The Hunt Club (27 page)

Suddenly Tombo stepped in. “Hey, Spence, easy…”

But the producer didn't back off. “Hey, yourself, Rich. It wouldn't be the first time Andrea's hooked up with some guy to boost the old career another notch. First me, now maybe Wyatt here…they're fooling everybody, the two of them, thinking this is just a hell of a lot of fun.” He turned. “What do you say about that, Hunt? True? False? Any comment at all?”

“Yeah,” Hunt said, “here's a comment. You're pathetic.” Every impulse in his body wanted to take a swing at Fairchild and deck him, but he forced himself to turn away.

Fairchild walked several steps after him. “When you see her, tell her she's played this out too far already. There's no getting back from where she's gone! She'll never work in television again!”

Nearly blind with anger,
Hunt willed himself through the lobby doors and across to the elevators. The elevator doors would open in a couple of seconds on the fourteenth floor, and he still had very little conscious idea of exactly what had brought him up here. It was more than the need to escape from Fairchild's insane accusations—he'd been on his way over here before he'd ever seen the video cams outside. He'd been wrestling with the logic of what he thought he knew about Andrea and what he could accept, what he felt. For if she were dead, as they all now feared, Hunt still in some obscure way felt a degree of responsibility.

Not for her death itself, of course, but for the last hours of her life, when he'd voluntarily taken on the role of her protector. And lover. With a stab of guilt, for the first time, he realized that he perhaps unknowingly had, in fact, taken advantage of her fragile state, her vulnerability. He hadn't seen it like that at the time. But he didn't want to fool himself—that might have been the true dynamic after all. The thought curdled his stomach.

And then, after he'd left her, someone had abducted her and done her grievous harm.

He did not believe, as Juhle did, that she had killed Palmer and Rosalier and then taken her own life.

He did not believe, as Fairchild did, that she'd plotted her own disappearance as some sort of publicity/celebrity-making stunt.

Hunt believed that he knew what had happened with a certainty that was startling. And that certitude—in its first flowering now after everyone's hope but his for Andrea's life had flown away—was rearranging his interior landscape back into something that he thought he had long abandoned and that he now recognized as both terrifying and familiar.

The anger that had nearly literally blinded him downstairs wasn't occasioned by the ravings of a prancing jackass like Spencer Fairchild. But those irrational stupidities had shattered somewhere within him the last resistance to the deep and abiding rage that he'd come to believe in the past four or five years he'd finally tamed.

A rage that had ruled his days from his sense of abandonment through his succession of foster homes until he'd finally moved in with the Hunts. A rage that had fueled his CID work in Iraq, then delivered him to his work rescuing children, finally blossoming into a general rage at the world he'd been left in when Sophie and their unborn baby had been taken from him. A wide-ranging rage at bureaucracy, at venality, at the incompetence and outright villainy of men like Wilson Mayhew. A rage, finally, that had almost undone him with its power and intensity. Day to day, night to night, unyielding and terrible rage. For the world seemed to promise so much. And that promise so often was a lie.

And then, after he'd established his business and worked as a private investigator for a while, the rage had gradually started to subside. His work was a job now, not a vocation. Wyatt Hunt read, he did his sports, he played his music, he satisfied his clients. He would not feed his rage any longer with his overwhelming desire to excel, to make right, to care, to love. The inevitable failures—and he'd come to believe that at least partial failure was always foreordained—had taken too great a toll on him. He didn't choose to live at that level anymore, and he'd been content. Marginalized, perhaps, never too deeply involved. But content.

And now suddenly, a toggle switch thrown, that inner contentment was over. And this was why he had felt so disoriented at Farrell's, so distracted on the walk over here, so unable to connect with what should have been sorrow at the idea of Andrea's death. He was not really sad, not unfocused, not lost. With a kind of terrible joy, he realized that what he felt now was pure—the rage for justice that had nearly consumed him before but that had also given his life ballast, moments of real connection and meaning.

If someone had killed Andrea Parisi, had rent the fabric of his world so thoroughly, he was going to bring whoever it was to justice. Nothing else mattered. He would take whatever help he could get, but if he had to do it all alone, then he would.

The elevator door opened, and he strode out to the first desk to his left, where a young woman stopped her typing to look up at him. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I need to talk to Carla Shapiro.”

