The Hunt Club

31

From Hunt's descriptions, Juhle thought he'd have better luck with Caitlin Rosalier than with any of the other principals. Besides that, she lived in Boston, where it wasn't so early in the morning. The gods smiled, and she was home and seemed eager to talk with him.

The phone call she'd had last night had really bothered her and kept her awake most of the time since then. Yes, she would be fine with Juhle faxing her an autopsy photograph. "It's not too gross, is it?" She'd been really close to Staci once and now seemed to need some sense of closure if, in fact, her friend had been the victim. There was a copy shop on the corner, and she could go there and call Juhle back with the fax number, and he'd told her he would wait for her call.

Before it came, though, Juhle's partner got back to him with the news that he wasn't coming in on this weekend morning. Maybe Juhle didn't realize it, but some cops couldn't live on their meager city incomes and had to supplement their earnings with part-time work such as Shiu's shifts at the Manions. Juhle would stay in touch and keep him informed, though. Right? Thank you very much. He could probably arrange to be in by early afternoon if it was a real emergency, but he didn't even want to commit to that until Juhle had something truly substantive and, in Shiu's words, "Remember, based on evidence, Dev."

Juhle hung up, said, "Asshole," and stared out through the fog at the freeway from his desk in the otherwise empty homicide detail.

For most of the next twenty minutes, he studied the forensics folder, laboring over the affidavit he would attach to the warrant he hoped to get on the Manions' two homes and their cars. At these locales, he would specifically be looking for the murder weapon or clothes that might be contaminated with blood or gunshot residue. From the cars, he hoped to get a hair or even a blood sample that would match Andrea Parisi's.

The evidence would not be as compelling since fingerprints lasted a long time, and perhaps Mrs. Manion had been to Palmer's home socially, but if he could get them, he'd like to find fingerprints indicating that Mrs. Manion had been in Judge Palmer's office. The rug in the judge's office, too, had yielded several different hair samples, and though any DNA or other sophisticated tests on these would be slow coming in, if they came up positive, they would help.

The telephone rang and he snatched at it. Caitlin, at last, with the fax number at her copy shop. He wrote it down, thanked her, told her to stay on the line if she could. He grabbed the best autopsy face photo of Staci Rosalier from the file and fed it into the detail's fax machine. By the time he was back at his desk, she was crying and he had his identification.

Still working on the affidavit for his warrant, Juhle looked up and broke a smile. "Look what the cat dragged in. Don't blame me for anything about last night. I told you to go home."

Hunt wasn't in much of a smiling mood himself. "Did you put them on me?"

"Give me a break, Wyatt. You did that to yourself. I even warned you. You find out anything for all your troubles?"

"Yeah. You're working with sociopaths."

"Hey, that's on the application. Get over it."

Hunt really hadn't come in to berate Juhle, and now he let it go, pointing at the folder. "They're up in Napa," he said.

"I know."

"How do you know that?"

"It was in the paper. Plus, you'll be pleased to hear that we've got four reasonably rock-solid IDs on Staci's picture. He's Todd Manion."

"He also got his hair cut this morning. Buzzed."

"Interesting. A little too late, as it turns out, but interesting." Juhle's head jerked up. "But wait a minute. How did you find that out?"

"Mickey's up there."

Juhle sat back, massaged his shoulder, apparently in real pain. When he spoke, he had his official voice on. "You've got to get out of this, Wyatt. I mean it. All the way out. And keep your guys out, too."

"Hold it. Let me frame an appropriate response." It took him about a second. "No, I don't think so."

"You obstruct this investigation at this point-"

"Hey!" Hunt pointed down at Juhle's face. "I'm the only reason you've got an investigation at this point."

Juhle remained calm. "Wyatt. It's moved beyond you. Caitlin Rosalier ID'd Staci about a half hour ago."

"I knew that twelve hours ago."

Juhle shook his head. "You didn't know it. You thought it. I proved it."

"And lost half a day while you were at it. And stopped me in my tracks in the process."

"That's because it is a process, my friend. Due process. Ring a bell? Sometimes it takes time to get it right."

"Sometimes you don't have the luxury of time. How about that?"

"This isn't one of those times."

"Except if it is, Dev. Except if it is."

Hunt's words brought Juhle up short. The fire went out of his voice. "You still think you're going to find Parisi alive, don't you?"

"Let's put it this way. I'm looking for Andrea. You're looking for a murderer. We can pretend there's no inherent conflict."

"Inherently, maybe not. But we'll be dancing close enough to one another we've got a pretty good chance we're going to trip each other up. And I need you to stay out of my way, Wyatt. I'm looking for a righteous arrest here before too long, and that whole process-process again-really is an orchestrated ballet. You've got to get it right or nobody applauds."

"I like to think I'm sensitive to that, Dev. But your arrest really is not my issue."

