The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  “No, sir. She didn’t. She wasn’t even on a witness list. But did you talk to her?”

  Moore appeared to be concentrating, his face gathered on itself. “I don’t believe that I did. As I said, I’d remember. But I recall the name. See Christ is the one that rings a bell, which is probably why I remember it. Not the other two. How does she fit in?”

  “That’s what I was hoping to get from you.”

  The man’s eyes squinted down. “You get any statements from her in any of the police reports?”

  “No. Which means none of the cops talked to her. I got that right?”

  A curt nod. “That’s the theory.”

  “Is that what happened in this case?”

  “If it did, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “But her name came up in some context, didn’t it? Such that you remember it here forty years later?”

  From back in the house, a woman’s voice carried. “Ferrill! What are you doing in that open door so long? Close it up, for God’s sake, it’s damn near freezing in here!”

  Moore called back over his shoulder. “I’m talking to somebody.”

  “Well, shoo ’em off or ask ’em inside, then, would you?”

  But instead, the old prosecutor moved forward onto the stoop, closing the door behind him, folding his arms over his chest. With another cold smile, he said, “Compromise.” Then, “I don’t recall the context. It’s a name I know I’ve heard, Mr. Hunt, but I can’t tell you where I’ve heard it. Or whether it was specifically with the Carson case. Does the woman have a sheet? Do you know where she is now?”

  “She’s dead,” Hunt said. “She died at Jonestown.”

  “Indeed?” His head bobbed up and down. “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “In what way?”

  “All by itself,” Moore said. “It’s something we don’t hear very much about anymore. You’re thinking maybe that Margie Carson was perhaps in a cult of some kind. Not with Jim Jones yet, but something similar? And this Evie might have put her in touch with someone who could do her harm? Or maybe harmed her herself?” He flexed his arms against the cold. “But let me assure you that there was no sign of that, of any kind of cult involvement. What happened with your mother was a marital fight that got out of hand, and that’s all that happened.”

  “If that’s the case, then maybe you can tell me why you’re so sensitive to anybody revisiting it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about you calling the chief of police after we talked last time and requesting that no more police resources be spent on the case.”

  “I did no such thing,” Moore frankly blustered. “I simply called to ask if new facts had come to light. It was my case and I was interested.”

  Hunt decided to jack him up a little to see what would happen. “That may be so,” he said, “but you gave the impression that there would be unstated repercussions down the line if we didn’t stop looking into it.”

  “Someone misinterpreted my intentions,” Moore said. “Besides which, no matter what you’ve heard, I don’t have any power to make repercussions happen to anybody. I’m an old man, and P.S., I’m retired.”

  Hunt met Moore’s eyes and was tempted to believe him. He pulled out his wallet and a business card and held it out. “If your memory kicks in on Evie, would you give me a call?”

  JILL PHILLIPS WALKED INTO HUNT’S OFFICE, looked at him slumped back in his chair leafing through copies of police reports from the stacks of paper piled on the table over by the window, and stopped in her tracks. “When’s the last time you slept?”

  “Recently.”

  “Really? As recently as last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how long did you stay asleep?”

  “Hours.”

  “How many hours? Please be specific.”

  Hunt sighed, put down his current reading. “What can I do for you, Jill?”

  “I was going to ask you about this idiot jury-selection expert I’m supposed to be helping, but I see you exhausted like this, and the mother in me comes out of hiding and gets all protective and weird.”

  “And I appreciate it, but I’m fine.”

  Jill didn’t believe him. “You might consider sharing some of this with us, whatever it is, and I assume it’s this case involving your parents. We are your team, you know. We could be helpful. You could use our talents, meager though they might be.”

  “They’re not meager.” Hunt motioned toward the door. “Who’s out there?”

  “Everybody. Even Mick.”

  Hunt closed his eyes, nodded to himself, then boosted himself to upright. “All right,” he said. “Let’s have a meeting.”

