The Hunt Club

25

They just got back to the car when Juhle's phone went off, and he picked it off his belt on the first beep, checked the number coming in, said, "Talk to me, Shiu. Make me happy."

But the call didn't produce that effect. After listening for less than a minute, shaking his head back and forth the whole time, he said, "I'm just leaving San Quentin with Wyatt Hunt. No, not the prison, Shiu. San Quentin, the burger joint. You don't know it? Out by the Cliff House. Awesome fries. Anyway, we might have something else maybe. But he can drop me back at the Hall. I'll tell you about it then."

"Let me guess," Hunt said when Juhle closed the phone. "The ballistics didn't match."

"I hate that guy," Juhle said.

On the rest of the drive back down to the city, Juhle made a couple more phone calls to verify that neither Andrea nor Arthur Mowery had turned up. No, to both.

After another lengthy phone call, during which Juhle asked a few questions but was mostly silent, he rang off. "That was Jeff Elliot. 'CityTalk'?" This was a popular Chronicle column that often dealt with the law and its practitioners.

"I know him well. What did he know?"

"Basically, everything. But I only asked him-you heard me-if he knew what it took to bring a guy in on parole violation. Give up? His parole officer says he's violated, period. Smoked a joint. Hung out with the wrong person. No warrant, no proof required. Is there any kind of hearing on this? Any moment with a judge or jury or lawyer?"

"I'm guessing no."

"You'd be right. So your violated parolee finally gets all the way back to prison and what happens?"

"They have a big welcome-back party?"

"Right. Balloons and everything. But after that, within thirty-five days he gets a hearing before a violation committee composed entirely of correctional officers, and guess what percentage of the time they uphold the violation?"

"A hundred and ten?"

"Close. Ninety-nine and a half. So then our guy gets up to a year on the violation. And this can be continued up to three years even if you're originally in on a one-year sentence. Can you appeal? Sure. It takes eight months and succeeds point oh-five percent of the time. One in two hundred."

"Was Elliot going to write a book on this or something?" Hunt asked.

"I hit him on a good day. He talked my ear off. I told you he knew everything. You want any more facts?"

"Does it have to be on the union? I'd like to know the depth of Lake Tahoe."

"Too deep to dive to the bottom. That's all you need to know. Here's your last real question, though. How many inmates in California prisons are there for violating parole? I'm talking percentages."

"Nineteen?"

"Fifty."

"That would be half."

"Correct."

"So more than nineteen percent?"

"Way more, Wyatt. Way more."

Juhle had to wait for Shiu, but Hunt had his own wheels and his own agenda, and he wasn't going to wait for anybody anymore, not when he felt they were getting this close. He finally dropped Juhle off at the Hall of Justice on Bryant, went around the corner and up to Mission and, doing his best imitation of Mickey Dade's driving techniques, turned left. The parole office for units 1-3 was six blocks down, and if Phil Lamott wasn't at that one, number 4 wasn't much farther away. It had gotten to midafternoon, between two thirty and three, now almost exactly forty-eight hours since he'd left Andrea at her house. Having worked within the city's bureaucracy for a good portion of his life, Hunt knew that there was a better than reasonable chance that parole officers, like his former CPS coworkers, would be at the office on Friday afternoons, getting their paperwork filled out before the weekend.

Close-up, Hunt put Lamott at about his own age. He wore his dirty-blond hair a bit long by police standards. He'd had bad acne at one time, and now tried to cover the scars, mostly unsuccessfully, with a short yet scraggly beard and wispy mustache. He was hunched over a dinosaur of a manual typewriter to the side of his cluttered desk, pecking away, filling in some official-looking form.

"Officer Lamott?"

His fingers stopped. His head turned. Hunt immediately recognized the expression from his days at CPS-don't let this be more work with only a couple of hours to go until the weekend. "Yeah. How can I help you?" No turn to face his visitor, no offered hand.

Hunt introduced himself, flashed his ID. The explanation of his involvement that Juhle had given to Warden Harron had been a good one for a sense of legitimacy, and he used it again. "I'm working with a law firm in town, Piersall-Morton, trying to locate one of their attorneys who's gone missing."

"Andrea Parisi," Lamott said. The story still big news.

"Right."

"What's she got to do with me?"

"Nothing. But she may have something to do with Arthur Mowery."

