Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [36]
I’d seen no evidence of surveillance on me at the airport, but that didn’t mean much. RKI’s people would be good, very difficult to spot. Or the surveillance might not begin until San Diego. Renshaw didn’t trust me, but he’d probably assume I’d play straight with them until I had a concrete lead to Hy. His people would keep their distance until I made a move.
God, I thought, the world that people like Renshaw operated in was a strange one—full of paranoia, suspicion, distrust. I’d come up against a fair amount of duplicity in my own world, but in his it seemed the accepted norm. Could he ever distinguish his friends from his enemies? Probably not; this afternoon he and his own client had been at each other’s throats. Was he ever able to let down his guard and confide in anyone? Perhaps his partner, Dan Kessell, but nobody else. And this was the world that Hy had connections to, somewhere in that nine-year void….
It occurred to me now that my former boss, Bob Stern, could very well have been right: I might be playing with people who were out of my league. If I made a mistake, it could prove fatal. But I had no choice—had I?
No, not if I cared for Hy. And I did care—more than I’d allowed myself to admit. Hard to commit your deepest feelings to a man who wouldn’t entrust you with knowledge of his past. Hard to give of yourself when you feared you’d receive nothing in return. Yet here I was—how had Bob put it?—riding to the rescue. No turning back now.
The plane lifted off, then began its southward turn over the Pacific. I reached under the seat in front of me and pulled the file on the biotech industry that Renshaw had given me from my oversized purse. Leafed through it until I found a copy of an Image magazine profile on the Mournings, and began to read.
They were originally from the Midwest—she, Wisconsin; he, Minnesota. They’d met and married while students at the University of Wisconsin, then come to the Bay Area; she’d entered Stanford’s prestigious M.B.A. program, he’d gone to work as a biochemist at Syntex, the pharmaceuticals giant. There had been lean times, when she was still in school and he and a partner left Syntex to tinker with biotechnology. There had been in-between times, when she trained in finance under a high-powered San Francisco venture capitalist—later one of the major investors in Phoenix Labs—and he began to get the infant firm off the ground. There had been glitzy, high-flying times, when—so the article implied—they had dipped into the venture capital for personal use; they’d owned a condo on Russian Hill, a beach house down south, a half ownership in a boutique winery in Alexander Valley. And there had been lots and lots of lovers.
Both Mournings had been frank with the reporter about their earlier extramarital escapades. Too frank, I thought, and not just because I was a private person where such matters were concerned. The reporter seemed to share my view; it came across in the sneering undertone of his prose. Neither Diane nor Tim would have noticed that, I was sure. They struck me as narcissistic, extroverted, certain that nothing they did could possibly be wrong or even in bad taste. A touch of the sociopathic personality to this couple: if it feels good, I do it; if you don’t like it or if I hurt you, tough. As I held out my cup to the flight attendant for more coffee, I felt vaguely uncomfortable. I set the cup down, rubbed my hands together as if brushing off dirt; touching the copy of the article had made them feel unclean.
There were other puff pieces: Fortune magazine had named Timothy Mourning one of a hundred bright young individuals who had made a difference; Diane Mourning had been profiled in the Wall Street Journal; they’d both been interviewed by People. The color photo in People showed them posed on the balcony of the Russian Hill condo they