  Now, with a semicircle of troops arranged on chairs in the reception area, he started at the beginning and brought them along through the texted messages, Father Bernard, the discovery of his mother’s murder and his father’s trials, Juhle’s conspiracy theory, Evie Spencer, and finally Jonestown.

  The whole recounting and analysis took less than a half hour, at the end of which Ivan said, “Now I know why I stopped being a cop. Eight years on the street and nothing remotely as interesting as this.”

  “Maybe you can pass the word along to Devin,” Tamara said. “Wyatt’s been trying to poach him for a while now and he’s not biting.”

  “My eventual goal,” Hunt said, “is to decimate the whole PD, get ’em working with us here, and then take over the city as a benign dictator.”

  “I like it,” Mickey said.

  Orloff ran with it, too. “If you’re benign, though, why would you need so many cops?”

  “That’s a good point,” Hunt responded. “In case some people didn’t get it. I’d need an enforcement arm. For my benignity, I mean. If that’s a word.”

  “It should be,” Tamara said. “And of course you’d need a title.”

  “Gotta be emperor.” Ivan had no hesitation. “The city hasn’t had an emperor since Emperor Norton.”

  “Well, there you go,” Mickey put in. “The precedent’s established already. Emperor Hunt. And his merry men.”

  “And women,” Tamara added.

  “I don’t know,” Ivan said. “As titles go, merry men might get a little squirrelly in this town. Especially for a bunch of ex-cops.”

  “True.” Hunt nodded sagely. “But can we keep emperor? I’ve always wanted to be an emperor, now that I’m thinking about it.”

  “But maybe,” Jill finally spoke, “we can back-burner the whole emperor thing for a while and get back to what we were talking about. Which is Wyatt’s real problem. How ’bout that?”

  Two minutes later, any vestige of humor was gone and Hunt was wrapping up again. “I’ve tried to be as complete as I can here,” he said. “If there’s anything that sticks out for any of you as a lead worth pursuing, or that I didn’t take far enough, feel free to speak up. I’m about tapped out.”

  Mickey had the first question. “What about your texter? You got the one phone, which was a burner. Devin knows where it was bought, and probably your texter bought more than the one, right?”

  Hunt nodded. “Likely.”

  “Well, if the clerk sold a bunch to one person, he might remember.”

  “Worth checking,” Hunt said without much enthusiasm.

  Jill cleared her throat and spoke up. “I don’t really get this Jonestown thing. Why does that matter?”

  “I’m not sure it does. Other than Evie Spencer died there.”

  “But your mom wasn’t involved?”

  “Right, or at least not directly, since it happened eight years after she was killed.”

  “And why, again,” Ivan asked, “is Evie important?”

  “I don’t know if she is,” Hunt replied. “She was a friend of my mom’s and her name shows up in the documentation for no apparent reason. But nobody who worked on the trial seems to remember her except Ferrill Moore, who thought he recognized the name but couldn’t remember a contex
t.”

  “Was she married?” Ivan asked.

  “I’m not sure. She had two children, so she might have been.”

  “So maybe the husband’s around? And his last name’s Spencer?”

  Hunt nodded. “Either that or something else. If Spencer was Evie’s maiden name and she kept it, who knows?”

  “Maybe nobody. But I could run with that for a while, see what turns up.”

  “Go for it,” Hunt said.

  “That gives me an idea,” Jill said. “What about Burg’s wife?”

  “Burg?” Hunt forced a tolerant smile. “What about him? Was he even married?”

  “Either way, maybe he’s got family. Brothers, sisters, wife, somebody.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “And he’s a dead guy who showed up at your parents’ place at least twice and maybe more. Maybe he got called in on the domestics, too. There might be something there, is all I’m saying, if we’re down to the dregs.”

  “Which, apparently, we are,” Hunt said. “Although, Jill, that’s a good call.”

  “If we are down to the dregs, information-wise,” Mickey put in, “what about your birth father?”

