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Authors: Marcia Muller

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BOOK: A Wild and Lonely Place
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“Right. Your nephew’s a nice kid, you don’t want him in trouble. But then there’s RKI; they abuse the system all the time.
Tell me, Sharon, what’s it like to be in bed with them?”

I didn’t flare up because I sensed a real concern for me behind the question. “I use RKI. They don’t use me.”

“Yet.”

“Ever.”

“Your boyfriend’s one of them.”

“But cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth.”

“So you tell yourself.”

“So I know.”

“I’ve never heard you sound so sure about anyone. Certainly you never did about me.” He thought for a moment, turning his
wineglass round and round on the table. “Okay, I guess I should let it go. Can’t help feeling protective toward you, though.
So tell me what you need.”

I repeated the mental list I’d made back at the office. Greg jotted down items on a notepad. When I finished he said, “I’ll
get started on it first thing tomorrow. Where can I reach you?”

I gave him my phone number at the cottage, then asked, “What else are they saying about Joslyn?”

“She’s going to crash and burn, and it’s a damned shame.”

“But if she gets it together and collars the bomber—”

“You going to do her work for her again?”

So the departmental brass was aware of that, too. I shrugged.

Greg finished his wine. I asked, “Where’re you off to now?”

“The fry cook’s. You?”

“The home I share with the terrorist.”

He looked surprised at the mention of a shared home, but only said, “Give him my regards.”

* * *

The two-lane road through the Anderson Valley was dark but well paved and easy. I sped past the closed-up wineries and through
the little hamlets. Toward the coast the pavement narrowed and snaked through heavily forested hills. I felt wired from the
espresso and pushed the MG to its limits, downshifting at the ends of the straightaways, accelerating on the curves. Then
I glided down the coast highway and turned north to where our cottage sat on the cliff above Bootlegger’s Cove.

Soon I could see our security lights across the rocky land between the road and the sea cliffs. The cottage itself was dark.
I followed the blacktop past the place where our friends’ home once stood, reminding myself that someday Hy’s and mine would
rise on the site. My headlights washed over the little stone-and-timber structure nestled in a cypress grove at the land’s
edge. When I got out of the car, the sea wind assaulted me, the sea smell stung my nostrils.

I stood there for a moment listening to the surf, feeling the serenity. Tonight I sensed none of the violent ripples beneath
its surface, heard no sounds of grief and loss in the waves. This was not a gentle land; its edges were jagged and sharp.
But it was a land of strength, vitality, and resilience, and it suited Hy and me. We’d renamed the property Touchstone, after
the siliceous rock used by metallurgists to test the purity of silver and gold. Hy and I were one another’s touchstones, each
continually testing the purity of our actions, motives, and decisions. Like the land, the interface between us was often jagged
and sharp, but we always meshed.

I went to the door, disarmed the security system, and stepped inside. Rearmed the system. Embers glowed on the hearth, but
the two rooms were silent. I looked through the bedroom door and saw my lover lying long-limbed beneath the down comforter.
He had wrapped his arms around his pillow, and his dark blond hair was tousled. Quickly I slipped into the bathroom, weariness
overcoming my caffeine rush. I shed my clothes, gave my teeth a cursory brush, my face an even more cursory wash.

Sleep, I thought. Hours and hours of blissful sleep.

In the bedroom I moved cautiously, sliding beneath the comforter with extreme care. Hy’s wake-up mechanism had a hair trigger;
while it had been many years since he slept with a gun under the pillow, any sudden movement would make him reach for the
.44 he kept in the nightstand.

In spite of my caution he stirred. Pushed the pillow away and reached for me instead of the gun. “McCone,” he said, “about
time.”

No blissful sleep—for a while, anyway.

But who was complaining?

Seven

Except for a long walk on the fog-shrouded beach we spent Saturday lounging in front of the fire. Hy lay on the couch studying
reports on the military situation in Haiti; with his dark-rimmed reading glasses perched on the bridge of his hawk nose he
looked more the college professor than a specialist assessing the feasibility of bringing a Haitian dissident over the frontier
into the Dominican Republic. Word of the well-financed one-man crusade he’d embarked upon last fall had spread quickly among
human-rights organizations; this was the second rescue attempt referred to him by a group in Miami.

