The Ever

by Marcia Muller

  Why, I wondered, were my nephew’s similes always couched in terms of food?

  “Crack away,” Hy said, and left the office. He sounded annoyed. Probably because of Mick calling the iMac an ancient machine. For most of his life, my husband had been a confirmed PC user, until this bright-orange baby had lured him into the Apple camp. It was akin to being told your first love couldn’t keep up with the younger, sexier numbers on the dance floor.

  “Before you get started,” I said to Mick, “I think you should know that one of the properties you came up with on Dan Kessell was a dud.”

  “Oh?”

  “Timber Cove. Different Dan Kessell.”

  He frowned. “Interesting. Thing is, Kessell—spelled with two ls—is not all that common a name. And I found only two residential properties in California to which a Daniel Kessell holds title.”

  “A coincidence. It happens.”

  “Yeah.” Mick turned his attention back to the iMac. “Well, let me see what I can do here. Shouldn’t take long.”

  “That can wait till later,” I said, taking Derek’s chair and propping my feet on the shelf of his workstation. “First I need to know what you’ve come up with on Gage Renshaw.”

  Mick swiveled toward me. “Now, he is one interesting guy. Like Kessell, born and raised in Fresno, although I wasn’t able to turn up any link between them.”

  “Dan’s older than Gage; kids tend to associate with their peers.”

  “Right. I don’t think Gage had many peers, though; he was a brilliant student, class valedictorian and, I gather from his lack of extracurricular activities, a loner. Received full scholarships to a number of colleges and chose USC, where he was prelaw. Started law school at Georgetown in D.C., but dropped out when he was recruited by the DEA.”

  “Why, I wonder?”

  Mick shrugged. “Excitement, travel. Maybe the law bored him.”

  “Sounds like what I know of the man.”

  “You know about CENTAC?”

  “Not a lot. They were an elite, high-security task force of the DEA that was suddenly disbanded. Almost everything about them is classified.”

  Mick smiled. “Yes, ma’am, but I’m working on getting it. The words ‘elite’ and ‘high-security’ suggest the kind of power their operatives had; most of them used it positively, but not Renshaw. Those stories Hy told you about his wheeling and dealing are accurate. I e-mailed a couple of people who would know, and they confirmed it. But that’s not the part of Renshaw’s story that interests me; it’s the years after the task force was disbanded and he resigned from the DEA. There’s no evidence he came back to the States, and no hint of where he was all that time.”

  I considered for a moment. “When did he reappear?”

  “A year and three months after Dan Kessell established RKI—well, Kessell International, at that point. Renshaw turned up in San Diego, opened a bank account, and the next day, close to seven million dollars were wired to it from Credit Suisse.”

  “Some of which he used to buy into the company.”

  Mick shook his head. “Kessell gave Renshaw a fifty percent interest for one dollar. And here’s another thing I find fascinating: the firm went from being Kessell International to Renshaw & Kessell International. Gage first.”

  I thought back to when Hy joined the firm. They’d solicited him with a one-third ownership, bonuses, and incentives. But at the time they’d badly needed someone who could negotiate in hostage and ransom situations—for which Hy had discovered a talent while flying for K Air in Thailand—and were willing to make concessions to bring him on board. But for Kessell to yield a one-half interest in what had then been a fledgling company without demanding any investment from Renshaw? What was that about?

  I said to Mick, “I think Renshaw has something on Kessell. He’s probably holding their dealings in Thailand over his head.”

  “But wouldn’t that mean Kessell also has something on Renshaw?”

  “Yeah. Except maybe Renshaw kept a video- or sound-taped record of their transactions.”

  “That sounds like a tactic Gage would employ.”

  I considered for a moment, then said, “Why don’t you put that iMac on hold, or turn it over to Derek when he gets back from lunch. Keep digging on Renshaw and Kessell.”

  By one that afternoon, Gage Renshaw had left five messages for me—each sounding more irate than the one before. I ignored them and consulted with Patrick—giving him information to plug in to his charts—and caught up on agency business.

