The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  “WELL, THAT WAS SPLENDID,” Juhle said when they were back in his car, rolling again down Telegraph Hill. “Broke a lot of new ground.”

  Hunt’s jaw muscle worked.

  “And showing him your dad’s letter,” Juhle went on, “that really pried him open.”

  “I believe that letter,” Hunt said. “I don’t care what Giles says, or anybody else.”

  “Atta boy. That’s the spirit.”

  “There’s no spirit involved, Dev. There was somebody else involved in this thing, and my father knew who it was.”

  “Not to say there wasn’t, Wyatt, but why didn’t he bring it up when it could have done him some good at his trials?”

  “He didn’t know about it until afterward. My texter says they gave him money to get him out of town. Obviously, he thought it was just friends helping him out. And what was he going to do here in the city if he stayed? Work as a gardener or something for one of Bernard’s parishioners?”

  Juhle shot him a glance. “Maybe it’s him sending you these texts?”

  “It’s crossed my mind, of course, but I asked specifically and got told no. Besides, I just don’t think it would be.”

  “Any reasons?”

  “Some. The first being that I think if he were that close to me, if he had my cell number, he’d come out of wherever he’s been hiding and say hi. There’s no reason to hide from me after all this time. It might be awkward for a few minutes, but why hide out, especially if I could help him?”

  “Maybe he’s afraid he’ll wind up being the prime suspect again.”

  “And what? I’m going to turn him in? I don’t think so.”

  BY FOUR O’CLOCK, Juhle had gone home. Hunt, back at his warehouse, had called Bettina Keck and gotten her machine again. He’d copied more pages from the case file outside the homicide detail and had piled them on one of the library tables that held his computers. He’d been sitting at one of those computers for more than an hour now, reviewing the professional histories of former police chief Dan Rigby and former assistant DA Ferrill Moore—neither had interacted much with the other, had had any apparent influence on the other’s career, or had been in any scandal involving women or sexual indiscretions of any kind. If they had spent any time covering up for themselves or for one another, they’d done an impressive job of it.

  Now Hunt, still at his computer, was just starting to check out the background on Jerome Armanino, who had been Dan Rigby’s partner investigating Hunt’s father. He located the man’s current address and telephone number and then, firmly believing that it was always better to ask forgiveness than permission, found himself picking up his telephone and punching numbers.

  “Hello.”

  “Inspector Armanino?”

  “Not for a while now, but that’s who I used to be. How can I help you?”

  Hunt introduced himself and plunged right into his pitch.

  “Excuse me,” Armanino said before he’d gotten very far. “Forty years ago?”

  “Give or take. You arrested a man named Kevin Carson for murder.”

  “If you say so. What about him? Who’d he kill?”

  “He never was convicted. But the victim was his wife, Margie.”

  “Why wasn’t he convicted?”

  “The jury hung. Twice.”

  Armanino tsked. “This crazy town,” he said. “You wonder why you bother picking up the scumbags if they’re just going to let ’em go.”

  “Yeah.” Hunt at his most noncommittal. “So you don’t remember the trials?”

  “It’s not ringing a bell, tell you the truth. Kevin Carson, right? Early seventies? I could look it up. I got a record of who I collared somewhere around here, I’m pretty sure. Filed away. What do you want to know?”

  “Well, this is a long shot, but I’m trying to find a woman named Evie Secrist, who sometimes called herself Evie See Christ. She was a friend of the victim.”

  “What’d she do? Was she a witness?”

  “At the trial? No.”

  “So what’s her connection?”

  Hunt decided he had to stretch things. “She was possibly involved in drugs, maybe the sale of them, maybe to the victim. The son of both the victim and the suspect, my client, thinks this wasn’t explored sufficiently at the trial. He thinks the murderer might not have been his father, might have been somebody in the drug trade, connected to this Evie Secrist. She shows up in the case file, but never made the witness list.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have anything to say.”

  “That’s probably it. But it’s something my client wants to look into. I thought that you, as one of the inspectors, might have had a memory of her.”

  “If I talked to her, I wrote it up,” Armanino said. “It would be in my files someplace. You know offhand who I was partnered up with on that one?”

  “Dan Rigby.”

  “If Dan talked to her, he really wrote it up.”

  “But he didn’t, that’s the thing. I’ve gone through all the paper.”

  “So how’d she get in the file?”

  “That was from a child-endangerment call at the Carson apartment a few months before the murder. Rigby was one of the responding officers on that call. Obviously, before he got to homicide.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “What?”

  “How this Evie person got in your file. Dan remembers the endangerment call and a few months later there’s a homicide at the same address? No way, being the most tight-assed man who ever wore a uniform, no way Rigby doesn’t pull up the earlier report and at least throw it in the file, even if he never went back and interviewed anybody.”

  “Why wouldn’t he, though? Interview her.”

  “Well, for example, if the husband looked good enough for it right away. Which he must have. So what’s the point of talking to her?”

  “So you wouldn’t have looked too much for other suspects?”

  Suddenly the warmth of Armanino’s tone dropped a few degrees. “Not so much. Why would we? We get the one good one, we tend to stop there. If the husband did it, and he usually does, it narrows the field right on down, now, don’t it?”

