The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  "Oh, yeah, that's him. He's in here all the time."

  Chiurco flashed his girlfriend a smug little grin, and the waitress said, "I still can't believe we traded him, you know. That was so dumb."

  "I don't know," Chiurco said. "I've got to believe it's better than the Giants trading for all these guys who are at the end of their careers, instead of trading them away."

  "Yeah, but Jerry. It's like if they would have traded away Montana."

  "I never would have traded either one," Tamara said. "And now I'd let Jerry play until he didn't want to anymore, then make him a coach and keep him around forever."

  "Then rename the park after him." Chiurco, having fun, going with the moment, letting the ice break naturally.

  "I like it." Mahoney nodded. "Rice Park? Rice Field?"

  "How about The Rice Field?" Tamara asked. "The Rice Field."

  "Perfect," Mahoney said. "We'll tell him when he comes back."

  "Except he's not a Niner anymore," Chiurco said.

  Mahoney made a sad face. "Oh, yeah. That." With hardly a pause, she switched gears. "So you guys said you're with a private investigator, not the police?"

  "Right," Tamara said. "The Hunt Club." She had a card with her name on it and presented it to her. "Right now we're hunting for Andrea Parisi."

  Mahoney wore her expressions on her sleeve; now she looked a question. "The trial person? I saw that on TV, but I didn't really she's really missing?"

  "Why wouldn't you believe it?" Chiurco put in.

  A shrug. "No real reason. I mean, she just missed one show, right? And they only had it on one channel. I thought it was probably some ratings thing."

  "No," Tamara said. "She's really missing. Since yesterday afternoon."

  "And she's got something to do with Staci?"

  Tamara kept it low-key. "We don't know. That's what we're trying to find out."

  "Evidently," Chiurco said, "Staci had one of Andrea's business cards in her wallet."

  "That's it? That's the connection?" Reaching down into her apron, she pulled out a thick deck of business cards and placed it on the table. "That's tonight," she said. "That's every night." She took Tamara's card and placed it on the top of the stack. "Now you're in it." She turned to Chiurco. "You got one, you can buy in, too. I hope that's not all you have."

  Tamara, cool and elegant, took a sip of her drink. "Not exactly."

  Chiurco leaned in, elbows on the high table. "So we're trying to figure out if there was some connection between all three of them. If Staci knew Andrea, for example."

  "She never said anything about that to me." Mahoney felt on firm ground here. "And she would have. Definitely, I think. She was a big Trial TV fan."

  "So you two were close?" Chiurco asked.

  Just like that, the liquid eyes threatened to overflow and she dabbed underneath them.

  They waited.

  Mahoney sighed, sighed again, then shrugged. "I was nice to her when she first came on here, and maybe that hadn't been so normal for her in her life before. That's the impression I got anyway."

  "So you didn't know her before she started working here?" Tamara asked.

  "No."

  "Do you know if she grew up here in the city?"

  "I don't think so. Just the last couple of years. Before that, I don't know."

  "Because," Tamara continued, "no one has turned up from her family. The police haven't been able to get any kind of background on her yet."

  The waitress frowned. "Nothing?"

  "Not a thing."

  "That's just so wrong." She brightened for a second. "But wait. I know she has had, I mean, a younger brother. She had his picture in her room."

  "Did you ever meet him?"

  "No."

  "How about his name?" Tamara was carrying on the interrogation while Chiurco stood, arms crossed, letting her go with it.

  "I don't know what it is," Mahoney said. "She just called him her brother." She looked over at the bar; she'd been on break about long enough and this brother stuff wasn't going to help Staci or find Andrea. "We never really talked about him. I just saw the picture and asked who he was and she said, 'Oh, that's my brother.' We didn't really go into it. He was just her brother."

  "This couldn't have been her first waitress job," Chiurco said, taking a different slant, trying to get Mary back into it.

  "No. She worked, I think, at a Thai place out on Ocean. She was going to school at City College and lived out on that side of town before she got the place here."

  "What's here?" Tamara asked.

  Mahoney pointed behind them out the window. "Right there. Those condos just across the street. The judge got it for her."

  "We're almost done, Mary," Chiurco said. "Can you try to remember? Did Staci ever mention Andrea Parisi to you at all, in any context?"

  Her collagen-enhanced lips tightened with a few seconds of concentration. "I'm sorry, but I don't really remember anything like that."

  "Okay, last one," Tamara said. "Is there anything you remember about Staci that you think might help us? Any reason somebody might have wanted to kill her?"

  "I just can't believe anybody wanted to kill her. I think it must have been all about the judge, and she just happened to be there."

  "But to your knowledge," Chiurco added, "had she ever gone there before, to his house?"

  "No. I'm pretty sure of that, actually. She would have mentioned it."

  Tamara seemed to be asking it as much of herself as of Mahoney. "So why then?"

  "I don't know." Mahoney offered a broken smile. "Why any of it, you know?"