"You'll pardon me, though, if it's mine, huh?" But Juhle wasn't unaware of all of Hunt's contributions to his investigation so far. He'd basically built the case that Juhle was now trying to verify. And without any useful contributions from his true partner in homicide, Juhle was inclined to take whatever help he could get, so long as it didn't compromise his own endgame. He sat back in his chair, looked up at his friend. "So what are you here for?"

"I wanted to tell you about Napa and the haircut, make sure you were up to speed. I figure you're moving on your due process down here, am I right? Pulling warrants, whatever else you do. Get a team inside Manion's house and look around."

"A little of that, hopefully, yeah. So meanwhile, what are you doing?"

"Meanwhile, I think I'm in Napa."

"Doing what?"

"Shaking the sugar tree, seeing what falls out."

Juhle dropped his head for a minute, then looked back up and spoke in a reasonable tone. "If I asked you please not to talk to Carol Manion, could you restrain yourself? If you get her spooked and lawyered up by the time I talk to her, which I will soon, I'll have you tortured and then killed, and I mean it."

"I wasn't planning on talking to her, Dev. Even if she told me the truth, which she wouldn't, she couldn't tell me anything I don't already know."

"Except maybe where she dumped Parisi."

"That won't come out in an interview, Dev. She's not giving anything up voluntarily after all this."

"So how does it come out?"

"I'm working on that," Hunt said. "I find out, I'll let you know."

Still long before noon, and Juhle had his paperwork together as he stood in front of Judge Oscar Thomasino, on magistrate duty as he had been all week and obviously not particularly thrilled to be hassled at his home on a Saturday morning. Now the judge, in his street clothes, sat behind his desk in his office, the novel he'd been reading facedown on the blotter in front of him. "Refresh my memory, inspector," he was saying, "but wasn't it very recently that you and your partner came to me for a similar search warrant?"

"Yes, Your Honor. A couple of days ago."

"But it wasn't this same case, was it?"

"Yes, it was."

Thomasino's kindly face clouded under his wispy white hair. He removed his Ben Franklin eyeglasses and absentmindedly began to wipe them with a cloth he'd pulled from his desk drawer. "What were the results of that earlier search if I may ask?"

"We found some.22 caliber weapons in the woman's house, Your Honor, which we ran ballistics tests on. And some clothes, which we tested for GSR."

"And the results of those tests?"

"Negative."

"I see." Thomasino looked through his glasses, blew on them, then continued buffing the lenses. "And I presume you will be looking for positive tests this time on the same types of items-a gun, and clothes, and so on-if I sign this warrant?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

Thomasino put his glasses back on, threw Juhle a curveball. "Where is your partner today, inspector?"

"At his part-time job. He moonlights doing private security."

"Ah." The information gave the judge pause. "But you've been working this case together up until this time? You and Inspector…"

"Shiu."

"Yes, Shiu." He came forward a bit, elbows on his desk. "What I'm getting at, Inspector Juhle, is whether-this is just a question, so please don't take offense-whether your appearance here before me, without your partner, might indicate some lack of accord between you and Shiu about whether this warrant is supported by the evidence."

"No, Your Honor. I don't believe there's any lack of accord. Inspector Shiu feels he needs to augment his salary…"

Thomasino held up a hand. "Many of us do, Inspector, many of us do. And yet I'm fairly certain that most of your fellow homicide inspectors, if they happened to be working the extremely high-profile case of a murdered federal judge, might find it incumbent upon themselves to, say, cut their extraneous work a little short or even cancel it altogether if critical evidence suddenly came to light on a Saturday morning. Don't you think that might be the norm?"

"I do, Your Honor."

"Let me take it a little further, if you don't mind. Do you think your own partner, Inspector Shiu, would voluntarily miss the opportunity to take a more active role in what would no doubt be the most important, the most significant arrest in his entire career if he believed that you were close to a breakthrough in that case?"

"Normally, yes, he might, Your Honor. He would, I'm sure. But in this case…"

"Go on."

"Well, Inspector Shiu moonlights for the Manions. He's been with them for several years that I know of. I have often thought that it's not impossible he rose up as quickly as he did through the department and made it to homicide because of, shall I say, political influence."

"Friends of the Manions?"

"Just a pet theory," Juhle said.

"Not a nice one."

"No, Your Honor. But we were being frank."

"So you think he sees this warrant as some kind of conflict of interest?"

"I wouldn't go that far. Let's just say, he might feel uncomfortable having to explain to the Manions why he was part of having it served on them."

"And you think by the same token that he might be choosing to distance himself from an endeavor that he finds ill-conceived and which he also perceives might infuriate influential and powerful people without guaranteeing any success in the case. Inspector, people in your trade might call that a clue."

Juhle remained silent.

