspect I want to try to flip. If he’ll work with us we can make several arrests in the next few weeks and then it doesn’t all go to waste.”

The faintest smile started on Bell’s face. “Lieutenant, all August has to do this morning is pick up the phone. Won’t he call everyone he’s bought illegal sturgeon or roe from?”

“We don’t connect all of the suspects with August. There are other people.”

“You don’t know if August is working with or buying from these other suspects, and in fact, what you don’t know has been highlighted in the last eighteen hours. Let’s face the music, Burdovsky identified you for August. She blew the operation. It’s over. You’re done. I’m meeting with Chief Baird in an hour to discuss the SOU because I think we’ve also reached that door.”

“What door is that, Chief?”

“Last night was an embarrassment.” He paused so the importance of that wasn’t lost on Marquez. “The question I’ll raise with Chief Baird today is whether the SOU is viable in its current configuration. I don’t believe this would have happened if your team had been at full strength. You would have known she was staying with August. Keep your phone with you today. I’ll call.”

Marquez left Sacramento and drove back into the delta on Freeport Road. He talked to Shauf and Cairo, told them where to
meet before taking a call from his stepdaughter, Maria, who was with her mom in Boston. Though his wife, Katherine, and his stepdaughter had been gone on a college tour only a single day, it felt like weeks.

“What colleges have you seen?”

“Boston College and Tufts. We’re on our way to Harvard Square. We’re going to BU this afternoon. Mom wants to see it.”

“You don’t?”

She breathed hard into the phone as she walked. He tried to picture them in Boston, white sky and cold when he’d checked Boston weather on the Internet.

“Dad, this trip is more about her.”

“Have you told her what you told me?”

“Not yet. Where are you this morning?”

“In the delta on a sturgeon poaching case, but don’t change the subject.”

A month ago, Maria had lightened a streak of her hair from dark brown to a pale gold sheaf falling down her left temple, similar to her mother’s streak of white hair. She’d done that despite arguing nearly continually with Katherine for the past six months. What she’d talked to him about on Thanksgiving was her plan to take a year off before college.

“I’ll talk to her today or tomorrow,” she said. “She’s going to get really upset.”

Katherine had gone one semester to a college in Vermont twenty-five years ago and had loved being away from home and in college. Then her mother had been diagnosed with ALS and she’d had to drop out, return home to help care for her and get her younger sister through high school. She’d signed herself up
at the local junior college. Now what she hadn’t had she wanted for Maria.

After hanging up with Maria he drove into Freeport and parked across the street from a restaurant the SOU used occasionally as a rendezvous point. He bought three coffees to go, walked up to the levee road, then down the wood stairs and around the old building to the marina dock. Gusts shoved two plastic chairs around, and he caught one to sit on. He propped the other so it couldn’t move and rested the coffees on a splintered dock board at his feet. He tried to drink his but found his gut was already churning.

He looked out over the river. The fog was gone and cirrus clouds were running ahead of the forecast storm. Shauf and Cairo were still fifteen minutes away, and he thought back to the first contact with Anna and his first meeting with August. Because of the smaller size of his team he’d done something he wouldn’t ordinarily do, made direct contact with the suspect, visiting August at his San Francisco store under the guise of opening a catering business.

Marquez had bought tiny olives imported from a boutique Spanish producer, capers from the Aegean Islands, ghost shrimp from the delta that August advertised with the old line, “So fresh you can’t see them.” He’d bought Caspian caviar that the Ashland, Oregon, wildlife lab had tested and come back negative on for Pacific white sturgeon DNA, though the SOU was fairly sure August was buying poached sturgeon roe from the Sacramento/ San Joaquin delta and repackaging it as Caspian beluga, or mixing it with Caspian beluga. Unfortunately, “fairly sure” was as far as they’d gotten with August, which was why Anna had seemed like such good luck.

He’d given August his card with the name John Croft, told him he was a cook going into business on his own, starting a catering business called Three Bridges Catering, meaning he’d go anywhere in the San Francisco Bay counties. You build a cover story, make it whole enough to stand up, make it so it wears like a comfortable shirt.

August sold walnut oil, honeys, tins of sardines, dried fishes and seaweed, balsamic vinegars, olive oils, a whole vocabulary of artisanal products. He spoke seven languages, made a point of telling Marquez that, eyes glittering, the kind of guy who needs you to be impressed by his credentials, wants you to think he’s superior to you. He claimed to travel the world looking for “what was left,” and Marquez didn’t doubt that. Some of the best of what was left of sturgeon was in the Sacramento/San Joaquin delta, and August certainly had been there.