Juhle said, “No.
No evidence.”

He was in Lanier's office, sitting awkwardly forward because of his sling. Shiu stood one step inside the closed door, at rigid attention. It was a small room with a big desk in it. There were three windows, two in the wall behind Juhle and one in the wall behind Shiu. None of them opened to the morning's sunshine in the real world. None of them opened at all, in fact. Just beyond Shiu's window, about a million miles away, Juhle could see four of his fellow homicide inspectors shooting the breeze and laughing about something.

When Juhle brought his gaze back inside, Lanier wasn't laughing. “No evidence at all?”

Juhle looked over at Shiu—no help. “Maybe if we can get Mrs. Levin—the Palmers' neighbor—down to see Parisi's car, she might give us a positive make.”

Lanier grunted, leaned back in his chair, and pushed himself away from the desk until he got to his back wall, where he stopped. “Maybe she might, huh?”

Juhle shrugged. “What we've got, Marcel, are connections. Six or seven of them, which taken together are pretty damn compelling if you ask me and Shiu, and you did.”

“We don't have any other suspects, sir,” Shiu said.

“Here's a tip, my son,” Lanier said. “That's probably the kind of thing you don't want to mention out loud to somebody who does your performance reviews.” He turned to Juhle. “But Parisi?”

Juhle shrugged again. “I didn't just make it up, Marcel. I think she did it, tried to bluff it out, made it a day or two until guilt or remorse or whatever the hell else you feel made her kill herself.”

“I don't feel anything,” Lanier said.

“I know, me neither. Feelings, I mean. I don't feel any feelings. I do feel my shoulder.”

“He won't take ibuprofen,” Shiu said.

“I did for the first ten days. Not only didn't it work, it hurt my stomach.”

“I'll tell you what hurts my stomach,” Lanier said. “My stomach hurts when I start thinking about going out in front of our ravenous media representatives with the announcement that the case on Federal Judge George Palmer—did I say
federal
judge?—only the fourth
federal judge
to be killed in the entire history of the United States—”

“Is that true?” Shiu asked. “Only the fourth one? Wow.”

Lanier risked a quick, conspiratorial I-know-why-you-hate-this-guy glance at Juhle. “Right. So I tell the jackals we've solved this case, locked it up tight in only three days. The murderer's Andrea Parisi. But you'll just have to take our word for it because we don't have any evidence. What do you think, Dev? You think they'll go for it?”

Juhle sulked. Lanier was right, and Juhle was dead beat after the last couple of sleepless nights. “What do you want us to do, Marcel? I could drive out to Andrea's house, find some hair in the sink or something, drop it off over at the judge's…”

“We can't do—” Shiu began.

Wincing, Juhle held up a hand. “Kidding, Shiu. Back off.”

“But all kidding aside,” Lanier said, “we've already got some issues—well, especially you, Dev, are not going to get any slack here. Whatever you get has got to be rock solid.”

Juhle's eyes turned dark. “What the fuck does that mean?” He shot an I-dare-you look at his partner.

Lanier pushed off from the back wall and wheeled his chair forward, up to the desk, and put his arms on his blotter. “That means that there are some people in positions of authority who were not completely convinced by your exoneration on the OI.” The officer-involved shooting that had cost Juhle three months of administration leave but had finally resulted in his merit citation.

“Well, how can I put this? Fuck them.”

Shiu straightened up more, tightened down his jaw. Even Lanier seemed to wince. Profanity was tolerated in the field, but Deputy Chief of Inspectors Abe Glitsky frowned on it in the various units under his command.

Immune to this sensitivity, Juhle didn't slow down. “I mean it, Marcel. Who are they? No, I know who they are. Maybe I should…”

“Maybe not, Dev. Maybe nothing, okay? We both know who they are, and they're wrong, and you're up for cop of the year, okay? You want my opinion, I hope you get it. And you might as long as you don't say ‘fuck' too often around Glitsky. But my point is that these couple of supervisors have the ear of the mayor and the chief. And not only is this the biggest case in the world, but we've finessed the FBI to keep the hell away from it because it's not political. So it's all yours, both of you guys, and welcome to it. But don't come to me without any evidence, please. If Parisi did it, show me something that'll prove it. Or at least find something that eliminates everybody else?”

