The Hunt

by Jennifer Sturman

  “Then why did she lie about Alex driving her home from the party?” I asked. “She must be in cahoots.”

  “Rachel, I know Caro too well. She would never be involved in anything like this. And would you stop saying cahoots?”

  “Ben, was the hatch down to the cabin locked when you got here?”

  “Yeah, but picking locks is part of our basic training. It didn’t give me much trouble.”

  “But whoever brought Hilary here in the first place must have had a key,” I said.

  “Probably,” Ben agreed. “I didn’t see any of the scratches around the lock that you usually see if somebody had already tried to fiddle with it.”

  “Who but Caro would have a key?” I said to Peter.

  “I can’t explain it, but there has to be some sort of mistake,” he said. “Maybe she hides a copy somewhere on deck, and Alex knew where it was.”

  “Do you think she has stock in Igobe, too? She handles the company’s PR, right? What if Iggie paid her in shares instead of cash? If that’s the case, she wouldn’t want Hilary’s article to come out, either.”

  “Rachel,” Peter repeated, “Caro doesn’t have anything to do with this. Maybe Alex is involved, after all. He must be, given what Ben saw on the tapes. But not Caro. It’s impossible.”

  There was an awkward silence as Peter and I stared at each other, and it continued even after I broke eye contact. Everyone else was studiously averting their gaze the way people do when they don’t want to interfere in another couple’s fight, and I found myself with nowhere to look but down. My eyes fell on the needlepoint pillow we’d used to cushion Ben’s head, still lying on the floor next to where he sat. The pillow was monogrammed, which didn’t surprise me. Caro seemed exactly like the type of person who’d have a lot of monogrammed belongings. But what did surprise me was the monogram.

  “Peter, what’s Caro’s full name again?”

  “Caroline. Caroline Vail,” he said. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Does she have a middle name?”

  “Caroline is her middle name. She has a first name that she never uses.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she hates it.”

  “Why does she hate it?” I asked.

  “How would you feel if your name was Agnes?”

  “Agnes? Really?”

  “Yes. But why is that so important?” Then his eyes followed mine to the pillow. “Oh,” he said.

  The initials were there, stitched in red wool on a blue background: A.C.V. For Agnes Caroline Vail.

  “Oh,” he said again. Then, a moment later he continued a little more quietly, “It’s a coincidence. That’s all. It has to be a coincidence.”

  And another awkward silence fell over the room.

  27

  Hilary didn’t have much patience for silences, awkward or otherwise. “What time is it?” she asked.

  Ben checked his watch. “A little past seven.”

  “We can argue about accomplices later,” she said. “Right now I need to go. There’s somewhere I have to be.”

  “Where do you have to be? We need to figure out how we’re going to catch this Alex person and bring him to justice,” said Luisa.

  “Can we figure that out on the way? I promised Petite Fleur I’d be at the club at eight. And he’s an elusive guy-I wouldn’t want to miss him.”

  “I’d like to meet Petite Fleur,” I said, glad of the diversion. “Maybe he can even help us with more than your article.”

  “I’d like to meet Petite Fleur, too,” said Abigail.

  “Does this mean we’re all getting back in the car?” asked Peter. His voice had almost returned to normal now that we’d tabled the accomplice question.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “All right. But we need to lay down some ground rules first,” said Peter.

  Given Ben’s recent head injury, it didn’t seem safe to let him drive, so he left his rental car in the parking lot and all six of us piled into the Prius. It was a bit cramped as a result, but Luisa should have known better than to agree to do Rock Scissors Paper with me to determine which of us was going to squeeze into the hatchback.

  The return trip to the city took nearly as long as the trip to the yacht club, but it was far less stressful now that we weren’t worried about anybody killing anyone else in the immediate future, and since Peter’s first ground rule was that Luisa and I weren’t allowed to speak directly to each other while in the car, there was no bickering. Instead we spent the time brainstorming about ways to prove what had happened since we lacked the hard evidence or eyewitness testimony we needed to officially incriminate anyone. It was good to have Hilary back, but that didn’t mean we should let her abductor and any coconspirators he might have get away with everything.

  “Hilary,” asked Abigail as we neared the city, “just out of curiosity, what does Petite Fleur look like?”

  “Skinny and bald,” Hilary said.

  “How old would you say he is?”

  “I’m not sure. His face is pretty young-looking, but you don’t see a lot of people under forty with so little hair. And it wasn’t like his head was shaved or anything. He was seriously bald.”

  Abigail was clearly thinking about Leo again, but even when he’d been alive there was no way anyone could have described him as skinny and bald, at least not based on the picture I’d seen. If anything, he seemed like the poster child for hirsute. Still, it was easy to understand how a teenaged skateboarding enthusiast would label anyone an “old dude” if he looked the way Hilary had described Petite Fleur.

  Once off the highway, we were only a few minutes from the Mission neighborhood, where Chez Bechet occupied a small storefront on Valencia Street. Posters in the window promised live jazz, which under normal circumstances would have been enough to keep me far, far away, but tonight something else in the window made equally sure that nothing would keep me from going inside: a hand-lettered sign advertised a two-for-one drinks special lasting the entire month of June.