  12

  AT 11:15 ON MONDAY MORNING, Hunt flung open the door to his office and raised a fisted hand in triumph. “Success at last.”

  Tamara turned from her computer and gave him a tight smile that he might have missed, it came and went so quickly. “He arrives,” she said. “Success at what?”

  “Evie Secrist. Or, her real name, Spencer. Lived on Arguello around the corner from the Carsons. Bettina at CPS finally got back to me this morning and I went out there and it didn’t take us ten minutes. Secrist, see also See Christ and Spencer.” He hesitated, cocked his head. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re sure? How was your weekend?”

  “Good.”

  “I tried to get you Saturday night. I thought you might want to eat something, maybe go see a movie.”

  “I know. I got the message, but I was out. Sorry.” She grabbed a pen and tapped it a couple of times on her desk. “So Evie Spencer, what does that mean?”

  “I don’t exactly know, which I realize is kind of ridiculous since I spent most of the weekend trying to find out almost anything about her. True, under the wrong name, but still. But she’s the only actual link to my parents so far. If she doesn’t lead me someplace, I’m back at square one.”

  “Have you gotten any more texts?”

  “No, not since Friday.”

  “Taking the weekend off.”

  “Looks like.”

  “Oh, but on that, Devin called and said he’d gotten the lab results on the cell phone Mickey picked up in Santa Rosa.”

  “Yeah, I called his cell to tell him about Evie.”

  “So he told you about the phone?”

  “What there was. No other calls from the phone, in or out. Fingerprints, but none from any criminal database, and no DNA. And also nothing on the SIM card about
who owned it. Although he thinks he knows where it was bought. All in all, not much help, but I wasn’t expecting much from that quarter anyway.” Hunt crossed over and boosted himself onto Tamara’s desk. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “That’s the second time you’ve asked me that.”

  “I know. I’ve been counting. It seems like something’s bothering you.”

  “No.” Looked at him. “Or yes.”

  “If you want to talk about it . . .”

  “I don’t know if I do.”

  “Okay, then. If you change your mind, I’m in my office. Or, in a virtuoso display of my legendary flexibility, in a pinch I could come back out here.” He pushed himself off the desk. “Meanwhile, I’m going on a computer hunt for the ever-elusive Spencers.”

  * * *

  BUT HE NEVER GOT TO IT. Before he’d even sat down at his desk, he heard the familiar two-toned beep telling him he was getting a message.

  Progress?

  By now, Hunt felt like an old pro getting connected to his phone company person, Callie Lucente, while he kept the message line open to his texter. “I’ve got ’em again,” he said on speakerphone.

  “Keep ’em on.”

  “Will do.”

  Evie Spencer?

  Yes. Be careful. You are close.

  Dodie?

  Who?

  Dodie Spencer.

  ??? No.

  I need to talk to you.

  No. Evie.

  “I’ve got it, Wyatt!” Callie’s voice on speaker, excited now that the chase was on again. “The call’s from the Ferry Building! You guys are almost on top of each other.”

  Hunt moved to the window from which he could see the Ferry Building down the block across the street. Although, naturally, he couldn’t make out any individuals talking or texting on their cell phones.

  Please. I need more information.

  Tapping at his keypad, he crossed the room to his office door and pulled it open. “Tam! We got a live texter. They’re at the Ferry Building.” He stopped moving, tapped some more.

  Are cops involved?

  ???

  Tamara, on her feet, was already leading him out, on her way to the main door, holding it for him as he tried to keep the contact alive.

  Rumor of cop cover-up.

  ???

  Father Bernard?

  ???

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  Can’t. Can’t.

  “Callie,” Hunt all but screamed into his cell phone, “I need an exact location!” Out in the hallway, he and Tamara had gotten to the door to the stairs leading down and outside. They could make it to the Ferry Building within a minute.

  “Looks like just outside the Slanted Door, maybe just inside,” Callie yelled. “Right at the water!”

  Hunt looked down at the screen.

  You have enough!

  I need to meet you! Please!

  “Bafongool,” Callie said over the speakerphone. “It’s gone. Lost it. The entire signal.”

  Hunt and Tamara stopped on the second-floor landing and shared a look of disgust. “Want to bet,” Hunt said, “they dropped the phone into the goddamn bay?”

  BEGINNING WITH THE SLANTED DOOR, the Vietnamese restaurant at the far end of the structure, Hunt and Tamara spent the next hour together and singly combing over every inch of the Ferry Building, with its dozens of food shops and hundreds of customers. It was lunchtime and the place throbbed with humanity. If Hunt’s texter was someone he knew, which had been the assumption all along, then that acquaintance had disappeared by the time they had arrived.

  Now, since they were there anyway, Hunt suggested they take advantage of the opportunity and have some lunch, so they were sitting at the bar at the Hog Island Oyster Company, chowing down on raw oysters just in from Tomales Bay. “The worst thing is,” Hunt was saying, “I get the feeling that might have been the last text.”

  “Why?”