“You want us to prove a negative?” Juhle asked. “That can get tricky.”

“Don't get smart, Dev. You know what I want. I want more. If it's on Parisi, fine. But we don't even have next of kin on one of the victims if I'm not mistaken. To the critical soul, this might bespeak a lack of vigor in the investigation. Am I making myself clear?” His eyes went to Shiu. “You really don't have any other suspects?”

“I don't know who they'd be at this point, sir.”

“You don't. Not with all these union hassles? Nobody the judge had ever ruled against? Maybe the girlfriend had another boyfriend? Don't I remember the wife has a sister? What was she doing Monday night? I don't know squat about this case, and I can think of half a dozen questions you haven't even asked yet.”

“I
have
asked them, Marcel,” Juhle said. “I've asked every goddamn question you just gave us, and the other half dozen you didn't mention on top of those. And for the record, we went down to the judge's chambers first thing and spent a fascinating few hours talking to his staff, and found out that he's got lots of cases with people who are mad at him. Not just the CCPOA. And believe me, they're all rattling around in my brain every single second. And sure, I might be wrong, but it's good police work to follow the clearest trail.” He paused to grab a breath.

Shiu stepped into the breach. “And that, with respect, sir,” he said, “looks like Parisi.”

Lanier held up a hand. “I've heard. I get your message. But traditionally we like those little links in what we call the chain of evidence that maybe—”

Juhle had heard enough. He was already on his feet, interrupting. “You want us to shake some more trees, Marcel, sure, we'll do it. But there's no more evidence in those directions than there is with Parisi. It's going to look like what we're really doing is covering our ass.”

Lanier blew his frustration out at them. “There are worse ideas,” he said. He gestured toward his closed office door. “Keep me up on developments. My door's always open.”

Betsy Sobo's oversize
tortoiseshell glasses didn't fool Hunt. With the dorky specs, the tousled dirty-blond hair, only the barest touch of makeup around the eyes, and no lipstick, the young associate in the family-law division of Piersall obviously tried to pass herself off in her professional life as plain, even bookish. Today, she was even dressed in the Catholic school uniform of a plaid skirt and white blouse, black leggings, no-nonsense black shoes. It was a nice try, but Hunt thought she could be in sackcloth and ashes and draw admiring stares.

She'd stood up to meet him and shake his hand, then had gone back behind her desk. Hunt sat across from her on a folding chair, which was about all that fit in her office after she'd squeezed in her bookcase and files. She had six feet of window behind her, a nice view over downtown to the east. Hunt asked her permission to record their conversation, and she said yes.

“I talked to someone last night about this,” she was saying. “A woman. Another attorney.”

“Amy Wu?”

“I think that was it. I don't think I helped her much. I told her I didn't know what Andrea wanted to talk to me about.”

“But she called you herself to set up this appointment? I just talked to her secretary, and she said it wasn't her.”

“Yes. She called me herself.”

“To ask if you could give her a half hour or so of your time?”

“Right. But that's about all. I said sure.”

Hunt leaned forward. “According to Carla, she called you just after she'd seen Judge Palmer for lunch, isn't that right? So my thought is that maybe she dropped a hint of something we haven't heard about yet.”

“I don't know what that would be. And wouldn't she have mentioned whatever that was to Gary—Mr. Piersall—at their meeting?”

“She might have,” Hunt said, “but I don't think she did. I think what she wanted to talk to you about was different. I talked to Mr. Piersall last night, and apparently the big topic between him and Andrea was this order the judge was threatening to sign. He and Andrea didn't talk at all about union benefits.”

“But I'm not even sure that's what she wanted to talk to me about. I just assumed.”

“Is there anything specific she might have said that made you assume that?”

“I don't know what it could have been.” Taking a breath, Sobo put her elbow on the desk and rested her forehead on the fingers of her left hand. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Okay. She said that Mike Eubanks—he's the partner for our unit—he told her to call me. And if Mike told her, it would have been benefits.”

“There you go,” Hunt said.

“Then she said, ‘This person I met at lunch.' And then she stopped and said she only had a minute but there were some pretty big players involved and she didn't want to start anything unless she was solid on the law.”

