The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  "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

  She had closed her eyes again and now opened them. "I'm sorry," she said. "I do want to help you find who did this if I can."

  "Do you have any idea who it might have been? Did your husband have any enemies?"

  "Don't you think we have to know who that woman is first? Why is she here? Whatever it is, that's what this has to be about. Doesn't it?"

  Juhle wasn't sure that was true. He could envision several scenarios off the top of his head that explained the girl's presence. But Jeannette Palmer was right. The overwhelming likelihood was that it wasn't about the judge by himself. Jane Doe was part of it.

  "But all right. George's enemies." Her big shoulders heaved in a mirthless laugh. "This sounds awful for such a charming man, but it could have been anybody, really. You'd have to check his files. Every time he made a decision, he made an enemy, and he's been doing that for years and years. Then there's the CCPOA ."

  Juhle shot another quick look over to Shiu. The CCPOA, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, was the prison guards' union, the most powerful and richest labor organization in the state. It was no secret that it wasn't doing much of a good job at policing itself. And suddenly Juhle, with a shock of recognition, put it together that the judge—who had been in the news looking into the possibility of putting the CCPOA into receivership, deposing its president, and freezing its assets—was George Palmer.

  Jeannette Palmer didn't notice the silent exchange, and she was going on. "They're not nice people, and they were terrified that George was going to put them out of business."

  "Did they threaten him?" Shiu asked. He had taken out the small notepad he used.

  "Not that I know of. Not overtly, anyway. George would have told me."

  Juhle waited for a moment, then asked if she knew what the judge had done on the previous night. She opened her eyes, brought him into focus. "He was home here when I left but said he was going out to dinner."

  "Did he say with who or where?"

  "No. It was casual. He just said he had to see some people about a horse, which was our code for cases he wasn't supposed to talk about. Even to me. Maybe his secretary would know. I'm sorry. But it wasn't the dinner. We know he came b
ack from that, don't we? With her."

  At the moment, Juhle didn't even know if he'd gone out at all, but he simply said, "Maybe not with her. Maybe she came later."

  The thought seemed to give her a moment's reprieve. Perhaps grateful for that, she nodded. "Maybe she did," she said. "Maybe she came with the killer."

  This, Juhle thought, was a pretty thing to think. But not very likely.

  She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. "Oh, God," she whispered, "oh, God."

  Juhle gave her a moment, then spoke her name, and she opened her eyes, but the faraway gaze she'd worn when they'd entered was back.

  He tried again. "Mrs. Palmer?"

  But she just looked at him and shook her head.

  7 /

  Snapping his fingers, Amy Wu's boss Dismas Hardy had told Wyatt Hunt that he could set himself up as a private investigator just like that. But it hadn't been exactly just like that. First Hunt needed to convince the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs that his time in the army as a member of the CID should count as the required education in police science, criminal law, or justice, and then that his years of work in the CPS gave him at least the equivalent of six thousand hours of investigative experience. Then there was his evaluation by the federal Department of Justice and the criminal-history background check. To say nothing of the two-hour written exam on laws and regulations. And finally the additional requirements for a firearms permit. All that took the better part of two months.

  Then four years ago tonight, he had hung up the shingle.

  Now he sat against the wall at a large round table in the power corner at Sam's, the classic restaurant and watering hole at Bush Street and Belden Alley. Fresh from a successful day locating a Piedmont dentist's nineteen-year-old daughter who'd dropped out of the USF dorms and moved in with her boyfriend in the Mission District, Hunt was the first one here for the anniversary party. Sitting alone at the table, he took a first sip of his Bombay Sapphire gibson and sighed with contentment.

  He knew that in a few minutes he was going to be all but holding court with a high-energy, even slightly famous group of some of the city's most successful legal professionals. He wore a suit and tie. He could spout some of his high school Latin, his college French, and everyone would know what he'd just said—more, they wanted to know what he would say. They would be drinking fine wine and their waiter Stephano would call them all by their first names.

  It almost seemed impossible. From where he'd been to here.

  Hunt had been a foster kid in a succession of homes until he was eight when the then-childless Richard and Ann Hunt had miraculously decided to adopt him (and then proceeded to have four natural children of their own in short order).

  When he opened his agency, there was never a question as to what he'd call it. In a practical sense, as a business name, The Hunt Club sounded substantial, as though a bunch of like-minded professionals hung out together and did good work. There might be fifty employees in an organization called The Hunt Club.

  In fact, at first it was just him.

  Next had come Tamara Dade. She and her brother Mickey were two of the very few kids Hunt had met in the course of his emergency work at CPS with whom he'd kept up. Tamara had looked Hunt up when she was about fourteen to thank him for saving her life back when she'd been Tammy and down to her last spoonful of peanut butter.

