The Ever-Running Man

by Marcia Muller

  “Is Kessell talking?”

  “He says he went down to San Diego to ask Tyne for ‘compensation’ for using his identity all these years, but Tyne refused, so he went to a motel and flew back north in the morning. When I questioned him about the thirty-eight we found in the plane, he said he didn’t know how it got there. And then he lawyered up. We’ll be bringing him down to San Diego for arraignment tomorrow morning. Hold on a second.”

  Muted voices in the background. Gary came back on the line. “Here’s something interesting: the thirty-eight was registered to Dan Kessell—the one in San Diego.”

  “To me, that sounds like they argued, Tyne pulled the gun on him, and Kessell shot him in the course of a struggle.”

  “Sounds like that to me, too.” Gary yawned. “His lawyer’ll probably plead him self-defense, but that’s the DA’s problem. Now, on these other allegations—the bombings—Kessell’s lawyer gave us a list of his alibis for those dates. Most of them check out.”

  “But not all?”

  “No. We’ve turned the information over to the feds, and they’ll do a more thorough investigation, but I’d say there’s a good chance he isn’t the bomber.”

  “Or was working with an accomplice.”

  “Possibly. But my instincts tell me that the Tyne shootings and the bombings don’t mesh. This guy isn’t bright enough to engineer those, and he doesn’t really strike me as a premeditated killer.”

  “I think you’re right. Unfortunately.”

  “McCone,” Gary spoke in a lowered tone, “Kessell told the deputies who brought him in a story about you breaking into his house and then hiding in the vacant place next door that belongs to one of his clients.”

  “What? He’s crazy. He just wants to make trouble for me because he heard I was asking questions that put him in San Diego at the time of the murder.”

  “That’s what the general consensus here is; you’ve got a good rep. And I’ve reinforced it, told them I’ve known you most of my life, and you would never break and enter. He’s stopped talking about it since his lawyer got here. But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t ever do anything like that again. At least not down in my jurisdiction.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. Did you get the report on someone shooting at Hy in the RKI parking lot?”

  “It came from La Jolla this morning, and headquarters faxed it to me here because of the connection with this case.”

  “What d’you think?”

  “Sounds as if this ever-running man is trying to throw everybody off track, tie in the bombings with the Tyne murder. Your husband told La Jolla the shots didn’t even come close to him.”

  “Anywhere near him is too damn close.”

  “Back to square one,” I told Mick and Patrick when I finished talking with Gary. “We’ll need to keep working tonight.”

  Mick said, “Fine with me. I’m in no mood to go home and watch Charlotte packing.”

  Patrick shot him a sympathetic look—been there, done that. “How about if I redo these charts?” he said. “Remove the element of Tyne’s murder. They’ll be cleaner, and maybe we can see something that all this clutter is concealing.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “An hour or so.”

  “Okay, while you’re doing that I think I’ll take care of some personal stuff. When you’re ready, we can start again.”

  Once Mick and Patrick had left my office, I called Jim Keys’s cellular and told him I couldn’t possibly come over to Church Street and view his progress until the final walk-through. He said that was fine; all was going as planned.

  Michelle Curley wasn’t home, but her mother told me the cats were doing well. Allie had screamed all the way to and from her annual appointment with the vet, and afterward had turned her back every time she caught a glimpse of ’Chelle. No surprise there.

  Ma and Melvin weren’t home, thank God. I left a long, reassuring message.

  Rae told me she and Ricky would be in all evening. She insisted I again make use of their guest room, and I took her up on it.

  Hy answered his cellular, and I brought him up to speed.

  “Now what?” His tone was flat.

  “Patrick and Mick and I brainstorm. We wait to hear what the FBI comes up with on Kessell’s alibis.”

  “More like we wait till this maniac strikes again.”

  “Listen, I know how discouraged you feel. I’ve felt that way at this point in every major case I’ve worked. But then something makes it all come together.”

  “McCone, I hope that something comes soon.”

