Die-Off (13 page)

‘It’s John Marquez.’

‘Marquez, I’ll be damned. I was thinking about you this morning. Remember that afternoon we met in that little town on the eastern side of the Sierras? What was it called? Lee something or another—’

‘Vining.’

‘That’s right, Lee Vining, and we walked out and talked looking over Mono Lake with those gulls overhead and the crazy rock formations in the lake and me trying to talk you into letting us make you a Task Force Officer and getting you deputized with the U.S. Marshal’s office. I didn’t think you’d do it. You were pretty down on yourself about one of your team getting killed.’

‘Why were you thinking about me today?’

‘I don’t really know why; going back over my career in my head I guess, what mattered, what didn’t. I’ve only got a couple more years here at headquarters. What’s on your mind?’

‘I need your help. I’m trying to find a guy named Emile Soliatano.’

Marquez told him the story, a pike problem that turned catastrophic, and Emile Soliatano masquerading as the dead man’s brother, and who later with his wife abandoned the family van and got into a black Chevy Tahoe in a parking lot at Hilltop Mall in the Bay Area.

‘Send me the videotape.’

‘I just did.’

Desault played the video twice as he talked with Marquez then said, ‘Interesting. Let me run this by our techs and I’ll call you back.’

He called later that afternoon.

‘This didn’t have anything to do with the Bureau and we don’t have an Emile Soliatano in our system and I didn’t find him in the national database. You probably already know he owns a house in Vallejo but you might not know he paid off a lien the IRS has had on him for ten years for seventy-five thousand with a check for thirty-two grand last month.’

‘I didn’t know about the lien.’

‘I also got a tech to look at the video. They’re all busy so this was just a quick look, but she agrees someone was trying to make it appear as if he was getting picked up by Federal agents.’

‘Why bother to stage that?’

‘I have no idea why. You’d have to tell me. Maybe someone is trying to fool you.’

Marquez thought about that. ‘It’s probably not me they were thinking about but someone else looking for Soliatano, somebody who wouldn’t have access to some ageing agent riding out his last years at FBI headquarters. What you left out in that Lee Vining memory is that you were in your car asleep when I got there.’

Desault chuckled. ‘Yeah, I was beat. I was so tired.’

‘But the coffee place was right there.’

‘Yeah, but the sun felt better than coffee sounded. We did a good thing with that operation, John.’

‘We did.’

‘How does this Soliatano tie into the pike problem?’

‘I’m still sorting that out, but I know he connects to a climatologist who works for a firm called ENTR that may link to the pike scheme. We’ve tied Soliatano to this climatologist, Hauser, and it could be Hauser is trying to back ENTR away from searching for Soliatano. I know how that sounds and I agree none of it makes much sense, but it’s all that fits for me right now.’

‘Okay, well, I’ll call you if we come up with anything more; and I’ll call you next time I’m out in the Bay Area.’

‘Do, and we’ll get a drink and reminisce about the old days.’

Desault laughed and hung up. Marquez doubted the drink would happen but he looked forward to it anyway; it was good to hear Desault’s voice and know he was there and that he could reach out to him and get help. He had no proof but the call only reinforced the gut feeling that Hauser knew where Soliatano was.

T
erry Ellis was tall and lean and built like the runner she was. Marquez saw that when he met her the day before she and Sarah Steiner were killed, and he knew from Maria that Ellis made a mark at Oregon State running the 1,500 meters. Maria described her as smart, funny, and tough. She believed that Ellis ran that night to save both herself and Sarah, that the terror of the assault did not cause her to abandon her friend. Rather, she realized that if she could get free she could outrun the attackers and get help. The miles of winding dirt track back out to the first houses would not have intimidated her, or at least this was how Maria dealt with it.

Marquez had never said anything to dissuade her but he was sure the terror Steiner and Ellis felt was overwhelming. He knew Voight would get graphic with Maria and give her details that made vivid being jerked out of the back of a camper and hitting the road hard while still in a sleeping bag. Even in the sanitized files Voight let him look through that was there, a wounded and dying Steiner left behind, the killer’s footprints chasing Ellis down to the river.

