Die-Off (30 page)

‘One of her last calls was to you,’ Voight said. ‘She works for ENTR and we haven’t told them she’s dead, though the company has verified she’s an employee. I want you to look at her before I give you her name or call ENTR.’

‘You can’t tell me her name?’

‘I’d like you to drive here first.’ When Marquez didn’t answer he asked, ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s up?’

‘What kind of car?’

‘A white Audi.’

‘I’ll see you there.’

She was out of the car and in the county coroner’s wagon when Marquez arrived. Voight pulled the sheet back and Marquez felt a strong wave of sadness looking at the sightless eyes of Barbara Jones.

‘You knew her?’

Marquez nodded. He couldn’t quite speak.

‘You’re in her recent calls. What was that about? Why was she calling you?’

‘She was looking for the third pike hatchery and we just agreed to team up to find it.’

‘Could she have been killed for that?’

Marquez didn’t have an answer for him or for any of his questions about who would kill her. He reached to touch her face and Voight pulled his arm back and then they looked at the car together as the coroner slammed the doors shut and backed off of the dirt turnout and drove away.

V
oight watched Marquez’s reaction when he saw Barbara Jones’ body. With his pike deal Marquez sided with this whacked and yet he was clearly disturbed by this ENTR employee’s death. He treated embezzlement charges the climatologist was facing as some sort of side show, yet now he was saying that Mathew Hauser was in it from the start and double-crossed those who set up the pike project. He claimed he and the victim here had begun to work together.

Marquez took a step back and Voight knew he was both looking at her car and trying to get his head around how the murder happened. He watched Marquez assess what evidence was left in the dirt after the rancher and locals and deputies drove in and out of the turnout and tramped around the car. The rancher brought his family down here thinking they might recognize her. They all walked around the car. It was pretty well hopeless when he had arrived and worse now, but Marquez looked like he was going to do his pathfinder thing and squat down and scratch at the dirt with a stick. Voight walked over.

‘You’re wasting your time.’

But if Marquez was anything he was stubborn. Voight talked and Marquez questioned him about the rancher’s tire tracks. Now he was looking at the deputies’ vehicles. He turned back to him.

‘Was she on her phone when she was shot?’

‘She may have been but I don’t know yet. Her phone is out of juice and I need to get back to the office to check with the phone company. She was in the driver’s seat and her window was down. Maybe she lowered it for whoever shot her or maybe it was already down. If you’re okay with one of these deputies driving your pickup back to Yreka, I’d like it if you rode with me. I want to talk with you about her. When did you start working with her?’

‘When I gave up on Hauser.’

Marquez handed over the pickup keys to a deputy and walked out on the road, but there wasn’t going to be much there to see. Voight had already walked it. He gathered Marquez’s missing hatchery was somewhere around here and after talking to the rancher he knew Barbara Jones may have parked here for the simple reason that this is where cell phones worked. That’s what you did in this part of the county.

Voight had her laptop in his trunk in an evidence bag and figured to plug that in this afternoon and ask ENTR to get him past whatever encryption he encountered. Her car would get covered and towed. The forensic team had already loaded and left, but he was never in a hurry to leave a crime scene. He walked her car again and left Marquez out on the road.

When Marquez returned he was on the opposite side of the road and looking down like one of those diviner types who search for water. Voight saw him pause and called, ‘What are you seeing there, John?’

‘Let me show you something.’

Voight walked with him to a curve in the road near a small creek and then around the curve. They could no longer see her car, only the curve ahead with the brush on either side. Off the shoulder were a couple of footprints in the mud.

Marquez knelt.

‘This is recent and it could have been one of your guys walking the road this morning, or it could be someone else walking toward the turnout.’

‘It doesn’t look like it goes any farther than here.’

‘It does but let’s look at this first.’

Marquez showed him what he called the first tracks, but it was just as likely a deputy who stepped off the road earlier today.

‘This is where a car could have stopped to let someone out. That’s what I’m seeing here. The heel is dug down because they got out fast then needed these next steps to get their balance and move left onto the asphalt. Meanwhile the driver accelerates away and drives past the turnout where she’s parked. She sees the headlights go flash past.’

