“All right.” Hunt stood up. “Sooner would be better. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Gotcha.” Juhle flashed a phony smile. “Thanks for stopping by.”
HUNT HAD ALREADY PACKED. He had a flight to Minneapolis that left at 6:15, continuing to Indianapolis the next morning. But he stopped by the more than desultory office to underscore his directive that nobody was to do any work at all on his mother’s case. If anybody—Juhle or Bernard or anybody else—called in on updates, they were to take no action. Just convey the messages to him. He understood that it had only been Tuesday—two days ago—when he’d sat them all down and included them in that investigation, but now because of what had happened to Ivan, he was taking them off it.
“But we don’t even know Ivan was on that, not for sure.” Mickey sat on one of the credenzas against the windows in Hunt’s office.
Hunt, on the couch next to Tamara, nodded in agreement. “Maybe not. But I believe it with all my heart, and that’s what I’ve got to go on, Mick. This guy’s already been flushed once, and I don’t think Ivan ever saw it coming. I don’t want him to think this agency is somehow on his case. We’re done with it, back to our regular work.”
“Except for you,” Tamara said.
“Right. Except for me. But I’m getting out of Dodge and letting Devin and Russo do their work here.” He half turned. “Jill,” he asked, “are you good with this?”
From the upholstered chair next to Hunt, Jill cast her gaze upward and blew out a deep sigh. Now, her eyes back on Hunt, with her fingertips she smoothed away the tears on her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m not really listening. I’m still…I mean, I can see him sitting here just the other day.”
“I know,” Hunt said. “It’s brutal.”
Tamara reached over and placed a consoling hand over one of Jill’s. “It’s all right,” she said. “Not really listening, I mean. It’s just so hard to imagine, or accept.”
Jill shook her head. “I don’t want to accept it, that’s the problem. I want him back here, the way we were.”
“We all do,” Tamara said. Then again, “We all do.”
Jill closed her eyes for a moment, gathering herself. Suddenly, she straightened her back. “It’s just so wrong,” she said.
“It is,” Hunt agreed. “Which is why I don’t want any of you out there working on any part of this, maybe giving this lunatic another target.”
Tentative, obviously coming to some kind of acceptance, Jill finally asked, “So it’s your assumption that the person who killed Ivan also killed your mother?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“We could help with this,” Jill continued.
“We want to,” Mickey added. “Take down the son of a bitch.”
But Hunt shook his head. “I appreciate that, both of you, I really do, but number one, Devin and Russo will have our heads if we show up around this thing at all. They promised me that this morning. I’ve given them all my notes. They know what we’ve got so far, and now the smartest thing we can do is just lie low. Make this guy think he’s either scared us off or that Ivan was acting alone.”
“What’s number two?” Tamara asked. “Why we can’t help?”
“Number two is it’s just too risky. This madman sees any threat and he eliminates it. So I don’t want any of you hitting his radar. Let the cops close in on him if they can.”
“You just said something that gave me an idea,” Jill said. “He killed your mother because she was a threat.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know. Something or somebody. At least it’s a motive of some kind, and that’s been missing all along, hasn’t it? This is a reason she might have been killed.”
Hunt nodded. “I’m going to keep that in mind, Jill. That’s an interesting idea.”
“Okay, so what about your texter?” Mickey asked.
“What about my texter?”
Mickey shifted his position on the credenza, obviously unhappy with this whole strategy of disengagement. “There ought to be some way we can reach out and try to make some contact again. Put an ad in the paper. Something.”
“And then what?” Hunt asked. “This person doesn’t want to go public, Mick. And because of Ivan, I think now we understand a little better why that is, don’t we?”
An unsettled silence descended.
Until finally Mickey sighed. “So what do we do, Wyatt? Just forget it?”
“That’d be best,” Hunt said. “If the police have questions, answer them, but don’t go to them and don’t go out on your own. Especially don’t meet with clients you don’t know. Be aware if you find yourselves in sketchy areas. In fact, avoid them altogether.” He paused. “And don’t think I don’t know you all think I’m paranoid. Maybe I am. But I’m still dealing with some issues about responsibility for Ivan . . .”
A small chorus of objections made Hunt raise a hand.
“Whether or not you agree with me, it’s something I’m living with, okay? If I’d have known this was going to happen, I would have let my mother rest in peace, but now that it’s gotten to here, I need to play it out. But none of you do.” He took a beat and met the eyes of his troops, one at a time. “Really,” he said. “Really really really.”
JILL AND MICKEY WERE BACK at their stations. Tamara closed the door to Hunt’s office when they went out and now she and Hunt were both on their feet, facing each other, in the middle of a conversation.
“I just don’t know what you hope to accomplish there,” Tamara said.
“I’m not too sure of that, either. Maybe nothing, but I’ve got to go and find out.”
“Find out what?”
“If there was any relationship between my mother and Jim Jones.”
“And what if there was? What does that get you?”
“I don’t know. Knowledge. Motive. Certainty.”
“Again, Wyatt, about what?”
