The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  “She doesn’t care about happiness, not in the same way you do,” Gail replied. “Happiness to her is money. And she just wanted to make money off of us, plain and simple. You’re such a believer in the goodness of people, Deborah. You’d think you’d have grown a little more realistic by now.”

  “It’s just that I’ve always liked Judith,” Deborah said. “She seems so sweet.”

  “Con men don’t succeed if they’re not sweet,” Gail replied with her usual asperity. “Same goes for con women.” She shifted her focus. “And you, Mr. Hunt, thank you. This is precisely why we decided to hire you, and you’ve saved us all embarrassment, not to say possible financial reversals.” Now, taking in her fellow members, “I believe our decision is clear here, is it not? Decline?”

  Dodie nodded. “Decline.”

  Deborah sighed. “Oh, if I must.” She wagged her head sadly. “Decline.”

  * * *

  DODIE WALKED HUNT OUT as far as the foyer. Talking about “the old battle-ax” in a stage whisper, she kept her hand on Hunt’s arm as they walked. “I particularly liked it when she told me to ‘quit mushing.’ I didn’t know I was mushing. Did you think I was mushing, whatever that is, Wyatt? Was I bothering you?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Promise.”

  “All right, then. Just so I’m not a nuisance.”

  “You’d have to go quite a ways to get to there, Dodie.”

  “Well, thank you.” She gave his arm a little squeeze. “And also, thanks again for the background on Judith. She would have been a cancer here if we’d let her in.”

  “I’m glad I could be of help, what little I could do.”

  “You did plenty, believe me, and beyond that, you kept it all under the radar, and that’s a talent rare as gold. The last thing this club needs is a public scandal.”

  For an instant, Dodie stopped and looked up at him. Hunt wondered if she might try to kiss him. When she had interviewed him for the assignment here, her attraction to him had been obvious: She’d hung on his every word. His professional background. His personal story all the way, it seemed, back to his childhood. It had almost been unprofessional enough to make him decide not to take the job.

  But now the intensity in her eyes gave way to a smile and she said, “We will certainly keep you in mind if anything new comes up. Have a nice day.”

  IN FRONT OF THE MANSION, Hunt was waiting for his car to be delivered to him when he took out his cell phone and powered it back on. Mickey’s earlier text message appeared again on the screen, some menu he was working on. Hunt could get back to him later. He pressed “Close” on Mickey’s text, and the next message popped up from an unknown number.

  What the…?

  The message read, How did your mother die?

  2

  I VAN ORLOFF SLOUCHED on the chrome and leather chair in the reception area of the new Hunt Club digs in the Audiffred Building directly above Boulevard restaurant. After a lengthy stint as a San Francisco police officer, he’d finally succumbed to Wyatt’s blandishments and eleven months ago had come to work with the firm. Now in his early thirties, slightly heavier than he needed to be, he looked dark and brooding with his low forehead and thick black hair. But his looks were misleading. Upbeat and optimistic, he had a smile for everyone and often a joke to go with it. Although this, of course, was no time for jokes. “Did you try calling the number back?” he asked Hunt.

  “It’s the first thing I did. No answer, no voice mail, no nothing.”

  Jill Phillips was a forty-two-year-old mother of two teenagers. No-nonsense in demeanor, clueless about fashion, she was four months into what she hoped would be a three-year apprenticeship with the Hunt Club that would give her the six thousand hours of investigative work that she’d need to qualify for her PI license. “Disposable phone,” she said. “One of those prepaid things.”

  “Probably,” Hunt said.

  “Could you text back to it?” Ivan asked.

  “I tried. No response.”

  Tamara Dade, boosted on her desk, wore a short green skirt with a plain white blouse. She had kicked her shoes off, now was swinging her long legs. “Maybe it’s a prank. Some kids sending texts to random cell numbers.”

  “If that’s it,” Hunt said, “they need to get a life.”

  “How did your mother die, Wyatt?” Jill asked. “What’s that about?”

