The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  * * *

  The dressing-down left Hunt literally shaking. Or maybe it was the information—still just a rumor, he reminded himself, although he intuitively believed it—about Andrea and Palmer. He stood out on the sidewalk in front of the Freeman building staring after Shiu and Juhle's car until long after it had turned a corner and disappeared.

  When he came back to himself, he returned to the main doors of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, rang the after-hours bell, and waited for the click that unlocked the door. In a minute, he was up the stairs, knocking on Farrell's door, letting himself in. Wu was sitting on the couch, talking on the telephone. Farrell had undone his tie and taken off his dress shirt, leaving him in today's T-shirt, which read, SEEN ONE SHOPPING CENTER, SEEN A MALL. Farrell was standing behind the easy chairs and had just shot a Nerf ball toward the basket. Neither attorney was facing the television set, which was back on, albeit silent. On the screen was a picture of Andrea Parisi. Hunt ran over and hit the sound.

  " not been seen since midafternoon yesterday. Further cause for concern among authorities is the fact that Ms. Parisi's legal work brought her into regular contact with Judge George Palmer, who was shot to death at his home last Monday evening. Anyone having any knowledge of Ms. Parisi or her whereabouts is urged to call the police or this station at "

  Hunt muted the sound. Wu still held the phone but now was standing, staring at the screen. Farrell, too, had turned, and his face had clouded over. "Well, now it's official at least," he said. "Maybe Missing Persons will move on it after all."

  "Don't count on it," Hunt said. "The TV saying somebody's missing doesn't necessarily mean that they're missing."

  "But she is missing," Wu insisted. "I know something's happened. We all know that. She'd never go this long without telling somebody."

  Hunt pointed at the phone in her hand. "Who are you talking to?"

  "Oh." With an I'm-stupid expression, she spoke back into the phone. "Jason. Did you hear that?"

  Farrell sat on the arm of the easy chair, his jaw tight. "Devin doesn't really consider her a suspect in Palmer, does he, Wyatt?"

  Hunt lowered himself down onto the wall unit next to the television. "I'd say close to as good as the wife."

  "What do you think?"

  "You really want to know? You don't want to know."

  "You think she's dead, don't you?" Wu had hung up and now sat, her hands nervous little birds in her lap. "I'm afraid of that, too."

  Farrell's expression showed he wasn't far from that thought himself, but he said, "What about kidnapped?"

  Hunt shook his head. "Why? And no ransom demand. It makes no sense."

  "Neither does her disappearing," Farrell said, "unless she just split up the coast or somewhere to get her head straight. Between this thing with Palmer and her fight with Spencer, I could see her just laying low for a few days."

  But Wu was shaking her head. "She would have told Carla, at least. And probably Gary Piersall."

  "Maybe she did, Amy," Hunt said.

  "No, not Carla, anyway. I talked to her enough times today. Nobody's that good an actress."

  Farrell said, "Maybe she just wasn't thinking straight and forgot to tell anybody."

  Wu shook her head. "That's just not her."

  Hunt said, "She was fine when I left her. She wasn't freaking out. She was going in to work. Besides, if she's taking a mental health day or two, the story breaking on TV is going to bring her back in. If that or some ransom demand doesn't happen in the next few hours, and I don't think they will " He let the sentence hang unfinished.

  "So what do we do?" Wu asked. "Just sit and wait?"

  "I don't know what else we can do," Farrell said. "She turns up or she doesn't."

  "Well, maybe not." Hunt lifted himself up from the credenza, the nebulous idea of why he'd felt he needed to come back up here beginning to form into something more cohesive. "If she's dead, nothing we do makes any difference. But if she's not if she's hurt or trapped or crashed and skidded off the road someplace or anything besides dead, there's still a chance we can do something."

  "All right, maybe," Farrell said, "if we could get the police "

  But Hunt was shaking his head. "Think about it, Wes. We've already got the police. Juhle wants her. He'll pull out all those stops." He took in both of them. "I'm talking about us."

  "Us? You mean you and me and Amy?"

  Hunt nodded. "And Jason. And my troops, Tamara and Craig and Mickey."

  Wes cracked a thin smile. "And do what?"

  But Wu said, "I'm in. Whatever it takes."

  "Here's what I see," Hunt said. "Wes, hear me out. We've got three options. One, Andrea's already dead. Two, for some reason she went away on her own. On that, she'll either come home on her own, too, or she plans to stay away indefinitely, in which case she's left the country and we'll never see her again."

  "I don't think that's it," Wu said.

  Hunt nodded. "I don't, either. But she also might have had a bona fide accident going where she was going, and then the cops will probably find her or her car. So forget one and two. Those are just out of our control."

  "Okay," Farrell said. "What's three?"

  "Three, somebody took her." Hunt held up his hands, forestalling the response he saw in both of their faces. "I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's the only thing we can look at, and possibly affect, rather than just sit and wait. If somebody took her, they did it for a reason—something she did, someone she knew, something she was involved in. That's what's left."

