Marquez was in Sacramento in Chief Blakely’s office on the thirteenth floor of the Water Resource Building. Blakely moved out from behind her desk and they sat at the table and talked.
‘You’re not going to be suspended, but the SOU won’t do any undercover work until the investigation is over.’
‘On some of our ongoing operations it’s going to be hard to pick up the pieces later.’
‘I know.’
‘How long will we be down?’
They looked at each other, Marquez with his big right hand resting on the table, his sun-weathered face in the shade of this room, Blakely not wanting to answer.
‘You’ve got court dates coming up and paperwork to do. You can check out leads, but the SOU can’t initiate any new undercover operations.’
Blakely didn’t address the real question, so he did it for her before leaving.
‘Melinda Roberts could step in for me.’
‘No, we’re not going there yet. There aren’t going to be any snap judgments. Go pick up the loose ends. Finish the reports. Get your team to focus again. If you want to check out the bighorn tip, that’s fine, go do that.’
The Fish and Game hotline, CALTIP, had recorded a call last night from a young woman reporting an alleged illegal bighorn hunt in the southern Sierra. That might be trophy hunters or bone merchants. A pair of the horns could net you sixty thousand dollars on the black market. The young woman who left the tip also left her phone number, and Marquez had left her a message.
When he walked out the temperature was close to a hundred degrees and the valley sky a hazy white-blue. He drove through the delta on the way home, past Holsing’s boat and then out to Holsing’s house in the Green Valley, a three thousand square foot, cedar-sided, two-story house there was no way Holsing could afford, yet had bought for cash. The house had been searched after the boat but the only thing of interest was a notebook and Holsing’s private cocaine stash. In the notebook was a page of handwritten codes that looked like this: