Die-Off (28 page)

‘Where did he go?’

‘You need me, Lieutenant. You can’t get it done on your own. Everything you want to save is for sale and there’s more demand every year.’

‘I want to keep talking but I need to know more about you.’

‘I left Texas after finding out my wife had an affair as long as our marriage and that my son wasn’t mine. I would have killed the man who fathered the boy, but I couldn’t then. I had to wait for that. That was a humiliation like no other. I couldn’t stay there any longer. My ex lives in a trailer park on the outskirts of town now and waitresses at a dump that’s been there forever and pays nothing. She’s barely holding it together.

‘I sent a man to make her feel better and bring her flowers at the restaurant and ask her out last summer. Over dinner on their first date he offered her a weekend job across the border in a Mexican whorehouse. He said her face collapsed, but I’ll never forgive her. I’ll track her to her grave. The boy never made it out of high school and does grunt work for a fracking company. He’ll never go anywhere.’

‘Who were you when you left Texas? I want to hear you say the name.’

‘The man you’re asking about doesn’t exist anymore and doesn’t matter in this conversation.’

‘I want you to say your name.’

‘It’s Rider and I started into animal trafficking when I was a bartender. I bought illegal abalone and urchin for restaurants. Then a man I used to pour free drinks for connected me with a cartel that could deliver just about any Latin or South American animal. That worked into a relationship and an even broader pipeline. I developed Chinese buyers. They haggle over everything, but they pay their bills and they want everything. I can’t come close to giving them everything they want. That’s how much demand there is. Marquez, I’m offering you something you could only dream of and you’re taunting me with this name bullshit. Why are you doing that?’

The cabin door creaked open and a guard apologized as a teenage girl appeared, sunlight shining from behind her. She spoke to Colson as if Marquez wasn’t there, telling him she needed to see him today and he ignored her until the guard pulled her away and the door pushed shut.

‘It’s different out here. They grow up faster but they don’t have much education. There are only so many things she’ll ever be able to do.’

He stared at Marquez.

‘Your vanity is you go places without enough backup. You think you’re that good and your badge will cover the rest. You’re wrong about both and you’re a fool to offend me this morning.’

‘I’m not alone out here.’

‘Those two wardens got a flat tire. The Del Norte deputies got lost on a dirt road. You are alone. I could have you killed today and your body left where it will never be found.’

‘You didn’t bring me here to kill me and I’m interested in your deal but I have to know who I’m talking to.’

‘That’s a lie. You’re fucking with me but let’s get out of this cabin. Follow me.’

They walked down the trail back to the encampment with two guards following and one in front. Marquez saw a couple of kids in the brush, an old pickup settling into the ground, blue smoke rising from a faded tepee. They stopped at a fire pit ringed with stones in a clearing with split logs for benches out front.

‘This is where the girl lives. Her parents first sent her to me as a way of paying down the money they owe me.’

He gestured toward a small child who looked around the edge of a red blanket covering the opening to one of the lean-tos.

‘These people think they’re the start of a new civilization.’

He turned to look at Marquez, eyes opaque, a strange smile forming.

‘Is a deal possible or is this just a waste of our time?’

‘That depends on how badly you want out.’

‘I’m offering to help you, Lieutenant. I’ll trade immunity for what you couldn’t gather in a lifetime.’

He reached slowly and touched the back of his head.

‘This was a bad wound. I’ve been here weeks. I don’t need this anymore. We can make a deal or remain enemies. It’s your choice.’

‘I want to know who I’m dealing with first.’

Colson took a gun now from one of his men and stood in front of Marquez and far enough back to where Marquez couldn’t lunge as he raised the gun and aimed at Marquez’s head. His eyes narrowed, his trigger finger tightened, and seconds passed with Marquez not looking away.

‘I’m not going to kill you today, but if we don’t make a deal I’m not going to let you keep looking for me. But you won’t stop, so it’s this or we deal.’

‘Show me you mean that.’

Colson lowered the gun.

‘I’ll give you Lia and Arturo. She’s the one who almost blinded you. They’re in LA. I have an address in the cabin and I’ll get it and then you leave and you get forty-eight hours to answer my offer.’

