The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  CAN’T TALK RIGHT NOW. Busy. Come home.

  Hunt stared down at the message. What the hell? What was she doing that she couldn’t talk to him? Cooking? Tasting stuff?

  How about surprising him by being at his place, he berated himself, making him a special dinner, which would be their first one together alone at his home? Venticello would keep for another night. He should be able to recognize this for what it was, the spontaneous gesture of a woman aiming to please and delight.

  Cut her a little slack, would you, Wyatt.

  He had to remember that he was the one having the supremely difficult last few days here, the one suffering from the revelations he’d discovered. He had the angst. From all indications, Tamara was blooming in the sunshine of their love and he would be well advised to cherish those moments and even try to get in the spirit of them himself.

  Pulling up his text screen to reply, suddenly another thought brought him up short. He looked back down at the last two messages.

  Where are you? Come home. I’m here.

  Can’t talk right now. Busy. Come home.

  Both unusually terse. And both with neither a sign-off of any kind—she almost always wrote “Love” or “Luv,” then “T”—nor with a smiley-face emoticon, which she would almost invariably use, especially when the message had an apologetic cast, such as “Can’t talk now.”

  Wyatt flashed back to his interview with Dodie Spencer. He didn’t like to dwell on the sometimes dangerous nature of his work, and neither did he think he was paranoid. But the plain fact of what he’d told Dodie was undeniable: Ivan Orloff had never been Lance’s biggest problem; Ivan had been doing Hunt’s work. And now in Ivan’s absence, that work would devolve back to Hunt.

  Which made Wyatt the threat now.

  And given the apparent acceptance of Lionel’s guilt by the police, Hunt was the only person left standing between Lance and his freedom. Of course, if Hunt bought the Lionel story, then Lance was safe. But what if Lance had followed his wife today, or was having her followed? What if he’d somehow discovered that she’d met with him at the club? A bribe to Taylor the footman would accomplish that nicely. Then Hunt was truly back in the danger zone.

  How likely was that? Not very, he realized.

  But impossible? No.

  And even “possible” was almost too disturbing to bear.

  He stood out on the sidewalk on California Street, just in front of the Huntington. Suddenly, his blood rushed in his ears and a wave of nausea washed over him as he realized that though the text messages came from Tamara’s phone, that did not necessarily mean it was she sending them, did it?

  Still clutching his cell phone, Wyatt leaned back against a streetlamp, trying to slow down his thoughts, the swiftly creeping onset of panic. Maybe he should have taken another dose or two of Dr. Gutierrez’s pills. But he had not. He hadn’t felt he needed them.

  Should he try to call her, not text her, again? Or text her again with an urgent message to call him back, or…?

  Easy, he told himself. Think it through. Easy.

  He needed time. He needed time. All at once, this became the imperative. With time, he could consider possibilities, evaluate, plan, decide.

  I’ll be there in an hour. His finger paused over the “Send” button. He added, Love, Wyatt.

  He sent the text.

  * * *

  BEFORE HE MADE ANY OTHER PHONE CALLS, he needed more evidence that he was not suffering from paranoid delusions. He didn’t need absolute certainty, but another hint would not be unwelcome. So he punched up his home landline telephone number and listened as the kitchen phone rang four times, then kicked over to his answering machine. He heard his voice telling callers that he wasn’t able to get to the phone, but they should leave a message and he’d get right back to them.

  If Tamara were cooking in the kitchen, she might choose to monitor calls and not pick up under normal circumstances, but if she heard his voice, that was a different story. Even if—especially if—the message was clearly false. “Hey, Wyatt,” he said. “This is Mario. I’m stuck down at the Marina on this Tucker matter and I need to know what you want me to do. So if you’re monitoring calls . . .” After a reasonable pause and a theatrical sigh, he went on. “Okay, I’ll try your cell.”

  He hung up.

  If Tamara was in the house as she’d texted him she was, there was no way she would not have picked up the phone on that call.

