The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

"Well, look, Natasha, I got a problem. Carol Manion called here for something like sixty people coming by the house up there after the auction, and we've got her very expensive and rather particular order all together, but I need to talk to the kitchen to see what we've got to have completely cooked here and what you guys can handle up there. But this number here we're talking on; this is the number Carol gave us."

  "I believe it. She is so distracted lately."

  "Who isn't? It's nuts week here, too. Anyway, if we're not there on time and with everything cooked just so, the fallout from the explosion is going to render our lovely valley uninhabitable for the next two hundred years, and then where will you and I be? So could you please, just this once, give out the home number? I promise I'll burn it up, and then swallow the ashes twice as soon as I'm done with it."

  Natasha gave a little chuckle. "Once ought to be enough, Andy. Hold on a sec. Okay, you ready?" She gave it to him.

  * * *

  "That was too easy," Mickey said. "It can't be that easy."

  "Sometimes it is." Hunt wasn't in a joking mood. He had the Manions' phone number, and that's what he'd needed, and now he had his cell phone back at his ear, on with Juhle.

  "What is this place?" Devin asked him. "Disneyland? The Epcot Center? I didn't know they made this many cars all told in history, and they're all here right now. I haven't moved a mile in fifteen minutes."

  "Where are you now?"

  "In traffic."

  "I guessed that. You've got to get out of it. I just got word from Amy and Jason. Carol Manion all but admitted she made the call from the Saint Francis."

  "What's that mean? All but admitted."

  "Didn't deny. Amy mentioned it specifically."

  "If that's true," Juhle said, "it may be our first real break."

  "It might be," Hunt admitted. "But you've got to hustle. Carol and Ward are on their way home."

  "They'll be in this parking lot, too."

  "Yeah, but coming from the other direction, and maybe a lot faster. Where are you now?"

  "On some freeway somewhere. Twenty-nine."

  "Are you through the town of Napa?"

  "I think so."

  "Okay. You're going to make it. Take your next right."

  "Any right? You don't even know where I am."

  "You're north of Napa, I don't care. Take your first right, and every chance you get keep going right, toward those hills you see out your passenger window. Got it? The next big road you'll hit is the Silverado Trail, where you'll hang a left. I'm on it now, and the traffic's moving both directions. You'll see Quintessa Vineyards on your left—it's huge, you can't miss it, slow down. Manion Cellars is next on your left, but Mick's got his green Camaro parked on the right side of the road a few hundred feet up, and that's where you'll find us. You shouldn't be another ten, fifteen minutes, which ought to do it."

  "Do what?"

  "Get you here before they get home."

  "And why is that important?"

  "Maybe it isn't. But since you wanted to talk to her anyway, humor me, all right? I'm delivering her to you. Maybe badly shaken up and maybe ready to break."

  "In spite of your promise that you weren't going to talk to her."

  "I never did."

  "But you got her shaken up. How did that happen?"

  "Magic. I'll tell you the secret later, but for now, your job is to drive, okay? I know you're a cop and it flies in the face of your every belief, but speed if you have to."

  "Fat chance," Juhle said.

  * * *

  Juhle drove up the winding driveway, past the "Open to the Public" tasting room and its parking area and continued uphill until he stopped and pushed the button on the box by the wrought-iron gate that straddled the private road. Identifying himself as a police inspector with the San Francisco homicide detail, he waited another five minutes or so until a young man in a dark suit appeared, let himself out of the compound area through another gate in the fence, and came to Juhle's driver's window to verify the credentials.

  "But I'm afraid you may have driven up here for nothing. They're not home right now."

  "That's all right. I'll wait if you don't mind."

  "It might be a while. They're down at the auction."

  "What auction?"

  "Auction Napa Valley."

  "Sorry. I don't know it."

  The guy didn't know if he believed Juhle, but he said, "Well, it's a big event up here, and it's been known to go late, with parties afterward."

  "Are you telling me you're not letting me come up?"

  Long pause. "Sir, you can come up the drive, but I can't let you into the house without explicit instructions from the Manions."

  Flashing a smile, Juhle nodded. "Thanks, then. I'll take my chances."

  The security guard punched a code into the box, the gate opened, and Juhle drove through. The road climbed steeply for fifty feet and then forked immediately as it leveled slightly, one lane going off to the right, winding through vines, before it disappeared around the side of the promontory. Juhle waited at the fork until the man who'd let him through got to the car. "You want a lift to the top?"

  "Sure, thanks. It's farther than it looks from the road."

  "Left or right."

  "Left."

  They drove in silence over another rise, dipped to the right in front of the new caves with their impressively carved heavy oaken doors, climbed a last time and leveled off on a large, gravel-strewn circular parking area with a working fountain in the center and bounded by olive trees in front of the ornate structure of the château itself. Juhle passed two parked dark SUVs and an old Honda Civic and continued around the circumference until he caught up with some shade and stopped within it, telling his passenger that he'd wait in the car.