“About all these tenuous connections, Tam. Evie and Lionel Spencer, my mom and dad, Jonestown. Right now it’s all just conjecture that all these things hook up at some point. There’s a huge gap, and not just a time gap, in what happened. Everything in me is screaming for an answer to close up that gap, and I haven’t been able to find it here, so I’m going there to look.”
She stood with her arms crossed, her jaw set. “Okay, but everything in me is screaming for you not to go, Wyatt. I’ve got a very bad feeling about it. You should do what you ordered us all to do and just let this go. Let Devin handle it. It’s his job now.”
“Maybe it’s his job, but it’s my mother. I’ve come this far. I need to know what happened to her. How it all happened. That’s my job. That’s my duty.”
“No, it isn’t! That is just so wrong, Wyatt.” She moved a step closer to him. “Listen. Don’t you see? Your duty isn’t to your mother anymore, if it ever was. She’s long gone, Wyatt. Dead, dead, dead. It’s Devin’s duty, it’s Devin’s job, to find this killer, her killer.”
“Okay, but . . .”
“No ‘but.’ Your duty, your job, is to your future. If I’m going to believe everything we’ve said to each other in the last week, your duty is to our future, to you and me. Don’t you see that? Don’t you believe it?”
“I do believe it, Tam. But I’ve got to do this, too. I’ve got to find out.”
Tam’s voice broke. “What if finding out gets you killed, Wyatt? What about that? What am I supposed to do then?”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
A bitter laugh. “Yeah, well, Ivan didn’t think it was going to happen, either. He never thought about it at all. And now look.”
Hunt hung his head, raised it back up. “I’m not going to get killed. I’m going to go out there and find out what I need and then come back here and start our future without a killer hanging over our heads.”
She closed the last of the space between them, reached out, and grabbed him by both arms. “Wyatt.” Her pleading v
oice near a whisper. “Let’s just get away from here, right now, me and you. Not someplace where you can work on this case. Just away, anywhere else. Let this whole thing work its way out, and when Devin makes his arrest in a day or a week, we come back and it’s all over, just as if you’d been a part of it. Except we’d have had our time. We’d have started.”
“We have started, Tam. We’re together.”
“We’re not. Not yet.”
Wyatt exhaled completely, closing his eyes. “Tam.”
“Just say yes.” Gripping his arms. “Say yes, damn it!”
Letting out another breath, he couldn’t dredge up the word.
Tamara let go of his arms, let her hands drop.
“I’m sorry,” Hunt said. “I’ll be back in a few days. We’ll work this out then.”
19
HUNT LANDED AT AROUND MIDNIGHT and checked in at his hotel in Minneapolis. When he got to his room, he dropped his bag by the bed and turned right away to go out again to the lobby bar, which was the only sign of life at the place, although it wasn’t what he’d call hopping. Three men about his age, whom he took to be businessmen who’d be flying out about the same time he was next morning to another midwestern city, each sat a stool or two apart from one another, watching ESPN, eating from their little individual tray of nuts, sipping their cocktails.
Hunt picked a spot at the very end of the bar, where the TV wasn’t quite facing him. A somewhat faded pretty redhead—her name tag said “Adrienne”—placed a napkin in front of him. “You just made it, hon. Last call’s in five. What’ll it be?”
Hunt didn’t want a drink so much as he wanted company, although that wasn’t exactly it, either. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He just didn’t want to be physically alone. The entire drive down from the city to the San Francisco airport, and then during the flight out, he’d beaten himself up over his last moments with Tamara. His stomach had been knotted up back when he’d left his office, and it was knotted up now.
He’d called her when he’d landed and of course she hadn’t picked up and he’d said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is a mistake. I’ll try to make it up to you.”
He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to do that and it made him sick.
Now he gave Adrienne a weary smile and ordered a double Hendrick’s on the rocks and she said, “I don’t have that. What is it?”
“Gin,” he said. “Little round dark bottle?”
“Nope. Never heard of it. How about Beefeater?”
“An eminently fine drink,” he said. “Beefeater would be fine.”
“Still double?”
“Sure.”
“Rocks?”
“Yep.”
“Vermouth?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Olive or onion or lime?”
Hunt threw a grin at her. “I’ve built model airplanes with less directions.”
She didn’t take offense and smiled back at him. “Just trying to get it right, honey. Gin drinkers can be darn persnickety.”
“I’ve heard about that. I’m not one of ’em.”
“Good for you. I’ll breathe a little easier.” She moved off a few feet to his right, threw ice in a glass, and took the gin bottle from the well, free-pouring to the rim. “So where you off to tomorrow?” she said as she put the drink on his napkin.
“Indianapolis.”
“Nice town. Super friendly folks.”
“That’d be nice. I could use some friendly.”
“You’ll find it there,” she said. Moving off a couple of steps, she tapped on the bar. “Last call, gentlemen.” For the next few minutes, she refilled glasses and chatted amiably with the other customers before coming back to stand in front of Wyatt. “Top yours? Last chance.”
“Sure.”
She put the rim-filled drink back down in front of him and reached out her hand. “Adrienne,” she said.
“I guessed.” Shaking her hand, Hunt said, “Wyatt.”
