Someone Always Knows (19 page)

4:30 a.m.

I
t was oh-dark-thirty again when I lifted off from Tufa Tower and set my course for Oakland. I watched the lake and the Sierras recede in the distance and the sun begin to wash over the fuselage as it outpaced me. The Bay Area looked clear, cool, and welcoming.

When I touched down at Oakland, Mick was waiting in my car.

As soon as I'd gotten in, I asked if there had been any communication from Hy or any news about him.

“Nothing,” he said, flicking a concerned glance at me. “But we've been keeping on top of everything else, especially Don Macy's whereabouts. He's been going about business as usual—driving, errands, home.”

“No slight variation in his routine?”

“Well, a professional driver like him doesn't really have a routine, in the sense of where he goes and with whom. But those new operatives we put on him have logged every passenger and destination. I swear they don't sleep—and unfortunately, they don't let me sleep either, phoning in at all hours.”

We were now traveling across the Bay Bridge (my mind, as ever, on those defective bolts) to the M&R building. I asked Mick why he was driving my car, and he described picking it up from my house in a series of automotive maneuverings that astonished me. He hadn't wanted to waste agency money on a taxi. (This from the son of a multimillionaire, who was about to become one himself!) So he'd woken Alison on one of her rare mornings off and prevailed on her to drive him to my house.

Why not take his car or the bike? I asked. Both were in the shop. Then, when he arrived at my house, he'd found John's new Jag blocking the driveway. My brother is neither a willing nor a gracious riser, so for a moment Mick considered hot-wiring the Jag. Fortunately he concluded this wasn't the neighborhood for such early-morning activities. Common sense prevailed further in the person of Chelle, who had seen him and emerged in her bathrobe with John's keys.

My family members are, if nothing else, inventive.

I set things in motion for a staff meeting at four and then, even though I'd caught a couple of hours' sleep at home, napped some more on my office sofa.

The sleep had made me groggy, but I pushed through my mental fog and called Rae.

“No sign of the bastard,” she said. “I've canvassed all the data storage places he was hanging around, staked out your building too. Nobody's seen him, and as far as we know, he hasn't had any contact with Macy either.”

“I don't think he'd bother to go back to any of those storage companies; he got what he wanted at the Depot.”

“Maybe he's still in Mexico.”

“No, he got what he wanted there too. Why don't you give it a rest for now and come sit in on our staff meeting? There's been a new development you should know about.”

“When's the meeting?”

“Four o'clock.”

“I'll be there.”

The conference room was ready, with copies of Hy's files placed before each seat. Only Craig had read them, since he was the one operative likely to fully understand FBI-speak. People began to filter in and take their places. When everybody was assembled I began.

“I know I don't have to stress this with you all, but what's said in this room today goes no farther. I trust you to keep strict confidentiality. No exceptions.

“In a way that's too complicated to explain now, I've found out Gage Renshaw's motive for attacking this agency, Hy, and me. There'll be time for you to study the materials in front of you later, so I'll summarize. They concern an illegal overseas arms deal arranged by Renshaw and his late partner Dan Kessell, and thwarted by Hy many years ago. Renshaw's motive is revenge. And his plan for revenge is linked to his search for the three and a half million dollars in bearer bonds supposedly secreted in the abandoned house we were investigating on Webster Street.

“Much of this is theoretical, but I assume Renshaw found out about the bonds somehow and received confirmation that they exist—or existed—while he was in Mexico.”

Adah said, “I thought the bonds were destroyed in the fire.”

“Maybe not,” I told her. “As you remember, I saw someone running away from the house immediately before the fire flared up.”

“Renshaw?”

“Could've been. The man was Renshaw's height and body type.”

“Macy's too. It could've been him, acting on Renshaw's orders.”

“That's also possible.”

“What about the man who was killed in the fire?”

