The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

"Okay, a couple of questions. Like, how do you explain the slug in the book? The shooter's three, four feet max, from his targets, who at the very least aren't moving much. Palmer's in his chair. How does he clean miss? And okay, of course, gun's go off by themselves, but just to think about. Next, what's this nonsense about how they can tell that the shooter is probably short? Like kid-size, small-woman-size."

  Juhle snapped his fingers. "That rent-a-midget place," he said.

  Shiu painted on a frustrated look that Lanier ignored and went on. "The other question is where does a woman like Jeannette Palmer find a professional killer, first, who's going to trust her, and second, who she's going to know how to talk to once she finds him, if she can get that far? How does she even ask? What, she's doing research for a book or something?"

  Shiu spoke up. "Are you suggesting we drop it?"

  "No. But I do think it's a reach."

  "Why is that?" Shiu asked.

  Lanier gave it another moment, considering. "Okay, the stuff I've just mentioned, for starters. Not insignificant, especially setting up the deal in the first place. Next, no scuff marks on any of the slugs, which means no silencer. Another small point, I grant you, but if I'm shooting somebody—make that two people—during daylight hours in a street-facing room in a house in a quiet, highend residential neighborhood, even if I'm using a .22 pistol, I'm trying to keep the noise down, you know. Simple precaution."

  Lanier paused, picked at a spot on his right ear. A silence built in the small room, but the lieutenant obviously had more to say, and evidently even Shiu saw the wisdom in letting him get to it uninterrupted.

  "You know what's the real thing, though?" he asked. "I'm picturing the moment, okay. Palmer's in his big leather chair, the girl is next to him, the shooter's across the desk." He shook his head. "I just don't see it."

  "Why not?" Shiu asked.

  "May I?" Juhle asked.

  Lanier nodded.

  "It's too far away," Juhle said. "The judge let him in—we've got no sign of forced entry. Okay, say, he showed the gun at the door, backed everybody in. No way do they get to the office with the judge sitting in his chair. No, the second he's inside, the shooter pops him in the head right now, then goes for the girl. They are not all somehow chatting in the office."

  "I have no trouble with any of that." Shiu had sat back, crossed his legs, spoke to Juhle, while including Lanier. But a tone of defensiveness crept in. His back was straight and stiff against the wooden chair. "But maybe the person didn't appear to be a threat. Maybe the judge knew him. Or her. And the victims thought they were going to be able to talk things out."

  The guy even sits at attention, Juhle was thinking. He said, "It's not a deal breaker, but there is one more thing." He turned to Lanier. "He shoots the girl again, am I right, Marcel?"

  "I think so," Lanier said. He lowered his voice, shifted to face Shiu a bit more. "She went down after the shot, but there's no visible wound. What do you do if she's your contract? He's already missed at least once. She might have fainted, or even ducked. A pro doesn't leave her there without making sure. He comes around the desk and puts another one in her brain. And probably another one for the judge as well."

  "At that range, he would know they were dead if he hit them in the head." Shiu sat with all of their objections for a long moment. Finally, he said, "I still think that somehow it has to involve Mrs. Palmer."

  "And I agree that it's a strong assumption," Juhle said. In fact, he'd seen enough homicides to know that the taking of lives almost always involved a great deal of sloppiness. Retaliatory gang hits would as a matter of course take out four bystanders and leave the intended victim untouched. A woman would plan to kill her cheating boyfriend, wouldn't put enough rat poison in the peas—or he'd taste it halfway through—and they'd wind up in a knife fight that left them both dead. Strung-out, part-time hit men had been known to hit the wrong guy. Oops.

  But beyond the randomness that often accompanied violent death, depending on who you asked, Juhle knew that the going rate to take someone's life in San Francisco ranged from down around one thousand dollars to somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars. Obviously, if you hired from the low end of that spectrum, your junkie street person looking for dope money to get right might make any number of technical errors in planning and execution. Of course, Juhle figured that if Mrs. Palmer had hired out the job, she had drawn from the upscale side, but maybe not.

  He just wanted Shiu to have a little perspective. On the other hand, he and Shiu lived most of each day together, and there wasn't any point in alienating him or helping to make him look bad. "There is one way it might have worked, though," he said.

  "What's that?" Lanier asked.

  "You been following this thing in the papers between Palmer and the prison guards?"

  * * *

  In one of his well-tailored Nordstrom suits, Hunt was in a room full of very serious adults, talking about financial details of a million-dollar partnership that had gone awry because one of the principals had played loose with the books. It was important stuff to everybody else there—Hunt knew that the associates at McClelland, all younger than he was, made a minimum of one hundred fifty dollars per hour and that they lived and breathed these details.

  Now he was there, at a mere eighty dollars per hour, to ensure that his witness, a sixty-year-old gentleman named Neil Haines, was going to say substantially the same things in his deposition testimony as he'd told Hunt in their discussions about four months before, discussions that Hunt only vaguely remembered, but which fortunately he'd recorded. He'd also taken copious notes.

