Die-Off (25 page)

The California Highway Patrol were all about clearing the bridge. They were ready to throw the tusks in the water so traffic could flow again. Fewer were in the southbound lanes and those got picked up and heaved over to the northbound side. They clattered and bounced as they hit the roadway and even with the salt air and a light wind blowing across Marquez smelled Africa. He smelled the elephants.

The first cars started moving southbound and the honking subsided. Marquez, Muller, and an SOU warden named Linda Rees, and two highway patrol officers loaded the rest. Marquez made sure they got laid into the U-Haul carefully, as if that somehow could change anything.

It wasn’t a world that would ever come again or one that he believed any longer that he could help save, but he could slow down the destruction and buy time. He lifted an eight-foot tusk and slid it in on top of four others then slid the back door down and latched it.

Muller pointed at Faesy. ‘You’re coming with me.’

Linda Rees drove the truck off the bridge to the tourist overlook on the Marin side and Marquez listened as Faesy repeated that he didn’t know what was in there and he was just driving the truck as a favor for a friend whose name he didn’t remember. Marquez listened and then walked back to his pickup and sat a few minutes in the cab in the sunlight looking at the bridge, the backed-up traffic, the commute that would take another hour to adjust, though by now commuters were being reassured that whatever spilled was cleaned up and gone.

His phone screen lit up and it was Hauser calling for the fourth time in half an hour. Marquez let it go to voice mail. He didn’t call Hauser back until he pulled onto the freeway, and when he did he realized that Hauser was scared.

N
ow he sat with Hauser on a white-painted picnic bench outside a bakery in Larkspur Landing. Hauser was unshaven and claimed he had slept in his car last night because he didn’t have enough money for a hotel. Coming from a guy who lived as he did, that was hard to believe, but he said his wife had transferred everything from the joint accounts and frozen the credit cards. His company Visa card was no good anymore and he said he had not had a personal bank account in years.

‘Let’s get you some food. Go order what you want.’

Marquez pulled out his wallet, gave him a couple of twenties and called Captain Waller after Hauser was inside in line. Through the window he watched a woman in line behind Hauser wrinkle her nose and step back. At Fish and Game talking to Waller about reimbursements was called talking to the wall, but he had to bring it up now and he was going to try. ‘Your source who lives in a mansion in Piedmont can’t afford a hotel room? Give me a break. The chief isn’t going to approve it either, but you can try him if you want.’

Marquez called Chief Ippolito and Ippolito wasn’t defensive but he didn’t like snap decisions or being put on the spot.

‘Hauser’s there with you?’

‘He is and he’s got a throwaway phone now with thirty-minutes of time on it, after which I may not be able to call him.’

‘Do you honestly believe he’s out of money?’

‘He might be temporarily and I don’t want to lose contact with him. He looks like he has been sleeping in his car and we’re at a bakery now where he’s buying food and wolfing the free samples they have out. He’s out of his house. His wife asked him to leave and got a restraining order. She froze their credit cards and bank accounts and he says he doesn’t have anywhere to go.’

‘What has he actually given us?’

‘The pike plot and he’s told us that the people behind it may be inside ENTR.’

‘But no names. He’s flirted with you on the phone, but he never comes through—that’s what you told me. Why would we back him now that he’s been accused of significant felony and after ENTR has found in his computer files the location of the second hatchery?’

‘That’s their claim. We don’t know what’s true yet. They haven’t proved to me that he knew where it was.’

‘His wife walked away from him. She knows more than any of us.’

Marquez didn’t have an answer for that and watched Hauser pay for the food. In the minutes before Hauser came back out Marquez didn’t get anywhere with the chief and ended the call as Hauser walked out. He waited until Hauser was eating before buying himself a coffee and then sitting down across from Hauser again. Even with fear and anxiety in his eyes Hauser still figured himself for the smartest guy in the room and Marquez knew he was nearing the point where he would have to decide whether to keep playing along.

‘Our department doesn’t have any money to help you out and I don’t make your kind of money, but I’ll get you a room in the Corte Madera Best Western.’

‘I’ll pay you back.’