Some of the comments Maria read online painted Ellis as a coward who abandoned her friend and ran. Those had deeply disturbed Maria and Voight would pick up on that. He would work it.

At the Klamath River meeting where Marquez had met them, Sarah Steiner did most of the talking. She had thick dark wavy hair and Ellis was a straight-haired blonde, her hair parted down the middle, and yet somehow they came across as sisters. Maria told him they were close enough to be that and tonight as he talked with Maria he heard how strong that belief was still. Ellis heard her friend scream as a knife cut through the sleeping bag and into her. She heard her stabbed as she struggled to get out of her own bag and Voight would want Maria to visualize that. Voight would show her photos that Marquez wished Maria didn’t have to see. He knew they would stay with her forever.

‘Dad?’

‘I’m here.’

‘You went quiet.’

‘I’m thinking about Rich Voight interviewing you.’

‘He wants me to come to Yreka to their office. He’ll pay for me to fly up and they’ll put me in a motel for the night. I asked if we could Skype, but he wants to do it in person. Is that normal?’

‘In person is best.’

‘He has this list of people he wants to ask me about, names he got off their Facebook pages. And he was asking questions about you and me, how close we are and what you were like when I was growing up. Even when I called you my father he kept saying stepfather, you know, like repeating it on purpose.’

‘Well, you knew he was going to ask about me.’

‘I know but it’s weird. It was like he was trying to be my friend while he asked these really personal questions about you and mom. I told him about when you and mom separated. I wish I hadn’t and I don’t know why I did.’

‘It’s all okay. We did separate. We separated and got back together. What he is doing is trying to find a connection with you. That’s part of the job.’

‘But he’s not on your side, Dad. He asked me why you wanted to meet Sarah and Terry and why you went to the thing at the high school. I’m pretty upset about it. It’s like he thinks you’re hiding something. What’s wrong with you meeting Terry and Sarah? Why is he making such a big deal about that?’

‘Right now he’s looking at me as a possible suspect.’

‘How can he do that?’

Marquez realized he hadn’t told Maria that’s what was happening. He assumed she knew and that it disturbed him too much to talk about it.

‘I was with him and the Siskiyou County sheriff a few days ago. Voight’s suspicion comes from me going out of my way to meet Sarah and Terry the day before they died and showing up right after their bodies were found. Sometimes a murderer will turn into a spectator at the scene. They get a thrill out of it and Voight is playing with that idea.’

‘Playing with? He’s investigating you, Dad!’

Three SOU wardens had been with Marquez. Voight knew that operation was legit and his real question was why did Marquez stay along the Klamath River after his suspect blew off the meeting and the rest of the SOU pulled out? The answer was he stayed because he wanted to see how the local crowd treated Ellis and Steiner. The pair had become targets of hate and he was going to step in if there was an incident. A local newspaper derided their right to speak at the debate as allowing outside environmental activists who knew nothing about the area to squander the time of potato farmers who drove in for the meeting. ‘Go the fuck home,’ was spray painted on the right side of the pickup they had borrowed from Terry Ellis’ brother, Jack, black spray paint over the faded red paint of the truck.

Marquez saw that before he walked into the high-school gym. Ellis and Steiner had parked where the truck with the painted message couldn’t be missed. But when they left that afternoon they drove back into California and a distance down the Klamath River Highway. So maybe they were pulling back. Maybe the incident frightened them—or somebody did.

But Marquez didn’t think so. What he had gathered was that Ellis and Steiner were aware of the disdain and anger focused on them, yet still traveled in a bubble of well wishers, some of them online and a handful of them in the towns they visited. In the farming areas along the river there was plenty of distrust of outside environmentalists, though that didn’t start in 2009 when Ellis and Steiner came through. The great die-off of salmon along the Klamath River was years before in 2002 and after another push had already begun to remove dams along the Klamath.

