While Other People Sleep

by Marcia Muller

  Somebody else? Me.

  “You ever check out her apartment?”

  “I wouldn't do that!” He sat up straighter, tried to look injured.

  “Come on, Tim, I know you. And don't forget—you're talking with somebody who just entered this building illegally.”

  A rueful smile. “Okay, yeah, I checked it out.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing interesting. No personal stuff that would tell me anything about who she is or where she came from. Not even many clothes. Just booze and snacks in the kitchen, the usual woman stuff in the bathroom. No phone, and she never gets any mail here. Like I said, the studio's just her crib.”

  “When's the last time you saw her?”

  “Earlier tonight, maybe around seven.”

  Damn! I'd come close again, only to miss her. Had she engineered that?

  If she had the Mariposa Street flat wired, as I assumed she must, she knew I'd discovered her identity. She might even know I'd spoken with Russ Auerbach. But I'd flown to Paradise VFR, without having to file a flight plan; she couldn't know I'd spoken to the people from her past there. Unless she was in contact with one of them …

  “Tim,” I said, “what was … Ms. Elizabeth doing when you saw her?”

  “Leaving alone, with a little suitcase. I said hello, asked if she was going away for the weekend. She said yes, and it was gonna be a great one because she just loves the beach.”

  “Can you think of anything else about her? Anything at all?”

  He considered, arms resting on the top of the chair's back. “The reason you're asking—has she done something bad?”

  I nodded.

  “Hurt people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then, let me tell you my personal opinion of our Ms.Elizabeth: There's something spooky about her. Something scary. Anybody that crosses her, they better watch their ass.”

  Tonight I feel restless. It's well after two in the morning, yet I don't want to go home. The house seems violated, even though it's been nearly two weeks since Lee D’Silva invaded it. So I'm driving south from the city.

  Besides, how can I go home to a phone that never rings with the call I so badly need? I'll drive till I'm exhausted.

  Past the county line on Skyline Boulevard, where it angles close to the sea. Down there are the old riding stables, where a friend's little girl used to take lessons. Sometimes I'd drive her there when her mom couldn't, and on one of those days I heard on the car radio that the stables had caught fire and many of the horses had died. She came running out of school—happy little girl in her jaunty riding habit—and I had to break the news I'll never forget the heartbroken look on her face as her first realization that the world can he a sad, brutal place sank in.

  Turned out the fire was set by a developer who wanted the land. A guy with an agenda, and to hell with other people.

  An agenda—just like Lee D’Silva has.

  Now I'm speeding through the slumbering suburb of Pacifica. Winding through the inland valley toward the still-wild San Mateo County coastline. Hugging the dangerous curves of Devil's Slide—going much too fast, and I don't care. Half Moon Bay goes by in a blur of closed businesses and darkened homes, and now I know where I'm headed.

  The state beach at San Gregorio. I park in the deserted lot, zip up my flight jacket, and hit the sand.

  There are caves hollowed out of the cliffs here, hollowed by the sea waves. Just like at Bootleggers Cove below Touchstone. I guess that's what drew me—the closest approximation to the place I love more than any on earth. Because I share it with Hy.

  Share. Not shared.

  The sand's cold and wet, and the hard moonlight makes the surf shimmer. Tide's out, hut the waves still pound, tearing away at the edge of the continent. After half a mile or so, I begin to feel at peace, he-cause I'm in my element.

  Water: as much my element as the air.

  Ever since childhood, I've headed for water when I'm upset. Not because it's beautiful or placid, but because it so mirrors the nature of life itself: shifting currents, eddies, waves, and—at times—violence. Tonight it makes me realize what I've learned in the past couple of weeks.

  Everybody acts upon a certain given that provides the illusion of personal safety. For some it's that the job is secure, the doors and windows locked, the kids tucked in bed. For others, it's that they have money and power and can buy or sell anything or anyone. For still others, it's that they have a relatively warm and dry place to shelter till sunrise.

