“If you give up now and they lose this year, it’ll be your fault.”
“Don’t pull that bullshit. What I do or don’t do does not affect baseball standings.”
“Okay, if you believe that. I’m just saying, why take the risk?”
Emma was no dummy. She’d graduated from the Wharton School of Business and currently did financial analysis from her home for a small private equity firm in Mill Valley. Having gotten Kaitlin down to sleep, now she was standing in the doorway, a glass of white wine in her hand, listening to these men and their sports.
Clearing her throat, she stepped into the room and said, “He can’t help it, Wyatt. You don’t have to worry. He’ll be there till they clinch it.”
“Or not.”
“All right. Or not.” She sat down on the other end of the couch from her husband. “But you know, I was under the impression that Wyatt had a few things going on in his life right now that might be more important than the Giants, and I was just wondering what it would take for you guys to get around to talking about them.” She sipped her wine to silence, then smiled and said, “Okay, I’ll start. You and Gina broke up?”
“SO THE TRAIL STOPS with this Evie See Christ?” Emma said.
“So far. The priest, Bernard, had no idea what became of her, and didn’t know much to begin with.”
“What are the odds,” Rich asked, “that she’s your texter?”
“I don’t know,” Wyatt said. “Slim, I’d imagine, but I couldn’t rule it out.” He paused. “I’m going on the assumption that somewhere I must have met this person, and I don’t remember ever meeting an Evie.”
Rich nodded. “If she kept her first name, and she did change her last.”
“Right. I know. But changing a first name is different. I mean, it’s what you answer to.”
“And why do you think you must have met her?” Emma asked.
“Well, she’s got my personal cell number, which I don’t give out except to people I know.”
“Maybe somebody else gave it to her,” Emma continued. “One of your people. Maybe thinking she was a potential client.”
“Possibly, though that would be unusual.”
“So what’s your next step?” Rich asked.
“I’m a little stuck on that,” Wyatt said. “At first I thought the killer must have been one of the witnesses, but there’s no hint of any suspicion, and I mean none, in any of the police reports. A few neighbors, some cops, but no personal connections at all to either Margie or Kevin.”
“Your birth parents,” Emma said. “How hard is that for you?”
Hunt took a beat, his head down and then back up. “Not the easiest thing I’ve had to deal with, honestly. Especially considering I kind of consciously kept it locked up all this time. Or unconsciously, since it seems to be coming out in dreams and in my guts. I mean, it’s one thing to have come to grips a long time ago with the fact that you were abandoned. Okay, so move on. Don’t dwell on it. And then you find out you weren’t.” Hunt let out a breath. “It just whacks you unexpectedly. I don’t think I’m done with the reactions.”
“I’d be surprised if you were,” Emma said.
“But your dad. Kevin.” Rich wrestled with how to say it. “It feels weird to call him your dad. He did abandon you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, I suppose so. Technically. But he got driven to it. It’s not like he just woke up one day and didn’t want a kid and left me on some doorstep. He thought he’d be in jail and I’d be better off with another family. I know that might not be a real distinction, but it feels different.”
“It does to me, too,” Emma said.
“Yeah,” Rich countered, “but you don’t leave your kid.”
“Maybe some cases you think you have to. I’m not really defending him, Rich. I’m saying the way it feels to me. Now. And it feels, somehow . . .” Hunt sat back in his chair, put a hand over his stomach. “It seems like it’s all in here, sorting itself out.”
“Well, we’ll let it, then,” Emma said. “But if you need to talk about any of this stuff anytime, we’re here. You know that.”
“I do. And I thank you. But in the meanwhile, unless I can find a way to Evie See Christ, or whatever the hell her name was or is, I’m not getting any closer to finding out what really happened. And something tells me I’m going to need that if I want to get all this unconscious stuff worked out.”
“She wasn’t in any of the police reports?” Rich asked. “She wasn’t one of the witnesses?”
“How odd is that?” Emma drank some of her wine. “If she was Margie’s best friend?”