This got his attention. He abandoned his typewriter and swung around. "What do you mean?"

Hunt realized that in order to make any sense of the scenario they were pursuing, he'd have to give Lamott the same kind of in-depth explanation that he'd provided for Harron. This he wasn't prepared to do for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that any conspiracy theory involving CCPOA members more or less contemplated the involvement if not of Lamott himself, then of someone in an analogous position.

So he kept it simple, omitting any mention of the Palmer/Rosalier murders. "I mean the police are now considering him a person of interest in her disappearance."

"Arthur? Did he know her somehow?"

"I was hoping to get that from you. I'm assuming you're the one that violated him the two times he's gotten out."

"Yeah, that was me. Both times."

"What did he do?"

"The usual. He was loaded. He's a crackhead, but you probably knew that. What would he have…you're saying you think he abducted Parisi or something?"

"The police must think so. I got it from them."

"They're talking to private investigators nowadays?"

"I'm trying to locate her. They're trying to find him. We're cooperating."

"They give any reason? They have any evidence?"

"Not to me and, no, not that I know of."

Lamott pulled at one side of his mustache, then the other. He squeezed the meat of his lower lip. "So what's their interest based on? Is there a ransom note? Did he call from somewhere?"

Hunt feigned ignorance. He was asking his own questions. "I noticed he went about eight years between arrests?"

"He got married and straightened out for a while. He moved up to El Dorado Hills, someplace like that, evidently lived like a citizen until his wife left him a couple of years ago."

"Isn't that a little odd? A guy with his record? Especially with the violence. You'd expect a DV"-domestic violence-"complaint, wouldn't you? Something."

"Maybe not. People get better." Lamott shrugged. "It happens. Get off the dope, you're okay. But you're right, either way, Arthur's a violent guy."

"He's got an attempted murder by firearm on his sheet. Last time you picked him up-Saturday, wasn't it?-he had a gun on him, too. I understand he got into some shit in prison. You believe he really was straight for eight years?"

"Yeah, I do. More or less."

"You see him during that time?"

"A couple of times. Like I told you, he moved up by Sacramento, so he reported up there."

"And never got violated?"

"Apparently not."

"Until he got down here, and you hauled him in?"

"Right."

"After eight years?"

"What's your point?"

Hunt thought the point was obvious enough-Mowery had protection of some kind in Sacramento and got thrown to the wolves down here when he had stopped cooperating-but he didn't want to antagonize Lamott so that he wouldn't talk to him anymore. "I just find it curious," he said. Then he tacked. "So what'd he do? For work?"

"Mechanic. Mostly private planes."

"That's a little unusual, isn't it?"

"I don't know. He's got a pilot's license and knows airplanes pretty well. He's a pretty sharp guy, actually, unless he's strung out. But I go call on him Saturday and he's loaded, I've got no choice. I've got to violate him."

"He's got a pilot's license?" Hunt with visions of Mowery dropping Andrea miles out over the ocean.

"Suspended now. And of course no plane. Although that's a question."

"What is?"

Suddenly suspicion showed in the sallow face. "The cops didn't tell you this? They should know."

"I'm looking for her," Hunt repeated. "They're looking for him."

Apparently, this was good enough. "A small plane, a Cessna I think, got stolen out of Smith Ranch Airport on Monday night. It still hasn't turned up."

" Smith Ranch Airport? I don't know it."

"It's a private place. Small planes. Lots of tie-downs, no security to speak of. It's near San Rafael, and as a flier himself, Arthur definitely would have known about it. You want to know the truth, the whole airplane connection is where CDC's been concentrating their efforts to find him."

"And where is it? Smith Ranch?"

"I don't know exactly-maybe three, three and a half miles from San Quentin." Suddenly another thought struck Lamott with an almost visible force. "Maybe I don't remember, but Parisi hasn't been gone since Monday, has she? It's been that long?"

"No. Wednesday afternoon."

"Hmm. Well, not saying that Arthur definitely hotwired and stole the plane, but if he did, and he certainly could have, he was long gone by then."

Down the street from the parole office, Hunt sat out in his car, trying to figure out what he had missed. And of course, as Lamott had said, it was still possible that Mowery had not stolen the Cessna at all. Or, for all Hunt knew, since Mowery was a flight mechanic, he might even have absconded with the plane out of Smith Ranch Airport, flown under everyone's radar to any one of the small private airports near the city, and committed all sorts of mayhem in San Francisco. But suddenly what had seemed almost too obvious only an hour before had become implausible if not impossible.

