The Hunt Club

26

Hunt sat at the computer terminal, going through his e-mail. He had spam-blocking software but still the majority of his messages were from organizations or businesses he'd never heard of. There were a couple more Web site hits from people interested in his services and several others from law firms he'd already worked with. He forwarded all of the inquiries along to Tamara at the office on the chance that she didn't already have them-it was his fail-safe backup system.

Mickey's e-mail from yesterday gave him the street address of the Manion home, and his young runner had even gone the extra mile and dug up the private and unlisted residence telephone number, which Hunt no longer needed. Cursorily viewing the JPEG photos Mickey had attached, Hunt wasn't surprised to see that the house was huge and elegant. Terra-cotta, it could have been an Italianate castle overlooking the sea on the Amalfi coast. It must have had twenty rooms, but its most striking architectural feature was a bougainvillea-covered square tower. Mickey had expensive lenses and a good eye, and he'd shot the place from three or four different angles, maybe planning to use it as a model and build one just like it when he became a famous chef.

The last telephoto picture-catching Mrs. Manion and her son coming down the front walkway to what appeared to be a waiting limo-tapped into Hunt's continuing frustration. Hard times for the rich folks, he thought. And then, remembering the waterskiing death of the older son, immediately regretted the reaction. He was being petty.

This wasn't getting him anywhere. Nothing had gotten him anywhere. Somebody had killed Parisi just about right in front of him and gotten clean away with it. Hitting his keyboard nearly hard enough to break it, he logged off.

A few minutes later, having changed out of his work clothes into sweats and tennis shoes, he was back out in the warehouse side, standing at his free-throw line. He intended to shoot from there until he made ten in a row or wore himself out, whichever came first. He dribbled a time or two, stopped, dribbled once again, focusing on his target, narrowing it all down.

Setting himself, instead of taking a shot, he unleashed a straight hard pass-as hard as he could throw-at the backstop. The ball slammed into the top of the reinforced glass. The sound echoed loud and deep, a hollow gunshot, a hammer blow on an empty oil drum. The sound ricocheted off the walls around him.

He caught the return on the fly.

He gripped the ball again now with all of his strength. Stood stock-still. Then he threw it again. Same trajectory, same force. Same explosion of sound reverting to silence.

As he rode the wave, the wait between explosions became shorter. From one twenty-second interval, to once every ten seconds, then every five, then two. Throwing so hard he was grunting with the effort. Finally, shrinking uncounted minutes later, Hunt threw and caught the ball one last time. He was breathing hard, the muscles of his jaw cramped.

His body settled down. His breathing slowed.

Now he dribbled once again, set, and lobbed the ball in a high-arcing shot. It swished through the net, and he let it bounce its way off his court and away to a far corner.

It was 4:22 by the industrial clock over the backboard. He went back to his computer, turned it on again, and waited in a kind of suspension while it booted up. When the screen came on, he got back into his e-mail, brought up Mickey's photos of the Manions' house, and sat in front of the terminal for a very long time, trying to make sense of what his eyes were telling him, resisting the impulse to theorize ahead of facts this time.

Marginally satisfied, leaving the computer turned on, he stood up and walked as though in a trance inside to his living area. In his bedroom, he crossed to his closet, where he'd hung up his suit. In the jacket pocket, he grabbed his portable tape recorder and rewound it through the interview he'd had with Betsy Sobo that morning, then started playing it back from the beginning.

When he'd heard it twice, he went back to the bed and stood over it for a long moment. Finally, sitting down, he reached for the telephone.

Wu must have been working at her desk. She picked up on the first ring. "This is Amy."

Without preamble, Hunt said, "What time did Carol Manion call Andrea's office to ask if she was coming to her meeting or not? After she'd missed it."

"Run that by me again, Wyatt, would you?"

"Carla said she got the message from Carol Manion on the answering machine the next morning. Isn't that right?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Okay, that means she must have called after Carla had gone home. Correct?"

"Unless Andrea had a direct line, and she called that. Are you getting somewhere, Wyatt? Tamara said you'd gone up to San Quentin…"

"No. That was a dead end. Now I'm trying to avoid another one. Carla will still be at work now, won't she?"

"Probably."

"I've got to go, then."

He hung up, Wu's absolutely logical objection echoing in his mind: "Unless Andrea had a direct line, and she called that." Hunt, as Juhle had earlier in the day, was beginning to wonder if he was still capable of rational thought. If Andrea had a direct line and Carol Manion had left her message on it between, say, three and five o'clock on Wednesday, then that would end this most remote line of inquiry, too.

But he had no choice. He watched as if from far above as his fingers punched in the Piersall-Morton number.

Then he was talking with Carla.

"No," she said as his heart sank yet again. "Mrs. Manion had Andrea's number, and it was on her machine, not mine."

"Do you know how she got Andrea's personal number?"

"I don't know. And it wasn't personal. It was just her direct line at the office. But a million ways. It was on her card. Or she met her somewhere and gave it to her. Anything."