  "It really could be some time."

  "If I get stir-crazy, I'll walk around. How's that?"

  "Your call, sir, but please don't leave this area in the front of the house." He walked around the car and paused by Juhle's window. "Excuse me, but it just occurred to me. You're with homicide? Is this bad news? I mean, for the family? I do have a number to reach them, but only in an absolute emergency."

  "Just routine." Juhle offered nothing else.

  After a second or two, the young man shrugged and walked away.

  Juhle sat in the car with the window down for a short while, enjoying the warmth and the sunshine. From his vantage point up here, he could see for miles in both directions up and down the valley. The green of the budding vines against the reddish soil, the jagged peaks studded with granite on the eastern slope, the cerulean cloudless sky with a lone turkey vulture circling in a thermal. It was a stunning panorama.

  Closer in, he noticed that while the traffic wasn't exactly thin on the Silverado Trail below him, it was moving. If Hunt was correct in his assumptions—and he had been so far—Carol and Ward wouldn't be long.

  It eventually got too hot in his seat, so he opened the door, slid out, and walked to the front edge of the parking area where the promontory fell off steeply below him. Here, with the foreground up close, the view wasn't as magical. With something of an effort given the grandeur of the rest of the setting, he reminded himself that vineyards, after all, were basically just farms that grew grapes as their crop.

  And, indeed, in a little hollow to the side of the new caves, Juhle caught the jarring note of a truly dilapidated ancient redwood barn surrounded by what seemed to be an inordinate amount of rusting old farm tools, as well as some of the newer heavy machinery that had obviously been used in the recent excavations, gradings, and plantings—a couple of tractors, backhoes and rotary hoes, huge bits and drill parts, shovels and spades, mattocks and rakes. Some were glinting in the sun; most had fallen into hopeless, permanent disrepair. The land itself around the cave entrances was still scratched and stripped of its soil, the bare limestone shining like animal bones in the bright sunshine.

  But he'd come here for a specific purpose, and much to his satisfaction,
Juhle saw that he wasn't going to have the time to take any more inventory of the château and surrounding grounds up here. Just below him, a black BMW Z4 convertible crested the rise beyond the gate.

  Juhle backed up a couple of steps until he was lost to the view of the car's passengers. By the time they cleared the promontory and broke onto the olive-shaded area where he'd been waiting, he'd put on his sunglasses and was walking toward them, his badge extended in front of him, his face locked down into impassivity.

  His footfalls crunching noisily on the gravel of the parking surface, Juhle walked directly to Carol's side of the car, spoke before it had rolled to a complete stop. "Mrs. Manion? Inspector Juhle from San Francisco homicide. You might remember me. If you could spare some time, I'd like to have a few more words with you."

  34 /

  "I must insist," Ward said. "As you can see, this really isn't a good time, inspector. My wife is really feeling quiteill. We just had to leave the auction preview because of it, and I assure you we would not have done that if it wasn't quite serious."

  The two men stood face-to-face in the circular, vaulted marble foyer. The fact that they'd acquiesced to this point and in essence invited Juhle inside the château represented a colossal logistical error on the Manions' part—if they'd made him stay outside, he would have needed a warrant to enter without their express permission, but once he'd been admitted, it would be a lot tougher psychologically to kick him out.

  As soon as they'd come inside, Carol, in the attitude of someone overcome by heat, had collapsed into one of the wing chairs along the walls. Now she rested an elbow on the arm of the chair and, eyes closed, supported her forehead with the first two fingers of her right hand. Juhle's unexpected presence, appearing out of the blinding whiteness of the afternoon, had dealt her the day's second psychic blow and rocked her.

  This had been Hunt's intention, the crux of his plan, and clearly it was working.

  Juhle kept up the pressure. "Mr. Manion, I've driven all the way up here from San Francisco to ask your wife just a very few questions after which I'll be on my way. But I'm in the middle of the murder investigation of a federal judge, and it's critical that I have your wife's statement. If you'd like to take a few minutes to get her a glass of water or freshen up a bit, that would be fine, but this is really very urgent."

  Ward Manion looked down at his wife, over to Juhle. "This is intolerable. I'm going to call my lawyer."

  "By all means," Juhle said. "That's your right. But if you've got nothing to hide, the easiest thing might be to just answer my questions."

  Manion raised his voice. "Nothing to hide? This is preposterous! You get out of this house right now. You can't talk to us like this "

  But Carol suddenly got to her feet, came up from behind her husband, and touched his arm. "Ward."

  He whirled, nearly knocking her over. "Carol, sit back down. I've got this "

  "No. No, it's all right. I'll talk to him. I don't need a lawyer. As you know, we haven't done anything wrong."

