The original Riverstone Fisheries corporation later failed, and much of its property passed through bankruptcy and redevelopment. Its physical assets had been scattered, but breeding records and some surviving broodstock were placed under the cooperative's successor trust. Smaller operators, including Ridgewater Fisheries LLC, had been contracted to maintain remnant breeding lines at the old site. The trust's records were incomplete because people retired, operators changed, and paper was moved between offices, but ownership had not simply vanished when the first company dissolved.
"I used to visit the facility twice a year," Martin said. "Then my health made travel difficult. The operator sent reports and photographs. I didn't think I had a reason to doubt them."
Daniel asked when he had last seen an inventory signed by an independent inspector. Martin turned several pages. The last full one was twenty months old. More recent summaries had come from Ridgewater's contracted caretaker, a man named Everett Pike, who had been responsible for the old raceways and a fenced holding pond.
"Do you know where Mr. Pike is now?" Daniel asked.
"He's not answering me. I tried three numbers yesterday."
Mara set her photographs beside the inventory. Several numbers appeared in both sets. These were not merely the descendants of fish that had escaped into storm drains years earlier. Some of the tagged animals had been specifically identified as active breeding adults in the trust's recent records, and several had been assigned to controlled pens at the old Riverstone facility.
"They were supposed to be held in the locked side ponds," Martin said. His voice became very quiet. "Not moved into neighborhood retention water, and certainly not transferred to somebody else's ranch."
I thought of Karen saying community stocking fish and felt the same anger I had felt at the bank, only colder now. An environmental problem could explain why a responsible person wanted animals moved. It did not explain why the person arranging the move had called them ordinary fish while carrying paperwork from a corporation that had been dead for decades.
Martin reached into the portfolio and gave Daniel a copy of the 1994 cooperative agreement. It required written consent from receiving landowners, identified a method for transferring title to offspring, and described how registered operators could receive licenses to manage or sell stock under the program's name. The agreement did not give a stranger ownership by accident, and it did not permit somebody to use the Riverstone Select name merely because they happened to have fish in a pond.
I read the relevant clauses slowly. Some of the older wording was broad, some depended on later schedules, and a few provisions would need a lawyer to interpret. But the principle was plain enough: somebody had spent years trying to preserve the fish as an identifiable asset. Karen had treated them like material to be moved out of the way.
"What would you like me to do with them?" I asked Martin.