Redback

by Kirk Russell

  ‘Where I’m at is I haven’t talked to Katherine yet. But you and I both know I’m going to have to step down from the SOU and I may join their task force for six months.’

  ‘You could do six months on a leave of absence. We can work that out.’

  ‘Melinda Roberts should take over as patrol lieutenant and I’ve been working with a warden out of Bishop who wants to be and probably ought to be SOU.’

  ‘Adrian Muller.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Muller is doing a good job in Bishop and knows the area. I don’t know who we would replace him with.’

  ‘That’s not his problem.’

  ‘No, you’re right, it isn’t.’ She paused. ‘Don’t do anything yet, John. Call me tomorrow.’

  He briefed her on the bighorn investigation and hung up. That night Maria came to dinner bringing a bottle of red wine with her and an effusiveness that felt forced. She told funny stories about work but her eyes never rested anywhere very long. They fried small peppers in olive oil and salt and ate them with a glass of wine before dinner. These were favorites of Maria’s but tonight she picked at them with a nervous intensity and hurried through dinner, then asked, ‘Who really believes anymore that America stands for individual freedom and human rights? Everybody at the top of our government is either rich already or gets rich on the other side.’

  Neither Katherine nor he touched it and Maria stood abruptly. She moved into the kitchen and started cleaning up. She moved in a way that didn’t leave any room for anyone to help, but Katherine got up anyway. She suggested to Maria, ‘Why don’t we get together later this week? Can you do that?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mom. There’s just too much going on.’

  ‘Even for a cup of coffee? I’ll come down to where you work.’

  ‘It’s just really a weird time.’ She looked at Marquez. ‘I didn’t mean to get angry or bring my problems here. I’m sorry about that, too. Bye. I love you both.’

  Katherine walked out to her car with her and when she got back, she said, ‘This is about her breakup with her boyfriend. She’ll get over it. He treated her badly.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘You’re right, you don’t. You’re not around enough to know. What is the FBI offering you?’

  ‘A position on a task force to go after Emrahain Stoval.’

  She bowed her head and covered her eyes with her right hand and Marquez sat down and put an arm around her shoulders. He didn’t try to sell her. He didn’t say anything and Katherine said very quietly without looking up, ‘If you chase that monster, you’ll bring him into our lives. How can you do that to us? I don’t get it. I don’t understand.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The next morning Marquez met up with one of his team, Carol Shauf, to visit a concrete contractor they videotaped buying sturgeon roe from Holsing. The contractor was on the phone in his office telling a joke that they could hear from the reception area as if he was standing next to them. When he hung up and his secretary led them into his office they saw walls festooned with fishing gear and photos of him standing near his varying catches, a bluefin caught off Cabo San Lucas, a marlin in Antibes, a huge silver salmon hooked on the Copper River, and then his favorite, a sturgeon taken right here in the delta.

  ‘Do you wish you were Hemingway?’ Shauf asked as she studied a photo of him with the fishing pole and the beard.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Do you wish you were Hemingway in Cuba instead of a guy poaching sturgeon in Antioch?’

  He looked puzzled then scared as he studied their cards, but managed to muster, ‘What can I do this morning for the Department of Fish and Game?’

  ‘Confess,’ Shauf said, ‘and we’ll hook you up and take you to jail. But I’d like to get a photo of you first so I can hang it on my wall.’

  Marquez stepped in.

  ‘We’re here about sturgeon poaching as part of an ongoing investigation. We’d like to ask you some questions about Jeff Holsing.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know who that is.’

  ‘If I showed you photos of the two of you together would you remember him?’

  Shauf had the photos and was delighted to show them. Then they sat with him for an hour and a half and decided he really didn’t know much about Holsing’s operation, though he did admit to buying illegal roe. His forehead dampened with sweat as Shauf brought up Judge Randall, a judge who liked to fish but never caught anything and blamed it on poachers. In northern California no one handed out tougher sentences. Shauf had a signed picture of the judge in his black robe holding a fishing pole. It was the first thing you saw when you came in the door of her house, but, in truth, nothing would happen to this contractor for buying illegal roe. An assistant DA would look at what they had and say, you’ve got to be kidding, so the only question was whether the concrete contractor could point them to another lead. He didn’t.

