Die-Off (3 page)

‘He told me.’

‘Told you what, that he had suspicions then?’

‘Don’t you think this tip call coming to you and you finding the gun should provoke some questions?’

‘Listen to the tape of the call and then see what you think. We got a copy out to Voight this afternoon. Ask him to email you the file. If he won’t, I will.’

Marquez handed him a card and looked at the tackle box in the detective’s hand. The box was crusted with river mud and it was quite possible this was nothing more than a hoax. Terry Ellis and Sarah Steiner as he remembered them were warm and light-hearted and on a summer road trip in addition to bringing their idealism to the Klamath water debate. He took in the detective’s balding gray head and tired face, the detective just doing his part.

‘Voight doesn’t think much of Fish and Game. He thinks we should issue hunting licenses, help clean up road kill, and generally stay out of the way of real cops like him. But that isn’t your problem. Thanks for making the drive here to pick this up.’

‘The Washington warden here says you were alone when you found the tackle box.’

‘I was.’

‘Time ran out and you refused to pull back from the river.’

‘That’s right. She kept her word and went up to the road. I stayed because the call to leave came early and the rocks up at the next bend up ahead looked like what was described to me.’

‘You dug in just the right spot.’

Marquez was done with this. He leaned forward and in a confessional voice said, ‘You know how it is, you bury your gun along a river and then go back years later and try to find it. It’s not so easy to find anymore and the warden made me carry the pack and the shovel and the metal detector and that slowed me down. Then I had to wait for her to leave so I could retrieve it and get on with my scheme. Now you’ve got it and if it checks out, Rich Voight, who is already spread too thin in that giant county, can put more energy into investigating me. That’s my secret plan, to have Voight on my ass.’

‘How deep was it buried?’

‘About two feet down.’

‘Could you find the spot again?’

Marquez was unsure if the detective was serious and then decided he was and pointed at the churning white foam below the dam.

‘The rocks should still be there. I think they’re big enough to take this, but I wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking for the sandbar.’

‘Did the warden here watch you open the tackle box?’

‘She did.’

‘Did you touch the gun?’

‘No. I used a knife to push back the cloth it was wrapped in. I’m going to head out now. Have a nice drive back.’

Before Marquez could turn away the detective said, ‘Rich Voight is a good man and a persistent investigator. Persistence is how cases get solved.’

‘Tell him Terry Ellis and Sarah Steiner were young and energetic in the way you can be when you still think everybody cares at least a little. And they were fighters. They would have done some good. Sarah Steiner managed to make a 911 call and couldn’t say much but gave the dispatcher the river road. No one got out there to check until near dawn. Why don’t you ask Voight why he hasn’t looked into that?’

‘Maybe he has.’

‘Ask him.’

Marquez left soon after the detective and his phone started ringing about an hour later, more or less when he thought it would. It was Voight and he called three times in quick succession. He didn’t leave a message until his fourth call. The message was he wanted to debrief with Marquez at the sheriff’s office in Yreka tomorrow.

Marquez might have done that just to get clear with Voight if something else hadn’t happened first. He returned the car, flew from Portland to Oakland, and drove home. Late that night a pickup carrying four eighty-gallon coolers loaded with fingerling fish rolled and pinned the driver near an abandoned boat landing off a dirt road along the Sacramento River. Marquez got a call from the warden whose area it was in. He recognized Grace’s voice immediately.

‘John, I’ve got something that may be what you’ve been looking for, a pickup truck that was loaded with fingerlings. The driver was backing down to the water and rolled his truck. I don’t think he had his lights on and I don’t think these are fish we want in the Sacramento River. Do you want to come take a look?’

‘I do. Where’s the driver?’

‘He’s still trapped and he’s in a bad way. They’re trying to get him out, but the truck is wedged between trees and his arm is pinned under it. He had his window down and was probably leaning out trying to see in the dark as he backed off the slope. When the truck rolled his left arm and shoulder got caught under the driver’s door. He also took a bad hit to the head. Paramedics are working on him and a tow truck is on its way here to try to get the pickup off him.’

