The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  "All inmates must be in their cells at lockdown, inspector. There are no exceptions. If someone's not there, it gets reported immediately. As was the case here." He gave Juhle the hard eye, shook his head dismissively. "Listen. These people, inmates, they don't get out to do a job."

  "We realize that, sir," Hunt said. "But until last weekend, Mowery had been out on parole."

  "Okay. And?"

  Juhle took it up. "And maybe he got violated because he refused to take a job."

  Harron wasn't buying it. "In or out, these people are not contract labor, gentlemen. They're psychopaths. They don't keep agreements and they don't follow the rules. If they get out, they're gone until we find them. They never come back on their own."

  Hunt knew that this was the obvious and correct response. It was also self-serving. But everyone in the room knew what was being left unsaid—that every prison had a bustling black market in tobacco, liquor, and dope; that sexual activity not only between inmates but between guards and inmates was not unknown; that "marriages" of convenience or protection or even love could create bonds as strong as anything on the outside, bonds that could make life in jail preferable to a life outside; that guards could beat inmates to death and never be called to account for it; that omerta—the code of silence—was the rule among the guards at every prison in the state.

  Whatever crimes might be ongoing and abetted by some few venal guards—money laundering, prostitution, drug deals, murders—the danger and boredom of the daily work and the degree of interdependence among these men guaranteed that no other guard would come forth to testify against any of their own. A bad guard was a bad guard, true, but he was a brother first. And you did not rat out your brother. That was the culture. Hunt, Juhle, and Harron all knew that Arthur Mowery's escape could have been arranged and executed with the collusion of some of the prison's guards.

  Juhle said, "Nevertheless, at the moment, we've got no choice but to consider Mr. Mowery a person of interest to this investigation."

  "Do what you want," Harron said. "But let me ask you this: In any of these articles you saw, was San Quentin in any way implicated?"

  "No, sir. Corcoran, Avenal, Pelican Bay, Folsom, a few others, but not San Quentin."

  "I'd like to think nothing like what you're proposing could happen on my watch."

  "Yes, sir."

  "We've already done our preliminary investigation, of course." He crossed to his desk, picked up a folder. His shoulders settled. He ran his whole hand across the top of his head. "I can't give you all of this, but what kind of details are you looking for?"

  "You tell us," Juhle said.

  Harron in his chair now held the folder open in front of him. He adjusted his glasses, but before looking down, his eyes came up, and he stared off into space. "Mowery's two previous parole violations are interesting in this context, aren't they?" Then he went back to the folder, flipped some pages, passed a computerized printout across the desk. Juhle and Hunt were up now, by the warden's desk.

  "Written up three times for assault," Harron said. "Active AB"—the Aryan Brotherhood—"thought to be an enforcer. Connected to one fatal prison stabbing. No willing witnesses, so no prosecution. Five thousand dollars on his books. Probably bribery or extortion or both."

  "So he's got money," Hunt said, "which means a connection on the outside."

  Juhle went back to the sheet. "He apparently went straight for eight years."

  "Either that," Hunt said, "or his parole officer had a reason to stop violating him."

  Juhle looked at the warden. "You don't have Mowery's lawyer in there, do you?"

  Harron thumbed through some pages, found a business card clipped to one of them. "As of seven months ago, Jared E. Wilkins. The third, no less." He handed the card over.

  Juhle took it, gave it a glance, held it up for Hunt. "Sacramento," he said.

  "Does that mean something?" Harron asked.

  "How does a San Francisco thug get hooked up with a Sacramento lawyer?" Hunt said. He took out his cell phone and, on a hunch, punched up the number on the card. "Mr. Wilkins, please," he said. "Sure, Jim Pine . Yeah, I know, I'm fighting a cold." Hunt closed the phone back up and handed it to Juhle. "Mowery's lawyer knows Pine."

  Harron's mouth was stuck on open. Finally he got it to move. "If this goes anywhere, inspector," he said, "I'd appreciate a heads-up, just between us."

  "If it goes anywhere, warden, the whole world's going to know about it. Who's Mowery's parole officer, who's busted him twice?"

  For an answer, Harron found the page he wanted and under his breath said, "Son of a bitch." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Phil Lamott."

  "He means something to you," Juhle said.

  The warden nodded. "I recognize the name. He started his career here, early nineties. As a guard."

  25 /

  They just got back to the car when Juhle's phone went off, and he picked it off his belt on the first beep, checked the number coming in, said, "Talk to me, Shiu. Make me happy."

  But the call didn't produce that effect. After listening for less than a minute, shaking his head back and forth the whole time, he said, "I'm just leaving San Quentin with Wyatt Hunt. No, not the prison, Shiu. San Quentin, the burger joint. You don't know it? Out by the Cliff House. Awesome fries. Anyway, we might have something else maybe. But he can drop me back at the Hall. I'll tell you about it then."

  "Let me guess," Hunt said when Juhle closed the phone. "The ballistics didn't match."

  "I hate that guy," Juhle said.