‘That leaves the shooter hidden around the curve in the dark and on foot. He starts walking down the road and sticks to the edge because he wants to use the brush to hide it. He doesn’t have a light and is letting his eyes adjust, but he steps off the asphalt in a couple of places because the edge of the road is uneven and the asphalt has degraded. You’ll see it’s the same boot print.’

Marquez showed him three more spots.

‘Same heel print as that first one and that’s a different heel than the deputies who were here earlier or the two still here.’ He pointed at the heel mark. ‘It’s fresh.’

Voight nodded. He saw it now. Marquez was right. From the blood splatter on her phone and on the laptop the shooter had walked up and surprised her. The shooter knew she would be parked here. She was on her phone and turned her head when she heard the shooter approaching or her name was called.

‘He walked up and shot her and the car that dropped him came back and picked him up,’ Marquez said. ‘They knew she was going to be here and waiting. Somehow they knew.’

Voight agreed but didn’t respond. He had his own questions such as why didn’t the shooter take her laptop or phone. He got four casts made of the footprints Marquez found and then started questioning Marquez as to what he knew about Barbara Jones and the ENTR security unit she worked for, but unfortunately, Marquez’s best source on her was Hauser.

‘Hauser told me the security unit was five-person and she was the one most often out in the field. She was very confident. She told me she was in Siskiyou County looking for the third hatchery.’

Voight nodded. She was way out a rural road for a reason and driving back with Marquez to Yreka Voight heard everything Marquez knew or was willing to say about her and the people she was looking for and worked with. When they got to Yreka he picked up a sandwich and potato salad and Marquez bought coffee and made it clear he didn’t want to leave yet. Whatever Barbara Jones had learned, he wanted.

But Marquez wasn’t saying what he was looking for and call it a bad habit or a suspicious nature, but he had Marquez’s steering wheel and door handles and several other spots in the car checked with luminal to look for trace blood. He did that despite not having any suspicions about Marquez and he liked it that Marquez cared about her. That showed when he saw her body and in the way he talked.

The laptop and cell phone were checked for touch DNA and plugged in and charged up and Marquez was still here, though he had been in and out of the building and on and off his phone. Voight talked with ENTR without Marquez in the room and ENTR walked him around her laptop firewall and provided her login, but they didn’t come across without a threat first. He went through files on her laptop and when he realized he’d need longer than today to do that, he brought Marquez back in.

‘What are you waiting around for, John?’

‘A look at her laptop and phone.’

‘You can look at both. In fact, I’d like you to read an email she may have been writing you when she was shot. Here.’

Marquez leaned over and read it. He nodded as if he understood her writing it, but he also looked puzzled.

‘What is she trying to tell you and why is it so cryptic?’

Marquez turned one of those big hands of his outward as if to say, who knows, then started talking.

‘Any email she wrote could be read by the company. They all get saved so she took it to the edge of what she thought I might figure out but that someone reading inside ENTR might not. That could mean she believed the pike project originated inside the company and there was someone at ENTR she didn’t trust.’

‘What about the rest of it? How does it connect, and if these emails are getting stored why didn’t she text you instead?’

‘It’s all the same. ENTR captures everything.’

‘You know that or she told you that?’

‘She told me and so did Hauser, as did a biologist I’m looking for.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Barry Peason.’

Voight slid the laptop closer to Marquez.

‘What’s the last part about?’

It read: ‘Saw one of shoot-out pair last week up here??? Call me.’

Now Voight felt Marquez evaluating him. He had weighed Marquez as a possible suspect and it was as if Marquez was turning the tables.

‘Marquez, don’t go dark on me. Don’t even think about doing that.’

‘The shoot-out she means was in Los Angeles.’

‘The tusk shooters?’

Marquez nodded.

‘Does that make any sense to you?’

‘Not right now but if she saw one of them up here it probably means she saw them with somebody she was watching.’

‘I still don’t get it.’

‘I didn’t say I did. Is that all you got out of her computer and phone?’

