The Hunt Club

by John Lescroart

  Grunting against the pressure on his neck, Hunt spit out the words. "I've got a license for the gun," . "Check my wallet, back right."

  "I know who you are," Shiu said. "Just calm down and we'll sort this out." But the pressure on his back and neck never let up. Hands plucked the wallet from his pocket, the flashlight's beam danced over the manicured lawn. For a few seconds, a chorus of heavy breathing framed the night, but no one spoke.

  Shiu finally said, "What are you doing here, Hunt?"

  The knee came off his back, the hand off his neck. His assailant straightened up quickly and backed away. The flashlight beam shined in Hunt's face.

  He rolled onto his side, blinked against the light. "You want to undo these cuffs?"

  "Not just yet," the voice said. "I asked you a question. What are you doing here?"

  Hunt gave them an answer he thought they'd like. "I'm helping out Devin," he said.

  * * *

  It didn't go the way Hunt planned.

  For whatever reason, most probably because Juhle had decided to get some uninterrupted sleep before he went in early on a Saturday morning, he had his phone unplugged when Shiu called to give him the news.

  Shiu and Al Poggio, the other cop in on the bust, were part of a group of about a dozen homicide inspectors who put in serious off-duty time for the Manions. In a city where policemen augmented their salaries by serving as rent-a-cops for everything from sports events to business conventions, from fashion shows to grand openings, the best job going was this kind of private security work. And hence, it was reserved for the elite such as homicide and select other senior inspectors. Paying fifty dollars per hour, the duties were laughably light and typically included nothing more than several hours per shift of television viewing—closed circuit, cable, and network.

  When Juhle didn't answer his telephone, neither Shiu nor Poggio were tempted to free Hunt from the cuffs. It was greatly to their advantage to show that they had responded to an actual threat to the client's security from time to time, and if that threat were exacerbated by the inherent danger of a concealed weapon, so much the better. The Manions were paying top dollar to keep their home safe, and if there was never a legitimate threat to that safety, they might be tempted to consider cutting back on their preparedness—and their security forces.

  Under no circumstances were Shiu and Poggio going to let this incident end without an official report of some kind. Hunt's new Sig Sauer P232 was not the weapon listed on his concealed weapons permit, and that was all they needed. So they called for a squad car to pick up their suspect and take him back to the local station for questioning.

  Shiu, of course, knew all about Hunt's involvement with Juhle, but he'd been very much on edge and chafing all day—in fact for the past several days—under Juhle's not-so-subtle ridicule. Telling him to exert his authority at the lab. Joking about the San Quentin hamburger stand. Not funny. Well, Shiu would see how funny Devin would think this was—Wyatt Hunt behind bars overnight. Trespassing. In possession of an unregistered weapon.

  Shiu closed his phone and walked back to where Poggio stood with Hunt. "What we do is, if we're looking for something," Poggio was saying, "we get a warrant based on probable cause, signed by a judge. Maybe you've heard something about this? So given that, maybe you could tell us what you were doing?"

  "I've been working on the Palmer/Rosalier case and I had some questions I wanted to ask the Manions," Hunt said. "I was out here in the area, anyway, and I figured I would see if they were home." He turned to Shiu. "You know I'm on this. Tell him."

  Shiu shook his head. "I know you've been working with Dev, sure, but I don't know anything about what you're doing here, and Dev's not answering his phone, so it doesn't look like your lucky night. What are you doing here, since we're talking?"

  "I wanted to have a word with the Manions."

  Poggio chuckled. "That's good. Except, you notice, they don't seem to be home. So you just happened to be passing by and were going to knock on the door? This time of night?"

  Hunt lifted his shoulders. "I wanted to see if any lights were on, maybe look in the garages."

  Shiu said, "That's funny. We've got you on videotape an hour ago ringing the doorbell that time, too. And you've been parked here in the street since before that. You think they showed up while you were sitting out in front and maybe you just missed them?"

  To which Hunt could make no response that wouldn't dig him in deeper.

  In another minute or two, the squad car pulled up. As they finally unlocked the handcuffs, each man took one of Hunt's arms and together they stuffed him into the backseat, slamming the door locked behind him. Shiu pulled the driver aside. "You can write it up as a twelve-oh-twenty-five"—concealed weapon violation—"but don't send him downtown or he'll just bail out. Keep him at the station until the next shift shows up in another hour, then we'll be down to talk to him."

  30 /

  Mickey Dade was a serious food-and-wine guy. When Hunt had called him earlier in the night asking him to drive up to wine country, if he'd realized that this was the weekend of the Napa Wine Auction or, as they were calling it this year, Auction Napa Valley—the Holy Grail of American haute everything—he'd have told his boss he wouldn't have missed it for the world.

  In celebration of the day, all of the great local restaurants were going to have special tasting menus, some available at prices affordable to the hoi polloi. There'd be grills set up in parking lots, world-class chefs roasting spring lamb and quail and asparagus, oysters and sausages and eggplant, the air redolent with herbs and mustard and smoke from vine cuttings.

