The Hunt Club (28 page)

Carla had called Gary Piersall
as soon as Hunt had shown up unannounced at her desk. She liked Wyatt, and the boss had told her to cooperate with him in every way she could. Beyond that, she knew that he was on Andrea's side, and that was also the firm's side. They were considering her a victim of abduction, and Piersall had given Hunt the okay to look wherever he needed. Wherever.

And, just back from his talk with Betsy Sobo, he'd hesitated, trying to decide on his next move, before he told her he'd like to look through Parisi's office. There might be something in her files, her notes, on her tapes or answering machine, almost anywhere, that might provide a clue to what had happened to her.

But to allow Hunt access to the intimacies of Andrea's office—Carla felt this was beyond the pale. She called Mr. Piersall again to get his specific permission but was told that he was in his office now with Mr. Pine and absolutely could not be disturbed. So she'd stalled, first having trouble locating the key, then taking a trip to the bathroom, until finally Piersall was still unavailable, bunkered down with Pine, and there was no alternative.

“Dev. Wyatt.”

“Talk to me. Where are you?”

“Piersall's again. In Parisi's office.”

“Are you shitting me? I'm on my way over there right now, stuck in traffic with Shiu. Why is it, you think, I'm the cop in the case and you're already inside?”

“Maybe the personal-charm thing?”

“Can't be that. Don't touch anything.”

“Too late. And you've got to see this.”

“I thought you didn't consider Parisi a suspect?”

“I don't. She's not.”

“That's funny, because we just pretty much sewed that up with what we found in her house just now.”

“Good for you, but I wouldn't go public with it until you see what I'm looking at.”

“In a contaminated scene.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you're in it. So whatever you've got, it's no good as evidence. Who's to say you didn't put it there?”

“Me. And even if I did, you're still going to want to see it.”

Hunt had been
in the room—really not much larger than a cubicle—for nearly fifteen minutes, the door closed behind him, and here in front of Carla's desk now was a man identifying himself as Devin Juhle, homicide inspector, accompanied by the firm's security officer and asking for Wyatt Hunt.

Carla Shapiro thought her heart might stop. This was not supposed to happen. She'd made the final decision on her own to allow Wyatt into Andrea's personal space, and now the police had come to find her out. She struggled a second for a breath, then managed to string together the words. “Our investigator's in Ms. Parisi's office.”

The inspector's face didn't do much to ease her sense of dread. “I know that,” he said. “Where's the office?”

Carla was already standing, though she didn't remember getting up. She walked over the few steps, grabbed the knob, and pushed the door open. The inspector was right behind her.

Behind Andrea's desk, in her chair, Hunt closed the lower left-hand drawer next to him and looked up. “Where's Shiu?”

“On his way to the lab. We're going to settle this thing once and for all. What do I need to see?”

Hunt had the manila folder ready and handed it over. The inspector put it down on the desk and opened it. Inside was a half-inch stack of newspaper clippings of various sizes as well as several printouts of what looked like Web pages. Carla risked another step into the room so she could see the headlines. The one on top read: “DA Killed in Hunting Accident.”

As the inspector turned to the following pages, Hunt was saying, “You'll notice the folder has no title on the tab. It was under her regular hanging folders in the back of the desk file here. The first one's Porter Anderton, who was the DA prosecuting some prison guards at Avenal. Then there's all seven of the stories about vandalism to candidates' headquarters up and down the state. Sixteen stories all told. Four deaths of people—Anderton's hunting accident, a couple of hit and runs, one suicide. Every one of the victims had dealings with one prison or another. One prosecutor, two whistle-blowers, one physician.” Hunt reached across and tapped the printouts. “If you're still not believing in coincidence, then she was on to something.”

“She was building a case.”

Hunt nodded. His eyes were so cold that a chill seemed to come off him. “Maybe more than a case, Dev. Maybe a story. And she'd already built it. And she told it to the wrong person.”

Mickey Dade finally checked in
and got through to Hunt while he was still at Piersall, and was double-parked outside ready to play chauffeur when he and Juhle came out of the building. Hunt gave him Staci Rosalier's address and told him to hit it. Most of the way over to her condo, Juhle was on his cell phone with Shiu, who was still at the lab. They were backed up and the various tests might keep him there for most of the afternoon. No, they hadn't even done the ballistics. That would be the first test, they promised. Yes, Shiu would call immediately the second he had the results.

Juhle's response was clipped. “Shiu, listen to me. We need those results
now
! Exert some goddamn authority, would you? We're homicide, for Christ's sake. Top of the food chain. Kick some ass. Threaten to get 'em fired. Whatever it takes.” He snapped the phone shut. “Idiot.”

Mickey Dade and Juhle had never met each other before, and now the young cab driver threw a worried glance first at his boss and then into the backseat, where Juhle sat smoldering. Next to Mickey in the passenger seat, Hunt turned halfway around and said, “You're scaring my driver.”

