The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  "That won't come out in an interview, Dev. She's not giving anything up voluntarily after all this."

  "So how does it come out?"

  "I'm working on that," Hunt said. "I find out, I'll let you know."

  * * *

  Still long before noon, and Juhle had his paperwork together as he stood in front of Judge Oscar Thomasino, on magistrate duty as he had been all week and obviously not particularly thrilled to be hassled at his home on a Saturday morning. Now the judge, in his street clothes, sat behind his desk in his office, the novel he'd been reading facedown on the blotter in front of him. "Refresh my memory, inspector," he was saying, "but wasn't it very recently that you and your partner came to me for a similar search warrant?"

  "Yes, Your Honor. A couple of days ago."

  "But it wasn't this same case, was it?"

  "Yes, it was."

  Thomasino's kindly face clouded under his wispy white hair. He removed his Ben Franklin eyeglasses and absentmindedly began to wipe them with a cloth he'd pulled from his desk drawer. "What were the results of that earlier search if I may ask?"

  "We found some .22 caliber weapons in the woman's house, Your Honor, which we ran ballistics tests on. And some clothes, which we tested for GSR."

  "And the results of those tests?"

  "Negative."

  "I see." Thomasino looked through his glasses, blew on them, then continued buffing the lenses. "And I presume you will be looking for positive tests this time on the same types of items—a gun, and clothes, and so on—if I sign this warrant?"

  "Yes, Your Honor."

  Thomasino put his glasses back on, threw Juhle a curveball. "Where is your partner today, inspector?"

  "At his part-time job. He moonlights doing private security."

  "Ah." The information gave the judge pause. "But you've been working this case together up until this time? You and Inspector "

  "Shiu."

  "Yes, Shiu." He came forward a bit, elbows on his desk. "What I'm getting at, Inspector Juhle, is whether—this is just a question, so please don't take offense—whether your appearance here before me, without your partner, might indicate some lack of accord between you and Shiu about whether this warrant is supported by the evidence."

  "No, Your Honor. I don't believe there's any lack of accord. Inspector Shiu feels he needs to augment his salary "

  Thomasino held up a hand. "Many of us do, Inspector, many of us do. And yet I'm fairly certain that most of your fellow homicide inspectors, if they happened to be working the extremely high-profile case of a murdered federal judge, might find it incumbent upon themselves to, say, cut their extraneous work a little short or even cancel it altogether if critical evidence suddenly came to light on a Saturday morning. Don't you think that might be the norm?"

  "I do, Your Honor."

  "Let me take it a little further, if you don't mind. Do you think your own partner, Inspector Shiu, would voluntarily miss the opportunity to take a more active role in what would no doubt be the most important, the most significant arrest in his entire career if he believed that you were close to a breakthrough in that case?"

  "Normally, yes, he might, Your Honor. He would, I'm sure. But in this case "

  "Go on."

  "Well, Inspector Shiu moonlights for the Manions. He's been with them for several years that I know of. I have often thought that it's not impossible he rose up as quickly as he did through the department and made it to homicide because of, shall I say, political influence."

  "Friends of the Manions?"

  "Just a pet theory," Juhle said.

  "Not a nice one."

  "No, Your Honor. But we were being frank."

  "So you think he sees this warrant as some kind of conflict of interest?"

  "I wouldn't go that far. Let's just say, he might feel uncomfortable having to explain to the Manions why he was part of having it served on them."

  "And you think by the same token that he might be choosing to distance himself from an endeavor that he finds ill-conceived and which he also perceives might infuriate influential and powerful people without guaranteeing any success in the case. Inspector, people in your trade might call that a clue."

  Juhle remained silent.

  Thomasino nodded and sighed, an aggrieved expression flitting across his features. "Inspector," he said, "since we're being frank and off the record here, let me ask you something else, just between us. Do you feel that besides its natural importance, that there are people at the Hall and in the city at large who view this case as a kind of a test for you personally?"

  The import of the question rocked Juhle, but he stood his ground. "Yes, Your Honor, I think I do. But I'm trying not to let that affect my handling of it." He pressed on in the face of Thomasino's skeptical look. "In the past few hours, Your Honor," he said, "I've learned irrefutably that Carol Manion's adopted child was the natural son of Staci Rosalier, the woman killed with Judge Palmer. Mrs. Manion has gone to great lengths over the past eight years to keep these facts hidden. To the extent that when I went to talk to her about this case just last week, she neglected to mention anything about it."

  "Did you ask her about it?"

  "No, Your Honor, but "

  "But you think she should have volunteered the information?"

  "To me it's unimaginable that she didn't, Your Honor. Unimaginable. If only to say, 'I know this is an incredible coincidence, but I think you should know about it.' She couldn't have been unaware of it."

