A Wild & Lonely Place (v5) (epub)

  Copyright © 1995 by Marcia Muller

  All rights reserved.

  Mysterious Press books are published by Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  The Mysterious Press name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56161-7

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  6,500 Feet Above The Tehachapi Mountains

  Part One: Northern California

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Part Two: The Leeward Islands

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part Three: The Journey

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Part Four: Northern California

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  PRAISE FOR MARCIA MULLER AND SHARON McCONE

  SHARON MCCONE MYSTERIES

  BY MARCIA MULLER

  A WILD AND LONELY PLACE

  TILL THE BUTCHERS CUT HIM DOWN

  WOLF IN THE SHADOWS

  PENNIES ON A DEAD WOMAN’s EYES

  WHERE ECHOES LIVE

  TROPHIES AND DEAD THINGS

  THE SHAPE OF DREAD

  THERE’s SOMETHING IN A SUNDAY

  EYE OF THE STORM

  THERE’s NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF

  DOUBLE (with Bill Pronzini)

  LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR WILLIE

  GAMES TO KEEP THE DARK AWAY

  THE CHESHIRE CAT’s EYE

  ASK THE CARDS A QUESTION

  EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES

  For Molly Friedrich

  with many thanks

  Thanks also to:

  Toni Alexander, Sharon McCone’s travel agent Suzanne and Rex Stocklin, guides on a scary journey Collin Wilcox, flight instructor to an earthbound author

  And to Bill, without whom…

  6,500 Feet Above The Tehachapi Mountains

  May 28, 6:27 A.M.

  The vast arid waste of the Mojave was behind us now, but the deathlike loneliness of the tiny airfield and the shroud of white smog drifting from the chemical plants at Trona had left nightmare traces in my mind. Below sprawled the Tehachapis, their wrinkled, jagged peaks thrusting aggressively. They seemed to telegraph a warning: we can claim you.

  I pulled my gaze from them before my imagination could cloud my judgment, looked instead at the last ridgeline separating us from the Central Valley and an easy flight home. Piece of cake, as Hy would say. Only Hy wasn’t saying anything just now—hadn’t for some time.

  Anxiously I glanced into the Beechcraft’s rear seat, where he’d crawled after I’d awakened him with difficulty at Mirage Wells. He was slumped against the side—unconscious again, and maybe better off, since the chills had passed and the fever raged again. The little girl sat rigid beside him, silent as she’d been the whole grueling journey. Her dark hair was matted, her face begrimed; her eyes had a bottomless quality that said she’d seen too much in too few years. I wished Hy were able to hug and reassure her, but for the moment my smile and the words “Not long now” would have to do.

  She didn’t respond.

  Well, who could blame her? After we were on the ground, I’d hug and reassure her. And get badly needed medical help for Hy.

  I checked the instruments, looked back at the ridgeline. The morning sun was turning its striated brown rock to gold. Some of my tension was draining away, but the grit of the desert was still on my skin, overlaying the clamminess of the tropics. I made myself feel it so I wouldn’t become careless.

  So much could go wrong yet. Could go wrong at any moment, as events of the past days had proved—

  The impact felt like slamming into a concrete wall.

  My stomach lurched and I felt a surge of panic. I scanned the instruments as the plane shuddered. The VSI showed we were descending fast: fifteen hundred feet per minute, sixteen hundred…When I looked up the ridgeline tilted crazily, then leaped to the top of the windscreen. All I could see was a fractured stone cliff face.

  Downdraft—bad one.

  Extreme clear air turbulence here, and why the hell hadn’t Flight Service warned me? Not that I’d’ve had any choice but to brave it.…

  I glanced into the rear seat again. Hy was still unconscious; no help from that quarter. The child’s eyes were wide, her face drained of color. Afraid I’d betray my panic if I spoke, I tried instead for a reassuring smile, but it didn’t come off.

  Okay, I thought, you know what to do. You’ve watched Hy deal with downdrafts a hundred times or more. Stay calm and change course. Get away from that ridge, turn toward lower ground.

  I turned. Another draft slammed us. For a minute the Beechcraft shuddered so violently that I imagined its wings being torn off.

  Two thousand feet per minute now and still falling!

  Sweat coated my forehead and palms. I gripped the controls, struggling for focus.

  “Mountain flying course,” I said. “Mountain flying—what did they teach me?”

  My mind refused to function.

  Oh God, not this! We’ve come too far, through too much.

  Twenty-three hundred.

  This can’t be happening! I can’t die this way.

  Twenty-five hundred.

  Jagged brown peaks below. Sunny gold cliff ahead. The last things I’ll ever see.

  Sunlight, you idiot! Mountains facing into the sun create up-drafts. Get closer to them, not farther away.

  Find an updraft, and you can use this machine as a glider. Find one, and you’ll clear that ridge.

  I began to test the controls, banking toward the cliff.

  For God’s sake, McCone, find an updraft!