  “So do I.” I thought of telling him about Mick and Charlotte’s breakup, but changed my mind. When your own relationship’s on rocky ground, the worst thing you can discuss is the failure of someone else’s.

  Mick, Patrick, and I brainstormed for hours. The charts looked less cluttered, but nothing significant stood out. Finally we took a break and opened a bottle of wine that was stashed in the little fridge in Ted’s office. We hadn’t ordered in any food, and on empty stomachs the wine soon made us feel mellow.

  “You know,” I said, “we need to look at the bigger picture.”

  “What d’you mean?” Patrick asked.

  “Our assumption all along has been that this is a vendetta against RKI. What if it goes back farther than that?”

  Mick said, “To Thailand. And K Air.”

  “Right. All three partners were there at the same time. Renshaw didn’t work for the company, but Kessell—Tyne—had a lot of illicit dealings with him.”

  “I don’t know, Shar. That was a long time ago. A long time for someone to harbor a grudge. Why didn’t he act on it years ago?”

  “Maybe he couldn’t, for some reason. Or he didn’t know where to find them till recently.”

  “Which brings us back to the real Dan Kessell,” Patrick said. “Maybe he is the bomber.”

  “No, I agree with Gary Viner’s instincts. Kessell only wanted to extort money from the man who stole his identity, and his attempt turned fatal. These bombings feel . . . I don’t know. Different.”

  “How?”

  “They’re methodical, well planned. There’s a coldness to them, but it’s a coldness that masks a great heat. Does that make any sense?”

  “No,” Mick said, and poured us more wine.

  “Maybe I don’t mean heat. Try hatred. Controlled rage. And he’s covered his movements well; Kessell didn’t. The bomber is very smart; Kessell’s kind of dim.”

  “Okay, but whatever it was would’ve happened way back when, in a foreign country.”

  “Hy once told me that most of K Air’s pilots and employees were Americans. If the pilots are alive and still hold licenses, the FAA will have records. I’ll call him, ask him to send you the names of anybody he recalls who was employed there. We’ll locate those that we can; maybe one of them will remember an incident that might’ve triggered this vendetta.”

  Mick said, “As soon as you get the list from Hy, Derek and I’ll get on it.”

  “And I’ll be standing by,” Patrick added.

  When I got to Rae and Ricky’s house at eleven-thirty, I made a call to Hy and told him of the new approach Mick, Patrick, and I had come up with. He liked it, said he could remember the names of at least five other pilots, as well as mechanics and office personnel. He’d have the list to Mick by the start of business tomorrow.

  “Also consider anything you might not’ve told me,” I told him, “even if it doesn’t seem important.”

  “Will do.”

  No resistance to the suggestion. No denial of withholding any information. And I sensed he wasn’t employing his skill at silence. Maybe . . .

  Set it aside, McCone. Set it aside until this nightmare’s over.

  I said, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  I went to the kitchen, where Rae was heating up leftover lasagna and Ricky was opening some red wine. While I ate like a pig—Rae makes great lasagn
a—I told them about the previous night’s experiences. Ricky looked horrified. Rae looked as if she was taking mental notes for a new novel.

  Then I went to the guest room and fell asleep while repeating my new mantra: A break in the case. Soon. Anything . . .

  Wednesday

  MARCH 8

  My cellular rang as I was getting into my car to drive to the pier the next morning. A male voice identified himself as Todd Williams.

  “What’s this in regard to?” I asked.

  “You wanted me to call you. I work security at the RKI safe house in San Francisco.”

  The man who’d been on duty when our apartment there was broken into. I’d forgotten all about him.

  He went on, “Jason Ng said you wanted to talk to me about my shift last Saturday. Sorry it took so long to get back to you; I had a few days off, so I took a trip to Vegas and didn’t check my messages.”

  “Oh, right. Thanks for calling. I’m interested in the malfunction of the camera outside the apartment Mr. Ripinsky and I are occupying. Can you pinpoint when it happened?”

