The Ever

by Marcia Muller

  Where was everybody?

  I leaned against the wall by the living room window, which looked out onto the rear alley, and pulled back the curtains. The rain had stopped. A lone light shone in the building across the way, shielded by blinds. A cat slunk through the shadows. A couple of buildings away, a garbage can lid thumped, and moments later a man jogged along in a peculiar, uneven gait—probably one of the city’s many scavengers who Dumpster-dived for the edible or useful.

  I could go to a movie. No, too restless. Have dinner at one of the many restaurants in the neighborhood? Why, when the pizza—my favorite, Zia’s Lotsa Pepperoni—didn’t appeal? A drink at the brewpub around the corner that Hy and I occasionally visited? A walk? A drive?

  No, no, and no.

  Then I thought of my half sister, Robin Blackhawk. Robbie was in law school at UC–Berkeley, and for weeks she’d been trying to get me over there to see her redecorated apartment. I knew she studied hard on weeknights, but maybe she’d be willing to take a break and have dinner with me. Then I could come back and tackle the file.

  Robbie was home, glad to hear from me, and said I should come right over, bring some wine, and she’d fix us exotic omelets. I put the pizza in the fridge, grabbed a chilled bottle of Deer Hill chardonnay, and left the apartment.

  The guard on the desk in the lobby that night was Jimmy Banks, a student at USF who was putting himself through a graduate program in history by working part time at RKI. I liked Jimmy a lot, and had occasionally sat at the desk with him, discussing San Francisco history. I’m something of a local history buff, while Jimmy was just getting to know the city. He was especially fascinated by my tales of the wild days of the Barbary Coast and the Gold Dust Saloon, which had stood on this lot before they knocked it down to build the warehouse.

  Jimmy looked up from his textbook and waved at me as I went out the door. When I was in college, I’d also worked as a security guard, studying between rounds at various office buildings both here and in Oakland. At the time, I’d thought I was going to be a sociologist—although just what I’d do in the field was unclear. The security job had led me into investigation when I’d discovered that there’s little need for sociologists who don’t possess advanced degrees. Strange, where circumstance takes you. I hoped Jimmy would be as fortunate.

  My old red MG sat across the street. RKI had an underground garage, but this parking space was so convenient that I hadn’t bothered to put the car away in its slot. I was just taking my keys out when—

  Whump!

  The percussive blast threw me against the car. I felt heat on my face, and my ears rang. When I looked back across the street, I saw smoke billowing from RKI’s building. The doors to the lobby had been torn off their hinges and were lying on the sidewalk, and glass rained down from the upstairs windows.

  I scrambled around the MG, crouched in its shelter.

  Another explosion, louder. It rocked the car, sending me off balance. I righted myself, peered over the hood, saw that its paint was blistering from the intense heat. Flames were shooting up from the building’s roof. Through the ringing in my ears, I heard people shouting, feet slapping on the pavement, and the sound of a siren in the distance.

  Another blast, this one quiet compared to the others, but it was the proverbial straw. I ducked down as the building’s brick façade began to crumble.

  Tuesday

  FEBRUARY 21

  I turned away from the doctor just as Hy entered the reception area at S.F. General’s emergency services. I shook my head and walked past him and outside. It was raining again. I tipped my head back and let the drops spatter down on my face.

  It was after one in the morning. Jimmy Banks, the security guard whom I liked and had hoped would be as fortunate as I, was dead. The doctor had told me there had been no possibility of repairing the massive injuries he’d received as a result of the blasts at RKI’s building.

  Hy’s footsteps approached from behind. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Good you came out here, McCone. I recognized a couple of reporters in the waiting room.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of reporters.”

  “I know. Jimmy was a good kid, he didn’t deserve this.”

  “Nobody does. You stopped off at Green Street?” I’d called Hy in La Jolla immediately after the explosion, and he and Dan Kessell had flown up in one of the company’s jets.

  “Yeah. The fire’s out. Nothing’s left but smoldering wreckage. Arson squad’s got it cordoned off and they’ll be on the job at first light. They tell me two people who were working overtime’re probably also dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Adkins and Shibuya. I don’t think you knew either of them.”

  “No. Ripinsky, I think I saw him.”

  “Who?”

  “The ever-running man. From the apartment window. Someone was running along the alley behind the building, maybe ten to twelve minutes before the explosions. I couldn’t see him very well, and I thought he was a scavenger.”

  Hy turned me around, pulled me close. “Thank God you got out of there before it happened.” He was tense, grim; I only felt numb.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked. It was a pro forma question; I didn’t really care. I kept flashing back to Jimmy’s smile and wave as I walked out the door.

  “Dan’s reserved a room for us at the St. Francis, where he’s staying.” Hy released me but kept one arm around my shoulders, began moving us toward the parking lot. When I didn’t speak, he said, “McCone?”

  “I don’t want to go to the St. Francis. I want to go home. But home’s all torn up, and Touchstone and the ranch’re too far away, and . . .” I stopped talking. I was already whining, and I didn’t want to add whimpering to the mix.

  “I know. Believe me, I know. But being together is the next best thing.”

