His thoughts flashed back to his first wife, Julie, now many years dead of multiple sclerosis. Toward the end she’d also been unmoving and silent, but there’d been an absence about her, as if her essence had already left her body. Not so with McCone; he still felt the psychic connection that had bound them together since almost the first time they met. If she was beyond all hope, would that connection exist?
No, he refused to believe it.
The past ten days were a jumble in his memory. His shock when the call came to his hotel in Seattle from Ted Smalley, who had been summoned along with the police and paramedics when the half-drunk security guard found McCone shortly after hearing the shot. The frantic and reckless flight to San Francisco piloting Ripinsky International’s jet. Heart-pounding drive from the airport, where two days before he’d left the Mustang inside the jet’s hangar, to the hospital. Then the waiting, a three-day and -night vigil.
We’ve established a good oxygen supply… Blood flow and pressure returning to normal… A setback, blood pressure crashing… BP edging toward normal… She’s responding to the medications… Another setback, incompatibility with the medication… Have to be very careful with meds in cases of traumatic brain injury… No, we can’t operate at this point; chances of her survival would be very slim…
Why don’t you get some rest. Mr. Ripinsky? Really, you’ll be no good to your wife if you don’t rest.
Of course, he hadn’t rested. Had sat by her bedside, alert for any change, any sign. And later, when they’d said she was stabilized, he’d stayed with her in the ICU except for brief trips home to shower and change and field phone calls from her family and friends.
Her adoptive mother near San Diego had collapsed upon hearing the news and been placed under sedation, according to Sharon’s stepfather. Sister Charlene and her husband, Vic, were in the city, in spite of Sharon’s not being allowed visitors. Calls came daily from her birth mother in Boise, Idaho; from her birth father on the Flathead Reservation in Montana; from her half sister Robin in Berkeley; from her sister Patsy in Sonoma. Brother John arrived from San Diego and installed himself in Sharon and Hy’s guest room.
The people at the agency knew better than to bother Hy. They had established a rapport with two of the floor nurses who kept them posted.
Hy leaned forward and grasped the steering wheel, weariness and helplessness diluting his earlier rage. When he’d first heard the news of McCone’s shooting, the rage had been dominant: he’d flown the jet recklessly, driven erratically, burst into the hospital like the proverbial storm. Now he was wearing down, the only bright spot on the horizon being the slim hope that the Brandt Neurological Institute promised.
Life without her-
No, for God’s sake, don’t go there!
He straightened, grasped the wheel.
So what to do to pass the long evening? Go home, where everything was a reminder of Shar, and their cats stared at her favorite chair with bewildered eyes? Where her brother John would rekindle his rage with endless discussions about “getting the bastard that did this”? Go to the RI office, catch up on paperwork in the hope it would numb his mind enough to let him sleep on the sofa there? Impose his presence upon friends who had already done more than he could ever repay?
None of the above.
He started the car and drove toward Pier 24½.
Cars were parked on the pier’s floor-so many that he had trouble slotting the Mustang. Odd, this late in the afternoon. Some of the offices on the first story were closed, but lights blazed upstairs at McCone Investigations, and he sensed tension and activity. As he climbed the stairway to the catwalk, he heard voices coming from the conference room.
When he appeared in the doorway, silence fell. Adah Joslyn, Sharon’s executive administrator, broke it by saying to Hy, “Is there-”
“No news. She’s being transferred to an acute care facility tomorrow.”
A collective sigh of disappointment mixed with relief. No news was bad news; no news was good news.
“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.
“No, no, of course not. Come in.”
He did, taking a chair against the wall, since there were no places left at the round oak table.
Adah was standing: an elegant, slim woman in a well tailored navy blue suit, with a honey-tan complexion and beautifully corn-rowed black hair. The perfect image for an increasingly successful agency, just as she’d been the perfect image for the SFPD’s campaign to promote women and minorities-not only because she was female, but because she was also half black and half Jewish. The perfect image until working the homicide detail had taken its toll and Shar had made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. In spite of Adah’s tightly controlled exterior, Hy knew her to be funny, generous, and a thoroughly staunch friend.
The silence stretched out. He said, “Go on with whatever you were discussing, please.”
Looks were exchanged around the table. Adah said, “Actually, we should have invited you to this meeting, Hy. It’s kind of… a tribal war council.”
“Meaning what?”
“We’re Sharon’s tribe… family… whatever-”
“And we’re pissed off, going to find out who shot her,” said Sharon’s nephew Mick Savage.
Hy turned his gaze to Mick. The petulant, spoiled son of a country-music superstar had matured into a stand-up man in the years he’d known him. Hard to grow up in the shadow of his father, but Mick had managed-in spite of being a tall, blond version of handsome Ricky Savage, but without his father’s musical talent, ambition, or ruthless drive. Mick had found both his present and his future in computers and, owing to the revolutionary software programs he was currently creating with fellow operative Derek Ford, would someday rival Ricky in fortune, if not in fame.
Hy said, “So how do you intend to nail this person?”
The operative who replied surprised him: Julia Rafael. She and his wife had had dinner at a Mission district tacqueria before Shar had returned to the pier to pick up her forgotten cell phone. Julia was something of an engima to Hy. She’d worked the streets of the Mission district from age twelve, selling herself and drugs. Arrests, abortions, and the birth of a son whose father she couldn’t begin to name had followed. The boy had given Julia a purpose; after her final release from the California Youth Authority, she’d turned her life around.
Hy, ever distrustful of dramatic turnarounds-in spite of having made one himself-had waited for Julia to screw up. And when she was arrested for crimes that put Sharon’s license and the agency in serious jeopardy, he’d wanted to say “I told you so.” But Julia, vindicated, had turned into a fine operative. He still wondered at McCone’s friendship with her: Julia was insecure in the extreme and covered it with a haughty, sometimes hostile demeanor. But McCone was an excellent judge of character, so she must have seen gold in Julia that was yet to be mined.
Now Julia said, “We started on these investigations the day after Shar was attacked, with the idea that the shooter had to have some connection with one of the cases the agency was working. Otherwise why was he skulking around the pier at night?”
“He wasn’t looking for money or stuff to sell for drugs,” Adah added. “Nothing was taken.”
“Unless Shar interrupted him before he could take something,” Hy said.
“It’s possible, but this has more the feel of an instrusion by somebody who knew the pier, knew Lewis was a drunk and likely to leave his station for long periods of time. Your average thief doesn’t just walk into someplace with a lighted guard’s desk.”
“Or shoot his way out of the situation if he’s caught,” Julia said. “He’d hide-unless he was afraid Shar would recognize him.”
“Someone who had been here before, then,” Hy said. “Someone she’d seen. Not necessarily her client, but one of the agency’s, or a witness or suspect in one of the cases.”