  “I don’t know. I never knew her. Neither did the Hunts, my adoptive parents. And I never asked.”

  “Well, there’s your problem,” Orloff said. “You’ve got to ask about these things. You want answers, you gotta ask.”

  “Thanks, Ivan,” Hunt said drily. “I’ll try to keep that in mind next time I get adopted. Note to self: Ask new parents about natural mother. I got it now.”

  But Orloff pressed. “You don’t remember her at all?”

  “Little tiny things, maybe. Snippets, but what I remember might have come from other places, other homes.”

  “What about your dad?” Tamara asked. “Your birth father?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I was in the foster system, so both my birth parents were gone. That’s all that really mattered.”

  “And now,” Jill said, “somebody’s sent you this text message.”

  “That’s creepy.” Tamara had known Hunt since she’d been in sixth grade, when he’d literally saved her life and that of her younger brother, Mickey. Their mother, dying from a drug overdose, had left them locked inside their apartment. After they’d missed several days of school, Hunt—at the time working for Child Protective Services—had gone to their apartment and talked his way inside, to find them both near death from malnutrition.

  Hoping to keep the siblings together and out of the foster-care system, which he’d once known so well, Hunt had helped hook up both kids with their maternal grandfather, Jim Parr, who then raised them both as his own. Tamara was as protective of Hunt as he was of her. “I think it’s creepy,” she repeated.

  “Somewhat.” Hunt chuffed out a breath. “I don’t know why they wouldn’t just call me.”

  “Yes, you do,” Ivan said.

  “I do?”

  “Sure. There’s only one possible answer.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, since you seem to have all the answers today.”

  “Actually,” Mickey said brightly, “he’s got ’em every day.”

  “In fact, Wyatt, if Ivan gets any better,” Tamara added, “we’re thinking of electing him boss.”

  “I’m not sure it’s an elective office,” Hunt said. “I’d have to check the bylaws.”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful,” Ivan said with a trace of defensiveness. “It just seems obvious to me why they wouldn’t have called you.”

  Hunt flashed him a smile. “Enlighten us, O wise one.”

  “Because they don’t want you to know who they are,” Ivan said. “You’d recognize the voice.”

  Hunt glanced around at the rest of his team. “I hate it when he makes it look that easy.”

  Ivan, smiling, nodded. “It’s a modest gift.”

  “But wait,” Jill put in. “Why does it matter how your mother died? And especially, why does it matter to somebody who doesn’t want you to know who they are?”

  “All good questions,” Hunt said. “Unfortunately, I’ve got no good answers.”

  * * *

  THE HOUSE IN BELMONT that Hunt had grown up in looked smaller every time he went down to visit. It was hard now for him to imagine that he’d shared a twelve-by-fourteen-foot bedroom above the garage with his two brothers—first Wyatt alone and then, when his parents had suddenly become fertile after years of trying and failing to conceive, Rich and Ethan sharing the bunk bed. Around the corner at the top of the stairs, Lori and Pam’s room wasn’t really much more than a closet, maybe eight by ten, with one window. His mother and father’s room, the master, such as it was, was on the ground floor down a short hallway behind the
kitchen/dining room. Seven people in fourteen hundred feet. Six to eighteen, the happiest years of Wyatt’s life.

  Now in mid-October the sun was just kissing the tops of the hills to the west outside the large picture window. Wyatt’s dad, Bob Hunt, sat in his recliner with a glass of red wine. Bald, trim, soft-spoken with an all-white goatee, Bob Hunt came across as mostly cerebral to anyone who hadn’t competed against him in any activity on the planet, from poker to pool to basketball to chess to golf. To those people, including his children, he was relentless, kind, and unbeatable.

  “Sure,” his dad was saying, “you can ask me anything. You know that.”

  “It’s about my birth parents.”

  His father’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. His eyes glinted with interest. As a clinical psychologist, Bob had often wondered about his adopted son’s refusal to acknowledge his natural roots. But it wasn’t Bob’s nature to pry. Wyatt had his reasons and Bob had always respected them.