“If she wasn’t around,” Wyatt said, “what was she going to be a witness to? But it’s worth asking. Maybe I’ll go back to Moore. He was the prosecutor. If Evie hated Kevin, or Kevin hated her, he might have known something about her, even if she didn’t make it to the trial.”
“Or Kevin’s defense attorney,” Rich added. “Same thing.”
Wyatt started to get up. “That’s a good call. Worth a try, anyway. If I don’t get to Evie somehow, I don’t know where else to look. She knew Margie, my mother. They were friends. If I find her, she can give me some context. That’s what’s missing here, and without that I’m kind of lost.”
“I might have an idea,” Emma said. “Didn’t you say that Evie was in this CPS report about your mother leaving you with her children?”
Hunt nodded. “Right. That’s where I got her name.”
“Well, wouldn’t there be a report on her there, too? I mean, a separate one. Her two kids were underage and at risk, weren’t they? Wouldn’t they have had a file on them, too?”
Wyatt, on the front inch of his chair, went dead still, staring at his sister-in-law. “You, my dear,” he said, “may have just won the grand prize.”
11
HUNT AND JUHLE WERE STANDING around at the case-laden table outside homicide.
“It would be great,” Hunt said, “except Bettina’s not answering her phone. I’ve left two messages already.”
Juhle checked his watch. “Wyatt, it’s ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. Could it be she wants to sleep in? Maybe she unplugged her phone.”
“I should drive by her house. Bang on her door.”
“Yeah, she’d love that. Maybe, really, you should give her time to wake up and call you back. Besides, it’s not going to be about Evie whatever-her-name-is anyway.” He motioned toward the stack of boxes. “I had a little discussion with Glitsky last night.”
“What about?”
By the time Juhle finished telling it, Hunt had drifted down into one of the chairs. He took his time before he spoke. “Dev, this was a young woman who didn’t know anybody. She’s not going to be in the middle of some grand conspiracy.”
“It doesn’t have to be grand. I’m just saying that if it really wasn’t your father, if it wasn’t the jury screwing up . . .”
“You’re saying Glitsky and Moore are in on this?”
“No. If Glitsky knew anything, he would never have let us start with this stuff. But Moore? I don’t know Moore. Was he political? What about the inspectors? Jerome Armanino and, you’ll like this, Dan Rigby.”
Hunt’s eyebrows went up. Rigby was a former chief of police. “You’ve been thinking about this.”
Juhle nodded. “Up about half the night with the basic idea.” He sat down across from Hunt. “I didn’t even think about the inspectors doing the case until this morning, and then I came in and saw it right away. And it gets better.”
“Hit me.”
“The officers who got called in on the child endangerment with your mystery woman Evie? When all you kids were left alone? You want to guess who they were?”
“You’re saying Rigby?”
“One of ’em, yep.”
“Why would a homicide inspector go out on a call like that?”
Juhle broke a smile. “He wasn’t yet in homicide. He got promoted in the intervening five months before the murder.
I looked it up this morning.”
“I knew you’d be great working for me.” Hunt thought a moment. “So who was the other guy on the call?”
“Jim Burg, who, you’ll love this, was also the R.O.”—the reporting officer—“on the murder. He’s the one who actually put the cuffs on your dad at the scene.” Juhle sat back. “Which, unfortunately, is actually not as weird as it sounds.”
“Why not?”
“Your parents’ address was on Burg’s beat. So you’d expect he’d be a responder if there’s a call. But you must admit, the stuff with Rigby, it’s something to think about.”
Hunt wasn’t so sure. But if this is what it took to maintain Juhle’s enthusiasm for the investigation, he’d take it. “So what’s your theory, exactly?”
“That’s the problem. Everything stops before it goes anyplace. But at least we’ve got some moving pieces to play with. I’d love it if there was some sign your mom hooked up with one of these guys.”
Hunt sat, his arm slung back over his chair, his brow creased, frowning. “My mother wasn’t having an affair, Dev. Bernard would have known about it.” After a minute, Hunt added, “I think I would have had a feeling about it, too.”