“Nemo James, Michelle Curley's boyfriend. I haven't confirmed this yet—and maybe no one ever will, since he was very badly burned—but I believe his true identity was Adam Smithson, son of the man who stole the bonds. I have a photo of James as a boy, but I only saw him in the flesh as an adult in his thirties. After studying the photo and showing it to Chelle, I've concluded there's a similarity in facial bone structure that an expert will probably confirm. There're also incidents in his childhood that indicate why he would adopt the Nemo alias.”

Derek asked, “Was he after the bonds too?”

“Yes. He knew about them from his father, who died before he could go back for them.”

“Why'd the son wait so long to try to retrieve them?”

“I know,” Mick said. “It occurred to me last night, and I checked with the state board of corrections today. Smithson was in prison all those years under his own name for an armed robbery he committed in San Diego. The personal history he presented to Chelle is an outright pack of lies.”

Julia said, “So this Nemo guy was looking for the bonds and along came Renshaw, who was also looking for them. The timing's quite a coincidence.”

“Coincidences
do
happen,” I said, “sometimes in bunches—otherwise there wouldn't be any such word.”

“True. So Renshaw bumps him off or otherwise disables him and gets the bonds and sets the house on fire. Deliberately?”

“No way of knowing. Until we get hold of Renshaw.”

“We?”

“Yes—we.”

“Tall order.”

Adah asked, “These bonds—can they still be redeemed?”

I glanced at Derek, who was keeping in touch with various financial institutions.

He said, “Yes, but I just found out today that the date they expire is coming up next month—another reason Nemo may have been anxious to get hold of them.”

“And have any of them been redeemed since the fire?”

“Not yet. Renshaw's probably made some illicit arrangements for cashing them, but hasn't had the opportunity to act on them so far.”

I thought of Señor Bernardo Ordway. Now there was a man who would know what to do—for a steep fee. That had probably been Renshaw's reason for going to Mexico.

We talked some more, going round and round on the same issues: Did Renshaw have any accomplices? Was he as truly unbalanced as we thought? How had he managed to function all those years if he was? What was the trigger that had pushed him into action against Hy and me?

During this session my phone rang: Nadya Collins, the relatively new operative who was tailing Macy. I left the conference room and took the call in the hallway: Macy had gone to Safeway after getting off work, and somehow she'd lost him there. “It's a big store,” she added apologetically. “He disappeared in the produce department, and when I came out his car wasn't in the parking lot. I drove over to his house, but it wasn't there either and the place is totally dark.”

“Continue your surveillance of the house for the next twenty minutes or so, and then I'll take it from there,” I told her.

Action was what I craved, not more brainstorming. My best lead to Renshaw was Don Macy, and the place to intercept Macy tonight was at his home…if he finally came home. I wanted to be the one to do that.

Nadya was parked a short way downhill from Macy's rented house. I pulled up behind her gray sedan and flashed my lights to let her know I'd arrived, which was our prearranged signal. She left immediately.

I took my .38 from my purse, where it had been since before I flew to Tufa Lake, and slipped it under the waistband of my jeans at the small of my back. Then I stuffed the purse under the seat and got out of the car. The night air was balmy, as it often is in September and October, San Francisco's true summer months.

I climbed the short front steps of Macy's home and pressed the bell. I didn't expect an answer and I didn't get one. I moved along the driveway, looking for signs of recent habitation, but there was nothing to see. The blinds and curtains were all tightly drawn. The driveway ended at a cracked concrete pad where a garage or carport might once have stood; it was so deep in the shadows that I hadn't noticed it before. I took out my small flashlight and shone it around, shielding the beam with my other hand. Oil stains, some old, some newer. Rotted foundation posts from an old superstructure surrounded the concrete.

I returned to my car, made a U-turn, and parked a few houses down on the opposite side of the block. Adjusted my side-view mirror so I had a good view of the Macy house. Below, the city thrummed to its own distinctive beat: the faint roar of freeway traffic; people calling their children and pets inside; music of various sorts. Brakes screeched, horns blared, sirens wailed. Life was going on down there, and here I sat with what so far was a dead-end case.

