Shell Games (27 page)

“The tide’s out, lad, enjoy the beach.”

Marquez saw the woman pull the hood off. She wasn’t Petersen.

“Where is she?”

“I hear she’s the crew’s favorite on a boat somewhere, but you can ask him yourself. He’s coming to visit you here. If I was you, I’d be giving myself up to God.”

“Where is she?”

“You’re a fuckin’ fool, lad.”

Marquez watched the Zodiac motor slowly out of the cave with a single man guiding it. The rest had gone, however they’d gotten here. He knew it would take time, maybe too long, to sort out that the man at the helm wasn’t him, and Kline had to be counting on that. The Zodiac turned out of the cave, the light vanished, and there was only the roar of the waves.

An hour or more had gone by
and he needed to get out of the water, had to get above the incoming tide. They’d stripped his clothes down to his shorts, had taken a knife, a second gun, the telelocator off him. How long would it take Douglas to figure out that someone else was running the Zodiac? He’d get sus-picious when the calls didn’t go through, but when would they start searching the caves? Get up, he thought, get off the sand and on the rock as high as you can. He lifted his head, staring into the darkness, head throbbing and not thinking clearly, his body trem-bling with cold. He could make out the cave entrance but there was little light. Pushed off with his heels, dug them into the sand, used the rocks to help pull himself up and then fell again. Fought his way back up as a wave ran as high as his knees.

There’d been a rock ledge near here when he’d swept his light across. If he could find it, maybe there was a way to get onto it. Four feet higher would buy a lot of time and sooner or later they’d
come here. He got to his feet, his back resting against the rock, breath coming in gasps. Had to get out of here, had to get high enough to last through the changing tide. Where was Douglas? What was taking so long? He pressed against wet rock, leaned into it, hopped sideways, working his way along.

She’s on a boat, the crew’s favorite, the Irishman said. Then she’s alive. She’s alive and can be found. He felt the gap in the stone now, leaned his head into the hollow. How deep was the ledge? No way to tell, and he tried jumping up and sliding onto the rock. Got partway onto the shelf and slid out, fell on his back on the sand, his shoulder striking a rock. He lay there, numbed. A wave touched his legs and he rolled to his side, got on his knees again, to his feet, tried again, fell again. On the fourth try he finally got enough of his weight onto the ledge. He rested and inched forward, praying there was enough room, that his shoulder wouldn’t brush rock too soon.

But there was plenty of room. The shelf was deep and worn smooth by the ocean. Marquez slid toward the back and lay on his side, watching for light, moving his legs and feet to fight the cold, trying to keep his fingers from going numb as another half hour or more passed. Waves finished against the rock now, spray reached him, and where was the Zodiac now? Why was it taking Douglas so long to backtrack?

Then he saw light but not from a boat, something surfacing in the cave, another diver, he thought, and slid against the back wall. The light came closer, moved toward him, and he heard rubber, the snap of a mask, a man’s hard exhale lost as a wave came in. The light had vanished and Marquez strained to hear, knew the diver was on the small beach where the Irishman had left him. Now he heard the tanks clank against rock, saw a beam of light working low along the water to his left and then quickly turned off.

“Where are you?” a voice said, but the light didn’t come back on.

Afraid to leave the light on, Marquez thought. Looking for me and surprised I wasn’t where they left me. The light scanned
again, this time the beam reaching closer. He heard the air tanks clank against the rock again, the rip of Velcro, the man reposition-ing himself, and briefly the light was on again. When it clicked off Marquez got ready. The next pass would reach him. He brought his knees up, thought he’d try to kick out, drive his legs into the man’s chest.

Then without warning, the sound masked by rough water at the cave entrance, there was a boat motor and a searchlight played along the walls. Marquez slid forward as the boat turned around. He heard a hard splash and the boat swept into the cave, its lights raking across him.

“Identify yourself.”

“Marquez,” he shouted. “Watch out! There’s someone in the water under you! Don’t let the diver get away, stay with his light!” But either they couldn’t hear him or didn’t understand. And then there were arms grabbing him and they struggled to get him aboard.

“Do we have her?” Marquez asked. “Do we have her?”

“No.”

“Stay with the light, there was a diver,” and a blanket was wrapped around him, a woman telling him they couldn’t do any-thing about the cuffs yet as they tried to pick up the light outside the cave, and a search began along the beach.