  Two drinks for the price of one had an unquestionable appeal, but it wasn’t the prospect of a bargain that drew me in, or the fact that the offer was written in big block letters in a hand that was becoming as familiar to me as my own. It was the occasion for the special that caught my attention-namely, Che Guevara’s birthday, some eighty years ago this month.

  We filed through the door into the sort of dark interior that would have been smoky if smoking were allowed in public establishments in California. A bar area occupied the front of the club and then opened up into a floor crowded with small tables and chairs, all facing a compact stage at the end. It was early still, and it was also a Monday night, so we weren’t surprised to find the stage empty and only a scattering of patrons taking advantage of the Che birthday special.

  “He was sitting in the back the last time I met him,” said Hilary, leading the way past the bar. “I got the sense he’s a regular. Everyone seemed to know him, and he mentioned that sometimes he performs here, too. I think he may even be one of the owners.”

  We hadn’t advanced more than ten feet when a dog began barking, and there was something familiar about the bark. A moment later, a Great Dane bounded up from the rear of the club, and there was something familiar about him, too. Dogs the size of small ponies aren’t that common, and his white coat with its black markings was distinctive. I realized I’d seen him before, being walked by a bald man on the sidewalk in front of the Forrests’ house.

  More importantly, the dog had evidently seen Abigail before and seemed to know her well. He made a beeline for her, rising up on his hind legs to lick at her face and then circling her excitedly, bumping up against her hips and barking.

  Abigail, meanwhile, had gone as pale as a ghost. In fact, she looked as if she’d seen a ghost. As far as she knew, she had.

  “Scat?” she said faintly. She was rewarded with another round of licks and barks.

  And then she looked up to see t
he skinny bald man now standing in front of us.

  “Leo?” she asked.

  It turned out that if you wanted to fake your own death, it helped to be a hacker.

  “But what about the dental records?” asked Abigail. “And the bone fragments?”

  We’d joined Leo at his usual table in a back corner of the club, and since the first jazz combo wasn’t scheduled to go on for another couple of hours, it seemed like as good a choice of venues as any for the time being. He shrugged in response to Abigail’s question. “The dental records were my dad’s-I hacked into my dentist’s network and replaced the files of my own X-rays with his. When he was sick, he lost some of his teeth. It happens with certain types of cancer. I saved the teeth after he died, and I also had the remains from when both he and Scat’s mother were cremated. That’s what they found after the cabin burned.”

  This was gross but apparently effective.

  “But why?” asked Abigail. “If you wanted to leave, or change your life, or whatever you were trying to do, why didn’t you just do it? Why go to all the trouble of faking your own death?”

  “Because someone wanted me dead. Iggie had been threatening me, and while it was hard to take threats from Iggie seriously, I had a couple of close calls that made me think it would be better to make myself scarce.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like getting home to my apartment and smelling gas. Somebody had left the burner on and blown out the flame. I don’t cook, and I hadn’t used the stove in months, but if I’d lit a match-man, the entire building would have blown up. And then another night I was up at the cabin and Scat started going nuts, barking like mad. I ran outside just in time to see someone take off, but he was on a bike and I couldn’t catch him, and it was too dark to get a good look at him. The next morning I found a can of gasoline and a bunch of old rags by the side of the driveway.”

  “On a bike? Do you mean a bicycle or a motorcycle?” I asked, just to be sure.

  “A bicycle. And the cabin was at the end of a long road, at the top of a steep hill. Whoever it was had to have pretty good endurance to pedal up there with a big can of gasoline. He must have had it strapped to the back of his bike somehow, or maybe he carried it in a knapsack.”

  “Then it definitely wasn’t Iggie,” said Abigail. “I don’t think he could ride a bike that didn’t have training wheels, much less up a hill in the dark with all of that added weight.”

  “But Alex Cutler is in a bike club,” I said. “He probably would have enjoyed the challenge.”

  “The venture-capital guy?” asked Leo. “You think it was him?”

  It took only a few minutes to tell him about what had happened to Hilary, and to confide our suspicions about Alex.

  “It all fits,” I said. “And it explains why he would have freaked out when he heard Hilary was digging up the rumors about your death. He was worried about more than her screwing up the IPO-he couldn’t let her find out he’d tried to kill you.”

  “But he didn’t. I burned the cabin down myself. And I’m not dead.”

  “He doesn’t know that, and even if none of his attempts were successful, the last thing he’d want is anybody looking into what happened all over again.”

  “I never did like that guy,” Leo said. “He was always talking about rates of return and exit strategies. He could care less about what the technology actually did as long as his investment paid off.”

  “Why didn’t you just call the police?” Ben asked. “When you thought someone was trying to kill you?”

  Leo shrugged again. “The software I created was to keep big brother from looking over people’s shoulders, not to invite him in. I don’t trust the police now and I didn’t then. I didn’t want to be a billionaire, either, but I also didn’t want people trying to kill me. I just wanted to live my life. Do my work and play my music and hang out with my dog. That was all I wanted.”

