Treasure Hunt

by John Lescroart

  “Shit! That bastard. That fucking bastard!”

  Hunt pressed. “Anybody else at Sunset?”

  Another pause, this one lengthy. Finally, Carter looked over to his left again and shrugged. “When I first came on, he and Lorraine were in the middle of a thing.”

  Ellen Como exploded, “What? Lorraine.” And stood up.

  Hess shot out of her seat, held her arm out as though fending Ellen off. “That’s a lie, Ellen! That’s a damn lie, Al!”

  Juhle was on his feet, arms out to either side as though he were a referee at a boxing match. He pointed to Hess. “Sit down!” and over to Como. “You, too, please, ma’am, right now.”

  But neither woman sat down. Instead, they stared at each other across the circle. “Lorraine,” Ellen Como asked in a near-whisper, “is this true?” She turned. “Al?”

  The driver nodded somberly.

  Hess was shaking her head. “No, no, no.” Pointing at Alicia, her voice quivering with rage, Lorraine Hess went on the attack. “She’s the one who was sleeping with him. They were screwing in the car. I know they were. If you look, you’ll know I’m telling the truth.”

  “If you mean look in the limo for evidence, Lorraine,” Hunt said, “the police already did that. And they found what you planted there.”

  “I didn’t plant anything. What are you talking about?”

  Hunt didn’t respond to her, but turned to Carter. “Al, what’s the first thing you do every day at work?”

  Carter nodded. “Like I told you today, we clean out that limo for my shift. Polish the car, wash the seats, vacuum the rugs.”

  “And that includes under the seats, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And did you do that the day after you dropped off Mr. Como for the last time?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And was there a condom in the car, or a scarf?”

  “No, sir. Nothing like that.”

  “But”—and here Hunt came back to Hess—“in fact, those items are exactly what the police did find. So the reason you were so sure there was evidence in the car, Lorraine, was that you put it there, didn’t you?”

  Hess seemed rooted to the floor, unable to reply.

  “My only question,” Hunt went on, “is if you stole the scarf intending to kill Dominic, or if you simply found it later and decided to use it to frame Alicia.”

  “Lorraine?” Ellen Como asked a last time. “It’s you. Could it really have been you?”

  Hunt, standing next to Juhle, took a step in Hess’s direction. “Do you want to tell us about the federal money, too, Lorraine? Dominic’s private safe? He not only broke it off with you, he discovered you’d been taking the money, too, didn’t he? He was going to let you go out at Sunset as well.”

  “This is all wrong,” Hess said. “You don’t know this. You can’t prove any of it.”

  “I don’t have to prove it, Lorraine. The police will have all the proof they need when they get a search warrant for your bank account, won’t they? When they find all the unexplained cash deposits. And when they talk to all the extra help you hired for your son, they’re going to find you paid with a lot more cash than you can explain, aren’t they? And even if you’ve got more cash stashed in other bank accounts, they’re going to find that, too, aren’t they?”

  Lorraine Hess put her hands in the pockets of the ski parka she was wearing, then lifted out her right hand, in which she was holding a revolver. Juhle, caught completely off-guard, went to reach for his shoulder holster.

  Hunt motioned for Juhle to stop, then turned and spoke calmly to Hess. “What are you going to do now, Lorraine? Kill us all? And then go on the run? Who’s going to take care of your son? And how long do you think it’s going to take the police to find you?”

  Hess stood holding the gun in both of her hands, aiming it squarely at Hunt’s chest. Her eyes flitted over to Ellen Como, to Juhle, to Carter and Alicia, and then back to Hunt. No one seemed to be breathing.

  But then at last, something shifted in Hess’s position, and she slowly began to lower the gun, then finally dropped it with a clatter onto the basketball court’s flooring at her feet.

  Now staring with a pathetically blotched face at Juhle, she hung her head, wagged it disconsolately from side to side, then looked back at him. “Thank God,” she said. “Thank God. It’s finally over.” She met Juhle’s eyes. “I never meant . . . but it doesn’t matter what I meant now, does it?”

