The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  And if that were the case, and Jim Pine had a war chest of many millions of dollars, which he did, then why would he use, at best, quasi-reliable parolees when he could simply pay professionals on the outside to do the same job more efficiently and with less possible downside? But if nothing else, Juhle had been adamant about one fact through all of their investigations: The Palmer/Rosalier murders didn't look like they'd been done by a professional.

  That's what had led them to consider the parolee option in the first place. And now that theory, too, appeared to be fatally flawed.

  Which left what?

  Hunt pulled out his cell phone. He'd had it off all day and knew that if the damn thing rang right now as he was holding it, he wouldn't answer unless it was one of his gang. Thank God for caller ID. He had missed five more calls in the course of the day, though, and scanning down the list, he saw that they were all clients. Probably all at the very least frustrated with him; at the worst, furious.

  Well, he couldn't help that. Not now. Not until this was over.

  He'd have to get used to it.

  Hunt closed up the phone, turned it off again, unclamped his jaw, threw the Cooper into gear, and pulled out into the street. Wisps of windswept fog condensed on his windshield and forced him to put his wipers on intermittent. He continued south and eventually pulled up half a block short of the Mission Street BART station, where he found a spot to park. Five minutes later, he was eating what he considered the biggest and best burrito in the city.

  He kept coming back to Juhle's reluctance to accept the coincidence of Rosalier's presence at Palmer's when someone just happened to stop by to shoot him. Staci had always been there in the picture somehow, providing a tenuous link between Palmer and Andrea, but the CCPOA had always until now assumed a much greater prominence. Now, with all other options either discredited or disproved—it hadn't been the wife, it probably hadn't been Arthur Mowery. A professional in the employ of the union would have done a cleaner, more efficient job of the killings. Hunt could still give no credence to Juhle's early idea that Andrea herself committed the double homicide and then either ran or killed herself, and in any event, they'd tested her clothing and the weapons at her house and found no evidence to implicate her.

  Itching to move, but with no place to go, Hunt sipped at his Coke, barely tasted the burrito.

  Turning it all over, viewing it from every angle.

  There were three victims. Start there.

  If Hunt played Juhle's game and ruled out coincidence, these victims must all have been somehow related.

  He sat indoors at a red plastic table. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner, there was only one other customer, a woman in her sixties or early seventies who was working on a bowl of albondigas a couple of tables down. Watching her, Hunt's mind flashed to Carol Manion of all people, whom he'd seen at Palmer's funeral that morning. Suddenly, it occurred to him that her association with the case, tangential at best, had always been because she'd made an appointment with Andrea Parisi. Parisi had been her connection, not Palmer. But now, apparently, if she'd been at his funeral, perhaps she'd known Palmer as well.

  Trying to conjure up some sort of a relationship between Manion and Staci Rosalier to complete the trifecta got him nowhere except to scorn at himself for grasping at such feeble straws. But the exercise didn't seem completely futile as it led him to consider even the most peripheral dancers in this fandango.

  Fairchild? Parisi's ex-lover, but no known connection to either Palmer or Rosalier.

  Tombo? No. Nothing.

  And both men alibied one another Monday night in any event.

  Piersall?

  Hunt stopped chewing, lowered his drink to the table. Piersall knew both Palmer and Parisi. Undoubtedly he'd eaten lunch at MoMo's at least once. Maybe he was a regular there. It was possible then that he'd met Staci Rosalier, which would make him the only person associated with all three victims. Also, Andrea had come to him about the imminent danger to the union represented by Palmer's order, and again with her concerns about the apparently criminal activities of the CCPOA. Beyond that, the Saint Francis Hotel was a short walk from his firm's offices on Montgomery. Might he have called Parisi from there on Wednesday afternoon and asked her to stop by the office ?

  Where what? Where he had Pine's people meet her as she parked in the downstairs garage and then drive her away?

  Hunt closed his eyes, willing his brain to slow down, get a grip. This was what he and Juhle, too, for that matter, had been doing for more than two days now, building theories and scenarios out of possibilities plucked from thin air. He knew he could now spend the next hour checking to see where Piersall had been on Monday night, whether he'd left the office between two and three thirty on Wednesday afternoon. And even if Piersall hadn't hired it done, even if he'd done it himself, even if he couldn't account for any of those times, Hunt would still be back where he was now, with no evidence, no hint of proof.

  But the tantalizing thought resurfaced. It was a fact that Piersall remained the only human being with a demonstrable connection to Palmer and Parisi and quite possibly to Rosalier. With no other alternatives, Hunt asked himself, wasn't this worth pursuing, too? What did he have to lose?

  He finished his Coke, wrapped up the remains of his burrito, and stood up. The old woman gave him a smile, and he patted his stomach and returned the smile, then walked behind her and dropped his garbage in the can by the door.

