Treasure Hunt

by John Lescroart

  Mute, she shook her head.

  “He’ll turn up.”

  “This isn’t normal, this late.”

  Hunt sighed, scratched at his cheek. “What do you want to do? You want to go home and wait?”

  “No. What good would that do?”

  “Probably none. But if you want, it’s an option.”

  “No. I’ll just wait here. Maybe if Mickey checks in, I can send him out looking at the usual haunts. After he’s done with your stuff, I mean.”

  “That’s okay, Tam. You could call him now if you’re that worried.”

  “No, I can’t. He doesn’t have his cell phone. He’s got to call in.”

  “Well, if he does.” Hunt looked down at her. “So you know, I mostly just sent him out on these errands to get him out of my sight.”

  “You’re really that mad at him?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “He’s trying to do what he thinks is right.”

  “If I didn’t think that, he’d already be fired. But he’s got me in a potentially terrible bind with Devin and Sarah, just when we’re getting back in their reasonably good graces, and also not so good a place in my own home. I really don’t like feeling that I could open my door and be looking down the barrel of one of my own guns.”

  “Wyatt. Come on. She’s not going to do that.”

  “Well, as I said to Mickey when he said the same thing, I hope you’re right. But I won’t know for sure, though, will I, until it happens or not?”

  “It won’t.”

  Hunt shrugged. It either would or it wouldn’t, and talking about it wasn’t going to make any difference. “So listen,” he said, “I was supposed to call Gloria White twenty minutes ago and then Turner showed up. So I need to touch base with her now or sooner. Meanwhile, can I bother you to call Devin, set up a time we can get together? I don’t think they know yet about the Monday- night meeting before Neshek got killed, and it wouldn’t hurt if they were following up on that too.”

  “Plus, that gets them off Alicia for a while.”

  “Secondarily. I thought you might notice that.”

  “Softie,” she said, with an approving smile.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” he told her. “It’s probably temporary. Anyway, see if Devin can run some kind of a sheet on a Keydrion Mugisa? He’ll have to guess on the spelling, but that’s why they pay him the big bucks. He’ll do it. In any event, the kid said exactly one word that whole time, you realize that? Which makes me think he wasn’t really there to add to the meeting.”

  “Why, then?”

  “To let me know Turner could do more than just fire me if I got too far out of line.”

  29

  Aside from his physical pains, which remained substantial, Mickey felt sick to his stomach at Hunt’s response to what he’d done. Driving out through the rain once again to the Ortega campus, shifting the Volkswagen, an inordinately difficult task with his steering arm in the cast, he kept revisiting his decision-making process from the time Alicia had appeared at his bedside. Maybe the Vicodin had played a role and affected his judgment, he told himself. Nevertheless, he wished he’d brought some of them with him from the hospital. His head pounded with every beat of his pulse, every bump in the road.

  And then there was the psychic pain as well. Mickey knew that Hunt was an experienced and intelligent guy, not given to extremes of emotion or flights of fancy, and Hunt didn’t think much of Alicia’s basic story. Clearly, Hunt had read Alicia’s admission of her lie to the police completely differently than Mickey had. To Mickey, it had been the baring of a burdened soul, utterly believable. To Hunt, on the other hand, this confession had pretty much sealed the deal that she should be considered the prime suspect in Como’s death. And in Neshek’s.

  Although every fiber in his being rebelled at that thought, Mickey couldn’t get it out of his mind. What if she was just playing him for a lovesick dope?

  He kept hearing himself explaining to Hunt, replaying the words in his head, that he could tell when someone was a good person. If anyone else had said them, Mickey knew what his response would be because it was the same one he had to his own words—what a tool.

  Of course you couldn’t tell when someone was a good person. Or a bad person. Or anything. You just saw enough of someone that over time you came to trust what appeared to be their essential character.

  And even Mickey would not argue that once you had the essential-character thing down, anomalies could occur. Good people did bad things all the time, sometimes by mistake, sometimes because they’d lost track of themselves in an altered chemical or alcoholic state, sometimes because smart, good people do foolish, wrong things. So to say that you could tell if someone was a good person was not only inherently idiotic, it was irrelevant to anything. It certainly couldn’t explain or predict guilt or innocence.

  That said, though, he could intellectually give his assent to a slightly different, though related, proposition: Alicia Thorpe might be a good or a bad person (and she’d at least told one big whopper of a lie in a crucial setting), but there was no way in the world he could imagine her brutally killing not just one but two people.

  And with that, he kept returning to another fundamental question: Why would she have come back to him, instead of just simply blowing Dodge? What, he asked himself, would be in it for her? Mickey’s involvement with her could not keep her from getting arrested if the cops came to that. If anything, he reasoned, the fact that she had come back to Mickey argued that she desperately wanted the killer to be found. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have fled after her last interview with Juhle and Russo? Instead, she’d found out he was in the hospital and she’d come running to him.

  Why would she have done that if she didn’t believe he could save her? She was truly innocent and she would put her trust in the one person who absolutely believed in her, that’s why.

  Of course, there were other, more disturbing, possible answers. But let Wyatt Hunt agonize over them, Mickey wasn’t going to.