  I thought of how close I’d come to never seeing him again. “No,” I said. “It’s the best. The absolute best.”

  Dan Kessell was stocky, all muscle in spite of his sixty-some years. His iron-gray hair was cut in an outdated flattop that he’d probably worn since he served in Vietnam, and his blue eyes were small and shrewd behind rimless glasses. Dan was a man of few words, weighing at great length what was said to him and sifting through his thoughts before he spoke. Sometimes his piercing gaze made me uncomfortable.

  I didn’t know much about Kessell’s background, only that he had been Special Forces in ’Nam and then ended up operating an air charter service out of Bangkok. In strife-torn southeast Asia there had been fortunes to be made by the unscrupulous, and Dan had made his by transporting anyone and anything for exorbitant prices. And sending his pilots—one of them being Hy—on risky missions from which there was no assurance that they’d return.

  It was on one of those missions that my husband had acquired enough nightmares to last three lifetimes: Dan, in exchange for a bribe from a Cambodian drug lord, had altered Hy’s flight plan to a deserted village where his passengers—members of a rival drug operation—were slaughtered and he was forced to participate in the killing to save his own life.

  I accepted Hy’s reasons for later going into business with Dan. By then Kessell had become a quasi-respectable security pro and RKI was a large, profitable firm. A one-third partnership with generous compensation for what amounted to part-time work—before September 11, 2001, had made corporate and executive protection an extremely hot commodity—allowed Hy to indulge in various humanitarian and environmental projects of his own creation. However, I was always on my guard in Kessell’s presence, always aware of the aura of corruption and danger that hung over him.

  This morning, though, as he and Hy sat in my office, I felt a certain kinship with Dan. People had been needlessly killed; I would have been among them had I delayed in leaving the apartment last night. Kessell, Hy, and I were united against a common enemy.

  There was a knock at the door, and a slender man in stylish slacks and a black leather jacket slipped inside and took a seat next
to Kessell. He looked to be Eurasian, like one of my operatives, Derek Ford.

  “My executive assistant, Brent Chavez,” Kessell said. “Brent, this is Sharon McCone.”

  Not Eurasian—Latino, or part Latino, maybe with some Filipino blood thrown into the mix. In the melting pot that’s California, often it’s difficult to guess at a person’s origins. I myself am one hundred percent Shoshone Indian, and when I tell people that, sometimes they ask why the Scotch-Irish name of McCone. I give them the short version: I’m adopted. The long story is too complicated to explain.

  Chavez and I exchanged greetings, and Dan added, “Brent was in the city on company business yesterday, but fortunately he’d wrapped it up and gone to dinner a couple of hours before the explosion. Not as close a call as yours.” He nodded at me.

  It was late, nearing eleven. I felt unkempt, wearing the same jeans and sweater and underwear as yesterday. The hotel had supplied the necessities for the night, but I’d need to shop for some clothing later. Some of my clothes were bagged up in plastic against the construction-zone dust at the Church Street house, but they were more formal than my usual attire. I’d also need to call my doctor to get a replacement prescription for my birth control pills. And buy a new hairbrush, shampoo, conditioner, blow-dryer, deodorant . . . A briefcase, PDA . . . My God, the list was endless! This was going to be an expensive proposition until RKI’s insurance paid off. Fortunately, I’d left my laptop locked in the trunk of the MG, and nothing I had had at the apartment was irreplaceable.

  Unlike Jimmy Banks’s life.

  Hy said, “I checked with the guard on the safe house, and nobody’s staying there right now. McCone and I’ll take one of the apartments. And I’ve already got our people working on setting up an interim operation on the top floor; our clients can’t be left out in the cold because of this situation.”

  Dan frowned. “You sure it’s secure? This guy—”

  “Isn’t going to wait around here to hit another target. He’s long gone. That building’s probably the safest place in the city.”

  “Okay, but watch your backs.” Dan reached into his briefcase, pulled out a file, and slid it across the desk to me. “Replacements for the documents that were in the apartment.”

  “Thanks. What have the police told you about the explosion?”

  “This one was different from the others. Before, he used a single charge consisting of ordinary black powder and a simple device for completing the electrical circuit. This time there were three bombs—one on the roof and two in the basement; they can’t be sure yet, but they think these were C-4.”

  C-4: a form of plastic explosive.

  Hy said, “You know, I blame the fuckin’ Internet for this. Anybody can go online and learn how to construct explosive devices; they even give sources for the materials. We’ve got all this domestic spying and illegal wiretaps going on, but is anybody doing anything to stem the availability of that kind of information? No!”

  To stop his rant, I asked Dan, “Have the feds arrived yet?”

  “They’re crawling over the site like ants.”

  “How will that affect my ability to pursue this case?”

  He turned cold blue eyes on me. “We don’t need the permission of those clowns to run a parallel investigation.”

  “I’m afraid ‘those clowns’ won’t see it that way. My license—”

  “We’ve got contacts at the Bureau. Hell, you’ve got a former agent on your staff. Besides, nobody can tell you not to do background on what’s in that file.” He gestured at the new one he’d given me.