  “So you staged your own death?” said Hilary.

  “Better to have people think I was dead than to have them coming after me. It wasn’t such a sacrifice. I was sick of the entire scene. But then it turned out I was sick of more than the scene. I had cancer, too. Hodgkin’s.”

  “Is that why you look so-?” Abigail started to ask, but then she stopped herself, worried he would take offense, or perhaps remembering that her appearance had also undergone considerable change.

  Leo laughed. “Bald, you mean? Don’t worry, it doesn’t bother me. My hair never grew back after the chemo, and I lost a lot of weight that never came back, either.”

  “But how could you get medical treatment if people already thought you were dead?” asked Peter.

  “It’s easy to make up an identity for yourself if you can access the right computers, and it’s just as easy to set yourself up with a health plan. Living off the grid isn’t a problem when you know how the grid works, and I got a kick out sticking it to big insurance.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” I said. “If you were so willing to walk away from your old life, what are you trying to do now? Why do you care about Igobe and its IPO enough to stop it?”

  Leo reached over to scratch behind Scat’s ears. “Well, that’s the irony of it. I thought I didn’t care, but there’s nothing like thinking you really are going to die to make you realize what you care about. The technology I developed can do a lot of good, and the money to be made off it can be used to do more good.”

  “And that’s why you were leaving the clues for the other bankers and me?” I asked. “You wanted us to help you figure out how to divert the money from Iggie and his investors to do good?”

  “Exactly. I got all the information about the people Iggie was scheduled to meet from his own network at Igobe, and I left clues for them all. But you’re the only person who made it this far. You’d have to have a decent grounding in social justice to put the clues together. Power to the people, right?” Leo clinked his glass of orange juice against the lemonade I’d ordered, which had turned out to be a bad choice since the citrus made my cut lip sting.

  “Did it occur to you to just call us, instead?” I asked, trying not to sound impatient. I knew he’d been through a lot, but he’d also made my weekend far more complicated than I would have liked.

  “What would be the fun in that? And this way I could make it a test, you know? You were the hardest to track down, since you weren’t staying at a hotel. I had to hack into your office’s systems, too, to find out where you’d be this weekend, but that only took a couple of extra minutes. So. Can you help me?”

  I was sure my colleagues at Winslow, Brown would be less than thrilled to learn how easy it was to breach our corporate firewalls, but right now I had to answer Leo’s question. “I wish I could, but that’s not what investment bankers do. It’s not like we’re all morally bereft or anything, but you don’t make partner by playing Robin Hood. Legally, the company and any money to be made off it belong to its shareholders.”

  “Well, I used to be a shareholder in the first company, before Iggy reincorporated it as Igobe. But it would probably be a real production to stake any claim now everyone thinks I’m dead, and by the time I prove that I’m not dead and get everything straightened out, it will be too late, won’t it?”

  “Probably,” I admitted. “You’d need to get a lot of lawyers involved, and you’d be looking at a pretty lengthy legal battle. Especially since we still have no way of proving that Alex tried to kill you, or that Iggie was involved in any way-it’s not as if we can charge them with anything criminal that would throw a wrench into the IPO process.”

  “Then I guess I’ll just have to go to Plan B.”

  “What’s Plan B? What are you going to do?” asked Luisa.

  “Are you going to hack Igobe’s technology?” asked Peter.

  “If you hack it, there won’t be any money to be made for anyone or for any cause, however good,” I pointed out. “Security software is worthless if it’s not secure.”

  “No worries
,” said Leo. “I’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Will you tell me about it?” said Hilary. “So I can put it in my article?”

  “Sure. But you might want to think about publishing your article online, and you might want to do it quick. Because twenty-four hours from now it will be old news.”

  28

  Tuesday morning dawned cool and cloudy, except for my skin, which dawned fluorescent with sunburn. My lip hadn’t been the only casualty of yesterday’s tennis game. My face and arms were now a startling shade of magenta, as were my legs from where the tennis dress I’d been wearing had ended down to where the tennis socks began. I was almost tempted to put on my new pink outfit rather than introduce a color outside of the cranberry family into the day’s look.

  We’d spent the better part of the previous night with Leo, watching as he prepared to put Plan B into motion and helping out as best we could. Fortunately, Peter’s parents hadn’t been expecting us for dinner, nor had they been waiting up when we’d returned home a little after three in the morning, too tired to do anything but fall directly into bed. This was also fortunate because while we hadn’t discussed my suspicions of Caro any further, and while Peter slept wrapped around me in his usual way, I still felt as if the tension between us was almost palpable.

  Our flight home was scheduled for early that afternoon, and we packed quickly upon waking. I spent a few extra minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, experimenting with powder and concealer as Peter carried our bags downstairs, but the cosmetics just made everything worse, so I rinsed my face clean again before joining him in the kitchen.

  He must have warned his parents about my appearance, because they showed only concern rather than shock, and Susan pressed a tube of aloe vera cream on me. “We’ll have to make sure you’re more careful the next time you’re here,” she said, apparently unaware that the odds of there being a next time were slim.