  Kendra had a problem with the UPS guy; twice now he’d tossed packages into the locked enclosure that served as the pier’s mail room, damaging their contents. She’d heard he was going through a divorce, but that was no excuse, and would I authorize her to complain to his employer?

  Hell, yes!

  Ted reported that there was a new program that would allow him to process employee expense reports more efficiently, and would it be okay to purchase it?

  Of course.

  At four-thirty, Cecily Alfonso called to say that her mother’s former therapist, Wendy Benjamin, had agreed to talk with me, but that it would have to be on the weekend. I phoned Ms. Benjamin, and we agreed to meet at noon on Sunday at a restaurant on Fourth Street in Berkeley. “I’ll treat you to brunch in exchange for wrecking your day off,” she said. “This is a busy week, and that’s the first opportunity I’ll have to come up for air.” I agreed and put it on my calendar.

  Gage called again at five. “Where’s that report, McCone?” he growled.

  “I don’t have anything written yet, but I can give you a verbal rundown on the investigation.” I turned to the computer and opened the file Derek had sent me on the former RKI employees. None of the possibles had checked out as being in the vicinity at the time of any of the explosions. After I read it to Gage, I said, “Of course, this is preliminary information—”

  “That’s all you’ve accomplished in four days?”

  There was no way I’d tell Gage that I’d been deep-backgrounding Kessell and him. It was a line of investigation he’d be sure to resent and, if he did have anything to hide, it would put him on his guard.

  “Not all. I’ve been working my contacts and interviewing people.”

  “More like sitting on your butt at Touchstone.”

  “There was a security problem, and I had to run up there.”

  “Oh? What kind of security problem?”

  “Nothing major. It’s fixed.”

  “I told Ripinsky he was a fool not to use our people for that place.”

  “Yes, I know you did.”

  “So when do I get that report?”

  “How about if I fly down there on Monday? I want to take a look around headquarters and the training camp.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I’ll see you then.” Quickly I broke the connection and left the office.

  On the catwalk, I ran into Julia. In her tentative manner—which I attributed to a horrible past that made her expect rejection at every turn—she asked if we could have a drink over at Gordon Biersch, a brewpub on the other side of the Embarcadero.

  I agreed, even though I was eager to get home. Julia’s life was problematic, and I hoped she wasn’t about to lay one of her crises in my lap. But it turned out that she only wanted to know if the items she’d bought me were okay, and if there was anything else I needed. I reassured her that all was well, and we chatted for a while, mostly about her son, Tonio, who had started music classes after school and was showing a talent for the guitar. When we parted, I felt almost happy.

  But not for long: that evening I had to ask my husband questions that would transport him back into his painful past.

  “What do you know about Renshaw’s whereabouts between the time he resigned from the DEA and when he became a partner with Kessell?”

  Hy steepled his fingers under his chin and stared into the fireplace. We were seated in matching black leather chairs in front of the hearth at the safe hous
e apartment. The night had come on cold and rainy, and after dinner he’d made a fire. Normally the flames would have warmed and cheered me, but I had a bad feeling about the turn this conversation might take.

  After a moment he said, “Nothing.”

  “But you knew him when he was in Thailand.”

  “Everybody knew Gage.”

  “When I met him, he said you’d been friends.”

  “Did he? Then Gage has a strange definition of friendship. And, as I recall, at that first meeting he hired you to locate me so he could take me out.”

  “He said you had been friends.”

  “More like drinking buddies.”

  “Did you know him from Fresno?” Hy had been born there, although his parents divorced when he was ten and he’d moved to Mono County with his mother and her new husband. Still, he’d spent time in the valley with his crop duster father until, as happens so often in that occupation, a plane crash had claimed Joe Ripinsky’s life.

  “Our paths never crossed.”

  “What about Kessell? He’s from Fresno, too.”

