Wolf in the Shadows Read online

  Copyright © 1993 by Marcia Muller

  All rights reserved.

  Mysterious Press

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56159-4

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Part Two

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  SHARON MCCONE MYSTERIES BY MARCIA MULLER

  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 Anne-Marie d’Hyevre and Michael Dowdall

  Many thanks to Liz Alexander, Lewis Berger, Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Janice Hayes, Betty Lamb, DeEtte Turner, Collin Wilcox, and an anonymous officer of the U.S. Border Patrol. Your generous volunteering of your time, expertise, and insights is greatly appreciated.

  And special thanks to my in-house editor and husband, Bill Pronzini.

  Part One

  Thursday, June 10

  The mesa was the most desolate place I’d ever seen.

  I climbed out of the Scout and followed my guide across rock-strewn ground where nothing but mesquite and spiny cholla cactus grew. The morning was overcast, the air saturated with salt-laden moisture—spitty weather, we used to call it. The wind blew sharp and icy off the flat gray sea.

  Ahead of us where the ground dropped off to distant ranchland stood the tumbledown adobe hut. My guide, Andrés, stopped several yards from it and waited for me to join him. “There is where it happened,” he said in a hushed voice.

  I looked at the hut, felt nothing. It was simply a relic of a bygone time, crumbling now into the earth that had formed it. I started toward it, then glanced back at my companion. He stood, arms folded, staring resolutely at the Pacific. Superstitious, I thought, and kept going.

  The hut had no roof, and two of the walls leaned in on each other at abnormal angles. I stepped through an opening where a door once had been onto a packed dirt floor, Loose bricks were scattered underfoot, and trash drifted in the corners; fire had blackened the pale clay.

  I still didn’t feel anything. No more loss or grief, no sense of horror—none of the emotional shock waves that surge through me at the scene of a violent death, even though the death that had happened here should have touched me more deeply than any.

  What’s wrong with you? I asked myself. You can’t have used up all your tears in one night.

  For a few minutes I stood still, looking for something—anything—and willing my emotions to come alive. But there was nothing here, so I turned and went back outside. I felt a tug at the leg of my jeans and glanced down: a little tree, dead now. Poor thing hadn’t stood a chance in this inhospitable ground. A few crumpled papers were caught in its brittle branches; I brushed them away. Rest in peace.

  One of the scraps caught my eye, and I picked it up and smoothed it out: U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Notice and Request for Deposition. The form the border patrol issues to illegal aliens when they pick them up, carelessly discarded here because it didn’t matter anyway. One trip over the border fence and through the wild canyons—infested with rattlers, scorpions, and bandits—had been aborted, but that made no difference. Soon the illegal—in this case, the form showed, one Maria Torres—would be back, and others would follow in a never-ending stream. I let the paper drift from my fingers.

  Then I walked away from the hut where so much had come to an end and stood at the very edge of the headland. To my right lay the distant towers of San Diego and, closer in, the vast Tijuana riverbed. The river itself had long ago been diverted from its original course; it meandered westward, its waters made toxic by Mexico’s raw sewage. Straight ahead was its destination, the leaden gray Pacific. And to my left, Baja California. A border patrol helicopter flapped overhead.

  I turned and faced south. Cars moved on the toll road leading away from the border; beyond it sprawled the pastel houses and iron and red-tiled roofs of Tijuana. The famed bullring—like a giant satellite TV dish that could service all of Baja—stood alone at the edge of town. I stared at the black steel-paneled boundary fence that lay across the ridge of rugged hills, and thought of satin funeral ribbons.

  For a long time I stood there, thoughts and impressions trickling randomly through my mind. I recalled the words “You keep what you can use, throw the rest away.” And then the sluggish flow began to rush in an unstemmable torrent toward the obvious conclusion. When I finally began to feel, the emotions were not the ones I’d anticipated. I turned and ran back to where AndrÉs still contemplated the sea.

  I’d come here this morning on a pilgrimage, thinking that everything was over, finished. Now I realized my search was only beginning.

  One

  Monday, June 7

  “Hey, where’re you going in such a hurry? I need to talk with you.”

  Hank Zahn’s hand gripped my shoulder as I tried to squeeze by him on the front stairs of All Souls Legal Cooperative’s main building. He jerked me to such an abrupt halt that I nearly lost my footing on the fog-damp step.

  “Sorry,” my boss added, steadying me with his other hand and whacking me on the elbow with his briefcase.

  “Let go of me,” I said through gritted teeth, “before we both fall down and end up in matching leg casts.”

  Hank did as I told him, running his free hand over his wiry gray-brown hair. “Sorry,” he repeated.

  “Just see that it doesn’t happen again.” I kept going, hoping to make a getaway while he was still befuddled.

