Shell Games

by Kirk Russell

  “I’d like to get those shells. My girlfriend makes jewelry.”

  “See what you can do for me and I’ll see if I can get her some shells. Call the number on the back of the card.”

  Marquez hooked up with Petersen again and they checked Noyo Harbor, walked the dock, and met with the harbormaster, who told them the Coney Island had pulled out early that morning. He’d heard that Stocker and Huega had both been staying down at Albion River Campground.

  They dropped down the road to the campground and looked at the campers of the more permanent residents, an American flag flying from one, the river bridge holding the highway with its gal-vanized steel and concrete supports towering overhead. Scanning the field Marquez saw few temporary campers. He checked with the office and the young woman told him Danny Huega had stayed there until yesterday. She didn’t know where he’d gone and didn’t know who Ray Stocker was. As Marquez left the office he saw Ruter’s sedan dropping down from the highway.

  “Called you twice this morning,” Ruter said.

  “I haven’t had a chance to call you back yet.”

  “Busy morning checking fishing licenses?”

  “Something like that.”

  Both detectives got out. Streatfield engaged Petersen, saying “I understand you’ve got a poaching problem along the coast.” Marquez heard Petersen take him up on it, and Ruter motioned him to walk over and talk privately.

  “I’ve got that report I was going to fax you.”

  Marquez took the copy of the police report and leaned back against the detectives’ hood. There were statements from Davies and Stocker and several from witnesses. He read a statement from a woman.

  “My husband and I were at the bar seated three stools down from the man who started the fight. One minute he was sitting there and then he kind of jumped up and went straight over to a table where there were I think four men. He flipped the table over and hit one of them in the throat. I was watching because of the way he got up from the bar. It was very weird. I thought it was some kind of martial art or something the way he jabbed at his throat. Then he hit him in the eye with the leg of a chair. It was very fast and one of the other men tried to stop him and he started attacking that man. It was so out of control it was scary, but I couldn’t tell what was happening after that because my view got blocked. We just wanted to get out of there.”

  “That’s your friend,” Ruter said.

  Marquez glanced at the detective’s eyes, saw his pleasure in the reaction he’d gotten. Then he read the rest of the report.

  “Does that sound like the man you know? Davies was sitting at the bar talking to someone about the Middle East. There’s a statement from that man, too,” Ruter said.

  “I just read it.”

  “He might have killed Stocker that night if he’d been allowed to.” Ruter paused. “This morning, when he came down to meet us we put him in an interview box and he talked for an hour just as calm as could be. He didn’t have a problem with anything, said he understood we had to do our jobs and agreed it didn’t look good, and by the way he said he was sorry he involved you. Then he wanted a bathroom break, but instead of going down to the bath-room he hauled ass out of there. That blue Econoline is parked down at Noyo. Must have driven there and got on his boat. Not charged with anything, but he’s the hell out of Dodge. What do you think about that? Where’s he headed, Marquez?”

  “As far from you as he can get.”

  “You haven’t talked to him?”

  “No.”

  “We need some of your time this morning.”

  “Let’s get a cup of coffee and talk.”

  “Not here. We’d like you to come in to the sheriff’s office. If you want, your warden can take your truck and you can ride with us and we’ll drop you afterwards.”

  “We’ll follow you.”

  “Your partner could be sitting around for a while.”

  “Why are you doing this, Ruter?”

  “Because like your friend, you’re not telling me everything you know and I’m going to be with you until you do.” Ruter smiled. “Does that make it clear enough?”

  3

  “There was something you wanted to find before we got there,” Ruter repeated.

  Marquez was past being angry. He was over it. He’d brought most of the problem on himself anyway. He glanced at Ruter scratch-ing his nose, then at the door swinging open, Ruter’s partner coming back in carrying three coffees in small Styrofoam cups, dropping one on the floor and swearing as it splattered across the wall. Neither Ruter nor Marquez watched him clean it up.

  “Two men had been murdered and you needed to see a shell pile before calling us?”

  “Give it a rest, Ruter.” Marquez opened his notebook, found the name of a fisherman who’d been attacked by two men in a pool hall bathroom last week in Eureka. They’d blinded him in one eye with a fork because he’d told them he planned to report them to Fish and Game. He flipped the notebook around and slid it at Ruter. “Read that. He was in the hospital when I tried to talk to him and his phone number is there. Maybe you’ll have better luck. He’s a little sensitive toward Fish and Game, right now. But I think he brushed up against the same people we’re looking for and maybe Stocker and Han did, too.” He leaned forward, chest touch-ing the table, eyes on Ruter. “Wouldn’t it be very hard for Davies to pull that off alone? Or are you going to tell me I helped him?”

  Streatfield interrupted, coming in as the middle guy again, the amiable peacemaker, explaining the scenario they must have been kicking around.

