The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  Hunt brought his other hand up to cover hers. “You’re not going to drive me off. You can just keep talking all day.”

  “Well, all right, but maybe we should move inside.” Astoundingly to Hunt, she brought all four of their hands up to her mouth and quickly kissed his.

  She cut a trim figure in blue jeans, with a generous bosom under a couple of layers of beige sweaters. She’d tastefully applied a light coral lipstick and a brush of eye shadow and mascara to accent her green eyes. Her gray hair was pulled back rather severely, revealing the facial bone structure and announcing that she had been extraordinarily attractive when she’d been younger. She was attractive still.

  She held the door and closed it after them, then led the way into the living room, which fronted the street. Plantation shutters over the picture windows. Light hardwood floors and a Navajo rug, brown leather couch and two matching chairs, with a coffee table, a built-in wall of books, and a fireplace. Pointing out the framed pictures on the mantel, she said, “Obviously, that’s Jim in the uniform. Then Tim, Douglas, and Carol each when they graduated from college. And these others are all my pride and joys, the grandchildren, though I won’t bore you with all their names.”

  “Good-looking family,” Hunt said.

  “That’s all, Jim,” she said. “He was great-looking, as you can see.” Her chest rose and fell in an unconscious sigh. “I can make some coffee in about two minutes if you’d like some. I’ve got one of those new espresso makers and Peet’s French roast, which is the best, you know.”

  “I could do that,” Hunt allowed. “Black and a little sugar?”

  “Done.” She told him to have a seat, and Hunt took one of the easy chairs and, while he waited, felt his eyes drawn back to the smiling husband who still had such a presence in this home thirty-five years after his death.

  And then she was back, carrying a tray of biscotti, a bowl of sugar, and their two cups. Putting the tray down on the coffee table, she sat catercorner to him in the other easy chair. “I promised myself in there that I wasn’t going to come back in here and start rambling on again. You’re the one who called and said you had some questions you wanted to ask me, so maybe I should let you ask them. How’s that sound?”

  “To tell you the truth, you were hitting some of the notes I thought we might talk about. I gather, for example, that you’re not convinced that your husband killed himself.”

  She placed a lump of sugar in her coffee and stirred for a long moment. “I don’t want to mislead you,” she said. “There was no evidence that he didn’t. Maybe I was just a foolish young wife who didn’t recognize the signs and didn’t want to believe he’d leave me, leave us all, like that.”

  “What were the signs?”

  “Well, that’s just it. That’s what I’m saying. If there were any signs, I didn’t see them. It just was completely out of the blue. He seemed…​no, he was happy. We were good, the kids were healthy, we had plenty of money…​I mean, not rich, but okay. Plus, the job was going so well. He’d just been promoted to inspector, and the future, from my point of view anyway, looked really bright.”

  Hunt sipped the coffee—it really was remarkable—to give himself time to keep the excitement out of his voice. “I didn’t realize,” he said, “that he’d been promoted.”

  She nodded. “A couple of months before. Which of course helped a ton with the pension, not that I wouldn’t have gladly given it up.” Sighing again, she added, “But that was just another reason it didn’t make any sense. I mean, it’s a hurdle, you know. You go through a lot, especially if you’ve got three kids, to study for the sergeants exam and then you do pass and finally make inspector and suddenly it’s a different career than a patrolman’s.” She met his eyes. “You don’t make inspector and then kill yourself two months later, Mr. Hunt. You just don’t.”

  “I can see that.”

  “It was very hard,” she said. “And as I say, I might have been wrong. Nobody else seemed to have any doubts.” She took another sip of her coffee, then shook her head. “I don’t know. Has this been any help to you?”

  “It might be,” Hunt said. “It might come into play at some point.”

  “Into play with what?”

  “The case I’m working on.”

  Hunt saw this admission—that he wasn’t here primarily to investigate Jim Burg’s suicide—take a toll on her. “When you said you wanted to ask me a few questions about Jim,” she said, “I thought it would be about this. I thought somebody might be looking back into this for some reason.”

  “It might become part of what I’m doing,” he said. “But what I’m really investigating is another case where your husband had a very small role. He was the arresting officer on a murder case about three or four years before he died.”

  To Hunt’s surprise, she nodded. “That would have been the Carsons.”

  “Exactly,” Hunt said. “If you don’t mind my asking, how could you have remembered that?”

  She let out a small laugh. “Well, it’s not as though Jim was involved in a lot of murder cases, Mr. Hunt. He was a patrolman. He never got to homicide as an inspector. I think…​was his name Kevin? I think Kevin Carson was the only time he ever arrested a murderer. And actually, that came up a lot between us when he went to trial.”

  “What did?”

  “That he’d been the first one there and had to put handcuffs on him.”

  Hunt turned his coffee cup around in its saucer. “And so…​was that significant to him for some reason?”

  She nodded again. “Oh, very.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Well, because he didn’t think Kevin was guilty. But he was the first one to the scene after the call, you know. And if the man’s standing there over the victim with blood on his hands and you’re a cop, your job is to get him into custody if you can, which is what Jim did.”