  Hunt had crossed the circle and gotten his hands on the weapon. Now, that threat removed, he looked up at her. “Lorraine,” he said. “Jim Parr. Where’s Jim Parr?”

  For an answer, Hess turned vaguely, almost wistfully, to Juhle. “I wonder if you could send somebody to see if my son Gary’s all right? I always worry about those pills I give him when I need him to sleep, that I might have given him too many.”

  34

  Juhle hated this.

  He imagined himself in front of the Police Commission, explaining how he had gotten involved in this half-assed operation. And without his partner or any other backup. This was not how it was done, fraught with risk and uncertainty for everyone involved. He wondered and sincerely doubted if any other cop he knew would have made the kind of promise he’d made to Hunt; if any other homicide inspector, with an imminent arrest of his prime suspect in his pocket, would have postponed the moment and agreed to this amateur-hour charade. His only consolation was that when Hunt’s scenario failed—as it surely would—he would then pick up the Thorpe woman. Of course, the fact that Hunt had invited Roake along would complicate that arrest, but not impossibly so. Still, it galled Juhle that Hunt had never even mentioned Roake’s presence here as Thorpe’s attorney during their phone call. In fact, everything about this felt wrong to him. But, he told himself, that’s what happened when you believed your friends.

  And people wondered why cops grew so jaded over time. It was because you were either in the brotherhood or you were not. You played by the rules or you didn’t.

  Somehow Hunt had persuaded him he had no choice. And that, more than anything else, added to his fury and frustration.

  Almost as soon as Juhle had arrived, Hunt suggested that they all come out now to the basketball court. Now Roake, Thorpe, and Dade sat together in consecutive chairs while Juhle stood behind them, arms crossed and his shoulder holster unbuttoned, where he could keep his eye on them as well as on whoever entered through the Brannan Street door. The lights were up; the temperature fairly cool, in the mid-sixties, the way Hunt liked to keep it.

  They weren’t in there and settled for more than three or four minutes when the doorbell for this side of the warehouse rang and Al Carter, who for some reason Hunt had designated to greet the guests, crossed to the door by the garage entrance, opened it up, and said hello to Len Turner and a tall, thin, well-dressed young black man that Juhle guessed must be Keydrion Mugisa.

  Inside his jacket, Juhle’s hand went to the butt of his duty weapon.

  The doorbell rang again. As instructed, Carter opened the door again.

  Quite clearly, Juhle heard him say, “Hello, Lorraine.”

  And then he heard the voice of Lorraine Hess as she said, “Hi, Al, you dumb shit.”

  And then the enormous boom of the shot.

  Hunt was over by the residence side of the warehouse and broke for the door, jumping over Carter’s prone form. He got outside just as Lorraine Hess was running to get to her car, sitting and idling there at the curb fifty feet up the street, a couple of seconds after the unmistakable report.

  “Hold it,” he yelled. “Stop!”

  Stopping and turning in her tracks, but without any hesitation, she raised her arm and fired another shot. Hunt, seeing her arm coming up, dove sideways away from the building and heard the bullet ricochet off something back at the corner.

  Hunt by this time was lying on the pavement, leveling his gun out in front of him, but he found that he could not fire. She was not then firing at him a
nd it was bad luck to shoot in the back even an escaping murderer. To say nothing of the fact that under those conditions, it was nearly impossible to claim self-defense.

  Even if it was. Even if she’d just shot at you.

  Lorraine Hess got to the door of her car and again he saw her extend her arm, and again he rolled as the shot pinged off the pavement behind him.

  Still on the ground, he squeezed off a round in the general direction of her tires. Off to his left, coming out his door, Juhle had his own weapon out, extended in both hands. He got off two quick shots that cracked the windshield before Hess got the car moving, and then Juhle had to jump backward inside the warehouse as she slammed it into gear and tried to run him down, smashing her front bumper into the side of the building, then bouncing off and coming on, faster now and off the curb.

