Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [18]
“That’s pretty impressive growth in not much more than five years.”
“Well, I wouldn’t guarantee that some of the offices aren’t just mail drops, but it looks impressive as hell.”
“This Dan Kessell,” I said, “what about him?”
“Kessell’s background is harder to pin down. Special Forces in ’Nam, that much I know. Renshaw’s their front man— gives interviews to the Wall Street Journal; you’ve seen that kind of stuff. Kessell stays out of the public eye.”
“And he’s an old friend of Renshaw’s from where?”
“They went to high school together in Fresno, of all damn places.”
Fresno. Maybe that was the connection. Hy had been born in Fresno; his father had operated a crop-dusting service there. But his parents had divorced when he was twelve, and he’d been raised on his stepfather’s sheep ranch—the ranch he’d inherited, where he now lived—near Tufa Lake. “Bob,” I asked, “have you ever heard the name Hy Ripinsky mentioned in connection with Renshaw or Kessell?”
He considered. “No, I’d remember if I had.”
“What about if you wanted to get close to these people without them knowing what you were after? How would you go about it?”
“Very carefully.”
“But how?”
“Sharon, just what are you after?” Now Bob’s tone was concerned.
“I have reason to believe that a friend of mine got mixed up with RKI and may have gotten hurt.”
“So you’re riding to the rescue.”
“Uh-huh.”
“When’re you going to learn?”
“Probably never.”
“Sharon, you may think you’re hot stuff because you’ve gotten your picture in the local papers so many times that now you have to work to keep it out, but you’re not in RKI’s league. These people have been around—everyplace. They’re tough and they’re dangerous.”
“That doesn’t tell me what I need to know.”
He sighed. “I’m trying to tell you to leave them alone.”
“Can’t.”
A silence. “All right, then, I’ll give you this advice: you want to find out about your friend, you level with them. No subterfuge is going to get you what you need to know. Make an appointment with Gage Renshaw, and just come out and ask what happened.”
It sounded good to me; I’ve always preferred the straightforward approach.
After I hung up, I sat on my sofa with my feet propped on the coffee table and thought for a while. The international security consulting business is an outgrowth of the rise of terrorism against employees and executives of U.S. companies both at home and abroad. The firms provide such services as risk analysis, security program design, preventative and defensive training for personnel, guards and escorts. That’s the part they talk about in Wall Street Journal interviews.
The activities they don’t like to talk about are what they call contingency services: crisis-management plans for extortions or kidnappings; ransom negotiation and delivery; hostage recovery. Insurance companies that write large anti-terrorist policies specify which of the security firms is to be called in, along with the FBI, in the event of a kidnapping. When Bob said that the insurance carriers were leery of RKI, it meant that their methods were unorthodox, that they would often bypass the step of bringing in the federal authorities. Their tactics in paying ransoms and recovering hostages would be riskier than those of the other firms; they would probably have a high success rate, but when one of their negotiations went badly, it would result in a tragedy.
What was Hy doing with these people?
He’d told me an old buddy in San Diego had a business proposition to talk over with him. An old buddy from his childhood in Fresno? Or an old buddy from that nine-year hole in his life? Either way, it had to be someone from RKI, probably Dan Kessell or Gage Renshaw. And my former boss was right: the best way to find out was to ask.
I went to the phone and dialed the La Jolla number that I’d copied from my answering-machine tape the night before. A woman answered. I asked for Gage Renshaw. He was out of town. What about Dan Kessell? He was unavailable at the moment. Could I perhaps reach Mr. Renshaw in San Francisco? I could try; did I have the number there?