Lamott's reactions to Hunt's questions, or more precisely the lack of them, were instructive as well. Mention of one of his parolees had not sparked a trace of defensiveness, as it certainly would have if Lamott were involved in a conspiracy to break Mowery out of San Quentin so that he could assassinate a federal judge. Lamott appeared to be exactly what he was-a functionary in a civil service job that made few demands on his time or personal life. It was hard for Hunt to imagine the low-affect Lamott as any kind of player in the high drama and secrecy of the union's political arm. To this particular parole officer, Arthur Mowery was clearly just another one of the hundreds of mostly pathetic lowlifes he processed through the system again and again and again. Mowery may have had a controller among the parole officers in the Sacramento region, directing him in the union's mayhem, but Hunt couldn't put Lamott in the role.

Juhle had told him that half of California's prison population were parole offenders, but more than that, he remembered hearing that something like seventy percent of everybody out on parole in California got violated back in, which was twice the national average. Parole officers like Lamott weren't in the business of helping prisoners break out of jail, that was for sure. Not for any reason. The entire thrust of the CCPOA bureaucracy was to keep 'em in, keep the population up so there'd be more jails and more guards.

But all this left Hunt with a great hollowness. There had been a symmetry and even some elegance to the idea of the union as the solution to Andrea's disappearance. She and Palmer had both been involved with it on many levels. The judge's latest order was a great and immediate threat to the union's very survival. Andrea's clandestine research on the labor organization's apparent crimes furthering its political agenda may have been unearthed and exposed her to reprisal. But all of it, taken together, depended upon the belief that the union was engaged not just in systematic harassment but in actual premeditated contract murder.

And if that were the case, and Jim Pine had a war chest of many millions of dollars, which he did, then why would he use, at best, quasi-reliable parolees when he could simply pay professionals on the outside to do the same job more efficiently and with less possible downside? But if nothing else, Juhle had been adamant about one fact through all of their investigations: The Palmer/Rosalier murders didn't look like they'd been done by a professional.

That's what had led them to consider the parolee option in the first place. And now that theory, too, appeared to be fatally flawed.

Which left what?

Hunt pulled out his cell phone. He'd had it off all day and knew that if the damn thing rang right now as he was holding it, he wouldn't answer unless it was one of his gang. Thank God for caller ID. He had missed five more calls in the course of the day, though, and scanning down the list, he saw that they were all clients. Probably all at the very least frustrated with him; at the worst, furious.

Well, he couldn't help that. Not now. Not until this was over.

He'd have to get used to it.

Hunt closed up the phone, turned it off again, unclamped his jaw, threw the Cooper into gear, and pulled out into the street. Wisps of windswept fog condensed on his windshield and forced him to put his wipers on intermittent. He continued south and eventually pulled up half a block short of the Mission Street BART station, where he found a spot to park. Five minutes later, he was eating what he considered the biggest and best burrito in the city.

He kept coming back to Juhle's reluctance to accept the coincidence of Rosalier's presence at Palmer's when someone just happened to stop by to shoot him. Staci had always been there in the picture somehow, providing a tenuous link between Palmer and Andrea, but the CCPOA had always until now assumed a much greater prominence. Now, with all other options either discredited or disproved-it hadn't been the wife, it probably hadn't been Arthur Mowery. A professional in the employ of the union would have done a cleaner, more efficient job of the killings. Hunt could still give no credence to Juhle's early idea that Andrea herself committed the double homicide and then either ran or killed herself, and in any event, they'd tested her clothing and the weapons at her house and found no evidence to implicate her.

Itching to move, but with no place to go, Hunt sipped at his Coke, barely tasted the burrito.

Turning it all over, viewing it from every angle.

There were three victims. Start there.

If Hunt played Juhle's game and ruled out coincidence, these victims must all have been somehow related.

He sat indoors at a red plastic table. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner, there was only one other customer, a woman in her sixties or early seventies who was working on a bowl of albondigas a couple of tables down. Watching her, Hunt's mind flashed to Carol Manion of all people, whom he'd seen at Palmer's funeral that morning. Suddenly, it occurred to him that her association with the case, tangential at best, had always been because she'd made an appointment with Andrea Parisi. Parisi had been her connection, not Palmer. But now, apparently, if she'd been at his funeral, perhaps she'd known Palmer as well.

