The Ever-Running Man

by Marcia Muller

  “May I see some ID, ma’am?” The man’s tone was nonconfrontational.

  “Sure.” I moved toward him, fumbling in my purse, and slipped out the falsified New Mexico driver’s license that an informant—a convicted forger now almost gone straight—had provided me. It said I was Nancy Estrada—a name that more or less fit with my Shoshone looks.

  The man checked it with a flashlight. Now I could see his face—weathered and creased, with the deepest lines around his eyes and mouth. He studied the license, handed it back to me.

  “Your friend doesn’t live here,” he said.

  “No? I’m sure it’s the address she gave me.”

  “No Altmans here.”

  “Whose place is this? Maybe the guy she’s living with—”

  “No woman living here. You’d best move on.”

  “This isn’t Sand Dollar Drive?”

  “Nope. Sandpiper. You got your sea creatures mixed up with your birds.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry! I feel so foolish . . .”

  “No harm done, ma’am. You have a good evening.” He touched the bill of his cap in a little salute and moved back toward the monster vehicle.

  When I skirted it, angling for the MG, I spotted a big Doberman sitting in the truck bed; unmoving, it stared down at me. The door of the truck slammed and its engine started up, but the guard didn’t turn around and follow me as I’d expected. Instead he kept going toward a secluded bluff-top home at the end of the road.

  I debated waiting to see if anyone came back to the lighted kitchen in the green house, but decided against it. Many second-home owners leave a light on in the window, and the hell with electric company bills. Hy and I were not that extravagant, but we did leave a nightlight burning in the entryway at Touchstone, as well as lights around the property’s perimeter that switched on at dusk.

  Right now, those lights beckoned me.

  Friday

  FEBRUARY 24

  Past midnight, and I couldn’t sleep. Normally the sound of the surf in Bootlegger’s Cove below Touchstone lulled me, but tonight when I stepped out for some fresh air on the small deck beside the master bedroom, the crashing and booming of breakers heightened my restlessness.

  I went back into the bedroom, locked the door, reset the security system. As with my mother, hot milk had never done the trick for me on a sleepless night, but a brandy might help . . .

  As I went down the hall to the combined kitchen, living, and dining room, the house hummed with silence. While not nearly as large as the original structure that had stood on its foundations—which, coincidentally, had been destroyed in an explosion—it was larger than what I was used to. I skirted the pit fireplace that separated the sitting and dining areas from the kitchen, snapped on the overhead lights. The red indicator on the answering machine blinked at me; I’d forgotten to erase the messages that had accumulated during our two-week absence. Most had been the usual: wrong numbers, solicitors, friends down at the Sea Ranch hoping we’d come up soon and wanting to get together for dinner in Gualala. But two were from Gage Renshaw, who had apparently learned from the office or Hy that I was in residence. He was pissed off because I hadn’t gotten back to him. I deleted his messages along with the others.

  And then tensed, thinking I heard a sound in the guest wing. There were two bedrooms and baths there, reserved for the inevitable influx of friends and relatives, plus small offices for Hy and me.

  I strained my ears. Another sound—faint, stealthy?

  No, McCone, don’t do this to yourself.

  The security system on the gate and the property-line fence hadn’t been breached. Neither had that of the house. As part of my routine precautions upon arrival, I’d checked the small stone cottage on the cliff’s edge, where we used to stay before we built the house, and the shed where we kept an old pickup truck for the times when we flew here.

  All was as we’d left it a couple of weeks ago.

  So why the anxiety?

  I took the brandy bottle from the cupboard, found a glass. Glanced toward the guest wing again. Set down the glass and went that way, switching on the hallway lights and looking into each room. No one there, nothing disturbed—

  Except something was wrong.

  It was in the air, the feeling of a violated space. Someone had been in the house in my absence. Someone who should not have been.

  I checked the closets, the windows. Nothing out of place. Everything secure. When I went back down the hallway and stepped into the central room, my reflection in the dark seaward windows startled me.

  That’s what a violation of your personal space will do to you.

  But who? And why?

  I pulled the blinds against the foggy night, poured the brandy, and took it back to the bedroom, where we had a hot tub in an alcove with windows facing the sea. I got the jets going, pinned up my hair, and slipped out of my robe into the warm, soft water. Sipped brandy and leaned my head back against the tub’s padded edge, telling myself that morning would be time enough to figure out how our security had been breached.

  Tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough.

  “I found it,” Garland Romanowski said as he stepped into the kitchen.

  I looked up from the small round table where I was nursing a third cup of coffee. A big, gray-haired man in a plaid flannel shirt and none-too-clean jeans, Garland was the security specialist who had installed our system here at Touchstone. Hy, with paranoia born both of his past association with Renshaw and Kessell and his knowledge of the firm’s inner workings, had insisted we not use any of their people; a friend who had installed my system in the city had recommended Garland as the best on the Mendocino Coast. Apparently he was very good; he’d arrived only half an hour before, and already he’d located the source of the trouble.