  I hesitated, then nodded. “Just see that you work your contacts. And I’ll ask my operative Craig Morland to work his.”

  Annoyance flickered in those cold eyes; Kessell wasn’t accustomed to anyone telling him what to do. Then they became as emotionless as before.

  I glanced at Brent Chavez. His face was pale and tense, as if he were imagining a scenario in which he’d stayed late last night at Green Street. Or maybe he was attuned to Kessell’s mood and hoping it wouldn’t flare into unpleasantness.

  Kessell stood and motioned to Chavez. “Come on; our pilot’s standing by at SFO. We’ll fly down south and monitor the situation from headquarters while Ripinsky sets up his operation here.”

  As the three of them left my office, Hy gave me a thumbs-up sign and winked.

  I asked Kendra Williams, our assistant office manager—whom her boss, Ted Smalley, calls “the paragon of the paper clips”—to fetch me a sandwich when she came back from lunch. I fetched myself coffee from the urn in the conference room and asked Ted to keep holding off the media types—a few of whom knew my connection with Hy and had been sucking around the pier all morning—and field any phone calls. Then I settled in to read the file. It was after three by the time I finished. I got up, did a few stretching exercises, then went to the armchair by the window and curled up in it to contemplate the conundrum that was Renshaw & Kessell International.

  The firm was a maverick in the world of corporate security. While they provided such routine services as security program design, preventive and defensive training for executives and other personnel, and risk analysis, their emphasis was more on what they called contingency services: crisis-management plans for extortions or kidnappings, ransom negotiation and delivery, and hostage recovery. Insurance companies that write large antiterrorist policies exercise the right to decide what firms will be called upon in case of a kidnapping or other hostile acts; their names are written into the policy, along with the ironclad stipulation that the FBI is to be called in immediately. Not always so with RKI.

  Their risky and unorthodox methods more often than not turned out positively, but on occasion had proved fatal for both the hostage and the negotiator. While the other firms in their class mainly employed former CIA and FBI operatives, lawyers and accountants, many on RKI’s staff had pasts even more murky and corrupt than Dan Kessell’s. Most of their clients were legitimate companies with legitimate concerns and problems, but others had clandestine reasons for wanting a quick fix without notifying the FBI. For those reasons, they paid top dollar.

  Gage Renshaw, the third principal in the firm and my old sparring partner, was even more of a puzzle than Dan Kessell. He’d been with the DEA, and had worked in Thailand with a select and low-profile task force called CENTAC; when CENTAC was disbanded, Renshaw quit the DEA, disappeared for several years, then reappeared in San Diego and teamed up with Kessell.

  Both men had returned to the States in possession of small fortunes. Gage’s job while in Thailand had been to prevent drug trafficking, but in collaboration with Kessell and others of his ilk, he’d profited immensely from many illegal activities. As Hy had once told me, “Kessell would get at least one referral a week from Gage. Along with his official work, he was out there hustling and making contacts. People wanted to move stuff fast—firearms, gold, jewelry, artifacts, uncut stones, currency. Drugs, too, although Gage professed not to know about that. They wanted to move themselves and their families, and didn’t care what it cost. And it cost plenty, because before Kessell gouged them, Renshaw had his hand out for his finder’s fee.”

  Nice folks, my husband’s partners. When I thought about them for any length of time, I wondered what he was doing with them.

  I wondered what I was doing with them.

  But then I remembered the hostages whose lives RKI had saved. The attacks on corporate personnel that they’d prevented. And the projects Hy funded with his proceeds from the firm: anything from the relocation of refugees to wetlands restoration.

  Was it possible for so much good to come out of such evil? Or was every good deed tainted by the past?

  God, McCone, stop trying to be a philosopher, and get your butt in gear.

  Before I could stir from the chair, however, there was a knock on the door. Julia Rafael, one of my best all-around operatives, looked in at me. Her strong-featured face was strained, her large dark eyes filled with concern.

&nb
sp; “Shar,” she said, “I was watching CNN on the plane back from Seattle and found out about the explosion.” She’d been up there tracking down a witness in a civil suit. “Are you okay?” she added.

  I got up, motioned her inside. “Yeah, I’m okay. Thanks for asking.”

  “Do you and Hy have a place to stay? Sophia and I would be glad to have you with us; you could take Tonio’s room and he could sleep with me.”

  Julia, who lived in a two-bedroom Mission district apartment with her sister and her young son, had the least to offer in a material way of any of my employees, yet she was willing to open her home to us. The others had offered too, but for them it had involved far less sacrifice. I blinked, afraid I might tear up.

  “Thanks so much, Jules, but we’ve got an apartment available.”

  “What about stuff? All your stuff must’ve gotten blown up.”

  “It was.” And I’d been obsessing about it all day. Ridiculous, in light of the enormity of what had happened, but it was my way of disconnecting from my deeper emotions so I could function. When in shock, focus on the small issues.

  I looked at my watch. “Damn! I need to go to the store, but I’ve got to catch Mick before he goes home.”

  Julia sat down on one of the clients’ chairs and took a notebook and pen from her jacket pocket. “Okay,” she said, “what do you need?”

  “You don’t have to—”