Trying to conjure up some sort of a relationship between Manion and Staci Rosalier to complete the trifecta got him nowhere except to scorn at himself for grasping at such feeble straws. But the exercise didn't seem completely futile as it led him to consider even the most peripheral dancers in this fandango.

Fairchild? Parisi's ex-lover, but no known connection to either Palmer or Rosalier.

Tombo? No. Nothing.

And both men alibied one another Monday night in any event.

Piersall?

Hunt stopped chewing, lowered his drink to the table. Piersall knew both Palmer and Parisi. Undoubtedly he'd eaten lunch at MoMo's at least once. Maybe he was a regular there. It was possible then that he'd met Staci Rosalier, which would make him the only person associated with all three victims. Also, Andrea had come to him about the imminent danger to the union represented by Palmer's order, and again with her concerns about the apparently criminal activities of the CCPOA. Beyond that, the Saint Francis Hotel was a short walk from his firm's offices on Montgomery. Might he have called Parisi from there on Wednesday afternoon and asked her to stop by the office…?

Where what? Where he had Pine's people meet her as she parked in the downstairs garage and then drive her away?

Hunt closed his eyes, willing his brain to slow down, get a grip. This was what he and Juhle, too, for that matter, had been doing for more than two days now, building theories and scenarios out of possibilities plucked from thin air. He knew he could now spend the next hour checking to see where Piersall had been on Monday night, whether he'd left the office between two and three thirty on Wednesday afternoon. And even if Piersall hadn't hired it done, even if he'd done it himself, even if he couldn't account for any of those times, Hunt would still be back where he was now, with no evidence, no hint of proof.

But the tantalizing thought resurfaced. It was a fact that Piersall remained the only human being with a demonstrable connection to Palmer and Parisi and quite possibly to Rosalier. With no other alternatives, Hunt asked himself, wasn't this worth pursuing, too? What did he have to lose?

He finished his Coke, wrapped up the remains of his burrito, and stood up. The old woman gave him a smile, and he patted his stomach and returned the smile, then walked behind her and dropped his garbage in the can by the door.

This neighborhood was usually the last place the fog hit in the city, and now it was thick and wet, so he knew it was going to be miserable everywhere else. He ran the short distance back to his car and, in the relative warmth inside it, pulled out his phone and called his office.

By the time Hunt got home, he had nothing left.

On his instructions, Tamara talked to Gary Piersall's private secretary and learned that her boss had been chairing a shareholders' meeting Monday night that had run through dinnertime until nearly eleven o'clock. All of Wednesday afternoon, Piersall had been with Pine and other union representatives and attorneys in the firm's conference room.

Tamara also told him that Craig had gotten his last two subpoenas served early, then gone to Ocean Avenue and found the place where Staci Rosalier had worked before MoMo's. It was called Royal Thai, and she'd been there for two years. It was her first job after graduating from high school in Pasadena, down in Southern California.

Juhle put the last nail in the coffin. Hunt had called him just after he left Lamott's to save him a trip to the parole office and to offer his revised opinion now on the likelihood that Arthur Mowery had played any kind of role in either the Palmer/Rosalier murders or in Andrea's abduction. He'd just pulled into his warehouse, the door closing down behind him, when Juhle called him to say that it had been a long and fruitless day and now he was going home for the weekend, but Hunt might want to know that they'd just gotten word that the Cessna aircraft that had been reported missing from Smith Ranch Airport had been located, crashed in rugged terrain at seven thousand feet of elevation in the Tehachapi Mountains outside of Bakersfield. The pilot, not yet positively identified although the plane was, was assumed to be Arthur Mowery, who'd apparently been trying to make it to Mexico.

"I'm back to thinking she killed herself," Juhle said. "There's nothing else. You want to come by and have some dinner with us? You'd even get to watch me coach a Little League game first. I could call Connie. We wouldn't have to have pizza."

But Hunt had just eaten and didn't feel like company, certainly didn't feel like arguing with Juhle, who was welcome to think whatever he wanted. But for Hunt's part, he was certain that Andrea didn't kill herself, and that this was true because she hadn't killed Staci or Palmer. He took that as unshakable fact, immutable truth.