“We’ll find him,” he heard the boat’s pilot say, but he knew they wouldn’t. He’d lost the money and they had nothing. He leaned over the side looking down into the dark water. Who was the diver? Was it Kline?

“You’re a stand-up guy,”
Douglas said outside Mar-quez’s house, and Marquez waited for the reason Douglas had driven up here. His heart had jumped when Douglas pulled into the driveway, afraid Douglas was here to deliver bad news in per-son. Marquez hadn’t gotten home until dawn and this was where the FBI insisted he be, as though Kline would contact them again. “You probably came pretty close to buying it last night. Good thing you got on that ledge.”

“What about the Irishman’s comment she was on a boat?”

“Do you believe him?”

“I want to believe she’s alive. How much money was in those bags?”

“$200,000. A lot of one dollar bills.”

That brought a rush of anger in Marquez. He squinted against the sunlight, his eyes tired, his mind veering off from how Kline would react to the short money.

“Tell me. You shorted him, so what was your plan?”

“To be there, John, and I think you know that. He didn’t bring Petersen; he wasn’t ever planning to make a trade, which probably means he doesn’t have one to make.”

It was Alvarez who’d figured out that the man on the Zodiac had gone off the side wearing dive gear and swum to shore. The Zodiac steering had been locked and it had run out to sea drawing all but the vehicle surveillance with it. The FBI theory was that he’d floated the money ashore with him and met his ride.

“There was a last image on the Web site before it went down,” Douglas said. “You’ll see it soon enough. Her head was tipped back and she had a knife at her throat. The facial contusions were deeper, more colored. I’m told they took at least forty-eight hours to develop the color they had. It means that not all the images were shot the same day, but whether that’s good or bad we don’t know. I don’t want her husband to hear any of this. He doesn’t know about it now and doesn’t need to.”

“I won’t be the one to tell him.”

“How computer literate are you?”

“Not as literate as my fifteen-year-old stepdaughter.”

“I hear you on that. The site is down, but he may come back up, and if he does and keeps the same sequencing going, it may not be a very happy ending.”

“You’re talking around the edges of whatever you have to say.”

“What I’m getting to is, it’s our opinion there’s nothing more that can effectively be done. We need to let him make the next move, because we don’t have one.”

“I think the Irish bastard was telling at least part of the truth; she’s alive on a boat somewhere. We can check every boat over sixty feet in California.”

“And if you get close you may cause him to kill her. Better for your team to sit tight, hard as that is, and we’re all over the boats anyway.”

“I’m not going to have my team stand down.”

“Then, if you find a boat, don’t do anything except call me.”

“We’re going to come up with a list of boats.”

“And we’ll work together. Here, I brought you another one of these.” Douglas fished a telelocator out of his pocket. “Don’t lose this one.”

He watched Douglas drive away and then turned to Katherine. She’d been here when he’d gotten home and he figured the FBI must have called her, must have alerted her though he hadn’t asked. Now he talked to her about his fears for Petersen, his sense of loss and responsibility, the terribleness of having her taken this way. She touched his face, her fingers cool and smooth. She said he ought to get some rest, but what he did after she left was lay out how the team was going to check all vessels over sixty feet. Had to be at least that big, he thought, or at least they’d work from that point. He’d have to get Baird to lend wardens. He took a call from Stuart Petersen, and the conversation was very hard, Stuart saying repeatedly that they had to try to contact the kidnappers, go out to the media in a new way, that the FBI was stonewalling. Marquez could feel Stuart’s hope dying. After he hung up he closed his eyes, thought back over each thing he could remember from last night.

Somewhere in the late afternoon he fell asleep, waking at dusk with a blanket over him and hearing Katherine and Maria talking, taking comfort from the murmur of their voices before closing his eyes again. An hour later he rose and walked into the kitchen. Maria was there alone, her mother was in the shower.

“What’s going on, Maria?”

“I’m making dinner tonight.” Maria hugged him. “I’m really glad you’re back.”

“Count me out on dinner,” he said.

“Oh, you have to eat or you’ll lose weight.”

“I lost too much weight once. I wouldn’t want to do that again.”

“Maybe there’s a message there for me.”