  21 /

  Hunt and Piersall rode down to the main lobby together in silence, then took the walk around to the basement elevator, got in, and Hunt pressed the button marked "4," where he thought he remembered parking. Still without a word, Piersall reached around him and hit "5."

  When the door opened, Hunt stepped out and quickly looked both ways. The only car on that level was a black Miata. He didn't see his own distinctive car and stepped back inside the elevator. At "5," they both got out. At this time of night, theirs were the only two cars on that level. Piersall had put on his suit coat again and carried a large briefcase. He beeped open the trunk of his Lexus, dropped the briefcase inside, and went around to his driver's door. There, he paused, seemed to consider saying something, but instead merely gave Hunt a minimal nod, opened the door, and got in.

  Hunt sat in his own front seat, trying to make some decision about what to do next. Next to him, he was vaguely aware of Piersall's car backing out of its spot, then driving off.

  While all of Piersall's information about the CCPOA might be relevant to Judge Palmer's murder, Hunt couldn't quite get into focus how it could help him find Andrea. Taking the newspaper clipping from his shirt pocket, he reread it for the fourth or fifth time, wondering what it meant.

  If anything.

  If, as Piersall seemed to believe, this escaped convict Mowery had anything to do with Palmer's murder, and further if Mowery had come to set his sights on Andrea, then Hunt had little doubt that she would, in fact, be dead by now.

  But that was a lot of ifs.

  None of them contemplated the reality that Hunt had chosen to believe and act on—that somehow she was still alive. Though as each hour passed, that position became more difficult to sustain. He knew that he would have to call Juhle first thing in the morning and convey Piersall's information, but none of that seemed capable of helping him in his primary objective. Which even now he was beginning to recognize as more of an irrational hope than a realistic possibility.

  But until she was found, while she might still be alive, he couldn't abandon the pursuit.

  Alone on this parking level, down in the bowels of the building, Hunt suddenly understood with a jolt something that had been nagging at him. Hitting the ignition and throwing the car into reverse, he peeled out with a screech of rubber, got to the end of his row, and turned up, following the exit sign.

  Stopp
ing at the entrance to level four, he drove down to the elevator bank and pulled into the space next to the Miata he'd briefly glimpsed on the elevator ride down when the doors had opened and he'd stepped out for a moment to look for his own car.

  Getting out of his Cooper, he went to the Miata driver's window and peered in. There was nothing to identify the owner—no purse, no article of clothing, no junk. Just black leather seats. He went around to the back and checked the license plate, trying to remember if he'd even glanced at Andrea's plates when the car had been in her garage. But for the life of him, he couldn't dredge up anything he recognized.

  But his adrenaline was up, and though it was irrational, he knew. This was her car.

  The scenario flickered in his mind, frames in a silent movie. She'd come to the office on Wednesday after all, not driven directly to the Manions. Her assailant therefore had very possibly not killed her on sight—certainly not by gunshot, anyway, not in the middle of an afternoon in what would have at that time been a crowded parking structure. But had taken her somewhere, where conceivably she might still be alive.

  Hunt had to take the elevator back up to the lobby again and get outside before he could get reception on his cell phone. Standing on the dark and empty sidewalk, he listened to the rings on the other end of the line. "Come on, come on, come on. Pick up. Connie! I know, I'm sorry, but it's important. I need to talk to Dev."

  * * *

  Juhle wasn't the happiest Hunt had ever heard him with the idea of running the license plate at this ungodly hour to find out whom the car belonged to, but by the time he called Hunt back, having gotten somebody on the night shift at Central Station to do the two-minute computer check, he sounded wide awake. It was Andrea's car all right.

  While he waited for the first black and white to arrive, Hunt used the time to check in with his troops.

  Farrell, smart man, was off the clock, his phones either turned off or unplugged, and Hunt left a message, calling a meeting for the morning on Sutter Street at eight o'clock sharp.

  Amy and Jason were still awake and watching television, having drawn blanks from Carla Shapiro. Amy mentioned the tenuous, tantalizing near meeting with Betsy Sobo, perhaps on family-law/union-benefits issues, that Parisi had scheduled and then bailed on for Monday afternoon. Brandt and Wu also reported that by now all the local television channels had picked up the story of Andrea's disappearance and were giving it a lot of prominence—they were watching News 4 Late Edition now, and the story was heading up the hour. Amy had also called Parisi's mother, who had already been contacted by several media types. She was now distraught and had no idea where her daughter was or what could have happened to her.

  Tamara and Chiurco didn't have much to offer, either, on any possible connection between Staci Rosalier and Andrea Parisi. Hunt only now remembered that he hadn't yet caught up with Mickey Dade, who didn't seem to be answering his cell phone either.

  Hunt left a message, asking Mickey to check out Thai restaurants on Ocean Avenue that might have once had a waitress named Staci Rosalier. He knew that if this trail grew hot at all, Juhle would find a way to get some manpower on that aspect of it, and Mickey's work would be largely redundant.