  Even if it meant infuriating his boss, and it did.

  Even if it meant his job, and it might.

  The bottom line was that it was a matter of faith. And for good or ill, Mickey believed her. He believed in her. If she were lying and betrayed him . . .

  But he shook his head. That wasn’t happening. He wasn’t going to go there.

  Russo and Juhle were parked outside of Alicia’s house again.

  “I’ve got this amazing sense of déjà vu,” Juhle said. “Wasn’t she not home yesterday at this time too?”

  “It was later, but yes.”

  “Where does she go?”

  “This is probably mostly when she kills her victims. Except those days she’s surfing.”

  “She kills people before she goes to work?”

  “Right. Usually. If she’s not too busy surfing, or if the waves suck. And then, remember, she’s got to get cleaned up afterward, either from the killings or the surfing, or both, if she’s got to be dressed up to greet the carnivores.”

  Juhle, nodding sagely, looked at his watch. “How long you want to give it?”

  They’d already been parked here for nearly a half hour. They had been on their way out to Nancy Neshek’s to canvass the neighborhood, but the idea of slogging to mostly empty houses through the rain to try to talk to rich people who didn’t look out their windows had persuaded them both to take another stab at interviewing Alicia Thorpe. After the scarf identification yesterday, both of them thought she was close to breaking, and now Russo was of the opinion that even though they didn’t know definitely whose semen it was, they could drop the news, which they’d held back yesterday, about its presence on the scarf and see if they could break her at last.

  Yesterday, she’d remained strong in her insistence that she’d lost the scarf a few week ago, but that, too, was something they had on tape that she could possibly contradict, and once that happened, their leverage would increase exponentially. Neither of
them had much doubt about her factual guilt, and they felt that they needed just one small break to have an excuse to put on the handcuffs and take her downtown, and once that happened, the confession was pretty much just going to be a matter of time.

  “Ten more minutes,” Russo said. “Then we get something to eat and come back one time on our way out to Seacliff.”

  “The quality of decisiveness,” Juhle said, “is not strained.”

  “What?” Russo asked.

  At that moment, the cell phone on Juhle’s belt went off with a ringtone from an old-fashioned telephone that was so loud it made them both jump.

  “You gotta change that,” Russo said.

  But Juhle, already on the call, didn’t even hear her. “Yeah,” he said, and then again. “Yeah, but we’ll be in the field most of the day. Nothing so far, but if he’s interested, he can catch us down at the Hall when we get back in. I’ll be on this phone. Right.” He listened for another few seconds, then said, “You could tell him that maybe he ought to be checking those himself, but I wouldn’t waste too much time on it if I were him.” He rolled his eyes over at Russo. “Because we’ve already got a person of interest with no alibi for that night, as he knows . . . no . . . no . . . no, we like thorough, that’s fine. All right. Just a sec, I need something to write with.” Resting the phone against his ear, he pulled out his little notebook and the pen from his pocket. “Okay, shoot. You want to spell that? All right, you’re not sure, it’s phonetic. Got it. We’ll try. Okay. Fine. Later.”

  Hitting the disconnect button, he said to Russo, “That was Hunt’s girl, and—”

  “You mean his secretary?”

  “Yes, of course. What could have gotten into me that I said ‘girl’? You’d think that after all those weeks of sensitivity training . . . what I meant to say was that was Hunt’s executive assistant, is what I was saying. He wanted us to know that Turner’s Communities of Opportunity, including Neshek, had a meeting at City Hall on Monday night before she was killed.”

  “Okay.”

  “And he wanted us to check everybody’s alibi. I told her to tell him we already had Alicia’s lack of one and liked it a lot, but if he got a better one, he should let us know.”

  “I heard you. So what’d she have you write down?”

  “A guy’s name.” Juhle looked down at his pad. “Keydrion Mugisa or something like that. He’ll have a sheet somewhere. We’ll find him. One of Len Turner’s people. I’m thinking probably not Irish.”

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what Hunt’s asked me to find out.”

  “We gonna do it?”

  “Might as well. I don’t see how it could hurt.”

  Al Carter was sitting in the lobby at a fold-up lunch-style table among a large group of what Mickey had come to recognize as Battalion members—mostly young men, but some young women as well, all reasonably well-dressed and well-groomed. A hum of comfortable, loose banter floated out across the lobby all the way to the door where Mickey entered.

  He was here mostly to see Lorraine Hess about her whereabouts and activities on Monday night, but when he saw Carter, Mickey thought of a question he wanted to ask him and headed over that way first. They were working from boxes filled with perforated forms—pledge cards—that they were tearing into thirds, organizing in some way, and then sending the oblong mailing through a Pitney Bowes automatic postage machine. When they’d gone through that, another few of the Battalion kids packed them into a growing pile of open-topped white cardboard boxes that Mickey guessed would soon be on their way to the nearest post office, or possibly even all the way down to the main station at Rincon Annex, if the mass mailing was big enough.

  Mickey got about two-thirds of the way there when Carter saw him. After an infinitesimally brief look of confusion or maybe impatience, the older man rearranged his face into its natural and neutral expression and pushed himself back from his folding chair. Closing the now-small distance between them, he extended his hand. “Al Carter,” he said, reintroducing himself.

