Wolf in the Shadows

by Marcia Muller

  Salazar’s fingers clamped tightly on the arms of his chair. He looked hotly at Abrego, then seemed to remind himself of something, and waved Jaime off. I realized that whatever Luis had on him must be very damning indeed.

  After a moment Salazar’s eyes regained their remoteness. He looked at a point beyond me and spoke slowly. “It is said that someone was shot up there that night. It is said that there was a body left in the adobe.”

  A coldness began to creep through me. “Whose body?”

  “I did not see it, of course. But it is said he was an Anglo.”

  “What did this Anglo look like?”

  “I did not see the body.”

  “What happened to it?”

  He shrugged. “It is no longer there.”

  “Did the police remove it?”

  Another shrug.

  “I’ll ask you one more time, Salazar: what did the dead man look like?” Now my voice shook with anger.

  Abrego spoke in Spanish, softly and swiftly. I understood none of it, but the words made Salazar go white around the mouth. He turned hard eyes on Luis for a long time before he spoke. “I have heard that the man was tall and thin. His hair was not blond, but not dark either. He had a mustache and a face like the falcon’s.”

  The coldness now touched my bones. “Anything else?”

  Salazar was watching me intently. Like a predator alerted to weakness in his quarry, he’d heard something in my voice, read something on my face. “There was a ring.”

  “What kind?”

  “A heavy gold one with a blue stone carved like a bird.”

  Hy’s ring—the one with the gull-shaped stone that matched the airborne bird on the Citabria.

  For a moment I was isolated by the extreme cold. Sounds dimmed, colors faded, the faces and palm trees and floodlights blurred. Then I heard the beating of my own heart—strong and steady. Odd how it could go on doing that when everything else had shut down….

  “Sharon?” John and Luis spoke in unison. John reached for me, and I pushed his hand away.

  Now everything came back into focus—hard, bright, sharp-edged. I saw Salazar’s knowing eyes watching me, his lips drawn into a cruel smile.

  “You killed him,” I said. “You killed him and got rid of the body.”

  He continued to smile, spread his arms wide to profess innocence.

  I clamped my hands onto my thighs, gripped them until they hurt. Bit my lip, drawing blood. Tried to bring my rage under control. Fatal to give vent to it now; Salazar’s bodyguard had not moved far away. And I had more than my own life to think of.

  After a moment I stood. Took a step toward Salazar. Jaime moved closer, stopped when I did.

  I asked, “What happened to the body, Salazar?”

  He shrugged, still smiling.

  Luis and John stood at the same time, moved to either side of me. Luis’s restraining hand gripped my elbow.

  Very softly I said, “Salazar, I know you killed him. I’m going to prove it. And when I do, I’m going to bring you down. Remember that.”

  Salazar’s expression didn’t change. The bodyguard didn’t move. Luis and John seemed frozen.

  I wrenched my elbow from Luis’s grasp and hurried through the encircling palms to the gate.

  Fifteen

  I ran down the sidewalk toward the Scout, John and Luis close behind me. When I reached it, I leaned against the door, my forehead pressed against the cool window glass.

  “You okay, kid?” John asked.

  I didn’t reply. Turned to Luis and said, “He told some lies, but most of that was the truth.”

  “… Yes.”

  “Even what he left out—that he killed my friend and got rid of the body—was obvious.”

  Luis nodded, face drawn with sorrow.

  There it was, then: the reason I’d failed every time I’d tried for a connection to Hy. He was dead. I’d traced his every move for three days now, and all that time he’d been dead. Fatally shot on an isolated mesa, his body somewhere in a shallow grave.

  Tears stung my eyes. I blinked them away. Not now.

  What about the other man in the Jeep? I wondered. Dead, too? No, Salazar wouldn’t have bothered to conceal that. A confederate of his? Probably. For all I knew, Salazar could have been involved in the Mourning kidnapping. And Timothy Mourning? Renshaw was right about his fate: lying in a ditch somewhere with a bullet in his brain. The two-million-dollar letter of credit? Somehow it didn’t matter anymore.

  I said to Luis, “I want to go to that mesa.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” he said gently. “Salazar’ll have made sure of that.”

  “I don’t care. I want to see where it happened.”