  Pause. “Could’ve been as early as noon.”

  “You see anyone approaching the blind spot on the other monitors?”

  “. . . Not that I recall.”

  “Were you paying attention?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Your job is to check those monitors constantly, Mr. Williams.”

  “Well, excuse me, but we were understaffed on the weekend. Plus there were all these people from headquarters who used to work at Green Street in the building. I thought it was okay to leave the monitors to take a leak.”

  Hy really needs to look at the quality of the staff in all of RKI’s facilities.

  “Okay, Mr. Williams. You saw the camera was out. Why didn’t you contact one of the on-call technicians and ask him or her to check it?”

  “I did try. But ‘on-call’ doesn’t mean much to them, I guess. The only one I could reach couldn’t get there for an hour. By then, Jason would be on shift and could check while I watched the monitors.”

  Why can’t people do their jobs these days?

  “Ms. McCone? You’re not gonna report me for taking a leak, are you?”

  “No, don’t worry about that.”

  I’m going to report you for being an idiot.

  When I got to the pier, the first thing I did was put Kessell’s unmailed letter to Gina Hines as well as a brief note of explanation into an envelope and address it to her daughter. She and her father deserved an explanation of why Gina had been so frightened toward the end of her life. Then I buzzed Mick and asked him to come to my office.

  He looked dreadful: red-eyed, rumpled, unshaven.

  “You sleep here last night?” I asked.

  “On that air bed Ted keeps in the supply room closet. It didn’t inflate all the way, and I felt like I was on one of those old-fashioned waterbeds. But I couldn’t’ve slept well anyway.”

  “I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

  “I’ll survive. But I’m trying to avoid Charlotte. She’s in her office, business as usual, Patrick tells me.”

  Not a harmonious situation, in an agency where people had always related well. As I’d told Mick yesterday, I couldn’t in good conscience fire Charlotte. But there must be some solution . . .

  “You get that list of names from Hy?” I asked him.

  He frowned at what he must have perceived as my lack of compassion, but said, “Yeah. So far I’ve located one pilot, Edward Biggs, currently living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”

  “You have a phone number for him?”

  “Uh-huh.” He slid a piece of scratch paper across the desk to me.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll call him. And you keep on it.”

  As he left my office, I added, “And tough it out as far as Keim goes, kid.”

  “Don’t call me kid, old lady.”

  Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Central time zone, two hours later there. I dialed the phone number Mick had given me. Edward Biggs, the woman who answered informed me, had died two months ago. “Would you like to speak with his wife?”

  “Please.”

  A pause. Muffled conversation. Then, “This is Nan Biggs.”

  I identified myself and said I was looking into an insurance matter concerning K Air. “I understand your late husband flew for them in Bangkok.”

  “An insurance matter? That company went bankrupt years ago.”

  Bankrupt? That was something new. “Perhaps I have the wrong information. When did it go bankrupt?”

  “Sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. I forget. An accountant embezzled most of their funds and disappeared.”

  That was after Hy had left the charter service and moved back to his ranch; he wouldn’t have known about the bankruptcy. And I was willing to bet it wasn’t an accountant, but the owner who had cleared out and used the funds to re-establish himself in California.

  “Was your husband still working for K Air then?” I asked Nan Biggs.

  “Oh, no. He was only with them a couple of years. He quit and came back to the States, got a job flying for Federal Express.”

  “I see. Mrs. Biggs, how did your husband die?”

  “The engine failed on his homebuilt plane. What does this have to do with an insurance matter?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry, Mrs. Biggs. Forgive me for intruding.”

  I hung up. I hadn’t given the woman my phone number, and she probably hadn’t internalized my name. She’d wonder about the conversation, then put my questions down as nosiness.

  One lead gone.

  I did some paperwork, conferred with Ted. Stopped in at Mick and Derek’s shared office space; they were both busy and shooed me away. Julia and Craig were out in the field. I glanced toward Patrick and Charlotte’s office, then went back to my own. I wasn’t sure I was up to facing Keim yet.