  “Well,” Bob said, “not that I’ll be much help. Your mother and I never knew them and you didn’t seem too curious.”

  “More than not too curious,” Hunt said. “More like actively hostile.”

  “So what’s changed?”

  Wyatt told him about the text message, trying to figure out where it had originated, then went on, “. . . and then I saw there were really two sides to this equation. One was this mystery text and who sent it, but the other was the message itself, the whole question of my birth mother, my birth parents. And suddenly I realized that I wasn’t mad about any of that anymore. Which, you know, after the way I was . . .”

  “You were fine, Wyatt,” Bob said. “You thought it would hurt our feelings, especially your mother’s, if you got all emotional and needy about your birth parents. So you didn’t. We understood that. Even admired it.”

  “I consider you guys my parents.”

  Bob cracked a smile. “Good thing, since we consider you our son.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want you and Mom to think—”

  Bob cut him off. “—that we’re getting demoted somehow. No chance of that. I’m afraid you’re stuck with us. It’s just that now, suddenly, something’s come up and you’ve got a reason to look into things.”

  “Maybe a bogus reason. Maybe just a prank of some kind.”

  “But maybe not.” Bob sipped his wine. “So what do you need to know?”

  Wyatt spread his hands. “A name would be good. I could start with that.”

  His father nodded. “And it would be a good thing to start with, I admit. But I don’t have it.” He held up a hand. “I know. It’s ridiculous, but this was in—what?—’74. Char!” he called out. Then, to Wyatt, “Your mother will know more about all of this than me. Always.”

  Wyatt’s mom, Charlene, in the kitchen with the spaghetti sauce that was perfuming the entire downstairs, now came and stood in the doorway with a straw-covered bottle of Chianti in her hand. Tall, rangy, still handsome pushing seventy, she wore her thick gray hair proud and long. She could have been a prairie wife from two hundred years ago. “And at his beck and call,” she announced, “your servant arrives bearing wine.”

  “And how could it hurt?” Bob asked. “But that’s not what I called you for. Wyatt’s got some questions about his birth.”

  A shadow crossed her face and tightened her lips, then vanished. “I’ve got a few of those myself, to tell you the truth. Your father probably already told you we don’t know much.”

  “Not even a name?”

  She pulled a dining room chair around and sat on it. “It was a different era. Everything about adoption was so much more hush-hush than it is now. Back then, everybody was so protective.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything, really. First, just the stigma of being adopted. Which right off the bat meant somehow you weren’t ‘normal,’ whatever that means. You don’t remember kids teasing you at school?”

  Wyatt nodded. “Vaguely, maybe. Not really.”

  “Ah, repression,” Bob said.

  “It was just one more thing to fight about back then, Dad. I don’t specifically remember the adopted thing being what it was about.”

  “Good. Then your mother and I did our job.”

  “Plus,” his mother said, “you were six when we got you. There wasn’t any point in trying to deny you were adopted. That was always part of the package with you. The other kids picking on you used to make me nuts.”

  “It seems like a weird thing to tease somebody about,” Wyatt said.

  “Some kids,” his mother said, “anything will do.”

  “Well, remember,” his father put in, “back then, if you were adopted, especially through Catholic Charities, which you were, then you were probably illegitimate, so the fourteen-year-old birth mother just wanted to get back to her real life and pretend you never happened.”

  “And then the adoptive parents like us,” Charlene added, “were terrified that the birth mothers were going to come back and claim their babies and take them away when they got older. So there was this whole legal apparatus keeping the birth parents and the adoptive parents separate, and then of course keeping the kids from being able to go back and find their birth mother, either, and disrupting her whole adult life and family.”

  “So my birth mother and father might still be alive?”

  “That’s not impossible, I suppose,” Charlene said. “They could be midfifties, sixty. If they were young when they had you, they could be younger than us.”

  “Except,” Bob said, “that your texter knows something.”