  The unlikely possibility moved inexorably toward the terrifying probability.

  THE CLOCK WAS NOW TICKING and Wyatt could not allow himself the luxury of second-guessing himself. He had to gather as much information as quickly as he could, and then make what might be split-second decisions based on what he’d learned. Almost without conscious thought, he was searching his Contacts list and selecting a number. First things first: Determine where Lance was not.

  Dodie picked up on the second ring, her voice tinged with a whispered urgency. “Wyatt, what are you doing calling me at home? You can’t call here.”

  “Don’t hang up. I just have some quick questions: Is Lance there with you?”

  “No. He hasn’t come home from work yet.”

  “Do you know he’s at work?”

  “Not for sure, no. He doesn’t check in with me.”

  “Have you heard from him in the last hour or so?”

  “No, but what is this about?”

  “Do you know where he is for a fact?”

  “No.”

  “Does he have a cell phone?”

  “Of course.”

  In the moment, an idea surfaced. He had originally planned to ask Dodie to call Lance and try to locate him. Make up some excuse to find out, at least, where he was not. But suddenly a much more elegant solution occurred to him. “Will you give me the number for it?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. What for?”

  “I need to know where he is.”

  “How can knowing his phone number tell you that?”

  “You’ll have to trust me. It can. Please. It’s extremely urgent.” He lowered his voice. “This can get you everything you want. Everything you talked about today. This could be the end game, Dodie. Please.”

  A pause. “All right,” she said, and gave him the number.

  32

  AFTER THEIR LESS THAN AMICABLE parting at lunch, Hunt wasn’t at all sure that Juhle would even pick up when he saw who the call was from. So when Devin did answer, Wyatt laid it on thick. If he was correct about what was happening right now, Juhle’s initial reaction to him wouldn’t matter. Also if he was wrong, it wouldn’t matter. So he had nothing to lose.

  “You were right and I apologize,” he began. “If I’m going to get you involved in my stuff, I’ve got to include you in whatever I find out. I don’t know what got into me. I was a horse’s ass, okay. I’m sorry.”

  “So who’s your texter?”

  “Dodie Spencer. Lance’s wife. It’s Lance.”

  “Your mother’s murderer, you mean?”

  “And Orloff, and the cabbie, and Lionel Spencer.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because right now Lance is at my place, holding Tamara captive.”

  Hunt could almost hear Juhle come bolt upright.

  “What?”

  Giving him the short version, Hunt nevertheless didn’t want to leave anything out. Twenty-five valuable minutes had already been lost since he’d talked to Dodie while Callie Lucente triangulated her “ping” of Lance Spencer’s phone. So far she had picked up the signal from his cell phone on two towers south of Brannan, and it would take a third tower for a dead-on GPS read of exactly where the phone was located. But the two towers made it clear that he was within no more than a two-hundred-yard radius of Hunt’s warehouse, close enough for Wyatt to be certain. “. . . so I’m calling you, and you know how badly I hate to say this, because this now is clearly a police matter. You need to get some troops and surround the place. And I mean now.�
�

  “Just like that, huh?”

  “As soon as you can, Dev. This is no joke. He’s there with her, there’s no doubt. He’s waiting for me to show up so he can kill me when I open the door.”

  “You say no doubt. Do you know this for sure? This is a damn serious matter, Wyatt. You can’t be wrong.”

  “I understand that, but this isn’t a hunch. I promise.”

  LANCE SPENCER CHECKED his wristwatch.

  It had been nearly another forty minutes since Hunt had texted back that he would be here within an hour.

  The girl had stopped her whimpering and now just lay there on her side. He’d secured her in the manner he’d learned in Vietnam: got her on her stomach, bound her hands tightly behind her, then brought the rope down to her feet, pulled them up and wrapped the rope around her ankles five times, tying it off when he was done. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  He’d pulled the bedroom chair out into the hallway, where he could keep a better eye on the door to the garage and with an ear to the lock turning in the kitchen door. Either way, he was covered.

