Treasure Hunt

by John Lescroart

  At some point, he reached behind him, got ahold of the gun, and laid it on the passenger seat beside him.

  By the time he pressed the button to open his garage, he was breathing deeply through his nose, all of his senses on full alert, his world closed down in an immediacy to the here and now that would have surprised and possibly embarrassed him if he’d been aware of it. Which he was not.

  Even before he actually entered, just as he was turning off Brannan, he saw that Alicia’s car was still parked up against the right wall of the building, where it had been when he’d come in this morning. He sucked in a lungful of air and let it out in relief.

  Again, his eyes scanned the space in front of him. Seeing no movement, or even a shadow that he could not account for, he shut off the car’s engine, at the same time pressing the button on his visor to lower the garage door again. He opened the door to the Cooper and listened for a moment. Nothing. The screen savers on his three computers, all beach and ocean scenes, glowed over across his basketball court. Grabbing the gun, he stepped out of the car and closed the door behind him. Taking off the safety, he started walking to the house, his gun hand in his jacket pocket.

  It occurred to him, now much too late, that maybe he should have called to see if Devin and Sarah were nearby at the Hall of Justice, and could come by—it was only a few blocks—to accompany him when he went in. Gone from his mind was the slightest thought of providing her sanctuary from the police any longer.

  But he’d already announced his presence by opening his garage. There was nothing for him to do now but press ahead. When he got to the door that led to the part of the warehouse he lived in, he knocked, and almost at the same instant, the door flew open in front of him.

  “Oh, God.” Alicia’s hand at her mouth, her eyes wide. “Thank God it’s you,” she said. “I heard the garage and was just standing here inside, afraid to move. Scared to death, really.”

  Hunt released the tightness of his grip on the gun in his pocket. “You and me both,” he said.

  “I can understand me being frightened,” she said. “But what are you afraid of?”

  “Lots of things. But right up there at the top is coming into my home when I know it’s not empty.”

  “Yeah. That could be creepy. I could see that.”

  “I’m sure you could. But in this case it’s not hypothetical.”

  When Hunt’s meaning hit her, her face clouded over. “You’re not saying you’re really afraid of me, are you?”

  “I don’t know if afraid is exactly the right word. For the time being, let’s go with cautious.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense.”

  “By the same token, it’s not something that you’re going to talk me out of.”

  “You can’t think I killed Dominic.”

  “I can’t? Why not?”

  “Just because . . . because you can’t. I didn’t.”

  “That’s what Mickey says too.”

  “Well, Mickey’s right. You ought to believe him, if not me.”

  “It’s not a question of believing.”

  “It’s not? What is it, then?”

  “It’s opportunity, motive, access to the murder weapon, or weapons.”

  A brittle, small laugh escaped into the space between them. “Oh, so I’m a suspect in two murders now? Dominic and Nancy, I suppose.”

  “While we’re at it,” Hunt said, “maybe three.”

  “Sure, why not?” she snapped out, then shook her head in a very convincing show of disgust. “Please.”

  But Hunt wasn’t in any kind of conciliatory mood. “You want to step back and let me in? Then we can continue this discussion.”

  She backed away from the door, pulling it along with her. Hunt stepped over the threshold, threw a quick glance first over her shoulder down the hallway to the right, then over to his left. “Okay,” he said, reaching for the doorknob and closing it behind them.

  “Who’s the third murder victim?” she asked.

  “We’ll get to that,” Hunt said. “Meanwhile, what I’d like you to do is go down to the TV room and sit there for a minute and wait for me. I’ll be right with you.”

  “Has someone else been killed?” she asked. “If somebody was killed last night, I was with Mickey the whole time. I couldn’t have killed anybody.”

  “Maybe not,” Hunt said. He pointed. “TV room. Please.”

  She crossed her arms and stared at his face with ill-disguised hostility for a couple of seconds, then let out a frustrated and angry guttural sound and turned back down the hallway, disappearing where Hunt had asked her to go.

  As soon as she’d gone, Hunt went to his bedroom, where, with a mixture of chagrin and relief, he saw that his rug had apparently not been disturbed. Nevertheless, he crossed to the corner of it, pulled it up, and lifted out the board that covered his safe. He twirled the combination wheel, which turned easily, signifying that it was locked. But, wanting to be sure, he dialed the combination and opened it again, saw his second gun where he’d left it earlier, and then closed and made sure he’d locked it up one more time before he stood and reversed his actions with the board and the rug.

  As soon as he appeared in the doorway to the television room, she looked up. Scrunched over as though she had a stomachache, her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her, she appeared suddenly small, waiflike. And all the more beautiful for her apparent vulnerability—her doe eyes threatening to overflow, the color high on her cheeks.

  For a moment, even in his highly skeptical, antagonistic state, Hunt felt something akin to awe at the power she could wield over men, if only she knew.

  But of course she knew, he thought. How could she not know?

  “Has someone else died?” she asked. “Please tell me no one else has died.”

  Taking her very seriously indeed, wishing to minimize the chance that she would try to play him by mere proximity, Hunt sat in the chair farthest from her across the room. “Al Carter says that you offered to take Jim Parr home from the memorial yesterday,” he said. “Is that true?”

