The Hunt Club (7 page)

Judge Palmer's place was in the mold. The house was a three-story Victorian, immaculately kept up. A low, tan stucco wall with a wrought-iron fence ran along the sidewalk. Then behind the wall, a circular driveway swept up to the steps of the porch. In the semicircular garden carved out by the brick drive, a three-tiered stone fountain splashed down into a small lily pond surrounded by flowering shrubs, seemingly every one of which somehow contrived to be in bloom.

The two inspectors had gotten to the scene so quickly that the sergeant from the nearest station, who was supposed to superintend at these types of scenes, hadn't made it yet, but Officer Sanchez, a field-training officer, met them at the front door and told them they could find Mrs. Palmer, apparently in shock, with his rookie partner in the living room, off to their right. The office, with the bodies, was to the left. “Nobody's touched anything in there,” he said, “and the wife says she didn't either, except the phone on the desk to call nine one one.”

Juhle and Shiu, partnered in homicide now for two months, knew that within minutes they'd be joined by the assistant coroner and the crime scene investigation unit, who would quantify and memorialize, videotape, photograph, examine, fingerprint, and/or book into evidence everything in the room. Depending on how fast the word flew, they could expect a team of field agents from the FBI, since killing a federal judge could be a federal crime. Homeland Security might even want to explore whether there might be a terrorist angle to the judge's murder, and Juhle had to admit that this might not, in fact, be out of the question.

Meanwhile, this was Juhle's chance to get some impressions without interruption, and he wasn't about to pass up the opportunity.

The bodies lay,
as advertised, on the floor, mostly hidden from the door behind the desk. The judge was dressed in pale brown slacks, a white dress shirt, and darker brown pullover sweater. The chair, a big, comfortable-looking leather swivel, lay on its side next to the body. There was a small hole in the judge's right cheek and a congealed pool of black blood coming out from under the judge's head onto the clear plastic that protected his rug from the wheels of his chair. The room's lights were on overhead, as was a reading lamp on the desk, which looked pretty much undisturbed.

The woman was much younger than the judge—early twenties max. She wore stonewashed jeans, an undershirt of some kind, and a black sweater that left her midriff exposed. A diamond stud was visible in her navel. She lay flat on her back, her neck skewed a bit where her head had hit the wall behind her as she fell. There was no evident entry wound and no blood under her, although a thin thread of black came from her mouth and ended in a dark puddle on the floor beneath her. A large diamond glittered on a necklace chain out over the sweater.

“Well, it wasn't a robbery,” Juhle said.

“No, and it happened fast,” Shiu said. “She was standing next to him, the shooter whips it out, and it's bam bam over.”

“Maybe.” Juhle stood over to the side of the desk where he could see both bodies. But he wasn't looking at the bodies. He was looking at the bookshelves behind the desk. “But maybe bam bam bam. Three shots.” Stepping over the woman, he leaned and pointed to a spot on a bookshelf at about the level of his waist, at what appeared to be a gap between two books. “There's a book pushed back in there. I'm guessing we got a slug.” He looked some more. “Also good spatter all around it, pretty much the same height.”

“Where do you see that?”

Juhle ignored the question. He wasn't here to give a class. “But only with one of them.” He stepped back, scanned the bookcase over the woman's body. “Small caliber,” he said. “No exit.” He crossed over to his right, where a clutch purse was half-wedged into the cushion of a reading chair. He pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. “This ought to tell us who she is,” he said.

But it didn't. It contained some cosmetics, a pack of Kleenex, eighty-five dollars and change in cash, a holder for a diaphragm, and a package of Trident chewing gum but no driver's license. No identification of any kind.

Shiu threw a look to the office door. “Where are those guys?”

Juhle shrugged. The crime-scene team would get there when they did.

“I wonder if anybody heard anything.”

Juhle wondered if his partner was making these inane comments to fill the dead air, like Dandy Don Meredith on a slow football night. Did Shiu construe this as helpful? The thought made his scalp itch. As for himself, he had no idea if anyone in the neighborhood had heard anything and didn't really wonder about it. He knew that canvassing the residents in the surrounding area was in his and his partner's immediate future. They would find out if anyone saw or heard anything, usual or not. They'd also double-check the 911 log to see about any possibly related calls. But he said, “Unless somebody was right out front, they wouldn't have heard anything. In fact, a bullet this small, I'm surprised there was enough firepower to knock him out of his chair.”

“He could have been halfway up. After the first shot to her.”

More inanity. Could have, should have, might have been—all of it a waste of breath until they actually had some evidence. Worse, preconceptions formed without evidence interfered with your ability clearly to see the evidence when you actually got it. A big part of the job was to work a case from the facts and not from imagination.

Juhle continued to look around, checking the floor, behind the drapes, just in case. Behind a leather wing chair, leaning over, he made the mistake of putting pressure on his hand as he pushed himself out of his crouch, and he swore as the pain from his broken bones shot up his arm.

“Is that still bothering you?”

“Continuous. I've been trying to figure out some game I can challenge Malinoff to where I can hurt him back. Except he's stronger and quicker than I am at everything. And that's when I'm not crippled and hurting. I'm going to have to cheat. Maybe hire someone to hurt him.”

“You can't do that, Dev. You're a cop,” Shiu said. “Kids look up to you.”

“Oh, yeah, the role model thing. I forgot for a minute. But I wouldn't cheat, anyway, Shiu. It's against my religion.”

“You don't have a religion.”

“Yeah, I do. Just not a formal one like you do. And one of its main rules is don't cheat.”

