The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  “Towers. If he calls between your office and the Tenderloin, that narrows down where I’ll find the records. And hey, what about your texter? Any news there?”

  “Nothing new. The last call was where you got ’em at the Ferry Building. I’m thinking they stopped. Whoever it is says I’m getting close and they feel threatened.”

  “And you think your dead guy . . .”

  “Ivan.”

  “You think Ivan might have been part of this? Your texts?”

  “Not impossible, Cal. I’m actually pretty worried about it.”

  “So what are the cops doing? Are you with them?”

  “Not exactly with, but not against, either. They’ll be investigating, too. And I’ll share whatever I get with them. But they’ve got lots of cases they’re working on all at once, whereas me, as of tonight, I’ve got only one.”

  “Okay, I’ll get back to you the minute I get something.”

  “You know the cops will be looking for these numbers, too.”

  “That’s all right. They’ll go through channels with warrants and all that. They’ll never get within a mile of me. We’ll kick their ass.”

  “Okay, Callie. And thanks. I’m really going to owe you.”

  “Are you kidding me? I live for this stuff.”

  WHEN HE FINALLY GOT HOME, he had a message from Tamara asking him to call her whatever time it was. She picked up on the first ring and he had just started to fill her in on what he’d been doing since they’d left one another, when she stopped him.

  “He was still, I mean his body, his body was still there when you got there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you saw him? It was really Ivan, then?”

  “No question.”

  “Oh, Wyatt.”

  “I know, Tam. I know.”

  “So what are we going to do now?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice had a catch in it. “Everything.”

  “Well, first, we’re going to find out who did this, if we can.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “We know what he was looking at with his cases. We’re hoping he’ll have left some clue behind someplace.”

  A silence hung on the line. “You’re telling me you think this was related to something he was working on? With us?”

  “That’s the working assumption. He had an appointment and got ambushed. Maybe, anyway. Nobody knows. But if it’s part of one of his cases, it gives us someplace to look.”

  “But that means we’re working on it, too, doesn’t it? The office, I mean.” She went silent for a beat, then said, “This is getting scary, Wyatt, you know that?” Another pause. “It would be nice to hear you say something.”

  “We don’t know absolutely it was one of his cases, Tam. Devin perked up at the work connection to us because it might give him somewhere to look, that’s all.”

  “That’s not all, Wyatt. You said you agreed with him.”

  “I do agree with him,” he admitted. “I can’t shake the feeling that Ivan’s murder is connected to my mother’s case. When you and I left work tonight, he was on Lexis looking at Spencers. That’s the last thing we know. It’s got to mean something.”

  “You know what I think? I think it means he ran into her killer.”

  “I think you’re right, Tam,” Hunt said. “I think you’re right.”

  16

  DEVASTATION.

  The office was technically still open, but nobody was even pretending to do any work. The phone calls—people reading about it in the paper or seeing the news on television—had started long before Wyatt had gotten in around 8:30, and the ongoing flood kept Tamara marooned at her desk. Blotch faced and teary eyed, Jill holed herself up back in her own office, the door closed. Mickey busied himself drinking coffee and arranging the bouquets that were getting delivered about every fifteen minutes by the law firms and insurance companies with whom they did regular business.

  Hunt sat zombielike in the corner LexisNexis cubicle, staring at the monitor in between fielding phone calls, from time to time making a more or less random search among the Spencers as an idea occurred to him.

  Juhle had called to check in, and Hunt had learned that Callie’s prejudices and skills notwithstanding, formal law enforcement could beat her on a few things, at least. Or maybe she just hadn’t gotten around to looking yet. In any case, armed with Ivan’s cell phone number, Juhle had learned that Ivan’s last and only phone call, back to midafternoon yesterday, had been to his girlfriend.

  Hunt suggested, the idea just occurring to him, that Juhle should try to get ahold of the telephone records from the office’s landline. Ivan was the last one in the office last night. If there had been an outgoing call after about five o’clock, he would have made it. Juhle said that this was a good idea and he’d follow up. Otherwise, they had made no progress on Ivan’s murder.

  Hunt had had another dream in his few hours of sleep and had come in relatively pumped up with the idea that he could locate his father, who after all might still be alive.

  Why this had assumed a sudden urgency was something he couldn’t have explained, even to himself.

  He didn’t know why he hadn’t considered this latest strategy earlier, but he had an address where his father had lived in 1970 and thought that he could find it—as indeed he could, with relative ease. So now he knew who presently lived in his parents’ former apartment, but that turned out to be no help. Kevin Carson was in the database, all right, and associated with the property back then. But that information couldn’t take Hunt anywhere toward the present. Kevin Carson had lived there, but so what? Where was he now? That was the question. And apparently one for which there was no answer.

  Everything had happened so damn long ago.

  TAMARA OPENED THE DOOR and came into Hunt’s darkened inner office, where he lay stretched out on the couch, his eyes closed and his breathing slow and regular. Going down to one knee, she touched his face and whispered his name.

  “I’m here,” he said. “What time is it?”

  “Eleven-thirty, as requested.”

  “You’re a gem.”

  “I am,” she said. “Do you want some coffee?”

