The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  "No," Fairchild said. "It's just us guys so far. As you can see."

  "Have you talked to her today?" Shiu asked.

  "Not yet. She's not due till the afternoon gavel, and sometimes she's got other work and misses that." Fairchild shrugged as though this were no issue at all. "I expect her around for the wrap-up, though, you want to stop by then."

  "What's up, guys?" Tombo asked.

  "Well, since we're here, anyway, for starters," Shiu said, "we wonder if either of you could tell us a little about the extent of her involvement with the prison guards' union?"

  "You mean, beyond them being her client?" Fairchild asked.

  "Piersall's client, you mean," Shiu said.

  The producer shrugged. "Okay, sure, but she worked on their stuff all the time."

  "Maybe I'm missing something," Tombo said. "You guys are on Palmer's murder, right? What's Andrea got to do with that? Or the prison guards, for that matter?"

  Juhle stepped in. His partner had said too much already. "We don't know," he said. "All we've got are some dots we thought Parisi could connect."

  "About Palmer?" Tombo asked, followed by Fairchild's, "Like what?"

  Juhle didn't like to give information out to television people. He offered both men a bland smile and asked his own question instead. "Has she ever mentioned a young woman named Staci Rosalier to either of you?"

  Tombo shook his head. Fairchild frowned.

  "Ring a bell?" Juhle picked up something in Fairchild's expression.

  "No. Not from Andrea. The name's familiar, though."

  "She was the other victim," Shiu said. "The other woman with Palmer."

  "That's it," Fairchild said. "That's where I heard it. What's her connection to Andrea?"

  Juhle reached for an edamame. "That's what we want to know."

  Tombo and Fairchild shared a blank look.

  Shiu said, "Okay, let's go back to the prison guards for a minute." He turned to Fairchild. "You said she worked with them all the time. So she must have been aware of Palmer's, um, problems with them."

  "Sure," Fairchild said. "But who isn't? Some article's in the paper every couple of weeks, right? Inmates killed by their guards by mistake up at Folsom. Mexican Mafia's making a fortune running drugs out of Pelican Bay. They're staging gladiator fights to the death with the prisoners at Corcoran. Half the prison doctors have rap sheets of their own, don't have current licenses, give the wrong prescriptions. And every time, Palmer's threatening that this time he's shutting the union down. The guards are out of control. If the union can't discipline itself, he'll put it under federal jurisdiction. Well, guess who he communicates all this to the union through?"

  "Wait a minute." Tombo came forward, no sign of laughter in his eyes now. "You think the CCPOA had something to do with Palmer's death?"

  "We don't know," Shiu said. "We do know the union has muscle and isn't afraid to use it. We also know that people who run against the candidates it supports, especially in the rural counties, have had bad things happen to them, to their campaign headquarters, like that."

  Juhle had listened to enough of Shiu's irresponsible chatter. Next he was going to tell them that they were looking into the possibility that Jeannette had paid somebody, maybe one of Palmer's union enemies, to kill him. This was where they'd been in Lanier's office early in the day. But since then, having come that far, Shiu might tell them that they'd realized that they didn't need Jeannette as the prime mover at all. It might have been some union henchman all on his own. Pretty soon, if Shiu kept it up, they'd hear all of their theories on television. "Anyway, what we'd like to see Parisi about," he said, "is maybe some context on this, that's all."

  "But you've got her with the other victim somehow," Tombo said. "Isn't that right?"

  Juhle evaded. "Again, context." He was getting out of the booth, his body language bringing Shiu up and out along with him. "When you do see her," he said in his most amiable tone, "would you mind telling her we'd like to talk to her? If we don't before, ask her to wait around, and we'll catch her on the wrap-up."

  * * *

  "This incredible story she was going to break." Fairchild didn't appear to be having any trouble with the dolmas. He was finishing his fourth. "That was why New York was really going to want her. She was going to be this amazing investigative reporter. Anyway, that's what started it."

  "You told her it didn't matter."

  "I had to." Fairchild shrugged. "It didn't matter. It doesn't."

  "She tell you what it was?" Tombo asked. "The story."

  "Some. But I got a better sense of it right now, talking to these guys."

  "What?"

  Fairchild leaned in over the table, lowered his voice. "It's one thing you get some union thugs to mess with people, right? But how about if you actually spring inmates for a night or two to do crimes? That's what she was looking at."

  Tombo had already pushed his plate away, mostly uneaten. He was filling up on water. "To do what?"

  "Whatever needs to be done. Trash a campaign headquarters. Intimidate some assemblyman leaning the wrong way on prisons appropriations. I don't know, maybe assassinate somebody. And meanwhile, they've got the perfect alibi if anybody ever comes and looks—they were locked up."

  Tombo raised his eyes, shook his head. "No."

  "'No,' what?"