  * * *

  On the rest of the drive back down to the city, Juhle made a couple more phone calls to verify that neither Andrea nor Arthur Mowery had turned up. No, to both.

  After another lengthy phone call, during which Juhle asked a few questions but was mostly silent, he rang off. "That was Jeff Elliot. 'CityTalk'?" This was a popular Chronicle column that often dealt with the law and its practitioners.

  "I know him well. What did he know?"

  "Basically, everything. But I only asked him—you heard me—if he knew what it took to bring a guy in on parole violation. Give up? His parole officer says he's violated, period. Smoked a joint. Hung out with the wrong person. No warrant, no proof required. Is there any kind of hearing on this? Any moment with a judge or jury or lawyer?"

  "I'm guessing no."

  "You'd be right. So your violated parolee finally gets all the way back to prison and what happens?"

  "They have a big welcome-back party?"

  "Right. Balloons and everything. But after that, within thirty-five days he gets a hearing before a violation committee composed entirely of correctional officers, and guess what percentage of the time they uphold the violation?"

  "A hundred and ten?"

  "Close. Ninety-nine and a half. So then our guy gets up to a year on the violation. And this can be continued up to three years even if you're originally in on a one-year sentence. Can you appeal? Sure. It takes eight months and succeeds point oh-five percent of the time. One in two hundred."

  "Was Elliot going to write a book on this or something?" Hunt asked.

  "I hit him on a good day. He talked my ear off. I told you he knew everything. You want any more facts?"

  "Does it have to be on the union? I'd like to know the depth of Lake Tahoe."

  "Too deep to dive to the bottom. That's all you need to know. Here's your last real question, though. How many inmates in California prisons are there for violating parole? I'm talking percentages."

  "Nineteen?"

  "Fifty."

  "That would be half."

  "Correct."

  "So more than nineteen percent?"

  "Way more, Wyatt. Way more."

  * * *

  Juhle had to wait for Shiu, but Hunt had his own wheels and his own agenda, and he wasn't going to wait for anybody anymore, not when he felt they were getting this close. He finally dropped Juhle off at the Hall of Justice on Bryant, went around the corner and up to Mission an
d, doing his best imitation of Mickey Dade's driving techniques, turned left. The parole office for units 1–3 was six blocks down, and if Phil Lamott wasn't at that one, number 4 wasn't much farther away. It had gotten to midafternoon, between two thirty and three, now almost exactly forty-eight hours since he'd left Andrea at her house. Having worked within the city's bureaucracy for a good portion of his life, Hunt knew that there was a better than reasonable chance that parole officers, like his former CPS coworkers, would be at the office on Friday afternoons, getting their paperwork filled out before the weekend.

  Close-up, Hunt put Lamott at about his own age. He wore his dirty-blond hair a bit long by police standards. He'd had bad acne at one time, and now tried to cover the scars, mostly unsuccessfully, with a short yet scraggly beard and wispy mustache. He was hunched over a dinosaur of a manual typewriter to the side of his cluttered desk, pecking away, filling in some official-looking form.

  "Officer Lamott?"

  His fingers stopped. His head turned. Hunt immediately recognized the expression from his days at CPS—don't let this be more work with only a couple of hours to go until the weekend. "Yeah. How can I help you?" No turn to face his visitor, no offered hand.

  Hunt introduced himself, flashed his ID. The explanation of his involvement that Juhle had given to Warden Harron had been a good one for a sense of legitimacy, and he used it again. "I'm working with a law firm in town, Piersall-Morton, trying to locate one of their attorneys who's gone missing."

  "Andrea Parisi," Lamott said. The story still big news.

  "Right."

  "What's she got to do with me?"

  "Nothing. But she may have something to do with Arthur Mowery."

  This got his attention. He abandoned his typewriter and swung around. "What do you mean?"

  Hunt realized that in order to make any sense of the scenario they were pursuing, he'd have to give Lamott the same kind of in-depth explanation that he'd provided for Harron. This he wasn't prepared to do for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that any conspiracy theory involving CCPOA members more or less contemplated the involvement if not of Lamott himself, then of someone in an analogous position.

  So he kept it simple, omitting any mention of the Palmer/Rosalier murders. "I mean the police are now considering him a person of interest in her disappearance."

  "Arthur? Did he know her somehow?"

  "I was hoping to get that from you. I'm assuming you're the one that violated him the two times he's gotten out."

  "Yeah, that was me. Both times."

  "What did he do?"

  "The usual. He was loaded. He's a crackhead, but you probably knew that. What would he have you're saying you think he abducted Parisi or something?"

  "The police must think so. I got it from them."

  "They're talking to private investigators nowadays?"

  "I'm trying to locate her. They're trying to find him. We're cooperating."

  "They give any reason? They have any evidence?"

  "Not to me and, no, not that I know of."

  Lamott pulled at one side of his mustache, then the other. He squeezed the meat of his lower lip. "So what's their interest based on? Is there a ransom note? Did he call from somewhere?"

