Shell Games (25 page)

Marquez pulled what he had
on Heinemann out of the truck and waited as the detective copied the parts he wanted. When they got to the murder of Meghan Burris a light seemed to go off in the detective’s head. He knew about it, more of the pieces connected for him, and Douglas took the conversation from there, his hands moving slowly in the air as he spun a story.

Marquez didn’t need to hear it and walked back over to his truck. He dropped the tailgate and called Petersen back. There was a light wind off the ocean this morning, not enough to generate any lift for the glider pilots, yet air junkies were arriving and a few had unfolded their gliders out on the sandy launch area. He watched them as he talked with her.

“I’ve asked around about the two Salt Point divers,” Petersen said. “One guy I talked to thinks they have a rented house in Fort Bragg and they’ve been diving north of town. I got a street name and thought I’d check it out.”

“Do it, but take Cairo with you.”

“He’s down at Van Damme State Park checking another tip. There was a CalTip call last night that he—”

The clattering of helicopter blades drowned her response and he watched the body bag swinging in a metal basket beneath the hovering copter. They lowered the basket, slipped the bag out, and the helicopter rose into the fall blue sky and started up the coast. He heard Petersen clearly in the quiet that followed, about Cairo following up on a tip and finding nothing so far. She gave him the street name in Fort Bragg for the Salt Point divers and then said good-bye. He flipped the tailgate up and looked at Douglas, want-ing to talk alone with him before leaving.

Beyond the edge of the parking area, out on the flat sand and dirt along the top of the cliff, four hang gliders had been unfolded and their keels rested in the sand. He watched one of the pilots sliding ribs into the bright-colored sail to draw the wing taut and saw the awareness of what was going on over here, heads nodding toward the police vehicles at one end of the parking lot. He couldn’t look at the gliders without remembering the year that followed after he’d returned home from the hospital in Texas. After he’d exhausted his money and given up on finding Kline.

It had taken the winter to heal his body and the next spring he flew to San Diego and took a bus down to the Mexican border and began hiking north on the Pacific Crest Trail. In the week he’d lingered among the highest peaks of the Sierra, in Muir’s Range of Light, he’d watched hang gliders circling with hawks as they caught thermals rolling up the dry eastern face from the desert far below. He’d watched the pilots negotiate the turbulence and trash air over the great mountain faces while he sat high on the rock try-ing to figure a way to move his life forward again. He remembered hiking in moonlight the hundred switchbacks up from the meadow and lying on the summit of Whitney under the cold brilliance of stars, trying to find the motivation to return to society.

He looked from the gliders back to Douglas, still remembering the Pacific Crest, how he’d moved in the early and the dusk hours, largely avoiding people, but encountering bear and deer and then elk as he got farther north. Near the Washington and Oregon border, as the fall closed in, he’d helped a woman with a badly sprained ankle, carrying her pack, assisting her back to a trailhead, and that ordinary act had been the catalyst that brought him home.

Now Douglas walked over to him. “We’re going to assist on this one, but I’d like it if you gave us everything you know about or had going on with Heinemann.”

“Sure, but I think you’ve got everything at this point.”

“I’d also like a way to reach this Tran Li.”

Marquez wrote down Li’s phone numbers, tore the page out of his notebook, and said good-bye to Douglas.

“This one bothers you because you feel responsible,” Douglas said. “But you’re not. Heinemann got himself mixed up with these assholes.”

“I wish it was that simple.”

“Let him go, he made his own bed. Listen, I got a call on the way down here. Your Bailey is back in Pillar Point.”

“Thanks for that. I’ll go see him.”

Forty minutes later, Marquez was in Pillar Point, standing above the docks looking down at Bailey scraping paint on his boat. He talked to Petersen again before walking down. She’d seen dive equipment in the driveway of a little asbestos-shingle house in Fort Bragg. An old Chevy Nova, pumpkin-colored, was parked out front, matching what the retired ranger had remembered. It was probably the right house. She hadn’t seen any activity but had scouted several good places to watch the house from and was currently heading north to check a couple of other coves she’d heard these divers might be working.