As far as Juhle knew, Shiu was probably the only Asian Mormon in the state of California. And now he couldn't pass up the opportunity for his continuing missionary work. “That's a main LDS rule, too, Dev. You're halfway to being one of us. With some training and prayer, you could—”

“Shiu.” Juhle went to put up his hand, but the pain stopped him, and he grimaced again. “Haven't we done this? We're in the city of tolerance, right? Hell, we
celebrate
our diversity. I tolerate your religion. You tolerate me not having one.”

“But I don't like it, Dev. Our jobs, you know, we could get killed any day without any warning. I don't want to see you die and cast into outer darkness.”

“I know. And I appreciate it. I really do. And I halfway agree with—the die part. But meanwhile, all I'm trying to do is figure out what happened here and how I can hurt Malinoff as much as possible without getting arrested for it. That's all. Just those two things.”

“I'll still be praying for you.”

“I know you will, Shiu, I know you will.” Juhle took a last look at the room. He was four years older than Shiu, and with his many more years in homicide, the acknowledged senior partner. When they'd seen all they needed to at any one given place, it fell to him to make the call, which he now did. “Well, while we await the arrival of our ace crime-team specialists, perhaps we should go see what the grieving wife can tell us.”

The living room
was done in soft tones of ivory and pink and lavender. The mirror-image footprint of the office where Judge Palmer and the current Jane Doe lay dead across the hall struck Juhle as singularly sterile—similar in its own way to those rooms in the projects where the furniture in the unused living rooms are sometimes covered with plastic so they will last forever. Even though Juhle was far from a connoisseur, he was struck by the display of wealth and good taste. The wide, gold-etched mahogany coffee table; the sideboard with its Venetian glass collection; the occasional table with its stunning and apparently fresh floral arrangement; both love seats; the two matching crystal chandeliers; the eighteen-by-twenty-foot Oriental rug; the overstuffed couch—every article of furnishing was superb. And yet there seemed to be no life to this interior, no sense of play or even of excessive familiarity. As though it were a dollhouse that Mrs. Palmer had assembled not to live in but only to have, to rearrange, to impress others with.

In his career, Juhle had seen enough shock from victims' relatives that he knew he was looking at something very much like it now. The woman herself was large, though not fat. She sat at the very end of the overstuffed sofa with its pastel floral design, wearing a cream-colored tailored suit that ended at her knees and that now, with the sag of her strong shoulders, seemed to hang on her like a laundry sack. Mrs. Palmer's artfully honey-dyed hair showed signs that it had been carefully coiffed earlier, but every little while she would run a hand all the way through it, front to back, then pull at strands on the sides as though she were a distracted schoolgirl. Her face, probably a little more than conventionally attractive when she was made up, now was blotched and haggard, her eyes minimized behind the swollen lids.

Across from her in a love seat, keeping silent watch, Sanchez's rookie Officer Garelia had stood when Juhle and Shiu came in and immediately crossed over to stand, silent and ramrod straight, at the door by which they'd entered. He didn't look to be more than twenty-three years old or so, and Juhle guessed it might be his first murder scene, perhaps the first time he'd seen a body or two up close.

But Juhle wasn't here to critique the furniture or observe the reactions of rookie cops. Sparing his injured arm by using his foot, he moved the loveseat's ottoman closer to the couch and sat down. “Mrs. Palmer,” he began, “I'm Sergeant Inspector Devin Juhle with homicide, and this is my partner Inspector Shiu. Are you up to talking to us?”

She adjusted her posture, sitting back further into the sofa. Looking from Juhle to Shiu, her eyes took on a look of surprise, as though she hadn't noticed when they'd come in. “Yes, I think so.” With an air of desperation, she let out a breath and asked, “Who is that woman in there with him?”

“We don't know, ma'am. We were hoping you might be able to tell us.”

Mrs. Palmer's head moved from side to side as if she had little control over it. “I've never seen her before in my life. And now she's here, dead, in my house. What can that be about?”

“I don't know, ma'am.”

“And what was she doing
here
? With my husband? This is our house. He wouldn't have brought her here.” She looked from one of them to the other as though she sought their agreement. “He wouldn't have,” she repeated.

Juhle and Shiu shared a glance. Shiu stepped into the silence. “You discovered the bodies this morning, ma'am?”

“Yes. When I got in.” She drew another long breath, then pulled at a hanging strand of her hair. “I was at my sister's last night. Vanessa Waverly. That was my maiden name—she's divorced and went back to using it—Waverly.”

Juhle noted the disjointed flow of her words. He had to remember to keep the questions simple and see if she might settle down. “And where was that?”

“Novato.” A Marin County town about a half-hour's drive north of the city. “It's far enough, I usually stay over with her when I go up there.”

“Do you do that often?”

“Every few weeks or so. She's my business partner—we run a spa and salon in Mill Valley. JVs.”

“So it was a business meeting?”

“Yes, but I mean…she's my sister, too, mostly. We had dinner together. That's really all it usually is. We just talk.”

“And you left here when?”

“Actually, early. Around four. I wanted to miss rush hour on the bridge.”

“All right.” Juhle tempered his voice. “And you were with your sister the whole night after that?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me about when you got back here this morning?”

She sighed heavily, closing her eyes on the exhale. When she opened them, she took another weary breath. “I got in before eight but didn't want to wake him up if he'd managed to still be sleeping in. He's always had terrible insomnia, so I just left my overnight bag by the stairs and went into the kitchen to make myself some coffee. But then I thought I smelled something burning, so I went looking, and it was coming from his office. When I stopped at the door, I realized I couldn't see his chair, so I walked over…”

Juhle didn't have to close his eyes to reimagine the scene of carnage he'd just witnessed. Though it was, in fact, behind the desk, enough of the young woman's body showed around it that even a cursory glance from the door to the office would have revealed some part of it. Of course, he realized, Mrs. Palmer might not have even given the office that minimal glance. Although if she remembered noticing that she hadn't seen the chair…