  Patrick appeared in my doorway to ask if I had anything to add to his flow charts.

  No. But it was nearly noon, so why didn’t we go to lunch?

  We walked down the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building and ate at Hog Island Oyster Company. On the way back, I asked him how his meeting with Hank had gone.

  “He thinks I’ve got grounds for full custody.”

  “You going for it?”

  “Yeah. I know it’ll be hard, working full time and raising my kids by myself, but it’s better than them being exposed to addicts and God knows what else. My mom and sisters’ve said they’ll help.”

  “Good for you.” A lot of men in his position would have shrunk from the burden of parenthood, but not Patrick.

  Mick came to my office at quarter to two. “I’ve located another former K Air pilot,” he said. “This one’s here in the city.”

  I took the sheet of scratch paper he held out: Kurt Wilhelm, address on the Great Highway.

  He added, “That’s in the condos across from Ocean Beach.”

  The ones on the former site of Playland. I remembered the controversy when a developer bought the fabled amusement park by the sea and tore it down; San Franciscans love their institutions, no matter how tattered and out-of-date they become. To add insult to injury, the developer then went bankrupt and the site became a gaping scar on the city’s landscape until someone else finally built there years later.

  “No phone number?” I asked Mick.

  “Unlisted.”

  “Well, that’s not a problem. I think it’s better to pay him a surprise visit. Given the nature of K Air’s business, many of their former people aren’t going to want to make an appointment to discuss it.”

  At the pier, the sun had been shining; at the beach, fog was sweeping inland. The gray sea looked forbidding, the rolling waves dangerous, but people were still walking on the sand. I parked in one of the spaces by the seawall, took the crosswalk—dodging a Ford Expedition whose driver apparently hadn’t heard of the pedestrian’s right of way—and entered the stucco complex, whose units were pain
ted in various innocuous shades. Most of the windows that faced the Pacific were covered with blinds or curtains; a direct westerly view often is not as charming as it might seem—particularly on warm days when the sun glares on all that glass, or a day like today when gloom threatens to invade your home. Kurt Wilhelm’s unit was on the ocean side in the middle of the complex. I rang the bell and after a moment heard footsteps within. The door opened, and a tall man with a head of thick white hair looked out at me.

  “Mr. Wilhelm?”

  “Yes?”

  I identified myself, handed him my card. “I’d like to talk with you about K Air. I believe you worked for them in Bangkok.”

  His features went very still, eyes watchful.

  “You did fly for K Air?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “My husband, Hy Ripinsky, was also one of their pilots. He gave me your name.”

  His guarded expression disappeared, and he smiled. “The Ripster! How the hell did he get a good-looking woman like you?”

  Soon I was seated on Kurt Wilhelm’s big leather sofa, a glass of single-malt Scotch in hand. I don’t often drink hard liquor, and I don’t like Scotch—the result of a disgraceful episode during college where I spent most of an evening hugging a toilet bowl—but I can tolerate single-malt, and I sensed it was important to Wilhelm that I join him in a drink. Important because I’d interrupted him in what was probably not his first of the day.

  “The Ripster,” he said, sitting down opposite me in a matching leather chair. “He was one stand-up guy. Fearless pilot. Fearless man. Absolutely.”

  “He still is.”

  “So he sent you to talk with me about the old days?”

  “In a sense. He wanted you to know that Dan Kessell has died.”

  “Kessell? Too bad. A good man. What happened?”

  “Heart attack. Did you know him well?”

  “Dan and me were buddies, yeah. Where’s he been all these years?”

  “San Diego. He was a partner with Hy and Gage Renshaw in an international security firm.”

  “Renshaw. Jesus Christ. What a character.”

  “He certainly is. If you could tell me what you remember about those days in Bangkok, Hy and I would appreciate it.” I took my tape recorder out. “We’re planning a memorial service, and we’d like to have statements from Dan’s friends to read.”