  “Davies rousts them at gunpoint sometime after they went to sleep, and maybe he’s disguised and they don’t know who he is, but he reassures them nothing will happen as long as they cooperate. Let’s say they think they’re going to get robbed and then every-thing will be okay. Maybe that story is believable, maybe it’s not, but he has a flashlight shining in their faces and a gun and he has Han bind Stocker’s wrists before he lets him stand up. Neither Han nor Stocker know they’re taking a walk yet, but now he starts them up the trail. He keeps the flashlight on their backs and he’s got the gun. Han had some serious facial bruising so let’s say he’s had to be convinced before he’ll start walking, but they both go up the trail. Davies walks them out across the field to the tree and they don’t have a clue because he’s stashed everything up there ahead of time, the chain, the knife, everything he’s going to use in addition to the gun in his hand. When they get to the tree he has Stocker sit down with his back against it and Stocker does it because he’s scared and Davies keeps telling them everything will work out okay if they cooperate. Okay, so then Han ties Stocker’s ankles, but Han is real scared and he knows they’ve got to do something soon, so he decides he’s going to run for it and when he does Davies shoots him twice, once in the lower back and once in the left leg. He drops him about twenty feet from the tree.”

  “Han was shot?”

  “Yeah, he was shot. His left knee was shattered and he bled heavily. He was still alive but didn’t have much blood left when he got the final knife wound. We’ve got bloodstains off the grass being analyzed. We think we know where he was shot. Anyway, he goes down and Davies pounces on him and runs the wire around his ankle, twists it tight, then drags him back over to the tree. You with me?”

  Marquez nodded, though he didn’t buy it.

  “Okay, now Davies retrieves the chain he’s hidden nearby and runs it around their necks. Now, it’s question-and-answer time, except maybe Han is moaning because he hurts, so Davies starts with him, starts asking where the money is hidden. Maybe he gets an answer or maybe he makes an example out of Han, since Han is fading anyway. He rips up through Han’s gut with the knife and Stocker can hear it all, he’s just a couple feet away. Probably had to stand over him and use two hands to bring it up through his gut like that.” Streatfield raised a hand as though Marquez was going to interrupt him. “Han died as much as four hours ahead of Stocker and Stocker may have died within eight hours of
when you got there. Stocker’s knife wounds occurred while he was in a sitting position, but you can bet it wasn’t until he gave up the loca-tion of the money. When Davies came for him it looks like he struggled and tried to twist to one side. The body was probably repositioned afterwards.” He paused a beat. “No more lawsuit and he gets some money out of the deal.” Streatfield stroked his mus-tache, adding, “An irony.”

  “You know anything about rigor mortis or body temp?” Ruter asked Marquez.

  “Yes.”

  “Pretty good chance only his head had locked when you got there. You weren’t that far behind the killer, and Davies was either holding the knife or right on their heels. Real close, too close in my book. That put more perspective on it for you?” Ruter pushed his chair back and stood up with Marquez’s notebook. “Okay, if I make copies?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Streatfield unfolded a California map, then asked him to identify harbors where he’d met with Davies in the past. Marquez marked Noyo, Crescent City, Half Moon Bay, Pillar Point. They talked about urchin diving, Davies’s habits, and Ruter came back in. He’d copied most of the notebook and wanted to go through the pages, reading as he did. Ninety-foot black pickup boat. Anecdotal threats of violence. Possible Hispanic suspect and a description. Possible caucasian suspect and description. Rumors of abalone transfers from one boat to another done out on the open ocean. When he finished he stacked up the papers, handed back Marquez’s note-book, and slid his chair back, arms folded over his chest.

  “I tried to learn something about you this morning, Lieutenant. I talked to your deputy-chief, Ed Keeler, and he was unwilling to give us any records on you, but he did say you’d been DEA before Fish and Game, so I called a friend at DEA. Did you ever know a Bob Cook at DEA?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he’s high up and works out of D.C. He did some research and told me you left the DEA in 1989 after your team went down in Mexico. Everybody except you in one night and then you quit and went looking for the killers. You were obsessed with finding a man named Eugene Kline and at some point he came after you, or maybe he was already looking for you. Is that correct?”

  “In a loose way.”

  “You didn’t find him but you had a close call that put you in the hospital. It scared you and you came home.”

  “Is scared his word or yours?”

  “Probably mine, and if it’s the wrong word, no offense.”

  The only reason Marquez could think of for Ruter to have made the call was that they considered him a possible suspect.

  “What I’m getting at is you went after this Kline on your own and it cost you your job at DEA. They warned you off him several times. Cook read your file to me. He also said and I quote, ‘you had a habitual disregard for procedure.’ His words.”

  “My first thought when I saw those two chained to the tree was Kline.”

  Ruter smiled at his partner. “So now he’s here? From Mexico to Mendocino, huh. Is he following you?”

  “We got close to him up in Humboldt once. You could check that with your new friend and he’ll probably tell you Kline is more diversified now.”

  “Oh, I see, you still keep tabs. Do you do that through Fish and Game?”

  “I haven’t talked to anybody about him in a couple of years.”

  “Until today.”

  “Until yesterday, Ruter.”

  It would have been better to have said nothing about Kline. He waited them out now, regretting having said a word. He pictured Kline’s long pale head, the deep-set eyes, and returned Ruter’s stare. Abruptly, Ruter pressed his palms onto the table and stood.

  “All right, Lieutenant, we’re done here today.”

