The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  Which should have been the end of it. After all, Juhle had six witnesses to everything. Manning was dead, killed by the first blast. The car was a shot-up mess. It was clearly self-defense at the very least and heroism by any standard.

  But not necessarily.

  Not in San Francisco, where every police shooting is suspect. One of the homeless in the encampment, a highly intoxicated diagnosed schizophrenic, insisted that police had run up to the deceased and executed him for no reason. The fact that he claimed there had been five such officers and that he maintained that the man had not had a shotgun—in spite of Manning's death by shotgun blast—didn't even slow down the right-minded public nuisances of the antipolice crowd.

  Beyond that, Juhle's shot was so perfect that it led Byron Diehl, one of the city's supervisors, to opine that perhaps the killing had, in fact, been an overreaction by an overzealous and enraged cop. Perhaps it had, in point of fact, been an execution. Nobody could hit a moving man with a pistol between the eyes at fifty or sixty feet. That just wasn't a possible shot. The man with the gun might have already surrendered, laid his gun down, and Juhle—out of control because of the murder of his partner—had walked up and shot him point-blank.

  The other witnesses? Please. Most of them wanted the shooter dead, anyway. Plus, they were naturally afraid of the police. If Juhle told them they'd better back up his story or else, they'd say anything he wanted. They were simply unreliable and their testimonies worthless. Except for the schizophrenic, of course, who was struggling with his substance abuse issues. The idiocy was so palpable that it may have been fun to watch but not to be part of.

  So Juhle spent the next three months on administrative leave, under the shadow of a murder charge. He testified four times before different city and police commissions, not including a formal session defending his actions and confronting Diehl in the chamber of the board of supervisors. He was asked to demonstrate his prowess with a handgun on various police ranges in San Francisco, Alameda, and San Mateo counties, where they had pop-up targets that demanded speed as well as accuracy.

  Finally, a couple of months ago, he'd been cleared of any wrongdoing. Returning to his place in homicide, though—Manning was of course gone forever—he found himself newly partnered with an obviously political hire, Gumqui Shiu, whose ten-year career didn't seem to have included much real police work. He'd been an instructor at the Academy, worked in the photo lab, and been assigned to various other details, where his progress had been rapid but unmarked by any real accomplishment. He clearly had juice somewhere, but nobody seemed to know where it came from.

  * * *

  This morning, Juhle was at his desk. Insult to injury, he still had his right arm in the sling from arthroscopic rotator cuff surgery—three little holes. His doctor had told him it was an in-and-out-in-the-same-day procedure, little more than an office visit. He'd be pitching Little League practice again in no time.

  Not.

  Like he ever wanted to do that again, anyway. Little League was pretty much the reason he'd thrown out the damn arm in the first place, letting his macho devils con him into a little mano a mano with Doug Malinoff—perfect baseball name—the manager of Devin's son Eric's team, the Hornets. Doug was a good guy, really, if maybe slightly more competitive than your typical major-leaguer during the playoffs, talking Assistant Coach Devin into playing a game of "burnout" for the enjoyment of the kids. Give them a taste of what it's like to really want to win.

  Burnout's a simple game for simple adults and preadolescent boys: You throw a baseball as hard as you can starting from, say, sixty feet. You use regular gloves, no extra-padded catcher's mitts allowed, and you move a step closer after each round. First one to give up loses. Devin was no slouch as an athlete, having played baseball through college. He still had a pretty good gun of an arm. Nevertheless, he gave up, conceding defeat, after seven rounds, his opponent nearly knocking him down on his last throw from thirty-five feet. Malinoff had played shortstop in minor-league ball, made it to double-A. He could throw a baseball through a plywood fence.

  Juhle caught the sixth toss not in the webbing but in the palm of the mitt. He never mentioned to a living soul and never would that on top of ruining his shoulder through his own stupidity on that cold and misty March day, he also allowed Malinoff's major-league fastball to break two bones in his catching hand.

  Since then, Juhle had been having confidence issues. He found it hard to convince himself that he was among the most brilliant homicide inspectors on the planet when at the same time he considered himself a certified idiot for going at it with Malinoff.