“That's another thing,” Juhle said. “How is it you have an on-call, off-the-meter cab to drive us around wherever you want to go, while I'm a goddamn inspector of homicide and I'm reduced to hitching rides?”

“It's got to have something to do with karma,” Hunt said.

Now they had gotten
the key again from the marginally cooperative Mr. Franks and were on their way up in the elevator. This stop was necessary, Juhle was explaining, because Lanier's criticism that they hadn't even identified next of kin on one of the victims wasn't completely off the mark. They should have moved on that already if only for credibility's sake. So he needed to come here and grab the larger, framed, but still very fuzzy photo of the young boy and then get one of the papers to run it with a
DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS PERSON
? tag. They'd blown up the other photograph that had been in Staci's wallet and brought it back to the station, and it had been useless. The kid must be some relation to Staci, didn't Hunt think?

Hunt knew. “He's her brother.”

“How do you know that?”

“Mary Mahoney. The waitress at MoMo's…?”

“I know who she is, Wyatt. I'm the one who gave her to you.”

Hunt wasn't going to fight. He didn't blame Juhle for his frustration. In the last hour, Juhle had gone from what he considered a probable closing out of this case to an entirely new and increasingly plausible theory of it. Particularly if the ballistics on the derringers didn't match and he found himself back at square one. And it didn't help that the new theory was one that Hunt had pressed him to consider from early on, and Juhle had flat out rejected.

Hunt decided to be conciliatory. “That's right, Mary was your ID on Staci, wasn't she? Anyway, she told Tamara he was her brother.”

“Did she get a name?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Of course not. That would be too easy.”

“Right.”

They got to the fourth floor, crossed the hallway to suite A, and Juhle opened the door. The drapes were still open as Juhle and Shiu had left them the other night, and the room was fairly bright. Juhle walked straight across to the table next to the sofa bed and picked up the framed photo of the boy and, in sort of a slow-motion double take, stared at it for a long moment, his frown growing more pronounced.

“What?” Hunt asked, crossing over.

“This is her brother?”

“According to Mahoney.”

“How old do you make him?”

Hunt looked. “From that picture? Good luck. You're the one with kids. Six?”

“That's about right, I'd guess. And she was twenty-two?”

“So?”

“So fourteen years. That's a good stretch between babies, don't you think?”

Hunt shrugged. “Happens all the time. Plus, that picture might be six, ten, fifteen years old. They could be as close in age as Mickey and Tamara.”

Juhle's face went a little slack. He rolled his hurt shoulder, let out a heavy breath, and suddenly, surprisingly, turned and sat down on the sofa bed. “I'm losing it, Wyatt, I swear to God,” he said. “You know that? I'm losing it.”

“What are you talking about?”

Juhle hung his head, shook it as though it weighed a ton. “This goddamn shooting. The scumbag I shot last year.”

“What about it? You didn't have a choice, Dev. Plus, you saved a bunch of lives.”

“Yeah, but suddenly I'm the tall poppy.”

“What's that mean?”

“You know, a field of poppies, one of them sticks up too high, that's the one you chop off. Ever since the…the incident, everything I do gets second-guessed. Lanier just brought it up again this morning, more or less saying that if it wasn't me on this Palmer case, it'd go a lot easier on him. On everybody. So what do I do? I know I'm under the magnifying glass, right? So that's what I'm thinking about. How things get
perceived
—if you can believe that bullshit.”

“Don't worry about that. Just do your job.”

“Easy for you to say. I tried to convince Lanier this morning that I'd actually considered other suspects, and I have, but I couldn't get a one of them to gel, except Parisi. I don't seem to be able to get my brain working the way it used to.”

“You followed a lead till it gave out, Dev. That's what you do.”

“No. It's more than that. Like this picture just now.” Juhle put on a voice. “Oh, really? It might not have been taken in the recent past. It might, in fact, be ten fucking years old.” He looked up at Hunt, shook his head again, continued in his regular voice. “Jesus Christ! Where's my brain?”

“Your brain's fine, Dev.”

“That's nice to hear, but you're not inside my head with me, Wyatt. Now I'm second-guessing
myself
. This job's about half instinct, you know, and I'm getting pretty damn close to zero confidence in mine. And that, of course, makes me act that much more certain of everything, even when I'm not or shouldn't be. It's eating me up.”

Hunt walked over and stood by the window for a second, then came back and sat down next to his friend. “If it's any help,” he said, “I personally think you're still the same horse's ass you've always been. And the only way you're going to convince other people that you're a good cop is to be one over time. Don't get pushed into having to defend something that might be wrong. The investigation is continuing. You don't know yet and you don't say until you do. Then your mind isn't cluttered with all this confidence crap. You just do what you do.”

“He was coming at me, Wyatt. He'd already killed Shane and opened up once on me. I had no choice at all.”

“I believe you. So does every cop in the city. Including Lanier.”

“I'm still waking up a couple of times a week. See the double barrels coming down. Connie's even trying to talk me into going to see a shrink.”

“It might not kill you.”