  Beginning with that unexpected phone call, they'd stayed in touch with one another in a haphazard way. A few years ago, Hunt had attended her graduation from San Francisco State. After that, Tamara did some clerical work while she looked for a "real" job, but nothing exciting presented itself. Then Hunt opened his agency and found that business was good and he needed at least both an assistant and a part-time field guy. Now Tamara came in to the office every day, serving as receptionist, office manager, bookkeeper, secretary, and since she was going back to school in criminology and starting to log her investigatory hours, occasional partner. Though she was an efficiency machine in the office, she was even better getting her hands dirty in the field—totally fearless and a crackerjack interrogator in whom people naturally confided.

  They weren't long in the business before Hunt had occasion to call on Devin Juhle for some classified DMV information he couldn't get through normal channels. Hunt got acquainted with some of the homicide guys' snitches, who tended to know where witnesses went to hide out. After that, Juhle and his partner Shane Manning had started to refer to themselves as Hunt Clubbers. Then one night when Hunt was over at Juhle's house for dinner—a regular occurrence—his wife, Connie, refused to put food in front of him until he made her a member as well.

  After that, the whole thing took on a kind of insider's cachet. One evening Amy Wu had stopped into Lou the Greek's with Wes Farrell, one of the partners in her firm, for a drink while Hunt, Juhle, and Manning, already a bit in their cups, were working on the club's bylaws, in this case, formally adopting Will Ferrell's Saturday Night Live bit, itself based on the original Fishbone lyric, as their official club cheer—"U-G-L-Y, you ain't got no alibi, you Ul-ly, hey, hey, you Ul-ly."

  Naturally, Amy and Wes lobbied for admission. Hunt and the guys played hard to get. After all, what was the point of having a club unless there were standards? What could Amy and Wes bring to the party? Wes didn't hesitate. He unbuttoned his dress shirt and showed off the T-shirt he wore under it, on which were written the words,

  EVERYTHING'S BETTER ON ANABOLIC STEROIDS.

  "I wear a new one of these every day," Wes said. "I may have the world's most complete obnoxious T-shirt collection."

  Nodding in admiration—Farrell passed the attitude test and was going to make the cut—Hunt and the cops turned to Amy.

  She wiped away the tear that now somehow glistened on her cheek. "I have never, ever been in a club in my life," she whispered. "No one's ever let me join in. Oh, never mind, anyway." Obviously hurt, she turned, took a few halting steps away. Hunt, feeling awful, rolled his eyes and got up to undo some of the psychic damage if he could—after all, she was his friend, to say nothing of a significant source of his income. He gently put his hand on her shoulder. "Amy, we didn't mean "

  And she whirled around, beaming at him. "Are you kidding me?" she said. "You don't think people would kill to get me in their clubs?" She pulled him down and kissed his cheek. "Great liars are always in demand, Wyatt. You never know when you're going to need one."

  Eventually, Amy hooked up with and was now engaged to Jason Brandt, another lawyer who worked mainly in the juvenile division but who made the club after he won a bet with Hunt that he could get the three of them into any Giants game any time they wanted without tickets or reservations. Or any other public concert, event, happening. Brandt didn't seem to understand why anybody ever paid or bought tickets to do anything. He told Hunt, who had come to believe it, that over the course of his senior-year summer—and granted, it had been before 9/11—he had toured the U.S. by commercial airliner, with stops in Chicago, Boston, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, without buying one ticket.

  Finally, Hunt hired another young stringer, Craig Chiurco, to help out with surveillance, and soon enough Chiurco and Tamara became an item. So now, since Shane Manning had been killed, there were eight of them—four, including Hunt, on the payroll—and another four irregulars who took the occasional break from their day jobs as lawyers and cops and even mothers to have a little fun on the edge of things, break up the routine.

  This morning at the office, Hunt had given his employees each a five-hundred-dollar bonus. For the irregulars, the anniversary was a reasonably good excuse to have a dinner and a few laughs at Sam's.

  * * *

  Wes Farrell had grown out his hair again, though not as extreme as a few years before when it had gotten below his shoulders. Still, in a ponytail, the hair was a statement, like tonight's T-shirt he'd just shown everyone under his dress shirt that read, I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE NO MATH. He was explaining that he gene
rally preferred nonverbal statements, such as his hair.

  "So what's with the hair, anyway?" Wyatt Hunt asked him.

  "You don't like it?" Farrell, hurt, put a hand to his heart. "I've been working on it for weeks."

  "I know. I love the hair. I do. It's just not exactly the standard lawyer look."

  "Tony Serra has it," Amy Wu said, referring to the defense legend they'd once made a movie about. "Long hair, I mean."

  "Tony Serra's not your run-of-the-mill standard lawyer," Hunt said.

  Farrell took umbrage. "Nor, might I point out, am I."

  "No," his girlfriend said, "that you're not." Samantha Duncan—no relation to the restaurant Sam's—put a hand over his and leaned over to answer Hunt. "And as for the statement, he's not cutting his hair until something makes sense. I tell him that's not going to happen until we've got a new administration in Washington." Sam was rather flamboyantly a Green Party person, which in San Francisco put her close to the mainstream, though not necessarily among this crowd of law enforcement types.