I curled in the big cushioned rattan chair reading through the printout of Mick’s research. Every now and then Hy would mutter
something and I’d look up and see he was making notes. When I burst out laughing, though, he stopped and took off his glasses.
“What’s so funny?”

“Mick. Whenever he does a complicated report for me, he goes overboard with the prose. I swear that if he falls out of love
with investigation he could become one of those terribly snide and irreverent columnists. Listen to this: he’s writing about
the emir of Azad, Sheik Zayid bin Muhammad al-Hamid.

“‘The sheik is a real piece of work. His thing is flowers, and he’s blown millions trying to grow an English garden in the
middle of the desert. When his old man died, his brother was first in line to take over, and Zayid wasn’t too happy about
that. So what does he do? He invites the bro over to look at his new rose bushes and shoots him in the back. I guess afterwards
he felt guilty, because he turned into a born-again; they’ve got them there, too—Islam style. He’s big on morals and family
values, has reinstated the death-by-stoning penalty for rape and murder. They say he’s trying to take Azad back into the nineteenth
century, which is probably why a lot of Azadis like to live abroad. Frankly, it sounds like a pretty boring place.

“‘The sheik’s life is anything
but
boring, though. In the seventies his father built up the capital city, Djara, in a major way. Only the old man was cheap
and always took the lowest bids, and now everything’s falling down—including the sheik’s palaces, so he keeps having to move.
He’s got this family you wouldn’t believe, they make
ours
look normal. There’s this brother he keeps having to ship off to a nuthouse in Switzerland. Another brother gets off on hanging
his servants when they piss him off. So far none of them have died because the bro doesn’t know his knots. Zayid’s daughter
is rough on servants, too—she’s always trying to lay them, and if they don’t cooperate she drops them off in the desert, naked.
No wonder the royal family can’t get decent help these days. Zayid’s wife is hooked on tranquilizers—who wouldn’t be? And
they all drink on the sly, except for the sheik. The
whole country
drinks. The capital city’s got a pop of fifty thousand, and ten thousand are certified alcoholics. And a lot of the men prefer
their poker buddies over their wives as bed partners. All this came out of a report commissioned by their ministry of health
and welfare. The Azadis are so dim they actually
published
the thing.’”

Hy was laughing and shaking his head. “Jesus, the kid’s good.”

“How much of this d’you suppose is true?”

“Well, the stuff about the royal family may or may not be an exaggeration—he couldn’t’ve gotten that out of a government report—but
the rest fits with the Middle East that I remember.”

“Oh?” He’d mentioned flying in supplies for the oil fields when he worked for Dan Kessell’s air-charter service.

“Uh-huh. Repression pushes them over the edge into sheer insanity, and alcoholism really is that common. Back in the mid-seventies
one of our people—hotdog pilot named Ralston—got his ass thrown in jail in Qatar. The son of a bitch was importing alcohol
on the side, and the natives were making him rich, but when he got caught it was a potential life sentence. Dan and I flew
in, delivered a load of pipe fittings, and then spread a lot of U.S. dollars around to the jailers. When we left we had Ralston
in the skin of the plane. That was when we more or less developed that method.”

The skin-of-the-plane method involved wrapping an individual in as much insulating material as possible and hiding him between
the inner cabin wall and the outer wall of the aircraft, where he would escape detection by police and customs authorities.
At high altitudes for prolonged times, temperatures in that space can cause frostbite or death, and even with the best of
precautions things can go wrong—as Hy had found out after a mission in Laos.

Momentarily I was silent, remembering the pain in his eyes when he told me about finding the frozen bodies of the Laotian
government official and his young family whom he was transporting to Hong Kong. They hadn’t understood his instructions, had
removed their protective layers once aboard and weren’t able to put them back on in the confined space.

Hy said, “Hey, McCone, it’s okay. I’ve come to terms with all that old garbage.”

I nodded and set Mick’s report on the floor. “Look, do you want to take a break? I need to run some things by you.”

“Sure.” He got up and closed the blinds against the darkening bank of fog outside the seaward windows. “I don’t know about
you, but I could use a beer.”

“Red wine, please.”