  Hunt, in her path now as well, rolled out into the street and the car passed him, missing him by no more than a few inches. He turned to see her disappear around the corner with a squeal of her tires, heard the diminishing roar of the engine as she sped away, and, lying there on the street, then heard Juhle’s professional voice talking urgently into his cell phone. “I’m calling to report a shooting victim at around Sixth and Brannan. Ambulance required immediately. Urgent, repeat, urgent.” And then, as he closed up the phone, “Son of a bitch.”

  It was one week to the day after the arrest of Lorraine Hess.

  Wyatt Hunt put down the pages and looked across Gina’s small living room to where she sat with her Oban, her legs tucked up under her. “A twenty-two doesn’t make an enormous boom,” he said. “More like a ‘pop.’”

  “Everybody’s a critic.”

  “And besides,” Hunt went on, “that’s not what happened.”

  “I realize that. But it’s damn sure what very easily could have happened, and forcing you to take a good hard look at the other possibilities was kind of my point in doing the exercise. Because actually, it could have been much worse even than this. In my first draft of this, she runs you over and you die too. But then you’d be out of your misery, and I didn’t want that.”

  “You wanted me to suffer?”

  “Just a little more. I wanted you to see where this so easily could have gone.” Her smile was fleeting, laced with portent. “But just for fun, let me count the ways.” She held up a finger. “First, Lorraine doesn’t confess and goes home and realizes that she’s finished and she shoots her son while he sleeps and then takes her own life. And meanwhile, of course, Devin arrests Alicia.”

  “Don’t be such a softie,” Hunt said. “Have something bad happen.”

  “Something bad is coming right up,” she said. “Because maybe you’ve forgotten about it, but that first shot, Lorraine’s first shot as soon as Al Carter opened the door? In my little version of the story, it killed him and he’s lying dead on the floor of your place. And guess who the mildly angry Inspector Juhle is going to blame for that homicide—hint, it’s not just Lorraine, but the person who set up the encounter in the first place. So the good news is that nobody cares what he thinks because he’s going to lose his job for getting involved in this at all. But the bad news is you can’t give him a job because you lose your license at least, your shop gets closed up, and you maybe even go to jail. Next, in her ongoing rage and plain old embarrassment at having somebody shot to death in her partner’s presence when he was right there to stop it and she would have been there if you hadn’t sandbagged him, Sarah Russo comes after me for conspiracy or obstructing justice or some trumped-up charge and I lose my license too.”

  “And,” Hunt added, “we become another of San Francisco’s prominent homeless couples, living out of a Dumpster.”

  “Laugh if you want, Wyatt, but all of this was this close to happening, and I don’t see you realizing that.”

  “That’s because it didn’t. . . .”

  “Oh, and the last thing . . . because Lorraine killed herself when she got home, see above, she never could have told us where she had dumped Jim Parr at Lake Merced after she shot him, and he would have undoubtedly died too.”

  “And still may.”

  “True. But maybe dead, or as Billy Crystal would put it, mostly dead, is far preferable to completely and officially dead. They’ve done studies.”

  “All right.” Hunt crossed a leg and sat back in his chair. “Yep, those all would have been bad things, I agree. But what else would you have had me do, in some future case where I’ll be able to apply all these important lessons you’re trying to teach me from this one?”

  “How about you just call Juhle—or whoever the relevant police figure may be in the future—and tell him what you’d figured out?”

  “And then what? In the first place, he doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m blowing smoke at him to protect Alicia. Then, even if he buys what I’m telling him, he’s still got no evidence. So he’s going to play it by the book. He shows up with twenty- five cops, the SWAT team, a tank, and a helicopter and scares Lorraine away. Or worse, he simply goes and talks to her and she denies it and not only is she on her guard because she knows she’s a possible suspect, but Juhle’s back at square one—”

  “Not exactly. He could have found witnesses at that Noriega bar. Or after they found Jim, dead by this time, he could have gotten a warrant to look for the gun.”

  “But once she knows they’re looking at her, she ditches it.”

  “They’d eventually have gotten to her, Wyatt.”

