All major media had simultaneously received the same email with the website address. In minutes it bounced around the world, but it carried a personal immediacy for Marquez and Hosfleter. He walked the island with her, showed her the rotting dock where he and Shauf pulled in with the DBEEP boat and where he’d found the bucket of bait and the fishing pole. From the top of the levee he saw all the vehicles parked in the apple orchard and the crime tape perimeter around the shed. The trail through the dry rye grass had long since been trampled.
‘Is this water running free a good thing for the delta?’ Hosfleter asked. ‘Is it good for the river systems, the wildlife, the fish, all that?’
‘Sure.’
‘Are you secretly glad nature has been liberated?’
‘Do you really want to do this?’
‘I’m just asking.’ She held out her hands. ‘It’s done. There’s nothing we can do and now the rivers will all run to the sea again and all that crap. Excuse me, the water will flush out the delta and save the midget fish whose name I can’t remember and the salmon which I do remember because I love to eat them. I’m just asking what you really feel, coming over from Fish and Game, and all.’
‘You’re not asking anything, you’re making a statement.’
Gutierrez had sworn him in this morning with Desault standing behind him. It took less than five minutes. His new creds and passport were with him and Hosfleter probably knew that. Maybe it made her angry. Maybe she believed Maria knew more and he was coaching her. Or she was frustrated to get to the island too late and blamed him. Either way, she had crossed a line.
‘I am coming over from Fish and Game, and it’s temporary, but what you might not know is that I was a Federal agent once before, right about the time you were lying in bed hoping you’d get the third grade teacher you wanted. My career has been in law enforcement and one thing I swore I’d never do is be a Fed again. But here I am.’ He offered his hand. ‘Good luck. I’m not sure we’ll be meeting up again.’
‘Marquez, wait, don’t go yet, and I apologize, I’m sorry. I’m frustrated. The National Security Agency came close to tracking our tipster’s email, but it turns out he has very sophisticated computer defenses that detected the probes and he’s gone quiet. He’s gone, probably forever, and I don’t know where to look for Gant next.’
None of what she’d just said made much sense to him. He knew someone tipped the FBI to a San Francisco link that included Gant, but that was about it.
She continued.
‘Gant scares me. Truly scares me. Come look at what’s in these sheds. Let me show you why we need to find this guy and now. I know Maria is not involved. I do know. But come look at why I’m leaning on her for help, and don’t get me wrong about you. I’ve got nothing but respect for you signing on with the task force. Please come look.’ She paused. ‘I’m really asking because I need help. I don’t know where they’re going to hit next.’
FORTY-NINE
‘ Ever think about Jim Osiers anymore?’ Sheryl Javits asked when she called him that night. She sounded like she’d been drinking. He was reading Stoval files and stepped away from them to talk with her. Desault’s idea of taking Stoval down on animal trafficking charges or illegal trophy hunting had gotten a tepid response from the rest of the task force and skepticism from himself initially, but the more he learned the more it seemed possible. Katherine was in San Francisco at dinner with Maria so he’d read into the night and he was seeing patterns in Stoval’s habits. He felt the first thread of excitement and got how Desault came up with the animal angle.
There were gaps in the reports, but also stretches where they knew where Stoval hunted grizzly in Siberia and Canada, and a recent entry suggesting he might have been in Alaska with a Chinese businessman named Xian Liu. The files had sketchy info on legal boar hunts in Italy in September, repeated visits to a bird market in Mexico City, details on a trawler owned and sailed under a Liberian flag and working off the north coast of Africa catching illegal tuna to feed the EU markets, and a lot of wing hunting of the kind Billy Takado had talked about.
Stoval owned thousands of acres south of Bariloche. He had residences in Argentina, Capri, Barcelona, London, Hong Kong, Zurich, and Cape Town. He had pieces of hotels and of hunting preserves in Africa, Chile, and Poland. He was building a new residence in Mexico on the Baja peninsula. But if there was a pattern it was that every month or so he got himself out in open country and hunted.
Sheryl’s call disrupted his concentration and he talked reluctantly at first. Then, as she revealed more, he listened closely.
‘I should have told you before now. I don’t know why I didn’t, except that I thought it would all go away. I’m being investigated by Internal Affairs. Jim Osiers’ oldest son, Daren, persuaded them to reopen the investigation. Daren went to work for the DEA five or six years ago. He’s out of San Diego. He’s got a theory going where the La Paz bank account was mine and that I framed Jim.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No, really, he got his SAC to persuade Internal Affairs to reopen an investigation and Internal Affairs up here has interviewed me three times this week. The agent in charge is a woman named Beth Murkowski. You may hear from her as early as tomorrow. She’s got a story Rayman fed Daren Osiers about me taking bribe money to pass information to the Salazars. He claims he helped feed information to the Mex Feds and frame Jim Osiers and now with the Salazar brothers dead he’s free to tell the truth.’
She exhaled and muttered something he couldn’t hear.
‘Another thing you don’t know is that I went to several of Rayman’s parole hearings after he’d served most of his sentence for the KZ Nuts deal. He was a model prisoner and they were thinking of letting him out early, but I fought it because I always thought he had something to do with Jim getting killed. I wanted him to do his full sentence.’
‘Did he?’
‘Yes, I made sure. So he’s got it out for me.’
That last didn’t quite ring true and Marquez sat down. He jotted Beth Murkowski on the pad where he’d made Stoval notes. He wrote Rayman underneath it.
Marquez remembered the three Osiers boys at the funeral. The oldest, Daren, had looked the most like Jim and was dressed in a black suit too small for him. Unlike the other two boys he’d held his grief inside. It was Daren that Marquez had given the letter and flowers to at the Osiers’ front door. Clea, Jim’s wife, hadn’t come to the door, and later Marquez learned that Clea believed that he and the rest of Group 5 had known about Jim’s girlfriend in Loreto and that he’d assigned Jim there so he could be with her. She wouldn’t talk to him at the memorial service and he understood. He tried six months later and there was no response, but he would never hold that against her.
‘Supposedly, I used Jim’s face and a fake ID and the banker did what he was told to do by the Salazars. I was the woman behind the fake man. Funds went from the La Paz bank account to a fictitious corporation called ALCRON that was really me in an offshore account.’
‘A-L-C-R-O-N?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Sounds like an insecticide.’
She drew a deep breath and from her voice he knew there was something else, another reason why she was calling tonight.
‘I got grilled a couple of days ago on how I afforded the down payment on my house in San Francisco. I told them the truth; I got the money from my ex-husband when we divorced. I got it from Pete. It has nothing to do with Group Five, the DEA, or anything that happened eighteen years ago.’
‘How much money?’