  But for me, it's my connection to Hy—that, and a largely false assumption.

  The assumption, I now know, is that people—no matter who they are—act on understandable, although sometimes obscure, motives. That they want identifiable things and act in a manner that is consistent with getting them.

  That belief is at the basis of the problem I'm having understanding Lee D’Silva. She wants something from me, she's performing all these acts to get it, she's leaving me messages right and left. But they're messages in a psychological language that's different from any I've ever encountered.

  What do they mean?

  What the hell does she want from me?

  Saturday

  When I crawled into bed shortly before four, I hadn't expected to sleep at all, but I dozed off toward sunrise and when I woke, it was after ten. Exhaustion, both physical and emotional, had finally caught up with me. Now I felt rested and clearheaded, except for a nagging sense that I'd overlooked something important. I tried to identify it while showering and dressing, then gave up on it as a lost cause. There were more important items on my schedule, such as sitting down with Greg Marcus to see if I had enough on D’Silva for the SFPD to put out a pickup order on her. If so, Greg could steer me to an officer who would handle the matter quickly and discreetly.

  Greg was on duty but couldn't see me till two that afternoon, so in the meantime I made phone calls. To Tamara Corbin, telling her to drop the surveillance on D’Silva's Potrero Hill flat. To Rae, asking how things had been going at the office and finding out that the place seemed to function beautifully without my presence. To Russ Auerbach and Misty Tyree, with whom I went over much the same ground as in our previous conversations. And I called RKI's La Jolla headquarters and Buenos Aires office.

  Gage Renshaw and Dan Kessell were either away from headquarters or ducking my calls—and I suspected the latter. Nobody there or in Buenos Aires would tell me anything about Hy's situation, much less acknowledge that a situation existed. Possibly they were ignorant of what was going on; at RKI information was shared on a strict need-to-know basis—an operational policy rooted in the backgrounds of the principals.

  Renshaw had spent years with the DEA, the last few on an elite and now defunct special task force; Kessell had owned an air charter service that undertook delicate and not totally aboveboard transport missions in Southeast Asia. And Hy had flown many of those missions, had returned from Asia with enough guilt and nightmares to last several lifetimes. Pseudo-spy games came naturally to all three, but they were not my favorite form of recreation. Now I chafed at having become an unwilling player.

  It was a relief when one-thirty rolled around. I gathered my files into my briefcase and headed for the door. And the phone rang.

  “Dammit!” I looked over my shoulder at the instrument, tempted to let the call go on the machine. But it might be important …

  “Sharon?” Gage Renshaw's voice.

  “It's about time!”

  “What d'you mean? I've left five, six messages on your machine.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday, day before.”

  Oh, hell, now she was erasing not only Hy's messages but Renshaw's as well! After the last incident, I'd changed the remote access code for the machine, but there were only a limited number of combinations, and someone with D’Silva's skills could easily figure out the new code.

  “Sharon, I can't talk long, so listen carefully. Where're you going to be this afternoon an
d evening?”

  “… I'm not sure. Probably away from home. Let me give you my cellphone number.” I repeated it twice for him. “Why—”

  “No time for explanations. During the next, say, six hours you'll receive a call. Either from Ripinsky or me.” He hung up.

  I stared at the receiver, then banged it down. God, how I hated his cryptic talk! What Gage meant was that the situation—probably a hostage negotiation or ransom delivery—was about to be resolved. If positively, Hy would phone. If negatively, I'd hear from Gage. And if I heard from Gage, it might mean—

  My vision blurred and for a second I lost my equilibrium. I grasped the back of the armchair next to me, shook my head to clear it. Pushed aside the impulse to panic.

  I would hear from Hy. Sometime during the next six hours. Believing that was the only way it was humanly possible to go on.

  Greg said, “You don't have enough on her for us to take official action.”

  “I was afraid of that.” I got up and began to pace around his cubicle off the Narcotics detail squad room, stopping to tap on the windowpane at a pigeon that was crapping on the ledge outside. It ignored me.