  He’d gotten up twice: once to use the bathroom, after which he carefully wiped down the toilet and all around it; and once going down to the kitchen to make sure the door there was locked back up the way he’d found it before he’d broken in. Although Hunt would almost certainly enter the building by driving his Mini through his garage door on Brannan, there was some small possibility that he might leave the car somewhere else and come in through the kitchen. Given that the place was an industrial warehouse in a fairly dicey area of town, he couldn’t believe it didn’t have an alarm system. But sometimes, he knew, you just got lucky.

  Both times he’d gotten up, Lance had returned to find the girl exactly how he’d left her, facing away from him on her side on the bed, the knots holding nicely.

  She really wasn’t much in the way of company, was she?

  Lance realized that Hunt couldn’t be too far away and thought he might as well get rid of the girl now and avoid any potential source of drama or hassle later. He’d thought about the volume of the gun’s report earlier, and that had slowed him down in his execution—he didn’t feel good about hanging around after the noise of another shot—so he figured he would simply get a knife from the kitchen and cut her throat. Quiet and effective, one less detail to worry about.

  He got up from his chair and started to move toward the kitchen, when the telephone rang again in the kitchen. He stopped—it would only delay things here for a second—and listened. It might be Hunt with an explanation or a change in his timing, and that would be worth knowing about.

  Four rings, and then the answering machine.

  Lance Spencer took a step down the hallway that extended in a straight line to the kitchen.

  Hunt’s machine played out its message. A pause. The beep.

  “Lance Spencer,” he heard. “You need to pick up the telephone. This is Inspector Juhle of the San Francisco police. We have the building surrounded. There are only two exits and we have them both covered. You need to come outside right now with your hands in the air.”

  LANCE SPENCER PICKED UP the telephone’s receiver. “You can kiss my ass,” he said. “I’ve got a hostage and I want a car.”

  “Look, Lance,” Devin said. “This isn’t going to work out for you. You know you’re not going to get away from here. Let the girl go and we can talk about how to end this so nobody gets hurt.”

  “I’ll tell you how nobody gets hurt. You get me a car or I’ll blow her head off. Right now.”

  “You don’t want to kill her, Lance. What would that get you?”

  “Satisfaction, if nothing else. But that’s not really the question, which is, Who is more screwed if I kill her, you or me? And I think we both know the answer to that, don’t we? Especially when killing her is so easily avoidable. You get me a car, I’m going to the airport to get on a plane. I leave the girl on the tarmac and fly away. It’s an easy deal.”

  “Lance. I just can’t do that.”

  “Really? Maybe you want to talk to someone else about that before you get too committed to a bad idea. Your chief, or maybe the mayor. Or Wyatt Hunt. You know who he is?”

  “We know him. You’re in his house.”

  “That’s right. And you know what’s special about this place? It’s a goddamn fortress. All the windows are high up, you notice. No seeing inside, no telling where I am. You say you’ve got the entrances covered? Well, so do I. And nobody’s even trying to get in here, or I shoot the girl. You teargas the place, I shoot the girl. Is that clear? And you haven’t got all the time in the world. And oh, did I mention I had to shoot her already? She caught a bullet in the leg. She’s already lost a lot of blood. So you’re going to have to move on this. You still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “All right, Inspector. So here’s what going to happen, and it’s going to happen exactly as I say, or I finish the girl.”

  THE FIRST SWAT UNIT mobilized in about an hour from Juhle’s first call. They cordoned off the block of Fifth Street where it abutted the alley behind Hunt’s place, and also all of Brannan Street between Fourth and Fifth. Four police cars and the SWAT team van lined the bigger main streets, while a patrol car and two SWAT members had pulled down into the alley behind Hunt’s place all the way to where it ended at the shipping entrance to another warehouse, and a final patrol car with its two SWAT members blocked the mouth of the alley at Fifth. The alley, normally ill lit with only one streetlight, now glowed with the banks of kliegs they’d set up to illuminate the back entrance. Three television mobile units with their crews were strung along the street back up toward the Hall of Justice.