Most people don't understand that a lot of a private investigator's work involves dead ends: A promising lead turns up and you follow it doggedly, but it takes you nowhere. You sit in your car, run out of food and water. Or you bring too much water and end up having to pee in ludicrous places. You park facing the wrong way, and the subject sneaks around you easily, but you don't realize he or she has gotten away till the next morning. You're bored out of your mind, your butt aches, but you don't dare get out and exercise or play a DVD. You attempt to fantasize, but if your dreams involve what you used to do in the backseat of a decades-old Chevy, they're pretty hard to fit into the front seat, even of a brand-new luxury car.

God, the night was black! I didn't often conduct surveillances any more, and it had been a while since I'd had to contend with such dark, lonely places. I flashed back to a long-ago confrontation on the US-Mexican border south of San Diego, where I'd had to kill a man. That had been one of the darkest nights I'd ever experienced, but I'd felt strong. Last night at the ranch, when I'd taken a short break from reading Hy's journal to walk in our meadow and looked up at the stars over the high desert, I'd felt a measure of comfort. When I'd made my first night flight, the sky had been black, with clouds scudding across it, and it had welcomed a fledgling pilot. But here, with the lights of the city fanning out below, the night felt impenetrable, and I felt profoundly alone.

A few cars passed, but none of them stopped. A motorcycle buzzed by, its driver trailing a long white scarf. A man walked a blond lab, but displayed no interest in me. A shabby pickup truck rattled past. I felt like I was like a computer in sleep mode: waiting, waiting, waiting…

After a while I broke one of my own rules and got out of the car and took a walk along the block. It sloped sharply to the south, then rose to another precipitous height. All the time I kept my gaze on the Macy house. A couple of cars passed, but neither turned into Macy's driveway.

Was Macy coming home, or had he perhaps gone to meet Renshaw in another part of the city or even someplace farther away after shopping at the Mission Street Safeway? My assumption was that he'd been doing his grocery shopping and then would head for home. But he hadn't.…

Until now. Finally.

I watched as Macy's Honda edged into his driveway and parked far back on the concrete pad. I couldn't see whoever got out, but after a moment a man's figure appeared, lugging a couple of bags to a side entrance.

After some fumbling with keys, he went into the house. I watched as a light came on behind closed blinds in a room I supposed, by the number of exhaust pipes in the roof above it, was the kitchen. After a few seconds the light went out, leaving the place as deserted-looking as before. He hadn't bothered to put away his purchases. Or to turn on any more lights.

Why? What was he doing in the dark?

When I came home to my empty house late at night, what did I do? Turn on lights and leave them on until I'd made sure everything was secure, even though I have a good alarm system. I'd check for messages, maybe take a look at the TV news in case I'd missed one of our all-too-frequent catastrophes. I'd use the bathroom, brush my teeth, sometimes take a shower.

Maybe I was overly fastidious.

Maybe Macy was drunk or careless.

Or maybe he'd spotted me and hoped I'd go away.

The hell with that!

I crossed the empty, echoing street. Went up to Macy's door and rang the bell, keeping my thumb on the button.

It took more than a minute for the door to open. Macy looked out at me with owlish eyes.

“Mr. Macy, I'm Sharon McCone, a private investigator. I need to talk with you.”

“At this time of night? About what?”

“Gage Renshaw, among other things.”

“Who?”

“Come on, Macy. Your friendship with Renshaw is well documented.”

“Friendship? What're you talking about?” Beads of sweat stood out on Macy's high forehead now. His eyes jerked to his left.

I glanced that way, but saw nothing in the darkness behind him. “What are you so afraid of?” I demanded.

“Afraid? I'm not afraid of anything. You're bothering me late at night, invading my privacy—”

“Tell me about Renshaw and I'll go away.”

“I can't!”

“You can, and you will.”

I moved forward, putting my left hand on the partially open door. Macy braced it against me. I pushed it, and suddenly the resistance eased. Macy's mouth popped open in surprise. A hand came out of the darkness, gripped my upper arm, and dragged me into the foyer.