“Cold this morning,” Shauf said as they got up on the porch of the main house and knocked.
The sky was white, and the lights glowing from inside the house gave the porch a feeling of dusk, though it was just 10:30. The kids would be at school. They knocked on the door again and waited for the sound of creaking boards as someone came to answer. Shauf’s breath clouded the air in front of her as they talked.
“Beautiful old house, but it sure needs work. Almost easier to tear it down,” she said, then asked, “Do you think he’s blowing us off?”
They checked the outbuildings and the rows of trees, looking for Isaac through the bare limbs. They checked the equipment shed because they’d seen day laborers come and go out of there. They drove down to the canning building, and the door was closed but the deadbolt not thrown. Marquez knocked and then pushed on the door. Behind him, Shauf spoke quietly.
“We ought to be careful how far we take it. We don’t have an active warrant anymore.”
The canning room door swung open, and Shauf’s questions died in her throat when she saw what he was looking at.
“Why the children?” was all that came from her.
Marquez reached and stopped Shauf and then walked over to their bodies. He didn’t really need to. He could see they were dead, but leaned over and touched Isaac’s throat and then the girl. He went back for a flashlight and shone it into the pupils of the boy and then Cindy. They lay side by side, lined up, he thought, made to lie that way. Blood had dried, crusted in their hair. He moved the flashlight from one to the other, then turned it off.
Abe had several high wounds on his back as if he’d ignored an order and started to rise after they’d all been made to lie down. His brother had a wound at the temple in addition to two in the back of the head. All five of them had been shot in the back of the head. He moved toward the door, went to the truck and the radio, then changed his mind and flipped open his cell phone. He found Selke’s number.
“Great minds think alike,” Selke said as he heard “It’s John Marquez.”
“I was going to call you this morning. We’ve ID’d the body in the refrigerator. Her name is Sherri La Belle. I want to meet with you this morning, and I’ll come to you. Just tell me where you are. Where did Torp and Perry lose her car? Was that at the chop shop where the bust went down?”
“Selke, hang on, I’m at Raburn Orchards. Do you know where that is?”
“Sure.”
“One of the outbuildings here has a canning room. One of my team, Carol Shauf, is with me. We arrived at approximately 10:30 expecting to meet with Raburn, his brother, Isaac, and Isaac’s wife, Cindy.” He felt compelled to give Selke facts he could start with, some framework. “But we’ve just found their bodies as well as those of the two children in an outbuilding where they do canning. They’ve all been shot twice in the back of the head.”
There was a quiet, a rustling like leaves, and then a much quieter Selke.
“Are you absolutely certain they’re gone?”
“They’re gone.”
“Have you touched anything?”
“Isaac’s throat and the girl’s, feeling for a pulse. The door was ajar. I pushed it open, saw them and walked over to make sure.” He did not want to stay on the phone. “We’ll be out front.”
It felt much colder than it had earlier. He stood near his truck looking out across the bare orchards, and Shauf tapped him on the arm, said, “I’m going to let everyone know.”
Don’t assume the killing is about sturgeon, he thought. It could be an old debt, anything. He could not comprehend killing the children if it was about sturgeon. The boy was older, fourteen is what Raburn had said, wearing the same clothes he’d probably gone to school in yesterday, jeans and baggy T-shirt, but no shoes, no heavy sneakers. They were used to seeing him with his iPod, and he guessed now it happened last night before the kids had gone to bed. The girl was no more than eight or nine, long straight hair blown back alongside her head into pooled blood.
Marquez turned and looked at the door he’d pushed open. He saw the girl lying inside and knew the door had been open long enough after she was killed for her hair to blow into the pooled blood. The girl wore a sweatshirt. Someone at her school would remember what she’d worn yesterday. Someone had seen them yesterday.
Isaac’s arms were along his side. The right side of his face rested in blood. Marquez looked from Isaac, to Abe, to the boy on the far end and couldn’t say why, but saw Cindy and the boy shot first. Shot before anyone knew they were going to die. Then questions asked of Isaac and Abe. Cindy’s hand looked as though it might have rested on her daughter’s back and slid off. Why the kids? On the risk that they’d overheard something?
“John, you look rough,” Shauf said. “Maybe you want to sit down.”
“This happened because I leaned on him.”
“Then he called somebody.”
“Yeah, he probably did.”
“I know it sounds hard but that’s one more mistake he made.”
Except that we don’t really know, he thought. He felt sweat start under his arms and along his spine. He was sure this had happened because he’d cornered Raburn and forced him to it.
“If we’d just taken him down like you wanted to, this never would have happened,” he said, then turned and asked her, “Where’s your camcorder?”
With Shauf he videotaped the scene inside the canning shed. He heard sirens now, heard leaves rustling in the wind through the grove, smelled the heavy mineral blood smell seeping from the door, and took everything he knew about the operation, Raburn’s face yesterday, a fleeting look of shame at shooting out the windows of his own boat. He saw August with his fine Italian leather coats, his black driving gloves, the meticulous Porsche, the goatee trimmed to try to make him look hip.
“They’re here,” Shauf said. “They just turned off the levee road.”
Marquez walked out in the road and caught the eye of the lead driver, stopped him from getting close to the canning room. He watched an ambulance turn down, then an unmarked county unit and a detective getting out. The detective had talked with Selke. He was waiting for Selke but walked in to view the bodies. He set up a perimeter and took statements from them.
At dusk, hours after the coroner had come and gone, Marquez drove away with Shauf. He drove home and plugged the camcorder into his TV and made two tapes. Later, in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep, he watched the tape again. Cindy’s long hair had blown the same direction as her daughter’s, and that fit the wind out of the east. The door had been open, the wind blowing, and Marquez could almost hear voices, the questioning. Not caviar though. Not this kind of killing. What possible threat were the Raburns? Not Cindy. Not with her routine of kids and school and work. Not Isaac who almost lived among his trees. It was Abe. What did you see, Abe? Was it something you saw, and you made the mistake of telling somebody or threatened to tell us? You called somebody after I came by, didn’t you? What did you say to them that brought them out last night?
45
In the late afternoon Marquez waited for Selke on the deck of Raburn’s houseboat. He looked through the windows and saw the same disarray as last time, a man of modest means living alone with his habits. The bed was unmade. Magazines and fishing lures covered the table. A green Heineken can sat at one end. In the kitchen, smoked fish rested on a plate. A big pot sat on the stove, and he remembered Raburn talking about making chili. He’d never finished trimming the windows, and the same can of primer sat under the sawhorse. Paint had dried on the brush. Honest Abe hadn’t been bailed since the last rain and sat low in the water. It was impossible to look at the scene without wondering how much of what had happened was set in motion the rainy Sunday when they’d offered Raburn the deal.