  He took his phone out, brought up the screen to the beginning of the latest string of messages. “Well, look. First it tells me I’m close, then says to follow the Evie lead, and then finally says I’ve got enough. I’m on the right track. Now I’m supposed to run with what I’ve got.”

  “Which would be Evie.”

  “Right, and that’s pretty much all.”

  “Maybe it is enough.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  Tamara sipped from her beer. “So who is Dodie Spencer?”

  Hunt shrugged. “She’s a woman on the hiring committee from the Mission Club. Suddenly, with the name, Spencer, I just thought it might be her. Unlikely, I know. But not impossible. I thought I’d ask.”

  Tamara scrolled down through the message. “And what’s this about a cover-up?”

  “Devin’s idea, which kept us going over the weekend. To no avail, I might add. Everybody involved in the trials, even his own attorney, thinks my father did it.”

  “But Devin agrees with you? He doesn’t think it, either?”

  “Well, let’s say he’s marginally open to the idea. Which, for a cop, is a pretty big step. He got ordered to stop looking into the case, and that got his back up.”

  “He got ordered to stop looking into the case? When did that happen?”

  “Friday.”

  “I’ve been out of the loop.”

  “Not on purpose. It was the weekend.”

  “Who wanted Devin to stop?”

  “Glitsky. But the word came down through Vi Lapeer and Ferrill Moore, the prosecutor.”

  Tamara whistled her reaction. “Big guns.”

  “Somewhat.” Hunt went on to explain Juhle’s conspiracy theory and his conversations with Steven Giles and Jerome Armanino, both of them striking out on the Evie connection. “I tried to get to Jim Burg, too,” he concluded. “He was the arresting officer and also one of the cops on the original child-endangerment call on my mother and Evie, but he committed suicide in ’75, so that was the last of who might have known Evie or something about my parents that wasn’t in the trial record.”

  “Except for Rigby, though, right?”

  With a resigned nod, Hunt said, “Well, right. But Devin swore a solemn oath to kill me if I tried to get in touch with Rigby. So that’s on hold for the moment, though if I have to, I’ll go rattle his cage.”

  Tamara picked up her last oyster by the shell and slurped it into her mouth. “God, how good are these?” She tipped up her beer mug and finished that, too. “How did Jim Burg kill himself?” she asked.

  “The usual for cops. His own service weapon. One shot to the temple.”

  HUNT WASN’T FIVE MINUTES BACK AT HIS DESK, his computer booted up, just starting to finally get to some research on Evie Spencer, when Tamara knocked and came in, closing the door behind her. Her color was high. Her eyes shone as though she were close to tears. “Okay,” she said by way of introduction, “I think I want to talk about it.”

  Pushing his chair back from his desk, Hunt laced his hands over his stomach. “Good. I’m listening. You want to sit?”

  Nodding in assent, she went to one of the comfortable dark brown leather chairs usually reserved for clients and plopped down in it, drew in a deep breath, and let it out in a rush. “Well, here’s the short version,” she said. “I picked up a guy the other night and I feel like shit about it.”

  Hunt went still for a long beat, then let out his own heavy load of air. Getting up, he went around his desk to one of the other chairs and sat facing her. He hesitated a moment, then said, “You’re an adult, Tam. You can do whatever you want.”

  She waved it off. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “No,” Hunt said, “I know that. You like him?”

  Shaking her head. “That’s not the point, either.” Another sigh. “The point is that now I feel like I’ve betrayed…​I don’t know, everybody, somehow. You, me, him. I just flat-out led him along and he called me yesterday and again this morning and wants to go out with me.”
/>   “Is that bad?”

  “Yes, it’s bad.”

  “Why?”

  She came forward to the front of her chair and leaned toward him. “Because you shouldn’t be going out with other people when you’re in…​involved with somebody else.” She met his eyes and tried a feeble smile. “But I don’t know if I am.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Not really. I don’t want to be forward here. And I know you just broke up with Gina and you probably need some time. But when you told me about that, about you and her breaking up, I thought . . .” She eyed him hopelessly. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “Yes, you do. And you want to guess why Gina and I broke up?”

  “You told me. You didn’t want to be committed.”

  “To her. Committed to her, Tam. It was kind of specific. But that wasn’t really it. You know that wasn’t really it, because you know what it really is, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “I’m a little afraid of it.”

  “I don’t blame you. I’m a little nervous about it, too. We could start a club.”

  “But I don’t want uncommitted. Even with you, Wyatt. I’m twenty-eight. I’ve done uncommitted. I’m not doing it anymore.”

  “I’m tired of it, too. But talk about not wanting to be forward. I’m your boss and there are rules about that. I couldn’t say anything, you know, without…​I mean, if I was wrong, you could be gone. And no matter what, bottom line, I didn’t want to lose you.”

  “You could never lose me.”

  Hunt stared across the two feet separating them. “You won’t lose me, either. And I’m not talking as your boss.”

  This, finally, brought a small murmur of laughter, a wash of relief. “This is quite a conversation for two people who’ve never even kissed each other, isn’t it?”

  Hunt got up out of his chair. Took her hands in both of his. “We can fix that.”