  "So what do we do?" Farrell asked.

  "How about if you go talk to Fairchild and Tombo. Between the two of them, they're going to know more than any of us but may not know what they know."

  "What do you want me to do?" Wu asked.

  "You and Jason, maybe you could get with Carla Shapiro. Find out who Andrea hung with at work, what her caseload was, her personal life outside of Trial TV. Meanwhile, I'll put Tamara and my stringers on the phones and try to pick up any other lead I can."

  "Where?" Wu asked.

  "I don't know exactly. I'll start digging. Maybe, as you say, Wes, talk to Devin some more."

  "He's a good guy, Wyatt, but he's a cop on a big case. He's not going to be inclined to share." Farrell came forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. "Don't get me wrong. I'm on the team here. But this is a helluva long shot, the whole idea."

  "I realize that," Hunt said. "But what's the alternative?"

  18 /

  Hunt got lucky with Mickey Dade.

  Besides the occasional work he did for Hunt, Tamara's twenty-three-year-old younger brother also drove a cab in the evenings while he sporadically attended chef's school during the day at the California Culinary Academy when he could afford classes. Hunt thought the interest in food might have had something to do with Mickey getting down to his last spoonful of peanut butter when he'd been ten, but they'd never discussed it.

  Tonight, though, Mickey was circling Union Square, not four blocks from Farrell's office, when Hunt got him on his cell phone. Picking him up out front, Mickey left the meter off and started to drive. Hunt, sitting in the passenger seat next to him, wasted no time. "How's it look for work over the next day or two, Mick?"

  "Clear enough. I could probably find a few hours. What do you want?"

  "I don't know yet. You hear about Andrea Parisi?"

  "Who?"

  "I guess not, then. She's on TV about the Donolan trial almost every day."

  "I don't watch TV. Waste of time."

  "I know. It's one of the things I've always liked about you most."

  "Except for the Iron Chef. I love that show."

  "Mick."

  "Yeah."

  "Andrea Parisi."

  "Okay."

  "She's missing. We're going to try to find her."

  "Who's we?"

  "You, me, Tamara, Craig, some of my pals from the legal world."

  "Where'd she go?"

  "Was
that a smart or dumb question?"

  Mickey took a beat. "Dumb. I get it. If she's missing, though, don't the cops automatically look for her?"

  Hunt explained about Missing Persons, as well as where they stood with Parisi in a general way, while Mickey managed to run three reds and hit fifty miles per hour between every other stoplight on the way down to Brannan. He got Hunt home in a little under ten minutes, but before he sped out in a hail of gravel for a dispatch fare at Lulu's, he promised Hunt he'd keep his cell phone on and await instructions.

  "You got your camera on you, right?" Hunt asked him. "Just in case."

  Mickey patted the small leather case on the car seat next to him. "Always, dude, always."

  Back home, Hunt changed out of his business suit into jeans, hiking boots, an old flannel Pendleton. By the time he'd changed, his computer was up, and he sat at his desk, where he Googled the names Ward and Carol Manion. Andrea Parisi had not made it to her final appointment with Carol Manion, true, but if the two women had talked after Hunt had left Parisi, that made Mrs. Manion perhaps the last contact Andrea had had before she disappeared. She might have said something, left some hint.

  He spent nearly a half hour scanning through a selection of the hits—there were over seventy thousand of them, so anything greater than a cursory look was impossible, even after he winnowed his searches down to the narrowest parameters he could. The Manion name hadn't quite made it into the very pinnacle of the San Francisco pantheon inhabited by the Swigs and Gettys and Ellisons, but they seemed to be well on their way to getting there. Hunt already knew about their statewide—rumored soon to be nationwide—chain of discount specialty grocery stores. Likewise, in just the last couple of years, they had acquired huge brand recognition for their fledgling Manion Cellars label by producing some extremely cheap, remarkably high-value Napa cabernets and merlots. Hunt himself had a couple of bottles of their stuff in with the rest of his minimalist collection on the floor next to his refrigerator. The family had been among the biggest bidders at the Napa Valley Wine Auction for the past several years, last spring paying more than one hundred thousand dollars for a jeroboam-size bottle of '96 Screaming Eagle from the birth year of their younger son, Todd. In sports, aside from their involvement with the 49ers and NFL football, they owned a minor-league baseball team in Solano County and were big-time sponsors of the U.S. Winter Olympic Ski Team. The tragedy Hunt had vaguely remembered concerned their older son, Cameron, who'd died in a waterskiing accident just last summer. The twenty-four-year-old golden boy was a competitive racer who'd been training in Lake Berryessa for the Emerald Bay Classic at Lake Tahoe when he'd hit a submerged log at seventy miles per hour.

  Hunt did quite a bit of this kind of computer work and knew exactly what he was looking for, and suddenly there it was. The Manions' private residence was the site of the Kidney Foundation dinner in 2000, and the society write-up of the event included the information that the home on Seaview Drive in the Seacliff neighborhood "commanded a stunning panoramic view from the Golden Gate to the Farallones."