‘No, there’s something else you need to look at.’ He slid her phone across his desk. ‘Take a look under Notes.’

Marquez scanned the files and found a grocery list which literally read: milk, bread, etc. Voight watched him read through a holiday shopping list, gifts and names to go with them. He scanned a recipe for a Thanksgiving turkey and a file titled Juliet and after reading wondered aloud if Juliet was a girlfriend, or a lover, and went slowly down a to-do list that included ‘leak at fireplace, buy new coffee maker,’ and three entries under to-do: ‘BP offer’, ‘possible meet with SH’, and the last entry was just one word with a question mark, ‘Rider?’ It gave him a chill. He looked up as he started to get into her emails. Then he looked up alarmed.

‘Did you save the files in her computer?’

‘No.’

‘Do it now. Emails are vanishing off her phone.’

Marquez clicked into Settings and tried to disconnect the phone from any network. He turned the phone off and it came back on and Voight was aware Marquez wasn’t having any luck and his own fingers were trembling as he pushed a memory stick in and called to Marquez for help in getting into the docs and Marquez took over. Marquez wasn’t fast but he knew what to do, but it was too late. Voight watched him try three times and then they just sat there aware that everything was gone.

‘I’ll get somebody to pull them off the hard drive.’

Marquez didn’t answer at first then said, ‘They’re buying time to move the fish out of that third hatchery. One of her notes on the to-do list read “BP offer.” That’s not British Petroleum. That’s Barry Peason, the biologist I mentioned.’

‘Do you know him?”

‘I’ve talked to him and I’ve been chasing him.’

‘Who is SH? Is that Hauser’s initials?’

Voight reached for his notebook, still stunned that everything on the computer was gone.

‘Mathew Stephen Hauser,’ he read. ‘She was being clever using his middle initial.’

Marquez shook his head.

‘I’m not sure it is him. It could be but there’s another way to look at this. She and I talked about Siskiyou County and who knows what goes on up here. It’s five times bigger than the state of Rhode Island and has forty-five thousand people living in it, so we talked about who’s connected, who knows the area and the people and the name Sheriff Harknell came up. The date on this note is right after she and I talked. SH could be Sheriff Harknell.’

Voight sat on that one for a moment.

‘What was she going to do with that idea?’

‘She was going to call Harknell. He knows a lot about what’s going on in the county and might have heard rumors about a hatchery and that’s not to say he would know anything about what’s being grown at the hatchery, just knows that it exists. She had some charisma. She might have gotten it out of him.’

Marquez slowly stood.

‘I’ve got to go. Think about who could ask him and call me.’

‘There’s no one to ask him.’

‘Then I guess it’ll be me and you. Call me when you’re ready.’

T
he next morning fog was low in the trees and misting across the wet road as Marquez drove the dirt track to the encampment. The road splintered as he neared the overgrown airfield in the meadow and he parked under trees near there. He crossed the wet grass of the airfield and walked up the dirt road that climbed to the encampment. He found the tented and tarped remains of the falling-down cabin where the girl who showed up at Colson’s cabin lived. He wanted to talk with her first.

Smoke rose from the stone chimney and there was no door but he called and a woman who looked like she could be her mother pulled the tarp back. When she did the smell of tortillas and frying eggs was strong. She squinted as if trying to comprehend his presence here and then shook her head. She saw no reason for him to talk to her daughter.

‘She’s not here.’

‘Is there a way I can find her?’

‘She hasn’t done anything wrong.’

She let the tarp fall shut as she went back inside and Marquez heard a man’s voice and waited to see if he’d come out, but no one did and he worked his way through the salvaged iron and wood and rusted vehicles and past the scraggly crops at the center of the encampment and climbed the trail up through the cedars to Colson’s cabin.

The young man standing guard was familiar. His gun rested against the cabin wall as he warmed his hands over coals glowing in a rusted barrel. He looked stiff and tired as if he had been there all night. He probably had. But he moved fast when Marquez pushed aside a cedar branch, stepped into the small clearing and identified himself. He held his Glock level and warned the man he wasn’t alone. He backed him away from his gun then moved to the cabin door.