  “It’s dark. It’s too dangerous.”

  “First thing tomorrow, then.”

  Abrego and John exchanged glances.

  “I’ll go, regardless.”

  Luis said, “I got a last-minute job to drive some people north. I’ll leave before it gets light. Wait till I get back, then I’ll take you.”

  “I need to do this right away.”

  “I’ll go with you,” John said.

  “No.” I didn’t want my brother there. Didn’t want him to see me grieve. I needed to make my pilgrimage in private.

  Luis seemed to understand. “I’ll get somebody who knows the place to guide you. Andrés, my neighbor. You meet him in front of my building at first light, he’ll take you there.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Just be there.” Abrego turned and walked toward his Dodge, raising a hand in sad farewell.

  “I’ll drive,” I said to John and held out my hand for the keys.

  “You sure you want to?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded, gave them to me, and went around to the passenger’s side.

  I drove carefully, concentrating on each movement, keeping my mind off anything else. If I could deliver him to Lemon Grove and get to the privacy of my father’s house, I’d be all right. When I let him off in his driveway, he hesitated, then came around to my window. Leaned in and kissed me on the forehead—a gesture rarely offered in my family.

  “You need anything at all, call me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Call me tomorrow anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  “Kid …” He paused, face twisting with effort.

  “What?”

  “I love you. Don’t forget that.” Then he hurried off, hunched with embarrassment.

  “I love you too, big brother,” I whispered.

  I turned the Scout and headed for Mission Hills.

  * * *

  The big house had never seemed so empty. I moved through its dust-dulled rooms, touching well-remembered objects and thinking of happier, more simple times. As I wandered, the atmosphere became oppressive; now I had to deal not only with my memories but also with my ghosts. Ghosts of Hy and me.

  The first time I met him, when he told me his somewhat peculiar name: “Heino Ripinsky,” he said, and I started to smile. “Don’t laugh,” he told me, leveling his index finger like a gun. “Don’t you dare laugh!”

  A night last fall when we drifted in a rowboat on Tufa Lake and I confided fears and dark urges that I’d never so much as hinted at to a single living person. He understood and didn’t condemn me, because he had often fallen victim to them himself.

  A morning when we parted in silence at Oakland Airport. I thought our fragile rapport had been destroyed, but he called after me as I walked away. “Glad you didn’t say good-bye,” he told me, “because it hasn’t even begun for us yet.”

  Now it had ended for good. I wondered how long it would be before someone told the florist to quit delivering my weekly rose.

  Stop it, I told myself. Stop it! You can’t afford this kind of self-indulgence.

  I went to the family room, threw the sliding door open, and went outside. The sky was overcast again, filmy clouds backlit by the moon. Quiet in the canyon, quiet in the surround
ing houses. Quiet as death.

  I crossed to the fence at the canyon’s edge, pushed through the creaky gate, felt with my foot for the first of the stone steps built into the slope. Climbed down slowly, bracing myself with my hand on the sturdy vegetation. At the bottom I paused, peering through the darkness until I spotted the oak that held the remains of our treehouse. I groped toward it, stumbling over rocks and logs.

  The platform of the house was still there, and I was now tall enough to climb up without the aid of the long-gone rope ladder. I grabbed a limb, swung my legs onto it, then scooted over to the platform. It was just large enough for me to lie on my back, staring through the spreading branches at the sky.

  And more ghosts crowded into my mind.…

  The look on Hy’s face when I stepped into his house the night I finally returned to Tufa Lake: incredulity, dissolving to delight, turning to a smug I-always-knew-you-would.

  We’d made love for the first time that night—Hy’s voice so rough, his hands so gentle, his body—

  No! I couldn’t afford that particular ghost.

  Better to remember some of the bad times: My frustration and anger at his closed-face refusal to discuss his past. The way he would spot the slightest trace of phoniness or pretense in me and tease me mercilessly until I owned up to it. The time he went too far with it and I threw a pan of cooked spinach at the kitchen wall.

  But we’d laughed together as it dribbled down like some science-fiction ooze.

