Marquez answered the question before it came. “I don’t know where they are, but you know who to ask.”
“I do, and Richie Crey is going to find out he could end up back inside if he obstructs.”
They looked at the remaining photos and then returned several times to three shots, all taken through fog and with no way to make out the location exactly, but it was Anna’s car, a parking lot Marquez knew was the fishing access, then a second car, a white BMW, and a shot of a man standing near a woman who was probably Anna. The photos were taken from above, probably from the levee road. The tall man near her was not Ludovna, August, Nike Man, or Crey. Well, he might be Crey, he conceded, then added, “But I don’t think he is.”
Selke’s phone rang before he could answer. Marquez watched him study the number on his screen.
“That’s the Feds,” he said to Marquez. “They’re going to take my case away.”
He walked onto the deck to talk to them, and Marquez could hear enough to know that’s exactly what was happening. When he heard Selke describe what they’d found on the computer he backed out of the photos and clicked onto the Internet. Raburn was on dial-up, had a power and telephone line strung from the roof of the houseboat to a tree on the shore. The dial-up was slow, and he heard Selke starting to wind down the conversation. But now the Net came up, and he attached all of Raburn’s photos, then emailed them to an address he used only with the SOU. The file was still sending when Selke hung up and came back in.
“What’s the story?” he asked Selke.
“They want that computer tonight. They want me to bring it to them and there’s something more going on. It’s more than the Raburn murders.”
Marquez looked down at the laptop, saw the last green bar fill, and the icon disappear. He clicked out of the Net as Selke walked over.
“Want me to turn it off?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
Marquez shut down the computer.
“I emailed myself the photos.”
“I figured that’s what you were doing. I want you to copy me.”
“Give me an address.”
He waited now as Selke wrote it down ayzSelke@yahoo.com. So Selke wasn’t going to chance sending it to the county either.
46
The next morning he rode into San Francisco with Katherine, and it was nice to be together. They were out of their routine for once. He looked at Kath’s face, her profile, the ghost streak of white hair along the dark hair at her temple. They drank cappuccinos, sitting at one of the marble tables at Presto on the Wharf, the new one, and he watched her with her employees, the deft way she communicated.
Then he took her car, because Maria was going to pick her up later. He drove over to Golden Gate Avenue to FBI headquarters, where Ehrmann was waiting for him. Marquez had three of the photos with him and more copies of those at home. When he’d left Selke he’d called a photographer friend in Oakland, then emailed the three fishing access photos. His friend ran them through his software program. You could read the faces now on the man and woman in the parking lot. You could read the license plates on the cars. He’d run the plates on the BMW and gotten the name Sandy Michaels and the same southern California address as the Cadillac that Ludovna had burned. He rode the elevator up and then waited as the duty officer found Ehrmann.
Marquez couldn’t remember a face that had changed more than Ehrmann’s had in less than a week. The skin under his eyes was very dark and sagged. He had a cup of coffee on his desk, but his movements had slowed.
“Lieutenant, do I look that bad?”
“You look like you’re carrying it all. You couldn’t have known.”
“They moved those two vehicles every day. I made an assumption I shouldn’t have made about why they were there. We could have gotten someone in the night before to check them out. Those agents are dead because of my failure, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about today, and I don’t want to talk about it. There are several people who are going to sit in with us, and I’d like you to take us through it, including any theories you might have of your own about the Raburn murders.”
They moved to a conference room, and Marquez recounted his conversation with Raburn the day before. He gave them the approximate time of that meeting and knew they’d gather Raburn’s phone records and go through his computer and determine who, if anyone, he contacted after Marquez had left. Then he related driving out there the next day with Shauf and finding the bodies.
“They would have done them in the house,” Ehrmann said, “if it was a straight execution. They wouldn’t have walked them down there without a reason.”
“The door wasn’t locked or latched, but it binds on the jamb and was closed enough to be stuck shut. I pushed it open. But I’m saying this because the wind was out of the east that night, and one thing that struck me was that Cindy Raburn and her daughter, who both had long hair, had pools of blood around their heads and must have bled before the wind blew their hair into the blood.”
“What’s that mean to you?”
“Only that whoever killed them didn’t just walk in, shoot them, and leave. Makes me think there was questioning going on, and if the killings had to do with sturgeon poaching, then it’s very possible it all comes back to Raburn’s working with us. If it looks like an organized crime-style killing to you, could that mean it was somehow retribution for the Weisson’s bust? What I’m wondering is if someone thought Raburn knew something, had information they could get out of him. Since we did connect sturgeon traffic through Weisson’s, it’s possible that Raburn let slip that he was working for us, and they tied the bust to him and killed him out of retribution.”
“Highly unlikely.”
Something Marquez had said caught the FBI’s attention. It didn’t matter whether they told him or not. All that matters is that they find who killed them. He pulled out his photos, had planned to show them only to Ehrmann, but what difference did it make? He kept them face down and then slid the lone shot of Anna’s car across the table to Ehrmann.
“Where did you get this?” Ehrmann asked.
“Off Raburn’s computer yesterday. I met the county detective there. Someone I know was able to improve the quality. That’s Anna Burdovsky in the fishing access lot she staged her disappearance from. This next photo seems to have been taken after another car pulled in alongside her.”
Marquez slowly flipped over the photo with both the BMW and Anna’s Honda. The cars were side by side. With a magnifying glass you could now read the license plates.
“The BMW is registered to a Sandy Michaels, which as near as the county detective can tell may be a fictitious name. We followed Nikolai Ludovna in a Cadillac with the same registered owner. The Cadillac was allegedly stolen and burned. I say allegedly because we think he had it stolen. The point is both are registered to Sandy Michaels.”
He waited. The first two photos were slid around the table. It was obvious they’d already seen them, and no one looked surprised. Instead, they watched him as he flipped over the next one. Again, he slid it to Ehrmann.
“I think the photos are sequential. This is after the BMW pulled in and they both got out of their cars.”
“Okay,” Ehrmann said. “Any others?”
“One. I asked a photographer friend what he could do with the profile of the man and then to compare it to Karsov.”
Now he had their attention. He slid the enhanced headshot and the computer profile comparisons onto the table for everyone to see. “Who’s this photographer?” someone asked, not Ehrmann, but one of the others.
“With our Fish and Game surveillances we’re often taking photos from a long distance, so I’ve paid attention to the advances in improving the quality of photos, particularly digital.”