The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  She reached her hand out and touched his face. “You guys,” she said gently. “You dumb guys.”

  “What?”

  “This isn’t rocket science, Wyatt. You’ve lived your whole life with all of these early memories tucked away, hidden and inaccessible. Everything you’ve ever done or remember has been in that context. Or with that handicap, if you want to call it that. Talk about not showing your feelings. Talk about having to be tough at all times. Where nothing bothers you. That’s your survival mechanism. It’s who you are. So now suddenly, whammo, that wall’s been breached. There’s stuff you haven’t let yourself look at in almost forty years. You think that could be just a little scary? You think that might be a reasonable reaction?”

  “Okay, but maybe I just don’t want the pain. All this stuff made me feel sick today. I mean literally sick. So if I go down this path, there’s going to be more pain.”

  “Well, it’s the classic old problem, isn’t it? You want knowledge with pain, or blissful ignorance?”

  “Can I pick door number three? Knowledge with no pain?”

  “Adam and Eve couldn’t,” she said. “Why would you be so special?”

  “I GOOGLED KEVIN CARSON from work. My father’s name. You know how many hits I got? One million and eighty.”

  “That’s roughly a lot,” Juhle said. “How many of ’em were alive?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “See? That’s the problem with Google. All that information, but where’s the stuff you really need?”

  “Maybe I could modify my search.” Hunt was sitting at Juhle’s desk in the homicide room. Juhle sat on the desk itself. It was a few minutes after ten o’clock. “You mind?” Hunt’s hands on Juhle’s keyboard.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Hunt typed in Kevin Carson Alive.

  “Aha!” he said. “Eighty-eight thousand hits. We’re getting close.”

  “Yeah, but to what? Type in ‘Kevin Carson Dead,’ ” Juhle said.

  A couple of seconds later, Hunt said, “A hundred and ninety-six thousand.”

  “You see the flaw here,” Juhle said. “That leaves about seven hundred thousand Kevin Carsons who aren’t either dead or alive.”

  “Logic would argue against that, wouldn’t it?”

  “Unless if by pure chance we’ve just happened upon a new state of being, neither dead nor alive, which I’m going with is unlikely.”

  “At least.”

  “So you want to see what I got?”

  “I thought you’d never ask. But in all seriousness, thank you. You probably could have waited until tomorrow.”

  “I could have, but it would have been wrong. I was done with my stuff anyway and it was either read transcripts or find your case. And you’re right,” he said. “Technically it’s still open.”

  “So you can work on it with me?”

  Juhle shook his head. “Don’t get your hopes up, Wyatt. I don’t see this becoming a priority for Glitsky.” Referring to the chief of homicide, Juhle’s boss, Abe Glitsky. “It’s got nothing to do with this year’s numbers, so it might as well not exist. But best case, he might not call me off a few hours on my own time. If you get something real and I can sell it to him.”

  “So where is it? The case file.”

  Juhle’s mouth turned up in amusement. “You passed it coming in.” Sliding off the desk, he said, “Back out here.”

  Hunt followed him out through the door that demarcated the homicide detail, into the large adjoining room—lockers against one wall and four old wooden tables in the center, the last one completely filled with cardboard boxes, in some places two deep.

  When Juhle stopped in front of the pile, resting his hand possessively on one of the boxes, Hunt said, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “You asked for it.” Juhle patted the pile. “Seven zero zero nine six three two one nine. It took me three trips to get it up here from my car. Police reports, transcripts of witness statements, lab work, notes, pictures, toxicology, tapes, motions, index of evidence, even a transcript of the first trial. Everything your little heart desires, and it’s all yours.”

  “Lord.”

  “I hear you. It might take a few minutes to get to it all.”

  “Minutes? We’re talking days here, Dev, maybe weeks.”

  “True, but the good news is we found it, and it looks reasonably complete. And I think I can probably get Glitsky to okay you being up here hanging out so long as you don’t take anything and share whatever you find.”

