The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  “All right, truce.”

  “So how’s it been going there?”

  “Pretty much a waste of time. Nice people, decent food, no information. It’s all too old. You were probably right. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Except you felt you had to.”

  “Yeah, except that. Stupidly.”

  “Maybe not. You didn’t know that then. I’m sorry I freaked out. So,” she continued, “has Devin really got a suspect in all this?”

  “Better. A suspect who killed himself rather than get arrested. Lionel Spencer.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s the word.”

  “So when are you coming home?”

  “Barring unforeseen developments, I’ve got tickets for tomorrow. I should be in around dinnertime, if you’re going to be free.”

  “I could clear my calendar.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “What unforeseen developments, though?”

  “If I knew that, they wouldn’t be unforeseen, would they? But I’ve got a reporter looking into a few things. Maybe she’ll get lucky.”

  “She?”

  “Lynn.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Gorgeous. Pretty much a Reese Witherspoon look-alike. Except not.”

  “And if she finds something, you’ll be staying?”

  “Depends on what it is. It’s not impossible, but it’s not very likely, either. And since Devin’s already got Spencer, it would have to be pretty dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “I’m just saying. You’re already there. If you need to stay on, just let me know, would you? We’ll have a dinner date another night. Maybe a whole bunch of them before we’re through. I’ll understand, promise.” A short silence hung on the line. “Why don’t you call me when you’re getting on the plane? Or if you’re not.”

  * * *

  HUNT NEVER GOT BACK TO SLEEP. The three hours he’d crashed between dinner and Tamara’s call was all he managed. Sometime in the dead dark, he’d gotten up and poured himself two miniature bottles of vodka from the honor bar in his room and drank them off neat, hoping they’d help knock him out.

  They didn’t.

  At eight o’clock, he got the phone call from Lynn Sheppard. She had something, but didn’t want to say what it was over the phone. Yes, it was substantive, possibly conclusive. Yes, he had to come down and see her, how about ten? And yes, it might take up a good portion of the rest of the day.

  So Hunt left a message with Tamara and then canceled his flights.

  Stretched out on his bed, hands over his eyes, he tried to control his breathing against the incessant throbbing in his head. Desperate to summon another solid block of sleep—an hour, ninety minutes, anything—he stayed in bed as long as he could before he absolutely had to get up if he was to be on time. But some internal voice had seemed to keep insisting that if he slept, he would just have another nightmare.

  His brain wouldn’t simply shut up and let him be.

  The upshot being that when he finally gave up on sleep and got moving, he didn’t have time to shave or shower or even put on a new set of clothes.

  It was all right, he told himself, he’d catch up with all of that after he found out what Lynn had discovered. In his bathroom, he saw that he still looked okay, certainly presentable, if a little the worse for wear. He swallowed four aspirin, then for breakfast grabbed a to-go black coffee from the urn in the hotel’s lobby.

  Now, at ten o’clock, Hunt was back at the redbrick Indianapolis Star building, checking in at the guard desk. Lynn, who seemed herself to be running on adrenaline and caffeine, appeared from somewhere in the building and as she walked with him to her cubicle in the city room, she couldn’t hold in her enthusiasm.

  “I’m just so glad I caught you before you got on that plane, Wyatt. And I didn’t mean to be coy with you on the phone, but things like this, you don’t want to say too much to anybody, even somebody as closely involved as you are. Word gets out, and next thing you know, there’s your story under somebody else’s byline. Especially in today’s world, you might text somebody who puts it on Facebook, and next thing you know it goes viral and then where are you? Out to lunch is where.”

  “No problem,” Hunt said, though in actual fact he was truly frustrated. “But I really wasn’t out shopping this to anybody else.”

  “I’m not saying you were, dear. Of course not. It’s just the world we live in. And the fact that I’ve come to believe in this story of yours, more so now than ever. Just pull up a chair there and let me show you what I’ve got.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  She sat down across from him at her desk and took several sheets of paper out of her briefcase and passed them over to Wyatt.