  She dropped her head as though someone had cut the tendons in her neck. When she looked back up, the tears had broken from her eyes. “Is Jim all right?”

  “No one knows,” Hunt said. “He never made it home.”

  She closed her eyes, shook her head back and forth a couple of times. “I didn’t take him home,” she said. “He didn’t want to go home. He wanted to go out to Ortega. That’s where I dropped him off.”

  This news, whether or not it was true, sent a jolt of electricity up Hunt’s back. “What time was this?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure exactly. One, one-fifteen, somewhere in there.”

  “What did he say he wanted to do there? At Ortega?”

  “He didn’t say specifically. He just wanted to walk around and talk to people. He still knew a lot of people out there. One of them might have heard something or seen something, or just knew something, that might help Mickey. And you. He really wanted to help get the guy who’d killed Dominic if he could, and he thought there might be some chance up there. But when we got there, the place was all closed up—we realized for the memorial, of course. The staff was downtown.”

  “So what’d you do? With Jim, I mean.”

  “I told him I’d take him home. But he wanted to stay out there.”

  “In the rain?”

  “There’s a pizza place down on Irving, near Nineteenth. I dropped him down there. He said he’d wait it out and go back down to Ortega when the building reopened. I tried to talk him out of it, that he should just go home, but no luck.”

  “So you left him at this pizza place? You’re saying somebody might remember seeing him there?”

  “I don’t know how long he would have stayed, but somebody’d probably remember. One of the workers. Maybe you could call there and ask if an old guy came in alone a little after lunchtime? See how long he stayed.” She met his gaze with a hard one of her own. “An
d I know you could say that I hung around and picked him up when he came out, but I didn’t do that, Mr. Hunt. I went home and got ambushed by Juhle and Russo and then, when they left, I threw my clothes into my car and called in sick to work and got out of my apartment and went to find Mickey. That’s what I did. I left Jim at the pizza place.”

  Hunt had to admire her skill and tenacity. This was another perfectly plausible scenario—albeit a very difficult one to verify definitively— that she’d pulled together on the spot, all the while flawlessly acting out her part as a damaged and falsely accused victim. On the other hand, it might after all be the truth. Hunt found himself fighting against the temptation to believe her. “Do you remember the name of this pizza place?” he asked.

  “I’m going to guess Irving Pizza.”

  “And creativity still flourishes,” Hunt said.

  He pulled his cell phone out, punched in 411, and in a moment had gotten connected. Though it was lunchtime and there was a lot of background noise, the manager found time to come to the phone and listen to Hunt’s question, preamble and all. “Yeah,” he said. “The old guy was here all right. Came in a little after the lunch rush, ate a small pepperoni, and had most of a pitcher of beer. Nice guy. Jim something, I think. We shot the shit for an hour or so. He left under his own power. Is he all right?”

  “We’re trying to run him down,” Hunt said. “Thanks for your help.”

  When he hung up, he looked across at Alicia Thorpe.

  “I’m not lying,” she said. “Not about any of this.”

  Hunt said, “You lied about Dominic firing you. Did you forget that one?”

  She shook her head. “I was afraid. But I told Mickey about that. I told him why I did it. I’d never gotten grilled by the police before. I thought they’d arrest me because it might give me a motive to have killed Dominic.”

  “No ‘might’ about it.”

  “But it wasn’t like that. And it wasn’t like I even needed the job. I’ve already got a job, you know. I mean a real, paying job, not that it’s making me rich. But I’m okay with that for now. Besides, Dominic didn’t just kick me out. He explained the whole thing about Ellen to me. He was really sorry, but he just couldn’t deal with his home life anymore with our relationship making Ellen so crazy, even though there was nothing sexual to it.”

  “Nothing sexual?”

  “That’s right. Ian can tell you, I—”

  “Who’s Ian?”

  “My brother. He can tell you, I don’t do sexual with older guys anymore, especially married older guys. In fact, I don’t do much sexual anymore, period. It screws everybody up. Not to mention that it screws me up. I’m kind of hoping I get an actual boyfriend someday, then maybe start over with that stuff. But nobody seems to want to take the time, find out if we get along first. You know?”

  “I’ve heard stories,” Hunt said. But this was what he’d steeled himself against, this urge to connect, to believe her. And before he got to that place, he was going to take another shot at breaking her story. “But let me ask you something else: If there was nothing sexual going on with you and Dominic, how do you explain the fact that there was semen on your scarf?”

  Again, if this was acting, it was brilliant. She straightened up, her face a mask of confusion. “Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “The police didn’t tell me that.”

  “No. They sometimes don’t tell you everything they know all at once. They’re hoping maybe you’ll slip and tell them first, before you were supposed to know.”

  “Well.” She did not hesitate, did not even seem overly concerned. “I don’t have any idea about that. How am I supposed to know what happened to my scarf after I lost it? Doesn’t that make sense that I don’t?”

  Hunt realized that her relentless apparent guilelessness was wearing him down. She had either thought all of this through to a degree that would have been unique in his experience, or she was in fact telling the truth. Mickey believed her, Jim Parr had believed her, Tamara couldn’t bring herself to think ill of her.