“You? I thought you didn’t remember anything about that time.”
Hunt hesitated. “I’ve been having dreams,” he said.
BETTINA KECK STILL HADN’T CALLED HUNT BACK, so Juhle drove him out to Telegraph Hill to talk with Steven Giles, who’d been Kevin Carson’s public defender in both trials. As they crossed Market under glowering skies, Juhle glanced over from the driver’s seat.
“So how much of this is coming back?”
“Coming back isn’t how it feels. It’s not like an actual memory, or most of it isn’t anyway. It’s mostly dreams. I wake up. I’m in a sweat and don’t know where I am and I’m really, really, really scared.”
Juhle had been friends with Hunt in high school, and for close to ten years as an adult. He said, “You don’t get scared.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what’s so scary. I keep finding my mother’s body. I’m alone and it’s the middle of the afternoon . . .” Hunt blew out hard. “And there’s my dad, in a different scene. And I’m always riding around on his shoulders and I keep looking down and trying to see his face, but I can’t.”
“Maybe it’s not your dad.”
“No. It’s definitely him. I just can’t see him. And there’s no other guy, somebody Mom could be having an affair with. I think I would have seen him, or felt him, or something. Some kind of ominous presence, wouldn’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“The only other guy is in a black robe. You want to talk scary as far as images go. But I figure that’s just Bernard and the cassock. He ought to be around somewhere if he was counseling them, which he was. Harmless enough.”
Juhle shot Hunt a glance. “Well,” he said, “maybe this guy Giles can tell us something.”
DRAPED IN A DOWN COMFORTER, Steven Giles greeted them in his sitting room in a wheelchair. The view, even through the clouds, seemed to encompass about half the Bay. Giles was hooked up to an oxygen supply with two clear plastic lines and nose inserts. His wife, Dorothy, after bringing everyone coffee in large orange Princeton mugs, sat down next to him on a rocking chair and rested her right hand on his left arm, from which it would never move in the course of the interview.
“We appreciate you taking the time to see us,” Juhle began.
“You two are working together?” Giles asked in a surprisingly robust voice. “I don’t remember too many instances of cooperation between cops and PIs.”
Juhle could be smooth when he needed to be. “We have overlapping interests. The case I’m working on involves Mr. Hunt’s mother, who was killed back in 1970.”
A small chortle. “Not exactly yesterday.” Then, more seriously, to Hunt. “I’m sorry for your loss, son, even if it was so long ago. What was your mother’s name?”
“Margie Carson.”
Giles’s back straightened, his eyes sharpened. “Kevin Carson.”
Dorothy piped in. “Steve never forgets anything, you know. I should warn you.”
“That’s good to hear,” Juhle said. “We’ve been kind of hampered by the police reports and witness and trial transcript, which are fine as far as they go but don’t shed much light on some of the background stuff.”
“Such as?” Giles asked.
“Well,” Juhle replied, “that’s kind of why we’re here. To find out what, if anything, there might have been.”
Hunt spoke. “Evie Secrist, or See Christ, for example. Does that name ring any kind of a bell?”
Giles took a moment considering. “I can’t say that it does.” He squinted into the middle distance. “Does she appear in the record?”
“No,” Juhle said.
Hunt picked it up. “But she was a friend, maybe a best friend, to my mother. She had a couple of young kids a little older than me, and apparently they hung out together.”
“And how,” Giles asked, “would she have been involved in your mother’s death? Theoretically.”
“We don’t know,” Hunt said. “We’ve heard that Kevin, my father, hated her. Maybe he would have mentioned her to you.”
“In what context?”
“Apparently, she introduced elements into my parents’ marriage that caused problems between them. She was Bible-thumping religious and my father didn’t like it. He thought she was trying to convert my mother and they fought about it.”
“And who is your source on that?”
“Don Bernard. He’s a priest who . . .”