  "No, of course we haven't. But all this is so so wrong. They're treating you like a common criminal, barging in like this " Ward shook his head in disgust. He came back to Juhle. "This is absurd. What do you want to know?"

  "What do you want to ask me?" Mrs. Manion said.

  Juhle got out his portable tape recorder, turned it on, and put it on the umbrella stand next to the front door. "When was the last time you spoke to George Palmer?"

  She sighed heavily, threw a weary glance at her husband, and sank back into her armchair. Finally she raised her eyes to Juhle. "On last Monday afternoon. He called me at my house to invite me to a party."

  * * *

  It went on for nearly a half hour. It all came out—the long-ago relationship between Staci Keilly and her natural son Cameron, the connection between Staci Rosalier and Palmer, the photograph, her son Todd's true identity. To everything, her answers were straightforward and unambiguous. She admitted to the incredible coincidence factor. But she really hadn't known who Staci Rosalier was. She'd never heard the name before it had been in the press last Wednesday. If the victim's name had been Staci Keilly, of course, she would have notified the authorities. As to the photograph, naturally she'd noticed some similarity between the boy in the picture and her son Todd, but given the fact that she knew she'd never met this Staci woman—and why would this strange person have a picture of Todd?—she wrote it off as another in what was turning out to be a bizarre string of coincidences. But for the record, she didn't think the other boy looked exactly like Todd, anyway.

  Finally, Juhle brought it around to Andrea Parisi, and Carol again said that she'd already told him about her original telephone call to Andrea, the invitation to be the celebrity emcee at the Library Foundation benefit, the appointment that Parisi had never kept. What was the problem?

  Juhle hammered at the apparent discrepancies: Why did she wait three hours before calling Parisi's office after the time of the meeting when Parisi hadn't shown up? Why didn't she call while she would have been waiting in frustration? Why had Parisi told colleagues at her law firm that their meeting was going to concern custody issues? Given that, did Carol expect Juhle to believe that Mrs. Manion and Staci, Palmer, and Parisi were not already involved in negotiations over the child to whom they both had a claim?

  And yet she denied it. With a gathering calm and growing disdain.

  As they continued to spar, Juhle could feel the air between them grow thick and putrid. Though his understanding of exactly what had happened and why seemed to shock her, she grew more imperturbable as the interrogation went on.

  Finally, Juhle got to the phone call. "Mrs. Manion. You talked to one of our witnesses not two hours ago, and you didn't deny that you called Ms. Parisi on Wednesday afternoon from the Saint Francis Hotel to change your appointment to her office downtown."

  The accusation—and with it the knowledge that Juhle had obviously spoken to the young woman who'd chatted her up in the tent at Meadowood—drew new blood. The facade gave, cracked, came back together. "That's just not true, inspector. I wasn't there."

  "You told our witness you were."

  "I did not. She's either mistaken, or she's a liar."

  Juhle didn't miss a beat. "How do you know it's a she?"

  "I don't really know, inspector. It had to be a he or a she, didn't it? I picked one at random. Do you have other witnesses who say they actually saw me at the Saint Francis?"

  "We'll find them."

  "I doubt you will, inspector. I very much doubt you will. Because I wasn't there. I was at home waiting for Ms. Parisi."

  At last, Ward could endure it no longer. "Aren't we just about to the end here, Sergeant? If you haven't gotten what you came here for by now, don't you agree it's probably not going to be forthcoming? Obviously, my wife has some inadvertent connection to all these tragic events, but to assume as you appear to that she played even the most minor role in any of them is patently absurd."

  Part of Hunt's plan had been for Juhle to deliver the message to Carol that she hadn't fooled anyone. The truth was out there. People knew what she had done. He had done that. But he couldn't pass up at least taking a shot at getting her to confess.

  He went into a crouch to put himself at her eye level, his elbows resting on his thighs and his fingers linked in front of him. He spoke from his heart. "Mrs. Manion," he said. "You're an intelligent woman. I think you must intuitively understand that it's only a matter of time before this will destroy you. You're not a bad person. You snapped under an unexpected threat to your son's future and your life together and then tried to cover up what you'd done. But you're not the kind of person who will be able to live with yourself, knowing what it is you've done, that you've killed innocent people. You don't want your son to have to live with all the ways this will change you. And you know it will. It already has."

  From her expression, he thought for just a moment that he had her.

  "It can be over right now," he said. "You can e
nd it all right here."

  She seemed to be considering what he'd said. Drawing a breath in sharply, she pursed her lips and blinked rapidly several times. At last, she cocked her head to one side and brought her open hand down over her mouth. Her back went straight in the chair. "Todd is my son, and he is innocent. He loves me."

  And Juhle knew that he had lost.

  "I am his mother," she went on. "I would never let any harm come to him. I will protect him. I am his mother," she repeated.

  Juhle, sickened and depleted, pulled himself up to his feet. "As a matter of fact," he said, "you're not even that."