Dead Game (4 page)

Raburn’s cell phone played
“Take Me out to the Ball Game” with each ring. He pulled the phone from his windbreaker as they followed the river road toward Sacramento.

“Don’t answer it,” Marquez said.

“It’s my brother.”

“He’ll still be your brother after he leaves a message.”

The phone stopped playing, and the windshield wipers slapped back and forth. It rang again a few minutes later, and Marquez looked at mist low over the fields and asked, “Are you and Isaac close?”

“We’re twins, but he’s the hardworking one.”

“And what are you?”

“The fuckup.”

Raburn smelled of fish and stale clothes. When Marquez lowered his window a crack the rain found its way in. A lot had to be
going through Raburn’s head, but he probably didn’t see himself as a fuckup. Earlier he’d made a little stab at being a victim of his own ineptitude and alluded to ignorance of the game laws, but he wasn’t that guy either.

“What’s your brother going to say about this?”

“There’s no reason he needs to know.”

“You work out of the pear packing shed, and we’re going there. He’s going to find out.”

“He doesn’t have to, and he’s got enough problems already. Leave him out of it.”

They drove through Courtland, and, as they neared the sign for Raburn Orchards, Marquez slowed. But he didn’t turn down the steep road. Below on the levee island were long rows of pear trees, some still with fall leaves, wet red-brown, turning in the storm wind. They looked like a fire burning across a field. Between the rows, the soil was dark from rain. Pears had all been picked before the end of July this year, Bosc and Reds last. A hundred yards from the road was the pear packing shed, a big wooden building with a gable face that Raburn worked out of.

There were other outbuildings, an equipment barn, two aluminum prefab structures, and the main house in the distance, a big three-story wood frame with a sagging roof. Half an hour later they drove past Ludovna’s one-story ranch house in the Land Park area of Sacramento. Brick wainscoting. Painted redwood siding. Lawn out to the street. A good-sized but ordinary house in the suburbs. On one side of the garage was a white BMW 330i, the car’s polish gleaming through the rain.

“Ludovna’s car?”

“He has a lot of cars.”

“Is he into cars?”

“I don’t know what he’s into.”

“Fair enough, but when we made the offer to you, Abe, we did it because we believed you know enough to help us. If it turns out on the drive that you don’t remember anything, we’ll have to rethink it all.”

Marquez jotted down the plates as though it was new information, but it wasn’t as if he’d never seen this house. There was a man who worked for Ludovna who drove this car. They called him Nike Man because his standard outfit was a running suit. The BMW was registered to Ludovna’s fish brokerage business. They’d assumed Nike Man was both an employee of Ludovna’s Sacramento Fresh Fish and a bodyguard. In the last month they’d steadily tried to gather more information on Ludovna, but their focus had been August, Raburn, and a dozen poachers who were feeding sturgeon to Raburn and a couple of other suspects. He turned back to Raburn.

“How much does Ludovna pay you?”

“A dollar fifty a pound for meat, fifty dollars a pound for roe. Sometimes I freeze the eggs, sometimes I make caviar.”

“How did you find him?”

“I didn’t.”

“He found you?”

“Right.” He stared out the windshield. “His guy just showed up at my boat one morning, and I could barely understand him. Ludovna speaks English okay, but not the guys that work for him. They’re all from Russia or places like that.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Including the guys who work at the shop, I guess about
five. They like vodka and they like to play cards. They all wear black clothes.”

Marquez kept questioning him as they drove back into the delta and past the houses of a couple of guys who fished weekends and worked construction during the week. Guys who supplied him. They crossed the Sacramento River and drove toward Main Street in Rio Vista where Raburn said he routinely sold to the owner of Beaudry’s Bait Shop, a place Marquez knew. According to Raburn, the former owner, Tom Beaudry, had sold out over a year ago to an ex-con named Richie Crey. Sold the sport fishing business, the boat, everything.

“Crey never wants to deal directly with me. He has a couple of guys who pick up the fish.”

“What’s he do with it?”

“I don’t know where he sells it. I don’t even know how he heard about me.”

“Maybe from the same people we heard from.”