  His arms crossed, Hunt took in the mountain of material. “Where would you start on all this?”

  7

  FROM THE OCEAN BEACH SPACE where Hunt parked his Kawasaki, he could see the familiar bank of nimbostratus cloud beginning to reclaim its customary place several hundred yards off the coast. Any day now, the cloud would roll in low over the water, kiss the world’s surface as fog, and pushed along by westerly gusts of wind, launch its assault again upon the land, and the balmy stretch the city had enjoyed for the last couple of days would fade into memory.

  But for the moment, they still had the sun, and Hunt wasn’t going to let it get away from him before he could get his maximum enjoyment from it. So, in his hiking shorts and a tank top, he took his motorcycle and headed out for the beach.

  Last night he’d stayed up with the cardboard boxes that made up the case file, though it seemed something of a misnomer to call the enormous mass of data a mere file. Trying to get his bearings while Juhle finished up some business at his desk before he had to go home, Hunt had had time to glance at some of the police reports and skim the transcript for the first trial. He learned a few things: that the prosecuting attorney was named Ferrill E. Moore, the public defender Steven Giles; that Hunt’s mother had died of blunt-force trauma, several blows to the head from one of a collection of large river stones they used for decorations around the apartment; that his father’s story was that he had come home from a long walk he’d taken with a six-pack after he and Margie had fought earlier that afternoon; that Kevin’s blood-alcohol level when the police had arrived after he’d dialed 911 was .13; that Wyatt had, apparently, been home when the murder occurred.

  Now Wyatt was walking across the sand below the Cliff House toward a lone fisherman. The usual angler out here on the dunes would plant his rod in a holder in the sand and sit behind it, waiting for a strike, but this man was standing on the hard sand at the edge of the freezing water, barefoot with his pants rolled up just below his knees, rod and reel in hand, working his bait methodically.

  Hunt got up within ten feet on the side of him, stood still there a minute, then gave him a nod. “Any luck?”

  “Nothing yet.” The man, somewhere north of seventy, was an inch or two taller than Hunt’s six-two, thin and clean-shaven with a head of thick white hair. “Got a nice striper last week, though. Fourteen pounds.”

  “Sweet,” Hunt said. “Are you Ferrill Moore?”

  The man’s head jerked at Hunt. “Guilty,” he said. “Who are you?”

  Hunt moved over a couple of steps and introduced himself. “I called your house this morning and your wife said I’d probably find you out here.”

  “And she was right, as usual. Why’d you want to talk to me?”

  MOORE HAD THE METAL ROD HOLDER after all, and after he’d planted it and rested his fishing pole in it, he walked with Hunt back to the softer, warmer sand, where the two men sat.

  “Of course I remember it,” Moore said. “I remember them all, but especially the ones I tried twice. You say Kevin Carson was your father?”

  “I just recently found out.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but he was guilty as hell.”

  “But a jury didn’t think so. Two juries, in fact.”

  Moore gave him a sidelong look. “Two people on one jury, one on the other, and one’s all you need to hang. Leaving twenty-one out of twenty-four voting for guilt. Any other jurisdiction in the country—hell,
in the world—he goes down. Again, apologies. But the plain fact is that our jury panels resemble nothing so much as the bar scene in Star Wars.”

  “No need to apologize about my father. I don’t know him. I never knew him.”

  “So what do you want to know? And why, for that matter?”

  “Good questions. I guess I’d like to know if there were other suspects, anybody else the police were interested in. Why they centered on my father.”

  “Because he was the obvious and only choice. Neighbors had heard them fighting, and not just that day, either. Then on the day of the murder, he couldn’t really give any kind of reasonable account for his whereabouts. His defense attorneys never found anybody who’d testify they’d seen him on his purported walk.”

  “So…​but there must have been an element of doubt. For the three holdouts?”

