Treasure Hunt wh-2

by John Lescroart

  “Sarah, come on. It was late. What were we going to accomplish by taking him downtown?”

  “We were going to accomplish the mandate of our job. We were going to accomplish what we’re supposed to do to somebody who discovers a body in any kind of a compromising manner. How about that?”

  Juhle shook his head. “He didn’t kill Nancy Neshek.”

  “No? How do you know that? How do you know he didn’t contaminate the crime scene? How do you know what he did before you got there?”

  “Look, Sarah, Hunt isn’t going anywhere. If his statement’s squirrelly in any way, we haul his ass back here and grill him till he’s well-done. But that’s not going to happen. He was up at her place because she’d called with a question about the reward and… well, we’ve been through all this.”

  “Yes, we have. And for the record, it still fries my ass. I don’t care what time it was. We should have hauled Hunt down here. And if Marcel”-this was Marcel Lanier, head of homicide-“if Marcel gets wind of this and goes ballistic, I’m laying the whole goddamned thing off on you as my senior partner who made the final decision. And meanwhile, just so I’m not tempted to lock up Hunt on general principles if he shows up here when he’s supposed to, I’m going to stroll on out of here and take a look at the guts of that limo right now. You and your pal can play patty-cake in the interview room and I’ll catch the rerun on the tape later.”

  Sighing, Juhle got up from his chair. “You were way more fun when you were younger, you know that?”

  “Not really,” she said. “People just think I must have been.” And she turned on her heel.

  When Hunt got to homicide to make his statement, Juhle was waiting for him. After wrestling with the decision, Hunt decided that his job was to pass relevant or potentially relevant evidence along to Devin and Sarah. So he included an account of Alicia Thorpe’s completely unverifiable and somewhat provocative alibi for Monday night.

  Hunt finished with Juhle, then grabbed both his sport coat and a tan overcoat against the still-gusting and cold north wind that he could hear whipping up the street. When he got back into his office, he waited for Tamara to finish her call and hang up, and asked about her progress with his potential pool of part-timers.

  “We’re in luck. And more than that, you might be happy to hear that the downturn in business over the last six months might not all have been fallout from Craig.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, my first call was to Willard White”-another local private investigator firm-“and Gloria said I could have her whole staff for a few days if we could put ’em to work. Beats her having to lay them off, she said.”

  “Really? How many people she talking about?”

  “Up to five.”

  Clearly, the number surprised and pleased Hunt. After Mickey had gone out again this morning for his interviews, Wyatt had spent some time with Tamara going over the notes he’d taken yesterday on the work he’d acquired. He’d estimated that load at close to two hundred hours. Five stand-ins would bridge the gap nicely. And from what it sounded like, they and perhaps even their bosses might all be available to fill in on standby if he kept hustling future work. “Why don’t you see if you can get all five of them down here later today, and maybe even Gloria and Will themselves, say two or two-thirty, and call me on my cell and let me know?”

  Tamara snapped him a salute. “Will do, mon capitaine. Oh, and we also did get one more reasonably intelligent-sounding reward call, finally, from Hang-up Lady, real name Linda Colores. She was walking home from work-she’s one of the floor people at the Pottery Barn on Chestnut-and she heard a man and a woman having an argument on one of the streets down by the Palace. She thinks this was last Tuesday night, but she’s not sure exactly.”

  “Did she get anything they actually said?”

  “I didn’t ask her that. I didn’t want to step on your toes. But I got her vitals if you want to go out and talk to her, although she works all afternoon starting at one. Or I could ask her to come in here in the next hour or so and I could talk to her.”

  Hunt, standing in front of her desk, shook his head in admiration. “Has anybody recently told you how fantastic you are?”

  Tamara blushed and looked down briefly, then back up. “Thank you. It’s good to be back working. I didn’t know if I could do it anymore. Or do anything, really.”

  “I wasn’t worried about that. In fact, it never crossed my mind.” He came forward and put his palms down on the desk across from her. “You can do anything you put your mind to, Tam. You know that, don’t you?”