  "No everything. It couldn't happen."

  "Why not?"

  "Because, Spencer, here's what happens you let a convict out. He keeps going. He doesn't go do the job you've kindly asked him to do. He probably leaves the state. At the very least, he doesn't come back to his friendly local prison, having just killed somebody for you, or trashed a campaign headquarters, to peacefully serve out the remainder of his term."

  Fairchild chewed for a moment, considering. "He does if, say, his brother's in the slammer with him and might have a fatal accident if you didn't come back."

  "Oh, yeah. The ever-popular two-brothers-in-the-same-prison trick."

  "Might not be a literal brother. Might be another relationship. Or," getting into it now, Fairchild said, "or how about you get conjugal rights every night, plus dope, plus liquor, cigarettes, any combination of the above? They bring it all in for you."

  "Who does?"

  "The guards."

  "The guards who are guarding you?"

  "Yeah, those guys."

  "And where's the warden all this time?"

  "He's in on it. He's just taking care of the union's business. It's grateful. He gets a bonus under the table every week. Not surprisingly, it's not a credit business."

  Tombo was frankly smiling now, enjoying the idiocy. "How about they get him a Harley to drive around the yard with, too? I agree to go out and kill somebody, I'd demand a Harley."

  "Maybe not the Harley," Fairchild said. "Too visible. Piss off the other inmates."

  "Like conjugal rights wouldn't?"

  "They might at that."

  "This doesn't happen, my man. I can't believe Andrea was really looking into this."

  "I think she was. She might be still. And I mean this minute."

  "Even after you told her it wouldn't get her to New York?"

  "Maybe it was the Palmer case. If she thought that it could have happened with him. I mean an assassin out of one of the prisons. She could break the case, get famous on her own, make the move to New York without my help."

  Suddenly serious, Tombo went silent and twirled his empty water glass on the table.

  "You think that hard, I can actually hear the cogs turning," Fairchild said.

  "They don't spring inmates," Tombo said in a nearly breathless whisper. "They use parolees."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Spencer, what have we been talking about? Union muscle. Andrea was onto something, but it wasn't the inmates. It's the parolees. They get their parole violated and sent back to the joint if they don't do what they're told. Then whatever they do, maybe up to murder, they're alibied by their parole officers."
/>   "That's a stretch, Rich. I can't believe you'd get many cops who'd have any part of that."

  "No. I don't think many cops would, either. But parole officers aren't cops."

  "Sure they are."

  "No, they're not."

  "What are they, then?"

  "Technically. They're prison guards. CCPOA."

  * * *

  Devin Juhle's opinion was that Gary Piersall had too much hair for a guy in his fifties, all of it a perfect shade of gray, and not a one out of place. At least six foot four, he probably didn't weigh two hundred pounds, and his perfectly tailored light gray suit was shot through with almost but not quite invisible threads of neon blue. A strong aquiline nose under a wide forehead gave him a patrician cast that was only accentuated by piercing milky blue eyes.

  They were in his office, seventeen floors above San Francisco. The firm had four floors in the building on Montgomery Street, and Piersall's lair was about a third of the way to the top, in the northeast corner, which afforded views of the bay, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate. Piersall had greeted Juhle and Shiu at the door and had offered them the wing chairs that faced his desk while he had gone around to put the ornate piece of cherry furniture between them.

  "I'm afraid I still don't understand why you've come to see me," he was saying. "What connection do you have between George Palmer's murder and the CCPOA?"

  Juhle, unruffled, sat back comfortably in the oversize chair, one leg crossed over the other. "Well, sir, it wasn't much of a secret that the judge was threatening to freeze the union's funds and put it into receivership."

  Piersall assayed a thin smile. "The key word there, inspector, is threatening. You have to understand that this was a game he liked to play, although frankly he had cried this version of wolf enough that the entire exercise had become much more tedious than worrisome."

  Shiu, in contrast to Juhle, sat in the front six inches of his chair, his feet planted flat on the carpet. "So you're saying that he didn't have enemies with the union?"

  "No. I'm sure he had several. He was biased and unsympathetic to the guards and loved the limelight. He bought all the bullshit the cons were selling and was a loud, sanctimonious son of a bitch on top of that. So, yeah, he had an enemy or two, Jim Pine maybe being the most visible of them."

  Pine was the president of the union and, because of the vast sums of money he controlled, one of the state's most powerful political figures. He had personally spearheaded the drive for California's Three Strikes law, which vastly increased the state-prison population and in turn created the need for more guards and, hence, more union dues. Pine was also the driving force behind the Victims' Awareness Coalition, which constantly lobbied for harsher criminal penalties to keep inmates in prison for longer periods of time. Every get-tough-on-crime prosecutor and legislator in the state of California had benefited from the lobbying efforts and political contributions of Pine and the CCPOA.