Marquez knew he was looking at Jim Colson, no doubt about it. He nodded at Colson and waited as Colson limped back to the cabin then returned with what he said was a way to find Lia and Arturo.

‘We’ll look for them and I’ll be back in touch. If we make a deal then when we do your name has to come from you. No one named Rider is getting immunity from anything.’

Marquez left the encampment with the men who brought him here. They drove dirt roads for an hour until they came to a stop.

‘This is where you get out.’

Marquez could see a long distance down a smooth Forest Service road. He saw where it disappeared into the trees.

‘Take me to the highway.’

The man in the passenger seat turned and pointed a gun. ‘Out.’

‘You got it, bud. I’ll walk from here and I won’t forget you.’

M
arquez walked for hours before the two wardens found him with the GPS trackers. But it was a call from Voight that let him know his cell phone was working again.

‘Bad news, Marquez, the sheriff wants me to bring you in. You can bet that’s about the election next Tuesday. He likes you for the murders. Do you want to let him go public with a warrant or do you want me to come pick you up and bring you in?’

‘Let me call Harknell first.’

Marquez called the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office and asked for Sheriff Harknell, figuring that Harknell would pick up and tape the call.

He picked up on the third ring. ‘Lieutenant, where are you?’

‘I’m waiting for Voight to arrive but before he does I want to make sure you and I understand each other.’

‘I’m for that.’

‘You’re playing this game with me and I know you’re going to say it’s not a game but you owe me at least the true reason why.’

‘You’re right, Warden, it’s not a game it’s a murder investigation.’

‘How is a false arrest going to help your credibility?’

‘We’ll let the courts decide guilt or innocence.’

‘Call whatever TV and print reporters you’ve contacted and tell them you’ve changed your mind about framing me.’

‘We’re not backing away and I’ve got some advice for you: confess and let your attorney cut a deal that keeps you off death row.’

‘Don’t hang up yet. You need to know I won’t let you get away with this. I told you that once before and I meant it. You don’t get to make a quiet apology later and explain how you were going with the best information you had at the time. It’s not going to work like that.’

‘I hear that as a threat, warden, and I’ll play this for the judge. Let’s hold right there until we see each other.’

The sheriff broke the connection and Marquez didn’t feel any better for having talked to him. The wardens dropped him in Hoopa and Voight picked him up there. Two hours later they slowed along the front of the SCSO in Yreka and in the lot were three TV vans and a half-dozen reporters.

‘I’m supposed to pull up here with you in the back in handcuffs. He wants to make sure they get you on local TV so you can never work effectively undercover up here again. But we’ll go in a back way.’

Harknell was stiff and tense with anger when he learned that’s what had happened. He confronted Voight with Marquez ten feet away seated at a chair in an interview room with the door wide open.

‘Why wasn’t he handcuffed?’

‘I didn’t arrest him.’

‘You’d better have a very good reason.’

‘I do. I have nothing to charge him with.’

It got loud now.

‘You have a double murder.’

‘There’s no evidence.’

‘You’re relieved of duty as lead investigator. I’m replacing you.’

‘Then I’m going to tell you that you can’t hold him or charge him.’

‘I’m reassigning you to a night patrol unit but not until you get your weight within department parameters. You’re on leave until then and unless you can produce doctor’s evidence that your weight is uncontrollable that will not be paid leave. You can draw from sick days and vacation. Do not take away any of the files relating to the case. I want everything related to it on my desk in twenty minutes.’

‘My weight is none of your business.’

‘I just gave you orders.’

The sheriff stood a long minute looking at Marquez and getting a hard stare back. Then he walked away without arresting or charging Marquez with anything.

The rest of it Marquez saw later that night on local TV in a Redding motel room. Voight must have delivered the files to the sheriff before walking out the front and gathering the news reporters, several that he knew, and telling the cameras that he had just been put on an indefinite leave of absence for refusing to arrest a Department of Fish and Game officer and falsely charge him with the murders of Terry Ellis and Sarah Steiner. He allowed that those charges might still come but guaranteed they would be dropped immediately following election day and dropping them would be followed by an apology that he didn’t want to be part of.

