Raburn’s cell phone played “Take Me out to the Ball Game” with each ring. He pulled the phone from his windbreaker as they followed the river road toward Sacramento.
“Don’t answer it,” Marquez said.
“It’s my brother.”
“He’ll still be your brother after he leaves a message.”
The phone stopped playing, and the windshield wipers slapped back and forth. It rang again a few minutes later, and Marquez looked at mist low over the fields and asked, “Are you and Isaac close?”
“We’re twins, but he’s the hardworking one.”
“And what are you?”
“The fuckup.”
Raburn smelled of fish and stale clothes. When Marquez lowered his window a crack the rain found its way in. A lot had to be going through Raburn’s head, but he probably didn’t see himself as a fuckup. Earlier he’d made a little stab at being a victim of his own ineptitude and alluded to ignorance of the game laws, but he wasn’t that guy either.
“What’s your brother going to say about this?”
“There’s no reason he needs to know.”
“You work out of the pear packing shed, and we’re going there. He’s going to find out.”
“He doesn’t have to, and he’s got enough problems already. Leave him out of it.”
They drove through Courtland, and, as they neared the sign for Raburn Orchards, Marquez slowed. But he didn’t turn down the steep road. Below on the levee island were long rows of pear trees, some still with fall leaves, wet red-brown, turning in the storm wind. They looked like a fire burning across a field. Between the rows, the soil was dark from rain. Pears had all been picked before the end of July this year, Bosc and Reds last. A hundred yards from the road was the pear packing shed, a big wooden building with a gable face that Raburn worked out of.
There were other outbuildings, an equipment barn, two aluminum prefab structures, and the main house in the distance, a big three-story wood frame with a sagging roof. Half an hour later they drove past Ludovna’s one-story ranch house in the Land Park area of Sacramento. Brick wainscoting. Painted redwood siding. Lawn out to the street. A good-sized but ordinary house in the suburbs. On one side of the garage was a white BMW 330i, the car’s polish gleaming through the rain.
“Ludovna’s car?”
“He has a lot of cars.”
“Is he into cars?”
“I don’t know what he’s into.”
“Fair enough, but when we made the offer to you, Abe, we did it because we believed you know enough to help us. If it turns out on the drive that you don’t remember anything, we’ll have to rethink it all.”
Marquez jotted down the plates as though it was new information, but it wasn’t as if he’d never seen this house. There was a man who worked for Ludovna who drove this car. They called him Nike Man because his standard outfit was a running suit. The BMW was registered to Ludovna’s fish brokerage business. They’d assumed Nike Man was both an employee of Ludovna’s Sacramento Fresh Fish and a bodyguard. In the last month they’d steadily tried to gather more information on Ludovna, but their focus had been August, Raburn, and a dozen poachers who were feeding sturgeon to Raburn and a couple of other suspects. He turned back to Raburn.
“How much does Ludovna pay you?”
“A dollar fifty a pound for meat, fifty dollars a pound for roe. Sometimes I freeze the eggs, sometimes I make caviar.”
“How did you find him?”
“I didn’t.”
“He found you?”
“Right.” He stared out the windshield. “His guy just showed up at my boat one morning, and I could barely understand him. Ludovna speaks English okay, but not the guys that work for him. They’re all from Russia or places like that.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Including the guys who work at the shop, I guess about five. They like vodka and they like to play cards. They all wear black clothes.”
Marquez kept questioning him as they drove back into the delta and past the houses of a couple of guys who fished weekends and worked construction during the week. Guys who supplied him. They crossed the Sacramento River and drove toward Main Street in Rio Vista where Raburn said he routinely sold to the owner of Beaudry’s Bait Shop, a place Marquez knew. According to Raburn, the former owner, Tom Beaudry, had sold out over a year ago to an ex-con named Richie Crey. Sold the sport fishing business, the boat, everything.
“Crey never wants to deal directly with me. He has a couple of guys who pick up the fish.”
“What’s he do with it?”
“I don’t know where he sells it. I don’t even know how he heard about me.”
“Maybe from the same people we heard from.”
Raburn didn’t see the humor. He rubbed the whiskers alongside his jaw.
“You don’t know where he goes with the sturgeon?”
“No, but somebody is buying. Last spring I could have sold all the roe in the world. Somebody wants everything there is.”
“Ludovna?”
“No, it’s not him. I think he buys from me and sells to them.”
They recrossed the Sacramento River on the Rio Vista Bridge and drove upriver past the fishing access where Anna had disappeared. They followed the levee road, winding through the delta towns until they reached Courtland and Raburn Orchards. Then they made the steep drop down to the levee island. A graveled road ran out through deep puddles to the packing shed. Marquez pulled inside under the roof and left his headlights on.
“My room is in back.”
As Raburn went to turn the lights on, Shauf’s van eased into the big shed. She got out as Raburn walked back, and he seemed uncomfortable with her presence. He kept glancing over at her as they started back toward the room his brother let him use. They walked past conveyer belts and sorters and an ancient box machine.
“Does your brother own his packing equipment?” Marquez asked.
“He leases.”
Water dripped through holes in the corrugated roofing twenty feet over their heads, and they dodged that and worked their way around old wooden fruit boxes. Raburn unlocked two tall wooden doors, swung them open. He hit a light switch, and they were looking at two long wooden tables, dirt floor, stainless-steel sinks, stainless-steel pans, a hose, freezers, always a freezer, but not the pots and seines for producing caviar that Marquez was looking for. He opened a freezer and found sturgeon fillets wrapped in white butcher paper. On the end of one of the tables was a scale.
Shauf worked her way around the room with the camcorder. She was the one designated for recording all evidence. If it went to trial she’d be the one called. That was their practice, have one officer designated to avoid having several pinned down by the same trial.
When they finished, Marquez drove Raburn back to the houseboat and dropped him near his pickup. The rain had stopped, though heavy droplets still fell from high in the eucalyptus branches and struck like pebbles on top of the truck cab.
“I’m supposed to buy a sturgeon in the morning,” Raburn said.
“I’ll ride with you to pick it up.”
“You don’t believe me about Nick, do you? You think I’m bullshitting you.”
“I’m hoping you’re not bullshitting us. I’m putting faith in you.”
They had set up surveillance on Ludovna’s house this afternoon. Cairo was there now.
“We’ll meet tomorrow,” Marquez said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Driving away, he returned a call from Cairo, and he’d worked enough years with Cairo to know the differences in his voice. There was a way Cairo’s voice got both quiet and intense.
“Ludovna just got here, and it looks like he’s leaving again. There’s a woman with him, Lieutenant. He pulled up in a midnight-blue Cadillac that looks black in this light. It could be Anna’s airport car. From across a parking lot in the fog it would look black. It’s late-model, maybe last year’s. He’s pulling out now. What do you think?”
“Stay with him. I’m on my way.”