  It was Tuesday morning, May 31, nine fifteen. June, just a day away, is synonymous with fog in San Francisco, and today Juhle couldn't see the elevated freeway sixty yards to his left out the window. Awaiting the arrival of his partner, he was at his desk in the crowded, cramped, and yet wide-open room without interior walls that was the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco's Hall of Justice. He was sipping his third cup of coffee this morning, his right arm and still untreated opposite hand—damned if he was going to let anybody know—both throbbing in spite of six hundred milligrams of Motrin every four hours for the past ten days. He turned to the second page of the transcription of a witness's testimony in one of his cases that he was checking against the tape and suddenly took off his headphones, stood up, made his way past the shoulder-high, battered green-and-gray metal files that served as room dividers, and stopped at the door of his lieutenant, Marcel Lanier, who looked up from his own paperwork.

  "What's up, Dev?"

  "We gotta do something about the quality of people they hire, Marcel."

  Lanier, only fifty-some and yet still a hundred years with the department, scratched around his mouth. "That's a song I've been singing for years. What kind of people this time?"

  For an answer, Juhle handed him the printout he'd been reading. "You'll see it," he said.

  Five seconds into his reading, Lanier barked out a one-note toneless laugh, then read aloud. "'And what is your relationship with Ms. Dorset?'"

  Juhle nodded. "That's it. You don't see a relationship like that every day."

  "He was her power mower?"

  "Must have been, since it's right there in black and white."

  "Her power mower?"

  "Yeah, except maybe instead of power mower, what he actually said was that he was her 'paramour.'" Juhle leaned against the doorpost. "And this is, like, mistake ten on one page, Marcel, not counting the big chunks that she has marked 'unintelligible' on the transcript, but that I can hear perfectly on the tape. Do they give an IQ test before we start paying these people? Of course, I've got to correct the transcript, anyway, but now it's going to take me two days instead of an hour. It'd be quicker to write the whole goddamn thing out in longhand."

  Shiu floated up behind Juhle into the space left in the doorway. "What's going to take two days?"

  Lanier ignored both the arrival and the question. His phone rang and he picked it up. "Homicide, Lanier." Frowning, suddenly all serious, he pulled over his yellow pad and started jotting. "Okay, got it. We're moving." Looking up at his two inspectors, he said into the phone, "Juhle and Shiu." When he hung up, there was no sign that he'd ever laughed or thought anything in the world had been funny ever. "Either of you already signed out on a car?"

  The inspectors shared a glance. "No, sir. Paperwork day," Juhle said.

  "Not anymore it isn't. Grab a ride in a black and white downstairs," he said, "and have 'em light it up out to Clay at"—he shot a quick look at his notes—"Lyon. Don't pass go, guys. I'll get word to the techs. I want a presence there yesterday. Somebody just killed a federal judge."

  * * *

  Jeannette Palmer had made the call to 911 at precisely a quarter to nine, her voice high-pitched and panicked, saying that her husband was dead, that somebody had shot him. Since Pacific Heights is a high-income neighborhood, emergency response tends to be prompt. In this case, a patrol car had been cruising wit
hin a couple of blocks down in Cow Hollow and was at the scene within two minutes. An ambulance arrived one minute later.

  Jeannette was standing in the door—dressed, wringing her hands, crying—to meet the cops and guide them to the judge's office, a large room in the left-hand front of the house, with bay windows and thousands of books. This was where Jeannette had found her husband and a young woman she'd never seen before, both of them on the floor behind his desk, and where the responding officers then directed the med techs in the ambulance, who took one quick look and then left the bodies undisturbed. Both had been cold to the touch.

  Juhle and Shiu, as ordered, got to the scene in fifteen minutes in a patrol car with lights and sirens clearing the traffic for them. Even so, a news van from Channel 4 had obviously picked up the dispatch and was already parked in the street out front, a harbinger of what was sure to be the full-scale media circus to follow. A knot of people—neighbors, probably—stood over by the van, chatting away with backstory. The good news was that there were already three other patrol cars at the premises, the officers out of the cars in uniform, securing the scene, denying access.

  Juhle wasn't a native San Franciscan, but he'd moved up from the Peninsula for college at San Francisco State and had stayed. He had always loved Clay Street, especially this stretch of it. The gas lamp–style antique streetlights. The elegant gingerbread houses were set back a civilized distance from the sidewalk, usually with a low wall or discreet fence marking the property boundary. And then the landscaping, each house as though it were watching over its own small private park—no bigger than an average front lawn in suburbia—making a totally different statement about taste, urban life, civility.

  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."