  “Nobody saw him actually do it, if you want to call that reasonable doubt, which I don’t. He was there at home with your mother, the two of them had a fight, he went insane for a few seconds, then got himself drunk in remorse while he figured out what he’d tell the police after he called them. I mean, there was very little question. None, really. And I’m still not clear on why you care if you didn’t know him.”

  “Well, he was my father, after all. And he wrote me a letter saying—no, swearing—that he didn’t do it, which I only saw for the first time yesterday.”

  Moore’s thin lips went tight. “You deny something long enough, you come to believe it. The prisons are full of people who swear to this day that they didn’t do it, maybe even really in their hearts believe that they didn’t do it. And you know what? They did. So how’d this letter come about?”

  “He left it with a priest to give to me if I ever showed up.”

  “Bernard,” Moore said.

  “You know him?”

  “I knew him then. He was going to be a character witness for your father if it ever came up, which it didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the defense decided not to introduce character, probably because if they had, I could have rebutted with evidence of bad character. And character was probably a winner for us.” Moore picked up some sand and ran it through his fingers. “Your father was, to put it kindly, underemployed. He’d also had a marijuana-dealing charge knocked down to misdemeanor possession of over an ounce and then several domestic violence calls. In those days, you didn’t get the DVs automatically and the judge kept ’em out because they never got charged. So the defense decided to forget about character and leave well enough alone.”

  “Several DVs?”

  A shrug. “Three, four, I don’t remember exactly. So the jury never heard the good Father Bernard try to paint your father as a good guy—doting husband, caring father, hard-luck young man now looking at raising his young son all by himself.”

  “Well, he didn’t do that.” Hunt paused. “He put me up for adoption.”

  “But now you want to go back and somehow clear this guy’s name? This loser who killed your mother and abandoned you while he was at it?”

  “No. I want to find out who killed my mother, if in fact my father didn’t.”

  “But in fact,” Moore said, “your father did.”

  “I’m not ruling it out,” Hunt said. “And I hear what you’re saying about everybody who’s guilty sings the same old song that they didn’t do it. But what I don’t really get is why a father writes to his three-year-old boy he may never see again to tell him he didn’t kill his mother. I mean, why not just go away and leave it at that?”

  “How about he’s a congenital liar?”

  “That’s one possibility,” Hunt said. “But there might be others.”

  “Well, you want my advice, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over them.”

  “It’s already too late for that,” Hunt said. “Thanks for your time.”

  “HEY,” Hunt said.

  Hunt hadn’t laid eyes on Gina Roake since they’d officially broken up five weeks before. On a hunch she’d be there, he swung by her Pleasant Street town house and rang her doorbell, and here she was, dressed almost identically to him—hiking shoes, hiking shorts, and an orange tank top that looked a hell of a lot sexier on her than his did on him. “Hey, yourself,” she said. “This is a nice surprise. How’ve you been?”

  “Good. Busy. You?”

  “Pretty much the same. What’s up? I was just going out for a walk. You want to join me?” Gina looked him over, then glanced down at herself and chuckled. “Color coordination, the key to adult happiness.”

  “We got it,” he said. “Where’re we goin’?”

  “Up,” she said, pulling the door closed behind her and starting off uphill.

  Pleasant Street was on Nob Hill, and as they walked first past Grace Cathedral and then over toward the Fairmont and Top of the Mark hotels, Hunt filled her in on what had happened. When he finished, they were on the way down California Street.

  She asked him, “So you have no idea about this texter? Who it is.”

  “None.” He hesitated. “Actually, I haven’t ruled out the possibility that it might be you.”

  This stopped her in her tracks on the corner of Grant Avenue, now in the heart of Chinatown, tourists milling by, flowing around them in the still-beautiful noon hour. “Me?” Gina’s confusion evident in her face. “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Probably you wouldn’t. But you always said it would be good if I knew more about my birth parents, to have those missing pieces fit in. This would be a way to get me to check them out.”