“Yes.” Giles cut him off. “I remember him. He believed in your father’s innocence. One of the few. So he is still alive?”
“Very much so. Out at Star of the Sea.”
“And Father Bernard thought that this Evie might have had something to do with your mother’s death?”
“Only in the sense,” Hunt said, “that she might have been one of the things they were fighting about.”
“If it was,” Giles said, “I never heard about it. And I would have, because the weakness in the prosecution’s case was motive. There just didn’t seem to be any reason strong enough to make your father feel like he had to kill your mother. Of course, motive gets trumped by means and opportunity every time, and Mr. Moore knew that, so he didn’t worry about it too much. But I think in the end it’s why they couldn’t convict. This was before DV was the flavor of the month here in the city. Nowadays, of course, the jury doesn’t need much more than an accusation to vote guilty.
“So there just wasn’t a reason, beyond them arguing and, you know, juries like a reason, even a bad one. It’s one of those things.” Giles seemed to realize that he’d been making a little speech, and he smiled with a bit of sheepishness. “My point is that if there was any specific motive, almost anything, I would have heard about it. Moore would have brought it up just to hang his hat on it. And he didn’t.” He spread his palms. “Anything else?”
Hunt looked the question over to Juhle. “We were wondering,” he said, “if you gave any thought to an alternative theory of the case. You know, if Kevin Carson didn’t do it, then who did?”
Giles brought a hand up and squeezed at the sides of his mouth. “No. I can’t say that I did.”
“And why was that?” Hunt asked.
The answer clearly pained him, but Giles came right out with it. “Because I thought that Kevin did do it. Factually. I’m sorry. Do you have any substantive reason to believe he didn’t?”
“Nothing as strong as proof,” Hunt said. “But something.”
He took his father’s letter out of his jacket’s inner pocket and gave it to Giles, who read it quickly—almost at a glance—and then handed it over to his wife.
“When did you get that?” Giles asked while she read.
“Bernard gave it to me a couple of days ago.”
“He’d been holding it for you all this time
? Not knowing if you’d ever come for it? How did you find him?”
“I was an adopted kid and finally got interested in finding out some of the details about my birth parents. I’d lost track of who they’d been, and Bernard’s name came up through Catholic Charities, so I hunted him down through the archdiocese.”
“So you’ve only recently found out that your mother had been murdered?”
Hunt nodded. “A couple of days ago.”
“Oh.” Dorothy’s hand went to her own mouth. “What a terrible shock.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hunt said, “about equal to learning that my father had been tried for killing her. Twice. So now I’m trying, with Inspector Juhle here, to find out what really happened.”
Dorothy handed the letter back to Hunt.
“And you think that,” Giles said, pointing to the letter, “casts some doubt on whether he did it?”
“I don’t see why he’d have written it if it wasn’t the truth.”
The implied question was not a hard one, and to the old attorney, the answer was clear. Giles shook his head, answered in an avuncular tone. “Because if it ever came up, and maybe it never would, he wanted his son to believe that he was innocent.”
“Even if it wasn’t true?”
“Especially if it wasn’t true.” Giles spread his palms again. “It costs him nothing. If it ever comes up, it makes you feel good about him. Why not? I’m sorry, but that’s how I read it.”
“How about the other people he refers to?” Hunt asked. “Offering him a job?”
Giles scratched at his cheek, perhaps embarrassed by Hunt’s obvious need to believe in his father’s innocence.
Juhle cleared his throat and stepped in. “We were just wondering if there was some drama in the background that you might have been aware of that didn’t make the trial. Maybe a jealousy angle, maybe Margie having an affair? Or Kevin?”
Giles slowly wagged his head from side to side. “If there’d have been anything like that, don’t you think I would have brought it up? Now, as it turned out, I didn’t need it, but if I had anything like another even remotely viable suspect to point to, don’t you think I would have been all over him, or even her? I assure you, I would have. There simply wasn’t any such person, neither then nor, I believe, now. Certainly your father couldn’t give me anybody, and we talked about that a lot.”
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