  “Wait!” he called.

  I sighed and turned. “What?”

  “I need to talk with you before the partners’ meeting at three.”

  It was close to noon now. “What about?”

  Hank’s eyes grew evasive behind his thick horn-rimmed glasses. “Oh, some things to do with the reorganization.”

  So they’d finally coined a term for it—reorganization. It referred, I supposed, to the mixed bag of changes that had gone into effect during All Souls’s transition from a small neighborhood law cooperative to one of northern California’s largest legal-services plans. At any given time during the past year you could have found at least one employee reeling from some change in job status or description, and now it appeared it was to be the turn of their chief investigator. From the look in Hank’s eye
s, I wasn’t going to like what I heard. Still, I had my priorities.…

  “Hank,” I said, “I’m working a case, and I’ve got to take off.”

  “I really need to—”

  “I’ll try to get back to you before three.”

  “If not …” He paused, looking downright guilty now.

  “Yes?”

  “The partners would like you to attend the meeting.”

  Bad sign. Very bad. What the hell was this? Surely they didn’t plan to fire me? There had been a number of dismissals lately, and Lord knew I’d played fast and loose any number of times with what few rules All Souls had, but I was a good investigator, and they damn well knew it.

  I frowned, but before I could say anything, Hank fled up the steps. “Be there,” he called back to me.

  I watched him go inside, his shoulders hunched under the burden of his guilty knowledge, then shrugged and headed downhill, where my old red MG was sandwiched between the corner and a fireplug.

  * * *

  All the way to Oakland Airport I fretted. I’d just come off an investigation that had turned into a flat-out case of obsession, and I’d expected to give such behavior a rest for a while, but here I was tying myself into emotional knots a day and a half later. From All Souls in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights district to Treasure Island in the middle of the Bay Bridge, I obsessed about my job. From Treasure Island to the airport, I obsessed about Hy.

  Hy—Heino—Ripinsky. Gentleman sheep rancher and director of an environmental foundation in the Mono County town of Vernon on the shore of Tufa Lake. Multitalented: airplane pilot, book collector, naturalist, sometime diplomat, sometime protester for worthy causes. Long rap sheet to go with the latter. Multilingual: English, Spanish, Russian, and French, speaking all with unaccented fluency. Tall, lanky, hawk-nosed, with shaggy dark-blond hair and a droopy mustache. Given to rugged outdoorsman’s clothing, but also at home in formal fund-raising attire. A gentle, passionate man, but a man whom I’d also heard described as dangerous, perhaps violent.

  And he did have his darker side. Tragedy in his background: one wife, Julie Spaulding, who had, as he put it, saved him from hell and later died of a debilitating disease. Julie, who had understood his self-destructive urges and wisely established the Spaulding Foundation to occupy his lonely hours. Mystery in his background, too: a nine-year hole, years away from Tufa Lake about which rumors abounded. Rumors, from employment by the CIA to a prison term—and none, I was convinced, that came close to the true story.

  Hy refused to tell me the truth, even after we became lovers late in March. The barrier of silence had driven me to set up a case file containing what fragmentary information about his past I’d been able to gather. A file that I’d destroyed only a little over a week ago, convinced I had no right or need to pry into what he seemed determined to conceal, and had set up once again just this morning when I learned from his assistant at the foundation that Hy had apparently staged a deliberate and well-thought-out disappearance.

  At first tracking him down had seemed like an adventure, perhaps a response to a subtle challenge on his part. But after an hour of thought, I began to wonder if the disappearance was deliberate after all. Hy didn’t play games, not that kind. Now tracking him down seemed imperative. Now I was afraid for him.

  * * *

  Oakland Airport was nearly socked in by fog, and the wind gusted across its north field, where the general aviation terminal was located. A couple of corporate jets were fueling up, but otherwise there was little activity. I skirted the terminal building to the small aircraft tie-downs.

  The wind made the Cessnas and Beechcrafts and Pipers strain at the chains that tethered them; their wings creaked and shivered, looking deceptively fragile. I moved quickly among them until I spotted Hy’s Citabria Decathlon in the tie-down where he’d parked it last Wednesday morning. Even if it hadn’t been in the same place, I would have known it instantly by the blue silhouette of a gull that seemed to soar against the white background and the identification number, 77289. It was a small, high-winged plane—tandem two-seater, and aerobatic. Hy had once proudly informed me that it could fly upside down, but so far, thank God, he hadn’t treated me to that experience.

  As I approached the Citabria, I felt deflated, a little shaky, even. I supposed that in the back of my mind I’d hoped to find it gone, learn that Hy was on his way back to Tufa Lake, and be able to stop worrying. But seeing it here brought the gravity of the situation home to me, and now I was sure that Hy’s disappearance wasn’t a playful challenge to my investigatory abilities.