  Thomasino considered, fingers templed at his lips. He looked down at the notes he'd scribbled while Juhle had been laying out the whole rather complex scenario. "I may have gotten some details wrong, inspector, and if so correct me. But as I understand it from the way you've outlined it to me here, Mrs. Manion adopted a baby from a Staci Keilly, isn't that so? And if so, why would the name Staci Rosalier prompt her to mention her child to you? If you, in fact, even had that name on Tuesday afternoon when you spoke to her."

  Juhle's face went slack. He felt a rush of blood draining from his head. Not that the basic fact of Todd's parentage was any longer in doubt—or at least, he didn't think so—but Carol Manion didn't necessarily know about Staci on Tuesday when he and Shiu had questioned her about her original appointment with Parisi.

  The only way Carol could have known Staci's true relationship to her son was if, in fact, she had been confronted with it and killed her. But that was putting the cart before the horse. If she hadn't done that, and there was no evidence at all that she had, then all of her actions since—not mentioning Todd to him and Shiu, buzz-cutting Todd's hair because, after all, summer was coming on—had been blameless.

  He also suddenly realized that even he and Shiu had been unable to identify Staci as either a Rosalier or a Keilly until late Tuesday night when they'd met up with Mary Mahoney in the morgue. And what, then, did this mean about the four identifications of Todd Manion this morning?

  The judge was still looking over his templed fingers. "Are you all right, inspector? You don't look well."

  "No. Fine, Your Honor. I've been taking some pain medication. I just got a little dizzy there for a minute."

  Thomasino clearly wasn't so sure that was it, but he let it go and moved on. "So, bottom line, inspector, is that I'm a little bit leery to sign off on what amounts to an open-ended fishing expedition on one of the city's most prominent families. Especially given the fact that this would be the second nearly identical warrant on two different suspects that I'd have approved in about as many days. You can see where it might raise some eyebrows, huh? Where you and I both might be open to accusations of overreaching? Invading privacy without cause? In your case, even launching a desperate vendetta to deflect attention away from a stalled investigation?"

  "Yes, Your Honor, although this is not "

  "Goes without saying, inspector, of course. No explanation necessary." Moving on again, adjusting his glasses, the judge lowered his gaze to the pages Juhle had placed in front of him and scanned
over them. "Now what I might suggest, if I may, is you've got no privacy or probable cause issues with the crime scene. You note here that you've got unidentified fingerprints, hair, and fabric fibers that have already been collected. If you can connect some of this to Mrs. Manion, then okay, at least you've got some plausible reason to search her home to ask her to explain how they got there. If evidence rises to the level of probable cause, I'll entertain another request for a search warrant for her home at that time. Meanwhile"—he looked up, offered his avuncular smile—"you might want to go home and sleep off some of that medication. It's Saturday, inspector. People aren't going to begrudge you a day off."

  * * *

  But Juhle, shaken, wasn't about to take the day off. There were other avenues under the great canopy of due process that he could take with impunity, and now he was going to be forced to explore them. Judge Thomasino may have been right that his request for a search warrant on Carol Manion's house was premature. But as a homicide inspector, Juhle was entitled to interrogate people when and as he saw fit, provided he could get them to talk to him.

  Mrs. Manion may not have known on last Tuesday that Staci Rosalier was Staci Keilly, but the fact remained that it would be instructive, perhaps even conclusive, to see how she reacted when he confronted her with this fundamental truth. Juhle had a gut for witnesses—if they were lying, there were a million tells, and he could spot most of them. Then at least for himself, he would know. He would take the investigation from there and slowly, carefully build a case, over months if necessary, which the DA could prosecute and win against any army of high-priced lawyers.

  If Carol Manion, in her wealth and hubris, had dared to kill a federal judge on his watch, Juhle would bring her down. And to do that—and right now while the questions he would ask her were all so clear!—what he had to do first was have a conversation with her.

  32 /

  In the wide and sun-splashed upstairs corridor of their château in Napa Valley, Carol Manion knocked on the door to her son's bedroom. "Todd."

  No answer.

  She knocked again. "Todd, please. Your mother wants to talk to you."

  "I don't want to talk to her. I'm mad at her."

  "Please don't be. I can't stand it when you're mad at me. Your hair will grow back, I promise."

  "And meanwhile I look like a geek."

  "You don't. You look like what you are, a handsome young man. Would you please open the door?"

  "I don't want to."

  "But I really need to talk to you."

  "What about?"

  "Todd. Not through the door, okay? Please. I'm saying please."

  "I asked you please not to before you made him cut off my hair. Please, please, please." Punctuating the words by kicking at the door. "It wasn't fair."

  "I know it wasn't. I'm sorry. Your father and I just thought it would be a good idea."