  And so the day went, working links to Holsing. They let one fishmonger know he was likely to be charged. The surprise of being confronted with photos and wardens’ notes turned several denials into apologies and the fishmonger and another suspect agreed to make statements. At dusk, before calling it a day, he and Shauf bought sandwiches, chips, a six-pack of beer, and took it all down to the river. They sat on top of a picnic table, the beer between them.

  ‘So you,’ she asked, ‘what’s going to happen?’

  ‘They’ll conclude Brad was inadequately supervised and the team was spread too thin. They’ll recommend a reorg and I’ll be out.’

  She took a pull of beer. This wasn’t news to her. She’d already come to the same conclusion and he didn’t doubt the team had talked it out. She reached for the potato chips and looked out over the river, saying, ‘If you go, I may go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘DBEEP.’

  They often worked with the Delta Bay Enhanced Enforcement Patrol and Shauf liked being on the rivers. He could see her doing that. Having offered that, she wanted an answer from him.

  ‘What will you do, John?’

  He laid it out for her now. He told her about the FBI offer. Shauf took a pull from her beer and said nothing. There was sunlight on the river and seals out on the red buoys. Shore reeds moved in the wind but it was warm, and for a few minutes that was enough and then she said, ‘You’re going to do it, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m talking with Katherine.’

  ‘But you’re going to do it.’

  Shauf reached for the bottle opener. She opened one, then a second beer and handed him a full bottle. She raised her bottle and touched it against his in a toast.

  ‘We were good,’ she said. ‘We were the best and we had a long run.’ She clicked her bottle harder against his and toasted the river. ‘To the SOU.’

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘I hiked back up there and found shell casings and I talked to the backpacker again,’ Muller said. ‘He said he talked to you yesterday also.’

  ‘Yeah, I called him.’

  Finding shell casings up there must have been next to impossible and he turned the dark thought that Muller, after applying and failing to get into the SOU last year, came up with the idea of shooting a couple of bighorn, and then orchestrating an investigation that he would later solve. After all, he grew up in the area. He knew these mountains. He had sniper training and got someone to play the tipster, Terri Delgado. He listened now as Muller described finding 30.06 shell casings in country so big it had no problem swallowing the wreckage of small planes. He listened and then discarded the idea Muller planned this.

  ‘There’s a flat slab of granite I think he shot from. And something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They built a rock cairn like you see as a trail marker. Built it on the rock and maybe that was so they could find it again or else like the radio collars, but that would be spooky.’

  ‘The rock cairn was where you found the shell casings?’

  ‘Yeah, they built it for us
, I guess.’

  The backpacker Marquez had talked to remembered two guys who came into Anvil Camp near dusk. The backpacker had an old Primus gas stove he was trying to light so was distracted, but remembered an older man who was taller with dark hair that had gone white at the temples. He was probably late fifties, early sixties. He walked like he was used to walking in the mountains.

  Marquez had asked, ‘Could it have been a father and son?’

  ‘Could have, but I didn’t get that impression. The younger man was short and thick, sort of stocky. He was maybe five foot seven, one eighty, and the older man was six foot one or in that area and kind of rangy. I might have gone over and said hello after I made dinner, but I got a weird vibe from the older guy so I just left them alone. It felt like he was studying me and not in a friendly way. As if I was in their space or something, and I shouldn’t be there. But they were gone in the morning. That’s all I know.’

  ‘No shared whiskey, no compadre with a fellow hiker after a long climb into the mountains?’

  The backpacker, who had turned out to be an attorney in Fresno, laughed.