  “Yes, sir. I remember. Mickey Dade.”

  “Well, Mickey Dade, what happened to you?”

  “I got hit by a car. Or rather, my car got hit by a car. It looks worse than it is.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. ’Cause if it was as bad as it looks, you’d be dead at least twice. You want to sit down a minute?”

  “That’d be good.”

  They got over to the wall by the administrative offices and sat down where a few extra fold-up chairs had been set up. “I met your boss yesterday at Mr. Como’s memorial,” Carter began. “Hunt. So what brings you down here to these environs again?”

  “I’ve got a few more questions for Ms. Hess, but then I saw you and I thought I’d ask—”

  Carter stopped him by replying, “I already told your Mr. Hunt about Mr. Como firing Alicia that last morning. I don’t know what I can add to that.”

  “That’s not an issue,” Mickey said. “Or not the issue I was talking about.”

  “All right.” He cocked his head to one side, a question.

  “Last time I was here, you told me you’d known my grandfather, Jim Parr.”

  “I did. Reasonably well.”

  “Well, I know there were a lot of people at that memorial, but you didn’t by any chance run into Jim there, did you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. Why?”

  Mickey took a deep breath and released it. “He hasn’t come home. He didn’t come home last night.”

  Carter straightened up, his face now thoughtful, his frown pronounced.

  “What?” Mickey asked.

  “Well, I didn’t just see your grandfather yesterday. I don’t know if you heard about Mrs. Como when she saw Alicia . . .”

  “She kicked her out.”

  “Yes, she did. Or rather, she asked that she be removed. I don’t know if you’d heard that I stepped in and became the remover.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “I went over to her, put an arm around her, got her outside, and the two of us ran into your grandfather. I was surprised that they knew each other.”

  “Yeah. We’d had her and her brother over the night before.”

  “So I gathered.” He paused and looked sideways over at Mickey, obviously conflicted about going on. “You know,” he said, “when we first talked about the reward last time you were up here, I didn’t want any part of it. I didn’t want to make any profit out of Dominic’s death. But since then . . . well, it’s a hell of a lot of money. It’s life-changing money.”

  “It might be. But I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “I’m getting at what I told your boss yesterday, about Alicia. Getting fired. If that turns out to be what the police need, for her arrest, I mean. I’d just want you and Mr. Hunt to remember where you heard it.”

  “There’s no chance we’d forget, sir. But I don’t see what Alicia being fired has to do with her and my grandfather.”

  “I don’t see that either. Not specifically. But I just have the same feeling I had yesterday when I felt like I was pointing the finger at her. I don’t mean to do that. I like the young woman very much.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But I know what I know.” His vision lasered into Mickey’s face. “She told Jim she’d drive him home.”

  “Alicia did?”

  He nodded. “That’s who we’re talking about, isn’t it? Jim had come down on the bus, and was going to take it home, but she said she was going by his way, and she’d take him. Wouldn’t hear otherwise.” He shook his head, uncomprehending. “And now you’re telling me he never made it home. You hear what I’m saying?”

  The sudden pounding of his heart into his broken ribs threatened to double Mickey over with pain just as an explosive throbbing expanded behind his eyes. He brought his good right hand up to his forehead and squeezed at both temples. “Give me a minute.” Dry-throated, he barely got the words out. “I just ne
ed another minute.”

  It took him more like fifteen minutes, and when he got his breathing and the pain back under control, he was still at a complete loss as to how he was supposed to proceed. Al Carter, having made sure he was basically all right, and with nothing else to tell him, left Mickey and went back to his supervision of the pledge-card mailing.

  When his head had sufficiently cleared, Mickey’s first inclination was to call Alicia and simply ask her.

  But he found that he couldn’t do it. Some psychic barrier had arisen. He didn’t know what it meant yet, but for the first time now the weight of all the evidence against this woman he had believed and cared for had tipped the scales out of her favor. He didn’t immediately leap to the conclusion that something bad or, God forbid, tragic, had happened to Jim, or even that, if something had, Alicia had played a role in it. But the possibility loomed large and ate at his guts. Along with the stark reality that so far as he now knew, Alicia had been the last person to have been with Jim, who’d known where he was. And with all of that, suddenly—very suddenly—he found himself reluctant to give her any more benefit of his doubt. And that, more than anything, shook him to his depths. He found himself unwittingly back in Hunt’s camp, reinterpreting not only Alicia’s confession, but nearly everything she’d told him about herself and about her relationship with Dominic Como.

  Doubting.

  Was she truly the kind of person Mickey had heard about but never met, a bona fide psychopath—nerveless, emotionless, a consummate actor, absolutely capable of cold-blooded murder whenever it suited her convenience?

  Doubting and doubting.

  In the cascading maelstrom of his thoughts, his next idea was to call Tamara and Hunt and tell them the basic facts, even to warn them about his suspicions, such as they were. Although he realized that the warning would be something Hunt wouldn’t need. He was already on his guard. Still, this new information was too important to ignore.