  So Mickey had made his three hundred and fourteen dollars, plus fifty-one in tips on his regular shift, which ended at two in the morning. Dropping his cab off at the dispatch house, he picked up his own used Camaro, and then, sick of fog and not remotely interested in sleep, he pointed the car north on 101 and took it over the Golden Gate Bridge, by JV's Salon in Mill Valley, then past Vanessa Waverly's home in Novato. Turning east on 37, he averaged eighty-two miles per hour until he got to the Napa/Sonoma turnoff at 121, then jammed it up over the Carneros grade and onto Highway 29 in just a little over twenty minutes. Forty-eight minutes, all told, a new personal best.

  Once in the valley, under a clear and cool night sky, he took the Oakville Crossroads over to the Silverado Trail—the other north/south artery in the valley—and turned north. In a few miles, he pulled left off the road into the driveway for Manion Cellars, obvious and visible even in moonlight. In front of him, the château itself looked down from a small promontory. Off to either side, the vineyards traced sinuous lines over an undulating landscape. Slightly to his right and up ahead, the promontory fell off into more vineyards, but above them, he could make out the line of four newly excavated caves back into the limestone rock, the doors that Manion Cellars was using for its logo.

  The gate to the estate was closed across the driveway, so Mickey backed out and proceeded north on the Silverado Trail up as far as St. Helena and Howell Mountain Road, where he knew a few good hiding places, and here he parked on the side of a side street under a low canopy of oak. He carried a sleeping bag in his trunk for emergencies such as this, and within five minutes of setting his brake, he was sound asleep on the soft ground next to his car.

  * * *

  At five forty-five, Juhle got the paper from his front porch and brought it back to his kitchen table, where he laid it out next to his coffee. His shoulder had tightened up again overnight, but he'd made the decision to leave the sling at home, and he was going to stick with it. When his administrative miseries had concluded and they'd brought him back to work, Connie had given him as a present a device called, he thought—his French wasn't much—a café filtre that made coffee by filling a cylinder with very fine ground beans and hot water, and then pressing down on a strainer. It had been too painful to use since the burnout game he'd had with Malinoff, but this morning, in his new spirit of healing, as he forced the strainer through the black liquid
, he realized that even the broken bones in his catching hand were truly on the mend.

  The coffee was far thicker than anything he'd ever made at home, and he had developed a taste for the bitterness, albeit tempered with two teaspoons of sugar. Now he sipped, savored, opened the newspaper, looking for the picture of Staci's brother. Or was he, as Hunt now believed, Staci's son? Or was it a picture of Todd Manion, to whom Juhle had been cursorily introduced when he and Shiu had first interrogated Carol Manion earlier in the week?

  Away on the Presidio Little League diamond, and then watching the Giants' game at the Malinoffs' last night, he'd missed the many times the photograph had been televised, and now he wanted to examine it again in light of Hunt's information.

  He found the photo effortlessly enough, well positioned on the top of page five, but looking at it, he found himself disappointed and somewhat hard-pressed to place the face before him with that of the boy he'd shaken hands with a few days ago. In the first place, the fuzziness of the original photograph had been magnified by the half-tone reprint. Beyond that, the Todd Manion he'd met for only a few seconds was still clearly older than the smiling boy in this snapshot—indeed, neither he nor Shiu had remarked on any similarity between the two when they'd first come upon the picture in Rosalier's condo.

  And, of course, this picture in the paper today was black and white, so even the so-called distinctive background—the terra-cotta tower of the Manion home—left him unconvinced. Studying the face in front of him now, Juhle realized he had little confidence that this would result in any kind of positive identification of Todd Manion from someone who knew him today.

  And yet Hunt, starting with this premise, had apparently run a new quarry to ground. He'd unearthed another believable scenario for the deaths of Palmer and Rosalier, maybe even for the missing and presumed dead Andrea Parisi. As Juhle and Shiu had done originally with Jeannette Palmer, and as he and Hunt, working in concert yesterday, had done with Arthur Mowery, Jim Pine, and the CCPOA.

  Juhle put his coffee mug down on the table and stared off into nothing. He did not underestimate the importance that this case might have on his career, for good or for ill. If he blew it by a false arrest, a bad arrest, or no arrest—all potential yet distinctly different kinds of failure—he could kiss away his chances to make Police Officer of the Year. And without that, he believed, his citation for heroism would always be tainted, his reputation forever clouded. On the other hand, success in this case would go a long way toward proving that Lanier's confidence in him had not been misplaced, that his reinstatement as an active homicide inspector had been justified.

  He wanted it so badly it made his teeth ache. But now Hunt's latest path to his own salvation was starting to look like it meant an investigation into one of the wealthiest, most politically connected, philanthropic families in San Francisco. And why? Because they had adopted a child, perhaps their own grandchild, eight years before.

  He recalled Lanier's words to him the last time they'd met in his office. Lanier did not want to hear about any suspects, especially in this case, and especially coming from Juhle, without evidence to back up the accusation. Juhle's gall rose at the memory of what this discussion had been when he'd been arguing that Andrea Parisi had killed the judge and his girlfriend, and then herself—a scenario that was still, from the facts in evidence, plausible.

