Die-Off (32 page)

Not long after, the first sirens echoed in the canyon.

T
he next day he rode with Voight to Harknell’s house in Weed. Darcie Smith-Harknell, the sheriff’s wife, opened the front door and frowned when she saw Voight. She stared at Marquez before turning back angrily to Voight.

‘Is the sheriff expecting you?’

‘He’s not the sheriff, ma’am, and this isn’t a social call.’

‘He’s still the sheriff at this house and I’ll call him that just as long as I want.’

Marquez saw Harknell come out of a room and start toward them. He looked as if he had been napping and ran a hand through his hair and shook off what looked like confusion as he reached the small foyer. His eyes lit when he saw Marquez. With a hand he moved his wife aside and stood in the doorway.

‘What’s this about? Get out of here, both of you.’

‘You want to talk to me,’ Voight said, ‘and Lieutenant Marquez is here because Jim Colson talked to him about you.’

He turned to Marquez.

‘What did you talk about? Did he owe you money to keep his trafficking operation going? Is that why you’re up here so much? There’s nothing he could have said about me that wouldn’t be a lie. I heard they picked him up off the shoulder like road kill.’

Marquez had an answer for that but it was Voight’s lead and he kept quiet as Harknell and Voight got into it, Harknell telling Voight that he should quit and go back to LA, that he never fit here and was considered the department drunk. Now Harknell stepped out onto his porch, his face taking on a pink hue as his anger rose. He pulled the door shut behind him and got in Voight’s face.

‘You’re an embarrassment to the department. It was Siskiyou County’s bad luck that you landed here and now you think you’re going to trump up something to get even with me. That isn’t going to happen and I’ll tell you something else that I’ve been thinking for a while. The man who murdered your child did it because he knew you wouldn’t have the stones to do anything about it.’

Voight launched at him and Marquez got an arm between. When Harknell tried to push him away he gathered up Harknell’s sweatshirt in his left hand and pushed him hard enough against the wall of his house that the breath wheezed out of him. He used his right to hold Voight off until Voight stopped himself and laid it out for his ex-sheriff.

‘If you don’t want to talk to us that’s your right, but I will be back. I will be back and back and back and I’ll bring you in and question you until you have answers.’

‘What in the fuck are you talking about? You don’t make any more sense today than you ever did.’

‘Invite us in and we’ll talk.’

‘I don’t want the warden in my house.’

‘He comes with me. I want him here.’

‘Then we have a problem.’

Voight started back to his car and Harknell called, ‘All right, we’ll take twenty minutes in my office and we’ll walk around the house to get there. I don’t want Darcie exposed to this horseshit.’

They followed Harknell around the house on a garden path and into an office of much higher quality than the rest of the house. Floor to ceiling windows faced Mount Shasta where wind high on the mountain lifted plumes of new snow off the summit and spun it into funnels in the clear sky. The floor of the office was oiled walnut planking and the white-painted walls were smooth and clean. The chairs were plush, his desk suggestive of his ambition. Harknell directed them to a couch and Marquez took a chair.

‘What have you got? Let’s hear it or do you want scout here to talk first and tell how he found Colson, who I know for a fact has been paying him off for years.’

Voight asked a dozen questions about what contact Harknell had with Colson and for how long and whether he had ever met with him at the cabin where Marquez arrested him yesterday.

‘I’ve never met with him anywhere. I’ve never met the man or had reason to.’

‘Did you ever make a phone call to Texas and confirm he had once worked for the state police?’

‘I did after you got on to him and scout here. I don’t have a date for you.’

‘They have a record of you making an inquiry two and a half years ago.’

‘Bullshit, they do. No one keeps records like that.’

‘This is informal here,’ Voight said, ‘but if they send me what they’ve promised and I compare it to your phone records and it comes back that you lied to me, that’s an issue.’

‘What if I did make an inquiry? If you’re sheriff and you’re like me you want to know everything you can about anyone questionable. If I checked him or anyone else two and a half years ago and can’t remember doing that it doesn’t mean jack shit.