Marquez had stood on the polished chestnut floor of August Foods, handling tins of Iranian caviar, talking business, August memorizing his face while explaining that he was working through his stock of the 2003 harvest of Caspian caviar. He didn’t know what he would do next, because the UN through CITES had banned any commercial trade in sturgeon roe from the Caspian Sea. They’d shut down the 2004 harvest, blaming the poaching for decimating sturgeon stocks. But that was in September. By October CITES had reversed itself, and the ban was lifted. Go figure.

Now Shauf and Cairo walked around the corner. Marquez handed out the coffees and Shauf freed the other plastic chair. She sat across from him in the chair, the wind at her back, and Cairo sat on the dock.

“So when do we get the word?” Shauf asked.

“Bell told me to keep my phone close this afternoon.”

“We may as well go home.”

“No, with Baird there’s a good chance he’ll want to think it over this weekend, so I’m thinking we’ll go see Raburn tomorrow, and see if we can flip him. It’ll shock him hard when he sees my badge.”

Shauf shook her head, saw the reasoning but had a hard time with it. She’d handled the surveillance of Abe Raburn. She had him nailed for commercial trafficking in sturgeon, and they’d hoped to take him down along with the rest once they’d built the full case.

“This is all so wrong,” she said. “If it turns out Burdovsky is alive I want to see her do time.”

Marquez looked to Cairo, who’d been quiet through all this. Cairo nodded. He was for giving it a try with Raburn.

An hour later Marquez was on the phone to Jo Ruax, the lieutenant who ran the DBEEP boat. They’d worked in pieces with the Delta-Bay Enhanced Enforcement Program crew. He figured from the way Bell had talked this morning he’d already called DBEEP, possibly Ruax directly. He followed Ruax’s directions and parked along a road on San Pablo Bay, then walked down the trail and found her sitting between trees, binoculars focused on a boat on the bay. Her lips were chapped, her cheeks red from the cold wind. She smiled a tight smile, handed him the glasses, and behind her the horizon carried the dark gray band of the approaching storm. She was a hard-charger and had wanted to direct the surveillance on the sturgeon operation. She’d argued against bringing in the SOU.

“I heard this morning you’re going to get shut down,” she said.

DBEEP was funded by both the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Water Resources. Their focus was the fisheries, and Ruax knew a lot more about sturgeon than he did. What she didn’t know more about was undercover work. “If that happens we’ll get together, and I’ll make sure you’ve got everything on everyone we’ve been watching. Did my chief call you?”

“He did. He wanted to know if I’d ever met Anna Burdovsky and what I thought of her. I told him what I told you.”

“That you think she’s a flake?”

“Yeah.”

In a lot of ways he liked Ruax, and he had a lot of respect for DBEEP. They had an identity, knew who they were, and Ruax was tough and serious and good at what she did.

“We’re supposed to get the word this afternoon, Jo. If we go down, I’ll call you.”

“What happens otherwise?”

“We’re going to try to flip Raburn and take another run at it.”

He caught the faint shake of her head. “Good luck,” she said. “He’s just about the last guy I’d want to have to rely on.”

Bell never called,
and the next morning Marquez led the way down a muddy path in the rain. Off to their right was a rotting dock, then a clot of willow, cottonwood, and bay trees. Beyond that was a row of houses, each with river access and a modest dock, and though he lived near them, Abe Raburn wasn’t really part of their community. He moored his houseboat in a small cove beyond where the road ended. His work boat, the
Honest Abe
, was tied off on a buoy near shore. His old Ford pickup was parked between eucalyptus trees well above the river. Shauf called the cove “Raburn’s homestead.”

Raburn saw them coming, and if he recognized Marquez, gave no sign of it. He was outside on the rear deck of the houseboat standing over a barbecue under a blue plastic tarp he’d rigged from the roof of the houseboat out to shoreline trees. Smoke from the barbecue swept violently sideways in gusts. White cotton line
had been strung through the corner grommets of the tarp, but little had been done to cinch the tarp tight, and it snapped and pulled against the lines so hard it was just a matter of time before the tarp ripped loose, not unlike the way Raburn’s life was about to change.

“Hey,” Raburn said, “good to see you, and I’ve got plenty of fish and beer. I was about to watch a football game.” He looked quizzically at Marquez, his joker’s expression frozen for a moment. “Who are your friends?”

“My friends are game wardens, Abe.” Marquez showed his own badge. “We’re here to talk to you.”

“I’ll be damned.” He shook his head. “Sonofabitch. I should have known.”

Raburn wore sandals, shorts, and a T-shirt under a windbreaker. Stenciled let ters on the back of his windbreaker announced a police golf tournament in ‘92. Hairs on his legs glistened with rain. He was a gregarious man, but you didn’t have to look through the windows of the boat very long before you knew he lived alone. He did his business in bars, used them as offices, and watching him Marquez had decided that Raburn also needed to be among people before coming back here at night alone to his boat.