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  After hanging up, Marquez entertained the idea he’d danced around since first hearing the description of the older man from Terri Delgado and then quizzing Anderson – that the hunter was Stoval. There were only so many places to hunt bighorn in the States, so it wasn’t as unlikely as it sounded. His instinct said the older man would be the shooter, the younger stocky one the guide. He talked with Muller about who among the local guides would fit and the next morning Muller and Marquez drove out to talk to a watercolor artist named Alice Durrell who lived in the Round Valley.

  Alice Durrell painted landscapes that sold through a gallery in Bishop. Yesterday was her day to bring work into the gallery and when she did she read about two bighorn poached up on Mount Williamson. She finished reading and folded the Inyo County Register in half, and then carried the newspaper with her as she walked through town to the Department of Fish and Game office to tell her story. When she found the office locked she left a note.

  As they parked an Australian shepherd raced toward them snarling. Marquez calmed the dog down and the artist came out of a converted garage that was probably her studio. A thick head of snow white hair cascaded down her back and was tied off near her hips with a bright blue rubber band. In a face weathered like desert sandstone her blue eyes were strikingly clear. She wore a blue long-sleeved man’s shirt rolled up to her elbows and she led them into her studio where she’d drawn a charcoal sketch of two men standing near the back of a vehicle that to Marquez looked like a new Range Rover.

  ‘What color was it?’ Marquez asked.

  ‘Black. They were out on the Onion Valley Road about two miles west of Independence. I wanted to paint the sunset over the mountains. A friend had dropped me off and I planned to walk back into Independence.’

  Muller had described her as a local eccentric who for decades could be seen walking along roads in the desert with her easel strapped to her back. Marquez read her as sincere and concerned about what she had found. She also seemed clearheaded. In the sketch the taller of the two had black hair and a ball cap. She touched her sketch.

  ‘The shorter man I recognized. The other man I made a second sketch of because he frightened me. It’s around here somewhere, though I don’t know what I did with it. I probably turned it so his face wouldn’t look out. I’m superstitious that way.’

  She told her story now of sitting quietly on her folding stool out in rocks in the high desert and watching the short stocky man lug something out into the sage and cheat grass as his companion stayed near the Range Rover. She’d sketched the other man standing alone near the vehicle. After they drove away she walked over and found the head of a bighorn sheep with the horns cut off. She turned to Muller.

  ‘Did you find it?’

  ‘I haven’t looked yet.’

  Muller had gotten the story from her late yesterday afternoon over the phone after finding her note, but it was seventy miles from Bishop to Independence and he hadn’t had time to go out there yet. It was Marquez’s idea to talk to her first or he would have gone out this morning. Marquez studied the sketch and then helped her move canvasses around as she searched for a second drawing.

  Before she found it she said of the shorter man, ‘His mother was half Paiute and they lived out toward Benton. I’ve tried to think of his name, but I don’t have the memory I once had.’

  ‘Nate Thompson,’ Muller said quietly as soon as he heard that.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, one of the Thompson boys. He should have been the one to notice me but it was the other, and it was when he had his back to me. He just sensed me.’ She looked at Marquez. ‘You’re like that too.’

  When she found the sketch there were no facial details, but the stance, the look, the posture was right. It was the way the man held his head as he seemed to stare at her.

  ‘Do you recognize him?’ she asked Marquez.

  ‘I might.’

  Muller cut in, asking, ‘Alice, if we took you down to Independence with us, would you be able to take us to the head?’

  ‘I don’t think you should be warden for the area if you can’t find a bighorn head lying in a field.’

  Marquez couldn’t help smiling though Muller looked offended.

  ‘The Thompson boy got in trouble for something like this fifteen years ago,’ she said. She stared at Marquez. ‘He shot a bear.’

  ‘I remember,’ Muller answered, and Marquez said, ‘I’ve got a photo that I’d like to bring back and show you. Can we stop back by this afternoon?’

  ‘I’ll be here.’