Marquez’s photo didn’t run and the local TV angle was tensions in the sheriff’s office boiling over ahead of Tuesday’s election. One reporter speculated that Harknell had shot himself in the foot. Marquez called Voight’s cell after watching the coverage on two channels.

‘Thank you.’

‘I didn’t do it for you. I did it for myself. I thought it was bullshit last time he was so intent on getting you to the office so he could sit in on the questioning. He has moved me to the graveyard shift driving a patrol car. I’m done as an investigator as long as he’s sheriff and the kid moving up has you as job one, so stay the hell out of the county for the next week. As soon as the election is over he’ll lay off you. In the meantime he’ll have everyone looking for you. He’ll call a press conference and have a new angle tomorrow.’

Marquez flew south-west from Oakland early the next morning and sat with two LAPD homicide detectives then recounted what Colson told him yesterday. The detectives took him to the warehouse which was out near the border with Glendale in a white-painted concrete building in a rundown area that wouldn’t attract much attention from anyone. He stood in front of the building and looked at the railroad tracks off to his left and the freeway onramp not a quarter mile from the building.

They showed him where the guard was found and apologized for calling US Fish and Wildlife first, but had reasoned the cache of animal parts was so large and varied they figured it was a Fed deal.’

‘We’ve got a copy for you of what US Fish and Wildlife catalogued.’

‘I’ve got that already.’

They showed him where the young Hispanic guard was shot. Inside the building it was cool and dark and he looked at the pool of darkened blood on the concrete and the spaces where the live animals were kept and the rooms where animal parts were stacked.

They drove from there to the address Colson gave him. No one answered but a neighbor volunteered that the two people who lived there had left in the middle of the night. The neighbor described a woman that she knew as Marianne so accurately that Marquez turned to one of the detectives and said, ‘Different name, but that’s Lia Mibaki.’

‘Maybe this Colson tipped them.’

‘Or they’ll be back.’

‘Or he tipped them and all this is to fuck with you.’

‘He lost a warehouse here. It’s more likely he wants to shed everyone connected with it. But he also sent me back with an offer to our department to make a deal with him.’

Marquez paused there. Colson had also given him something else and the detectives weren’t going to like it and might react against it. But it could fit.

‘He gave me one other name and that’s someone he claims is inside your department who has been on his payroll for years. His words were, “I’ve paid this guy for a decade to watch out for me and he owes for the warehouse.”’

‘Give us the name.’

‘Pat Tillerson.’

One detective said, ‘Pat?’ The other shook his head. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘It’s what he said. Who is Pat Tillerson?’

‘Someone we work with.’

‘I’ve got to head to the airport. Call me.’

T
he Best Western Hotel in Corte Madera was just off the freeway, not that far from where Marquez lived. He liked the proximity and the rooms were reasonable enough to where he could get reimbursed or at least had a chance of getting reimbursed if he put an informant up here. Or that’s the way it used to be.

When he couldn’t reach Hauser by phone he stopped there, found Hauser’s room, and knocked on the door. He knocked harder the second time and when nothing happened went down to the front desk and showed the Visa card the room was charged to. Even then they were reluctant to open the door, but after they did and he saw the bed was made and the carpet looking like it hadn’t been walked on since it was vacuumed, he got the manager to check with the cleaning staff. A maid reported she didn’t have to do anything in the room this morning.

Marquez took that back to his car and called Hauser. Behind him, he heard the low roar of the freeway as Hauser’s cell rang. He answered on the fifth ring.

‘I’m checking in with you, Matt. How are you doing?’

‘Not well.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In the hotel room you rented for me and on my back with a bad migraine. I can’t talk long.’

Hauser who hurt too much to talk long did a riff now on his wife and his wife’s lawyer and the restraining order forbidding him to go near his house in Piedmont. He said his lawyer told him again this morning that he should quit cooperating with Fish and Game as it wasn’t a reciprocal arrangement. Marquez didn’t cut him off or interrupt. He listened to the whole thing and waited for Hauser to return to his headache.