Hunt didn't move for a long moment. “And that would have been family law, right? She said somebody she met at lunch. Those words?”

“I think so. Yes. Pretty close.”

“As in met for the first time? Rather than just met for lunch.”

“Maybe. I'd say so, yes.”

“So not the judge.” Not a question, either. “Let me ask you this: With all the union work this firm does, have you ever worked on benefits issues before?”

“Me, personally? Not usually. I'm mostly into the custody battles and restraining orders, stuff like that. There's just a ton of divorces with these poor guards' families. You wouldn't believe.”

“So what did you think this was? That Andrea wanted?”

Sobo considered for a minute. “Maybe some kind of divorce coverage into the members' package, attorneys fees or counseling, so it doesn't come out of pocket for these guys and their families. We make the case that it's the stress of the work that's a proximate cause of the marital breakups.” She shrugged. “We've prevailed on this kind of thing a few other times—the stress in the job
is
a killer. I mean almost literally.”

“I'm sure it is,” Hunt said. “So the pretty big players Andrea was talking about?”

“I figured some insurance companies. But it may have been one of the heavy politicians, the governor, even, if we were bringing the issue to the legislature.”

“So it made sense to you? Andrea wanting to see you?”

“Sure. It's the kind of thing we would do. Definitely.”

Judge Oscar Thomasino
was the warrant magistrate on duty today, and he was a much easier sell than Marcel Lanier had been. It took Juhle about forty-five seconds to explain to His Honor what he and Shiu would be looking for at Parisi's home and why a search was necessary, and the judge signed off before Shiu had finished filling out the affidavit.

Twenty minutes later, they were inside her house, standing over the handgun collection. The cabinet wasn't locked, and Juhle started picking up the pieces one by one, smelling them, then placing them on the table next to them. All the guns were in working condition, firing pins intact; most appeared to have been cleaned relatively recently, although in their enclosed cabinet, they might have simply been protected from dust over a period of months or even years. But they still smelled of oil. There were nine of them in all. Seven Old West–style revolvers. When Juhle looked down the barrels of both derringers, however, he could tell that they hadn't been cleaned since they'd last been fired. And they were .22 caliber. He had Shiu bag the tiny guns to bring to the police lab for ballistics comparisons on the slugs retrieved from Palmer's study.

Pretty sure that he'd found his evidence, Juhle let some cockiness show. “Are we glad we came here, Shiu, or what? I'm tempted to run those puppies down to the lab right now and be back in Marcel's office by noon with the results.”

“They might not be a match.”

“Well, we'll find out. But I've got to tell you, I feel lucky.”

Juhle closed the cabinet back up, made his way slowly back through the kitchen, then across the living room and into the hallway that led to the bedrooms and a bathroom, which Juhle entered, turning on the light.

“What are we looking for in here?”

Over by the hamper, Juhle said, “You know those videotapes you didn't want to watch the other day? Monday's Trial TV?” He rummaged around for a second and then pulled out an instantly recognizable purple blouse. “Look familiar? I don't think she changed after they shot the show. First, she went back to work, right. Then I think she drove right out to the judge's and shot him still wearing this blouse. So let's bag this sucker for GSR and blood. And I'm betting we find the suit she wore still in her closet. And if we're lucky, the shoes.”

Jim Pine worked
in West Sacramento.

He liked being nearby the capital so that he could schmooze the lobbyists and legislators and direct the workings of the political action committees that did his bidding. Controlling a yearly income of over twenty million dollars in annual dues, he was the largest contributor to California's political scene—bigger even than numbers two and three, the California Teachers Association and Philip Morris, respectively. Every election cycle, the CCPOA was the major backer of between twenty and forty state lawmakers, and dozens of local office candidates, not to mention the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and state attorney general, regardless of party. Pine had also teamed the political clout of the prison guards' union with three of California's powerful Indian gaming tribes and formed the Native Americans & Peace Officers Independent Expenditure Committee, another superpowerful PAC, whose offices, too, were in West Sacramento.

Over the years, under Pine's direction and leadership, the CCPOA and its supporters had lobbied for tougher and tougher laws, with more and bigger prisons to house the criminals that broke these laws. In the process, the California Department of Corrections, the CDC, grew from thirteen to thirty-one prisons, with a total population of one hundred sixty thousand inmates, and to have a yearly operating budget of nearly five billion dollars. And while the twenty-five thousand prison guards now earned a yearly salary of fifty-four thousand dollars, it was far from uncommon for an individual guard to actually make more than one hundred thousand dollars or more with overtime and sick-leave benefits.

