A Wild and Lonely Place Read online

  “You’re not saying that Barbara and Rupert—”

  “I’m not saying my crazy parents have hurt my career, but they sure haven’t helped. You know them. She still goes to her Marxist study group every Wednesday night, and you’ll find her on the front line of every lunatic-fringe protest. And he still turns up at every open meeting at City Hall to tell them who and what he doesn’t like in local government—which is everybody and everything. I love them and I wouldn’t change them, but they’re not exactly assets.”

  I doubted the situation was as grim as she painted it, but it wasn’t good, either. “So that’s why you asked me for help on this investigation,” I said. “You want to crack the case and show them all up.”

  “I want to hand them the bomber, say ‘fuck you,’ turn around, and walk away. You help me do that and, like I promised, I’ll recommend you for the reward.”

  Again I was silent. For two weeks now Joslyn had been acting in direct violation of policy. She’d given me copies of reports and files, briefed me on the progress of the investigation. Together we’d brainstormed till both our heads ached. I wanted to crack the case, too—and not only because of the reward or for Adah’s sake—but now I wondered if I hadn’t been abetting her in a risky and potentially ruinous course of action. Maybe I should back off.

  She must have sensed what I was thinking. “McCone, dont’t listen to me,” she said quickly. “I’m having a bad day, that’s all.”

  “You know that’s not all. We need to talk.”

  “Talk? We’ve been talking.” She hitched her chair up to the desk and glared at me. “I’m out of time for you. Get the hell out of here and let me work. I’ll call you when I’ve got something interesting.”

  I nodded dubiously and left her along.

  Maybe, I thought, it was only the stress of the assignment that was getting to Joslyn. After all, a message was being sent to the task force from local and state government; from SFPD, ATF, FBI, and Postal Service headquarters; from Congress; from the White House itself: the Diplo-bomber is making international relations very iffy; get your asses in gear and find him.

  * * *

  After circling the surrounding blocks for some fifteen minutes, I finally found a parking space near the looming cliff face of Tel Hill and walked past decorator showrooms and antique shops and small cafés to RKI’s renovated brick warehouse. On the sidewalk I paused, however, reluctant to go inside. Even being on the premises made me uneasy.

  My feelings weren’t due to the type of business they conducted; counter-terrorism contingency planning and hostage-recovery services were necessary for corporations Operating in today’s high-risk environment, and if RKI’s methods were somewhat unorthodox, they usually worked. Nor were the feelings due to the fact that most of RKI’s principals and operatives had murky pasts; my lover, Hy Ripinsky, owned a past that crisscrossed those of Gage Renshaw and Dan Kessell, and now that he’d told me about it, I understood both the forces and the mistakes that had driven him. The potential for violence that I sensed in RKI’s people didn’t concern me; I’d long ago been forced to recognize the same potential within myself. And as for ethical considerations—well, I paid them a lot of lip service, but as recently as last fall I’d availed myself of the firm’s help on a difficult case.

  No, what really bothered me was that I might be becoming too much like those people.

  There was a time when I’d viewed everyone—both victim and perpetrator—through idealistic, compassionate eyes. No longer. There was a time when I’d gone strictly by the book, but then I’d found that the book was something that a lot of people in my business talked about but few had read. Toward the beginning of my career, remorse over having killed a man in order to save a friend’s life had dogged me for years. But last spring I’d cold-bloodedly shot another man and called it justice. I wasn’t sure that I liked the woman I was becoming, but she was formed of life experiences I couldn’t eradicate. You work with what you are, I often told myself on those dark, lonely nights when my misdeeds caught up with me.

  I told myself that now, crossed the sidewalk, and pushed through the building’s lobby entrance. The armed guard at the desk looked up from his closed-circuit TV monitors, surprised. “Mr. Ripinsky’s not in the office this week, Ms. McCone.”

  I set my bag and briefcase on the desk and went over to the security gate. “I’m here to see Mr. Renshaw.”