  Part One

  Northern California

  May 18 – 22

  One

  I had just left Adah Joslyn’s office at the Diplo-bomber Task Force headquarters when I ran into Gage Renshaw.

  As I walked toward the elevator of the decrepit Federal Building annex on Eddy Street, I spotted him turning away from the drinking fountain and brushing at some water drops on his rumpled blue tie. There was a dark stain on the lapel of his equally rumpled gray suit that might also have been water but could just as well be the remains of some long-past meal eaten on the run. Gage had the ability to go for days without noticing such things, but of course he noticed me instantly. His dark eyebrows quirked up and his mouth widened in a smile that gave him a distinctly satanic look.

  “Well, Sharon McCone,” he said. “What brings you here—as if I couldn’t guess?”

  “Hello, Gage.” I nodded pleasantly enough and kept walking. The conversation with Joslyn that I’d just concluded had disturbed me, and I was in no mood to spar with an old adversary—even one whom I’d forgiven most of his transgressions.

  Renshaw stepped in front of me and placed his hand over the elevator’s call buttons. “Visiting the SFPD’s representative on the task force?”

  I looked pointedly at my watch. It was only a little after one, and I had
a long gap in my schedule, but I hoped Renshaw would take the hint.

  “Hear anything interesting while you were in there?” he asked.

  “Only that the TV special last night brought out the usual nut cases.” I peeled his hand off the call buttons and punched Down. The single elevator was absurdly slow; I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms, prepared to suffer Renshaw’s curiosity until it came.

  He regarded me through his dark-rimmed glasses, cool gray eyes amused. The dim light from the fixture above our heads cast shadows on the bony planes of his face and made him look like a middle-aged Abe Lincoln. He said, “Of course, you wouldn’t tell me if you had—heard anything interesting, I mean.”

  “Of course. And if I were to ask you why you’re here, you wouldn’t tell me, either.”

  “I think our motives are fairly obvious, and similar. Every investigator in town is whoring after the million-dollar reward the feds’ve posted for information leading to the bomber.”

  Now there was a false note if I’d ever heard one. Gage’s firm, Renshaw and Kessell International, specialized in corporate security and counter-terrorism services, and a million dollars was nothing to them, compared to the handsome retainers they collected. His very presence in San Francisco was suspect, as he worked out of RKI’s world headquarters in La Jolla.

  I didn’t comment, though, just raised my guard an inch or two and waited to see where this conversation was going.

  Renshaw came over and leaned against the wall next to me. His white forelock—startling in contrast to his shaggy dark mane—flopped onto his brow; he tossed it back with a practiced twist of his head. “The figure one million does have a nice ring, Sharon.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Not much chance of one individual claiming it, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “In my experience, an investigation like this requires teamwork.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you might be better off joining forces with an organization that has greater resources than yours.”

  “An organization such as RKI.”

  “We’ve got capabilities you’ve only dreamed of.”

  “Then why on earth would you want to co-opt me?”

  “Well, there is your connection with the task force. You can’t convince me that Inspector Joslyn hasn’t been feeding you information.”

  She had, but Renshaw didn’t need to know that. I pushed away from the wall and punched the call button again.

  “Besides,” Renshaw added, “you and I have worked well together in the past.”

  I stared at him, astonished. “Worked together? You tried to use me to get a lead on Ripinsky—so you could kill him!”

  “And you used our money to save him. Touché. Anyway”—he waved his hand dismissively—“all that’s in the past. Ripinsky’s a partner in the firm now. He, Kessell, and I have reached an understanding. You and he are…well, whatever you are to each other. That makes us practically family.”

  “You and I are not family. We will never be family. And McCone Investigations doesn’t enter into cooperative arrangements with firms whose practices are…incompatible with ours.”

  Renshaw tried to look wounded at my thinly veiled slur upon RKI’s professional ethics, but the effort was lost on me. I’d long before learned that he was incapable of being insulted. If anything, he took pride in his dubious transactions and extralegal shortcuts.

  “Okay,” he said after a moment, “let me make you a proposition. Come back to the shop with me, take a look at what we’re got on these bombings. If it intrigues you, you share what you’ve got with us, and we work together. If you’re still not interested, the subject is closed.”

  The elevator finally creaked to a stop, its doors wheezing ominously as they opened. I stepped on, and Renshaw followed.

  “Why such largess, Gage?”

  “Oh, let’s say for old times’ sake.”

  “Don’t give me that. You must need my connection to the task force very badly. And it isn’t because, as you put it, you’re whoring after a million-dollar reward.”

  He hesitated. “Okay, it’s not. But come back to the shop anyway. What’ve you got to lose?”

  “Only my self-respect.”

  “That’s nothing.”

  “Thanks a lot.” But already he’d intrigued me. I said, “I can be there in half an hour. But remember—I don’t owe you a thing.”

  “Not yet, anyway.”

  * * *

  As I drove to RKI’s building on Green Street between the foot of Telegraph Hill and the Embarcadero, I thought about my earlier conversation with Adah Joslyn.