  This neighborhood was usually the last place the fog hit in the city, and now it was thick and wet, so he knew it was going to be miserable everywhere else. He ran the short distance back to his car and, in the relative warmth inside it, pulled out his phone and called his office.

  * * *

  By the time Hunt got home, he had nothing left.

  On his instructions, Tamara talked to Gary Piersall's private secretary and learned that her boss had been chairing a shareholders' meeting Monday night that had run through dinnertime until nearly eleven o'clock. All of Wednesday afternoon, Piersall had been with Pine and other union representatives and attorneys in the firm's conference room.

  Tamara also told him that Craig had gotten his last two subpoenas served early, then gone to Ocean Avenue and found the place where Staci Rosalier had worked before MoMo's. It was called Royal Thai, and she'd been there for two years. It was her first job after graduating from high school in Pasadena, down in Southern California.

  Juhle put the last nail in the coffin. Hunt had called him just after he left Lamott's to save him a trip to the parole office and to offer his revised opinion now on the likelihood that Arthur Mowery had played any kind of role in either the Palmer/Rosalier murders or in Andrea's abduction. He'd just pulled into his warehouse, the door closing down behind him, when Juhle called him to say that it had been a long and fruitless day and now he was going home for the weekend, but Hunt might want to know that they'd just gotten word that the Cessna aircraft that had been reported missing from Smith Ranch Airport had been located, crashed in rugged terrain at seven thousand feet of elevation in the Tehachapi Mountains outside of Bakersfield. The pilot, not yet positively identified although the plane was, was assumed to be Arthur Mowery, who'd apparently been trying to make it to Mexico.

  "I'm back to thinking she killed herself," Juhle said. "There's nothing else. You want to come by and have some dinner with us? You'd even get to watch me coach a Little League game first. I could call Connie. We wouldn't have to have pizza."

  But Hunt had just eaten and didn't feel like company, certainly didn't feel like arguing with Juhle, who was welcome to think whatever he wanted. But for Hunt's part, he was certain that Andrea didn't kill herself, and that this was true because she hadn't killed Staci or Palmer. He took that as unshakable fact, immutable truth.

  26 /

  Hunt sat at the computer terminal, going through his e-mail. He had spam-blocking software but still the majority of his messages were from organizations or businesses he'd never heard of. There
were a couple more Web site hits from people interested in his services and several others from law firms he'd already worked with. He forwarded all of the inquiries along to Tamara at the office on the chance that she didn't already have them—it was his fail-safe backup system.

  Mickey's e-mail from yesterday gave him the street address of the Manion home, and his young runner had even gone the extra mile and dug up the private and unlisted residence telephone number, which Hunt no longer needed. Cursorily viewing the JPEG photos Mickey had attached, Hunt wasn't surprised to see that the house was huge and elegant. Terra-cotta, it could have been an Italianate castle overlooking the sea on the Amalfi coast. It must have had twenty rooms, but its most striking architectural feature was a bougainvillea-covered square tower. Mickey had expensive lenses and a good eye, and he'd shot the place from three or four different angles, maybe planning to use it as a model and build one just like it when he became a famous chef.

  The last telephoto picture—catching Mrs. Manion and her son coming down the front walkway to what appeared to be a waiting limo—tapped into Hunt's continuing frustration. Hard times for the rich folks, he thought. And then, remembering the waterskiing death of the older son, immediately regretted the reaction. He was being petty.

  This wasn't getting him anywhere. Nothing had gotten him anywhere. Somebody had killed Parisi just about right in front of him and gotten clean away with it. Hitting his keyboard nearly hard enough to break it, he logged off.

  A few minutes later, having changed out of his work clothes into sweats and tennis shoes, he was back out in the warehouse side, standing at his free-throw line. He intended to shoot from there until he made ten in a row or wore himself out, whichever came first. He dribbled a time or two, stopped, dribbled once again, focusing on his target, narrowing it all down.

  Setting himself, instead of taking a shot, he unleashed a straight hard pass—as hard as he could throw—at the backstop. The ball slammed into the top of the reinforced glass. The sound echoed loud and deep, a hollow gunshot, a hammer blow on an empty oil drum. The sound ricocheted off the walls around him.

  He caught the return on the fly.

  He gripped the ball again now with all of his strength. Stood stock-still. Then he threw it again. Same trajectory, same force. Same explosion of sound reverting to silence.

  As he rode the wave, the wait between explosions became shorter. From one twenty-second interval, to once every ten seconds, then every five, then two. Throwing so hard he was grunting with the effort. Finally, shrinking uncounted minutes later, Hunt threw and caught the ball one last time. He was breathing hard, the muscles of his jaw cramped.

  His body settled down. His breathing slowed.