‘The Best Western is close to here. I’ll put a motel room on a card and give you money for food.’

‘I’d rather stay at a hotel in San Francisco. I have one in mind.’

‘I’m sure you do, but it isn’t going to happen through me. I’ll give you some gas money and pay for a week at the Best Western. That’ll give you time to work something out with your wife. I want some things in return. I want you to call your biologist friend and—’

‘He’s not going to do anything.’

‘Call him anyway and get him to talk to me. I want his name, but we’ll keep him anonymous. I want his phone number and where he is.’

‘He won’t do it. Look what happened to me.’

‘Then borrow money from someone else. You must have a friend or relative you can borrow from.’

He didn’t answer that and put the sandwich down.

‘I can’t call him.’

‘Give me his number and his name. I’ll call him.’

‘I promised I wouldn’t.’

‘We need him and there are other things that need to happen too. I’m going to bring Emile Soliatano to the motel and the three of us are going to talk.’

‘Lieutenant, are you aware they’re following me? They’re watching us right now.’

‘I just talked to the chief of the department. He asked, why should we help someone who hasn’t helped us and who has tried to leverage every piece of information into something that helps himself? Basically, he said you don’t care what happens to anything except yourself. You got yourself into a bad spot with your company and when you learned of the pike project it looked like a way to weasel out. He reminded me that you’ve made promises for three weeks and delivered nothing. He now thinks you’re trying to use me and our department to get into a better negotiating position with ENTR.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Where’s the third hatchery? Where’s your biologist friend and what is his name?’

‘All right, I’ll call him. I’ll give him your number and I’ll sleep in my car.’

‘What’s his name?’

He hesitated on that. He looked at Marquez and then out across the bay. He probably did make the promise he said he had.

‘Barry Peason. I’ll call him right now.’

He made the call but Peason didn’t pick up. Maybe he didn’t recognize the number, or maybe it was a bluff on Hauser’s part. He called him again and this time Peason answered and Marquez listened to the conversation, to Hauser’s apology and heard the loud voice on the other side. He took the phone as Hauser handed it to him.

‘Barry, you’ve got to talk to me.’

‘I can’t take the risk!’

Marquez walked away from the table to tell Peason he got a call this morning from Washington Fish and Wildlife to say that they had confirmed a pike in the Columbia River; they were young fish and believed the stocking to be recent.

‘They’re scared. They think they may have thousands of northern pike in the Columbia. I need the third hatchery and more than that I need a way to get to whoever is behind the whole thing.’

‘They’ll destroy me.’

‘We’ll keep you anonymous.’

‘They’ll hack into your systems. They’ll find me. Look what they’re already doing to Matt.’

‘You’re a biologist. You know what’ll happen if we don’t stop this.’

‘I don’t know where the hatchery is.’

Marquez tried one last time.

‘What you know may get us there. Let’s meet and talk.’

Peason was quiet and then cleared his throat. ‘I’ll think about that. I’ll call you back.’

‘Stay on the line, Barry. The fish we found in hatchery two and those that almost went in the river from the first hatchery were all well along. The pike they are growing in the third hatchery are probably a similar age. They can’t hold them. They’ll need to get them to a river. We can’t wait.’

‘You’ve done nothing for Matt.’

Marquez looked over at Hauser.

‘We’re doing everything we can for him.’

‘I’ll call you back in an hour.’

Peason hung up abruptly and Marquez knew there wouldn’t be any call back. He wrote down Peason’s phone number then walked back to the table.

‘He thinks we haven’t taken care of you, that I made promises to protect you that weren’t kept. Did you say anything like that?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so. You would never say anything like that.’ He slid the phone over to Hauser. ‘Call him back and tell him it’s a big misunderstanding.’

Hauser called several times and Peason didn’t pick up. He emailed and texted him then laid his phone down and started eating again.

‘You’ve got to get to him.’

‘I’m trying.’

Marquez called the Best Western and read off his Visa number and gave them Matt Hauser’s name. When he left Hauser was talking like a victim. Marquez looked back at him before getting into the pickup and knew that what the chief and Waller said about Hauser was true, but still felt they had to stay with him. Later though he would regret that and wish he hadn’t thrown the money down for the hotel.

