Wolf in the Shadows

Many thanks to Liz Alexander, Lewis Berger, Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Janice Hayes, Betty Lamb, DeEtte Turner,
Collin Wilcox, and an anonymous officer of the U.S. Border Patrol. Your generous volunteering of your time, expertise, and
insights is greatly appreciated.

And special thanks to my in-house editor and husband, Bill Pronzini.

Part One

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 ranchland 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 in 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.

One

Monday, June 7

“Hey, where’re you going in such a hurry? I need to talk with you.”

Hank Zahn’s hand gripped my shoulder as I tried to squeeze by him on the front stairs of All Souls Legal Cooperative’s main
building. He jerked me to such an abrupt halt that I nearly lost my footing on the fog-damp step.

“Sorry,” my boss added, steadying me with his other hand and whacking me on the elbow with his briefcase.

“Let go of me,” I said through gritted teeth, “before we both fall down and end up in matching leg casts.”

Hank did as I told him, running his free hand over his wiry gray-brown hair. “Sorry,” he repeated.

“Just see that it doesn’t happen again.” I kept going, hoping to make a getaway while he was still befuddled.

“Wait!” he called.

I sighed and turned. “What?”

“I need to talk with you before the partners’ meeting at three.”

It was close to noon now. “What about?”

Hank’s eyes grew evasive behind his thick horn-rimmed glasses. “Oh, some things to do with the reorganization.”

So they’d finally coined a term for it—reorganization. It referred, I supposed, to the mixed bag of changes that had gone
into effect during All Souls’s transition from a small neighborhood law cooperative to one of northern California’s largest
legal-services plans. At any given time during the past year you could have found at least one employee reeling from some
change in job status or description, and now it appeared it was to be the turn of their chief investigator. From the look
in Hank’s eyes, I wasn’t going to like what I heard. Still, I had my priorities.…

“Hank,” I said, “I’m working a case, and I’ve got to take off.”

“I really need to—”

“I’ll try to get back to you before three.”

“If not …” He paused, looking downright guilty now.

“Yes?”

“The partners would like you to attend the meeting.”

Bad sign. Very bad. What the hell was this? Surely they didn’t plan to
fire
me? There had been a number of dismissals lately, and Lord knew I’d played fast and loose any number of times with what few
rules All Souls had, but I was a good investigator, and they damn well knew it.

I frowned, but before I could say anything, Hank fled up the steps. “Be there,” he called back to me.

I watched him go inside, his shoulders hunched under the burden of his guilty knowledge, then shrugged and headed downhill,
where my old red MG was sandwiched between the corner and a fireplug.

* * *

All the way to Oakland Airport I fretted. I’d just come off an investigation that had turned into a flat-out case of obsession,
and I’d expected to give such behavior a rest for a while, but here I was tying myself into emotional knots a day and a half
later. From All Souls in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights district to Treasure Island in the middle of the Bay Bridge, I obsessed
about my job. From Treasure Island to the airport, I obsessed about Hy.

Hy—Heino—Ripinsky. Gentleman sheep rancher and director of an environmental foundation in the Mono County town of Vernon
on the shore of Tufa Lake. Multitalented: airplane pilot, book collector, naturalist, sometime diplomat, sometime protester
for worthy causes. Long rap sheet to go with the latter. Multilingual: English, Spanish, Russian, and French, speaking all
with unaccented fluency. Tall, lanky, hawk-nosed, with shaggy dark-blond hair and a droopy mustache. Given to rugged outdoorsman’s
clothing, but also at home in formal fund-raising attire. A gentle, passionate man, but a man whom I’d also heard described
as dangerous, perhaps violent.

And he did have his darker side. Tragedy in his background: one wife, Julie Spaulding, who had, as he put it, saved him from
hell and later died of a debilitating disease. Julie, who had understood his self-destructive urges and wisely established
the Spaulding Foundation to occupy his lonely hours. Mystery in his background, too: a nine-year hole, years away from Tufa
Lake about which rumors abounded. Rumors, from employment by the CIA to a prison term—and none, I was convinced, that came
close to the true story.

Hy refused to tell me the truth, even after we became lovers late in March. The barrier of silence had driven me to set up
a case file containing what fragmentary information about his past I’d been able to gather. A file that I’d destroyed only
a little over a week ago, convinced I had no right or need to pry into what he seemed determined to conceal, and had set up
once again just this morning when I learned from his assistant at the foundation that Hy had apparently staged a deliberate
and well-thought-out disappearance.

At first tracking him down had seemed like an adventure, perhaps a response to a subtle challenge on his part. But after an
hour of thought, I began to wonder if the disappearance was deliberate after all. Hy didn’t play games, not that kind. Now
tracking him down seemed imperative. Now I was afraid for him.

* * *

Oakland Airport was nearly socked in by fog, and the wind gusted across its north field, where the general aviation terminal
was located. A couple of corporate jets were fueling up, but otherwise there was little activity. I skirted the terminal building
to the small aircraft tie-downs.

The wind made the Cessnas and Beechcrafts and Pipers strain at the chains that tethered them; their wings creaked and shivered,
looking deceptively fragile. I moved quickly among them until I spotted Hy’s Citabria Decathlon in the tie-down where he’d
parked it last Wednesday morning. Even if it hadn’t been in the same place, I would have known it instantly by the blue silhouette
of a gull that seemed to soar against the white background and the identification number, 77289. It was a small, high-winged
plane—tandem two-seater, and aerobatic. Hy had once proudly informed me that it could fly upside down, but so far, thank
God, he hadn’t treated
me
to that experience.

As I approached the Citabria, I felt deflated, a little shaky, even. I supposed that in the back of my mind I’d hoped to find
it gone, learn that Hy was on his way back to Tufa Lake, and be able to stop worrying. But seeing it here brought the gravity
of the situation home to me, and now I was sure that Hy’s disappearance wasn’t a playful challenge to my investigatory abilities.

When we’d climbed out of the plane last Wednesday morning, back from a Memorial Day weekend vacation in the White Mountains,
he’d said he planned to refuel and immediately continue on to San Diego, where one of his many unnamed old buddies had a business
proposition to make him. True to form, Hy hadn’t given me a hint as to what the proposition might be or where to reach him,
had merely said he’d fill me in if it worked out. Probably I should have become concerned for him sooner, because he hadn’t
called me. One thing— practically the only thing—I could depend on Hy for was to keep in touch.

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