  She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I used to. But then I kind of got convinced I was fooling myself.”

  He was standing looking down at her, but she couldn’t seem to commit herself to raising her eyes. “Hey.”

  When he reached across, touched her chin, and gently lifted it, she looked up and gave him a half-broken smile. “You know,” she said.

  He shook his head. “You weren’t fooling yourself, Tamara. You were amazing. You are still amazing, okay?” Waiting, still touching her chin, he held her gaze on him. “Okay?”

  And at last something gave way in her and she nodded. “Okay.”

  He pulled his hand away from her chin and straightened up. “That’s settled, then. Once and for all.”

  She saluted again. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Once and for all.”

  “You want to talk to this Linda Colores?”

  “I could.”

  “Okay,” Hunt said. “Go for it.”

  Nearly the size of a football field, the Green Room at the San Francisco War Memorial was on the second floor of the stately marble building next to the Opera House on Van Ness Avenue. Floors and pillars in the vast room were of marble. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high and the featured colors were gas chamber green trimmed with gold. The room was earthquake rated for 1,300 people, though it easily could hold many more than that. For Como’s memorial, city employees were on hand at both sets of doors to turn mourners away and prevent the room from getting overfilled.

  Hunt got there early enough to get in without any problem and he looked around to see an oversized photograph of a smiling Dominic Como hung from the wall behind the podium. Hunt had already walked by one of the long tables piled high with brochures of the Sunset Youth Project, the Battalion Special Corps, and pledge cards for the reward fund. The large portable screen up against the front wall indicated that the service was also going to include a video or a slide show.

  Hunt was beginning to wonder what he had hoped to accomplish by coming here today at all. Not only was this going to be a difficult, if not impossible venue in which to hold even the most cursory of interviews, he did not yet know many of the players by sight. The only people he had actually met in connection with Dominic Como were his wife, Ellen, and Len Turner.

  Now Ellen was surrounded by a mob of well-wishers and fellow mourners-perhaps some of them family members, but also a large host of mostly African-American men, women, and teenagers who Hunt assumed were Como’s associates, fellow workers, and many of the beneficiaries of his charitable work over four decades.

  But then in the sea of faces, Hunt spied a familiar one on the outskirts of the group surrounding Ellen, and he gradually made his way up near the podium and touched the arm of the man who’d discovered the tire iron in the lagoon.

  “Mr. Rand?” he said, extending his hand. “Wyatt Hunt.”

  Rand recognized him right away, shook the proffered hand, and said half-jokingly, “You ain’t here to tell me I already got that reward, now, are you?”

  Hunt grinned. “No, sir. I’m afraid not. But now that you mention it, we’ve learned that it was in fact the murder weapon. I don’t think that’s been in the news yet. They found some of what may be Mr. Como’s hair on it that didn’t get washed away. So if that information leads anywhere, I’d have to say that you’re still in the running, at least for part of it. Are you waiting to talk to Mrs. Como?”


  “Not really. I never met the lady. I’m just payin’ my respects.” He raised a hand and mouthed a hello to someone he knew and then came back to Hunt. “Good to see this kind a turnout. ’Specially after all that in the paper today. I don’t know where they got all that, make Dominic look like some kind a… I don’t know what. You see that?”

  “I did.”

  “So what’d you think?”

  “I think Jeff Elliot usually gets his facts right.”

  “So you think Dominic was skimmin’ some a that?”

  “I don’t know what to think, to tell you the truth. I didn’t read it so much that he was skimming something for himself as that he was only supposed to use certain money for certain things, and maybe he didn’t care so much about that.”

  “You got that right. He just put it where they needed it. And all that about his car and people runnin’ for him, that’s just the way he done it, drivin’ folks around, taking people where they’s needed.” Rand waved a finger around at the crowd. “You just look around in this room and now tell me Dominic Como didn’t help a whole lot more people than most anybody else ever meets. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “I do.”