  “Sorry, he didn’t tell me he was expecting you.” He made a cursory check of my things, then buzzed me in. Let me get your badge.”

  Since Hy had struck his deal with Renshaw and Kessell last winter, they’d kept my photo I.D. on file with those belonging to frequent visitors to the San Francisco offices. Not that I used it all that much; Hy seldom used any of RKI’s facilities, preferring to work out of his ranch in Mono County or the cottage we jointly owned on the Mendocino coast. He was, in fact, at the cottage right now, and I planned to join him on the weekend.

  The guard handed me the badge, and I attached it to my lapel. “Mr. Renshaw’s in the projection room,” he told me. “You know the way?”

  I nodded and went through an unmarked door and down a long white corridor.

  Renshaw was waiting for me in the last row of padded chairs, his feet propped on the one in front of it like a teenager at a double feature. I half expected him to be clutching a grease-stained bag of buttered popcorn. Wordlessly he indicated I should sit beside him, then fiddled with the buttons on the console between us. The lights dimmed and the projection screen shimmered.

  I’d sat here before, in this exact place, the day he told me he intended to kill Hy.

  “Do you mind if we go over the chronology of these bombings?” he asked.

  “That wouldn’t hurt.”

  A slide flashed onto the screen: a large, austere building, its windows blown out. Glass and rubble littered the foreground, and a military guard stared down at it as if he wondered where it had come from.

  Renshaw said, “Brazilian Embassy, Washington, D.C. March, nineteen ninety. The bomb was in a package delivered by mail, postmarked D.C. No fatalities, but the clerk who opened it was disabled.”

  A second slide replaced the first, showing a plain sheet of paper that bore a single sentence: VENGEANCE IS MINE. The letters were Italic—Palatino Italic, to be exact. Joslyn had told me they were a brand of rub-on lettering commonly sold in art and office-supply stores from coast to coast.

  “His message isn’t very original,” Renshaw commented, “but he makes his point. This was also postmarked D.C., arrived at the embassy the day after the bombing. No fingerprints, nothing distinctive about the paper or the envelope.”

  “As was the case with what they recovered of the packaging the bomb came in.”

  The next slide showed a black Lincoln Continental standing in front of a restaurant called Fino. The car’s doors had been blown off, and a body in a dark suit lay twisted on the backseat, legs extending toward the bloody pavement.

  I said, “Also D.C. August of ninety. The car belonged to the Saudi Arabian ambassador. He and some of his attachés were inside the restaurant. The package was on the backseat; apparently the driver noticed it and investigated. The same message, in the same typeface, on the same stationery stock, was delivered to the embassy the following day. Again postmarked D.C.”

  Renshaw clicked slowly through the next few slides. “He hit the office wing of the Pakistani Embassy in November of that year. No fatalities, same message the next day. Now we move to New York City.”

  Another slide: a torn-up living room. Large mirrors on its walls were shattered; their shards reflected a jumble of ruined furnishings. A primitive wood carving stood in the foreground, decapitated.

  I said, “Co-op apartment in the east eighties belonging to an official of Ghana’s United Nations delegation. The bomb was inside a florist’s box delivered by messenger. The messenger was never identified, and all the florist’s personnel were checked out and eliminated as suspects. No fatali
ties, but the maid who accepted delivery was badly injured.”

  Renshaw said, “January of ninety-one, right?”

  “Right. The usual message arrived at Ghana’s U.N. offices the following day, postmarked midtown Manhattan.”

  Renshaw kept advancing the slides. “The bomber really had it in for the U.N. He blew up the head of the Yemeni delegation’s car in June of ninety-one, severely crippling the son of a minor official. In February of ninety-two the Mexican ambassador’s apartment was hit. A lot of destruction, but no fatalities or injuries there. In December of ninety-two the entire Panamanian delegation was at a Christmas banquet at a midtown restaurant. A messenger with a package for them seemed overly eager to leave; restaurant management got suspicious and called the bomb squad, but the man got away and was never I.D.’d. Of course, the usual message arrived after each incident.”