Now Pine was not in West Sacramento, though, but in the office of the managing partner of his attorneys, at Piersall in San Francisco. After the slaying of Judge Palmer on Monday, he had deemed it necessary to be close to the investigation, should anyone in authority need to contact or question him. He knew that sometimes there had been apparent animosities between the judge and the union, and Pine was here to keep the story straight. He'd given over a dozen interviews in the past couple of days to various handpicked members of the media, always with the same message: George Palmer and Jim Pine had been adversaries from time to time in their professional lives, but personally they got along. They attended the same fund-raisers and functions and supported many of the same political candidates. And now, today, Pine would be at Palmer's funeral, in conspicuous mourning.

Mostly to be sure the bastard was really dead.

Gary Piersall wore black, too. He hadn't finally gotten more than four hours of turbulent sleep last night and now sat on the leather couch across from his client, on his third demitasse of espresso.

They would be leaving together for Saint Mary's Cathedral in a few minutes. Pine was sixty-three years old and looked ten years younger, as always, in his business suit. Carrying about 220 pounds on his six-foot frame, he was a robust forty pounds overweight, with a marine cut and the rosy cheeks of either a choirboy or a heavy drinker.

But for all of his cheerful, upbeat public persona, Pine was not happy. He'd been nearly assaulted by reporters downstairs when he'd gotten to the building—everyone gathered in the street and even in the lobby for this new angle on Andrea Parisi. And the rumors had begun again—that her disappearance had to do with the Palmer homicide and somehow, mysteriously, with the union.

Where did they come from? Pine wanted to know. How could he stop them? “I mean, what do they think, Gary? I'm putting hits out on people? First George and then Andrea? Christ! I liked that old son of a bitch. And I loved Andrea, I really did.” He leveled his gaze across the room. “You look like shit, Gary. Are you feeling all right?”

“I'm fine, Jim. Just a little done in with all of this.”

“Well, don't let them see it down there, let me tell you. You want to go throw some water in your face, you go ahead. You show any weakness, they'll eat you.”

“Don't worry about me.”

“But I do.” He kept his flat gaze on his attorney. “And I'm worried about Andrea. Do you have any idea what could have happened to her?”

“None.”

“You sure? You have any thoughts? Opinions?”

Piersall forced himself into a rigid calm. What was Pine doing here? Feeling out what he knew? Testing his loyalty? “I think she may have killed herself, Jim. She wanted to ride this Trial TV thing to New York, and when that fell apart—”

“So you also don't think there's a thread running through us?”

“Us?”

“Me, you, the union.”

“No,” Piersall said. “How could there be? What kind of thread?”

Pine sat back, the picture of relaxation, although his eyes were pricks of almost feline intensity. “I have people on the street who hear things, Gary.”

And at that moment, Piersall resolved to have the outer lobby swept for recording devices, as he regularly did with his own office. If Pine had heard what he'd confided to Hunt last night…

“Then this morning they had it on the Net, the Trial TV site. Where do they get this shit? But anyway, the point is by tonight it's everywhere. You know what I'm talking about?”

Piersall cleared his throat, tried to get down a swallow of his coffee. “I've tried to steer clear of all that, Jim. It's just these irresponsible journalists one-upping each other. It breaks on the Net, you know its unattributable bullshit.”

“Yeah, but then the legit stations pick it up. What I'm saying is we've got to treat this story as beneath contempt.”

“And the story is…?”

“That Andrea knew something, and we had to shut her up. That's hysteria talking, and we don't want to feed it. We shouldn't discuss it on any level.”

“I have no intention to, Jim. It is beneath contempt.”

“She ever talk to you about anything like that?”

“No. Not even remotely. She was a company girl all the way, Jim.”

“And you're a company man?”

Piersall put down his coffee cup, mustered his calmest tone. “I have been a company man for fifteen years, Jim. It's a little painful to me to think you'd have to ask.”

Pine studied him for a long moment. “Okay. Just so we're on the same page.”