  Last night, both exhausted and exhilarated by the accumulation of facts Hunt was presenting, he had found that this new theory had taken on a lustrous quality. Shenanigans in high places, coverups, conspiracies, class warfare. It had all sounded so sexy, so right.

  But here, now, as the first light of day outside revealed the thick, gray blanket that had wrapped itself around the city in its sleep, Juhle sneaked a last peek at the picture of Staci's brother/son. Or was it her nothing? A vision of a child she may or may not have lost.

  Juhle realized that he and Shiu would have to make all the calls that Hunt had made last night. And even if everyone repeated their stories faithfully—nowhere near a certainty—he would then have to arrange for Mrs. Keilly to fly up and identify Staci as her daughter.

  And only then, perhaps, could he begin to make a case against Carol Manion, if he were still so inclined. If she was already the child's adoptive mother and legal guardian, she wouldn't have needed to protect those rights. But if she'd simply bought the child from Staci's parents and had falsified or forged documents or even had no documents, then Staci might have had every right to reclaim her child. Carol Manion would be nothing more than a kidnapper. Juhle could envision no scenario more likely to provoke a woman of power and influence to do something hasty, not to say deadly.

  Could it be that simple, that basic, that much a question of class and greed?

  Yes, he decided. It could be.

  But in a situation such as this one, every move had to be by the book. The smallest procedural flaw would render all of his efforts useless. Lawyers would be lined up to find ways to toss evidence, dismiss charges, slander the arresting officers.

  He would have to take it slow. He had wanted a fast and righteous arrest in this case more than he'd wanted to admit to himself. That desire had impaired his judgment at nearly every turn. He'd been flitting from theory to theory for the better part of this week, and each one had seemed workable until it became time to deliver any kind of proof.

  So now here he was, up on Saturday at six o'clock. He'd already had his blast of caffeine, and he wasn't going back to sleep. He sipped more coffee, absently turning the pages of the newspaper. He paused briefly at the sports section, checked the no-surprise weather—morning and evening fog, partly cloudy afternoon, light winds, high of fifty-four in the city—and then his roaming stopped abruptly at the first page of the weekend insert.

  And suddenly, he knew why the Manions hadn't been home last night while Hunt had waited outside their house for them. They were at Auction Napa Valley. As a matter of fact, they were profiled inside as one of the probable big bidders, as they'd been in years past. Nice, apparently recent picture of them, too, but alas, without Todd.

  Juhle brewed himself another cup of coffee. He moved quietly back into his bedroom for his telephone, then walked back out to the living room window and gazed out into the gray. The paper had told him that Napa was expecting beautiful weather—no, perfect auction weather—today. Sunny, bright, highs in the mid-seventies. California was the land of the microclimate, and although Napa was only sixty miles or so from San Francisco, its weather was dramatically different and almost always better.

  Checking his messages, he couldn't help but enjoy the midnight call from Shiu. So, against his advice, Hunt had stayed out in Seacliff after all and had reaped the rewards. It would be a riot, Juhle thought, if they'd actually put him in custody for a while. In the meantime, there was nothing Juhle could do now about his friend. If Hunt was still in jail, oh, well. Not Juhle's problem. Maybe they'd talk again after he'd slept off his long night. In any event, the entire incident could be worth months of abuse, and Juhle was tempted to call early, wake him up if he was home, and start on him right away.

  But before he acted on that impulse, he thought he'd check in with the general-information desk to see if, contrary to his expectations, the skeleton staff that worked around the clock had received any calls on Staci's picture.

  A surprisingly upbeat, wide-awake female voice greeted him with—if Juhle hadn't known this was impossible—what sounded like actual enthusiasm. "We've gotten seven calls since midnight, sir. And one so far from the paper this morning. Four of the callers identify him as the same person. A Todd Manion."

  Juhle wasn't aware that any words escaped him in a whisper. "My God." Then, in his normal voice, "You've got names and addresses on these witnesses?"

  "Of course."

  "One of them wouldn't be Carol or Ward Manion, by any chance?"

  "Just a minute. No. Who are they, the parents? The famous local Manions?"

  "They might be."

  "Why wouldn't th
ey have called themselves?"

  "That question occurred to me. Maybe they never saw the picture." Which Juhle supposed was possible if they'd been up partying in Napa all last night. It would be interesting, he thought, if they did call today when they eventually saw the paper. Or someone who knew them saw it and told them about it.

  And more interesting if they did not.

  Hanging up, all hesitance about calling due to the early hour banished now, he immediately punched in Shiu's home number and listened to his partner's voice on his answering machine. He should have guessed that he would still be sleeping: Shiu had been hassling his pal Wyatt and hauling down his off-duty money at the Manions until after midnight. He left a message. Wrestling with the decision for about twenty seconds, he then called Shiu's cell number and again got told to leave a message. Next, he paged him and entered his own cell phone number as the callback.

  He woke up Connie while he was putting on his clothes. "Hey," he said quietly.