Raburn didn’t see the humor. He rubbed the whiskers alongside his jaw.

“You don’t know where he goes with the sturgeon?”

“No, but somebody is buying. Last spring I could have sold all the roe in the world. Somebody wants everything there is.”

“Ludovna?”

“No, it’s not him. I think he buys from me and sells to them.”

They recrossed the Sacramento River on the Rio Vista Bridge and drove upriver past the fishing access where Anna had disappeared. They followed the levee road, winding through the delta towns until they reached Courtland and Raburn Orchards. Then they made the steep drop down to the levee island. A graveled
road ran out through deep puddles to the packing shed. Marquez pulled inside under the roof and left his headlights on.

“My room is in back.”

As Raburn went to turn the lights on, Shauf’s van eased into the big shed. She got out as Raburn walked back, and he seemed uncomfortable with her presence. He kept glancing over at her as they started back toward the room his brother let him use. They walked past conveyer belts and sorters and an ancient box machine.

“Does your brother own his packing equipment?” Marquez asked.

“He leases.”

Water dripped through holes in the corrugated roofing twenty feet over their heads, and they dodged that and worked their way around old wooden fruit boxes. Raburn unlocked two tall wooden doors, swung them open. He hit a light switch, and they were looking at two long wooden tables, dirt floor, stainless-steel sinks, stainless-steel pans, a hose, freezers, always a freezer, but not the pots and seines for producing caviar that Marquez was looking for. He opened a freezer and found sturgeon fillets wrapped in white butcher paper. On the end of one of the tables was a scale.

Shauf worked her way around the room with the camcorder. She was the one designated for recording all evidence. If it went to trial she’d be the one called. That was their practice, have one officer designated to avoid having several pinned down by the same trial.

When they finished, Marquez drove Raburn back to the houseboat and dropped him near his pickup. The rain had stopped, though heavy droplets still fell from high in the eucalyptus
branches and struck like pebbles on top of the truck cab.

“I’m supposed to buy a sturgeon in the morning,” Raburn said.

“I’ll ride with you to pick it up.”

“You don’t believe me about Nick, do you? You think I’m bullshitting you.”

“I’m hoping you’re not bullshitting us. I’m putting faith in you.”

They had set up surveillance on Ludovna’s house this afternoon. Cairo was there now.

“We’ll meet tomorrow,” Marquez said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Driving away, he returned a call from Cairo, and he’d worked enough years with Cairo to know the differences in his voice. There was a way Cairo’s voice got both quiet and intense.

“Ludovna just got here, and it looks like he’s leaving again. There’s a woman with him, Lieutenant. He pulled up in a midnight-blue Cadillac that looks black in this light. It could be Anna’s airport car. From across a parking lot in the fog it would look black. It’s late-model, maybe last year’s. He’s pulling out now. What do you think?”

“Stay with him. I’m on my way.”

Ludovna came down the street
with his date, right hand resting high on her ass before slipping down and up under her skirt long enough to feel the slide of nylon on both legs. His arm was around her shoulders as they went into a restaurant, and Marquez waited until they were at a table in the corner and he could see a waiter opening a bottle of wine.

“You’re good to go,” he told Cairo, and Cairo slid onto his back at the curb and shimmied under the front of Ludovna’s Cadillac. He attached a GPS unit to the engine block, taking his time with the battery pack. He was still under the Cadillac when the waiter returned to pour more wine.

The rain started again as Ludovna and the woman stood up from dinner. When they walked outside Ludovna draped his coat over her narrow shoulders, and rain soaked through his shirt and blew against his face, but he didn’t seem to care or be worried
about that or anything else. He held the woman near his chest and sheltered her body as they walked to his car. He was half bald, the remaining black hair slick in the rain, his eyes checking the sidewalk ahead, checking his car, cars passing on the street, checking everything.

Marquez watched them pull away in the Cadillac, an Escalade, an ‘04, last year’s model. He drove toward his Land Park house but stopped at a bar on the way.

“The night is young,” Marquez radioed.