  “And then he took a couple of years off.”

  “Until last December.”

  The next slide showed the bombed-out facade of the storefront offices of the Libyan Trade Commission on Howard Street here in the city.

  “One fatality,” I said, “again, the clerk who opened the package. It was mailed from the main post office, as was the message that followed.”

  Another slide: an office with furnishings knocked helter-skelter. There was a big hole in the rear wall, and on the floor chalk marks outlined where a body had fallen.

  Renshaw said, “Belgian consular offices. Last month. Bomb and message both mailed from the Lombard Street substation. One fatality.”

  He left the slide on the screen, and we contemplated the destruction silently. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, but I was entertaining emotions, rather than intellectual concepts.

  Somewhere in this city was a person who methodically plotted and carried out monstrous crimes. A person who’d gotten away with them time and again. He could be any nationality, could come from any walk of life. Could look as ordinary and harmless as the wrappings that concealed the bombs. Could kill or maim again at any moment. The thought of such a creature walking the same streets as the people I cared about chilled me through and through.

  Renshaw had only guessed at part of my interest in the Diplo-bomber case. I wasn’t sure if even Joslyn was aware of it. Yes, a million-dollar reward was attractive; I’d be a fool if I didn’t want to claim it. But there was more.

  Last August a hired killer had blown up a house that had stood on the Mendocino coast property that now belonged to Hy and me. I had been his target, but someone else had died in my place, and other lives had been ripped apart as a result. Time had passed, people had healed, the rubble had been cleared from the cliff top; the place seemed beautiful and serene once more. But often at night I could sense violent ripples beneath the surface of that serenity, could hear the echoes of grief and loss in the waves and sea breeze. The aftershocks of that bombing would never be stilled.

  I couldn’t do anything about the tragedy in Mendocino County, but I sure as hell could take steps to prevent any more bombings in San Francisco. I was, as Adah told me when she asked me to help, “a flat-out fine investigator, if sometimes a pain in the butt.”

  I turned to Renshaw. “Okay, Gage, we’ve reviewed what’s public knowledge. Now show me something new.”

  He smiled thinly and advanced the slide.

  An imposing house: creamy white plastered brick, with a mansard roof and heavy cornices. The arched windows were elaborately ornamented, and carved pillars rose beside the massive front door. Yew trees stood like sentinels at its corners. I’d seen it before but couldn’t place it.

  Renshaw said, “Azadi Consulate, Jackson Street near Octavia.”

  “Azad—isn’t that one of those oil-rich emirates?”

  “Right. Oil rich, progressive, and politically stable. They’ve maintained the consulate since the late sixties, do a high volume of business with our West Coast oil companies.”

  “But they haven’t been—”

  “The target of a bombing? No.”

  The next slide showed another sheet of plain paper lettered in Palatino Italic: BE FOREWARNED. Below a sentence was taped, obviously a headline clipped from a newspaper: BRAZILIAN EMBASSY BOMBED.

  I asked, “The Azadis received this after the first D.C. bombing?”

  “Yes. And again after each subsequent one.” He showed slides of the messages in quick succession.

  Odd. According to Joslyn’s files, none of the other diplomatic missions who had been bombed had reported receiving such warnings. But then, neither had Azad. “Did these come to the consulate, or to other Azadi delegations as well?”

  “Only the consulate here.” Renshaw switched the projector off and the screen went blank.

  “Okay,” I said, “what’s RKI’s connection to Azad?”

  “We handle their security in San Francisco, D.C., and New York.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “They were impressed with how we dealt with a situation for an American company operating out of their capital in the late eighties. When these messages started arriving, they decided to beef up their protective measures at all three of their U.S. locations and contacted us.”

  “Did they also contact the authorities?”

  “No. Mrs. Hamid has an aversion to negative publicity and, besides, the authorities hadn’t done anything for the bomber’s other targets.”

  “And Mrs. Hamid is…?”

  “Malika Hamid, consul general here.”