"So you have no way of knowing what time she called?"

"Well, no, of course I do. It'll still be on the machine. I haven't erased anything this whole week, and it gives the time and date."

Hunt struggled to keep the urgency out of his voice. "Could I trouble you to run in and check that for me, Carla?"

She was gone for an eternity. Hunt, leaving his fingerprints on the receiver, could stand it no more and put her on speaker so he could pace.

Finally, finally: "Wyatt."

"I'm here."

"Seven seventeen, Wednesday, June first, except we already knew the date, didn't we?"

But Hunt had heard what he was hoping to hear. "Seven seventeen?"

"Right. I listened twice to make sure."

"And what time was their appointment scheduled for?"

"Three thirty. She mentioned it in the message."

"What else did she say? Would you mind calling me back from Andrea's office and playing it back for me?"

"Now?"

"Right now. I'll give you my number."

A minute later, Carla was back with him, and Hunt was listening to Carol Manion's voice on Andrea's answering machine. "Ms. Parisi, hello. This is Carol Manion. I was just wondering if you'd forgotten our three thirty appointment this afternoon or if perhaps I had the day wrong in my calendar. Would you give me a call back, please, and let me know? And maybe we can reschedule? Thank you."

"That's it," Carla said. "It sounds like a pretty normal call."

"You're right, it does." Hunt wasn't thinking about what the call sounded like. He was thinking about when it was made. "But listen, Carla. Would you mind not mentioning this discussion to anybody for a little while? Nobody at all."

"No, of course. If you say-"

"I do. Please. Now, is there any way you can connect me to Mike Eubanks? I think he's one of the partners. He's Betsy Sobo's group."

"Yes, he is. Sure. You want to hold a second?"

"I will. And Carla?"

"Yes."

"Between us, right? Nobody else."

"Nobody else," she said. "Okay, here goes. Hold on."

Mike Eubanks wasn't in.

Mr. Eubanks often went home early on Fridays. No, his secretary couldn't give Mr. Hunt his cell or home number, but she could try to reach him and have him get back to Mr. Hunt if it was important.

Hunt told her it was and took the phone with him out to the computer again, where he sat and stared at Mickey's JPEG picture of Carol Manion and her son Todd walking toward the limo parked in front of their house. He focused on the picture, on the slight anomaly that had at long last registered and struck him.

He'd seen Carol Manion in the flesh that morning, walking with her husband outside Saint Mary's Cathedral, on her way in to Judge Palmer's funeral. In that brief near encounter, he'd only had the time to form one impression, and that was of age. Not of debilitating old age, certainly, but not of anything resembling youth, either. Now the clear picture he was looking at confirmed that she appeared to be at least in her sixties.

He shifted his gaze to the boy. Could he be the link with Staci Rosalier that had always been missing in any consideration of Carol Manion in connection with the other two victims? He stared at Todd's face, nearly half in profile from this angle, and wearing a petulant frown. The salient feature of the fuzzy portrait that Staci had framed in her apartment was the boy's beaming smile, and so the similarity, if any, remained obscure. Aside from the coloring, stare and study as he might, Hunt could not say it was the same child or even if Todd Manion had any resemblance to Staci's brother at all.

But the question that had first grabbed Hunt's attention was not the boy's identity per se. It was the apparent age of the mother. Even if Hunt was ten years off on Carol Manion's age and she was only, say, in her mid-fifties (which he doubted), it was highly unlikely that she had borne a child eight years before.

Which meant that Todd was adopted.

This was Hunt's area of experience if not expertise, and he knew that if this were the case, it was decidedly unusual. It was relatively normal for a previously childless couple to adopt, and then go on to have natural children of their own. That had been the case in Hunt's own family-his mother apparently barren before they had adopted him, then giving birth to his four siblings in the next eight years.

But he knew that it was much more rare for a couple with a first or second natural child to want to add an adoptive brother or sister to the mix. Especially with an age gap of greater than ten years. Which is not to say it never happened. But when it did, the circumstances invited inquiry.

To say nothing of the reality that at this point, anything out of the ordinary that had even a tangential reference to Andrea was going to grab Hunt's attention and not let go until he'd wrung an explanation from it.

He sat unmoving in front of the computer screen, but he'd stopped seeing it. With all of his efforts so far, with all of his speculations, he was still left working with only one fact that might get him some traction: Carol Manion had called Andrea's office at 7:17.

Why would she call at that time? Why not at three forty-five or four while she would have been waiting for Parisi's imminent arrival at her home? To see perhaps if she needed directions to the house or if she'd gotten hung up with other business? Or even was stuck in traffic? Although that call would have been to Andrea's cell. Wouldn't it? Wouldn't she have had Andrea's cell number, too?

The telephone's ring startled him out of his reverie. "Wyatt Hunt."

"Mr. Hunt, Mike Eubanks. My office said it was important. What can I do for you?"