  Blinking a couple of times, Hunt boosted himself up. “I can get it.”

  Tamara was back on her feet. “I know you can. I was asking if you’d like me to get it for you.”

  “Did I already say you were a gem?”

  “You did.” She reached down and again touched the side of his face. “Let me go get that coffee.”

  “I will in a minute.” He nodded toward the door. “How are things out there?”

  “About the same. Awful.”

  “I should send everybody home.”

  “Probably.” She stopped at the door. “You want me to get the light?”

  “How about on the way back?”

  The corners of her mouth turned up. “I’ll try to remember.”

  In the dim light, Hunt sat on the couch, still half asleep. Suddenly, cocking his head as though trying to identify a barely audible sound, he then straightened all the way up, crossed over to this desk to get his hands on his folder, and a few seconds later got to his office door going out just as Tamara reached it coming in with his coffee.

  “Tie goes to the runner,” she said, holding it out for him.

  “Thank you.” He took the mug, sipping without slowing down. “I’m an idiot,” he said. “It wasn’t my father. It’s Spencer.”

  Prompted by his dream, he’d come in that morning with his father on his mind, believing—perhaps irrationally—that if he started with his father’s address on Fulton Street back in 1970, he might somehow surf the Lexis wave into the present. When that hadn’t proved to be true, he’d felt himself to be at yet another dead end.

  But in reality, it had just come to him in his latest dozing state that it wasn’t his father’s address he needed if he wanted to locate somebody in the pres
ent, but rather another 1970 address that he did have—Evie’s, from the CPS document Bettina had recovered Monday morning. That address might in fact lead him forward in time to what Ivan had possibly already discovered to his fatal misfortune, the identity of her husband.

  At the LexisNexis terminal, his folder open on his lap, he sipped coffee as his fingers flew over the keys.

  Tamara had followed him over and now hovered. “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m finding it.” Pointing down to his folder, he said, “Here’s the address where Evie lived in 1970, now with its current owners. See this? Now persons associated . . .” He hit another key. The screen scrolled down, and down again, back through the decades. The free-standing house on Arguello—right around the corner from the Fulton Street address where Kevin and Margie had lived—had been sold most recently in 2003. There had been different owners—sales—in 1998, 1991, 1982, 1976, and, finally, the owner Hunt was looking for, who’d bought the place in 1968.

  Tamara rested a hand on his shoulder.

  Hunt pushed a last key and sat back with a contented exhale. “Lionel Spencer,” he said, turning to include Tamara. “Got him.”

  EVEN IN HER HEAVY LEATHER COAT and wearing gloves, Sarah Russo shivered in the gale-force wind that whistled past them. On the sidewalk, she rang the doorbell to the mansion that loomed in front of them behind the rock wall with its heavy iron gate. She and Juhle were at the peak of Russian Hill on Larkin Street, where the cable car line seemed to fall straight off the face of the earth at the nearby intersection. “If I had enough money to own a house here, much less this monster,” she said, “I’d live somewhere else.”

  “But then you wouldn’t have the view.”

  Russo briefly glanced over to her left. Below them spread a stunning panorama, albeit familiar to both of them. A couple of container ships and upwards of fifty sailboats were beating through the whitecaps below. Alcatraz, the Marin shoreline, Angel Island, and the Richmond Bridge all supplied slightly different flavors of eye candy over the gunmetal water. Closer in, the orderly, almost sculpted-looking neighborhood behind the piers and churches of North Beach shone in the nacreous light of late afternoon. “It’s pretty in Antarctica, too, I hear,” Russo said. “As you may know, my motto is, If it’s too cold to play baseball, you don’t want to live there.”

  “Last time I checked we had baseball here.”

  She threw him a look of scorn. “Just ’cause we’ve got a team doesn’t mean it’s not too cold to play.” Shifting her attention back to the gate, she gave it a little kick. “Come on, come on, open up. It’s not like we weren’t invited.”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “Hey, we’re cops. Close enough.”

  LIONEL SPENCER BUZZED THE GATE and they took a winding footpath through a small grove of cypress and juniper about forty feet back from the sidewalk, then up four steps into a covered, circular stoop. He was waiting for them in the open front door, dressed in what appeared to be black silk pajamas under a monogrammed velour bathrobe and matching slippers. “Sorry if I kept you waiting,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t hear the gate bell the first time. I miss deliveries and they’ve got to come back twice. I really ought to get it changed into something louder. You want to come inside?”

  “That would be nice, thank you,” Russo said.

  “Come on, then.” He backed away a step or two, turned around, and started walking, obviously expecting them to close the front door and then fall in behind him. Juhle and Russo shot each other the quick secret look acknowledging that they were dealing with at the very least an eccentric and quite possibly a complete whack job. The thick, shoulder-length white hair, parted in the middle, was another clue.

  They followed him a long way back down the wide Persian runner that covered the hardwood hallway, past three large open rooms on the right and a stairway and other rooms on the left that at a glance seemed devoted to cooking and eating. But the showcase moment was at the end of the hall, where Spencer had been leading them. He stopped just inside the archway and turned back to them, ushering them into a large round glass-enclosed turret, filled with a myriad of plants and even trees and featuring an impressive telescope.