Marquez walked down to Bailey, who wore nothing but a pair of shorts that hung loosely on his hips and wraparound mirrored
sunglasses. He held a two-inch putty knife that he’d been using to peel paint from the cabin door with and cleaned the knife as though Marquez wasn’t there, dropping a curled paint strip into a plastic bucket on the deck of the boat.

“We’re working on a way to charge you, Jimmy.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong except use a shit batch of primer that didn’t dry tight. This is going to be a bitch to repaint.” Bailey’s pupils were pinpricks, his eyes carrying a hardness Marquez didn’t know he had in him. “I knew you’d come by today.”

“You’ve done a pretty good job burning us, but we’re not far from bringing it down around you. You could be standing in a lineup tomorrow.”

Bailey flicked a large paint chip into the water. He scraped the knife blade on the top of the bucket and started on the door again, saying, “Did you drive all the way down here to dump shit on me again?” Bailey grinned at a thought, his chapped lips pulling back over his teeth. “If you go through my house again and you find another babe in the attic, you’re welcome to her. You can use my mattress. I know that’s what you were thinking last time and she was pretty fun when she was coked up.”

“I found her in the truck after your friends rolled it down the ravine. The cab collapsed on her and snapped her neck. Her head was turned around.”

“I never liked her face anyway, but she had a nice ass.”

“What did you say?”

“I said she had a nice tight little ass. Too bad you got her killed.”

“Did you get Mark Heinemann killed?”

“Last I heard he was up north.”

“Heinemann’s body washed up this morning south of San Francisco. I pointed the detectives toward you and said I’m sure you know what happened. I told them you’d played it both ways with us and we’re trying to take you down on something new now. We’ve got someone looking at a six-pack of photos with your
face as one of them. We hope he’ll pick you out today and then we’ll haul you in.”

Bailey turned and wagged the putty knife at him. “You know, you’re total bullshit. I helped you people and you’ve treated me like garbage because I got scared. My lawyer says you’re frustrated by your own inabilities and that’s why you come after me.”

“The people I work with think you’re a beach rat, Jimmy. They think you don’t have much upstairs and the wind blows through empty rooms, but I think they underestimate you. You’re a lot more connected and a lot smarter. You were dealing successfully out of San Diego for years and I think that’s where you first hooked up with him. That’s how come he’s willing to hire you up here. You’re a known quantity and you’ve got your cover all worked out. You look like a sunburned dock toad living on gin and tonics, but that isn’t the case at all, is it? But, you know what, Jimmy? The fun is just starting.”

“Dude, I know that, and I wish I was going to be there when it gets to you. I really fucking do.”

“When was the last time you were in Mexico?”

“Fuck off.”

“You’re going to get on your new phone when I leave here, but that conversation isn’t private either. It’s closing around you, Jimmy. You think you’re riding on a former relationship with the man, but you’re way over your head. They’ll come for you just the way they did Heinemann because you’re a liability.”

Bailey turned his back and farted loudly as he started scraping paint again. “That’s the last word, dude,” and Marquez walked away. He heard Bailey call after him, “Fucking asshole,” but Marquez never turned again.

The call came from Cairo at two that afternoon when Marquez was crossing the Golden Gate after leaving a meeting with the FBI. He could hear the worry in Cairo’s voice. Cairo had lost touch with Petersen and when he’d last talked to her she said she had a vehicle behind her that she was unsure of.

“The reception was bad. You know how it’s okay along the coast for a while, then goes bad immediately after you turn in?”

Marquez did know. “What do you think she was trying to tell you?”

“I couldn’t hear her well enough. I could hear her truck engine straining. I think she was on an uphill grade and pushing it.”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty minutes now.”

That wasn’t a lot of time, but Cairo didn’t spook easily. It must have been her tone. Cairo heard something, fear, maybe.

“When did you last try her?”

“Just before I called you.”

“What about her telelocator?”

“It’s not with her. I’m at the cold house. I just found it in the bedroom.”

“I’m coming to you.”

When he hung up, fear gripped him and his stomach knotted. But don’t think like that, yet. Cairo is going to call you back and say she just turned up. Twenty minutes is nothing. She could be in the Burger King; she could be anywhere. Maybe she’s lying above a cove with a video camera. He tried to hold that idea as he started north.

