The Hunt Club

15

"Juhle, homicide."

"Hunt, Chinatown."

"Wrong."

"How could I be wrong? I haven't said anything yet."

"Why do I have to explain everything, Wyatt? If I say, 'Juhle, homicide,' you don't say, 'Hunt, Chinatown.' You say something like 'Hunt, investigations.' It's the work, not where you do it. Try again later." And he hung up.

Hunt sometimes thought that the only thing worse than dealing with someone who had a personality was dealing with somebody who didn't. He punched up Devin's number again, got his deadpan, "Juhle, homicide," and this time said, "Hunt, investigations."

"Wyatt," Juhle boomed, "how've you been all this time?"

"I've been good, Devin, but I'm investigating right now even as we speak. I need you to find out something for me."

"That would be me investigating, not you. And I believe I've mentioned I do homicide. Are you calling about a homicide?"

"I hope not."

"Then I'm not your man. Shiu and I, we're out the door in about two minutes on a murder case, which is what we do. And it's all we do. So good luck."

"Don't hang up!" Hunt was surprised to note the sharper edge in his voice. In spite of his assurances to Amy Wu that everything probably was fine with Andrea Parisi, Hunt was aware that the knot in his stomach where the last pork bao had settled had not gone away. "You remember last night we talked a little about Andrea Parisi…"

Juhle's voice fell half an octave. "Yeah."

"I just got a call from Amy Wu."

"What about?"

"About Andrea not returning her calls since yesterday and not showing up at work this morning."

"Hey, I almost didn't come in myself. It happens. My arm was killing me. I had to drop a Vicodin."

"Not the same thing, really." Hunt tried to keep the impatience and worry out of his voice. "I wondered if you could make a few calls around and see if a thirty-something Jane Doe has turned up somewhere."

"She wouldn't be a Jane Doe if it's Parisi. Somebody would recognize her."

"That would depend on how she looks, wouldn't it? Say if she was beat up…"

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"Yep."

"Why can't you make those calls and look for her?"

"I'm tied up with clients for the next several hours. You could do it quicker through one of those magical networks you cops employ, where you can find out about anything. Besides, you answered your own phone, which indicates that you're in your office either doing paperwork or screwing around until something more important comes up. And this is it."

Juhle looked down at the first stack of Judge Palmer's bank records on his desk in front of him. "How long has she been gone?"

"Since before dinner last night."

"And you want me to check where?"

"Everywhere you'd look if you were looking for somebody. The morgue would be my last choice, but hospitals. Maybe she got herself drunk and arrested last night and isn't checking her messages."

"You want missing persons," Juhle said.

"They won't start looking until somebody's gone three days, Dev. You know this, and that's too long."

"Not really, since it gives the missing person time to show back up if they've had a change of heart and decided to come back to their spouse or boyfriend or mother and father."

"This isn't any of those."

"You checked her house, her work, her…?"

"Yes to all the above. Some of us-Wu, Tamara, me-we're going to be calling around, but you know you can cover more ground a lot easier."

Juhle hesitated for a couple of seconds. He said, "Now you mention it, I kind of wanted to talk to her myself about what you mentioned last night."

"What was that?"

"Palmer, basically. The prison guards. Lanier thinks there might be something there after all."

"So you're admitting you owe me?"

Juhle sighed into the line. "All right. I'll see what I can find out," he said.

Tamara opened the door before Hunt put the receiver down. "Do you really think she's in trouble?"

"You've been listening in on my calls."

"Just the last two, and only to save you the time it would take to brief me. Are you really worried?"

"Let's say I'd feel better if we heard from her."

"What are you going to do next?"

He consulted his watch. "I was going to be finishing this class on the Net and then getting some business done, but I'm due at McClelland's, and that's going to take most of the afternoon."

"Do you want me to call anybody else in the meanwhile?"

Hunt was up, gathering papers, snatching up his briefcase. "Try Andrea's office again and make friends with her secretary, try to avoid getting her all worked up. Find out the last clients she saw, what they talked about, where she was last night…"

"Whoa!" Tamara raised a palm, stopping him. "I'm trying to avoid getting her all worked up, right? I'll just talk to her and see what she gives me."

"Okay, you're right. Otherwise, stay near the phones in case Devin calls back. You can page me. Or if you hear from her, of course."

Marcel Lanier closed the door to his office in the homicide detail. He went behind his desk and sat, leaving his two inspectors to wonder if he wanted them to remain standing or to sit. Shiu had come in before Juhle and apparently didn't intend to move. He now blocked access to the two chairs in the small area facing Lanier's desk. So they stood, unnaturally close together, by the door.

"If it's not the wife, you understand," the lieutenant began in a low and brooding tone, "we're going to be having jurisdictional issues again." He meant the FBI and Homeland Security. "What do you suggest we do about that?"

Juhle, with a little sleep under his belt and a Vicodin easing his hand and shoulder pain this morning, cracked an easy grin. "The Feds? How about we don't tell 'em? Yesterday, they backed out of it, thinking it was local. Maybe it still is; there's just a few complications. So today we just leave it. If they don't ask, we don't tell."