  "But I must tell you, inspectors," Piersall went on, "that Mr. Pine doesn't have to resort to strong-arm tactics, which is, I gather, what you're implying here. George Palmer wasn't going to take him down, and even George Palmer knew it. He just wanted to keep the pressure on with the union's efforts at self-discipline, which—I'll be honest—sometimes historically have come up a little short. But the whole interaction with George and Jim was all very much in the spirit of checks and balances between judicial and executive functions, and that's all it was."

  Juhle toyed with his own idea of a smile. "That's good to hear and all to the good, except that we've just come from Judge Palmer's office before we came here. We talked both to his secretary and to his clerk, who had already drafted the preliminary order to put the union into receivership. It's hard to believe you knew nothing about that."

  Piersall all but rolled his eyes. "He's gone that far several times before. It's just another stage in the threat." With a sudden show of impatience, he rubbed his hands together, put his palms flat on the expanse of desk. "But let me ask you this, gentlemen: Doesn't the presence of the young woman, the other victim, provide a more compelling theory here for George's death than some obscure and frankly tortured reading of union shenanigans? I'm assuming you've established an intimate relationship between her and the judge? And in that case, I'd expect that you'd be looking a little, shall I say, closer to home."

  Juhle instinctively mistrusted anyone who overused the word frankly, his experience having taught him that it was a nearly infallible indicator of mendacity. "Mrs. Palmer has a very solid alibi. And you're right. That leaves us pretty much at square one. So, frankly," he purposely repeated, "we came here to ask for your help and cooperation. We're exploring not only alternatives to Mrs. Palmer as the suspect, but ways that someone in her social position could have identified and maybe even contacted someone from the, shall we say, enforcement side of something like the CCPOA."

  This brought what appeared to be an expression of geniune shock, then a sympathetic smile. "If that's where you are," Piersall said, "then you gentlemen really are nowhere. You're saying that you are reduced to thinking that Mrs. Palmer might have contacted someone in the union to help her kill her husband?"

  Shiu nodded. "Let's say we'd want to rule that out, yes."

  "And leaving out," Piersall said, "that the CCPOA doesn't have an enforcement side."

  "No?" Juhle came forward. "So those little problems last year with folks running against your candidates in, what was it? Seven counties? What were they? Acts of God?"

  Piersall shrugged. "I don't know. A lot of that is rumor, and I've heard the theory that some of them might have been the candidates themselves, trying to create the illusion that the union was behind the incidents. But if you don't like that, I'd suggest the random spark, maybe even simple carelessness, I don't know. Local vandals, kids' pranks. And might I point out, frankly, that if memory serves, no one from the union was ever arrested in connection with any of that mischief."

  "The coincidence factor doesn't speak to you, does it?"

  "The coincidence ?"

  "Seven different political races, and only your opponents hit?"

  "Hit? Somebody gets a flat tire, and it's a conspiracy? As a matter of fact, some pro-union candidates were harassed, too, although these weren't as well publicized. So, no, the coincidence doesn't compel me much. And to extrapolate from that and think that Mrs. Palmer somehow " He stopped, shook his head. "I'm sorry, but it's just ludicrous."

  Juhle said, "To tell you the truth, sir, it would be ludicrous except for one thing."

  "And that is?"

  "Andrea Parisi."

  Piersall's ice-blue eyes squinted down. "What about Andrea?"

  "Well, as I understand it, she was your representative with the judge."

  "One of many, actually, and less so since she's been involved with her TV work on Donolan. Half of our associates work regularly on union billings. But, yes, she had a comfortable relationship with Judge Palmer. The court respected her, and she him." Cocking his head to one side, he continued, "But I'm afraid I'm still not getting your drift."

  "Staci Rosalier, the other victim, she had Parisi's card in her wallet," Shiu said. The junior inspector seemed incapable of talking to anyone without giving up every shred of information that their investigation had uncovered. "That makes her the only person we have who has a demonstrated connection to both victims. And the intersection with Palmer is the CCPOA."

  "Slim pickin's," Piersall said.

  "Yes," Shiu agreed, "but now that she's apparently missing, there's "

  Juhle, at the end of his patience, uncrossed his legs, held a hand out toward his partner, hoping to stem the flow.

  Piersall reacted as though he'd been jabbed. "What do you mean, apparently missing? She's not excuse me a minute, would you?" He picked up his phone. "Carla? Gary Piersall," he said. "I'd like to speak with Andrea, please . I see, since when? All right, thank you. Have her call me as soon as she gets in, would you? Thanks." He hung up, the confident face suddenly slac
k.

  Juhle had gotten to his feet. He wanted to get Shiu out of the room before he could do any more damage. He managed to place his business card on Piersall's desk. "We're really not trying to waste your time, sir. If you hear from her, we'd appreciate it if you had her give us a call. ASAP."