An hour later he had the whole team on the road headed to Fort Bragg and had called Keeler and Baird and asked for help from uniformed wardens and from the Coast Guard with a helicopter. He called the Fort Bragg police, gave them a description of her Toy-ota 4Runner and a physical on Petersen. When he got into Bragg, Marquez drove through town and continued north to where Cairo was.

The late afternoon sunlight had faded to an orange haze over the ocean. Cairo believed that Petersen had been somewhere in this area and Marquez left the coast highway and turned up Teague Ranch Road because he and Petersen had used spots up here on a surveillance a few years back. The road climbed steeply and he
thought the steepest stretch would also have been the last place with clear phone reception. You could make calls from farther inland, but the reception sketched in and out on you and a lot of calls got dropped. The road climbed through grassland and hills that rose into coastal mountains, then folded back on itself and ran across forested slopes.

His radio crackled a couple of times and he talked to Cairo, then to Chief Keeler who let him know several uniformed wardens were on their way to help. The road entered trees and dipped as it crossed a creek bed, then climbed steeply up switchbacks to the next ridge and he turned around there because he could no longer see the ocean and reasoned that her purpose for driving up here would have been surveillance of the coves or bluffs below.

And then another idea occurred to him, of what she might do if she was being pursued and couldn’t get through on a cell phone or radio. He drove slowly back down, remembering the places they’d used before, locations where you could get a vehicle off-road. He returned to the concrete culvert that carried a creek beneath the roadbed, parked and walked down to the dry creek bed, looked in through the culvert pipe. A circle of light came through from the other side, the downhill side. Cool air flowed down through with the faint breeze up from the ocean. The bottom was stained dark and powdery moss had dried well up the curve. He crouched and walked through the culvert and on the other side saw a turned-over rock, the raw soil underneath. He looked down the dry bed and saw tire marks against a boulder. He found marks from scraped paint, studied the color, then tried to get Cairo on the radio to tell him he was going to hike down the creek bed. Farther down, he began to put it together, found a second set of tire prints and realized it had been a pursuit. He paused at broken taillight glass, knelt and picked it up.

Petersen wouldn’t wreck a vehicle to chase a jeep or anything else down a creek bed unless there’d been a very good reason for
it. But this could be something altogether different, the paint color coincidence aside. Kids out four-wheeling and drinking beer, could easily be kids, he thought. He stopped at a gash in a tree, touched the blue paint left there, and looked at the V-shaped tire prints alongside the trunk, touched the grooves with his fingers. It was too violent. Someone had been chased. He tried Cairo again.

Where the creek dropped off a three-foot ledge, both sets of tracks cut into the topsoil, digging in as they made a hard turn and climbed away from the creek bed. They’d skinned the dry grass down to bare soil trying to climb up the slope. He climbed rapidly toward the ridge, having no trouble following the tracks. The driving had been rough. The lead vehicle had ploughed through low brush on the steep slope, tires tearing at the soil, and he guessed they’d been afraid of stalling and had pushed it hard, kept the engine revved. He neared the ridgeline, saw blue sky low at the tree bases and knew he was close to getting a wider view. At the top was a rock outcropping and looking down, he saw her blue 4Runner.

Standing on the outcropping, looking out on the ocean, he got through to Cairo and worked his way down to her truck while talking to him. The driver’s window and the back were open and the truck was empty. Droplets of blood had spattered on the dash and on rocks outside the truck and he told Cairo they’d need dogs. He clicked off the radio, yelled for her, and tried to follow the blood, but it petered out quickly. He smelled gas leaking from the truck and saw where the suspension had hooked on a rock. She’d been chased. It was a gutsy thing she’d been trying to do to get down this slope. Without doing anything to disturb evidence, he tried to think it out. If she was injured, bleeding, and still trying to get away, she’d take off in the easiest direction, or take up a posi-tion with her weapon. The bleeding was concentrated around one area of rock. Why had she stood in that spot? Held at gunpoint? Told to stand there? Or she got out of the 4Runner hurt, but with something pressed against the wound, dazed and trying to stop the
bleeding before trying to escape. She’d go down the slope, try to reach the trees and lose herself. That was the next place to look.