Lanier's mouth turned upward briefly in a parody of a smile. "That's a fine idea, Devin, except for the press conference that I'm supposed to be giving in about two hours."

Juhle shrugged. "The investigation is continuing. Tell 'em we're making progress. Which we are. Reporters love progress."

"We all do. But what would that progress be in this case?"

"Eliminating suspects. We don't have to tell them Jeannette's out because, in fact, maybe she's not. We're just pretty sure she wasn't the shooter."

Lanier didn't like that. "Pretty sure?"

Shiu stood at attention. "My money, she's still in it."

Lanier turned his head. "What about you, Dev?"

Not exactly exuding enthusiasm, Juhle lowered his chin an inch, which served as a nod. "Barring something pretty weird, it's probably true she couldn't have been there for the shooting, sir. She was up in Marin."

Shiu spoke up in a hurry. "But that doesn't mean she couldn't have planned it and hired someone."

"That's where you're going with this?"

"I think it's still our best shot, sir. One thing's sure-if Mrs. Palmer knew about the Rosalier girl, she's got the best motive. We'll be trying to find out if she did and if so, how."

"So she's still the focus?" Lanier asked. "Just on the off chance somebody with the feebs comes and asks."

"We're not ready to abandon the motive, Marcel," Juhle said. "Oh, and I did mention she got herself lawyered up, didn't I? Everett Washburn."

Although retaining an attorney was universally viewed by the cops as nearly tantamount to an admission of guilt, in this case the news didn't rock Lanier much. "You'd expect that, wouldn't you? Judge's wife. She knows the game. But Washburn, shit."

"Yes, sir," Juhle said. "High-powered. Good news is maybe it takes a couple of years before it gets to trial and he'll die before then."

Lanier shook his head. "I wouldn't get my hopes up. Prosecutors have been saying that for the past ten years. The old fart's going to live forever. He's too smart to die."

But clearly Mrs. Palmer's choice of legal representation wasn't his main concern. He leaned back in his chair, cast his gaze up to the ceiling for a minute. When he came back down to his inspectors, his face was set. "I want you to understand, Shiu, that I agree with you that she's got a good motive. Hell, the classic motive, no question. So I'm just being devil's advocate here a minute."

Juhle was starting to like this. In the old days, when he was paired with Shane Manning, the two of them would toss case theories back and forth all day long, dig into them for nuances, contradictions, contexts. Lanier might be the boss, but he'd come up through the ranks and had been an inspector himself for fifteen years. This was what cops did, how they talked, the way they thought. Juhle wondered for the hundredth time what he'd done to deserve his current partner, who just didn't have a cop's imagination. Standing here by the desk, rooted to the floor, for example.

"Excuse me, before you start," Juhle said, "my esteemed colleague here actually likes standing at attention all day, but I'd really like to sit down." Amazingly, his partner moved, crossing behind the desk to the far chair while Juhle took the near one. "Okay," Juhle said when he'd taken the load off, "advocate."

Lanier wasted no time, held up a finger. "First, professional hit is your call, am I right?"

"Right," Shiu said. "Best case."

"Okay, a couple of questions. Like, how do you explain the slug in the book? The shooter's three, four feet max, from his targets, who at the very least aren't moving much. Palmer's in his chair. How does he clean miss? And okay, of course, gun's go off by themselves, but just to think about. Next, what's this nonsense about how they can tell that the shooter is probably short? Like kid-size, small-woman-size."

Juhle snapped his fingers. "That rent-a-midget place," he said.

Shiu painted on a frustrated look that Lanier ignored and went on. "The other question is where does a woman like Jeannette Palmer find a professional killer, first, who's going to trust her, and second, who she's going to know how to talk to once she finds him, if she can get that far? How does she even ask? What, she's doing research for a book or something?"

Shiu spoke up. "Are you suggesting we drop it?"

"No. But I do think it's a reach."

"Why is that?" Shiu asked.

Lanier gave it another moment, considering. "Okay, the stuff I've just mentioned, for starters. Not insignificant, especially setting up the deal in the first place. Next, no scuff marks on any of the slugs, which means no silencer. Another small point, I grant you, but if I'm shooting somebody-make that two people-during daylight hours in a street-facing room in a house in a quiet, highend residential neighborhood, even if I'm using a.22 pistol, I'm trying to keep the noise down, you know. Simple precaution."

Lanier paused, picked at a spot on his right ear. A silence built in the small room, but the lieutenant obviously had more to say, and evidently even Shiu saw the wisdom in letting him get to it uninterrupted.

"You know what's the real thing, though?" he asked. "I'm picturing the moment, okay. Palmer's in his big leather chair, the girl is next to him, the shooter's across the desk." He shook his head. "I just don't see it."

"Why not?" Shiu asked.

"May I?" Juhle asked.

Lanier nodded.

"It's too far away," Juhle said. "The judge let him in-we've got no sign of forced entry. Okay, say, he showed the gun at the door, backed everybody in. No way do they get to the office with the judge sitting in his chair. No, the second he's inside, the shooter pops him in the head right now, then goes for the girl. They are not all somehow chatting in the office."

