The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  Now he saw a cab on its way toward them. He got to the side of the road, put his hand out. The cab pulled up and stopped, and Hunt went to the driver's window. "My girlfriend's had too much to drink," he said, pointing over to Parisi. "If you can just give me a minute."

  The cabbie was a middle-aged black man in a Giants cap and jacket. "You need some help?" he asked.

  In a minute, they had her in the backseat, passed out.

  "You want to take her to emergency?"

  Hunt almost said yes, then decided that it might cause her more trouble. She was breathing. She'd had way too much to drink, but she wasn't going to die. And the emergency room meant complications with her job and her TV work. He didn't want to cause her any further problems. He just wanted to get her through this.

  "I don't think so. Just home." He gave his address.

  The cabbie turned the corner and stepped on the gas.

  8 /

  The morning interviews with Jeannette Palmer and the briefing sessions with both the FBI and Homeland Security blew Juhle and Shiu through lunchtime. After hitching a ride back downtown with Assistant Coroner Janey Parks, they picked up their normal car and headed back out to Clay Street to start talking to neighbors and look over anything else CSI turned up.

  Which was not much.

  A slug in the book that Juhle had noticed verified the murder weapon caliber as .22. Mostly based on the accuracy of the shots and gunshot residue on the desk, the forensics folks had determined that the shooter was probably standing very close to if not at the very front of the desk. Although further tests would seek to amplify the initial data, which was sketchy at best, this in turn led Shiu to surmise—based on the blood splatter and trajectory angle through the book—that the shooter was either a short man or a woman.

  Juhle flinched. He knew that there were too many variables in the relative positions of the gun and the targets to draw conclusions. How could one possibly distinguish, for example, a tall man who shot from the hip from a short man holding the gun at shoulder height? He couldn't stop himself. "So, a man or a woman. Imagine that. As opposed to, say, a chimpanzee, which was my first choice."

  The neighborhood was a bust as well, with one perhaps important exception. Shari Levin, who lived directly across the street from the Palmers and who had gone out to her bridge party at about seven thirty, had noticed what she thought was Mrs. Palmer's car parked out in the street. She noticed because she wondered why she hadn't parked as usual in her own circular driveway. At least it was the same basic type of car—"one of those sports convertibles you see everywhere nowadays."

  She knew Mrs. Palmer drove the same BMW Z4 that was parked in the driveway now, and she thought it had been that car, although it had been near dusk and the car was dark, too. Juhle and Shiu filed the information, knowing full well that if it hadn't been Mrs. Palmer's, the car in question might well turn out to be an Audi, a Porsche, or a Mercedes. Even a Honda. In more rigorous questioning, all Ms. Levin had finally given them was that she'd barely glanced and hardly noticed, but there had definitely been a car on the street, parked up flush to the driveway, and she thought at the time that it had been Mrs. Palmer's. Whose else would it have been?

  So they hadn't exactly broken the case wide open in the first few hours. Not that they expected to, but public forbearance over slow progress would be short-lived. Chief Batiste made that crystal clear in his afternoon press conference when he said that the murder of a federal judge struck at the very heart of our free society and that the apprehension of the guilty party for this atrocity would be the top priority of his police department until the case was solved. The "my police department" was ominous. He would take the credit for success and the blame for failure. He promised results—and fast.

  Juhle hated when they did that. Batiste had no idea what they had, what they were working with; he hadn't the vaguest notion of the complexity of the crime. In fact, no one did yet. But Batiste was promising quick results. Stupid and counterproductive, and now all on the heads of Juhle and Shiu.

  Thanks, chief. And you wonder why morale's in the toilet?

  At the press conference, amping it up another notch, Batiste also announced that he and Mayor West had assigned an Event Number to the case, meaning that they were freeing up nearly unlimited funds from the city's general fund, outside of the police budget, for the investigation.

  No mistake about it: If Juhle and Shiu hadn't felt the pressure from the beginning, and they had, they were in a cooker now. And they still hadn't even identified the female victim. All the usual inquiries failed. No criminal history, no military record, no applications where she'd submitted fingerprints to any agency. Fingerprints sent to DMV came back negative.

  She didn't even have a driver's license?

  Now, Shiu driving and closing in on one in the morning, the two inspectors parked in the cops' lot behind the Hall of Justice. Groggy and silent, they walked up the dimly lit outdoor corridor that led them to the morgue, just across the way from the jail.

  It was a clear night, cold and quiet.

  Shiu rang the coroner's night bell—Juhle hadn't taken any pain medication since the morning, and his hand was throbbing. After a moment the silhouette of Janey Parks appeared back in the darkened recesses of the outer office. She was the efficient yet generally friendly bureaucrat with whom they'd hitched a ride downtown twelve hours before.

  When she opened the door, leading them back through the desks the way she'd come, she started right in: "The witness is Mary Mahoney. She's a waitress at MoMo's. Twenty-seven. Came down by herself. No question on the ID. Positive."