  “I’m not so sure. And in any event, it wouldn’t have been soon enough. All of his focus, and Russo’s, too, was on Alicia, you remember. At the very least they would have brought her downtown—even with you there lawyering her up—and put her through a very bad time. And she was our client. She was my first responsibility.”

  “That’s another thing, Wyatt: How did she get to be your client?”

  “Mickey brought her on. He committed us.”

  “For how much retainer?”

  “I know,” he said.

  “So how weak is that?”

  “Very. Admittedly. But it’s what I acted on. Which, in my defense, worked out okay.”

  “I grant that. But what I’m trying to tell you is you didn’t have to take all those risks, to bring all of us together like that.”

  “I did. I needed Alicia for Devin, Carter for Hess, you for Alicia. Ellen for Hess’s lie about seeing Alicia and Dominic doing it. Turner and the Sanchez couple for verisimilitude and to convince Hess it was a charity business meeting, me and Mickey for the party favors. I’d probably do the same thing again under the same conditions.”

  “Which, luckily, are not likely to recur.” She tipped up her Scotch, set the glass down on the end table next to her, then got up and crossed the room, where she leaned down and kissed him. “I’d just like you to try to think about it. Is that asking so much?”

  With a straight face, he held up his right hand. “I hereby promise to think about it.” He tapped the pages he still held in his lap. “These words have not been in vain.”

  Still leaning over him, her arms on the arms of his chair, she looked him full in the face. “I believe I’ve mentioned,” she said, “how it worries me that you lie so easily.”

  “I’m in therapy for it.” Hunt grinned. “Honest.”

  Jim Parr, in an extremely drunken haze by the reed-lined water’s edge at Lake Merced, and thinking they had gotten themselves to this private place so he could get himself fellated by the still reasonably-hot-by-his-standards Lorraine Hess, had taken the .22 brass-jacketed bullet point-blank in the chest. It had passed through his heavy peacoat, slowed down considerably, nicked his sternum, and been deflected down and slightly to the right, where it had missed a lung and lodged behind a front rib. It had not hit any of his major organs or, more importantly, any arteries.

  Nevertheless, between the drink and the bullet, he had gone down like a dead man—enough to fool Hess, anyway—falling back into the muddy reeds, where he lay unmoving and progressively more c
omatose for the next twenty-eight hours until a police unit found him exactly where Hess had told Juhle he’d be. His pulse was a bare flicker, his body temperature ninety-two, and the paramedics had to resuscitate him twice in the ambulance when he flatlined on the way to the ER at the Kaiser Hospital on Masonic and Geary. His doctor said that his survival was a flat-out miracle, but offered his theory that the exposure and low body temperature had probably saved him. He didn’t even have a theory about how he survived the gunshot wound.

  For the first few days, Tamara and Mickey had come in to visit him every day and night, but he remained in the ICU, basically unresponsive, and Mickey had stopped coming by at every opportunity, since he truly hated hospitals and Jim wouldn’t know he was there anyway. Tamara, though, wanted to be around for when her grandfather woke up, as she believed he would, and she visited whenever she could.

  Now, Thursday, six days after Jim’s admittance, during the later evening visiting hours, Tamara was sitting by her grandfather’s bed a few blocks from their apartment, holding one of his cold hands in both of hers when he opened his eyes for the first time, saw her, squeezed her hand, and smiled feebly.

  He started to say something, but could only manage a guttural gurgle.

  “It’s okay, Jim,” Tamara whispered through her enthusiasm. “It’s Tam. You’re going to be okay.” He closed his eyes again for a moment and in that time Tamara pressed the call button by the head of the bed.

  Almost immediately a nurse was next to her, checking his vitals, glancing with concern at the monitor.

  “He’s awake,” Tamara said. “He just tried to talk to me.” And Jim opened his eyes again. “Maybe he could have some water?”

  “Water’s always good,” the nurse said. She poured a glassful from the pitcher near his bed, put in a straw, and directed it to Jim’s mouth.

  After swallowing two or three times, he lifted his head slightly and the straw came out. “Where are we?” he asked.