‘Now, contrast that with you, Rich. You get up in the morning and if you’re sober you come into work when you’re ready and then sit at your desk until ten minutes to twelve and then go to that diner where you wolf as much as you can before you come back and shuffle papers around and nap in your chair ahead of going home. That’s your day. It’s busier as sheriff and if you don’t want to take my word for it, talk to your boss after he’s been in there a couple of months.’

Voight glanced at Marquez and that was the signal for Marquez to get in. Marquez stood as he started talking.

‘Colson will never testify.’

‘That’s for sure, son.’

‘I went to his hideout.’

‘I’m sure you’ve been there many times.’

‘There’s a young woman who lives there who has picked you out of a line-up. She’s here in Yreka right now. She was brought in last night. Would you remember sleeping with an under-age teenage girl more than once or does that just get mixed in with the rest of the job?’

‘Well, Scout, you’re a man, you know how it is. I have wandered occasionally but I don’t remember any teenaged whores. If you want to put her through that you can do that to her. You’ve got to remember a young woman can be fragile.’

‘Set what you did to her aside for a moment. What’s really going on here, Mark, is that your visits to Colson’s hideout can be proved.’

‘It’s a lie.’

‘Here’s the next thing. I was on the phone with Barbara Jones not long before she was shot. I know why she called you.’

Harknell broke off staring at him and looked over at Voight.

‘That’s true. She and I talked a number of times.’ He pointed a finger at Marquez. ‘Several of those were about you.’

‘I’m saying I know why she called you.’

Now Voight slid a copy of phone records across the coffee table and Harknell went to his desk for reading glasses. He picked up the printout. That her recent calls would get scrutinized couldn’t be any surprise to him yet he seemed unsettled. He tossed the paper back down on the table, dismissing it, but the gesture didn’t carry.

‘Again, I talk to a lot of people.’

‘You talked to her late in the afternoon of the day she was killed. I talked to her after you. She was looking for the third hatchery. That’s why she called you.’ Marquez glanced at Voight and gambled. ‘You went out to meet her.’

‘Gentlemen, excuse me for a minute.’

Harknell got up and left the room and they looked at each other wondering what was going on. Voight put on a gun for the trip out here and reached around and unclasped the holster. He didn’t like the abrupt departure. When they heard a car engine start, Voight jumped up.

‘He’s running.’

They got outside in time to see Harknell accelerate away. Voight leaned into his car and got on his radio and a deputy picked up Harknell. When he turned onto the southbound I-5 onramp two highway patrol units moved in to help follow. But he wasn’t pulled over because Marquez argued against it.

‘Let’s pass him. He hasn’t been arrested or charged with anything and he’s going to try to get on his boat. There may be something there he wants to lose. Get me there ahead of this convoy and I’ll take care of the boat.’

Voight got on his radio and let the deputies know that he was going around and then hit the gas and the car leapt forward and they took the Shasta Dam exit and as they rolled through Shasta City the call came that Harknell had just exited and was three miles behind them and driving slowly.

‘He’s scared and he’s unsure what to do, but he’s headed to the lake,’ Marquez said, and pushed Voight to drive the road hard. He figured he had five to ten minutes, probably closer to five after he got through the gate and onto Harknell’s boat.

After Marquez got around the dock gate he reached in through the cabin window and got the cabin door open. Now he cut the ignition wires and pushed them up under the dash. He was back out the gate and off the dock as the strange convoy rolled in and a red-faced and shaking Harknell confronted the deputies. They kept quiet as Voight tried to talk to him.

‘Goddamn you, you drunk fraud, so help me God, I’ll have your job.’

Harknell turned to the highway patrol officer, said loudly, ‘Eddie, your dad and I go way back and if you’ve got any questions about this bastard’s insinuations call him. He turned back to Voight, his hands shaking as he fumbled for his key to the dock gate. He opened the gate and maybe he was unaware it didn’t close behind him as he strode toward his boat or maybe at heart he knew it was over.

He cast the bow line off before getting onboard and two more sheriff deputies pulled in. Marquez stepped onto the dock and walked down to Harknell’s boat. Harknell had a gun near his right knee and was hunched over the dash trying to figure out why his key didn’t work.

Harknell turned.

‘Step on this boat and I’ll shoot you and I’ll be within my rights.’

‘I won’t get on the boat, Sheriff, and you don’t want to shoot anyone.’