  This last wasn't much of a surprise, since the young woman's face hadn't been touched by the bullet, a mystery which Ms. Parks had solved earlier in the day at Palmer's house by opening the victim's mouth with her rubber-gloved hands and looking inside with her flashlight, thereby discovering the entry wound at the back of her throat. The girl had had her mouth open when the shot was fired. All the teeth were intact. The slug didn't have enough punch to penetrate the skull, so there was no exit wound, either. "But, man, it did some damage inside," Janey was saying. "Ricocheted up and kicked around in there like a pinball. The brain was scrambled eggs."

  "Hey, great. Good detail. Thanks, Janey." This was the kind of image that tended to stick with Juhle and wake him up with the sweats. But he shook it off—it would come back to haunt him, anyway, get him on the ricochet, as it were.

  They got to the office of John Strout, the medical examiner who was now in his mid-seventies and had long since ceased caring about the formal appearance of professionalism. The place was a museum of the bizarre, the outright macabre, and the dangerous. Three hand grenades, reputedly live, served as paperweights on his desk. By the entrance to the morgue's cold room, a skeleton with a pipe in its teeth and a silken rope around its neck relaxed on an authentic antique Spanish garrote. On the bookshelf counter, Strout kept his collection of knives, brass knuckles, sharp and deadly ninja paraphernalia. Several rifles and shotguns leaned against the walls. In an immense terrarium in the center of the office—and completely illegally as a technical matter—he kept his favorite murder weapons from actual cases he'd worked, many complete with bloodstains: an ice pick, a beaker full of empty syringes, a baseball bat, various pokers and blunt objects, a couple more knives of particularly creative design.

  Even if you hadn't just come from having identified a deceased acquaintance, the place could be unnerving. And on top of all this, Parks had kept the lights dim, which maximized the terror factor.

  Juhle flicked the switch and the room lit up. It helped.

  And here was Mary Mahoney, sitting with her arms crossed tight over her chest, her eyes reddened from recent tears. Juhle moved a wooden chair over beside her and sat down. Parks, he noticed, had gone to sit in Strout's chair.

  On his own footstool, Shiu broke the ice. "I want to thank you for coming in tonight. It's not something everyone would have done."

  "I didn't know what
else I should do," Ms. Mahoney said.

  "Well, you did the right thing," Shiu said. "Every minute we save early on in the investigation increases the odds that we'll find who did this."

  "I kind of thought that." Ms. Mahoney had short, spiky black hair, wide-set liquid brown eyes—her best feature—lips that had been collagened, a nose she hadn't been born with. The effect wasn't negative.

  "So how did you come to think it might have been your friend?" Shiu asked.

  "Staci. Staci Rosalier." In her small voice, she continued, "Well, when I came in about four, everybody at the restaurant was talking about the judge, about what happened. He ate there, you know, just about every day. Nobody could believe it. And then, I don't know when exactly, but after the rush started, I heard something about a woman being with him. A young woman. Not his wife." She looked from Shiu to Juhle, who nodded, encouraging her to go on. "And so—we were jamming all night—but it got me worried. So when I got a minute—by now it's, like, ten thirty?—I went and asked one of the managers if she could check and see if Staci was in today. She worked lunch, which I did, too, when I first met her. Which is how we became friends, you know?"

  "So," Juhle said, "you asked the manager if Staci had come in?"

  "Right. But she hadn't even called in. And Staci never missed. She was like the rock at lunch." Mahoney closed her eyes, drew a deep breath. "So, anyway, when I found that out, now I'm really worried."

  Shiu stepped in. "So what's the connection between Staci and Judge Palmer? That you were so concerned about?"

  But suddenly Mahoney was shaking her head from side to side. Tears appeared in her eyes. "I just can't believe that's all that's left of her in there. I mean, she was the sweetest person. Who would do that to her?"

  "That's what we're trying to find out," Shiu said.

  Mahoney went silent. Shiu gave her a handkerchief, and she dabbed at her eyes. "I might be the only one who knew about it, but Staci and the judge had a thing."

  "You mean an affair?" Juhle asked.

  "Well, not exactly. Maybe more than that. He put her up, you know. Paid her rent."

  Juhle saying, "Do you know how long this had been going on, Mary?"

  "Him and her? I don't know exactly, but at least since last fall. Although the new place, she just moved in there only a couple of months or so ago."

  The two inspectors exchanged a glance. Juhle came forward. "The new place?"

  "Just across from the store. MoMo's. In those lofts, the new ones."

  Juhle knew them. Prices on the one-room studios started at around four hundred thousand dollars and topped out at well over a million for the penthouses. If Judge Palmer had put Staci Rosalier in one of these places, he'd made a serious commitment to her.

  "Have you ever been up to her place?" Shiu asked.

  "A couple of times, although she was pretty private about it. She couldn't let anybody find out about them, which you can understand."

  "But she let you," Shiu said.

  "We were real friends. Plus, it was so cool, she just had to show somebody." The tears spilled over. "I just " she began, then lowered her head and fell silent.

  Juhle gave her a moment. Then gently, "You're talking the new condos on Second, right directly across from MoMo's?"

  She looked up at him and nodded. "Why did this have to happen?" she asked.

  Juhle had no answer.