  “You do things first, you ask permission later, that’s how he was. An’ nothin’ wrong with that, you ask me.”

  “You feel the same way about Len Turner?”

  The name alone cast a shadow over Rand’s face.

  “You got a problem with him?” Hunt asked.

  Rand shrugged. “Don’t hate him. Different breed of cat, that’s all.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean, like Dominic, he one of us, one of the people.”

  “And Turner’s not?”

  This brought a tolerant smile. “You go have a word with the man. You find out soon enough.”

  “I already have, and I will again. And I believe you.” He turned to where Rand had glanced and finally saw Turner with a small knot of other mourners in somber conversation. “You know those other people over there with him too?”

  “Some. That big, good-looking woman behind Ellen, talkin’ to him now, that Lorraine Hess, Dominic’s number two. Next to her is Al Carter.”

  “Dominic’s driver.”

  Rand nodded. “One of ’em. Then the couple holdin’ hands, that’s Jimi and Lola Sanchez, from over at Mission Street.”

  “Those are a lot of my reward people,” Hunt said. “I’m going to mosey over there and say hello. Good talking to you, Cecil.” He’d gone two steps when he stopped and turned. “Oh, and as soon as I know anything on the reward, I’ll get back to you.”

  Rand showed some teeth. “I be waitin’ by the phone.”

  When he got close to the Turner group, Hunt hung back for a minute to listen. As opposed to the scathing CityTalk column, the death of Nancy Neshek hadn’t made it into this morning’s newspaper. But still, from radio, television, phone calls, and the Internet, word had obviously gotten out, and now this core group of nonprofit professionals was discussing her death.

  Hunt waited for a lull in the flow of the conversation, then stepped in. “Excuse me for interrupting,” he said, “but I thought I’d come by and introduce myself.”

  Turner took over and made the introductions all around, and when he’d finished, Hunt said, “I couldn’t help overhearing what you were talking about.”

  “Nancy can’t really be dead,” Hess said. “I can’t believe that. It can’t be true.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Hunt replied, “but it’s an absolute fact.”

  Turner asked Hunt, “You think this is connected to Dominic?”

  “How could it be?” Hess asked the group at large. “How could any of this even be happening?”

  Carter, calm but firm, put a hand on Hess’s arm. “Lorraine. Think about it. How could it not be connected to Dominic?”

  “Nobody knows about that one way or the other,” Hunt said. “Cause of death was the same. Blunt force trauma to the head. Beyond that it’s all conjecture.”

  “So you’re saying someone killed her?” Turner asked.

  Hunt nodded. “Without a doubt.”

  “Lorraine’s right. This is unbelievable.” Jaime Sanchez put his arm around his wife and drew her in closer to himself. He looked to Hunt for an answer. “Do you have any idea what this is all about?”

  “No,” Hunt said. “The timing suggests a connection with Mr. Como’s death. Plus, Ms. Neshek called my offices on Monday night with a question about the reward.”

  “What was the question?” Turner asked.

  “She never got to ask it. She wanted to talk to me in person, but never got to it.”

  “And this is why we’re paying you?” Len Turner asked. “This and the Chronicle story this morning?”

  The question was so unexpected and so hostile that for a moment it stopped Hunt in his tracks. But not for too long. “I knew nothing about the CityTalk column until it came out this morning. And even if I had known about it, I would not have been able to stop it. Jeff Elliot writes what he wants. We are doing what you’re paying us to do, Mr. Turner. We’re following up leads as quickly and efficiently as we can.”

  Turner was fuming. “Well, I trust, Mr. Hunt, that you’ll also do the other thing that we’re paying you for, which is to keep us well-informed of the progress of your investigation. That seems to have become a problem.”

  Lorraine Hess interrupted. “So you’re saying these murders were about the money? They had to be about the money.”

  “Not at all,” Hunt said. “I don’t know what they’re about, though I do believe they’re connected.”