"I'm working under Gary Piersall's orders on the disappearance of Andrea Parisi." Not strictly true, but Hunt didn't care. It would get Eubanks's cooperation.

And it did. "Well, then, of course, anything."

"We're looking into the possibility that the matter she had planned to discuss with Betsy Sobo might be important in some way, but the two women never had that meeting. I talked to Betsy this morning and she didn't have much of an idea what Andrea wanted to talk about, other than in the most general terms. But she also said that Andrea had called you first and you'd referred her to Betsy."

"That's right. She wanted to talk about some custody issues, which is more Betsy's bailiwick, so I told Andrea she ought to call her."

"Custody? Was she more specific than that?"

Eubanks didn't respond for a few seconds. "She said she had a potential client with some custody issues that might be fairly complicated, so I told her that Betsy was our ace on that stuff."

"She said potential client?"

"Yes, I'm pretty sure of that."

"So it wouldn't have been the union?"

"The client? No, I didn't get that impression. I'd worked with her on some union matters before, general contract and benefit issues, but this was definitely different. Besides which…" He paused.

"What?"

An embarrassed chuckle. "Well, it was a joke Andrea and I had with one another. Whenever she called on union business, she'd start by saying, 'Start your engines, Mike.'"

"Start your engines?"

"It meant we were on billable time from the git-go. This call, though, my secretary told me it was Andrea on the line, I picked up and said, 'I'm revving 'em up,' and she said, 'Not this time I'm afraid.' So it wasn't the union. Is this what you wanted?"

"I'm not sure. It certainly doesn't hurt."

"Good." Then, "Mr. Hunt?"

"Yes?"

Eubanks hesitated. "Do you think there's any chance she's still alive?"

"No one's found her body yet." Hunt's next words came out before he'd thought about them. "Until it turns up, I'm going to choose to keep hoping."

"That's good to hear, especially since the rest of the goddamn world's already got her in the grave. I hope I was some help."

He was going to make a few calls right away, but it was closing in on five o'clock and there might be something on TV that he'd want to see first.

Hunt had bought his television so he could watch sports and the very occasional rented movie. He hadn't tuned in to a single regular network or even cable show in years. People he knew sometimes used to talk about Seinfeld or Friends and lately now The Sopranos or Deadwood or those reality-show stupidities. He didn't get it-maybe it was a habit he'd just never developed. Even if he had the downtime, which was rare enough, he would always prefer to do something active, keep the body or the brain engaged.

But now he had his set turned on to the news. For a new all-time low in tastelessness, he gave big points to the first channel that came on, with its picture of a smiling Andrea Parisi in the corner of the screen, the caption "Andrea Watch," and a continually scrolling digital display under it counting the hours, minutes, and even seconds that she had been missing. 50:06:47.

Counting from the phone call to her cell phone, three o'clock Wednesday.

Changing the station, he caught a moment of anchor gravitas: "…who refused to be identified confirmed a few minutes ago that Andrea Parisi is now being considered a possible suicide and is, quote, not an impossible suspect, unquote, in the shooting deaths last Monday of Federal Judge George Palmer and his alleged mistress Staci Rosalier. San Francisco police would neither confirm nor deny this characterization, but…"

Enough already.

Hunt flipped to Trial TV. Rich Tombo was doing his part of the Donolan wrap-up out in front of the Hall of Justice, just around the corner. It seemed as though it had been forever since this morning in the street outside the Piersall offices when Spencer Fairchild had accused Hunt of colluding with Andrea in concocting this elaborate publicity stunt. When Tombo finished with his analysis of the prosecution's day in court, he staggered even the cynical Hunt by starting to introduce the new woman who would be taking over for the departed Andrea Parisi and providing insight into the defense…

Hunt couldn't even look to find out who it was.

Back on network TV, the next station he tuned to had moved along to the inability of authorities to identify any Rosalier next of kin. They had been supplied with a copy of the out-of-focus photograph of Staci's brother, and now the boy smiled out at Hunt while the female anchor's voice urged anyone who recognized this boy to either call the police or the number at the bottom of the screen.

But suddenly Hunt didn't see the kid's face anymore.

He saw the shape and color of what he was standing in front of. It, too, was out of focus, in the background, but once seen, unmistakable. In a second or two, he was back at his computer. Mickey's pictures of the Manion castle. The terra-cotta tower, the bougainvillea. He checked the other shots of the house from different angles, even finding the place where he supposed Todd Manion must have been standing when the picture from Staci's condo had been taken.

Back to Mickey's shot of Carol Manion and her son, coming down to the limo. And something else, at the edge of that shot.

He went back through the pictures again. One straight on of the front elevation, then one of the tower on the right, the triple garages and wide driveway to the left of the entrance portico. Hunt stopped on this one, leaned in to the terminal, although he saw it clearly enough-on the driveway, gleaming in yesterday's bright sunlight, a black BMW Z4 convertible.