  But Hunt couldn't think of any other assignment for the cabbie before the first patrol car finally arrived. It really hadn't been that long since he'd woken up Juhle—maybe twenty minutes. He met the police vehicle at the garage entrance and led the way down. The uniformed officers had him move his own car while they laid out the yellow tape around the Miata. Treating the car as a potential crime scene, which perhaps it was.

  Juhle pulled up—no Shiu, no comment—eight or ten minutes later. A CSI unit was on the way to do a once-over before they towed Andrea's convertible downtown. If there was anything on or in the car, Juhle was confident that they'd find it. At this time of the morning, they didn't need crowd control, so Juhle dismissed the uniformed officers. When they'd driven off, he boosted himself onto the hood of the family car he'd driven down and said, "So what do you make of this?"

  Hunt ran down his scenario.

  "You're saying somebody snatched her out of here?"

  "That's my guess. They've got video cameras coming out of the elevators in the lobby, so we can find out for sure as soon as we can get to them. But there's no way she ever made it up to her office. Someone would have seen her."

  "How about if she just parked, then walked back up through the garage here and out onto the street? Then away."

  "Remotely possible, I suppose," Hunt said. "But why would she do that?"

  "Maybe after she left her house, she heard something or talked to somebody and decided she had to disappear."

  "So she wants to disappear and immediately dumps her best way to get out of town? Plus, she doesn't hit the ATM and she hasn't used any of her credit cards." Hunt shook his head. "There's only two ways to go, Dev. Either somebody picked her up or she was snatched."

  "Not saying I don't agree with you, but we keep coming back to why. If somebody wanted to kill her, they'd have killed her. If it was a kidnap, where's the ransom demand? You're saying somebody just took her because they wanted to look at her or something? The most logical thing, admit it, is that she's on the run or killed herself. And if you've got a better reason for her to do that than because she killed Palmer and Staci, I'd like to hear what it is."

  Hunt hesitated, but he'd brought Juhle along with him this far already. He had to tell him about Piersall and the CCPOA. Screw the attorney-client privilege. But before he could really begin, he got interrupted by the arrival of the crime-scene unit. When the techs went to work, Hunt started again, and by the time he'd finished, they'd dusted the outside of the car for fingerprints and now were setting up to tow it to the PD garage to do a thorough search of the interior, luminol it for blood, and check it for gunshot residue.

  Juhle was pacing, all the prison guards' union facts making an impression. "You're telling me that Palmer was already drafting this order to federalize the whole prison system on Monday? I talked to his secretary, and she never mentioned anything about it."

  "Did you ask her?"

  "I asked her if she knew of anybody who might have had a reason to kill the judge."

  "Maybe she didn't think of the order in those terms. Maybe she thought it was another piece of paper like the thousand others she'd typed up before. Slow grind of the court."

  "So how did you find out about it?"

  "What's more important than that is whether it's true. And I'm sure you'll check it out, but this will save you some time: It is."

  "And Jim Pine got wind of it and sent somebody, some parolee, to make sure the order didn't get signed? That's the theory?"

  Hunt nodded.

  "What about the girl? Staci. That was just bad luck, her being there at precisely that time? I have some troubles with that."

  "Me, too. But I can also think of ten ways to explain it."

  "But all of them, I bet, some variation on the theme of luck or coincidence." Dissatisfied, Juhle pushed absently at the source of the pain in his shoulder. "But let's leave that for a minute and go back to Parisi. When the judge got killed, say, she had a feeling Pine must have been behind it. So what? You're saying she went to Pine and asked him about it? Only if she was an idiot, which she wasn't."

  "How about if she mentions it to Piersall, just to float the idea, and he lets enough of it slip to tip off Pine?"

  "We did this earlier," Juhle said, "when I said you were reaching. You still are."

  "I don't think it's any kind of a reach to see a connection between the union and Parisi, Dev. She worked for it. The judge was all over it. The timing is perfect. It all fits."

  "Staci Rosalier doesn't fit."

  "Again, bad luck. Or—and I know you hate this—coincidence."

  "No. I've got a better one. How about this?" Juhle held up a finger. "One, Rosalier had Parisi's card." Juhle pointed at the Miata, held up a second finger. "Two, a car that looked a lot like this one right he
re was in the street in front of the judge's house when he got shot. Three, regardless of what you may think, there wasn't anything professional about the job on the judge and Staci. We've got one missed shot and no coups to the head. Not a pro. Four, by your own admission, Parisi might be a jealous woman with at least some propensity to violence—the slap?—and a gun collection. Further, she has just maybe that day come to believe, contrary to what she's been thinking for the past six months, that she isn't going to be able to move three thousand miles away from the man she still loves and who she's forced to see all the time because of business. Finally, and again, just that day, Monday, she goes to lunch and sees the judge and puts it together that the sweet young thing who's waiting on him is the girl he's fucking instead of her! You think that doesn't get her just a little upset?" Back to pacing now, Juhle had gotten himself wound up. "Hell, Wyatt, the more I think about it, the more I like her for these killings. And then she blows Dodge."