  “Anything unofficial you can do?” I asked.

  “I can request that our people keep an eye out for her, relay the information to you if she's spotted.”

  “I'd appreciate it.” I continued to pace.

  Greg made a phone call, passed on the details about D’Silva and her car. Then he said, “Shar, sit down. You've got to relax.”

  I sat.

  “I've never seen you so wound up—not even during cases where you had a large personal stake.”

  “Well, it doesn't get more personal than this, does it?”

  He frowned at the edge in my voice. “Something else is wrong. What?”

  I shrugged, looking away from him.

  “Come on, Shar. This is me you're talking to.”

  After a moment I looked back, feeling a familiar rush of gratitude that we'd somehow been able to move from a smashed love affair to a friendship. His wry, answering smile cut through my defenses, and I bit my lip, afraid I'd cry. Then I poured out the whole story of Hy's silence from South America and Gage Renshaw's phone call. “And on top of all that,” I went on, “I'm trying to deal with this D’Silva situation. The hell of it is, I feel as if I'm ignoring something important.”

  “Well, about Hy—you're just going to have to wait it out, like Renshaw said. I know that's poor comfort. About the other—why don't you give it a rest? Do something relaxing instead.”

  I stared at him. “What, this woman is trashing my life, and I'm supposed to go to the movies? Or curl up with a book?”

  He held up a hand. “Now, don't get testy on me. What I meant is do something mindless that'll free up your thoughts and allow whatever it is to percolate up from wherever it's lodged. You used to walk on the beach when you were thinking something through.”

  “I already tried that. San Gregorio in the middle of the night. It's a lot like Touchstone's beach, and I thought—Jesus Christ!”

  “What?”

  “That's it!” I yanked my cell phone from my bag and began punching in the Point Arena number of Ray Huddleston, the caretaker who periodically checked on our property. As it rang I said to Greg, “D’Silva told the manager of my old building that she was going to the beach.”

  He frowned, then nodded, comprehension flooding his eyes.

  “Come on, Ray,” I muttered. “Come on!”

  Ray answered on the ninth ring, sounding out of breath. “Sharon! Sorry; I was outside getting some wood.”

  “No problem. Will you do me a favor—right away?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Take a drive down to our property and see if everything's okay there. Then call me at this number.” I read off the cellphone number to him.

  “Half an hour,” he said. “I'll get back to you.”

  As I stuffed the phone into my purse and stood, Greg asked, “You really think she's there?”

  “There, or close by. It's the only part of my life she hasn't invaded—and the most precious.” I whirled and started for the door.

  “Hey, wait! You don't know for sure.”

  “I know—I should've known last night. She's demonstrated she can read my mind. Now, by God, I'm reading hers.”

  Before I left town, I stopped by an outfit on Third Street where I often rented equipment that was too expensive and too infrequently used for the agency to own, and picked up a device I thought might come in handy at Touchstone. Then, from the car, I called the FBO at North Field and asked that they have someone fuel Two-eight-niner. Next I phoned the Oakland Automated Flight Service Station and listened to a taped weather briefing for the Mendocino County Airport at Little River. Hy and I had put in our own dirt strip on our property, but if conditions were bad at the airport, which lay inland, they'd be even worse at Touchstone.

  The weather sounded good, with winds at three knots and unlimited visibility, but the tape was several hours old, so I stayed on the line to talk with a briefer. He said a front was forecast for midnight which would bring high-velocity winds and rain. To verify his information, I called the airport and spoke with a woman employee whom I knew personally; her visual take on the outlook was that the front would arrive earlier.

  “If conditions start to look dicey,” she added, “you're better off landing here, rather than at that strip you guys've got down there on the cliffs.”

