He woke to Petersen tapping on his window with her cell phone. He’d been asleep about forty minutes and looked at her groggily, before it all flooded back. He opened the door and sat up.
“How’d you find me?” he asked.
“I always know where you are. You know, we used to wonder if you ever slept. Are you ready to get going?”
He drank from a water bottle. He needed coffee, food. They drove tandem to San Francisco and left her 4Runner parked on Gough Street. By 2:00 in the afternoon they were walking down the Pillar Point dock to where Heinemann’s boat was berthed. A light wind was blowing off the ocean, the soft air smelled of salt, and you could feel autumn. Gold light hazed through thin fog at sea.
Marquez climbed aboard and knocked. The Open Sea carried a sleeping berth and they knew there was a girlfriend. When a curtain moved and the fingers of a young woman’s hand showed he held up his badge, and then a blonde wearing shorts and a very thin cotton shirt opened the door.
“We’re looking for Mark Heinemann.”
“He’s not here.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Up north, but I don’t know when he’s coming back.”
“Can we come in and talk with you a minute?”
“If you want, but I don’t know anything.”
They established that Heinemann was her friend and that her name was Meghan Burris. She sniffled and touched her nose in a way that said cocaine. Without prompting she elaborated on her relationship with Heinemann. They weren’t a couple, but they were going out together. She wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for the cat, and she pointed at the striped tabby watching them.
“We’re working an investigation we hope Mark can help us with,” Marquez said. “We’re also looking for a Jimmy Bailey. Do you know him?”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen him today?”
“Nope.” She crinkled her nose. “I guess I’m useless. I have to get going anyway.”
“Have you ever heard Jimmy Bailey talk about abalone?”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
Petersen smiled broadly behind her and rolled the cat on its back, scratching its belly. Meghan made it clear now she only knew Mark Heinemann from school at UC Santa Cruz and staying on the boat was just sort of a fun thing to do. She didn’t believe in hurting animals. Marquez gave her his abalone rap anyway, the problem, what they were up against, needing the public’s help to save the species.
“We think Jimmy Bailey may be involved with poachers and anything you tell us might help Mark, because we know they’ve been out on the ocean together.”
“Mark wouldn’t ever poach, but there were these kind of freaky guys who came down to Jimmy’s boat.”
“Tell us about them.”
She described the men they’d videotaped in Oakland outside Li’s house, the hatchet-faced Caucasian and the black-haired, buffed Hispanic that Bailey had claimed came to meet with Heinemann. There’d been another man but she’d only seen him at a distance. He’d never come down to the dock.
“One of the guys that came down here wouldn’t quit staring at me so I left.”
“If I opened a calendar, could you show me what day that was?”
“Oh, I already know. On this Saturday it will have been three weeks. It was definitely a Saturday because I didn’t have school and I had to drop my car off that day.”
Marquez opened his pocket calendar. He marked Saturday August thirty-first and glanced at Petersen, knew from her look she read Meghan as telling the truth, or what she thought was the truth. “See, Mark was down helping Jimmy with his engine and when one of them showed up, it was like Jimmy pretended he didn’t know they were coming, but he did. He always acts like he can fool everybody.”
Marquez nodded. He tried to gauge what her reaction would be to what he was going to say next.
“I’m going to tell you some things that you might not like to hear, but that you need to know. We saw Mark bring up urchin bags filled with abalone near Elephant Rock up in the Point Reyes area yesterday. He was with Jimmy Bailey on the Condor and they took their catch down to Sausalito late last night. We broke up a transfer to another boat there, but that boat got away. Mark ran to that boat during the bust and there’s a warrant for his arrest now.”
“Oh, so you came here to trick me. That’s nice. Boy, does that suck. You said you weren’t after Mark, but you are. No wonder I can’t stand cops.” She brushed her nose with the back of a finger, let her hand fall slowly. “So I’m supposed to be the stupid girlfriend.”
“Not at all.” He made up a reason now. “We think Jimmy Bailey tricked your boyfriend. It’s Bailey we’re really after,” Marquez said. “Let’s go back to the night of the thirty-first again, what you heard in the conversation on Bailey’s boat.”
She hesitated, then spoke. They’d been drinking daiquiris on the Condor. Jimmy and Mark were smoking. She’d had one daiquiri, didn’t smoke, and the Hispanic guy had straight rum. Bailey told her she had to split for a while because they were going to talk private business. Mark pretended like he hadn’t heard what Bailey had said. Mark wouldn’t look at her and she’d been real angry when she left the boat. She’d gotten into a bad fight with him later that night and they’d broken up, for the second time, she said.
Petersen spoke up now, telling her they were going to check Heinemann’s boat for anything Bailey might have asked Mark to hold for him. She asked Meghan if she had anything private she wanted to remove first, deftly explaining that they didn’t need a warrant because they were deputized as customs agents. Petersen went through everything, found nothing, and they questioned her more, then gave her phone numbers to call. Marquez knew her first call would be to Heinemann.
As they walked away, Marquez said, “That story about Bailey had the ring of truth.”
“Yeah, it did.”
“We’ll borrow the condo and I think we’ll watch her.”
“Do you want me here?”
“Yeah, I think you and Cairo.”
He called Cairo as they drove up the highway a few miles to check out Bailey’s house. Bailey leased an avocado-colored stucco ranch house in an old subdivision. The house had a small lawn of dead Bermuda grass and a white concrete path to the front door that ran like a freeway through a desert. Neither Bailey’s black Suburban nor any other vehicles were in the driveway, but Mar-quez knocked on the door anyway. He looked in through the liv-ing room window at brown shag carpet, a few pieces of furniture, a widescreen TV.
“We’re going to hear from his lawyer next,” Petersen said from the porch steps.
“That’s right, and then he’ll surface.”
As they drove away from Bailey’s they talked over how to make the surveillance of the girlfriend worthwhile. There was no way they’d get a warrant for Meghan Burris’s phone records, but they had an application in on a cell phone number of Heinemann’s they’d gotten from Bailey. If Burris called him they wouldn’t get real-time notification, though he’d made that request as well, but would get a location, an area to work. He dropped Petersen in San Francisco.
Late in the afternoon, Marquez crossed the Golden Gate and drove home, talking on the phone with Keeler as he walked in, telling him about Heinemann’s girlfriend and his plan with the team.
“I dropped the gun at DOJ,” Keeler said, “and I’ve thought more about the FBI. We don’t want to interfere with anything they have going on. I don’t want you to go up the coast.”
“We go up the coast all the time.”
“Don’t go near the Emily Jane. Is that clear enough?”
He hung up with Keeler and called Shauf and told her to stick in Fort Bragg. He wrote out the report he hadn’t finished earlier, talked to Petersen again, took a run to clear his head, and at dusk showered, made a sandwich and drank a beer as he went over his notes of the last twenty-four hours. He put on music, an old Gram Parsons, then tried Maria’s cell phone and left a message. She was probably out with her cousin, he thought. Katherine was due in late and had declined his offer to pick her up at the airport, said it was easier to take a cab, and it left him sad and then he tried not to think about it and went back over all his notes, worked the sequence of events on the calendar, again, because sometimes things fell together.