  My friend was slumped behind her littered desk when I entered her office, a pencil skewered through her thick dark curls, a scowl creasing her honey-tan face. Even on what was obviously a bad day, she managed to look elegant. Her beautifully tailored jacket and pants had something to do with that, but I’d seen her look the same in sweats. Adah’s elegance stemmed from a combination of inner qualities: composure, confidence, assertiveness, her way of meeting the world with a level, honest gaze.

  A fifteen-year veteran of the SFPD, Joslyn had been the answer to the prayers of a former chief beset by complaints that the composition of departmental personnel did not reflect that of the community they served. In order to get the media, the mayor, and various citizen-watchdog groups off his back, he’d cast around for a minority figure to award with a high-visibility promotion, and in Joslyn he found her. She was not only half African-American and half Jewish, but also a decorated, talented cop. When she took her place on the elite Homicide detail, she quickly proved that she wasn’t there as mere political window dressing and soon won the admiration and respect of her most serious detractors.

  A month ago Joslyn had been tapped as one of the department’s two full-time representatives on the newly formed Diplo-bomber Task Force. There she joined agents of the FBI, the ATF, and the Postal Service in the search for the individual who had bombed two Washington, D.C., embassies, two cars belonging to foreign diplomats, two homes of delegates to the United Nations, and two consular offices here in San Francisco. In the past five years the bomber had killed three people and badly injured three others. Pressure for his capture from both our own government and foreign powers was enormous.

  The pressure must have really been on today; Adah’s scowl didn’t soften when she saw me. She waved her hand at her desk and said, “Do you believe all this shit?”

  I eyed the stacks of message slips, each a different color. “Phone tips?”

  “Damn eight-hundred hot line’s jammed. One of the callers told the operator he’d been on hold for fifty minutes.”

  “Anything useful there?”

  “Who knows?” She pointed to the largest stack—blue, weighted down by a stapler. “Those’re the real whackoid callers—the ones who claim the bomber’s an extraterrestrial or Elvis or the ghost of their dead mother-in-law who hated foreigners. The pink pile’s tips from folks who sound like they’re out to cause somebody trouble—the ones who accuse their boss or a family member or the next-door neighbor. Still, they’ve got to be checked out. These white ones”— she poked a third pile—”are from what you might call theorists. They’re cool, logical, persuasive; they’ve got it all figured out. Usually they’re wrong, but every now and then you spot a glimmer of truth that can lead to a breakthrough. And this yellow bunch’re from people whose memories may have been jogged by the TV special—folks who may have noticed something significant at some time and forgotten about it till now.”

  “And these green ones?”

  “First priority. Suspicious callers. Our interviewers have been trained to pick up on certain things; sometimes it’s as subtle as a change in vocal tone, other times the person knows one of the details we haven’t made public.”

  “And how soon are you supposed to finish checking them?”

  “By my calculations, about an hour ago.”

  I was silent,
overwhelmed by the size of her task.

  Joslyn pushed back from the desk, stretched her long legs out in front of her, and sighed. “You know,” she said, “I never used to envy you. The long hours you put in, the way the partners in that law firm ragged you, the shit you’d have to take off sleazes—none of that seemed worth the salary you drew. I’d tell myself, ‘Hey, compared to McCone’s, my life’s not so bad. I’ve got official status, the respect of the community, a good salary and all kinds of benefits.’ Woman on the way up, I was, maybe make captain someday.”

  I leaned on a corner of her desk. “Well, you’re still a woman on the way up. And I’m still doing all those things you don’t envy me for.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ve got your own agency now, you call the shots. And me…well, the shield has gotten kind of tarnished.”

  I frowned questioningly.

  “No, nothing like that. I’m still an honest cop. But the shine’s definitely off the metal. Official status? Doesn’t mean squat. Respect of the community? Forget it. Salary and benefits? I can think of a hundred jobs where I’d do better. And I’m not a woman on the way up anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m pushing forty and still an inspector; that wasn’t in my game plan. And after Bart Wallace moved to Vice, I never got a new partner. Somebody’s on sick leave, they send in Joslyn to pinch-hit for a while. Somebody’s new on the squad, they’re temporarily teamed with me. But then the regular partner comes off leave or the new guy learns the ropes and gets assigned to somebody else, and I’m back to operating solo.”

  “But what about your appointment to this task force? That was a coup.”

  “Hah!” Her hand swept across the desk, stirring the message slips. “What I got here is paper-shuffling, and what I am is a goddamn clerk for a bunch of federal agents who think they’re too good to share their ideas with me. No, the Department stuck me on the task force because years ago they trotted me out as their poster girl, and now they don’t know what to do with me. You see, in their hurry to revamp their image, they forgot to look closely at my background check; if they had, they’d’ve thought twice about promoting a girl from Red Hill.” Red Hill was what Adah called Bernal Heights; according to her, it had once been a hotbed of communists.