  Looking out over the sun-drenched city from the thirty-fifth-floor conference room windows inside McClelland, Tisch & Douglas, Hunt passed the rest of the morning in a haze of detail and tedium. When the depo team broke for lunch, he checked with Tamara. Andrea was still AWOL. Apparently she'd called in at work yesterday on her way to see a client at her home.

  "Who was the client?"

  "Carol Manion. And, yes, if you were wondering, that's the Manions."

  Hunt whistled. Unless she'd known the Manions personally beforehand, Andrea Parisi had obviously bartered some of her notoriety into hard billings if she was scoring this level of client. Ward and Carol were a well-known couple who had made their initial money in the grocery business but since had branched out into wineries and restaurants and sports teams. They owned a good portion of the 49ers. They had also been regulars on the society page, but Hunt seemed to recall that recently their son had died in a boating accident or something, and since then their public appearances had tailed off. "So did you talk to her, Mrs. Manion?"

  "No, are you kidding? How do I get to her?"

  "Andrea's secretary?"

  "Wyatt, come on. No way is Carla Shapiro giving out Manion's private number."

  "Did you ask?"

  "Did I ask? Am I slightly insulted by that question?" Hunt could almost see Tamara pout over the line. "She pretended she didn't have it. I'm sure."

  "So we don't know if Andrea ever got there?"

  "Right. I did call their corporate offices—the Manions's—and asked, too, but evidently it was something more personal. At the main office, they didn't know about any connection between Carol and Andrea."

  "Okay. What about Dev? Any word from him?"

  She told him that Juhle had called to report that no local hospitals had unidentified accident victims, the morgue had no recent Jane Doe, the jail hadn't acquired an attractive, young female-attorney inmate overnight. All this, as far as it went, was good news—Parisi wasn't verified as hurt or dead—although it was nowhere nearly as good as a sighting would have been.

  "Have you heard any more from Amy?"

  "No word."

  "I'll call her." But as soon as they hung up, the young McClelland turk who was directing their efforts in the depositions knocked on the glass conference room window and motioned to Hunt, indicating that they were going to start. Time was money, and the lunch break he
re at McClelland was thirty minutes. But whatever it was, they needed him in there, and the call to Wu would have to wait.

  16 /

  Spencer Fairchild had been the line producer on more than twenty-five trials nationwide for Trial TV, and in his opinion, the trial of Randy Donolan for the double murder of his wife, Chrissa, and her lover, Josh Eberly, was the absolutely best one he'd ever been involved with.

  It had it all.

  Randy Donolan was thirty-one to Chrissa's twenty-six to Josh's seventeen. Both of the adults were attractive, though neither matched Eberly for sheer heartbreaking sex appeal. Chrissa had been substitute-teaching PE and history at Lincoln High School when she met Josh, and they'd begun their affair within a couple of weeks. Right up until the day of his arrest over a year and a half ago, Randy had run a small but enthusiastic fundamentalist Christian ministry (and Web site startup business) out of his house in the Sunset District.

  Although Josh's and Chrissa's bodies had not been found to date, samples of blood types matching both of theirs, as well as DNA-matched hairs from each of them, had turned up in the truck bed of the vehicle that Randy used for his pastoral and Web-master duties. That truck turned out to be owned by a parishioner named Gerry Coombs. When the police discovered the blood and hair in Gerry's truck, Mr. Coombs found an altogether different religion and became the chief state witness against Randy, with whom he'd been having a homosexual affair.

  Among the dozens of allegations of one type or another that came out before and during the trial were the proposals that Gerry, Randy, and Chrissa had been involved for some time as a threesome; that Josh had decided to cut Randy out and leave Gerry and Chrissa; that Chrissa loved Josh and wanted to marry him; that Gerry had actually done the killings at Randy's request; and just about all other possible variations on the theme. Which in the San Francisco environment were nearly endless.

  From the get-go, the case had been a gold mine for Trial TV.

  And now, as if the case didn't already have enough complications, the extremely coolheaded, logical, and knowledgeable babe Andrea Parisi, who'd been explaining the meaning and nuance of every defense strategy and move since Day One, had apparently disappeared.

  Wu's early-morning call to Spencer Fairchild had alerted him to this fact before he'd left his apartment. Andrea had been upset the other night, of course—he really didn't blame her—but it never occurred to him, even if she weren't going back to New York, that she would do anything to jeopardize the position she'd created for herself here in San Fran. After all, she was definitely on the inside track for any future trials here. She had kicked ass on camera. And the money they were paying her, even given that in her everyday life she was a highly paid lawyer, was not chump change. To say nothing of the notoriety and branding, both for her and her firm.

  Even if her one first shot at the Apple hadn't worked out, Fairchild didn't doubt that she would realize that she was still young. A little more seasoning, a different break here or there, and she would be ready. And even if she wasn't, what she had here was not just good—television is a career-making medium, and she was already a star. She'd get over the affront to her amour propre. It was part of the business.

  So his initial feeling after he talked to Wu was that Andrea was probably off pouting and would be back in plenty of time, at least for the afternoon court session and definitely for when she was really needed at the wrap-up. This was the segment after the court adjourned for the day, usually no earlier than four o'clock, when she and Tombo would not only review the day's major events but put them in context from the defense and prosecution sides, respectively. Great television, especially when they'd get into it with one another, as they sometimes did.