  “Nancy and Dominic ran very different operations, Mr. Hunt,” Turner said. “You’ve admitted that any connection between them was conjecture. Don’t you have anything specific to report to us in the way of progress?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t. We’ve had lots of phone calls and several interviews, although I don’t believe the police are close to an arrest yet. On either case.”

  “But poor Nancy.” Tears had overflowed onto Hess’s cheeks. “And you’re saying the police haven’t found anything at her house either? Nothing at all? I mean, this isn’t a situation like Dominic, found four days later floating in the lagoon. There must be something.”

  “I don’t know,” Hunt said. “They only discovered the body last night. I’m sure they haven’t gotten through sifting everything they got. Something may turn up.”

  “This just seems so hard to imagine,” Jimi Sanchez said. “Nancy and Dominic were the last people you’d ever-”

  But he was interrupted by what sounded to Hunt like a strangled cry right behind him.

  Turning, Hunt was still only a few feet from Ellen Como, who was standing now as if transfixed, her hand extended outward, her eyes focused on a spot somewhere in the back of the room. Following her line of vision, Hunt didn’t at first notice anything unusual, the large crowd mostly milling in front of one of the brochure- and pledge-card tables, until he heard Ellen’s voice again. “How dare that slut show her face in here!” And then raising her voice even further, speaking to no one and to everyone, Ellen Como went on, “Put her out! Put her out on the street where she belongs! Get her out of here now! Now! Do you hear me?”

  The suddenly silent crowd seemed to separate and open a corridor through the room and Hunt, standing right beside Lorraine Hess, found himself looking at a very attractive young woman in a plain black dress that hinted at an exquisite body beneath it. She was standing perfectly still with one hand held over her heart. Her eyes were wide in surprise at being thrust into the spotlight by this unexpected reaction, and this, if anything, made her, if possible, even more luminous.

  On the other side of Hunt, Al Carter spoke in a matter-of-fact tone-“I’ll get her”-and moved at the same time to escort the young woman, who Hunt immediately knew had to be Alicia Thorpe, out of the room.

  The exterior of the 2006 Lincoln Town Car was spotless an
d shone with a high gloss. The black leather seats, likewise, might as well have been brand-new. The trunk contained a spare tire, but no tire iron or any other tools or debris. It looked as though it had been vacuumed within the past day. All the nonleather internal soft surfaces-dashboard, steering wheel-had recently been wiped down with Armor All, which, as all cops and many miscreants know, does not readily yield fingerprints. Russo and Juhle stood by while the crime scene personnel lifted the front rugs on both sides and found nothing under them. The CSI team had also already shone their flashlights and used their whisk brooms under the nonremovable front seats. The entire exercise had so far yielded one paper clip, nearly hermetically wedged into the seat-belt connector on the driver’s side.

  The police impound garage doubled as a maintenance shed for city-issued cars, and looked very much like the service area of any gas station. Russo, on her knees, her own flashlight in hand, watched while crime scene personnel now felt around under the passenger-side track that allowed the seat to move forward and backward. The technician, in her surgical gloves, worked something back and forth gently until it came loose from its perch under the seat. The woman straightened up, cricking her back, held up for their inspection an unopened condom in its wrapper.

  “Eureka,” Russo said. “Getting warm now.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Juhle’s enthusiasm less than genuine. “That ought to break the case wide open.”

  “You wait.”

  After she placed the condom in a Ziploc bag, the tech opened the back door of the limo, waited for her partner to do the same on his side, and then the two of them lifted the backseat. Russo turned her flashlight beam to the area under the seat cushion itself and it illuminated what looked like a multicolored rag of some kind scrunched into a ball and caught there.

  “What’s that?” Juhle asked.

  The tech was extricating it with some care from the springs under the seat. She finally brought it out and held it up by one end so that it fell open and revealed itself as a silk head scarf in reds, yellows, and oranges. But all of it did not fall out; several folds in the silk appeared to be stuck to each other.