Thomasino nodded and sighed, an aggrieved expression flitting across his features. "Inspector," he said, "since we're being frank and off the record here, let me ask you something else, just between us. Do you feel that besides its natural importance, that there are people at the Hall and in the city at large who view this case as a kind of a test for you personally?"

The import of the question rocked Juhle, but he stood his ground. "Yes, Your Honor, I think I do. But I'm trying not to let that affect my handling of it." He pressed on in the face of Thomasino's skeptical look. "In the past few hours, Your Honor," he said, "I've learned irrefutably that Carol Manion's adopted child was the natural son of Staci Rosalier, the woman killed with Judge Palmer. Mrs. Manion has gone to great lengths over the past eight years to keep these facts hidden. To the extent that when I went to talk to her about this case just last week, she neglected to mention anything about it."

"Did you ask her about it?"

"No, Your Honor, but…"

"But you think she should have volunteered the information?"

"To me it's unimaginable that she didn't, Your Honor. Unimaginable. If only to say, 'I know this is an incredible coincidence, but I think you should know about it.' She couldn't have been unaware of it."

Thomasino considered, fingers templed at his lips. He looked down at the notes he'd scribbled while Juhle had been laying out the whole rather complex scenario. "I may have gotten some details wrong, inspector, and if so correct me. But as I understand it from the way you've outlined it to me here, Mrs. Manion adopted a baby from a Staci Keilly, isn't that so? And if so, why would the name Staci Rosalier prompt her to mention her child to you? If you, in fact, even had that name on Tuesday afternoon when you spoke to her."

Juhle's face went slack. He felt a rush of blood draining from his head. Not that the basic fact of Todd's parentage was any longer in doubt-or at least, he didn't think so-but Carol Manion didn't necessarily know about Staci on Tuesday when he and Shiu had questioned her about her original appointment with Parisi.

The only way Carol could have known Staci's true relationship to her son was if, in fact, she had been confronted with it and killed her. But that was putting the cart before the horse. If she hadn't done that, and there was no evidence at all that she had, then all of her actions since-not mentioning Todd to him and Shiu, buzz-cutting Todd's hair because, after all, summer was coming on-had been blameless.

He also suddenly realized that even he and Shiu had been unable to identify Staci as either a Rosalier or a Keilly until late Tuesday night when they'd met up with Mary Mahoney in the morgue. And what, then, did this mean about the four identifications of Todd Manion this morning?

The judge was still looking over his templed fingers. "Are you all right, inspector? You don't look well."

"No. Fine, Your Honor. I've been taking some pain medication. I just got a little dizzy there for a minute."

Thomasino clearly wasn't so sure that was it, but he let it go and moved on. "So, bottom line, inspector, is that I'm a little bit leery to sign off on what amounts to an open-ended fishing expedition on one of the city's most prominent families. Especially given the fact that this would be the second nearly identical warrant on two different suspects that I'd have approved in about as many days. You can see where it might raise some eyebrows, huh? Where you and I both might be open to accusations of overreaching? Invading privacy without cause? In your case, even launching a desperate vendetta to deflect attention away from a stalled investigation?"

"Yes, Your Honor, although this is not…"

"Goes without saying, inspector, of course. No explanation necessary." Moving on again, adjusting his glasses, the judge lowered his gaze to the pages Juhle had placed in front of him and scanned over them. "Now what I might suggest, if I may, is you've got no privacy or probable cause issues with the crime scene. You note here that you've got unidentified fingerprints, hair, and fabric fibers that have already been collected. If you can connect some of this to Mrs. Manion, then okay, at least you've got some plausible reason to search her home to ask her to explain how they got there. If evidence rises to the level of probable cause, I'll entertain another request for a search warrant for her home at that time. Meanwhile"-he looked up, offered his avuncular smile-"you might want to go home and sleep off some of that medication. It's Saturday, inspector. People aren't going to begrudge you a day off."

But Juhle, shaken, wasn't about to take the day off. There were other avenues under the great canopy of due process that he could take with impunity, and now he was going to be forced to explore them. Judge Thomasino may have been right that his request for a search warrant on Carol Manion's house was premature. But as a homicide inspector, Juhle was entitled to interrogate people when and as he saw fit, provided he could get them to talk to him.

Mrs. Manion may not have known on last Tuesday that Staci Rosalier was Staci Keilly, but the fact remained that it would be instructive, perhaps even conclusive, to see how she reacted when he confronted her with this fundamental truth. Juhle had a gut for witnesses-if they were lying, there were a million tells, and he could spot most of them. Then at least for himself, he would know. He would take the investigation from there and slowly, carefully build a case, over months if necessary, which the DA could prosecute and win against any army of high-priced lawyers.

If Carol Manion, in her wealth and hubris, had dared to kill a federal judge on his watch, Juhle would bring her down. And to do that-and right now while the questions he would ask her were all so clear!-what he had to do first was have a conversation with her.