“We’ve got a proposition,” Marquez said. “We’re not in a hurry. We’re here to talk with you.”

Raburn tried to catch his stride again. He took a pull of beer that was on a shelf near the barbecue.

“Anybody else want a sandwich?”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Marquez said, “but I think you’d better lay off the beer until we finish.”

Cairo shook his head no. Shauf never answered the question, and Raburn laid another piece of fish over the coals. He went inside, cleared magazines and newspapers off his table, grilled bread and finished making the sandwiches, offered Marquez a beer, and found another couple of chairs for the table. Then, inside, in the small space around the table, tension gathered. Through the windows the tarp swelled and lifted as if the houseboat was in an America’s Cup race.

“We’re going to offer you a deal,” Marquez said. “The best one we’ve offered anyone in a long time.”

Raburn was fifty-one, bloodshot eyes, salt-and-pepper hair, three or four days’ stubble of beard going gray, an eccentric in a part of California that prided itself on eccentricity. They’d followed him over hundreds of miles of delta waterways, told him that now, let him adjust to the truth that he’d been under surveillance for months.

“I don’t know much about sturgeon.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t poach as many if you did,” Marquez said and took a bite of sandwich. “You seemed to know a fair amount about it the other night.” He held the sandwich up. “Thanks for this. What we want you to do is switch sides and start working with us. In return we won’t charge you and arrest you. That’ll keep you out of prison. Here, take a look at some of the videotape and photos.” Marquez wiped his hands, checked the camcorder, and then showed Raburn how to operate it. “If we arrest you, then anything we negotiate would have to go through the DA, so we thought we’d try to work it out with you first and keep the District Attorney out of this. But if you feel like you should hire an attorney and defend yourself, that’s your call.”

Raburn didn’t answer and picked up the camcorder. He played it back and then dismissed it.

“I can’t tell anything. It’s not clear enough.”

He laid the camcorder down.

“I can’t even tell if that’s me.”

“Do you think it could be your brother?”

He scowled and said, “Isaac’s not involved. He doesn’t know anything about it.”

Raburn’s twin brother, Isaac, owned a pear and apple orchard in Courtland called Raburn Orchards. It wasn’t far from here. The word was Abe and Isaac’s father had been a TV preacher who’d given his twin sons biblical names, then raised them with the brutality the self-appointed righteous seem to have such a gift for. The brothers had run away from home in their teens. They’d come to the delta and been here since, and even now, better than thirty years later, they lived just a short drive apart.

As far as the SOU knew, Isaac wasn’t involved in sturgeon poaching. But there was a twist. Isaac boxed and shipped pears from the packing shed in the orchard. He also produced organic apple and pear butter, and Marquez had seen the pear butter in August Foods.

“Okay, Isaac’s not involved, so it’s all you, and I can tell you it’s fairly certain we’ll get the sentence we want. Most likely three years, though you may only do a year to eighteen months. Then a fine for each felony count. The fines can get pretty big.” He laid a finger on the first photo after sliding it across the table to Raburn. “I was there for that one,” he said, waited, looked out at the rain on the river, caught Shauf’s eye as Raburn went through what they’d decided to show him.

“You work on the DBEEP boat,” Raburn said to Shauf from across the table, taking it to the next level, trying to sort it out, figure out where he’d screwed up.

Once again, Shauf didn’t answer, preferred to glare at him, and Marquez answered for her.

“No, we’re not part of DBEEP, though they’re good. They know the delta salmon, sturgeon, and striped bass a lot better than we ever will. We’re undercover officers for Fish and Game, part of a special operations unit, the SOU.”

“I’ve never heard of you.”

“Well, now you’ve met us, that’s even better.”

Marquez finished the sandwich as Raburn picked up the camcorder again. He turned the camcorder in his hands, probably looking for the erase button and the way out of this mess. Marquez had learned over the years that you can lay it all out for them, read them the riot act, but they still have to come to it on their own.

“Sometimes I loan my boat out.”

That got the start of a smile from Shauf, improved her day. Raburn’s twenty-three-foot Chris-Craft was tied off on a buoy just upriver from the houseboat. It left a persistent stain of blue smoke anywhere it went, and Shauf had joked about expecting to see it sink one day. Raburn pointed across the rain-pocked river at his boat. Marquez pointed at two sturgeons in a photo.

“See, there you are, and you look good there, relaxed, the sun on your face, nice day. You don’t want to celebrate your next three birthdays in a prison cell.”

“That’s what my father said would happen.”