  * * *

  The building supervisor, Jim Franks, wasn't thrilled to get woken up at 1:50 A.M. It took the sallow, potbellied, middle-aged man nearly ten minutes to get to the door, another very long minute to find the one key on his twelve-key ring that would open it. Juhle and Shiu stood outside all the while in the now fully gathered cold—impatient, unspeaking, unamused.

  Franks had thrown himself into a wrinkled pair of brown slacks and a stained Corona beer T-shirt. When he opened the door, he backed away a few steps. "This couldn't wait till the morning?"

  Juhle held his warrant up for Franks to see, dredged a tolerant expression from somewhere. "Mr. Franks," he said in a conversational tone, "you have my word we'd rather be doing this in the morning, too. But a woman who lived in this building was shot dead the night before last and we don't feel like we've earned any rest until we've got some kind of jump on who might have killed her, which we don't have yet. We thought we might find something in her apartment that might help us. Can you understand that?"

  The little speech hit its mark. Suddenly Franks was less hostile. "You said Staci Rosalier? She dead?"

  Juhle nodded. "She just got identified an hour ago by a friend of hers who told us she lived here. That's why we're bothering you."

  "You want to see her apartment?" But then a thought struck him. "Don't you need to have some kind of warrant for that?"

  Juhle sighed and produced it again.

  "Okay," Franks finally said. They walked down a dark hallway on the first floor to the office of the building, where Franks went to a cabinet, unlocked it on the third try, and pulled a key off a hook. "There you go," he said, handing it over to Juhle, "now if that's all "

  Shiu, unable to fake equanimity, hung back by the door, his arms crossed over his chest. Juhle looked at his partner, came back to Franks. "Just one or two questions."

  Sighing extravagantly, Franks lowered a haunch onto the corner of his desk. He brought a hand up to his eyes and rubbed them. "Okay, what?"

  "Would you notice when she had visitors?"

  "No, I don't think I ever did. She could have anybody come anytime they wanted."

  "But you didn't notice anyone special?"

  "People are coming and going all the time. I don't pay much attention." Franks checked the wall clock. "You said only a couple of questions "

  "Yes, I did." Juhle's humor actually seemed to be improving—in spite of the hour, in spite of his broken bones. "Here's another one: Do you remember if anyone came to see her in the past few days? Anyone unusual?"

  "I'm sorry," Franks said, "I just never pay attention to that. We've got almost a thousand tenants, and all of them have friends and families, most of 'em unusual one way or another. People are coming and going all the time." He straightened up off the desk. "Now if you don't need me anymore, I'm going back to bed. You can drop the key in the box when you're done."

  "Thank you, sir," Juhle said, "we appreciate your cooperation."

  Franks shrugged. "No problem."

  In the elevator, Juhle shot a glance at Shiu. "Personable guy."

  "If that was no problem," Shiu said, "I'd like to see him when he thinks he's got one."

  Juhle shrugged. "He's tired."

  "Who isn't?"

  "Offer it up to the poor souls in purgatory."

  "What's that?"

  "Purgatory? Kind of like a waiting room outside of heaven, although I vaguely remember hearing it doesn't exist anymore. Wouldn't that be a bitch? What happened to all the souls waiting around in there when they decided it wasn't there?"

  "Is that a real question? Let's make this quick."

  Staci Rosalier had lived on the fourth floor, three steps across from the elevator, where the judge would face little danger of being recognized when he came to visit.

  They opened the door and turned on the light. The condominium was high-end and modern in style and adornments but smaller than Juhle had imagined it would be. Twenty-five feet deep, maybe fifteen wide.

  Four stools fronted a bar that ran along to their left. Behind it was a kitchen area with a sink and two-burner stove. The bar ended at a door to a small, shower-only bathroom. Directly across were full-length closet doors and built-in bookshelves filled with paperbacks. The far wall was all window, drapes open both sides, the ballyard across the way. He guessed that the couch was a sofa bed. There was a coffee table on an artsy-fartsy throw rug and a comfortable-looking brown leather chair under a reading lamp in the corner.

  "The good life," Shiu said.

  "You don't like it?"

  "It's a hotel room. Nobody lives here."


  "No, look," he said. "Daffodils on the bar there. Books in the shelves." Juhle was pulling on his surgical gloves. On the small table next to the sofa, he turned on a three-way reading light and picked up two framed photographs, one—badly out of focus—of a smiling young boy, and the other of Judge Palmer. "Personal photos. She lived here, all right, Shiu. She just didn't have much room."

  Shiu was already behind the bar, poking around in the cabinets, the drawers, the refrigerator. He was reaching into a closet when Juhle grabbed his arm. "Gloves," he said.

  Juhle opened another closet filled with clothes and a dozen or more pairs of shoes. Staci had color-coded the hangers. He turned. "Here's the wallet." On a built-in chest of drawers. Moving out into the room, he sat on the sofa and began emptying the wallet's contents onto the coffee table in front of him. Cash—four fifties and four ones. Credit cards. Library card. Social Security. Costco. A smaller version of the same fuzzy snapshot of the boy. One of the judge—much more casual than the formal office shot she'd framed and taken in this room, Juhle realized—in the reading chair, grinning.