  "Why?" In three syllables. "It wasn't hurting anything." But the knob turned, and the door came unlatched, although Todd didn't pull it open.

  Carol gave it a gentle push.

  Todd had crossed to the window seat that overlooked the vineyards, where he'd piled some blankets from his bed and now burrowed into them. Carol walked over and sat so that she felt the contours of his little body up against her. "Thanks for letting me in," she said. "You're a very good boy."

  "Doesn't do me any good, though."

  Carol Manion sighed. "Aren't you getting a little hot under there?"

  The blankets moved as he shook his head no. "What did you need to talk to me about?"

  Now was the time. She sighed again. "There's a picture in the paper this morning of a boy who looks like you. In fact, it might even be a picture of you that someone took from a long distance away a couple of years ago."

  The head, teary-eyed but now curious, too, peeked out. "Why would somebody do that?"

  "I don't know for sure, but in the paper it said that they found the picture in the room of somebody who was killed last week."

  "Killed? You mean like really killed in real life? Not like on TV?"

  "No. Really killed."

  "Cool," Todd said.

  "Well, it isn't really, Todd. It's really kind of scary. But, anyway, they thought if somebody could recognize the picture of the boy who looks like you that they might be able to find the relatives of the young woman who got killed. If you were related to her. Do you understand?"

  "But I'm not."

  "No, you're not. But your father and I don't know who took the picture or why. Or if it even has to do with you. We just want you to be safe."

  "And that's why you cut my hair? Why didn't you tell me that before?"

  "Because we didn't want to scare you."

  "I wouldn't have been scared."

  "No. Probably not, I know. But it scares your mother and father to think that somebody who got killed took a picture of you and kept it, and now the killer might know what you looked like. So we thought it would be smart to change that a little, for a while at least. You see? I really want you to understand."

  "I think I do."

  "Good. Because some people might come by and ask questions. Maybe even policemen. And I don't want you to worry."

  "Why would I worry?"

  "You shouldn't. That's what I'm saying, that there's nothing to worry about. We're just going to tell everybody it's not you. It might look a little like you, but we don't think it's you."

  "In the picture, you mean?"

  "Yes. And that way we just stay out of everything altogether. We don't get involved because we don't need to be. This doesn't have to do with us. I want you to understand that."

  "But what if it is me? Can I see it? I bet I could tell."

  "I bet you could, too. But the picture's not the most important thing, Todd. The most important thing is that we protect you. That you always know that you're safe, no matter what."

  "I do know that, Mom."

  "Because you are my only son, and I'm never going to let anything happen to you. Ever. Okay? Now how about if you come out from under those blankets and give your old mother a big hug?"

  * * *

  Ward Manion had the face of a Marlboro man gone corporate, and it wore a stern expression as he looked across the front seat at his wife. "I don't think I agree that that's a good idea at all. I wish you wouldn't have talked to the boy without discussing it with me first." Though Jay Leno wouldn't take the stage and the auction itself wouldn't formally begin until six o'clock, the Manions had been invited to an exclusive preview of some of the wine lots that would be up for bid, and they were driving the BMW with the top down on the Silverado Trail.

  He glanced over at his wife, whom he thought was still a very handsome woman, albeit unconventionally so, with her strong jaw, deeply set and widely spaced gray eyes. She'd had her face lifted twice for lines and crow's feet, but the cheekbones needed no help and never would. "I agreed with the haircut," Ward said, "because what could it hurt? But I don't understand why you don't want to contact the police yourself. Say that it looks like Todd all right, but you don't know anything more about it, which is true."

  "No. That's not true, Ward. Not from their perspective, and you know it. How can I tell them it does look like Todd and not mention that his birth mother's name was Staci?"

  "It wasn't Staci Rosalier."

  Carol waved that off. "So she changed it. Or maybe the slut had gotten herself married. Two or three times even."

  Ward pursed his lips. To Carol, the girl who'd borne their son's, now their own, child, had always been and would always be "the slut." It bothered him, but he didn't suppose he was going to be able to do anything to change it now.

  "And then what if it is her?" she asked. "Staci. Todd's birth mother."

  He turned to her. "Well? We both agree that it might be. So what?"

  "So what is that it then involves us, Ward. You and me and Todd. You know we weren't involved in killing anybody, but they'll just rake up all that history, look into Todd's adoption
, everything. I know you remember how awful Staci's people were. I don't want to give them any excuse to get back into our lives."

  He seemed vaguely amused at the idea, shaking his head at the absurdity of it.

  "It's not funny, Ward. I told you George Palmer called me at home that last day ."

  "To ask us to a party, right?"

  "Yes, but all they'll know—"

  "Who are they now?"

  "The police. All they'll know is that he made the call. What if they see it as a connection between us and that slut?"