Cairo had run the Cadillac plates and gotten the name Sandy Michaels and a Ventura address for the owner. The digital clock on Marquez’s dash moved toward midnight. He could see the Cadillac under a light in the parking lot and thought about Raburn’s story of Ludovna and the treble hook. Shauf drove up, and he watched her get out and walk up to his truck. She got in on the passenger side, and they talked in darkness.

“My friend Cheryl in administration called me today,” she said. “She told me a story about Bell that might explain why he’s been all over us.”

“Must be a good story to call you on a Sunday.”

From her tone it didn’t sound like it was going to be a happy story, at least not for Bell. Marquez glanced over at her. He’d probably sat through more surveillances with Shauf than with anyone else in his years with the SOU. It was still less than a year since her sister had died of cancer, and, though she seemed like she was doing better, there was still a quiet to her that filled the cab at times.

“This happened the day before Thanksgiving,” she said. “A kid showed up with a pizza delivery for Bell at headquarters. You know how Chief Baird doesn’t like anything brought in, so Bell’s
pretty snippy about it when they tell him his pizza has arrived. He’s got to stop what he’s doing, writing a memo to God or whatever it was, and leave his office and tell the pizza kid he made a mistake. So he comes down the corridor and tells this kid he didn’t order any pizza, and what’s more would never order pizza to headquarters. But the kid checks the name again and hands Bell the tag. Pizza is from Bell’s wife. She called it in and sent it there, or so the kid insists.”

“Bell’s wife sent him a pizza?”

“Right, and that’s what Bell can’t figure out. He doesn’t even like pizza.”

Shauf’s face turned in the darkness. She was getting to the punch line, and the streetlights reflected her smile. But in her face he saw her anger at Bell.

“The pizza kid has one of those candy-cane striped shirts and a hat. I wish I could describe him like Cheryl did, but anyway he’s a pimply-faced college kid, and Bell asks, ‘What kind of pizza?’ The kid goes, ‘This kind,’ and opens up the box. He’s a process server, not a pizza guy, and he’s got divorce papers from Bell’s wife. He hands them to Bell and says, ‘Enjoy your lunch.’”

Marquez felt bad for Bell as he listened to the rest. Bell had stood there reading, making no attempt to hide what it was about, and according to Shauf’s friend he didn’t move for twenty minutes.

“Hard story,” Marquez said.

“Well, don’t forget all those times he went somewhere with his wife and then chewed our asses for working through the weekend and wasting overtime dollars.”

Marquez remembered Bell coming in Monday morning after a weekend in Aspen or LA, having gone to some party at the Getty Museum, remembered one Monday morning in particular when
Bell had flown back early from LA. With his wife, Bell did things that were complete fantasies for Marquez and Shauf on their salaries. More than a few times Marquez had walked out of Bell’s office angry, but he’d never begrudged Bell his lifestyle and forgave him his need to talk about it. He read it as Bell’s desire to look like something he wasn’t, but the truth was, Bell’s wife made the money. No one working for Fish and Game made any more than just enough to get by. The Bells lived in a big house in Sacramento with a wide lawn and a huge garden that went two lots deep in the back. Among the roses were a circular brick pavilion and a koi pond lit with underwater lights that threw soft colors into the water.

Working in a bureaucracy where the pay scale is low, you tended to hear rumors of who’s having more fun. The Bells entertained quite a lot, and those parties were, or so the rumor went, often thrown to further Bell’s career. For several years Bell worked out every day at lunch, and it always seemed like he was readying himself for some anticipated promotion. He got his hair cut at a beauty parlor, and the manicures were a running joke among wardens. He kept his skin tanned and his uniforms well pressed. In many ways he was the antithesis of a game warden, but not at a summer cocktail party where he could regale a group with tales heard from the SOU or wardens in the field and almost make it sound like he’d been there before he’d been promoted. At those parties where his tan skin and athletic pose suggested a man accustomed to the outdoors, he portrayed the image of an officer on the rise, a man who had it all.

He also worked hard and had kept doing so through the low morale of the budget morass. Few people had advanced much in the last four or five years. The Fish and Game Academy had been
shut down, a hiring freeze went into effect, and the department had hunkered down for the ride as the state deficits ballooned. The SOU went from ten to seven to five, now three.