  “Why didn’t he think Kevin was guilty?”

  “I think mostly because he knew him.”

  When Hunt picked his jaw up, he asked, “You mean they were friends?”

  “No, no, no. But Jim had gone on some calls to their apartment—squabbles and things like that—a couple of times, where a neighbor would complain, and Jim would have to go up and help settle things down. And he’d talk to them and see what the problems were, and he got to know them a little. I know that might sound a little strange, but that’s the way Jim was. He didn’t judge people. Plus,” she said, “he kind of identified with them a little. They evidently had a little boy about Douglas’s age. They were a young couple just trying to get their feet on the ground and they didn’t have much going for them. That was how Jim saw it anyway. He said when he put the handcuffs on Kevin, he apologized and Kevin said it wasn’t a big deal because he didn’t kill his wife and he was sure they’d figure that out soon enough. Except they didn’t.”

  “But they didn’t convict. You know that, right? And they tried twice.”

  “I know. Such a waste of time and energy. Actually, Jim followed it all pretty closely.” She chuckled. “Me, I had three kids, ’nuff said.”

  Perhaps inadvertently, Elinor had opened another window a crack, and Hunt took a second, then decided to push at it. “So if Jim didn’t think Kevin was guilty, did he have another theory as to who might be?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And?”

  “And you’re going to hate this, but he didn’t want to mention any names, even to me, before he had evidence, and he never had time to get any.”

  “In four years?”

  “No. It wasn’t four years. He was only an inspector for two months. And he felt that there wasn’t any real point in looking into anything while the trials were still going on. Besides which, being a patrolman…​that’s not something patrolmen do. They don’t go looking for killers. Even inspectors not assigned to homicide don’t usually go looking for killers. Poaching on homicide detail turf makes you enemies.”

  Hunt could relate. He tipped
up the last of his coffee, then put the cup on its saucer and sat back. “Then the second trial ended, and by that time he was an inspector?”

  “Close, anyway. Within a few months.”

  “So he could look? And question people?”

  She hesitated, remembering. “He thought it would be a feather in his cap if he could come up with something everybody else had missed, but he just never got the time.” She gave Hunt a hopeful smile. “And you being here tells me he would have found something, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know that. I’m not finding much. Just more questions.”

  “Yes, but they’re not just questions, are they, Mr. Hunt? Do you have any idea how much those questions mean to me, even if you don’t have any answers for them?” She put down her cup and fixed him in her gaze. “Those questions give me a reason to believe that Jim didn’t kill himself after all. Do you realize that? He found something and confronted somebody and got killed for it. He didn’t leave us. Somebody took him. And that’s a whole different thing. Completely different.” A tear broke down her cheek. “I’m sorry.”

  Hunt reached out and handed her a napkin from the biscotti tray. She dabbed at her eyes.

  “I’m sorry to have upset you.”

  She broke a brittle laugh through her tears. “Oh, but you haven’t upset me,” she said. “This is relief. This is happiness. This is redemption.” She glanced up at the photograph of her husband on the mantel. “Oh, God. Jim. Why did I ever doubt you?”

  Hunt left her to her emotions for a moment. Her newfound explanation for her husband’s death, though perhaps far-fetched, was not after all impossible. She could accept it as a comforting truth without having to prove any part of it.

  Hunt did not have that luxury—he needed some answers. “Let me ask you this, Elinor,” he said after she’d regained some composure. “Did Jim ever mention a woman named Evie See Christ?”

  “IF HE DID,” Hunt said, “she has no memory of it.”

  At their spot at the corner of Boulevard’s bar, true dusk still an hour away, Tamara took a sip of her Cosmo. “But we know she was Margie’s friend. You and her kids played together, right?”

  “I don’t know if played is the word. We were locked in an apartment together for a few hours at least once and evidently made a lot of noise. That’s all I know, except Father Bernard says they were friends and she was around a lot.”

  “And Kevin didn’t like her. Evie, I mean.”

  “Right. But that doesn’t mean she had anything at all to do with anything. All this sniffing around Evie, and what do we have to show for it?” Hunt swirled the ice cube in his Scotch with his index finger. “She’s just a trail that goes nowhere.”

  “Except Jonestown.”

  “Which is pretty much your definition of dead end, isn’t it? And speaking of that, you want to hear a scary thought I had driving back here tonight?”

  “More than anything.” She put her hand over his. “No, really.”

  “I was thinking about if my mom hadn’t been killed when she was and she’d kept hanging out with Evie, there was a pretty good chance she and my dad would have broken up over money or religion or something. Which would have left Evie as her only friend in the world. So Evie hooks into the People’s Temple and my mom goes along with her, taking me with them. And guess where we all wind up?”

  “Wyatt.” But gently. Tamara squeezed his hand. “Do you want to count out loud how many ifs are in there?”

  “I know,” Hunt said.

  “But all this is still knocking its way around inside you, isn’t it?”

  He let out a breath. “Must be.”

  After a minute, Tamara leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You’re not going to want to hear this, but maybe you ought to think about taking a little break.”

  He turned to her, his face hard. “I don’t want to do that at all.”