  The first was a Xerox of a portion of a newspaper page from 1964, featuring a picture of a man who appeared to be in his midthirties standing surrounded by a half dozen teenage girls in the serving line of what was identified in the caption as a soup kitchen. Four of the children were African-American, but there was one pretty white girl whom the caption identified as Margie Page.

  Hunt’s mother at fifteen.

  To Wyatt, exhausted and wired at the same time, it felt like all the blood was draining from his face. Before he even turned to the next picture, he raised his eyes and looked across at Lynn Sheppard. “How in the world did you find this?”

  She leaned back, beaming, the pride in her work exuding from her every pore. “Well, as we realized yesterday, the odds of finding your mother by just looking randomly through old newspapers were about zero. On the other hand, sometime late last night it occurred to me that Jim Jones really had quite a large profile in the city when he lived here. He was all over the place.” She pointed to the picture he was holding. “That soup kitchen, for example. He set up several of them. And a couple of nursing homes. All kinds of stuff. And he was just a pure publicity junkie, in the paper for one thing or another at least every week or two.”

  Hunt turned to the second page, another photograph from another old newspaper, another picture of his teenage mother as part of a group with Jones, this time at the dedication of a teen center fostering to racial equality.

  “So I thought,” Lynn went on, “if in fact he’s got a special relationship with one of these young people, with your mother, for example, Wyatt, then there’d be some chance that among all of his photo ops, she’d show up in a couple, like Monica Lewinsky somehow winding up next to Clinton in all those pictures. At least it was a shot. And, as it turned out, a good one.”

  Hunt, his pulse pounding in his temples, turned to the next page. And the next. In all, there were seven of them from 1961 through 1964.

  As he turned to the final page, Lynn said, “But this last one’s the real winner.”

  Hunt saw nothing particularly special at first glance. As usual, Jones stood surrounded by a group that included Margie Page as one of the few white people, but this last photograph was more formal, depicting as it did the investiture of Jones as a minister in the Disciples of Christ. This time, perhaps fifteen people bore witness to Jones’s charisma and popularity, and each of them—the church’s lay leadership—was identified in the caption. The person standing and smiling on the left side of Margie Page, her arm around her as she stood right next to Jones, was identified as Susan Page.

  “Her mother,” Hunt said.

  Lynn’s smile breaking again. “Yes, I believe it is. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  Hunt couldn’t take his eyes off the picture.

  “That’s not all,” Lynn said, patting her laptop in a proprietary manner. “As soon as I got it, I looked up Susan Page on Google.”

  “And found forty million of them?” Hunt asked.

  “Fifty, but close enough. Then I turned to our great and true friend, LexisNexis.”

  “How many did you get there?”

  “Low thousands. Not too bad, but still a little inconvenient. But then look for a Susan Page who has a daught
er named Margaret and you’re at sixteen hundred fifty. And next you add Indianapolis to the search and that gets you down to twenty-one. Twenty-one you can actually go through the individual records line by line. A little painstaking, but possibly productive.”

  “You ever want a job in California,” Hunt said with real admiration breaking through his fatigue, “come and look me up.” He pointed at the computer. “So we’re down to twenty-one?”

  Lynn shook her head, enjoying every minute. “No, we’re down to three. I figured if your mother was born around ’48, ’49, then her mother must have been somewhere between roughly twenty and thirty-five when she had her, so that’s a fifteen-year window for Susan’s date of birth. Nineteen thirteen to nineteen twenty-eight. Now we’ve got three living candidates. Three addresses. Three phone numbers. All here in town.” She made a show of checking her watch. “And it’s getting to be about the time of day where calling them up wouldn’t be rude.”