  Now he dribbled once again, set, and lobbed the ball in a high-arcing shot. It swished through the net, and he let it bounce its way off his court and away to a far corner.

  It was 4:22 by the industrial clock over the backboard. He went back to his computer, turned it on again, and waited in a kind of suspension while it booted up. When the screen came on, he got back into his e-mail, brought up Mickey's photos of the Manions' house, and sat in front of the terminal for a very long time, trying to make sense of what his eyes were telling him, resisting the impulse to theorize ahead of facts this time.

  Marginally satisfied, leaving the computer turned on, he stood up and walked as though in a trance inside to his living area. In his bedroom, he crossed to his closet, where he'd hung up his suit. In the jacket pocket, he grabbed his portable tape recorder and rewound it through the interview he'd had with Betsy Sobo that morning, then started playing it back from the beginning.

  When he'd heard it twice, he went back to the bed and stood over it for a long moment. Finally, sitting down, he reached for the telephone.

  Wu must have been working at her desk. She picked up on the first ring. "This is Amy."

  Without preamble, Hunt said, "What time did Carol Manion call Andrea's office to ask if she was coming to her meeting or not? After she'd missed it."

  "Run that by me again, Wyatt, would you?"

  "Carla said she got the message from Carol Manion on the answering machine the next morning. Isn't that right?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Okay, that means she must have called after Carla had gone home. Correct?"

  "Unless Andrea had a direct line, and she called that. Are you getting somewhere, Wyatt? Tamara said you'd gone up to San Quentin "

  "No. That was a dead end. Now I'm trying to avoid another one. Carla will still be at work now, won't she?"

  "Probably."

  "I've got to go, then."

  He hung up, Wu's absolutely logical objection echoing in his mind: "Unless Andrea had a direct line, and she called that." Hunt, as Juhle had earlier in the day, was beginning to wonder if he was still capable of rational thought. If Andrea had a direct line and Carol Manion had left her message on it between, say, three and five o'clock on Wednesday, then that would end this most remote line of inquiry, too.

  But he had no choice. He watched as if from far above as his fingers punched in the Piersall-Morton number.

  Then he was talking with Carla.

  "No," she said as his heart sank yet again. "Mrs. Manion had Andrea's number, and it was on her machine, not mine."

  "Do you know how she got Andrea's personal number?"

  "I don't know. And it wasn't personal. It was just her direct line at the office. But a million ways. It was on her card. Or she met her somewhere and gave it to her. Anything."

  "So you have no way of knowing what time she called?"

  "Well, no, of course I do. It'll still be on the machine. I haven't erased anything this whole week, and it gives the time and date."

  Hunt struggled to keep the urgency out of his voice. "Could I trouble you to run in and check that for me, Carla?"

  She was gone for an eternity. Hunt, leaving his fingerprints on the receiver, could stand it no more and put her on speaker so he could pace.

  Finally, finally: "Wyatt."

  "I'm here."

  "Seven seventeen, Wednesday, June first, except we already knew the date, didn't we?"

  But Hunt had heard what he was hoping to hear. "Seven seventeen?"

  "Right. I listened twice to make sure."

  "And what time was their appointment scheduled for?"

  "Three thirty. She mentioned it in the message."

  "What else did she say? Would you mind calling me back from Andrea's office and playing it back for me?"

  "Now?"

  "Right now. I'll give you my number."

  A minute later, Carla was back with him, and Hunt was listening to Carol Manion's voice on Andrea's answering machine. "Ms. Parisi, hello. This is Carol Manion. I was just wondering if you'd forgotten our three thirty appointment this afternoon or if perhaps I had the day wrong in my calendar. Would you give me a call back, please, and let me know? And maybe we can reschedule? Thank you."

  "That's it," Carla said. "It sounds like a pretty normal call."

  "You're right, it does." Hunt wasn't thinking about what the call sounded like. He was thinking about when it was made. "But listen, Carla. Would you mind not mentioning this discussion to anybody for a little while? Nobody at all."

  "No, of course. If you say—"

  "I do. Please. Now, is there any way you can connect me to Mike Eubanks? I think he's one of the partners. He's Betsy Sobo's group."

  "Yes, he is. Sure. You want to hold a second?"

  "I will. And Carla?"

  "Yes."

  "Between us, right? Nobody else."

  "Nobody else," she said. "Okay, here goes. Hold on."

  * * *

  Mike Eubanks wasn't in.

  Mr. Eubanks often went home early on Fridays. No, his secretary couldn't give Mr. Hunt his cell or home number, but she could try to reach him and have him get back to Mr. Hunt if it was important.

  Hunt told her it was and took the phone with him out to the computer again, where he
sat and stared at Mickey's JPEG picture of Carol Manion and her son Todd walking toward the limo parked in front of their house. He focused on the picture, on the slight anomaly that had at long last registered and struck him.