  Hunt feigned ignorance. He was asking his own questions. "I noticed he went about eight years between arrests?"

  "He got married and straightened out for a while. He moved up to El Dorado Hills, someplace like that, evidently lived like a citizen until his wife left him a couple of years ago."

  "Isn't that a little odd? A guy with his record? Especially with the violence. You'd expect a DV"—domestic violence—"complaint, wouldn't you? Something."

  "Maybe not. People get better." Lamott shrugged. "It happens. Get off the dope, you're okay. But you're right, either way, Arthur's a violent guy."

  "He's got an attempted murder by firearm on his sheet. Last time you picked him up—Saturday, wasn't it?—he had a gun on him, too. I understand he got into some shit in prison. You believe he really was straight for eight years?"

  "Yeah, I do. More or less."

  "You see him during that time?"

  "A couple of times. Like I told you, he moved up by Sacramento, so he reported up there."

  "And never got violated?"

  "Apparently not."

  "Until he got down here, and you hauled him in?"

  "Right."

  "After eight years?"

  "What's your point?"

  Hunt thought the point was obvious enough—Mowery had protection of some kind in Sacramento and got thrown to the wolves down here when he had stopped cooperating—but he didn't want to antagonize Lamott so that he wouldn't talk to him anymore. "I just find it curious," he said. Then he tacked. "So what'd he do? For work?"

  "Mechanic. Mostly private planes."

  "That's a little unusual, isn't it?"

  "I don't know. He's got a pilot's license and knows airplanes pretty well. He's a pretty sharp guy, actually, unless he's strung out. But I go call on him Saturday and he's loaded, I've got no choice. I've got to violate him."

  "He's got a pilot's license?" Hunt with visions of Mowery dropping Andrea miles out over the ocean.

  "Suspended now. And of course no plane. Although that's a question."

  "What is?"

  Suddenly suspicion showed in the sallow face. "The cops didn't tell you this? They should know."

  "I'm looking for her," Hunt repeated. "They're looking for him."

  Apparently, this was good enough. "A small plane, a Cessna I think, got stolen out of Smith Ranch Airport on Monday night. It still hasn't turned up."

  "Smith Ranch Airport? I don't know it."

  "It's a private place. Small planes. Lots of tie-downs, no security to speak of. It's near San Rafael, and as a flier himself, Arthur definitely would have known about it. You want to know the truth, the whole airplane connection is where CDC's been concentrating their efforts to find him."

  "And where is it? Smith Ranch?"

  "I don't know exactly—maybe three, three and a half miles from San Quentin." Suddenly another thought struck Lamott with an almost visible force. "Maybe I don't remember, but Parisi hasn't been gone since Monday, has she? It's been that long?"

  "No. Wednesday afternoon."

  "Hmm. Well, not saying that Arthur definitely hotwired and stole the plane, but if he did, and he certainly could have, he was long gone by then."

  * * *

  Down the street from the parole office, Hunt sat out in his car, trying to figure out what he had missed. And of course, as Lamott had said, it was still possible that Mowery had not stolen the Cessna at all. Or, for all Hunt knew, since Mowery was a flight mechanic, he might even have absconded with the plane out of Smith Ranch Airport, flown under everyone's radar to any one of the small private airports near the city, and committed all sorts of mayhem in San Francisco. But suddenly what had seemed almost too obvious only an hour before had become implausible if not impossible.

  Lamott's reactions to Hunt's questions, or more precisely the lack of them, were instructive as well. Mention of one of his parolees had not sparked a trace of defensiveness, as it certainly would have if Lamott were involved in a conspiracy to break Mowery out of San Quentin so that he could assassinate a federal judge. Lamott appeared to be exactly what he was—a functionary in a civil service job that made few demands on his time or personal life. It was hard for Hunt to imagine the low-affect Lamott as any kind of player in the high drama and secrecy of the union's political arm. To this particular parole officer, Arthur Mowery was clearly just another one of the hundreds of mostly pathetic lowlifes he processed through the system again and again and again. Mowery may have had a controller among the parole officers in the Sacramento region, directing him in the union's mayhem, but Hunt couldn't put Lamott in the role.

  Juhle had told him that half of California's prison population were parole offenders, but more than that, he remembered hearing that something like seventy
percent of everybody out on parole in California got violated back in, which was twice the national average. Parole officers like Lamott weren't in the business of helping prisoners break out of jail, that was for sure. Not for any reason. The entire thrust of the CCPOA bureaucracy was to keep 'em in, keep the population up so there'd be more jails and more guards.

  But all this left Hunt with a great hollowness. There had been a symmetry and even some elegance to the idea of the union as the solution to Andrea's disappearance. She and Palmer had both been involved with it on many levels. The judge's latest order was a great and immediate threat to the union's very survival. Andrea's clandestine research on the labor organization's apparent crimes furthering its political agenda may have been unearthed and exposed her to reprisal. But all of it, taken together, depended upon the belief that the union was engaged not just in systematic harassment but in actual premeditated contract murder.