  “What about him?”

  “If he’s alive, I can’t believe he’s not findable.”

  “You’re welcome to try, but I looked for him first thing when I got his name, Mick. I tried every database we’ve got access to in the universe. There’s like in the high thousands of Kevin Carsons in the country.”

  “What about his social?” His social security number.

  “What about it?”

  “Get him on LexisNexis; you got his address, right?”

  “I’m gratified that I’ve trained you so well, my son, but I’ve already done that. His last address is Fulton Street, where he lived with Margie.”

  “But I thought he was going to work in Texas?”

  “That’s what he said, but there’s no record he actually went.”

  “But he went somewhere, Wyatt. You’re saying there are no addresses associated with his social since he was in jail?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you think somebody killed him?”

  Hunt nodded somberly. “I think it’s possible, but he could have just changed his social, his name, whatever. He was notorious enough and maybe didn’t want to be.”

  “You can just change a social?”

  Hunt had to laugh. “You want a social, Mick, go down to the street and you can get yourself a new one in about fifteen minutes. Ask every undocumented worker in the state if you don’t believe me.”

  Tamara raised her hand, and Wyatt pointed and couldn’t suppress a smile. “You in the back,” he said.

  Her mouth turned up a fraction of an inch. “I’m wondering about the money,” she said. “The traveling money they paid your father to go to Texas.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it’s just laying out there and it’s something we haven’t talked about at all.”

  “I don’t know what there is to say about it. We don’t know anybody connected with this thing that had money back then.”

  “Well, that’s what I was thinking,” Tamara said. “There was somebody.”

  “Jim Jones,” Jill piped in.

  Tamara nodded. “And that brings Jonestown and Evie back into it.”

  14

  THERE WERE NO OTHER CUSTOMERS when Mickey walked into the cell phone section at the Best Buy on Geary. Behind the counter, a tattooed, megapierced salesgirl of about twenty with chopped henna hair was rearranging the display, her back to the store.

  Mickey stood waiting for about a minute that seemed longer before he ventured to knock one time on the counter and say “Excuse me.”

  Nothing.

  Knocking louder this time, he raised his voice as well. “Yo, cell phone person!”

  This time, with a theatrical sigh, the young woman turned. Mickey thought he discerned a slight tinkling from the hardware dangling from her ears. Her name tag read “Den” and she cultivated a look of glazed boredom.

  “Hi.” Mickey, swimming against the current, smiled and followed the protocol. He took out a business card and placed it on the counter. “I’m Mickey Dade, working with Hunt Club private investigators. I wonder if I could ask you a few questions?”

  Den shrugged and said, “Sure.” She met his gaze for a millisecond and then looked over his shoulder with such intensity that Mickey turned around to check out what was there, only to see nothing.

  Coming around back to her, he asked, “Is this where I’d come if I wanted to buy a prepaid phone?”

  For a response, with a barely concealed roll of her eyes, she turned her head, perhaps thinking she was indicating the array of cell phones all around her. “What kind?” she asked in a tone of sublime boredom.

  “You know, where there’s already a certain number of prepaid minutes and . . .”

  She cut him off. “Brand,” she said. “What brand? They’re all the same.”

  “Yes. I mean, I know that. I just wanted to make sure I was talking to someone who could help me.”

  After another pause, she said, “If you want a phone, that would be me.”

  “Okay, well, what I’m here about . . .” Mickey pushed on. “Someone was in here probably in the past week or so and bought a go-phone. In fact, we think he or she might have bought several go-phones at the same time. Offhand, do you remember any customers like that?”

  “A lot of people buy more than one phone.”

  “This might have been three or four or even more.”

  “Okay. That happens. Deals, you know?”

  “Did you have a special deal on them recently?”

  She shook her head once, slowly. “No. Not deals here,” she said. “Not sales. Drug deals. They use the phones once, then toss ’em.”