He smiled at her sarcasm. You were only young and self-centered a particular way once and then life showed you otherwise. But he had a lot of tolerance for that. He hadn’t been that fun to talk to as a kid, himself. “How much weight did you lose?” she asked.

“About thirty-five pounds. Some people on my undercover team were killed and I had a hard time with it. I felt guilty and unworthy, and there was suspicion thrown my way because I’d been the only one who’d made it. And I didn’t handle that very well, couldn’t handle my integrity being questioned. It made me very bitter and angry and I had to walk it off in the mountains and when I did, I didn’t eat enough.”

He told her more. He told her of a moment of change, of self-awareness that had happened to him, a dawn on San Francisco Bay, watching the sunrise from a boat. The light on the water had been particularly beautiful, like a thousand prisms reflecting that morn-ing. Hoping he wasn’t sounding too corny, he tried to tell Maria how he’d realized what he loved and what mattered and what it meant to embrace the positive.

But he could see that Maria had lost more weight. When they ate dinner an hour later, she cut a couple of small slivers off a chicken leg and counted out the string beans she put on her plate. She finished and asked to be excused.

“Mom, will you clean up since I made dinner?”

“Sure.”

“Is it okay if I do my homework with the TV on?”

“Don’t turn it on too loud.”

She turned the TV on before going down the hall toward her room and Katherine got up quickly from the table. She walked over to the edge of the kitchen wall where she could see Maria’s bathroom. When Katherine went around the corner he figured
Maria was in the bathroom and knew Katherine was listening. A few minutes later, Katherine was back.

“This is her routine now.”

“Let me try to talk with her again tonight.”

“She’s going to tell you she’s got to do her homework and right after that she’ll say she’s too tired to talk and has to go to bed. John, I know you can’t possibly think about this right now. Was there any news at all today? Did they find anything in the caves?”

“No, but we’re going back tomorrow.”

At a little after 11:00 Maria came out of her room. Marquez was out on the deck with Katherine. Maria waved a hand good-night from the deck door and Katherine coaxed her out and hugged her, then stepped around her, leaving Maria with him. As she left, Maria said sharply, almost bitchily, “What was that about?”

“She loves you.”

“She shouldn’t try to control me then.”

“You’re the one in control.”

“Tell her that.”

“I haven’t said much to you about it yet, have I?”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to start tonight?”

“Why don’t you sit with me a few minutes?” She sat on the picnic bench and wouldn’t look directly at him. “If we didn’t say anything, we wouldn’t be worth anything as parents. I told you the mess I got myself in. I let things go too far, sometimes. Maybe you’re a little like that, too.”

“Oh, so now we’re alike.”

“We might have that in common. You ate and then went straight to the bathroom, right?”

“So you’re accusing me, too?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Why would I want to throw up?”

“Maybe you want to control your body, because maybe the
rest of your life doesn’t feel like it’s under control.” She didn’t give a sign one way or the other. “Mine feels that way right now, too. What’s going on in your life?”

Maria deflected the question. “Mom says you shouldn’t be leaving tomorrow and should do what the FBI says.”

“Then I wouldn’t be in control.” That got the slightly crooked shy smile that was hers only, that was there when he’d met her when she was four. “But that’s not really it, either, Maria. Sue Petersen is missing and I have to do everything I can to try to find her. I stayed here today and shouldn’t have.”

“Mom says she might already be dead.”

“She might be, but if she’s alive she’s got to believe I’m look-ing for her.”

“Well, mom is always wrong.”

“She’s not wrong about you.” He paused a beat. “I know you, Maria, the lying has got to be making you feel lousy. You’ve got a problem here and you’ve got to face it, and if anyone has the will and the strength to do that, it’s you.”

Maria didn’t answer but something was happening. He saw her shoulders shaking and tears starting in her eyes. When she looked up the tears were streaming down her face and she cried silently, then shook her head, sobbing, confessing something he couldn’t make out initially. Her voice wavered, talking now about problems with her friends, feeling like an outcast, people ignoring her, calling her a freak behind her back.

“You don’t look like a freak.”

“Everybody says I do.”

