“I don’t know if I can.”
“You’re blocked on it, so we’ll come back to it.” Marquez reached and touched August thirty-first on the Day-Timer. “Let’s back up. Start at the beginning, again.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time and then started. Bailey had gotten him involved by saying it was a one-time diving deal for the two of them. Two other divers that Bailey knew had already gathered the abalone and it was up in the cove near Elephant Rock. All they needed to do was pick it up.
“Who were these other divers?”
“Jimmy was the one in contact with them. We were working off GPS coordinates when we got up there.”
“Up to Elephant Rock?”
“Yeah.”
“You were reading the coordinates?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty good with GPS.”
“Who were they?”
“The divers?” Marquez nodded, could feel this was the moment and exhaled slowly. Now he didn’t want to put any pressure at all on Heinemann. Let Heinemann make his own decision. Let him come to us now, let him put it together his own way. Let him see we’re sanctuary. We’re your only hope, Marquez thought.
“It may have been those divers at Guyanno Creek,” Heinemann said.
“That’s convenient,” Shauf said, and shoved her chair back. “A couple of dead divers.”
But Marquez knew now. He got it. Shauf stood up like it was over, Heinemann trying to sell them Stocker and Han because they were dead and couldn’t be questioned. Marquez calculated time now, Bailey’s call and the urgency of it. He knew it could be, but shook his head. “We have a problem with that,” he said.
“Well, fuck it, then. You guys don’t believe anything.”
“They’re dead so we can’t question them and it doesn’t hang because they had their own operation going.”
“Whatever.” Heinemann shook his head like he was disgusted.
“Two dead divers,” Marquez said after a quiet thirty seconds. “Two guys who’ve already got a pile of five hundred shucked abalone.”
“Yeah, and they were going to shuck the ones we picked up, but they got wasted first. That’s why Jimmy got the call. That’s how it all happened. Jimmy knew one of the divers. The guy’s name was Orion.”
Marquez nodded. They were partway there. Heinemann hadn’t gotten the name Orion from the newspaper articles.
“When they got killed you’re saying Jimmy got a phone call to go pick up some abalone.”
“Something like that.”
“How would anyone have known where to find the abalone? Stocker and Han picked it, right? They left it on the bottom of the ocean. So who knew where to find it?”
“GPS,” Heinemann said.
“You had coordinates?”
“We made a few trips like that. Like I said, I’m good with GPS.”
“How many trips? Write down where you dove.” Marquez handed him a notepad, watched him write, saw he was writing actual coordinates. He picked up the word Albion, saw Salt Point and couldn’t read the other two yet. He had Heinemann say aloud where they’d dove. Shauf had left the room; now she came back in and they formalized the written confession. Four trips out with Bailey and transfers like Sausalito. This gave them probable cause on Bailey and Shauf went to work on the warrant. They’d bypass the DA’s office in San Mateo County and go directly to Judge May-nard. Maynard was sympathetic to what they were trying to do and had once told Marquez that he was cleared to fax a warrant request anytime.
Marquez continued with Heinemann. They went back to August thirty-first, what had happened that day, and Heinemann’s tone changed as he recounted how it had gone.
A man had come down to Bailey’s boat just before dusk. There was no one else around and he’d seen him come down the ramp. He got on the boat and he obviously knew Bailey, put a hand on Bailey’s back. Meghan had gone for more potato chips and they were drinking beer with him when she came back. The dude’s name was Carlo.
Marquez copied a description, asked questions they could turn into an artist’s rendering, told Heinemann he’d have to agree to sit with an artist, but knew already it was the Hispanic in the Oakland video. They’d get a photo made from the video, get a package of photos together for Heinemann to pick this Carlo out. In his mind’s eye he saw the man getting on board, saying hello to Bailey, his fingers coming to rest lightly low on Bailey’s back, fingertips brush-ing Bailey’s spine, palm flat on the muscle as he told Heinemann since he was new to this he was going to get to meet the boss.
“So Bailey already knew this man?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he ever say where he’d met him?”
“Not really.”
“San Diego?”
“Man, how come you’ve got to tie everything together like this?”
“This Carlo led you to the car where the other man was?”
“Yeah, I was alone in there with him in the backseat and he told me not to look at him.”
“So you did anyway.” Heinemann smiled, obviously proud of how smart he was. Marquez knew he’d taken a good look at the man in the car. “Think about his face.”
“His neck,” Heinemann said.
“What about it?”
“A scar like this thin red line across his neck, like he’d been cut.”
“Okay, you got it.”
“You can barely see it.”
“You saw it.”
“That’s the guy?”
Marquez nodded.
“I haven’t seen him since,” Heinemann said.
“Not after Sausalito?”
“I’ve seen nothing but these Mexicans. We’ve been diving at night with light sticks and these guys don’t even speak English.”
“What was the name of the boat?”
“Coronado.”
“And you got on in Eureka?”
“It was really Crescent City.”
He explained how he’d been moved to another boat when the Emily Jane docked in Crescent City. He’d been told there was a full-blown manhunt underway and his only safe route was to get on this other boat. He’d had the feeling they were going to pull guns if he refused, so he’d gone along.
They questioned Heinemann another hour and then returned to how he would contact them when they released him, how the logistics would work tomorrow. They decided he’d call Bailey first and worked out the deal Marquez would present to the DA tomorrow.
“As long as I don’t have to get on a boat with them, I’m cool with it,” Heinemann said. “I’ll do what you want as long as I get to go home, man.”
“You’ve got to dance the dance and we’ll dummy some charges and put that out to the press, theft of the boat, abalone poaching, but we won’t leave you alone with them.”
“How do I know you won’t make the charges real if things get fucked up?”
“You’ve got our word.”
“I want something in writing.”
“Nothing goes in writing until we see how you move out there. We’ll set up your release for tomorrow afternoon and we’ll have your girlfriend’s pickup wired and ready.”
After Heinemann was taken to a cell, Marquez walked out with Shauf. The warrant request had been faxed off, but they wouldn’t hear from Judge Maynard until early morning. The night had changed several things. They had a positive ID on Kline. They had Heinemann moving to where he’d testify against Bailey and they had a tie to the Guyanno divers. He felt like they were close to catching a real break.
Marquez drove home feeling better about their chances than he had in a month. He slept soundly for once and woke with a clear head.
At dawn the sky was scalloped with high clouds that burned and twisted in the winds aloft. He threw out an opened beer that he’d never taken a sip of last night and flipped through the mail, checked for messages from Katherine or Maria, then made coffee and sat outside with the newspapers before getting in his truck.
When he drove down the mountain he was thinking of Heine-mann’s story of imported Mexican divers. They’d heard whispers of something similar last year. Mercenary divers. Travelers. The scarcity was driving prices up. Market poachers were becoming more sophisticated and exploitative. One study he’d read predicted that one-third of all animal life would vanish from earth in the next fifty years as habitat succumbed to the encroaching demands of a swelling humanity.