Now, with similar friendliness, the waitress brought Guy’s austere breakfast of a toasted bagel and tomato juice and slammed it down on the table with a force that would have registered on the Richter scale. He tried to engage her in pleasantries — usually an easy task for him — but met with stony resistance. When he asked for a newspaper, she told him he’d have to buy one at the stands in front of the supermarket. Then she withdrew, leaving him to eat while contemplating the highway, where cars mainly passed through without stopping and beside which few pedestrians walked.
Yes, he told himself, toasting his good fortune with his tomato juice, he’d come to the right place. Signal Port would make excellent fodder for his next “penetrating and seminal” — God, the things reviewers will say! — examination of a town in trouble.
Today he’d start asking the serious questions.
That was a close call with the man on the highway, Rho thought as she turned into the parking lot of the Soledad County Coastal Substation. At least the guy had been nice about it — not common behavior in Signal Port, where locals tended to be prickly about anything to do with traffic. He was a stranger, of course, and not a bad-looking one, with that thick silvery hair and tanned, craggy face. From the city, probably, and trying to fit in on the coast, but his wool shirt was too good quality and his jeans too crisp and new for him to escape notice. Coming from the Sea Stacks and heading for the hotel, an overnighter who would soon be on the road and, hopefully, forget about the woman who had almost run him down on his way to breakfast. Who would never realize said woman was a sheriff’s deputy.
The parking lot in front of the rambling prefab building tucked behind the cable TV office and hardware store was crowded this morning. Sheriff’s department cruisers, a highway patrol car, and several California Department of Fish and Game vehicles overflowed the marked spaces, and a county minivan was pulled in front of the substation’s entrance. DFG officers were herding a line of male prisoners — all of them Asian — onto the van for transport to the jail in Santa Carla.
So this morning’s pre-dawn raid on abalone poachers operating down at Pelican Cove had happened as planned. Rho squeezed her truck between the trash Dumpster and a cruiser and got out. “You stay here, Cody,” she said. The Lab whined, but stopped straining at the seat belt. As she took the steps of the substation two at a time, one of the DFG men grinned and flashed her a victory sign.
As usual, Valerie had the heat turned too high, and the interior was stifling. Rho twisted the thermostat’s dial, and the clerk looked up from her knitting — another of those strange garments that were too short to be capes and too long to be collars. They seemed to be all Valerie Middleton knew how to knit, and eventually each of her acquaintances would be gifted with one which, after enthusiastic thanks, would be consigned to the back of the closet. Now she set her needles aside and regarded Rho with bright little eyes set deep in her beaky bird’s face, the corners of her mouth twitching in disapproval.
She saw, Rho knew, the signs of a hangover. Valerie had worked for the department since Rho’s father was a rookie, and was thoroughly familiar with all the deputies’ histories. The clerk had been known to come down hard on the men for reasons as trivial as allowing their wastebaskets to overflow or leaving the seat up in the restroom, but other than this facial tic she’d offer no criticism to Rho. Her gruffly maternal attitude toward the substation’s only female officer could be a source of embarrassment, but on mornings like these Rho appreciated it.
Valerie said, “It’s supposed to be your day off. What’re you doing here?”
“Just couldn’t tear myself away.”
“That’s just as well. Wayne was asking after you.”
Wayne Gilardi, her counterpart on the morning shift. “Was he in on the bust?”
“Yes. You’ll find him in the interrogation room with one of the suspects.”
Rho set her bag under the desk she and Wayne shared and went down the hall to the room that did double duty for departmental meetings and interviews with witnesses and suspects. When she stuck her head through the door she found the big, gray-haired officer seated at the table across from a slender Asian in baggy work clothes. Wayne got up and joined her in the hall, shutting the door behind him.
“So what’s happening?” Rho said.
“For openers, we collared a dozen poachers. All Vietnamese. We suspect they’re affiliated with that ring operating out of Oakland.”
Poaching of the endangered abalone had become a huge industry along the coast, involving not only divers, but wholesalers, buyers, and deliverymen. Both in season — which ran from April 1 to June 30, and again from August 1 to November 30 — and out of season, individual divers would harvest more than the legal daily limit of four shellfish and pass them off to middlemen who then sold them to restaurants, mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Six months ago a group of property owners near Deer Harbor had gotten together to patrol their coves in the early hours of the morning when poachers typically slipped in by boats laden with their scuba diving gear. Acting on their tips, Fish and Game had arrested six Vietnamese men whose statements hinted at a much larger operation. An investigation, called Haliotis IV, after the abalone’s scientific name, had been ongoing since then, and hopefully this morning’s arrests would lead to the ringleaders.
“So what’s with the guy in there?” Rho nodded at the interrogation room. “It looks as if you’ve already processed the others.”
“Right. DFG’s waiting on a second minivan to take the last six to County, but this one — a diver called Zhi Phung — might have something for us. As soon as I read him his rights he tried to make a deal, swap information. And not about their operation.”
Of course not, Rho thought. That information was DFG’s concern. Besides, the poachers were known as a tight-knit group, bound by their culture and, in many cases, family ties; so far those who had been arrested had adamantly refused to inform on their fellow members.
“What kind of information?” she asked.
“About a crime he witnessed — a kidnapping.”
“That’s major. What did he give you?”
“Zilch. While we had him in the holding cell he changed his mind. Probably was persuaded by the others not to cooperate. Now he’s claiming I misunderstood him because he doesn’t speak much English, but his was as good as mine when I arrested him. Even the threat of an obstruction charge didn’t sway him.”
“You want me to talk to him?”
“Yeah. You’re better with these ethnic types.”
Better than you, anyway. Rho entertained few prejudices, while Wayne was notorious for his distrust and dislike of minorities. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
Zhi Phung was still seated at the table when Rho entered the room, his eyes focused on the beige wall across from him. They moved slowly to her, but otherwise he didn’t acknowledge her presence.
She introduced herself, added, “I hear Deputy Gilardi’s been giving you a hard time.”
The man’s expression remained blank, as if he didn’t understand her, but she saw intelligence and comprehension in his dark eyes.