  Marquez didn’t have Anderson’s recent photo of Stoval, but Katherine said an image of a man faxed through last night late. It woke her up. By now, he figured, Kath had faxed it to the Fish and Game office in town. He and Muller stopped there before driving out to Thompson’s house.

  Turned out Thompson lived out in the desert near Benton. The asbestos-shingled house couldn’t offer much protection from the cold winds sweeping this gap in the winter. A couple of vehicles, a Chevy pickup with a high wheel base and an old Volkswagen Jetta, sat in the front yard. The Jetta’s tires had rotted and the car had settled on to the rims. Inside the house was a new flat screen TV, an ancient couch, and a dining table someone had carved their initials in. A big Mackinaw trout and two deer heads were mounted on the wall. Marquez looked through the window and across the highway where the long alluvial plain rose toward the White Mountains. When he looked back, Thompson stood as he had in the sketch, a bandy-legged man with a barrel chest. He folded his arms now as Marquez dropped it on him.

  ‘Someone ID’ed you dumping a bighorn head out in the sage a couple of miles from Independence.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong guy. I haven’t been to Independence in months.’

  ‘You thought you were alone when you dumped the bighorn head, but a local recognized you. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘Who saw me?’

  ‘I’m not going to give you a name yet, but we are going to give you a choice. You’ve got the choice of talking to us about your client and the hunt, or trying to bluff us. If you help us, it’ll probably go a lot better for you, because we’ve got everything, the black Range Rover, the carcasses of the bighorn, everything. You made a very real mistake and now the question is whether you want it to get worse.’

  Thompson rubbed the back of his neck and frowned at Marquez.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong man.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth, warden.’

  ‘Then we’ll take your word.’

  Marquez shook his hand and glanced at Muller. Muller didn’t get it. His eyes showed his confusion, but he rolled with it, hid his feelings and they walked out.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ‘He’s scared,’ Marquez said as soon as they were outside. ‘Give me binoculars and drop me as soon as we’r
e out of sight of his house.’

  ‘What do you think is going to happen?’

  ‘If he’s got something to hide he’ll do it as soon as we’re gone.’

  Marquez took binoculars with him. Thompson should be patient, watch the road and give them time to get back to Bishop, but no way he was buying the handshake and sorry we bothered you. At least that’s what Marquez was betting as he got out of Muller’s truck.

  Near Thompson’s house there was little cover, sage, desert grasses, a scattering of other houses and buildings, a shack behind the next door neighbor’s house that Marquez hid behind now. He settled in. He called Muller and let him know where he was. Half an hour later Thompson came out of the house and walked to the Volkswagen Jetta settling into the side yard. He looked around before unlocking the trunk. A hinge squeaked as the trunk lid went up and Marquez saw Thompson cradling something reasonably heavy and wrapped in a blue blanket. He carried it over to his truck and put it on the floor behind the driver’s seat as Marquez called Muller.

  ‘OK, he’s moved something wrapped in a blanket from the trunk of the Jetta over to his truck. Close in, let’s do this. It looks like he’s getting ready to leave.’

  If Thompson left he could be in Nevada in minutes and Marquez doubted he’d get okayed to follow. Not without knowing what Thompson had in the truck. And even if they did get it, they’d be in Muller’s Fish and Game rig, so that was a bust.

  ‘On my way,’ Muller said.

  ‘Come in slow and park so he can’t back out. Get out with your camcorder in your hand and we’ll try to bluff him. I’m walking down now.’

  Marquez threaded through the sage. He walked up as Thompson’s back was to him and Thompson lifted a small suitcase over on to the passenger seat.

  ‘Planning a trip?’ Marquez asked, and Thompson jumped then quickly recovered and said matter-of-factly, ‘This is private property, warden.’

  ‘Yeah, and that’s a zoological preserve up on Mount Williamson.’

  Muller pulled up now and eased up behind Thompson’s bumper. He got out with one hand holding his camcorder and the other resting on his gun holster.