  “Yes, Wyatt, but…​no. I would never do anything like that. You should know that. I’d just come out and tell you to go look into it if I thought it was that important. I’d talk to you, the way we’re talking now. I’d never just text you and hide behind that.”

  “Okay. I had to ask.”

  “Is that it? Is that why you came by? If it is, I must tell you I’m a little hurt.”

  “The last thing I want to do, Gina, is hurt you. It was a dumb question. I’m sorry. I’d withdraw it if I could. But I just feel like I have to find this person.”

  “Why? It seems to me that the important thing is to find out who killed your mother. This text person is just the gateway to that.”

  “But they must know something.”

  “I’m sure they do. And they want you to find out what they know. So do that.”

  “I’m trying. In fact, that’s why I came by today. I wanted to get your gut feeling about part of this.”

  “Well, that’s a little better. What do you want to know?”

  In the next block, he told her about his father’s letter, the reference to the other people who’d offered him money and a job, Kevin Carson’s decision to forget about finding his wife’s killer, the protestation of innocence to his three-year-old son. “Anyway,” he concluded, “I talked to the prosecutor who did the trials this morning and I thought I’d get a defense attorney’s perspective as well.”

  “Who was the prosecutor?” Gina asked.

  “Ferrill Moore. You know him?”

  “Yeah, sure. Retired now, I think. A pretty good guy, but, you know, a prosecutor, so everybody’s guilty.”

  Hunt nodded. “That’s him all right. He said people like my father always just keep repeating that they’re not guilty to anybody who’ll listen. They come to believe it themselves.”

  “Well, sure, that happens,” Gina admitted. “But once in a while people keep insisting that they’re innocent because they are, in fact, innocent.”

  Hunt stopped now at the bottom of the hill and Gina pulled up beside him. “So that’s what I wanted to get your take on,” he said. “Listen, Kevin Carson thinks he’s probably never going to see me again. By the time he writes this letter, I’m maybe six years old, now living with the Hunts. I’ve got no way to reach him and vice versa, then or ever. So whether or not I believe he’s guilty, what could it matter at all? And yet he sits down and goes out of his way to
set the record straight that he didn’t kill Margie. I mean, why would he do that? To me, it almost has the feel of a deathbed confession, in a way, except the opposite. Why would he lie? Psychologically, it just doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  Gina chewed at the inside of her cheek. “If you want my gut,” she said, “for what it’s worth, it’s the same as yours. It feels to me like a blind shot into an empty and indifferent universe, just putting the truth out there.”

  Hunt exhaled. “That’s what it feels like to me, too. I don’t think he killed her.”

  “Of course I might be wrong,” Gina said, “and I’ve got that horrible defense bias where sometimes people have some goodness in them, but I agree with you. And you know what that means?”

  “Tell me.”

  “It means somebody else killed her.”

  HUNT HAD GONE BACK HOME and changed into slacks and a dress shirt. Now, waiting for Juhle to get back to the Hall of Justice, enduring the strained forbearance or sometimes the barely contained hostility of the rest of the homicide inspectors, he sat amid his cardboard boxes just outside the detail.

  Head of homicide Abe Glitsky had looked in on him twice, wanting first to make sure that Juhle had set up this meeting and that he was in fact on his way back to the hall to supervise Hunt’s endeavors, and second that Wyatt wasn’t removing any of the material contained in the file.

  Satisfying the lieutenant on both fronts, Hunt had spent fifteen minutes or so turning pages in the first thick binder of the trial transcript when his cell phone chirped. More wound up and attuned to the sound than he’d realized, his whole body jerked with his reaction.

  Progress?

  Yes. But are you my father?

  No. Is that all?

  After several tries practicing the few key taps he needed to keep his texter on the screen while talking to Callie Lucente, this time Wyatt picked up a touch of impatience and annoyance in her voice. “Is this another test, Wyatt?” Callie asked him.