His forehead was beaded with sweat, his cheeks red, eyes desperate and Marquez kept talking. Harknell started to rise then stumbled and sat back down in the seat, and Voight was now on the dock approaching with two deputies.

‘You’re a fisherman, Sheriff. You’ve got to tell me. You know what’ll happen. Tell me now before they get here. Those pike are going to the delta. They’ll kill off everything. You might hate me but you don’t want that.’

Did Marquez expect anything? No. But was it worth a try? Why not? Just as Voight and the deputies arrived and a moment before Harknell was ordered to place his hands on the boat’s dashboard, he whispered, ‘One-Two-Three-One Burnside Road.’

T
he SOU team was too far south to get there but a Siskiyou warden and two SOU met Marquez at the cut-off to Burnside Road. He laid out his plan.

‘I want them to think there are more of us. I’ll go in first and five minutes later, you.’

He pointed to one of the SOU wardens and she nodded. The other two would follow her.

‘I’m going to show you a photo I pulled off the Internet of a biologist named Barry Peason. I hope I got the right Barry Peason.’

Nobody laughed.

‘I’m joking. It’s him. He’s a biologist and this other guy is named Matt Hauser. I don’t know who else is here and I don’t know if these guys are here either, but I’m hoping they are and we’re not too late. I’ll go in now.’

Marquez turned in at a mailbox on a gray redwood post with stick-on letters reading 1231. It was a ranch and as he saw three cars and the buildings his first reaction was that Harknell may have lied and this was a legitimate ranch. A Ford 250 was parked next to a Honda and beat-up Subaru all-wheel drive. He saw a barn, a house, two other out buildings, three horses in a corral, alfalfa in a field, things he would expect to see on a small ranch.

He didn’t see Hauser’s car or the white Prius registered to Barry Peason. He studied the barn as he knocked on the door of the house, and then knocked again. As he did, the door to the barn rolled open sideways and almost silently but for a mechanical whirr, and when he saw what was happening he called Sheila Braga. She was the lead warden coming in.

‘I’m almost to you,’ she said.

‘Block the road and bring the others up fast. You’re about to see a white Prius with Peason at the wheel coming at you. Don’t do anything until there are three of you. I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’m checking out the barn and I can see fish tanks. The set-up is a lot like the last one.’

He walked through and confirmed what he knew he would find, empty tanks, the operation being shuttered and Peason on his way out. He called Braga back.

‘The pike are gone.’

‘We’ve got him.’

‘Bring him back here. I think the fish moved this morning. There are wet tire tracks in the barn and they’re from a bigger vehicle, not Peason’s Prius.’

Peason shook with nervousness and stalled and then blamed Hauser for everything. He didn’t know where Hauser was and no, Hauser had never been here. He said no one else was in the house or anywhere on the premises and gave them permission to check. Two guys were southbound toward the delta in a pickup truck with plastic coolers carrying the young pike.

Marquez let Peason believe if he cooperated it might all work out for him and he could undo everything and start over. He said the truck with the fish left two hours ago but wouldn’t release pike into the delta until dusk. There were multiple coolers and approximately three thousand fingerlings. They might release from a boat but he wasn’t sure and got more and more vague about the actual release spot, repeating that it wasn’t his responsibility.

‘Whose is it?’

‘I don’t even know their names.’

‘You don’t know the names of the guys driving the fish to the delta?’

‘The first time I saw them was this morning.’

‘Who paid for this hatchery?’

‘ENTR but only a few people know about it.’

‘We’ll need the names of everyone.’

‘I’m not a manager.’

‘You’re a scientist.’

‘That’s right. You need to talk to the manager of the project. When I took this on it wasn’t to dump invasive species into the delta. No one told me that’s what was going to happen. I don’t know anything about that part of it. This was an experiment to see if we could breed northern pike. The rest is something else that I don’t have anything to do with.’

Peason was scared and shocked and his story shifted. Marquez figured they couldn’t wait as he fumbled for a way out.

‘Here’s where you’re at. You’re the guy in charge of the California hatcheries and who knows where the Oregon and Washington hatcheries are. You’re not a bystander watching to see if we stop this delta release. You are absolutely fucked if it happens.