  “Nope. He’s a lot older than me, and probably was long gone when I was just a kid.”

  “So you met Renshaw . . . ?”

  “Through a mutual friend in Bangkok.”

  “And Kessell?”

  “When I arrived there. I answered a help-wanted ad in one of the flying magazines, and Dan hired me on the phone, paid my way over.”

  “So you flew for Kessell and drank with Renshaw and then . . . ?”

  “What is this, McCone?”

  “You know I’ve got to get more background on the two of them. When someone’s the target of a vendetta, you look into the victim’s past.”

  “That’s not the whole of it.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You’re looking into my past, too. I know you’ve got to, but it makes me damned uncomfortable. I don’t even like to think about those years.”

  “I know. We’ve talked about what happened then, and I hoped we wouldn’t ever have to discuss it again. Let me take another tack: what was Renshaw’s relationship with Kessell back then?”

  Hy frowned thoughtfully. “Closer than with most people. Sure, neither of them would hesitate to use the other to make a profit, but they seemed more of a team.”

  The phone rang. I got up and answered it. Mick.

  “Sorry to bother you at home, but I just got this information on Dan Kessell. He lived near the Fresno airport as a kid, and apparently the proximity made him want to fly. He traded maintenance jobs for lessons, and got his license the day he became of age. Holds a commercial license, instrument rating—and just about everything else. I talked with the owner of the flying school there, a guy who also hung around because his father was part owner of a crop-dusting service—”

  “What’s this guy’s name?” I asked.

  “Ben Galt. You want his number?”

  “Please.”

  He gave it to me and added, “He’s the one who told me about Dan living near the airport. I got the other stuff through public records. Galt says Kessell was a natural pilot, could handle any emergency, like the time—”

  “Mick,” I said, “I’ll talk to you after I read your report. Now, here’s something else you could look into: where did Kessell get the money to start K Air? If you don’t have the time, put Keim on it.”

  “Will do.”

  I set the receiver down and remained standing, my back to Hy for a moment before I returned to my chair.

  “Who was that?” he asked.

  “Mick. Nothing important.”

  “You sounded kind of abrupt with him.”

  “I’m tired, that’s all.” I massaged my temples.

  “Well, as you were saying . . . ?”

  I couldn’t for the life of me pick up the thread of the conversation because I was preoccupied with what Mick had told me.

  “Ripinsky—” I began.

  “Yes?”

  Coincidence, that’s all. Something that could easily be checked out.

  I said, “Nothing. Let’s not talk about this anymore tonight.”

  Saturday

  FEBRUARY 25

  “I need to use Two-Seven-Tango today,” I told Hy. The morning had dawned brilliantly clear—perfect flying weather.

  “Fine with me. I’ve got no plans except for monitoring the interim operation upstairs, sitting around and reading, and maybe watching a couple of old movies.”

  Old Westerns—his passion. “Great. I should be back by dinnertime. Maybe we could go to—”

  “How about I make my famous chili?”

  “That would be great. Do we have—”

  “I bought the ingredients yesterday. It’ll be simmering when you come home.”

  “You, too?”

  He smiled, and his eyes gleamed as they moved slowly over me. “You bet, McCone. Me, too.”

  Damn, I was glad I’d picked up that new prescription for my birth control pills!

  The San Joaquin Valley spread out below me, close to sixty miles wide between the Coastal Range and the Sierra Nevada. The land was geometrically laid out, brown plowed fields interspersed among green ones where winter crops grew. The valley is one of the richest agricultural areas in the US, the crops that spring from its soil grossing billions of dollars a year, and the city of Fresno is the sixth largest in the state. Soon I could see the dual runways of Chandler Executive Airport two miles to the west. Chandler is non-towered, so I contacted the UNICOM on 123.0, announced my position, and set my course at a forty-five-degree angle to the field. Traffic was heavy today—a lot of people practicing touch-and-goes—and I slipped into the pattern behind a Piper Cub and in front of a Cessna 150.