“Cheryl says he went in his office, closed his door for an hour, and then left for the day.”

“I wouldn’t have hung around either.”

It wasn’t that long ago that he and Katherine had a rough couple of years, and she had wanted to separate. He hadn’t realized until much later how numb that had made him.

“I hate him for making this thing with Anna the reason for closing us down,” Shauf said. “I can understand deciding three wardens isn’t enough for the team. It’s not enough. I know it isn’t; you know it isn’t. What I hate about Bell is he has to make us look like bad guys first. We embarrassed the department. That’s the kind of pure bureaucratic bastard he is.”

Marquez was listening but distracted now by a man working his way through the parked cars. At first it seemed he was looking for his car, but now he was stopped alongside Ludovna’s Cadillac.

“Do you see this guy coming across the parking lot?”

Shauf stopped her riff on Bell.

“Where?”

“He just got in Ludovna’s car. He must have had a key.”

The Cadillac lights came on a few seconds later, and the car backed out and started hard for the street. Marquez turned to Shauf, but she already had her door open.

“We go with him. Cairo can stay with Ludovna.”

Shauf went for her van, and Cairo read out the position of the car on GPS. Within minutes they were behind it on I-5 southbound, Shauf quietly calling it out over the radio.

“Lane one at seventy-five.”

Then they were into agricultural land the subdivisions hadn’t yet reached. The Cadillac exited, crossed under the freeway, and went eastbound on a county road. It started showering, and Marquez hit his wipers. The Cadillac lights blurred in the distance, and he went back and forth with Cairo as they figured out that the Cadillac was following a dirt road running between planted fields and a railroad bed.

“We’re trying to figure out where the car is. He went out a road following the rail bed, and his lights are off now. We can’t see him. He may be out there stripping it with a buddy or still driving.”

It was several minutes before Cairo came back. “I’ve got him stationary. You don’t see him?”

“No.”

“He’s about a mile and a half off the road.”

“Hold on, we’ve got lights coming at us, but from farther away.”

“The Cadillac isn’t moving.”

It took a couple of minutes to sort that out. The car stopped, and its lights were small dots out in the dark open fields. Marquez hit his wipers again. He lowered the window and used his binoculars as Cairo guessed that the other car was an accomplice, then cut himself off and said, “Ludovna is outside the bar with the babe. He’s looking around for his car and just pulled his phone like it’s a gun. Who are you going to call?”

“It’ll be the police to report it stolen. This was planned.”

Marquez used his scope and wanted to drive down the access road for a better position but figured he couldn’t risk it. He watched car lights start to move again and went back and forth with Shauf.

“Which car is moving here?” she asked.

“Car number two.” The lights swung away from them. “Turning around.”

“He may have gotten away fast, but he didn’t strip it that fast. So what’s going on?”

Marquez didn’t have an answer, but they were looking at taillights as the other vehicle moved away. He gave them another minute. They were moving fast.

“Let’s go recover our GPS unit,” he said.

He started down the access road. On his right was the elevated railway bed, and fields were planted on his left. About a quarter mile in he saw Shauf’s headlights follow, then ahead, a flash of light, white and quickly orange-yellow, a ball of fire and a low heavy whump as the sound reached his truck. Gasoline. Ludovna’s car burning, the fireball ballooning, then straightening. He knew that the kid who’d brought the Cadillac out here and whoever had picked him up were also watching and would see Shauf’s and his headlights approaching. But their headlights could be anybody, police, someone who saw the fire and got curious, anybody.

He drove fast but knew it was too late. When he got there, flames curled out of the interior and around the roof, the heat like a hand pressing against his face. The burning shell blocked the road and the rain did little to slow the fire. Even with the cold wind and rain, the air was thick with the odor of burning plastic, leather, the stink of paint frying. It illuminated the wet rail bed. With Shauf he watched the car burn and a twenty-thousand-dollar GPS unit with it. Marquez watched the flames and could think of only one reason for Ludovna to have his car intentionally stolen and burned.