  “Ah,” Mickey said. “Of course. But I don’t think our person would have looked like your typical drug dealer.”

  “Your typical drug dealer?”

  “I mean, it was probably an older person.”

  “Older people don’t sell drugs?”

  “Well, I mean, yeah, sure, but…​anyway, do any of the people who bought more than one of these phones stand out in your mind?”

  “No.”

  “For a minute there I thought you were going to say yes and describe who it was in great detail.” Flashing what he knew was his winning smile, trying to break through.

  “No.”

  “Okay, how about this? You keep records of what you’ve sold, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “And maybe who you’ve sold to?”

  She sighed heavily. “In theory. But nobody signs up.”

  “But you’ve got records of multiple sales, right? Maybe somebody used a credit card and I could tell who it was from that.”

  She just looked at him. Finally. “You’d have to talk to the manager.”

  “That’s a good idea. Where do I need to go for that?”

  Her shoulders raised a centimeter or so. “Follow the signs,” she said.

  “WYATT’S NOT PICKING UP, SIS,” Mickey said.

  “That’s ’cause he found Mrs. Burg and went out to interview her.”

  “That was fast.”

  “She was still getting a pension check from the city. It was like one call, and bingo. The man’s a wizard sometimes. How’d your thing go?”

  “About, roughly, the worst ever. We may have even gone backward.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Well, Devin was sure that the go-phone was bought at the Geary Best Buy, right? But the girl I talked to…​no, scratch that…​tried to talk to, she has never in her life sold anything to anybody, period. I’ve had better conversations with succulents, I’m not kidding. She didn’t remember anybody buying multiple phones. She didn’t volunteer anything. She barely answered direct questions. Why do people like that get a job working with the public?”

  “That’s one o
f the great questions, Mick, but we’ll take it up another day. Did you get anything at all if Wyatt checks in?”

  “All negatives. I finally went to the manager, a human being at least. We checked receipts and they had twelve multiple sales in the past twenty days, which is about our limit out in time. And all of those were cash. Evidently, you buy a go-phone, you pay cash.”

  “Yeah, but aren’t you supposed to register them somehow where you buy them?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. And how many people do? Guess.”

  “Approximately none?”

  “Exactly none. It’s totally unenforced. And salesclerks, they just put anything they want into the phone itself. Name of buyer: ‘Prepaid.’ Last name: ‘Phone.’ Like that. They don’t make commissions on sales. They’re not motivated. Basically they are clueless and uninterested, my own girl today being the most perfect example ever.”

  “And no videos of purchases? Nothing like that?”

  “No. They’ve got tapes, but they only save ’em for three days. And our texter started long before that. So basically, we’re back at zero with the phones, if you want to pass the word along.”

  “It’s not my favorite message, Mick, but will do.”

  * * *

  AVERY HANDSOME WOMAN, apparently somewhere near her late sixties, stood in the doorway to the downstairs duplex unit as Hunt came up the sidewalk on Balboa from his parking spot two blocks away, checking addresses as he walked. She stepped out while he was still a few buildings down the block and called out with a prim little wave.

  “Mr. Hunt? This is the place.” Advancing on him, she held out her hand. “I’m Elinor Burg and I can’t express how glad I am to see you. Ever since your call I’ve been sitting inside getting more and more excited until I had to get up and wait here by the door so I wouldn’t miss you. And you wouldn’t miss me, the address.”

  She closed her other hand over the one she’d been shaking and held him with both of her hands. “And now I’m afraid I’m just going to be a babbling old fool. But do you realize that nobody in the past thirty-five years has ever wanted to talk to me about Jim’s death? And even before that, right after it happened, nobody really delved into it very far. They all thought it was so obvious, what had happened, I mean. Cops kill themselves all the time. And because of, you know, the gun and all, and the way it looked, nobody seemed to think there was any doubt at all about it. Well, there I go, finally getting to talk and now I’m afraid I’m going to drive you off.”