  Then I was on the ground and taxiing toward the visitor tie-downs. Chandler is a small airport, compared to Fresno-Yosemite International, with no landing or parking fees, and I spotted Galt Aviation easily. When I stepped down from the plane, a warm breeze ruffled my hair; it must have been well over sixty degrees there. I shed my suede jacket—a beloved possession that I’d had on the night of the bombing—and, after I secured Two-Seven-Tango, hurried toward the low cinder-block building that housed the flight school. I’d phoned Ben Galt earlier, using the story that I was trying to track down Dan Kessell because he’d inherited money.

  Galt looked to be in his sixties: wiry and agile, with a concave chest and a slouch that made his body mimic a question mark. His face was wrinkled and suntanned, and bright blue eyes inspected me from under the bill of a baseball cap advertising the flight service. When I shook his hand, it felt stiff and gnarled. He took me inside, insisted on pouring me a cup of muddy-looking coffee, and seated me on one of the battered armchairs next to a counter; behind it a dark-haired man was talking loudly on the phone.

  “Look, mister, that information’s available online. Look it up . . . No, that’s not what I’m here for . . . Hey, we’ve got students with more brains than you!”

  He banged the phone down, and a couple of pilots who were hangar-flying over by the soft-drink machine gave him looks and shook their heads.

  Galt muttered, “Good help is hard to find.” Then he called to the man, “Hey, dummy, go easy on the callers, will you?”

  “Screw them, if they don’t have the smarts to find out the pattern altitude on their own.”

  “You lose the airport customers, we lose customers, and your ass is grass.”

  Dummy didn’t answer.

  Galt said to me, “Unfortunately, he’s my grandson and my daughter would give me hell if I fired him.”

  I nodded sympathetically, although secretly I sided with Dummy. Such information as pattern altitude, fuel availability, and airport communications and services is easily accessible—both on the Internet and from printed sources; calling ahead is the lazy pilot’s method.

  Getting down to business, I said, “I understand your father operated a crop-dusting service here.”

  “Yes. Galt Aviation used to be
Galt Crop Dusting. My father got his CFI and began instructing when I was five or six, but maintained the original name; when he retired and turned the business over to me, I changed it. We still do crop-dusting, but the bulk of our business is with renters and student pilots.”

  “You told one of my operatives that you knew Dan Kessell.”

  “Yeah. Kessell was a couple of grades behind me in school. He did maintenance work for my dad—mopping the floors, that kind of stuff—in return for lessons.”

  “You also said that he was a natural pilot.” I’d read the story Galt had told Mick in the report he’d e-mailed me, but I wanted to hear it for myself.

  “He surely was. The second time he went out solo—after only eleven hours—he had an engine out. He maintained total control, brought the plane down on one of the farm roads—straight along the center stripe. Could you have done that after eleven hours?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Kessell left town a couple of years after high school to go into the military,” I said. “By then he had most of his ratings.”

  “Right. Instrument, commercial, multi-engine. He’d even started flying helicopters.”

  “I wonder why he went into the Special Forces.”

  “Probably because of their elite image. Dan was always into image—he used to say you could get more women showing up at the fuel pumps in a Citabria than in a Cessna. Not that he had the money for either back then.”

  Well, he does now.

  “Have you seen Kessell since he left Fresno?”

  “Sure. He flies in here in an old Piper a few times a year, has family—a sister—in the area. He may own a security firm and all, but he’s the same old Dan, right up to the flight jacket that’s as beat-up as his plane.”

  “This sister—do you know her name?”

  He thought. “Elise. I don’t know her married name, but I do know that she’s living in the old family home on Wolfe Road. White clapboard, picket fence, rose garden out front. You can’t miss it.”

  I hesitated, wondering exactly what I hoped to find out about Kessell. Maybe I’d only flown down as an excuse to take to the skies and clear my head. Certainly I’d done thinking on the trip, allowing my mind to range freely over the facts of the case.