Die-Off (7 page)

Soliatano was about money and staying out of jail and not getting charged with anything. His claim of sending documenting photos to Hauser might be true. Those he forwarded last night to him were shots taken at night and not much as photos go, but they had the same truck and the date of the first drop last week stamped on the photo. Good chance they were real and Soliatano was documenting to earn his money. Did that mean Hauser was legitimate and building his own case?

He watched Soliatano and the little terrier turn back this direction and work their way back down. Soliatano dropped a plastic bag with the dog’s poop in a garbage can and went back into the house. Marquez gave him fifteen minutes before calling.

‘You’re early.’

‘We’ll pick up coffee somewhere.’

When Soliatano got in the car Marquez asked, ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘About a year but it was my wife’s mother’s house. Stacey is six months pregnant and we’re going to raise our kids here. I rent where I used to live in Vacaville.’ He added as if he’d thought about it, ‘It’s better for a kid here.’

Then he went on: ‘I talked to my brother-in-law last night. He’s a lawyer. He said I shouldn’t do this ride with you and that you can’t charge me with anything because there aren’t any witnesses.’

‘How much does he know about Matt Hauser?’

‘Not much.’

‘Hauser could turn on you and testify against you. That’s a reason to talk to me now.’

Soliatano processed that then said, ‘I watch TV cop shows. I know you don’t control everything, but I need to know you’re not going to fuck me.’

‘I’m going to take care of you like you did Enrique.’

Soliatano didn’t like that but didn’t respond and they drove and talked and Marquez followed his directions to where the first stocking occurred and the fish allegedly died of a virus. Then they left the highway and tracked dirt roads, drove past almond orchards and down to the river to a forgotten boat landing where Soliatano and Jordan had backed up and emptied fish into the river.

Soliatano took him through the drop, bringing the pickup truck’s rear wheels all the way down to the water’s edge, opening the first cooler and bailing water out of it until they could tip the rest of the cooler water and fish into the Sacramento.

‘Those fish were swimming way too slow. They were already fucked up. We could tell.’

‘You realized they were sick?’

‘Yeah.’

‘This was the first drop and there’s only been one other?’

‘That’s right.’

The river was green and gray and lapped at rotted pilings. The ramp was in bad shape, cracked and broken and closed. When Marquez felt like he had all Soliatano was going to give him here, he turned back to the second fish stocking.

‘What happened when Enrique got killed?’

‘The truck slid on mud. It went sideways.’

‘Why didn’t you leave him the phone?’

‘I wanted to have it in case I needed to call again. You know, if they didn’t show up. That’s why I waited down the road.’

‘Okay, let’s drive there and you show me where you waited.’

They drove to the second site. In daylight the small trees and broken brush and the muddy tracks from the truck looked raw. It looked like something bad had happened. A cold wind was blowing and they did the same again, Soliatano taking him through the whole thing, and then they moved down the levee road to where he had waited after calling 911.

‘Did you hang up on the 911 dispatcher when she was asking for directions?’

‘No.’

‘She thinks you did.’

‘That’s bullshit, the connection broke.’ He said that and then revealed, ‘I know where the third drop was supposed to happen – and pretty soon.’

‘Do you have a day?’

‘No, but the fish are almost big enough. The guy at the hatchery told Enrique that. Hauser knows.’

‘Knows what?’

‘Knows the next batch is almost big enough.’

They drove thirty miles to the next spot and it was different in that they followed railroad tracks and drove a railroad road very clearly marked with No Trespassing signs. The tires crunched through gravel and the fall air carried the smell of creosote from the rail tracks. A little dirt cut-off road took them down into cottonwoods and they were staring at the Sacramento River again. On the way back, Marquez was frank with him.

‘I’m just going to lay it on the table. I think when you left Enrique there you thought he would die and when he didn’t you went to the hospital to reassure yourself he wasn’t going to wake up and start talking about you.’

‘You’re fucking cold, man.’