  * * *

  SEVENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD SUSAN WELLS PAGE loved Tuesdays and Saturdays the most because those were the days that Indy-Gardens allowed the pets in. About a year before, Susan would have said—and in fact she told anyone who would listen—that she was at the end of her life and that the only thing she had to look forward to was a full-service nursing home and then the grave. As it was, she already had moved from her sweet little brick home and now lived in this assisted-living facility where her two best friends—including Doris, her bridge partner—had just died within three months of each other.

  The other people here were nice enough, the staff was efficient, the food was okay, but after Doris especially, nothing seemed to touch Susan personally anymore. It was too hard to make new connections and real friends at this age. She told Jeannette, her counselor here, that she didn’t think she could open her heart to anybody new anymore. She was just done, dried up, irrelevant.

  Time to go.

  But then the Gardens had announced this program to bring in animals once a week. At the time, Susan, with all her wits still about her, had decided she was definitely going to boycott the whole thing. Dogs smelled bad and were dirty and stupid and Susan thought it was condescending as hell for Indy-Gardens to assume, just because the residents here were elderly and often lonely, that they would embrace the idea of temporary pets just because they were something to touch and feel an emotional connection with.

  Ridiculous.

  So she’d stayed in her room reading until lunchtime. When she had finally opened her door to go out to the cafeteria, Bessie had been sitting there in the hallway, all alone, unattended. She was some kind of a Lab mix, but rather small, apparently just out of puppyhood, with curiously flopping ears and a lustrous black medium-length coat.

  “Shoo,” Susan had said, a brushing gesture with her hands. “Shoo now.”

  Bessie had looked up, gotten to her feet, and wagged her tail.

  “I’m going around you.”

  And she had.

  And Bessie had fallen in beside her, walking along down the hall, sitting next to the chair Susan had pulled out for herself. Sometime during the lunch, Bessie came to rest her muzzle on Susan’s thigh under the table. After a bit, Susan had broken off a small piece of bread and Bessie had taken it and licked her fingers and it hadn’t seemed gross or smelly at all. Then Susan had taken her book to the lounge and Bessie followed her in there as well. She’d petted the dog and let her settle against her feet. Twice a week since then, Bessie had been dropped off by the pet people and came directly to Susan’s door, where if Susan were not already waiting, she would scratch. Once. And Susan would let her in.

  This morning, Bessie her savior had already been curled up in her lap in Susan’s room when the telephone call had come in from the man who asked her if he could come and talk to her about her daughter Margie. He had some information that he thought she deserved to know, and of course how could she refuse? It had been so long since she had even heard her name, had even let herself think it.

  When, after telling him where he could find her, she hung up, Bessie turned her head to look at her and started in with a low whimpering, then brought her face up to Susan’s face to lick at the tears that overflowed onto her cheeks.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she said, leaning into the warmth and smell of her. “Momma’s okay.”

  * * *

  THE PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, Wyatt Hunt, looked somehow vaguely familiar to Susan, which was unsettling since she’d obviously never met him before; this might be the first sign of the dementia against which she was always on her guard. Unshaven and in wrinkled clothes, he seemed rough and quite obviously tired. But she knew that this was the way many younger people went about nowadays. She wasn’t going to prejudge, especially if he had something to tell her about Margie.

  His friend, the reporter, looked proper enough, professional, and that was reassuring. These were serious people with something important to tell her.

  They were in a little seating area in the corner of the main lounge. Bessie, bless her, somehow as always keyed to her emotional undertone, leaned up against the chair and rested her head on Susan’s leg while Susan kept her right hand moving gently up and down between the dog’s ears.

  After a few moments of small talk, Hunt leaned into a small pocket of silence and gave her a somewhat apologetic smile. “I really want to thank you for agreeing to see us, but I wanted to warn you before we go too far that this conversation might be painful.”

  Susan emitted a somber chortle and fixed him with her solemn hazel eyes. “Mr. Hunt,” she began, “if your news is really about my daughter, after all this time I’d hardly expect anything else. And the very fact that you’re here tells me that something has happened to her. Is she all right?”