“You don’t. You were bringing your weight down and maybe it got a little away from you and went further than you hoped. It’s the kind of mistake I would make.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“The thing about friends is you only have a few true ones in a
lifetime, and I wouldn’t sweat the rest. If I hadn’t been there last night, then I wouldn’t have been Petersen’s true friend.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Talk to me, talk to your mom, start there. We’re your friends. She’s all over you because she loves you, but she’ll back off when she sees you turn it around.”

“I mean at school.”

“You’re beautiful and bright, Maria. You’ve got it all going your way and you’re going to have to use that great will of yours to work this problem out. That’s what got you into this and that’s what’s going to get you out. But first you’ve got to try to figure out where it started.”

“I already know that.”

“Then go back to where it started and unravel it. Take it a day at a time. Two good days and maybe a bad day, then three good days in a row. Four good days. I’m having a real hard time with Petersen missing, but I’ve got to keep on with the SOU team. And you’ve got to keep going forward with school and what you have going. I’ll make a deal; I’ll tell you how it’s going for me and you tell me how it’s going for you. Can we make that deal?”

She nodded and got awkwardly to her feet. He followed her inside. From the hallway she turned and looked back to him, her face a vulnerable cross between child and woman.

The next morning he made coffee and stood on the back deck as high clouds to the east streaked with color. He drank a second cup, calling everyone in the unit, talking over the plan for the day, then called Chief Keeler.

“Douglas told me yesterday that Kline doesn’t experience ordi-nary emotions,” Keeler said, his voice strained and raw. “He doesn’t have any conscience, at least not in the way that we think of one.” Keeler added that he’d been up since two in the morning, thinking about Petersen. “Nothing like this could have ever happened when
I started here thirty years ago. We couldn’t have imagined it. Every decade or so a state ranger or warden would get killed by poachers during a confrontation, but nothing like this cat and mouse with poachers who have better equipment than us. That goddamned Internet has done more to help criminals than anyone else.”

Marquez walked back into the house explaining why he was sending Alvarez back to check the Van Damme caves. The FBI hadn’t done their search for evidence at low tide and he wanted to do that. He picked a list of boats off the table, heard Katherine and Maria moving around in the back rooms.

“I got a list of boats yesterday, Chief, everything longer than sixty feet that has docked at a California port in the last month. I’m going to head up the coast this morning.”

“They asked that you remain available.”

“I’ll be back tonight and I’m available by phone.” Marquez paused a beat, unsure how Keeler would react, but he seemed okay with it. “The last place they had me go was up north. We lost a full day yesterday.”

Marquez hung up remembering a day years ago with Petersen when they’d been out at Point Reyes checking on an abalone bed. A tipster who was leaving her boyfriend but turning him in to Fish and Game first insisted he’d stripped it. Marquez had gone into the water and found the bed intact. Petersen had laughed when he’d surfaced and said the ab bed was there still. Then they’d sat in the warm sun along the beach and eaten sandwiches. She’d taken in the day and her fingers sifted the warm sand and they’d talked about what would come next and gathered up their lunch trash and headed on.

Marquez limped out of the house, one of his legs a little sore. He loaded equipment but was on the phone until after Katherine and Maria left. Now, he backed his truck around, registering that the new side window was the only one without dust. He saw a piece of folded paper under the windshield wiper just before taking off,
and got out, picked it off the glass, and unfolded a lemon-colored piece of stationery.

“Thanks, John. I love you. Your daughter.”

He read it twice because there’d always been a careful accuracy to her signings, usually finishing any card or note to him with “your loving stepdaughter,” and he’d never asked her to pretend otherwise, although she almost never heard from her true father. Katherine had done the real child-raising and he’d helped out from the sidelines. With this current problem, Katherine had done the difficult part and he was just coming behind with some talk, and despite the note, there was no saying whether he’d made any dif-ference with Maria last night. Still, he folded the note and put it in his pocket, meaning to keep it.

Three hours later, Marquez left the coast highway and started up Guyanno Canyon. The road was narrow and laced with the tar used to repair cracks. He wound up through the trees, remembering the day he’d come to meet Davies and what had changed since then. He’d talked to Ruter yesterday afternoon and Ruter had volunteered that Davies was still his number one suspect in the Guyanno mur-ders and threw out an idea, that Davies had led Marquez down the coast to San Francisco, then ditched his boat before fleeing the country or at least California. Trying to make it look like some-thing had happened to him.