  Marquez left the detectives sitting there and when he got out-side Petersen was arranging stuff in the back of her truck. She’d been in touch with the team, but nothing had changed with Li. He hadn’t moved today. They picked up lunch and Marquez told her he’d head south now to hook up with the Li surveillance. Petersen would watch Noyo and check further up the coast for Huega’s boat.

  After he’d left Petersen and was driving back to the Bay Area, coming through slow traffic in Santa Rosa, Marquez took a call from Italy.

  “I tried you earlier,” Katherine said, her voice low and husky.

  “I was in a meeting.”

  Separated after seven years of marriage, he didn’t go two hours of any day without thinking about her and his stepdaughter, Maria. They’d been apart now long enough to have some distance. Katherine’s friend, the marriage counselor who’d suggested it, had insisted that separation helped couples talk things through and break “patterns of conflict.” Katherine and Maria had moved back into the house she’d owned since before they’d married. Every other weekend or so, they’d come up to his house and stay the night as though they were guests. Sometimes they’d come for dinner during the week and then leave, and all of it felt completely unnat-ural and ate at him. It didn’t seem to him that the separation had allowed them to get any nearer to sorting their problems out, and if anything, it had created a new distance in him. Hurt pride, perhaps. The counselor’s idea that they talk on the phone or meet for coffee seemed more a slow breaking away than anything else.

  He knew Katherine was throwing herself at expanding her business. She had a coffee bar on Filbert Street in San Francisco that both the tourist magazines and the locals liked. She was close to opening another one in a little space south of Market on Spear Street. He still hadn’t seen the new place. An Italian manufacturer of espresso machines had paid for a hotel stay in Rome and she was over there for five days. He didn’t doubt what the manufacturer wanted, all she’d had to come up with was the airline ticket. And he knew Katherine was trying to build a life that was financially secure and gave Maria a fair shot at a good college. Fish and Game paid one of the lowest salaries in law enforcement. You had to do a lot of interviewing and work hard to find a lower salary. You could do it, but only if you found a small enough city or went to work for one of the bankrupt Sierra counties and though Kath might say all day long that money never figured in, it did. It affected quality of life and it affected Maria’s chances.

  He glanced at the dashboard clock, realized it was after midnight for her. She was in her hotel room with the windows wide open looking out over a piazza on a warm night.

  “I’ve got this big bed, but no you,” she said.

  He didn’t know how to answer, unsure whether she even meant it. They hadn’t slept together in three months. He changed lanes without commenting. It looked like a fender-bender slowing traffic, two young guys scuffling on the highway shoulder.

  “How’s my Maria?” she asked. “Have you seen her?”

  “No, we’ve been talking on the phone. She had a sleepover with Alice last night.”

  “Is she eating?”

  “She says she is.” He added, “She’s going to a movie tonight with her friends.”

  “She shouldn’t be doing that on a school night.”

  “One night won’t kill her grades.”

  “Have you been home at all?”

  “No.”

  Call waiting interrupted her response and then she wanted to hang up, telling him first that Maria was losing too much weight, that there was a problem that needed to be dealt with, now. He rolled to the incoming call. The reception was poor, the connection crackling with static, Davies’s voice fading in and out.

  “That fat fuck of a detective is trying to figure out how to charge me with murder.”

  “Then come back and defend yourself.”

  “In the navy they taught us to be ready for anything.”

  “Did they teach you to run away?”

  “You can be pretty cold, Lieutenant.”

  “You’re starting to look like a man hiding something.”

  “You were in the service, weren’t you?”

  Marquez stared out through the windshield, still thinking about Katherine. He figured he was about to get Davies’s
justification for taking off.

  “I was in the marines getting ready to ship out of Oakland to Nam when the war ended,” Marquez said.

  “You stayed in the world?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Lucky, man.”

  But there wasn’t much about that year that was lucky. He remembered having a shaved head and getting spit on for wearing the uniform.

  “I was a SEAL until I hit a kid on a bike when I was driving home one night,” Davies said.

  “Where was that?”

  “Georgia. Where’d you go when the marines let go of you.”

  “Africa.”

  “Africa?”

  “You need to come back and keep talking to these detectives.”

  “I didn’t kill Stocker.”

  “Then what are you afraid of?”

  “I’m out here getting answers.”

  “Yeah, what answers? Where are you?”

  “North of Shelter Cove up off the Lost Coast with that diver I told you about, Danny Huega. I’m going to drop him on the beach up here when I’m done with him.”

  “What’s he doing on your boat?”

  “He’s helping me put it together.”

  “Put him on the phone.”

  “He can’t talk right now, Lieutenant.”

  “Don’t make another mistake.”

  “Hey, it’s his mistake. He lied to the detectives.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  “Those detectives offered him a deal. See, he’s got some old beefs with the county they can help him on, but we’re just getting to those details. After I get some answers he’ll be humping it down the beach toward Gitchell Creek. I think he can help you out, but I’d get to him before that fat fuck and his sidekick.”

  “Don’t hang up.”

  Marquez tried to keep him on the line. He was pulling over onto the shoulder when the line went dead.

  4