“That’s Jacob to you,” he said with a smile as he wheeled out from behind his desk. He offered his hand.
Angie shook it, sensing once more that peculiar combination of power and finesse in his grip.
“My pleasure.” His smile deepened. It exposed his incisors. It put light into his pale-gray eyes. And those eyes reminded her of a wolf. Cunning and watchful.
CHAPTER 19
Driving back to the station, Maddocks replayed for Holgersen the interview with Sophia Tarasov. Holgersen fiddled to free a nicotine gum chiclet from its packaging as he listened. Once he’d liberated his tablet of gum, he popped it into his mouth and said, “So, Vladivostok, eh? Jeezus, you sure I can’t smoke in here, boss?”
“When are you going to stop asking?”
He grinned around the green wad of gum between his teeth. “When it stops annoying you.”
“What do you know about Vladivostok?”
“It’s about eighty klicks north of the North Korean border—a hub for secondhand Jap cars. And Ruskie king crab, most of it poached and sold via South Korea and China to the US market.”
Maddocks shot Holgersen a hot, fast look.
“What? Jeezus, you’s like Pallorino. Thinks I knows nothing. I knows stuff, okay? I got interests.”
Maddocks eyed him a second longer before returning his attention to the wet road and traffic. “Go on.”
“I’s also seen a picture of ink like Tarasov described—a light-blue crab. It’s a thing for a group of the Ruskie crab Mafia.
“Crab Mafia? That’s a thing?”
“Sure it’s a thing. Everyone knows.”
“I didn’t know that was a thing.”
Holgersen shrugged. “Anyone who’s in the seafood industry or who invests in it knows. I’s from fishing folk—my folk all know. My great-gramps fought with the Ruskies in the Resistance during World War II, when the Krauts occupied the far north of Norway. See?” He made as if his hands were scales weighing a balance between the two. “Fishing, criminals. Ruskies. Like I says, I got interests—parta my background.”
Maddocks threw Holgersen another look. “Your great-grandfather was Norwegian?”
“Yep.”
“Guess that explains the name Kjel Holgersen.”
“Yep.” Holgersen turned to look out of the rain-streaked window and drummed his fingers on his bony knee. “My gramps and pops was both direct from Norway. They came over to Canada after my gramma died—they had relatives in what used to be a Norwegian fishing community way up the north coast, above Bella Bella, just shy of the Alaskan border. Wanted to start over and all that. I remember my gramps from when I was little. He told us stories about the Ruskies up near Lapland—guess I’s been interested since then. Fishing. Ruskies.”
“Who was us?”
“What?”
“You said he ‘told us’ stories.”
“Oh . . . no, just me I guess,” he said quickly. “And my pops. The moms wasn’t real interested.”
Maddocks detected the almost imperceptible shift in Holgersen’s tone and body language—he’d let slip something and was covering up. It piqued Maddocks’s curiosity—if you understood the motive, you understood the man. “So that’s where you’re from, then, north of Bella Bella?” he prodded.
His partner opened the window to a sudden blast of cold air, spat his gum out into the street, and wound up the window. A diversion tactic.
“Yeah, so, Vladivostok,” he continued as if the personal exchange had never occurred. “Going to Vladivostok to ask about poached crab is like going to Colombia to ask about cocaine. You gets your head chopped off, or your house is firebombed, or you gets gunned down in the street. You got all these abandoned and illegal pirate boats in the harbor there. Some is used for the gray fishing fleet—full of forged documentation and shit but condoned by Soviet authorities as legit, or the Ruskie officials turn a blind eye for some good vodka and a few hookers. But the black fleet—now thems the real pirates. Crew could be from anywheres—Indonesia, China, Russia, Sudan. The black ships are registered in places like Cambodia, Somalia. But both the black and the gray crab harvests go the same route, basically. Live crab hauled from the Sea of Japan is transferred from a fishing vessel to a legit cargo vessel and taken to South Korea.”
He groped again in his pocket for his gum. The guy never stopped fidgeting. Like it was physically impossible for him to be still. Holgersen cursed as his green gum wad popped from its packaging to the floor. He bent around his seat belt, groping on the floor of the passenger side.
“Hah! Bastards, these packages.” He wiped the wad with his thumb and stuck it in his mouth.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Maddocks said. “That the barcode girls could have traveled the same route as poached crab? They were smuggled with seafood imports?”
“Sounds like, from what Tarasov told you. A while back there was a bust in Seattle—a US seafood distributor was found with a warehouse filled with king crab marked as having come from China. But it was illegal Russian crab, routed via South Korea and then through China, where it was repackaged and got a from-China stamp. The US seafood distributor claimed he didn’t know the crab’s origin, and the prosecutor had nothing on him. Whole thing was dropped. Happens all the time.” He scratched his head and chuckled. “Crab laundering. Through China.”
Maddocks said nothing. His brain was racing. It actually did fit with the route Tarasov had described. He pulled up at a red light.
“Like money laundering,” Holgersen reiterated. “You get it?”
“Yes, for Chrissakes, I get it. We need to run the crab tat that Hansen sketched for us through the gang insignia databases.”
“Yeah. My bet is if we start looking at what crab or seafood imports came into the Port of Vancouver from China or South Korea over the past coupla years, we might nail our ship. But tracing back—now that’s gonna be a big international kinda job, and those Ruskies are full of fake documents from nonexistent government entities. They don’t even have a definition for organized Russian crime, it’s so tangled into government.”
“Your father still in the fishing business?” Maddocks said, circling back to whatever Holgersen might have been hiding with his slip earlier.
Holgersen measured Maddocks with his gaze. “No,” he said slowly. “You knows how it goes with them old resource-based communities—fishing industry in my hometown was decimated by international fishing practices and open-water salmon farms. My pops lost his job. Whole fucking place died. Virtually everyone took off—like a ghost town up there now.”
“Where’s your dad now—the rest of your family?”