“You still think this is about abalone poaching, but it isn’t. I know you still don’t believe me,” Ruter had said. “I don’t know about Peter Han. He may have been the equivalent of an innocent bystander, but Davies definitely came to kill Stocker.”
“What more have you learned about Han?” Marquez had asked.
“Neither the ATF or DEA have any record of him, nor do the people we’ve interviewed up here. If he sold dope, the people he sold to aren’t around. His background is sketchy, but we know he was hanging with Stocker and Huega.”
Marquez mulled the conversation as he drove the canyon road, closing in on the campground now. Down to his left the oaks and bays grew thickly along the creek. Farther up the canyon he could see white sky above the mountains and the rock along the spine. It was beautiful country, yet the first story he’d ever heard about Guyanno Creek campground had been about a group of bikers who’d arrived late one night and then held hostage and repeatedly raped two young Swedish women who were on a trip across the United States, and he believed he could feel that same darkness now as he parked and stepped over the chain.
He limped up across the broken asphalt, stopping short of the creek trail. This had been a torture/execution, but what drew Kline here? What could two abalone poachers reveal to him and why were they worth so much effort? He might kill them for cheating him, but he wouldn’t come all the way up here to do it. Kline would send someone like Molina to straighten it out.
He weighed the idea that Davies had led Kline up here and somehow participated in the killings. He shook his head in frustra-tion. He was going down the wrong path again, it came back to the problem of what would motivate Kline to take these guys out. He tried to think clearly, tried to separate what he really knew from everything else, but his worry and anguish over Petersen kept clouding his thoughts. Why had Kline come to Guyanno Creek? Why kill these two?
He started up the creek trail and hiked to the clearing of dry grass and thistle, then crossed to the tree where they’d been killed. He touched the cut in the bark where the knife had been buried and where the chain had scraped as the men writhed. He saw the tracks of feral pigs, where they’d rooted the earth checking the dried blood at the base of the tree. Stocker here, Han there, and he touched where Stocker’s back had been, thought of the photos of Han sent to Billy Mauro that they’d assumed had a racial slant. Maybe they’d been wrong. Maybe no one had bothered to take any photos of Stocker. He turned and looked across the clearing and saw the moonlit night in his mind’s eye, heard Davies’s voice in his head, the account he’d claimed that Huega gave him, Huega who’d escaped in the truck. He saw them marched across the clearing, Stocker cooperating, Han breaking and running at some point. What could Han know that Stocker didn’t? He thought about that on the hike back down and called Douglas’s cell phone when he got to his truck.
“We’ve talked about your informant on the Emily Jane, but was the FBI also selling abalone to Kline’s network?” Marquez asked. “Were you supplying your informant with abalone so he’d be valu-able?” He heard Douglas breathing quietly on the other end.
“I won’t lie to you, we bought some abalone illegally that we then used. We did that on four occasions. Where are you that it’s an issue this morning?”
“Guyanno Creek. What other ways did you try to infiltrate his network? Did you hire Davies?”
“No, and as I told you, Davies is a loose cannon and he may be the perp in the Huega case.”
“Do you have any proof of that or does it just fit to paint him that way?”
“I don’t need this from you and I don’t have time for it. What are you doing back there anyway?”
“Trying to figure out what I missed.” And it came to him now. Ruter had interviewed Han’s landlord in Daly City and came away thinking the landlord didn’t know who he was renting to. Han’s live-in girlfriend had disappeared fast, and no one up here knew him. He’d showed up with cash and drugs and cultivated Stocker. He heard Douglas’s soft exhale and then the pieces came together. “Han was FBI,” Marquez said softly. “He was one of yours,” and Douglas didn’t answer.
“You need to come here.”
“Not this morning, I’ve got a few more stops. Was he one of yours?” Douglas still didn’t answer. Marquez finished, “I’ll call you later today.”
He clicked the phone off, laid it on the picnic table, and then watched it ring and ring. When it stopped, he picked it up and called Ruter.
37
Ruter was already at a table on the restaurant deck, his briefcase leaning against his chair near his right leg. He buttered a saltine cracker as Marquez sat down, and there were bread crumbs scattered across the tabletop. It looked like he’d already finished a basket of bread and seemed self-conscious about it, brushing away the crumbs as Marquez adjusted his chair.
“The cooler weather makes me hungry and at home my wife’s there with a calculator adding up every calorie. There’s no butter in the house. We’ve got this oily shit in a little plastic tub that tastes like cold motor oil.”
Marquez nodded. His mind was on Petersen, and now Han, not Ruter’s eating habits. When the waitress came over Ruter ordered a BLT, Marquez a turkey sandwich.
“I think Peter Han was an FBI agent.”
Ruter’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t say anything and when a busboy landed a basket of bread Ruter handed the kid the butter ramekin. He pulled a piece of bread, tore it in half, and seemed to be contemplating the Han idea.
“Why would they keep that from us?” Ruter asked.
“Because they were afraid it would jeopardize their Kline operation.”
Ruter nodded as if something in the idea made sense to him, and a new tension began to form in Marquez. He watched Ruter lift the murder book out of his briefcase, open it on the table, put on reading glasses, and then scan his case notes.
“Han rented that house in Daly City,” Ruter said, “but a girl-friend lived there with him, a nice woman, according to the landlord, clean-cut and polite. Why I bring her up is she told the landlord that she was going to arrange a service for Han, said he had no immediate family, which would also fit. The landlord wanted to attend but he never heard from her. He tried to contact her, but the phone numbers she’d provided had been disconnected. I’m talking less than a week after Han is killed. She also never came back for her things.” He stopped as another idea occurred to him. “Han’s body is still at the morgue. Pretty soon, the county will have to deal with it, meaning no one has come forward to claim it. The Feds always take care of their own. They’d never let that happen.”
“Unless he didn’t have family and they felt they had to leave him there,” Marquez said, and thought, or maybe he wasn’t really there and they’d got the coroner to play along.
“Do you want what I learned about Han’s past employer?” Ruter asked.
“Everything you’ve got.”
“All right. Employer was Horizon Industries out of Belmont. You call and a rep will call you back and tell you they’re wind-ing down operations, moving to Nevada for tax reasons. Listed as a California C corporation that buys and sells used electronic equipment. Been in existence since 1997. The man I talked with confirmed Han had worked there, mostly at a computer screen. He also said Han used to talk about getting a job along the coast somewhere near the ocean.”