“I love that name. I’m an OK Corral freak. I actually went to Tombstone three years ago on my vacation. You mind all this chattering?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty much.”
“ ’Cause I’d stop.”
“I think I just said I don’t mind.”
“You did. I heard you.”
“Well, then.”
“So where you in from?”
“San Francisco.”
“And that’s not a friendly town?”
Hunt shrugged. “Sometimes not so much. It’s colder than people think it is. But why do you ask that?”
“Because you just said you could use a little friendly. That sounded like you weren’t getting a lot of it.”
Hunt twirled his glass. “It’s been a challenging couple of weeks,” he said. Then figured what the hell and came out with it. “An employee of mine got killed on a job I sent him on.”
“Oh my God,” she said, “that’s awful.”
“Yeah. It is.” He paused. “So maybe it’s not so much unfriendly as just hard. If I hadn’t…well, but I did.”
“That is hard, but these accidents happen.”
“It wasn’t an accident. I’m a private investigator and he was murdered.”
The revelation backed her up a step, her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Wyatt, honey,” she said. “I am so sorry. That is truly terrible.”
“Yep.” He let out a long breath, sipped at his gin, forced a half smile. “You mind all this chattering? ’Cause I’d stop.”
She patted his hand. “You go ahead, hon. Whatever you need to say.”
“I’m out here…Indianapolis, I mean, I’m going there trying to run down some clues about his killer if I can. The woman I love thinks I’m a fool coming out here.”
“Why is that?’ Scuse me one sec.” The customer nearest to Hunt was pushing back his stool and she raised a hand to him. “Thanks, hon,” she said. “See you next time. Sleep tight.” And then he was gone and she came back to Hunt. “So why would you be a fool doing what you’re doing?”
“Because it might be dangerous. Because I feel like I need to.”
“He was your employee and you feel responsible?”
“Right. Dumb, maybe, but right.”
“But maybe not so dumb.”
“Tell that to Tamara.”
“Tamara! I just love your names out there, hon. I don’t know I’ve ever met a Tamara. Wyatt and Tamara, I can just see the two of you together.”
“Maybe not for long. She thinks I’m betraying her. I don’t know. Maybe I am. I love her, but I’ve got to do this.”
The two other guys tipped up their glasses and left their tips and got their good-nights from Adrienne, and when they were gone she came back down around the bar and pulled up a stool next to Hunt. “I want to tell you a little story, Wyatt, and then I’m kicking your cute little ass out of here.
“After nine eleven, my husband, Matt, decided he had to join up. He felt it was his responsibility. I couldn’t talk him out of it, and believe me, I tried. I tried and I tried and I tried. But he went anyway and sure enough got sent to Iraq and sure enough got himself killed over there.”
She sucked in a deep breath and then blew it out heavily. “And all I can say is that I promise you, if he’d have come back, I would have forgiven him. I wouldn’t have thought about it. I would have just been glad he was back. And oh, I hated him while he was gone and then for a while after, but that was who he was and I still don’t regret that he was the man I picked to love. And I’d do it again, I swear.”
She sighed again, then reached over, picked up Hunt’s drink, tacitly asked his permission, got a nod, and took a serious sip. “People do what they gotta do, hon. Don’t let her give up on the two of you, and don’t you do it, either. Call her up. Keep her close. Goddamn it.”
Leaning over, she planted a quick kiss on his cheek. “Now go on and get the hell out of my bar, Wyatt. And you sleep tig
ht.”
THE INTERROGATION ROOMS just off the homicide detail were barely larger than closets, with room to hold only a small table and three chairs, one on one side, two on the other. A decade ago, moonlighting homicide cops had built them in their off-hours to save department budget dollars for their own overtime rather than waste that money on the city’s union contractors who would probably screw up the job and take too long getting it done anyway.
Sadly, the jury-rigged version they wound up with contained some parts that did not perform as well as expected, either. For example, the video cameras, mounted at ceiling level, were supposed to record not just a voice but a suspect’s face and mannerisms during interrogations. Unfortunately, the sight angle from its height was so steep that it could only capture the top of a suspect’s head. In effect, the video camera was useless.
The insulation and ventilation in these rooms ranged from substandard to nonexistent. Hence, there was very little soundproofing, which not only made the audio tapes difficult to transcribe, but also created some embarrassment when inspectors in the detail, as sometimes happens, said unkind things and politically incorrect things about the folks being questioned in the booths. Or vice versa.
Finally, the rooms quickly become overheated when there were two inspectors and hence three bodies packed inside the constrained space, but—a much worse problem from the inspectors’ point of view—frequently the individuals being questioned were hygienically challenged.
Such a person was the twenty-four-year-old Hispanic male named Jesus Chavez, a.k.a. Chewey Shavez (his spelling), currently waiting for the return to the interrogation booth of either Devin Juhle or Sarah Russo. Those two inspectors had first gone into the room for the interrogation together, but within fifteen minutes, the combined heat and stench—for Chewey had apparently not bathed in at least two weeks, if then—necessitated a tactical retreat and a tag team approach that they’d been keeping up now for the past hour or so.
The Hunter Page 19