  “So it was breached,” I said.

  “Yeah—and by somebody who knows what they’re doing. There’s this gizmo in one of the outside junction boxes. Looks like this.” He held up three fingers in a configuration that I couldn’t decipher. “The system’s only weakness. If you disconnect it, the whole thing’s disabled. But you gotta know where it is, and messing with it leaves signs, ’cause if you don’t want anybody to know you got in, you gotta splice it afterwards. Wanna see?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Understanding security systems has never been one of my strong points. “Any idea of where the person entered?”

  “Probably the window of the smaller office. It’s the closest to the junction box. But maybe not; that would be taking a chance, because it faces the highway.”

  “We’re a long way from the highway, though.” I paused, frowning. “But how did this person get onto the property? You checked the gate and the perimeter fencing and didn’t spot anything.”

  “Well, there’s the airstrip. But a plane landing on the bluff top is pretty conspicuous.” Garland motioned at the windows facing the sea. “You got a cove down there where a small boat can be beached at low tide. And steps coming up to that platform on the edge of the cliff. I’d say that’s a possible.”

  I sighed. “There’s not much we can do about the airstrip. If somebody wants to land there, they will. What about the platform?”

  “You might consider wiring it. I’d suggest weight and motion sensors hooked into a loud alarm that’ll scare ’em off.”

  “What would that cost?”

  “I’d have to work up an estimate. If we can wire it into the system on the little stone cottage, shouldn’t be too much.”

  I pictured the checks Hy and I had been writing to the contractor for the house in the city. Pictured the checks we’d soon be writing to Garland. Finally said, “Work it up and e-mail it to me, please.”

  “Will do. Any idea what they were after?”

  “No. As far as I can tell, nothing’s missing or looks like it’s been disturbed.”

  “Well, like I said, they knew what they were doing with the system. Probably knew how to make an inconspicuous search, too.�
� He touched his index finger to the bill of his old Point Arena Pirates cap and started for the door.

  “Garland,” I called after him, “do you know any of the private patrol companies down Timber Cove way?”

  “I know a couple of retired guys who patrol to supplement their Social Security. Why?”

  I described the man whom I’d encountered the night before at Dan Kessell’s place, his truck and his guard dog, too.

  “Doesn’t sound familiar. But I don’t get down there all that often.”

  “Well, thanks. I’ll look for that estimate.”

  After Garland’s blue truck pulled away, I poured the rest of my coffee down the sink drain, rinsed the cup, and put it back into the cabinet. Then I went to the smaller office—mine, because in an effort to keep my professional and private lives separate, I seldom work at Touchstone—and stood in the doorway, looking around and trying to imagine an intruder slipping through the window, checking the file cabinet that contained little more than the architect’s plans for the house, manuals and warranties for the appliances, and miscellaneous clippings. A number of phone books sat on the shelves, as well as books I’d brought up to read and decided to leave there, but they were greatly outnumbered by shells and pieces of driftwood I’d carried up from the cove. The table on which I set my laptop when I was in residence was bare except for a coffee mug full of pens and pencils, a scratch pad, and a photograph of Hy, Ricky, and Rae planting a cypress sapling in front of the house. Ricky stood by, arms folded, contemplating Rae, who, bent over, was placing the tree in the hole Hy had dug. Behind her, Hy raised the shovel, a fiendish look on his face as he mimed hitting her on the ass.

  I smiled at the memory and went to Hy’s office. It was more cluttered, as he liked to come up here alone and immerse himself in his charitable works. There was a fax machine, two four-drawer file cabinets, and an old tangerine-colored iMac that he professed to love so much he’d never part with it. I had a certain affection for the machine, too: one boring, rainy weekend when I was staying alone in the stone cottage on the cliff, I’d overcome my aversion to computers by playing with it.

  Today the office felt strange; the aura of violation I’d sensed last night was very strong there. I checked the file cabinets, but the drawers were locked, and I couldn’t find a key in the desk drawers; Hy probably kept it on his key ring. Then I turned the computer on and waited as it took its usual old-machine time to boot up. Finally the screen brightened to a sky-blue background, and icons appeared. Quite a few icons; Hy liked to keep most of his active files on the desktop. They were labeled cryptically, and I didn’t know what the titles meant. I clicked on them—Mendocino Coast Coalition for Open Space, Hurricane Relief Fund, Olompali State Park Restoration Fund, among others—but all seemed innocuous and worthy causes.

  Next I went to the listing of files on the hard drive, checked the dates they’d last been modified. The most recent was Sunday, two weeks past, before we’d left for the city. That didn’t mean someone hadn’t been looking at the files afterward; if the intruder hadn’t made any alterations, I had no way of knowing whether he’d opened them or not. I clicked on the trash icon. Empty. Finally I logged on to the dial-up service—DSL still not being available on our part of the coast—typed in Hy’s password, and waited for a connection. Checked his seldom-used AOL mailbox. Several messages, all of them looking like spam.