  We’d laughed a lot, and stretched our horizons, quite literally. I could still feel the heart-pounding thrill of the first time I’d piloted the Citabria. And there was the perfect three-point landing I’d accidentally made, surprising a seasoned flyer like Hy. Only a week ago we’d flown high into the White Mountains. I could still see the golden eagles, the wild mustangs, the bristlecone pines.…

  Bristlecone pines are the oldest living things on earth—some over four thousand years. Hy had been forty-one.

  I was crying now, lying on my back with tears washing across my temples and into my hair. Crying when I didn’t want to and couldn’t afford to because I had to do something about this terrible wrong that had been done both to Hy and to me. Crying, and I couldn’t stop. I … just … couldn’t … stop.…

  In the course of the past three days, everything that counted for anything in my life had changed. My past was remote, no longer accessible. My present lay shattered. The future was unimaginable.

  Nothing would ever be the same again.

  Sixteen

  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 ranch-land 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 into 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.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Gary Viner of SDPD Homicide had been in the same high-school class with my older brother Joey. I remembered him vaguely as an undistinguished member of a pack of boys who used to hang out in front of our house peering into the engines of various decrepit cars. He was still undistinguished, with thinning sandy hair, gray eyes that were mild to the point of vacuousness, and a wispy mustache that turned down, as if in disappointment at being the best he could grow. But when Viner spoke, I realized that behind his very ordinary facade he had not only a sharp mind but also a rapierlike memory.

  “Never figured to see you in my office,” he said, motioning for me to sit. “You haven’t changed all that much. Still eat tons of chocolate?”

  “Not like I used to.”

  Viner patted the beginnings of a beer belly. “Just as well. You could really suck it up, be fat as a hog if you didn’t cut back some. That’s what we were all waiting for, but you just stayed slim as ever. I take it you didn’t marry that bozo who was captain of the swim team. What was his name?”

  “Bobby Ellis.” As I said it, I felt an irrational flash of resentment. Bobby had taken my fragile early love and virginity, then dumped me for someone more socially acceptable to his upwardly mobile parents. I realized now that I was glad I’d tossed his class ring off the Coronado ferry. “He married somebody with a lot of money, who proceeded to make his life hell,” I added with some relish. “They’re divorced now.”

  “Isn’t everybody? What’s Joey doing these days?”

  “Living up in McMinnville, Oregon.”

  “Doing what?”

  I shrugged. “Working in a restaurant—at least that�
�s what he was doing last week.”

  Viner shook his head. “Joey’s a good guy, but … You think he’ll ever find himself?”

  “Joey doesn’t have the sense to know he’s lost.”

  He smiled at that, then sobered. “So what can I do for you?”

  I took out my identification and passed it across the desk to him. His eyes widened slightly as he examined it. “What do you know? From cheerleader to private investigator. You have your own office or work for somebody else?”

  “Somebody else, a San Francisco law firm.” I said it reflexively, then remembered it was no longer true. “I’m here on a routine missing-person investigation, and I came across some information that might interest you. What do you know about a shooting that occurred in a burned-out adobe on the mesa above Monument Road in San Ysidro Sunday night? Victim was a male Caucasian.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I heard about it from some Hispanics I was interviewing in the South Bay.”

  “So you rushed up here to report it, like a good citizen.”

  “No, I came up here because I think the victim may be the man I’m trying to locate.”

  “His name?” He picked up a pen and drew a scratch pad closer.

  “I can’t say. It’s a routine case, no crime involved, and the family doesn’t want publicity.” I felt uncomfortable lying so badly, especially to an old friend of my brother, but this was a situation where I couldn’t be straightforward.

  Viner sighed and tossed his pen on the desk, then turned to his computer terminal. He typed, stared at the screen, then brought up some more information. “Male Caucasian. Six foot three, medium build, brown hair, no identifying marks. Shot in the gut with a forty-four Magnum. Anonymous tip was phoned in to south station—in case you aren’t aware of it, San Ysidro’s part of the city, which is why we’ve got jurisdiction—at two fifty-one Monday morning. Body’s in the morgue. No I.D. on him. We’re trying to get a print match, but you know how that goes.”

  At first I didn’t speak, afraid my voice would betray my agitation. The description could fit Hy—or Timothy Mourning. Finally I asked, “Anything about a ring on the body?”