  “What texter?” Charlene asked.

  Wyatt ran down the situation for her. “So whoever this person is,” he concluded, “thinks they know who my mother was, somehow connected her to me, and that she is now, probably, dead.”

  “How could anybody know that? And why would they care?”

  Wyatt shook his head. “You got me.” He drank off half his wine. “How about my birth certificate? Didn’t I need that to get into the army? I think I did. Don’t we still have that here?”

  “I’m sure we do,” his mother said, “but it’s not going to help you identify your mother since you’re named in it as Wyatt Hunt.”

  “How can that be,” Hunt asked, “if I was six when you guys got me…?”

  “You were six when we got you out of that last home,” Bob said.

  “Okay, but I must have been Wyatt somebody else when I was born, right?”

  “Correct,” his father said. “And Catholic Charities has that name, I’m sure, on your original birth certificate. But you’ll have to petition them to get a look at that, and then if they’ve got a countervailing order from your birth mother or birth father, you’re still going to be out of luck.”

  Hunt sat back on the couch. “So when you got me, I was who?”

  “To protect your identity, you were Wyatt Doe,” his mom said quietly. “By the time we made it official, you wanted to be Wyatt Hunt.”

  “Still do,” he said. “So where does that leave me?”

  “Maybe,” Bob offered, “this texter will write you again and tell you something you don’t know.”

  Charlene twirled her glass on the table. “You could go to Catholic Charities.”

  “I’m definitely going to do that,” Wyatt said. “But here’s another question: Do you know how long I kicked around foster homes or other peoples’ prospective adoptive houses before you got me? I mean, I remember at least three, maybe four of them. I must have been slightly challenging, huh?”

  “You could say that, for those people,” Charlene said. “You were acting out some, dealing with abandonment. Those other people didn’t know how to connect with you, that’s all. They weren’t good fits like we all were.”

  “I think it was about three years,” his father said.

  “So I was with my birth mother and father until I was about three?”

  “That would be the math,” Charlene said.
r />   “So, 1971? That’s when I went into the system?”

  His dad nodded. “Pretty close, I’d say.”

  “That’s when whatever happened, happened,” Wyatt said. “I wonder what the hell it was.”

  * * *

  HUNT LIVED IN A FORMER FLOWER WAREHOUSE on Brannan Street. He’d bought the dilapidated shell in a down market fifteen years before when the neighborhood around the Hall of Justice seemed a step away from outright condemnation. He had renovated it, mostly by himself, into something unique and impressive.

  There were two possible entrances on the Brannan side, a solid-steel door and a garage door next to it. Both were cherry red because Hunt thought the accents went nicely with the purple of the rest of the outside wall. The space inside featured a twenty-foot ceiling, natural light coming through windows all around and way up high. The centerpiece was the hardwood basketball court and professional basket—hung from the roof—that Hunt had scored a decade ago from the Warriors when they’d upgraded. Along the white drywall beyond that, a cluster of guitars and amps filled one corner, while a bank of three computers sat on a couple of old library tables. In the other corner lurked Hunt’s surfboards and sails and a new Kawasaki motorcycle.

  A nearly invisible door led to the residential side, a nicely designed, functional, well-lit modern apartment—Hunt’s bedroom down a wide hall to the left, then a living room/den with books and his TV and stereo stuff, and finally a well-equipped kitchen and eating area—Sub-Zero refrigerator and Viking four-burner stove and six solid but mismatched chairs around a distressed farm table. A back door—like the front entrance, also steel—led out of the kitchen to the alley behind.

  Now Hunt sat at his kitchen table, nursing his frustration along with a Heineken. His cell phone was on the table in front of him. He could not understand how a random person could have come to know anything at all about his mother and then, even more impossibly, had connected her to him. Therefore, he thought, the texter was not and could not be a random person. The only solution that came to him was that he or she must be with the Catholic Charities. If Hunt and his birth mother were at either end of a chain, he reasoned, the adoption service was the single link that connected them.