‘I think you hung up on the dispatcher but the first responders drew enough from your description to get there. They know the area and put it together. You knew it was over once the truck rolled and you went to collect that night so Hauser couldn’t change his mind. You got the money and came home. The money was all that mattered.’

‘Fuck, let me out right here.’

‘Not yet, we’ve still got to get a statement from you. What did you take from Enrique’s wallet when you took the phone? The first responders said it was down in the driver’s footwell and it looked like someone had gone through it. There was no money.’

‘He didn’t carry money.’

‘Not even a few bucks?’

‘He carried some money in his jeans. Someone in the hospital probably stole it.’

Marquez took him to headquarters instead of the American River District Office. He interviewed Soliatano with Captain Waller sitting in. The video equipment was small and on a stand and Soliatano looked at the camera from time to time but he never complained and did another revision and refinement, telling the camera he thought that he and Enrique Jordan were stocking native fish in the river.

‘I thought the guy who hired Enrique was growing fish to help the rivers but couldn’t get a permit to do it so was doing it on his own.’

He stuck to his story of never having seen the hatchery and added, and this was a good touch, ‘He told Enrique it was safest for the fish to introduce them into a river at night.’

He now denied having made the 911 call and maybe that was on the advice of his attorney brother-in-law who he had talked to just before the interview. Maybe the brother-in-law told him a voice analysis wouldn’t be conclusive. He also denied knowing Matt Hauser or having met with him, ever communi-cated with him or received money from him. It was quite a turnaround from the truck ride and he did it all calmly as if the conversations with Marquez never happened.

He looked at Marquez and said, ‘I made up the other site I took you to. When you knocked on my door yesterday morning I got scared and I was trying to give you some answers so you would go away.’

Marquez nodded as if that made complete sense.

‘Anything else you’d like to tell us?’

‘One thing and that’s I won’t need a ride home. My brother-in-law is picking me up.’

‘Tell your brother-in-law we’ll have some follow-up questions.’

Soliatano grinned as if Marquez had told a good joke, but said it was fine to call his cell and that he was up early every morning. Marquez called close to dawn the next morning and a recording said Soliatano’s cell phone was no longer in service. When he stopped by Soliatano’s house his black Honda was parked along the curb, but no one answered the door and the dog didn’t bark. He knocked again and waited and walked around and looked in a window on one side of the garage then saw a neighbor come out of his house across the street.

‘They left in the middle of the night,’ the neighbor said. ‘I hope it’s not a problem with the baby being premature. My wife is worried.’

‘I don’t think it’s the baby.’

‘Are you a friend of theirs?’

‘We just met but I’m hoping to see a lot more of him.’

‘I see.’

Probably not, but that was okay. Marquez called Waller after he drove away.

‘Soliatano’s phone is disconnected and I’m just leaving his house. His wife’s van is gone and he told me she wasn’t driving anymore. The dog isn’t barking. The shades are down and a neighbor said they left in the middle of the night.’

‘It’s what the neighbor said, there’s a problem with the baby.’

‘I checked with the local hospitals. She’s not there. I think they’re gone. I’ve got the plates and a description of her car. I’m going to ask the highway patrol to watch for it.’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘We can’t lose track of this guy. We’ve got to find him.’

‘So he can lie through his teeth again?’

We need him
, Marquez thought.
We need him to get to Hauser
.

‘Talk to you later,’ he said, and hung up.

T
hat night a California Highway Patrol officer with the nickname ‘Lottery Lou’, having three times bought winning lottery tickets, was shopping for a new van with his wife at Hilltop Mall in Richmond. Today was the second day of a four-day Halloween sale at a dealership, and though the sales people looked weird in their costumes the prices were ‘slashed’ to where Lou knew they were competitive. He was ready to buy but what he couldn’t do was sit around and listen to a guy dressed up as a 1920s baseball player talk about Bluetooth features and the ‘capabilities’ of the car.

He already knew the car was capable. He had written speeding tickets for a dozen of these vans, so he told Lisa he’d be right back. He was going around the corner to a gas station so he wouldn’t have to do it later.