  But he didn't like to lose tabs on the "talent," and just to be safe, he'd done a little calling around—to Andrea's completely private, off-limits-to-anyone-else, emergency-only Trial TV–issued cell number, then to Richard Tombo's home. Knowing that Wyatt Hunt had run out after her the other night, he had called The Hunt Club and talked briefly with Tamara, who was trying to locate Andrea herself. At Piersall, he talked to Carla, whom he knew and who, he felt sure, admired the hell out of him, and she really, truly hadn't heard from her boss. She was worried.

  Now Fairchild was sitting across from Richard Tombo about to order what passed for lunch at Lou the Greek's, a semi-subterranean, dark, and marginally hygienic bar/restaurant across the street from the steps of the Hall of Justice. Today, Judge Villars had dismissed the Donolan morning session at eleven thirty, and so there were still a couple of booths available under the small and grimy alley windows along one side. In spite of Lou's drawbacks, which to Fairchild were legion—the food, the atmosphere, the lighting, the food, the smell, the food, and particularly the daily special, which was the only menu item—it was a popular place within the legal and law-enforcement communities and had been for more than twenty-five years. It was SRO from noon until about one thirty, two and three deep at the bar.

  Tombo was either an old thirties or a young forties. Wide-shouldered, substantial without being fat in the waist, a little above average height. His skin was very dark, his head buzzed, his dark suits always impeccable. Hints of gray accented his well-trimmed goatee. A wide, somewhat flattened nose bisected an almost exactly symmetrical face, and this gave him a definable and pleasant look—perfectly normal and yet somewhat unusual at the same time. His deep chocolate eyes, potentially so soulful, often winked out between laugh lines. In his own way, Tombo was as attractive as Parisi, and this, of course, was a large part of the reason Fairchild had chosen them.

  Fairchild was finally getting around to telling Tombo about Parisi's reaction two nights ago. "That's what this disappearing act is about, I'm sure. But let me ask you, Rich, did I ever pretend that I had that kind of pull? Haven't I always told both of you to just enjoy this ride while it's here because there's no telling when it's going to come again?"

  Tombo picked up a green pod of edamame from a bowl of them on the table, popped it open, and emptied the beans that were inside into his palm. "Evidently she didn't get that message somehow."

  "I never lied to her."

  "I'm not saying you did." He picked one bean and put it in his mouth. "She might have gotten a different impression is all I'm saying. With you both being so tight and all."

  "No tighter professionally, I mean, than you and I have been. It's been a team all the way, the three of us."

  The laugh lines showed. "Yeah, well, I wasn't just talking about the professional thing."

  "Okay, fair enough. But the first time I got a vibe that she was really thinking New York was on the plate was Tuesday night. That is no bullshit. That's the first time. I mean, that she was counting on it as the next step, that it was actually going to happen. As soon as she said that well, I had to set her straight. And that's when it started to get a little heavy. What are those things, anyway?"

  Tombo, opening another shell, looked down. "Edamame. Soybeans. Great stuff." He looked around the crowded room. "Lou's stepping it up, going gourmet."

  Fairchild said, "You notice the special coming in? Tempura dolmas? What is that?"

  "As you say, it's the special. Sui generis." Tombo paused, translated roughly. "It's own thing."

  "Maybe that, but we've got a ways to go to get to gourmet."

  Tombo shrugged. "Depends on your definition. In the Sudan, this stuff would cause food riots." He threw some soybeans into his mouth. "So where is she, you think?"

  "Laying low. Sending a message. Trying to get to me."

  Tombo clucked sympathetically. "Thinking it's personal."

  Fairchild cocked his head, wondering if Tombo was mocking him. "Exactly," he said. "She'll be back by the wrap-up, I'm sure."

  "Let's hope."

  "Well, if not, you'll carry it fine." The waitress came by with a tray of water glasses, put two on their table, took their unnecessary order for the record—the dolmas special. When she'd gone, Fairchild picked up his glass. "Tell me honestly,
Rich, what did you think you were doing after this trial?"

  Tombo shrugged. "Going back to billable work. God, that sounds horrible now that I think about it." The eyes lit up again. "Hey, maybe we can pull a few strings and get George Palmer's killer into trial in ten days or so. Wouldn't that be great?"

  "Terrific. But wouldn't they have to catch him first?"

  "If it's a him. Speaking of which, check this out." Tombo's gaze had gone to the crowd by the door, where two figures who were familiar to him had broken through. "Juhle and Shiu," he said. "And it looks like they're coming our way."

  * * *

  Tombo had been an assistant district attorney for nine years before going into private practice. He knew both Juhle and Shiu and had followed their assignment in the Palmer case. When they got to the table—he'd called it; they were coming right to him and Fairchild—he made the introductions. He and Fairchild made room for the inspectors by sliding over on their benches, and now the seating in the booth was a little tight. And Shiu started right in. "We were just on our way over to Andrea Parisi's firm, and Devin thought you guys would be down here, so we could hit you first. In fact, we were kind of hoping that Parisi would be with you."