  Out front on Brannan, they had a command post with Glitsky, Juhle, and Sarah Russo and some SWAT officers set up behind the SWAT van. Though not remotely a member of that unit, Wyatt Hunt hung in the close periphery, largely ignored, but since he’d been the one to sound this particular alarm, and since it was his domicile and his girlfriend, he was tolerated. It also didn’t hurt that he had been right about Lance, and not Lionel, as the perpetrator of the three homicides last week.

  Now the city’s hostage negotiator, Cyril Jarvik—an ex-SEAL psychologist with a quiet, friendly demeanor—was making another phone call to Hunt’s number inside with instructions to tell Lance Spencer that they’d located and reserved his airplane and were preparing it for flight.

  Lance picked up on the first ring, heard him out, then said, “I’ve been watching all you fools on television, and I want all those cop cars out of here—off the street and out of the alley—when we’re getting ready to come out. Is that understood?”

  “Perfectly,” Jarvik said. “No problem. But before we go further here, Lance, I want to tell you that it’s not too late to change your mind. At any time. If you want to end this, just let us know and we’ll take care of you.”

  “There is slim and no chance of that. Who the hell are you? Where’s the other guy I was talking to, Juhle?”

  Jarvik pointed at Juhle, motioned him forward. “He’s right here if you’d like to talk to him. Should I put him on?”

  “I don’t give a shit who I’m talking to. I just want to get this done.”

  “That’s our intention, too. We do, however, have a request for you.”

  “Not a chance. I’ve told you what I want.”

  “Right. We know that. But before we give you your car, we’d like to talk to the girl and be sure that she’s okay.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Lance said. “In fact, we’ve got a new problem. While you morons were screwing around, she’s passing in and out of consciousness. She can’t drive me anyplace now and I need a driver. And before you even say it, I’m not taking a cop. And that means I’m not taking anybody I don’t know. So here’s the new deal. I’ll trade you the girl for a car and Wyatt Hunt to drive it.”

  Jarvik paused. “You know we can’t do that. We can’t trade you one civilian for another. What difference does it
make if we send in a cop? Either way you’ve got your hostage. Either way you’ve got your plane.”

  “You heard my offer,” Spencer said. “And you better take it in a hell of a hurry. I don’t know how much longer she’s going to last.”

  Jarvik looked at Juhle. Juhle looked at Hunt, who nodded his head.

  “We’re out of time,” Wyatt pleaded. “Let’s just do this.”

  Jarvik nodded, spoke into the phone. “Okay, you got a deal.”

  At last Lance said, “He comes alone to the alley door. No Kevlar, and his hands are behind his back in handcuffs. Handcuff key in a shirt pocket or somewhere I can get it.”

  “You want the handcuff key?”

  “You heard me.” Lance, impatient, explained. “Think about it. How’s he going to drive with his hands behind his back. He gets in the driver’s seat, I cuff him to the steering wheel. Also, he’s all the way in before she goes out.”

  “Nope,” Jarvik said. “He goes halfway. Then the girl comes outside the door.”

  Lance considered for a second, then said, “I need a few minutes to get her set. Call again when Hunt’s ready.”

  THEY REMOVED THE SQUAD CARS from the alley and drove the van around so the command team had a view of Hunt’s back door. The plan Jarvik and Lance had agreed on was that once Tamara was out of the house, and the police had hustled her to safety, Hunt would walk down the alley and come in the back door to the kitchen. Meanwhile, an officer would back the van down the alley to a spot where the side entrance opened directly in front of Hunt’s back door, right up against the building. Lance wasn’t going to give some sharpshooter on a nearby rooftop the opportunity to get him in his sights. When the van was in position, the driver would get out and Lance and his hostage would emerge from the warehouse, enter the van by the side door, and close the door behind them. When Hunt was cuffed to the steering wheel, the van would start driving toward the airport.