  “You know what I wish?” she asked him.

  “What’s that?”

  “That I’d just never met Ellen. Then I’m sure none of us would be going through this. At least certainly not me.”

  Hunt felt an unexpected little frisson of interest at these words. They made him recall his first meeting with Ellen Como, when she’d set his own mind—and by extension Juhle’s and Russo’s, since Hunt had passed it along to them—onto the idea that Dominic had been in love with Alicia, certainly a believable scenario given his reputation and her desirability. But what had never quite registered with Hunt was he had accepted this bare fact—Dominic’s love of Alicia—because he’d taken Ellen’s word for it.

  The other bare fact—from Hunt’s personal experience—was Ellen’s enmity toward her husband, and her rage and jealousy at Alicia for being young and beautiful.

  “How did you even meet her?” Hunt asked. “I’d heard she didn’t have much to do with Dominic’s work.”

  “She didn’t. But one of the causes she did believe in was the Sanctuary House—battered women and their kids. And back when I first came on, Nancy Neshek had their big yearly do at her place and it was my night off and I thought—well, Dominic thought also, since I was just starting to work on my networking—that I ought to go. Besides, the rest of the Sunset professional staff was going, too, so I wouldn’t be all alone with just people I didn’t know. It would be fun, and great food—always a good thing.

  “But then Dominic, just being his usual charming self, you know, he kind of pulled me away from Lorraine and the other Sunset women and escorted me over specially to introduce me to Ellen as one of his new drivers, trying to make me feel at home, and I could just tell from the second she laid eyes on me that she was going to make trouble if she could. I mean, I was wearing this nice simple black cocktail dress—totally appropriate since it’s this like formal party—and Ellen looks me up and down and says something like, ‘Oh, hello, dear. Is that the new driver’s uniform?’ or some such bullshit. I could tell she wanted to scratch my eyes out, and this was long before Dominic and I had any relationship at all. So later, when we got to be friends, I guess he’d mention me sometimes, and she didn’t forget. She wasn’t going to be happy until I was toast.”

  As he listened to this, Hunt’s eyes had gone vacant and faraway. For one thing, almost without his conscious assent, he found that he had crossed over the line regarding Alicia. She sat facing him with no agenda and no sense of drama, just telling him what she knew as an unadorned truth.

  And something else besides.

  “Mr. Hunt?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “No,” he said. “Not everything. Do you think Jim went to Sunset after he got finished at Irving Pizza?”

  “Absolutely. If he made it. But it’s only a few blocks, so he should have.”

  Hunt made the quick count in his head. San Francisco’s east-to-west streets run south through the avenues in alphabetical order; Irving at Nineteenth was therefore only six blocks from Ortega at Nineteenth. An easy walk, even for an old man with a beer buzz in a light rain.

  “Mickey’s out there now,” Hunt said. “At Sunset, using their phone to check some alibis. I’ve got to make another phone call.”

  32

  “I’m here with her now,” Hunt told Mickey. “She’s fine.”

  “Did she drive Jim home yesterday?”

  “No.” Hunt paused. “She drove him out there.”

  “Where?”

  “Where you are right now. Sunset.”

  “But he promised me . . .” Mickey stopped midthought. A promise might be a promise, but another cliché holds that a promise is made to be broken. And Mickey knew which one Jim had accessed yesterday. “That wily bastard. So where is he now?”

  “That’s what I’m calling you about. We still don’t know. He hasn’t come home as of a
half hour ago. The campus was closed when they got there, him and Alicia. So she dropped him off at a place called Irving Pizza. . . .” Hunt filled him in on it.

  “And you believe that?”

  “It happened,” Hunt said. “I called the place. The manager corroborates it. He remembers him.”

  Mickey hesitated. “So . . . you believe her?”

  “Starting to. Maybe.”

  “Whoa. Rein in that enthusiasm, Wyatt.”

  “It’s under control. But what would really help is I need to talk to Al Carter, as soon as you can find him. Is he up there today?”

  “He was. He might still be.”

  “Okay. So find him first, then see if anybody up there saw Jim.”

  “No.” Lorraine Hess was in the middle of a celery-and-carrot-stick lunch at her desk. “I never saw him. And I would have loved to have seen him, since apparently I missed him at the memorial too. He’s a wonderful man. Are you sure he was here?”

  Mickey shook his head. “No. I know where he was at around two, maybe two-thirty, but not if he ever actually made it down here. Would you mind if I ask around?”

  “Not at all. Do whatever you need to do.” She took a quick nibble of carrot. “Most of the staff didn’t get back here until closer to three, though, just so you know. We opened up again at around three-fifteen. So maybe he got here and didn’t want to wait. Especially if he was outside in yesterday’s weather.”

  “I realize that,” Mickey said. “And all of this may be a false alarm anyway. Jim’s been known to stay out overnight before. He also promised me he wouldn’t come out here asking questions and bothering people, so maybe on his way his conscience started to eat at him a little. Though, knowing him, that’s unlikely.”