  When we’d climbed out of the plane last Wednesday morning, back from a Memorial Day weekend vacation in the White Mountains, he’d said he planned to refuel and immediately continue on to San Diego, where one of his many unnamed old buddies had a business proposition to make him. True to form, Hy hadn’t given me a hint as to what the proposition might be or where to reach him, had merely said he’d fill me in if it worked out. Probably I should have become concerned for him sooner, because he hadn’t called me. One thing— practically the only thing—I could depend on Hy for was to keep in touch.

  “Can I help you with something, ma’am?” One of the linemen, bundled against the cold in a down jacket, appeared around the tail of the Citabria. Hy often claimed that a pilot could instantly identify an airport by looking at a picture of the line personnel—in Burbank, for example, they all resembled movie actors—and I had to admit that this one, with his unshorn hair and single earring, had a touch of nearby Berkeley about him.

  “This plane,” I said, resting my hand on the Citabria’s wing, “has it been moved since last Wednesday?”

  The man shook his head, then looked more closely at me. “You were the passenger, I remember.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, it’s been here all along. The people at the counter in the terminal are getting a little curious; fellow said he’d only be tied down overnight, and it’s coming up on a week now. He doesn’t show pretty soon, they’ll have to do some checking.”

  “He said he’d be staying here in the area?”

  “Guess so.”

  I couldn’t believe Hy had lied to me about his destination. That wasn’t his style; rather than lie, he’d simply employ silence. “Did he mention where?”

  “Not to me. In fact, at first he wasn’t going to stay at all. Said he was going to make a phone call, then fuel up. But when he came back outside, he told me his plans had changed and got his gear.”

  “And went where? Did somebody pick him up?”

  The lineman shrugged. “Didn’t notice.”

  “Well, thanks for your help.” I dug in my bag and gave him one of my cards. “If he comes back or calls in, anything like that, will you get in touch with me?”

  His eyes widened slightly, the way some people’s do when they realize they’ve been talking to a private investigator. “Sure. You might want to check with Sandy at the desk inside. She probably knows more about this.”

  “I’ll do that.” I gave the Citabria a last glance and headed for the terminal.

  Sandy had curly auburn hair and a friendly freckled face, and reminded me a little of my assistant, Rae Kelleher. When I explained what I was after, she pulled the card Hy had filled out and let me see it. All it gave was his name, address, and the plane’s registration number. He’d also told her that he only intended to tie down overnight and had asked that they have the Citabria refueled.

  “The lineman told me that Mr. Ripinsky originally came inside to make a phone call,” I said, handing the card back to her.

  She nodded and motioned toward the pay phones. “He did that before he checked in with me.”

  I myself had made a brief call before driving back to the city; Hy must have come in very soon afterward. “Did you notice if it was local or long-distance?”

  “Long-distance. He came over and asked me for change for the phone, but I couldn’t spare any, so he said he’d use his credit card,�
��

  “Did he make just the one call?”

  “No, two. And he wrote something down, maybe directions.”

  “And then he checked in with you?”

  “Yes. Afterward he went outside, and a little while later I saw him talking with Jerry, one of the linemen who was just going off shift. I got the impression they know each other pretty well. Does Mr. Ripinsky fly in here a lot?”

  “Fairly often. Is Jerry working today?”

  She shook her head. “He’s on vacation—visiting his folks in the Midwest, I think. Won’t be back till next week.”

  Dead end for now—dammit.

  “Jerry gave him a ride,” Sandy added. “Probably to the main terminal.”

  “What makes you think they went there?”

  “Because Jerry’s seeing a waitress at the snack bar there and he usually goes over and has breakfast when he gets off.”

  “You’re a good observer.”

  “Well, I had a good subject.” She winked at me. “Mr. Ripinsky’s a very attractive man.”

  * * *

  I could think of only two reasons Hy could have had for going to the main terminal: to catch a connecting flight to a city that was far enough outside the Citabria’s range to make flying himself there a hassle, or to rent a car. And since he’d told both the lineman and Sandy that he only planned to tie down overnight, the latter was the more likely. It was close enough to the time of day when he would have arrived at the terminal that I reasoned the car-rental clerks would be the same ones who were on duty that morning; I started at Hertz and worked my way along the counters, showing the photo of Hy that I kept in my wallet. At a small cut-rate firm called Econocar—trust Hy not to squander on inessentials—I got lucky.

  The young black man with a high pillbox haircut recognized Hy immediately. “Yeah, he rented from us,” he said. “It was a slow morning, and I remember him because he was carrying a bunch of expired credit cards. Had a hell of a time finding one that wasn’t. He joked about it, said he couldn’t be bothered with cutting them up and signing the new ones.” He shrugged skeptically.