  Hunt looked over to Lynn, then came back to Susan. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Page. She’s dead.”

  There it was. The words she’d been afraid of hearing for most of her life now, nevertheless hitting her with the force of a blow. Nodding, she abandoned the petting of her dog and brought a quivering hand up to her face. “It’s funny,” she said, struggling with her voice. “You can imagine something for so long, even believe it, and then you finally hear that it’s really true . . .” Her hand moved down over her heart and she let out a heavy breath. “You’re still not prepared.”

  “No,” Hunt said. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Bessie nudged her head up against Susan’s leg and whimpered.

  “In some ways, it’s hard to believe she’s lived this long,” she said. “She was such a reckless child, so headstrong and independent. Did you know her?”

  “No, ma’am. Not really.” Taking a breath, Hunt plunged on. “Actually, this might be even harder to understand, but she didn’t die recently. She died in 1970.”

  “Nineteen seventy? Nineteen seventy? How?”

  Hunt hesitated, then came out with it. “She was murdered.”

  A quizzical expression bloomed on Susan’s face. “I’m sorry? She’s been dead all these years? All this time I’ve been hoping I might hear from her?” She closed her eyes against the awful truth. “And murdered? Oh my God,” she said with flat matter-of-factness. “Oh my God.”

  Lynn reached over and put a hand on the elderly woman’s shoulder, and for a long moment while Susan came to grips with her new reality, the tableau remained frozen. Eventually, she opened her eyes again and went back to petting Bessie, an air of reflection settling over her. Finally, she found her voice again. “Was this in California?”

  Hunt nodded. “San Francisco.”

  “Why did you think she lived in California?” Lynn asked.

  “When she left here . . .” She stopped, her eyes darting back and forth between Wyatt and Lynn. “Do you know who killed her?”

  “Not yet,” Hunt said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here. To find out.”

  “You think it was someone from here?”

  “I think her death might have had something to do with Jim Jones. That�
��s about as far as I’ve gotten.”

  At the mention of the name, Susan’s face went hard. “So she was still with the temple?”

  Hunt and Lynn exchanged a look. “Not really. She had gotten married. Her husband, who had nothing to do with the temple, was charged with the murder, but they couldn’t convict him.”

  She took that in and shook her head. “But you just said you thought Jones was part of it.”

  “I did. I do.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me. That man, as the whole world now knows, was the pure devil.” She spoke to Lynn. “That’s why I thought she might have stayed in California. That’s where they all went, Jones and all of his followers.”

  “But you didn’t go with them,” Lynn said.

  “No. At first I was a little taken in with the man’s…​passion, I suppose is the word. He seemed to be doing really good work, important work. It was all so idealistic and beautiful in a way, and then it was also the sixties.” Her mouth tightened in distaste. “But after I realized what he was doing with Margie…​I mean, the girl was only what? Eleven or twelve years old when it started. I couldn’t very well continue after I saw what he was really about. But to Margie, he was God. And for the longest time, he stayed God to her.”

  “So the relationship was sexual?” Lynn asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Susan snapped out her answer. “Of course I’m sure. At first she tried to hide it. Children know this stuff is wrong. But in the end, she was brainwashed, proud of it. Out of all those other women—and believe me, there were many of them—she thought she was special. Never mind the group sex. She was the one he really loved.”

  “Were there other children involved?” Lynn asked.

  “I don’t know. I would assume so, but I don’t know. He was extremely magnetic and completely amoral. I’d be surprised if Margie was the only one taken in, but she wouldn’t consider that. He loved her and he needed her and that was her life.” Again, she closed her eyes, took a few calming breaths. “You know, when they published the list of the dead at Jonestown, I almost couldn’t bring myself to look, but then of course I had to. I was sure she was going to be on it, but then when she wasn’t…​After that, for a while I had hoped . . .” The sentence trailed off into nothing.