  Hunt punched in Mickey Dade's cell number again, and this time gave him his marching orders: Would he try to get out to Seacliff before it got dark, ask around if he had to, and get the exact address of the Manions' home? With that, Hunt would be able to find their personal telephone number, where he could then reach Mrs. Manion and maybe get a few words with her.

  Finally, in his kitchen, suddenly ravenous, realizing that he hadn't eaten since the morning's bao, Hunt cut a three-inch chunk of dry salami off the roll that hung from a peg inside his refrigerator. It would have to do.

  He had to move.

  * * *

  Hunt didn't go to the Little Shamrock much anymore. Directly across the street from Golden Gate Park on Lincoln and Ninth Avenue, the bar used to be the local hangout for him and Sophie, but he didn't live in the neighborhood anymore, and it really wasn't much of a destination place in its own right. Even if it had been, Hunt wouldn't normally have chosen to frequent it. He'd put away and buried that part of his life.

  Still, tonight, no one had been home at Juhle's when he'd gone by. He cursed himself for not calling first, but he hadn't wanted to endure more scorn and perhaps rejection on the phone. If he simply showed up with another apology to his friend, though, he might get in the door. And from there make some kind of pitch for information. He wasn't, in fact, sure of exactly what he was going to say.

  But the Shamrock was on this side of town, and now something else—the recent though mostly oft-repressed memories of his life back then, the photograph of Sophie at the bar—was drawing him back to revisit the old haunt.

  On a Thursday night at seven thirty, Hunt expected that the place would be crowded wall-to-wall with people, which wouldn't have been saying much since on its best night the watering hole's maximum occupancy probably peaked at a hundred souls. Sophie and Hunt sometimes used to get in here when there were only a couple of customers before the cocktail hour, and it had always struck them as almost impossibly small for the flourishing concern that it obviously was—the establishment had first opened its doors in 1893 and had been in continous operation ever since.

  The old wooden bar ran halfway to the back of the place. Directly in front of the bar, the place was only about eight feet wide. Three tiny tables with four chairs each provided some seating. The facing wall was further cluttered by antique bicycles and other turn-of-the-nineteenth-century memorabilia, including a grandfather clock that had stopped for the last time during the 1906 earthquake. In the back by the dartboards and jukebox, the room widened out a bit, but a couple of seating areas with sagging couches and overstuffed chairs took up a lot more room than tiny cocktail tables would have and gave the spot a homey feel.

  Now out the wide front window the sun cast its last long shadows on Lincoln. A couple in matching black leather sat on stools at the far end of the bar, nursing pints of stout. A lone dart thrower pegged in the back. Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" played quietly over the speakers. The television was dark, and no bartender trod the boards behind the bar.

  Hunt took one of the stools nearest the door, wondering if he should just leave, unsure why he'd stopped by here in the first place. For most of a minute, he sat waiting and had just about made up his mind to go when the dart player ducked under the far end of the bar—"With you in a sec."

  Parking his darts in the gutter, the bartender started toward him, and Hunt said, "Mr. Hardy?"

  The man stopped, cocked his head. "Doctor Hunt," he said, then lowered his voice. "You can drop the Mr. Hardy when I'm here behind the bar. It's Diz. And what brings you all the way out to the frontier on this fine night?"

  "I've got a better one," Hunt said. "What's a top-dog lawyer doing tending bar at a place like this?"

  Dismas Hardy—Amy Wu's boss and Wes Farrell's partner—flashed a craggy grin. "I own some of this place," he said. "A quarter of it, to be precise."

  "And you bartend part-time?"

  "Very part-time. As in almost never. My brother-in-law's usually back here, but he's well, he's doing a bit of rehab, and he asked me to fill in for a few days. I didn't realize you came in here."

  "I don't, really. Not in a few years."

  "Well"—Hardy threw a napkin down onto the bar—"you seem to be here now. So what're you drinking?"

  "I'll have a beer. Tap. Bass."

  "Coming up." Hardy walked to the spigots, drew two brews, then walked back, carrying both of them. He placed one on the napkin in front of Hunt and took a sip from the other, putting it down in the gutter. "So. You working tonight?"

  "Not for money." Then, "You hear about Andrea Parisi?"

  Hardy nodded. "Amy and Wes were telling me earlier. She still missing?"

  "Yep."

  "You're looking for her?"

  "Starting, yeah. I was just with Wes and Amy at your offices, in fact."

  "Doing what?"

  "Putting them to work on it."

  "I thought it went the other way.
The law firms hire the investigators."

  "Usually that's true." He hesitated, wondering if he was shooting himself in the foot. He and Hardy had always gotten along, but in Hunt's experience, the average managing partner usually wasn't overjoyed to hear about billable hours that didn't get billed to some client or another. "But we're all pretty worried." He ran through his quick analysis of Parisi's chances. "We figure we might have a day, maybe two."

  "How long has she been gone?"