‘Who found him?’

‘Someone made an anonymous call to 911.’

‘Text me how to get there. I’m on my way.’

A
late-model white Ford 150 lay on its left side and brightly lit by lights powered by a generator. Marquez heard the voices of the first responders trying to get the driver freed above the sound of the diesel generator. He saw the pickup’s windshield was out and they were working on him through the opening. Their breath showed in the glare of the lights. It was cold and still an hour to dawn. A low fog lay over the river and Grace Headley, the area warden, stood with him and gave him her take, which seemed to be the right one.

The driver had tried to back down to the river with his lights off using only brake lights and moonlight. The truck slid in mud from the recent rain and the right rear tire ran up on a rock. Marquez’s flashlight beam illuminated muddy tire prints on the rock and he saw how as that tire rode up on the rock the other rear tire dropped into a rut. Then the truck rolled. The weight of the fish and water-filled coolers didn’t help.

Fish and water flowed out of the upended coolers and the truck, now on its side, slid down into a stand of trees and got wedged there. Getting it back onto four tires meant pulling it free with a tow cable. But that meant dragging it along its side and with the man’s arm pinned under the driver’s door they couldn’t do that.

He saw where they had cut five or six saplings down so they could get enough access to dig around his trapped arm. He watched as a tow driver repositioned his truck and ran a wench cable down.

Headley shook her head and touched Marquez’s back.

‘They found his wallet and I’ve run him. I’ll give you what I’ve got so far. Do you want to go down there first?’

‘Yeah, let’s go take a look.’

They followed the pickup’s tracks down the steep slope to where it rolled and fish flowed into the brush as the coolers spilled. That flood of water carried fingerlings almost to the river. Marquez shined his light on a red plastic cooler lid caught in a young bay tree and beneath saw hundreds of three-inch fingerlings. The smell was strong.

‘Over here, John, and you’ve got to walk around to the right. You’re not going to believe how many of them almost made it. They must have sloshed out in one big wave. What was he thinking, trying to back all the way down here?’

Marquez thought he had a pretty good idea of what the driver was thinking. Each cooler weighed somewhere around 650 pounds. Two orange-colored five-gallon buckets were downslope from the nose of the truck and were probably thrown out when the windshield popped loose. Good chance he was supposed to park and ferry the fingerlings down to the water two buckets at a time, more or less ten trips per cooler, and he figured it would be a lot easier to back down the overgrown dirt track to the edge of the river.

He brought his light back to the fish lodged in the brush and then worked his way over to Headley, where the fish had washed out and over rocks. He took in the flow of fish and estimated there were more than a thousand, and he didn’t have any doubt about what they were.

When he looked up Headley asked, ‘Ready to wake up a biologist?’

He was. He squatted down close to the water with the flashlight and picked up the largest of the fingerlings nearest him and laid it in his palm.

‘What’s going on with those fins?’ Headley asked.

The pectoral, the front-most fins, were cut short and damaged. So were the pelvic fins.

‘Whoever raised them fed them with pellets and they all race each other to get to the pellets. When they do that they get crowded in and bite each other’s fins. It happens in the feeding frenzy.’

Marquez looked at the dark line along the back, the start of speckled color along the sides, the long snout. He was sure but wanted to hear the biologist confirm it. He dropped the fish and with the light followed the rest of the wash of fish and saw several that had been crushed and, as Headley said, just a few feet from the water. She moved one with her boot.

‘I stomped these. They were dead when I got here but I wanted to make certain. My father’s family was from Michigan and we used to go there in the summers and I would fish with my father. It’s not the first time I’ve seen northern pike fingerling.’

She moved another with her boot.

‘Most grow to two feet but I’ve seen them as big as three. When I was seven I was watching a mother duck and a line of ducklings and then one of these came out of the water and the duckling at the end of the line was gone. After that my father couldn’t get me to put a toe in, at least not on that trip. This is what you’ve been afraid of, isn’t it?’