He went to the tiny kitchen area and returned with our drinks. I moved to the couch, nestling in a corner, my stockinged feet
against his blue-jeaned thigh.

“So what’s the problem?” he asked.

“My approach to this case isn’t working. The task force has been concentrating on the bomber—profiling him, trying to get
people who may know something to come forward. They’ve also put together profiles of the victims, as well as the diplomatic
missions that were hit and the countries they represent, but they haven’t had time to do more than scratch the surface. So
first I did a more in-depth profile of each, then looked for commonalities among them. There weren’t any.”

“And now because of what Gage told you, you’ve shifted your focus to the Azadis.”

“For a while I thought I was really onto something, but none of it hangs together.”

“Well, you haven’t gotten the information you asked your friend Greg for yet.”

“No, and that probably means he hasn’t come up with anything, since he said he’d get on it first thing this morning. NCIC
used to take a long time to reply to requests for information, but they’re fully automated and on-line now; you can access
their criminal history database in a matter of minutes.”

“Strange, since one of the people you asked him to check out is supposed to’ve been involved in organized gambling.”

“Yes, but there’s a hitch with that. I thought of it last night and asked Mick to check it out—that’s what the information
he faxed here was about.”

“And?”

“The hitch is diplomatic immunity.”

“Aha!”

I reached for Mick’s fax and read, “‘According to Article Thirty-one of the international treaty adopted by the Vienna Convention
on Diplomatic Relations of nineteen sixty-one, ambassadors and other diplomatic agents
and their direct families
have complete immunity from all criminal prosecution and civil suits in the host country. Courts have ruled that the direct
family includes both spouses and children. Although these rulings have been challenged in specific cases, they’ve generally
been upheld.’ That means that Dawud Hamid could’ve been caught red-handed running the biggest gambling operation in the country,
and he’d’ve walked within the hour. So there isn’t going to be any criminal history on him.”

“Above the law, all the way.”

“Dammit!” I tossed the fax on the floor. “There’s got to be
some
way of finding out what he was involved in. I’m pretty sure he had at least one run-in with the police; Mavis Hamid said
her mother-in-law wouldn’t call them in when he disappeared because it was ‘too soon after…’ And then she said that—whatever
it was—couldn’t’ve had anything to do with it, and changed the subject. Too soon after
what
? And how the hell can I find out?”

Hy sipped beer silently, stroked his droopy mustache. I nibbled on my lower lip, reviewing the possibilities. Then, at the
same time, we said, “The newspapers!”

Of course. Diplomats are granted immunity from prosecution, but not from media coverage. “God, I must’ve been in brain stall
not to think of this earlier,” I said.

Hy was still looking thoughtful. “When did you say Hamid disappeared?”

“February of ninety.”

“A month before the first bombing. You ever think he might
be
the bomber?”

“I’ve thought of it. I’m going to try to get a photo of him to see how closely he fits the physical profile.”

“Which is?”

“Sketchy. Medium to dark complected, medium height and weight. No information about hair color because he always wears some
kind of hat. No information about eye color because he always wears aviator-style sunglasses. Conflicting descriptions of
his voice. No noticeable scars or defects.”

“Where’d they get that?”

“It’s based on the descriptions of the messengers who delivered the bombs that weren’t sent through the mail. They all sound
like the same man, and the task force assumes they’re only dealing with one perp, because the psychological profile of this
kind of bomber indicates he works alone.”

“What’s his signature?”

Every bomb maker leaves a “signature” on the explosive device, whether intentionally or otherwise. Subtle details identify
him or her, much as brushwork and palette identify the creator of an oil painting. “That’s the detail the task force has held
back from the public. It’s the device for completing the electrical circuit—a spring that looks like a pair of praying hands,
held together by a twisted ring.”

“Odd.”

“It’s the same every time. He’s precise; the bombs are well crafted. He doesn’t get fancy; he uses ordinary black powder that
can be bought at sporting-goods stores. He’s cool; he walks into post offices and mails the packages without calling attention
to himself. And he probably enjoys a certain amount of danger, since he delivered some of the bombs personally. The task force
knows all that, yet they’re no closer to identifying him than before.”

BOOK: A Wild and Lonely Place
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