  I'd just ended the call when the phone buzzed. Ray Huddleston. “Sharon, I checked the property over, and nobody's there, but the security system's been tampered with and it's not functioning. I went through the cottage and the sheds, and covered the grounds pretty good. Nothing's been damaged, nothing looks disturbed, but there's a strange car in the shed with your truck—blue Honda Civic.”

  D’Silva's. Ray hadn't seen her but she was there—possibly hiding in one of the caves in the cliffs below. The driveway in from Route 1 was long, and she'd had plenty of time to get clear of the cottage after she saw him coming.

  “Thanks for checking, Ray.”

  “A pleasure. You want me to see about getting the system repaired?”

  “Not necessary. I'm on my way up there.”

  “I could stay here till you arrive, just in case.”

  “No, thanks, you've done enough.”

  It would be just D’Silva and me. Just the two of us, alone.

  The Citabria was fueled and waiting. I took the time to do a more thorough preflight than usual, checking both the gas and oil for contaminants I couldn't see by actually feeling for them with my fingers. There were no granular particles that suggested they had been sugared or otherwise tampered with, and I felt a sense of relief as I climbed into the cockpit.

  The finer points of detecting sabotage had been taught to me by a seventy-something pilot friend. Erlene didn't fly by herself anymore, but frequently she and I took spins around northern California, sampling the haute cuisine at airport diners, and occasionally she liberated the controls from me. It was on one of our jaunts that she told me about flying transport as a civilian for the military during World War II, ferrying aircraft to the locations where they were needed. Some of the male pilots felt so threatened by women in the cockpit that they sugared the planes’ fuel and oil—a little known and less than proud moment in our military history—but the women quickly caught on and learned lifesaving detecting techniques. I'd asked Erlene to pass them along to me, never imagining I'd have real need of them.

  “Clear!” I turned the key. The engine caught and sent the prop spinning into a silvery blur. After switching on the beacon and radio equipment and adjusting my headset, I contacted Ground Control.

  Here I come, D’Silva. Now we find out which of us is the better McCone.

  Saturday night

  Little River unicorn, Citabria seven-seven-two-eight-niner, request area weather advisory.”

  “Hey, McCone.” The voice belonged to Sonny West, the man
who managed the terminal building; Hy and I used to catch rides up and down the coast with him when we tied at the airport and were without the truck we kept at Touchstone. “Wind's picking up, around fifteen, sixteen knots from the west, and there's a mean-looking fogbank offshore. Your destination your own strip?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Mind the crosswind on the clifftop.”

  “Will do. Two-eight-niner.”

  It was after six-thirty and a very dark night. Below and to my right lay the scattered lights of the little town of Boonville in the Anderson Valley, roughly 15 miles southeast of Touchstone. I watched them recede, noted the position lights of another plane some 2000 feet above me, then pulled back on power to begin a gradual descent on a direct 45-degree angle to our strip.

  The fog was out there, all right—big gray billows sitting menacingly at sea. It could come in fast here on the coast, but not fast enough to prevent me from reaching my destination.

  Familiar landmarks now: the lights of three ranches lying in a triangle—

  My God! That dream I had the night after I first talked with Russ Auerbach! I was flying through a storm amid out-of-control high-tension wires, looking for a landmark. A triangulation of lights.

  I believe in the usefulness of dreams. They often carry messages from the subconscious that, if properly interpreted, can serve us well. But I'd paid scant attention to that important message, hadn't realized my subconscious was trying to tell me what I'd forgotten.

  D’Silva, according to Glenna Stanleigh, had known about our stone cottage by the sea. Had even known that we called it Touchstone. Shouldn't I have realized that it would all end on this remote stretch of coastline?

  But how had she known about it?

  I thought back to the day she had come to the pier for her job interview. Pictured her sitting tense and eager to please across the desk from me. It was a Thursday, and I'd promised the use of the cottage to Mick and Charlotte so they could get away for a long romantic weekend. Keim had stuck her head through my office doorway, seen I was busy, and started to withdraw. I excused myself to D’Silva, asked, “Charlotte, what is it?”