‘It is.’

She was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘There are enough northern pike here to start a colony. Are we looking for sport fishermen?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Who else would do something like this?’

‘That’s what I’m working on.’

‘John, really, what’s going on here? This is an awful lot of pike and I know what these fish can do. There won’t be any other species left. Why would anyone want that?’

‘The usual reasons.’

‘But where’s the money in this?’

‘I don’t know yet but it’s in there somewhere.’

‘Well, I don’t get it.’

Marquez moved his flashlight beam over the fingerling pike at their feet.

‘You don’t have to get it. This is all we need to know.’

They worked their way back up to the truck and then to her rig where she gave him what she had on the driver and the pickup that was registered to a corporation. The name on his license was Enrique Jordan and it was clear he was in bad shape. They were working to keep him conscious and there was urgency in their voices. He was almost free, almost on his way to a hospital, but not out yet. It sounded as if they hit a rock trying to dig around his arm and now were having to work around it.

Marquez and Headley moved back up to the levee road and were there as Enrique Jordan was freed. Four first responders supported his body and they brought him up the slickened muddy track on a backboard. He was unconscious but alive when they loaded him and left. Marquez got the name of the hospital where they were taking him and watched their lights disappear down the dirt road.

The pickup got dragged out of the trees and winched up to the road and he and Headley retrieved items thrown from the truck and went through everything inside it. Marquez searched for an hour for a cell phone. He swept the brush with a light trying to find it and criss-crossed the slope as the sun rose red over river fog. He was there as a DFG biologist arrived and took samples and confirmed the fish were northern pike.

Before the pickup was loaded and hauled away Marquez went through it one more time. He searched a wider area around the crash site, refusing to give on finding a cell phone. Everyone carried one. The driver wouldn’t be out here without one. He stood at the edge of the levee road reluctant to leave without finding it.

‘John, when did you first hear about pike?’

‘Three weeks ago from a guy who called me with a tip but no real information. He’s danced around and is looking for something for himself and I’m not sure what that is yet.’

‘I grew up on this river,’ Headley said and Marquez got it. He understood.

He copied down the address of the impound yard and walked the slope once more with Headley and gathered a few pike samples of his own.

‘What are you going to do with those?’

‘Fry them in oil and have them with scrambled eggs.’

She smiled, but not much of a smile.

‘I’m going to freeze them. We may need more samples later. Did you and your dad fish the Sacramento?’

‘We did and it’s lucky we had that. I was out of control when I was fifteen and my dad was real smart. He knew if he couldn’t get me to do anything else he could get me on the river with him, and if he could do that he could get me to talk. He talked me through some mistakes I made. I miss him a lot.’

She waved at the spilled pike.

‘I’m glad he’s not here to see this. He wouldn’t understand someone trying to take out the salmon and trout. He wouldn’t get it.’

‘But you get it.’

‘I don’t know what I get or don’t. It’s like the world has turned into one big shopping mall, an open market where everything is up for grabs. Everything is for sale. To say something like a river is sacred is a joke to people. Nothing is sacred. Rivers are for drinking water and having fun, and if they grow fish great, and if they don’t we’ll get the fish somewhere else or grow them in factories like we do with chicken and hogs. We can probably screw that up just as well as we did with them. You know what I’m saying – when they stop being fish or anything living they’ll just be product grown to eat. What are we going to do about these assholes that are behind that kid in the pickup? It wasn’t his idea. He’s probably all of nineteen.’

She paused then turned to him. ‘You know he’s going to die.’

Marquez was afraid she was right. She shook her head. ‘It’s overwhelming. I can’t get my head around how we’re going to stop something like this.’

He couldn’t help her with that. He’d been skeptical about the pike tip but wasn’t anymore. He pulled his phone and after finding the hospital address said, ‘I’m going to head to the hospital.’

Forty minutes later he was on the surgery floor among the anxious waiting to hear the results. At the desk the woman seated looked up and asked. ‘Are you family?’