  “A woman consul general? Interesting, for an Arab country.”

  “As I said, they’re progressive.”

  I thought for a moment. “Do you buy the idea that they didn’t contact the authorities because of Mrs. Hamid’s concern about bad press?”

  He shrugged.

  “There’s got to be more to it than that.”

  “If there is, no one’s told us.”

  “And you haven’t asked.”

  “It’s not our policy to question our clients’ motivations. Not that I wouldn’t mind finding out, and that’s where you—”

  A pager went off in Renshaw’s pocket. He took it out, went to an extension phone on the wall by the door, and spoke briefly, his back to me. When he hung up and turned, he asked crisply, “Sharon, do you want in on this or not?”

  His cut-to-the-chase tone alerted me that something big had happened. I stood. “Yes, I want in.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Azadi Consulate. There’s been a bombing attempt, and one of our operatives is injured.”

  Two

  The police had barricaded Jackson Street between Octavia and Laguna, so we parked around the corner from the consulate. The pavement there was at a steep grade, but Renshaw neglected to curb the wheels and set the emergency brake of RKI’s maroon-and-gray mobile unit. As he stepped down, the van lurched backwards. I grabbed the brake handle, pulled it up, then twisted the steering wheel to the left. Renshaw acknowledged his mistake with a rueful headshake.

  When I joined him on the sidewalk, he muttered, “Dan would’ve laughed his ass off at that—and then made me pay out of pocket for the damage.”

  “You were preoccupied.” I quickened my step to keep pace with him. “Surely Kessell could understand that.”

  “That’s no excuse—and I wouldn’t accept it either. Neither Dan nor I tolerates any margin for error.”

  Given their pasts, I could understand why. Renshaw had been an agent on the DEA’s elite—and now defunct—Centac task force, based in Southeast Asia. When it was disbanded in the mid-eighties, he disappeared into Indochina and emerged a wealthy man several years later; I’d never had the nerve to ask him about that period in his life. I did know that earlier, in the seventies, he’d accepted finder’s fees for steering important people who wished to remove themselves and their assets from the war-torn Asian countries to an air-charter service run out of Bangkok by Dan Kessell. Hy—who had been discharged from the marines after a f
lare-up of his childhood asthma—had been one of Kessell’s pilots; guilt stemming from his actions and experiences during those turbulent, terrible years had consumed him for nearly two decades. Not so with Kessell, though; on him they had left no mark. He was, according to my lover, the same resilient and apparently conscienceless man of the early days in Thailand.

  Renshaw and I rounded the corner onto Jackson. A police barricade blocked access and farther down I spotted squad cars, a fire truck, the bomb squad van, and an ambulance. Word about this latest bombing had already reached the media; reporters and camerapeople clamored to be allowed onto the scene, and the uniformed officers were having trouble controlling them. Renshaw and I pushed through the crush.

  As Gage held up his I.D., a Channel Seven cameraman swung around and began filming us. I stepped back so Renshaw’s body blocked view of me; already I had too high a public profile, and having my presence there broadcast could hamper my ability to investigate. The officer moved the barricade to let us pass, then shoved the persistent cameraman back when he tried to follow. Immediately he began yowling about the public’s right to know. I shot him a disgusted look and trotted after Renshaw.

  In front of the consulate, the excitement was dying down. The fire crew prepared to leave, the bomb squad van pulled away, and a pair of cops leaned against a black-and-white, talking in low voices. Neighbors from the surrounding houses and apartment buildings began to wander home, their hushed conversations in counterpoint to the harsh sounds from the emergency-vehicle radios. I recognized an unmarked blue Buick that belonged to the task force.

  The big creamy-white house was set farther back from the sidewalk than its neighbors, surrounded by a low ornamental fence and fronted by a formal garden. To the left of the brick walk leading to its front door lay the ruins of a fountain; jagged chunks of concrete were scattered around its tiled base, and water had gushed from its piping, soaking and puddling the ground. The pipe, capped off now, leaned at a forty-five-degree angle.