‘You and slugger can go over how the radio works.’

‘I thought we were doing this together.’

‘We are.’

He drove to a Chevron station and as he did he passed a store with a van sitting alone out along the outer edge, right where the lot ended and street lights didn’t quite reach. Something about it tickled at his memory though didn’t quite connect. He bought gas. He drove back but not in a hurry, figuring Lisa would be haggling, though the dealerships didn’t really haggle anymore and it was free money anyway. It was lottery money and all the crap about shopping for the right price was nothing more than going through the motions. She was going to get the car and get it tonight. She couldn’t bear having that much money just sitting in a Wells Fargo account unspent.

He turned in and drove across the lot to the lonely green Sienna van he passed on the way to the gas station. Lottery Lou had a head for numbers. Strings of numbers and letters and license plates stuck with him. When he bought a lottery ticket he’d read the numbers to himself a couple of times and that was enough. If he heard it again he would remember, and he knew now as he studied the halfway-to-a-junkyard Sienna that these plates came over his radio earlier today.

He parked and pulled out the flashlight, looked in the windows and thought: middle-aged mixed-race male, thirty-one years old, and a white female and a dog, a terrier. There was fur on one of the back seats and he stared at the plates again and thought about Babe Ruth back at the dealership flirting with his wife as she blew up the whole negotiation by telling him they won the lottery, and decided he had time to call it in. He read off the license plate to the dispatcher and told her he was off duty, but when she confirmed the plates it made his night.

Marquez heard that story from the CHP officer who waited for him at the Hilltop Mall lot. The officer had already walked the Sienna and hadn’t seen anything suspicious inside and asked Marquez before taking off if the car owner was a fugitive.

‘He’s not but he’s got critical information and I was concerned about kidnapping.’

‘What do you think now?’

‘That I need to get to whoever handles the store security cameras and that’s probably not until morning.’

As the officer left Marquez was scrolling his contacts for the phone number of a Richmond Police detective named Beckjoy. When he found it he left a message on his cell. A few minutes later Beckjoy called and, after listening said, ‘I’ve got a name and a phone number for you. Are you in my cell phone, Marquez?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Hold on a second, let me check. Yeah, you’re in here. I’ll text you his number. His name is Jacobs. I don’t know what his first name is but it doesn’t matter. Tell him you’re a fish cop and you talked to me and he can call me if he needs to. He’s the type who might come down there tonight and go over the videotape with you. We had a murder out there four years ago he helped us with and I was out that way last week and saw his car when I drove by. He still works there.’

Marquez called Jacobs who listened and then said he would drive over. Then, with Marquez in a chair alongside him, they worked backwards with the videotape until they hit tape where the van wasn’t there. The videotape was clear and distinct as Soliatano and the van drove into view. Emile Soliatano got out and then his wife and Jacobs said, ‘Pregnant’ and Marquez nodded and waited for the dog but there was no dog.

Soliatano locked the van and they started walking away and would have walked right out of view if Soliatano hadn’t stopped to answer his cell phone. His wife stood close by looking uncomfortable and unhappy.

Then a black SUV pulled up and a man got out on the passenger side and reached and opened the door to the back seat. Soliatano’s wife got in first and being shorter and pregnant it was awkward for her. As she slid over to make room for Emile the man who had opened the door for them glanced this way.

‘Freeze that,’ Marquez said, and Jacobs did and Marquez took a good look at the man’s face and said, ‘Okay, let’s keep going.’

The SUV pulled away.

‘Can you make me a copy of everything from when the van arrived to when they were picked up?’

‘Sure, I can send you a video file.’

‘Thanks.’

With enhancement they could probably get the license plate. The agency best equipped to do that was the FBI, but he knew he couldn’t go there because his best guess from everything he’d just watched was that the black Tahoe was an FBI vehicle and the pair were agents. Could be another agency, but it was most likely FBI. Soliatano had called for help and the Feds came to the rescue. Was that possible and, if it was, what in the hell was going on?