  “Nice room,” Juhle said.

  Spencer nodded. “I spend most of my time here. If you don’t go outside a lot, and I don’t, this is a good substitute. Why don’t we sit down?” He drifted over to a seating area and took one of the chairs in white upholstered fabric while the inspectors sat on either end of the couch.

  Russo said, “We appreciate your agreeing to talk with us.”

  “No problem. Although I don’t have any idea how I can help you. I didn’t know this person who was killed until I met him last night.” Spencer had one leg crossed over the other, his hands folded in his lap.

  “Ivan Orloff,” Juhle said.

  “All right.”

  “You met him last night?” Russo asked.

  “Yes, of course. I had dinner with him at Original Joe’s. When I left, it must have only been a few minutes before he was shot. I’d assumed you knew that. He called me here at home last night. Which I assume is how you got my number, and why you’re here now.”

  “That’s right,” Juhle admitted, though it wasn’t strictly true. Yes, they had traced his phone number from the Hunt Club’s landline, but they’d gotten his name and current address from Wyatt as soon as he’d located it on LexisNexis, and this was why Juhle and Russo were here in the first place. Hunt had also done a Google search on Lionel as soon as he’d located him that had come up maddeningly empty. The man had had no overt connection to Jonestown that Hunt had been able to find; beyond that, Lionel kept such a low general profile that the last activity noted was Lionel’s high bid for a magnum of Screaming Eagle cabernet at a charity auction nearly five years before.

  Due to this relative dearth of information, Juhle and Russo were reduced to taking part in the kind of interview they both hated: essentially a fishing expedition. And there was nothing for it now but for Juhle to cast the first line. “Would you mind telling us what Mr. Orloff wanted to talk to you about?”

  “You don’t know yourselves?”

  A polite smile from Russo. “We’d like to hear it from you, if you don’t mind.”

  “Do you think this might have something to do with why he got killed?”

  “We’re investigating the homicide,” Juhle said. “At the moment, we don’t know why he was killed. We’re talking to anybody who might be able to shed light on that.”

  A frown furrowed Spencer’s brow. “Am I under some kind of suspicion? I told you that we had dinner together, although I cut it a little short.”

  “Why was that?” Russo asked.

  “Well, after a while it became clear that he’d made the appointment with me under false pretenses.”

  Juhle came in. “And what were they?”

  “He said he had some information about my ex-wife, my former wife. Evie. And my children.”

  “Is she recently deceased?” Russo asked, though she knew the answer.

  “No. She died in 1978. In Jonestown. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

  The inspectors exchanged a glance and nodded in tandem.

  “Well, then.” Spencer sat back, his voice going quiet. “It’s still a difficult subject, as I hope you’ll understand.”

  “Of course,” Russo said. “She went down there without you?”

  “Or I would be dead, too, now, wouldn’t I? Though she did take our children,” he added with what sounded like unforced bitterness. “She ruined my life.”

  After a silence, Juhle asked, “So what did Mr. Orloff tell you? About your wife?”

  “Well, that was the point, you see? He didn’t seem to know very much about my wife. He lured me out to talk with him saying he’d come across some new information about them. Not that it would bring any of them back. How could I resist? But that was simply untrue.”

  “So what did he want to see you about
, then?”

  Spencer took a moment to gather himself, scanning the room, running a palm over his cheek, smoothing his hair back. “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. It was all a little bizarre. He asked me about some woman who evidently had been murdered in 1970 or thereabouts and who had apparently known Evie then. They were reopening that case or something like that, he said, and were looking for witnesses of some kind. I don’t know—I don’t think Mr. Orloff really knew—what they were supposed to be witnesses to. I told him I didn’t know the woman and hadn’t known her then, and wished him luck, and that, essentially, was all we talked about. I can’t imagine it had anything to do with his death.”

  Juhle came forward on the couch. “Did you know Jim Jones?”

  Spencer’s mouth twisted. “Yes. Of course. He was a huge part of all of our lives back then.” He scratched at the arm of his chair. “Evie was always searching for something bigger, some ultimate meaning to life, you know. And that’s what Jones was selling. It was a perfect match.”

  “A huge part of all of your lives?” Russo prodded. “Including yours?”

  He nodded with a rueful look. “At the beginning, when it seemed to be making Evie so happy, I joined up to support her. That was the way it worked. Jones got you, and if your spouse didn’t want to sign on, you had to dump the spouse, or your parents and kids and anything else that wasn’t part of the temple. So I stayed on at first, until I just…​I couldn’t anymore, that was all.” He fixed on the sympathetic Russo. “This really is painful,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  It was a dismissal. Spencer lifted himself up and out of his chair, and the two inspectors got to their feet. “Well,” Russo said, “thanks for your cooperation.”

  He shrugged. “For all the help I’ve been. But before you leave, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “This reopened murder case that Mr. Orloff was talking about. Is that something you’re all working on, too? I mean the real police?”

  “I’ve looked at it a little,” Juhle said. “And it’s technically not reopened. It’s still just plain open, since no one’s ever been convicted. And there’s no statute of limitations on murder, so it’s not going away. Why?”