No one fielded that. They didn’t want any part of his childhood this morning. He was a complex man, cunning, a born
smuggler, Shauf claimed. He earned part of his living brokering fish to a handful of markets in Stockton and Sacramento and lived modestly, but he had to be putting away cash with the amount of roe and sturgeon he was moving. He did other work as well, repaired appliances, did odd jobs, and they’d watched him install lights on a marina dock and tap into a PG&E line to draw illicit power for a friend living up a slough. He sold T-shirts with names like New York, Steamboat, Cache, or Terminous Slough across the front. Under the hundred or so shirts he routinely carried on his boat were two blue plastic coolers used to transport poached fish.

Marquez rested an open hand on the file. “Either we cite you, arrest you, and take you in, or we try to see if there’s some way you can help us shut down the sturgeon poaching operation you’ve been selling into. If you do help us, we’ll forget the charges against you.”

“I may as well kill myself.”

He made his big face look sorrowful.

Only Marquez heard Shauf’s whispered, “Sounds good to me.”

“Who are you afraid of?” Marquez asked.

“Will I be going into the Witness Protection Program?”

This time Shauf spoke up. “Oh, sure, and live on a clear blue lake in a nice new cabin,” Shauf said. “How would Lake Tahoe be, or is that too close to the guys who will want to do you?”

“We don’t have Witness Protection,” Marquez said. “That’s more a Federal deal. It takes a lot of money to relocate people. You’d still be here on your houseboat when it was over.” Marquez looked behind him across the small galley kitchen and at the thin wall of the bedroom. He realized the fish smell in here was probably permanent. “Still, this is bigger than any cell I’ve seen. Who exactly is going to kill you?”

“Ludovna.”

For a moment Marquez was unsure whether Raburn was gaming them, then realized he was serious. Raburn picked up a heavy fish hook lying on the table, a treble hook with three hooks joined together. Trebles were used to snag bottom feeders like sturgeon.

“I saw him get angry at a guy selling sturgeon.”

“Saw who get angry?”

“Nick Ludovna, because the fish he came to buy was old, and he thought he was getting ripped off. But it was just a Mexican guy with no money who screwed up. He caught the sturgeon and he didn’t have any way of moving it, so he’d tied it off to a tree in a slough, just like the one I sold you the other night.” Raburn touched his gut. “It was full of eggs and on its way up the river last April. Anyway, this Mexican called me first, and I went out and took a look at it because I’ve bought from him before. When I checked it the fish was fine and still alive.” He shook his head. “I told him not to kill it, but I think he got scared the fish was going to get away so he clubbed it to death. Then he lied to Nick about when he killed it, and Nick knew he was lying and got real mad. It was out of the water by then. They’d dragged it up on the bank and there was a treble hook still in its mouth, and Nick worked the hook out. He wanted to see the eggs so they cut it open and took out the ovaries. They were filled with eggs and they would have been perfect for caviar, except that the sturgeon had been dead for too long. Nick got mad because he’d paid him already. He wanted his money back and the Mexican kept arguing and saying it had died just before they got there.”

Raburn turned the treble hook in the air, gestured toward Shauf, sweeping it through the air slowly in her direction though nowhere close to her.

“Nick took the treble hook and swung it at his face.” He gestured toward Shauf again. “Like that, and it went right through his cheek and he pulled him in like he was fish. He took his money back while the Mexican was screaming and trying to get the hook out.”

“And what did you do?”

“He told me to leave. He said go back to my boat and forget about it, so I left.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No.”

Marquez had a hard time with that. It wasn’t difficult to picture what a treble hook could do, and there were plenty of fishermen poaching sturgeon who were poor and without work or money.

The tarp tore loose and blew back over the roof of the houseboat. It covered the four windows on the river side and steam hissed off the barbecue. Raburn looked at the tarp but didn’t react to it and looked back down at the table.

“I want to work with you,” Raburn said, “but I’m afraid of him, and I’m not ashamed to say it. He scares me sometimes. It’s like he’s okay and then he just blows up.”

“We’ll deal with Ludovna, but you’ll have to testify.”

“I don’t know about that either.”

“We can set it up so it’s done in the judge’s chambers.”

Marquez flipped a page in the file, slid more photos over. He knew the treble hook story might have been made up for them, but he didn’t think so.

“We want to meet Ludovna and we’ll want to sell to him. We’ll take a ride this afternoon, and you show me your whole routine when you go to deliver to him. Then you’ll have to convince him
you trust me and that I supply fish to you. After that I’ll cut you out of the business.”

It took all of them to tie off the tarp before they left. While they were doing that, Shauf leaned into Marquez and, with rain running down her cheeks like tears, said, “He should be more scared of us. He should be more afraid of losing his boat and going to prison. I get the feeling he’s already working us.”

“He’s all we’ve got.”

“Then maybe it’s not worth it.”