  “I believe I just predicted that response.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek again. “But really.”

  Hunt lifted his glass, put it back down. “Somebody killed my mother, Tam,” he said evenly, “and got away with it. How can I let that go?”

  “You just walk away. Forget about your texter. You don’t know what the motivation is there. The texter might even be who you’re looking for, you ever think of that? Maybe lure you into some kind of trap that would wind up hurting you. Or worse.”

  Hunt shook his head. “That’s not happening.”

  “Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? We don’t know what’s happening. We haven’t gotten anywhere.” She lowered her voice. “Your mother died forty years ago, Wyatt. Your father’s been gone thirty-six or so. Meanwhile, you’ve built a good business and a great life. And looking into all this the way you are has just been tearing you up.”

  “This is unusual stuff, Tam. I’m trying to work it out.”

  “I know it is. I know you are.” She rubbed her hand over his arm. “And I know you said that you needed to solve this for your own peace of mind, too. But look what’s happening. You’re not sleeping. You’re having nightmares and these Jonestown scenarios you’re in the middle of. That’s not peace of mind. That’s torment.”

  “Which ends when I get an answer.”

  “No guarantee of that. And that’s only if that answer doesn’t hurt or kill you.”

  “Now you’re being melodramatic.”

  “Not really, Wyatt. Not really. You are trying to find somebody who committed murder forty years ago, and maybe again with Jim Burg, and has gotten clean away with it all this time. And you think when you get close, they’re just going to go gently along with you or Devin? I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m being melodramatic at all.”

  Theodore appeared in front of them. “You kids having a good time?”

  Tamara half turned, shamefaced. “Was I being loud?”

  “Enthusiastic,” Theodore said, understanding and avuncular. He pointed to their drinks. “Get you both another round?”

  “Not for me,” Hunt said.

  “I’m good, thanks.” Tamara pushed her cocktail glass away from her to the edge of the bar’s gutter. Waited while Theodore moved down away from them, then came back to Hunt. “I didn’t mean to get mad.”

  “You have a point,” Hunt said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” He, too, pushed his drink away, turned to face her. “Do you want to go someplace quieter?”

  “Except that after I get there,” she said, “it won’t be.” Then she put her arm around his neck, came forward, and kissed him on the lips. About ten seconds later, the kiss ended and she pulled away. “But let’s give it a try.”

  * * *

  CONNIE JUHLE WALKED OUT OF THE KITCHEN and into the small dining room, where her family and a couple of tonight’s strays from the neighborhood—the boys’ pals Steve and Rasdip—were making an ungodly racket at the table. As far as she could tell, her two boys and Steve were arguing about—what else?—football, and Devin and the other two kids were taking it to the mat about whether Glee was better than Friday Night Lights, as if—in Connie’s opinion—there could even be any discussion about the matter.

  It was glorious, she thought, all this noise. There wasn’t an ounce of shyness in Devin or in any members of the family they’d made together, and the friends her kids brought home mostly seemed to fit that mold as well. So it was always loud in their house, and she loved it.

  Connie had grown up in a family of academics where if NPR got left on so that you could even hear a whisper of it in the next room, someone would be dispatched to go in and please turn the darn thing down. The first time Devin had picked her up at her parents’ home, now a million years ago, he’d honked his horn from the street several times, and that had just about done it in terms of winning her heart. When she’d opened the door, he’d howled from the car in excited greeting, and she’d howled back, ignoring her parents’ patent disapproval, and that—it had seemed—was that.

  Now she carried a large ceramic platter on
to which she’d piled his favorite meal, spaghetti in the middle with a circle of her famous homemade meatballs around it. They were already well into the garlic bread. Devin, she noticed, had popped the Two-buck Chuck and already had filled her glass—first things first.

  “Anybody want some spaghetti?” she called out as she entered, to a round of applause. Placing the platter in the middle of the table, she pulled out her chair and sat down. Someone had also saved her two pieces of the garlic bread and put them on her plate. “Salad clockwise,” she said, “spaghetti counterclockwise.”

  When everybody was served, Devin rang his glass and everybody went quiet. “Ras, you want to do the Tofu Moment tonight?”

  Due to the extraordinary diversity of San Francisco, of which the kids’ friends made a representative sampling, it had early on become clear in the house that Devin’s familiar old Catholic “Bless us, O Lord” grace wasn’t really going to cut it. So Connie had come up with the idea of the Tofu Moment, in which everybody held hands on both sides, and someone offered a nondenominational acknowledgement that they were all eating together and life was good. Different volunteers, guests as well as family, were pressed into service and had to say something—by now it was old hat to the regulars—and at the end, the whole table screamed “Hey men!” Loud.

  Rasdip held Connie’s hand on one side and Alexa’s up off the table with their fingers intertwined and Connie made a note to keep an eye on the two of them as the young man said, “It’s great to be here with all of you and thank you, Mrs. Juhle, for this awesome, awesome food, which tonight is like my total favorite.”

  “Wait for it,” Juhle said.

  The chorus erupted. “Hey men.”

  And Juhle’s cell phone rang.

  “Let it go,” Connie said. “Check it after dinner.”