"I have no trouble with any of that." Shiu had sat back, crossed his legs, spoke to Juhle, while including Lanier. But a tone of defensiveness crept in. His back was straight and stiff against the wooden chair. "But maybe the person didn't appear to be a threat. Maybe the judge knew him. Or her. And the victims thought they were going to be able to talk things out."

The guy even sits at attention, Juhle was thinking. He said, "It's not a deal breaker, but there is one more thing." He turned to Lanier. "He shoots the girl again, am I right, Marcel?"

"I think so," Lanier said. He lowered his voice, shifted to face Shiu a bit more. "She went down after the shot, but there's no visible wound. What do you do if she's your contract? He's already missed at least once. She might have fainted, or even ducked. A pro doesn't leave her there without making sure. He comes around the desk and puts another one in her brain. And probably another one for the judge as well."

"At that range, he would know they were dead if he hit them in the head." Shiu sat with all of their objections for a long moment. Finally, he said, "I still think that somehow it has to involve Mrs. Palmer."

"And I agree that it's a strong assumption," Juhle said. In fact, he'd seen enough homicides to know that the taking of lives almost always involved a great deal of sloppiness. Retaliatory gang hits would as a matter of course take out four bystanders and leave the intended victim untouched. A woman would plan to kill her cheating boyfriend, wouldn't put enough rat poison in the peas-or he'd taste it halfway through-and they'd wind up in a knife fight that left them both dead. Strung-out, part-time hit men had been known to hit the wrong guy. Oops.

But beyond the randomness that often accompanied violent death, depending on who you asked, Juhle knew that the going rate to take someone's life in San Francisco ranged from down around one thousand dollars to somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars. Obviously, if you hired from the low end of that spectrum, your junkie street person looking for dope money to get right might make any number of technical errors in planning and execution. Of course, Juhle figured that if Mrs. Palmer had hired out the job, she had drawn from the upscale side, but maybe not.

He just wanted Shiu to have a little perspective. On the other hand, he and Shiu lived most of each day together, and there wasn't any point in alienating him or helping to make him look bad. "There is one way it might have worked, though," he said.

"What's that?" Lanier asked.

"You been following this thing in the papers between Palmer and the prison guards?"

In one of his well-tailored Nordstrom suits, Hunt was in a room full of very serious adults, talking about financial details of a million-dollar partnership that had gone awry because one of the principals had played loose with the books. It was important stuff to everybody else there-Hunt knew that the associates at McClelland, all younger than he was, made a minimum of one hundred fifty dollars per hour and that they lived and breathed these details.

Now he was there, at a mere eighty dollars per hour, to ensure that his witness, a sixty-year-old gentleman named Neil Haines, was going to say substantially the same things in his deposition testimony as he'd told Hunt in their discussions about four months before, discussions that Hunt only vaguely remembered, but which fortunately he'd recorded. He'd also taken copious notes.

Looking out over the sun-drenched city from the thirty-fifth-floor conference room windows inside McClelland, Tisch & Douglas, Hunt passed the rest of the morning in a haze of detail and tedium. When the depo team broke for lunch, he checked with Tamara. Andrea was still AWOL. Apparently she'd called in at work yesterday on her way to see a client at her home.

"Who was the client?"

"Carol Manion. And, yes, if you were wondering, that's the Manions."

Hunt whistled. Unless she'd known the Manions personally beforehand, Andrea Parisi had obviously bartered some of her notoriety into hard billings if she was scoring this level of client. Ward and Carol were a well-known couple who had made their initial money in the grocery business but since had branched out into wineries and restaurants and sports teams. They owned a good portion of the 49ers. They had also been regulars on the society page, but Hunt seemed to recall that recently their son had died in a boating accident or something, and since then their public appearances had tailed off. "So did you talk to her, Mrs. Manion?"

"No, are you kidding? How do I get to her?"

"Andrea's secretary?"

"Wyatt, come on. No way is Carla Shapiro giving out Manion's private number."

"Did you ask?"

"Did I ask? Am I slightly insulted by that question?" Hunt could almost see Tamara pout over the line. "She pretended she didn't have it. I'm sure."

"So we don't know if Andrea ever got there?"

"Right. I did call their corporate offices-the Manions's-and asked, too, but evidently it was something more personal. At the main office, they didn't know about any connection between Carol and Andrea."

"Okay. What about Dev? Any word from him?"

She told him that Juhle had called to report that no local hospitals had unidentified accident victims, the morgue had no recent Jane Doe, the jail hadn't acquired an attractive, young female-attorney inmate overnight. All this, as far as it went, was good news-Parisi wasn't verified as hurt or dead-although it was nowhere nearly as good as a sighting would have been.

"Have you heard any more from Amy?"

"No word."

"I'll call her." But as soon as they hung up, the young McClelland turk who was directing their efforts in the depositions knocked on the glass conference room window and motioned to Hunt, indicating that they were going to start. Time was money, and the lunch break here at McClelland was thirty minutes. But whatever it was, they needed him in there, and the call to Wu would have to wait.