“Maybe I should.”

“Couldn't hurt.”

After a small silence, Juhle checked his watch, said, “Funeral,” and stood up.

They were driving
up Second Street, this time Juhle in the front passenger seat, heading eventually for Fifth and Mission, the
Chronicle
's offices. Hunt spoke from the backseat. “Hey, Mick, are you all right?”

“Great. Why?”

“Because I've driven with you approximately four hundred times, and you've never once before driven close to the speed limit.”

“I never exceed the speed limit,” he said. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Inspector Juhle here doesn't do traffic,” Hunt said. “He just does homicide.”

But Mickey Dade knew that Hunt was capable of a lie like this one—trying to get him to slam it up to sixty—and Juhle would write him up a ticket while Hunt got a chuckle out of it. So he turned to Juhle, sitting next to him. “Is that true? You don't write tickets? I thought all cops kind of did everything.”

“Are you kidding?” Juhle asked. “Traffic division does traffic. I do murders. You want to know the truth, I get pulled over myself for speeding or running a red or some damn thing about every month or two.”

“They tag you?”

“No. Of course not. They see the badge, and they either back off or I shoot 'em. But in theory, I'm not on lights and sirens, I'm at the limit or I get tagged. Just like you or any other citizen would.”

“Awesome,” Mickey said. “That's really true?”

“Scout's honor.”

“Cool.” And Mickey punched it up to forty-five before the next intersection.

When Mickey pulled
the cab up in front of the
Chronicle
Building, Juhle opened his door. “You don't mind waiting?”

“No sweat.”

Juhle disappeared into the building, and Mickey looked back over his shoulder. “So how'd you like the pictures? That's an awesome house. Manion's.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. I should have called you off that. I'll pay you for the time, but as it turned out, Juhle had already gone out and talked to her. Then I got busy and never got the time to call you.”

“No big deal. I shot the house anyway, though, and JPEG'd it off to you, home and work. You should check it out.”

“I will.”

“Someday, I'm a famous chef, I'm going to have a house like that.”

“I hope you do, Mick. I hope you do.”

“Goddamn it!
God
damn
it!” Standing on the Geary Street edge of the wide expanse of concrete in front of Saint Mary's Cathedral, Juhle snapped closed his cell phone.

“Shiu again?” Hunt asked mildly.

“You know how long it takes to run a ballistics test, soup to nuts? On a bad day, maybe one hour. You know how long Shiu's been waiting for them to start?” Juhle consulted his watch. “It's already been two and a half hours.”

“And you're thinking you should have gone down with him, exerted some authority, as you say, but it's probably just as well you didn't. Since Andrea never shot either of those guns at the judge or anybody else, those tests aren't going to turn out like you want, anyway, and then you'd be really mad. Besides, if you'd have gone down there, you wouldn't have come to Andrea's office, and then where would you be? Still thinking she's your suspect. Now, you're here, with an actual chance to see if not talk to somebody who might have had something to do with the case you're trying to solve.”

The last couple of days, Hunt was almost getting to where he was starting to expect television crews wherever he happened to go. Certainly, all three local channels and a couple of the cable stations were again represented here, although it looked as though Trial TV had for some inexplicable reason decided that they didn't need to carry Palmer's funeral live and direct.

A fitful sun broke through onto the throng of arriving mourners. Juhle at first hung back on the periphery of the property, getting the lay of the land, but then he nudged Hunt, who buttoned his suit coat against the steady breeze, and the two of them began to stroll down the row of Minicams.

Hunt pegged the crowd at already between two and three hundred. He recognized quite a number of the city's elite and powerful milling about, possibly waiting to be interviewed themselves—life as one big photo op. They stopped and listened for a minute as the mayor, Kathy West, extolled Judge Palmer's virtues to the blonde from Channel 4. Chief of Police Frank Batiste led a phalanx of his top brass, decked in their dress blues, up into the cathedral's mouth. A woman Juhle knew as another federal judge shared an anecdote with the hunk from Channel 7.

Many, many civilians, of course, kept arriving in a steady stream as well. Juhle pointed out the judge's wife, Jeannette, and her sister, Vanessa, who was flamboyant even in black. Palmer's secretary and his clerk.

An elderly couple caught Juhle's attention for a moment. He knew them. It was right there…then he snapped his fingers and said, “Carol Manion, and I'm thinking spouse.”

Hunt spotted Dismas Hardy—in black pinstripes looking nothing like his bartender persona—walking with a very pretty redheaded woman and his two partners, Wes Farrell and Gina Roake. Farrell gave him a somber nod.

Hunt saw Gary Piersall by one of the vans up ahead, standing with his hands in his pockets, the walking dead. After giving Juhle a quiet heads-up, when they got up to him, Hunt touched the attorney's arm lightly. “Mr. Piersall. Good morning.”

“Mr. Hunt. Inspector…Juhle, right?” Piersall extended his hand. The men shook. “It's a sad day,” Piersall said. “Are you making much progress?”