Anger and fear of change imposed by the ultimate of unknowing outsiders—federal bureaucrats—inflamed the farming communities, and restoring the Klamath wasn’t as simple as removing dams. Rivers need estuary systems and much of that land had been agricultural property for generations. Then there was the tight Presidential election of 2008 where the vote was close in Oregon. The views of the Oregon Potato Commission versus those of environmental groups led to then Vice President Cheney and the Republican political operative Karl Rove proposing bypassing the Endangered Species Act in order to provide water to farmers.

But that was over with before Ellis and Steiner showed up in 2009 and Cheney and Rove were long gone. The water problems of the Klamath remained, of course, and the frustration, anger, and fear that big government would make the wrong decisions were still there when Terry and Sarah came through. It was why Marquez had made a point of checking on Maria’s friends. It had worried him to see their pickup tagged with spray paint. He wanted to hear them talk and know that they were aware of how intense the water issue was along the river.

According to Maria, Terry and Sarah’s plan was to travel the 263-mile length of the Klamath to talk to people and blog in favor of dam removal. That was a long stretch of country, running from rainforest country in California to dry eastern desert in Oregon. They moved slowly up the Klamath, two days near Orleans, three at an organic farm, then onward with the beeswax candles, dried steelhead, and salves they had bought. They rented kayaks and bicycles and went to parties at night at least twice. It was, after all, also a summer road trip.

They crossed into Oregon, did the event at the high school where they got to speak, and perhaps it was the hostility that caused them to retreat as many miles back down the river as they did. Voight’s files charted their progress up the river and the retracement the night they were killed. He chased witnesses. He backtracked. The files showed his frustration.

Marquez met up with Maria two hours later in San Francisco not far from where she worked. Then they did what they had done for years when there was something difficult to talk about. They walked into an afternoon soft with fall light and under a clean blue sky with only a streak of feathered cirrus on the horizon. At the foot of Mission they crossed the Embarcadero and walked along the waterfront, talking through many of the same things they talked through on the phone earlier.

Maria stopped for a moment to make her point.

‘I have a photo on my Facebook page of the three of us that I reload every three months or so. I still do that even if they’re not ever coming back. It matters to me and I want to know who killed them and I wish I could kill the person who did it. I wouldn’t have any problem pulling the trigger.’

‘Yes, you would.’

‘No, I really wouldn’t.’

They started walking again and he moved the conversation on.

‘Can you remember anytime anywhere you were with Terry and Sarah and my name came up?’

‘No, but I’m sure I mentioned you. Why are you asking?’

‘Same as Inspector Voight, I’m just looking for any connection.’

‘You’re not the same as him at all.’

‘He’s doing what he thinks he has to, Maria.’

‘No, he isn’t. He’s an asshole and there’s no big aha moment he’s going to have talking to me. I never told you or Mom this, but Terry and Sarah wanted me to do the Klamath trip with them. We were going to make more of a road trip out of it. It wasn’t going to be all about the dams. They wanted to have fun. They were really good people and totally normal. There was no reason to kill them and it’s not like they were raped before they were killed. This wasn’t some sex killer. It was about what they were doing and Voight doesn’t know anything. If he knew anything he wouldn’t be questioning you.’

Her eyes clouded and she turned away. She brushed the corner of her eye with her right hand and shook her head.

‘How close did you come to going with them, Maria?’

‘Super close but then I talked to my boss and he said I’d have to take a leave of absence and they would have to get another intern. There wouldn’t have been any job to come back to, so I didn’t do it. And there was Terry’s brother’s pickup with the camper shell. It was perfect for two people but not for three. I would have had to drive my car.’

Marquez listened and guessed she did come close. She didn’t like where she was working. The pay was very low and her boss had been very cool toward her since coming on to her and getting rebuffed. That was over a year ago and her mom had encouraged her to quit immediately, which was probably why she didn’t.

‘I’m okay, Dad, let’s keep walking. Are they sure the gun you found is the one that killed them?’

‘Yes.’

They went there now and talked about guns and ballistics and this was the Maria he was counting on. She wanted to understand in every way how Voight could look at him as a possible suspect.

‘The connection might be me, not you, Dad.’