S
orzak’s call came less than an hour after he’d left Hauser. She was distant as she dictated where he needed to be tomorrow night, though the meeting with Rider wouldn’t be until the following day.

‘No other game wardens or police, nobody but you, or he said he’ll hold me responsible. I don’t like doing this. It’s scaring me. I know the guys who burned the cabin were sent by him. There’s no one else it could have been.’

‘I’ll take it from here.’

Marquez called Voight before calling Captain Waller to ask for backup from the Del Norte and Siskiyou wardens. Voight was right there, serious and interested, asking, ‘What did you hear back from the FBI?’

‘A James Edward Colson who worked for the Texas State Police disappeared while out on a night call helping with the aftermath of a tornado. He never showed up in the town hit by the tornado, but the tornado also touched down twice on the highway Colson would have used to approach the town. For months they thought the tornado got him and they expected to find him and his vehicle out in the brush or at the bottom of a pond.

‘They did a wide search for him and in that part of Texas plenty of people will remember his name. He left behind a wife and a kid and eventually they pieced together that he took off, though some locals still think the tornado got him.’

Voight was quiet a long moment then asked, ‘How did he get this far?’ The question was general. The question wasn’t really for Marquez to answer, but he did anyway.

‘He planned ahead and was ready with a new social security number. His name is common enough sounding and he headed for a place where a missing deputy in Texas would never make news. He changed jobs. He changed addresses. He never had a run-in with the law. I’ll call you when I get on the road tomorrow.’

‘Where are you supposed to be tomorrow night?’

‘At a bar in Crescent City and two of our area wardens will back me up.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘It’s what I’ve got.’

‘That’s a lot of crap. If this guy really is who you think he is and he’s fixated on you, you can’t take it that casually.’

Captain Waller wasn’t comfortable with it either. Waller was close to saying no, yet he didn’t on the condition Marquez found more backup and a more cohesive idea of how the backup would protect him. That left Marquez the rest of today and tomorrow to make that happen, but for whatever reason as he got off the phone his mind turned inward instead and back to LA where this investigation first started.

Fifteen months ago in August in LA on a stifling afternoon when the sky was white and the heat oppressive he waited in a shopping mall lot for another meeting that might or might not happen. The last one hadn’t and after a half-hour here he drove out of the lot figuring he couldn’t show weakness by waiting too long, and he wouldn’t call them back this time. He wouldn’t pursue. It would be on them to move it forward.

Then a new black Land Cruiser pulled alongside him and matched his speed. The passenger window lowered and the driver never looked over, but the woman in the passenger seat pointed toward the side of the road and they cut in front of him and signaled a right turn.

He followed them into an alley between industrial buildings and they parked and stood alongside a chain-link fence littered with trash at the back of a small parking lot. The air smelled of chemicals and the dry weeds on the other side of the fence.

‘Call me Adam,’ the man said, ‘like the first man, like the one in the Bible.’

He laughed. He wore black pants that clung to his legs and a T-shirt from a bar in Portugal. He was energetic in a jerky nervous way that put Marquez on guard, the type of guy to pull a gun and shoot without warning. The man feigned amusement at how long it had taken to get this meeting together. But in truth it had all been one way, Marquez trying to make a buy and them digging deeper into who he was first. Twice the phone he was using got hacked.

‘You seem worried, my friend, but what is there to worry about? Finally, we are meeting. You want to buy. You need to buy. You have customers so this is a good day, yes? So what is it?’

‘Let’s just do it.’

‘Of course, but first tell us more about your operation. Such a quiet operation you run, so quiet we couldn’t find it.’

‘And you couldn’t get into my phone either.’

The man laughed. He smiled hard then stared at the woman he called Lia. Marquez took a longer look at her too, half Puerto Rican he guessed, not a face he’d ever seen. She was tall, long limbed, and looked physical. It seemed her role was to protect. With striking suddenness the man’s eyes emptied, lost their depth and flattened. He reached and lightly touched Marquez’s chest at his heart.