  Your mortgage payment is due . . . Natural penis enlargement . . . Free stock tips . . . Swiss watches at bargain prices . . . She wants better sex! . . . A lonely housewife in your area . . . Viagra by mail . . . Custom-made caskets delivered to your door . . . Free stuff for completing survey . . . Contemplating a career change? . . . Sender unknown, no subject. I opened that last message.

  YOU’RE TOAST, RIPINSKY!

  I sped along the twists and turns of the coast highway, the iMac on the passenger seat. When I’d called Hy to tell him what I’d discovered, he asked me to bring the machine back to the city. “We’ll get Mick to recover any files that might’ve been deleted,” he said.

  “Maybe he can find out where that nasty e-mail came from.”

  “You’re taking it too seriously, McCone. I know a lot of people with . . . well, warped senses of humor. That’s why I give them the AOL address, rather than my regular one.” But there was an undertone of concern in his voice that I couldn’t ignore.

  At Timber Cove I detoured along Sandpiper Drive. No vehicle parked at the Kessell cottage, no smoke coming from the chimney, no dog in the fenced run. It wasn’t the sort of place Dan Kessell would come for a vacation—he preferred expensive resorts with world-class golf courses—but it had occurred to me that he may have bought the place as an investment. Oceanfront property, being in limited supply, never depreciates in value; he might have had the idea of buying up the surrounding lots for future development as they came on the market. He’d done something similar with an old housing tract south of San Diego, turning it into a sprawling industrial park. Wouldn’t you know that one of Dan’s hobbies was disfiguring the landscape?

  But it could be someone was living in the little house. Or at least coming and going, leaving a light on in the kitchen. I parked the MG and began knocking on doors.

  The first three cottages I stopped at were closed up, obviously second homes. At the fourth, a voice, quavering and old, identifiable as neither male nor female, told me to go away. A woman at the fifth told me she wasn’t buying anything and slammed the door in my face. But at one halfway between there and the highway, a big man with bloodhound jowls and wild, wispy hair that probably hadn’t been in contact with a comb since 1992 greeted me pleasantly. Yes, he said, he knew the occupant of the green cottage. Not well, but he and Mr. Kessell got along.

  “Mr. . . . Dan Kessell?”

  “That’s his name.”

  “Can you describe him for me?”

  The man frowned, enhancing his canine appearance. “May I ask what this is about?”

  I gave him one of my cards. “It’s in regard to an inheritance.”

  The frown deepened. “You one of those heir hunters?”

  “No, my client is a legal firm in San Francisco, Altman and Zahn. You can call them and verify that, if you like.” Hank and Anne-Marie were used to covering for me. Part of our professional courtesy arrangement.

  “No, that’s all right. But you have to be careful these days, you know. So many breaches of personal privacy. Mr. Kessell is in his sixties. White hair, leathery face, stocky.”

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “Private patrols for the second-homers. Home maintenance, too. Does well at it; there’re a lot of moneyed people on this part of the coast and up in the hills, although you couldn’t tell by looking at our little enclave.” He snorted. “People complain that we, and that trailer encampment up the highway, are a blight on the coastline. They can’t wait for all of us to die off so some fool can come in here and put up luxury homes. But we’re not ready to croak just yet. Most of us have been here a long time—and we intend to stay.”

  “Has Mr. Kessell been here long?”

  “Oh, my, yes. Before I came here, anyway, and that was in eighty-four.”

  “And he’s here all the time?”

  “As far as I know, the only time he goes anywhere is on Costco runs to Santa Rosa and hunting or fishing trips.”

  “Does he own a big truck, probably a GMC, and a Doberman?”

  “Yes. Why? Have you seen him?”

  “I just missed him as he was leaving yesterday. Mr. . . . ?”

  “Bradshaw. Chuck.”

  “Mr. Bradshaw, thank you for your helpfulness. I’d like to ask you not to mention my visit to Mr. Kessell.”

  “Why on earth not? If the man’s come into money . . .”

  “I think I have the wrong Dan Kessell. Your neighbor doesn’t fit his description.”

  “Well, that’s too bad.”

  “Yes, it is. Thank you for your time.”

  On the way
back to the MG, I tried to picture the property search report Mick had given me. No owner’s Social Security number, no identifying details except for the property location and the address where the tax bill was sent—and both had been the same. He’d merely hit on the wrong Dan Kessell.

  But I didn’t feel my coming up here was a waste of time. Not after what I’d found at Touchstone.

  “Nothing to it,” Mick said. “These ancient machines’re as easy to crack open as a peanut shell.”

  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.”