The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  Hunt cocked his head at her over the expanse of his desk. He tried a smile, but it broke off like the brittle thing it was. “I’m all right.”

  “He’s all right, he exclaims in a burst of wild enthusiasm.”

  “Not fooling you much?”

  “Maybe it was your losing track of three of our clients there for a minute.”

  “I would have found them again someday.” Then, seriously, “Everybody’s got work for tomorrow, right?”

  “It’s more the opposite, Wyatt. We’ve got too much work and we’re light on staff, especially if you’re not putting in your own time.” She held up a hand. “That’s not a criticism, just a fact.”

  “Noted.” Hunt templed his hands in front of his mouth. “This text thing’s got under my skin. And my mother . . .” He paused for a moment, then spread his palms out in front of him on his desk. “I don’t know what to make of all that. The fact that she was killed, my father’s disappearance for all this time. And how could I not remember this? Any part of it. I mean, before today.”

  “Maybe because it hurt too much?”

  “But not consciously, Tam. That’s the thing. You know me. I haven’t been walking around in anguish over my early life. I’m a happy-go-lucky guy.”

  “Hah!” Tamara let a laugh run for a moment before she corralled it. “I mean, right. That’s you, Wyatt. Easygoing, happy-go-lucky. People constantly remark on it.”

  Hunt appeared to be truly surprised. “They do? I’m not?”

  “No. You are. Honestly. Fun and carefree.” She came forward. “Wyatt, please. Know thyself at least a little bit here, would you? You don’t have a laid-back bone in your body. Why do you think you always need to be in such great physical shape? Why do you have to run your own business? Why are you so good at everything you get involved in, not to even mention the winning at sports thing?”

  “Those are not necessarily character flaws, Tam.”

  “No. But neither are they the signs of a mellow free spirit who doesn’t let anything bother him, like for example suddenly having to confront all of this early-childhood stuff you’ve been repressing for only about all of your life.” She lowered her voice. “It’s okay. You’re allowed to have a reaction to all this. In fact, I’d be worried if this didn’t hit you on some kind of a deep, real level. If it were me, I’d be lying in a ball in the corner, wondering where the next onslaught was coming from.”

  “Probably not,” Hunt said. “You’d probably be doing exactly what I’m doing, which is figuring out who’s doing this and why on the one hand, and trying to solve the murder of my mother on the other. Once I got used to the idea of having a mother to begin with, that is, and her being murdered. And a father…​who might still be alive. Can you imagine that, what that would be like?”

  “I think I can, Wyatt,” she said evenly. “Mick and I have the same situation, you might remember.”

  Her words hit him like a slap, and Hunt blinked at the force of them, then met her eyes. “Of course you do, Tam. I’m sorry. Of course you do.”

  She shrugged. “The difference is that I’ve never presumed that our dad was dead, Wyatt. He’s probably alive out there somewhere, and he doesn’t care about us, that’s for sure. Whereas you’ve got the possibility of this guy coming back from the dead now after forty years. Leaving you this letter . . .”

  “Okay, but here’s the thing. Is there any way our texter could have known about that letter? Or Father Bernard, or any of this?”

  Tamara chewed on her lip. “I can’t see how, unless this Father Bernard . . .”

  Hunt was shaking his head no. “No. I’ve got to believe what I believe, and there is no possibility that Father Bernard either knew who I was or that I’d be showing up at his rectory, today or ever. And he didn’t lie about not knowing how to use cell phones, either. So he’s not behind the texts, unless he just completely snowed me, which I don’t think is possible.”

  “But whoever it is must at least have known about your mother, right?”

  “Or at least had a hunch. Maybe they weren’t sure. Maybe that’s why the first text asked me how my mother died. If I write back and say spinal meningitis or something, they’d just drop it. But if I’m the long-lost son of this woman who was murdered, and they knew something about that, about the murder . . .”

  “Then why wouldn’t they go to the police? Why come to you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re trying to hide something, or keep what they know private. On the other hand, if I am the son, and I text back that my mother was killed, now I’m motivated to investigate, and investigating is what I do.” Hunt was sitting forward now, elbows on his desk, feeling that he was at least on some kind of track. “And they know who I am, don’t they? If they got my cell number, which means I gave it to them or called them, they know what I do.”

  “Somebody who knew your parents.”

  “No, not necessarily. Maybe somebody who found out something about them later. They don’t want any official involvement. They don’t want to get in trouble, upset their regular life. But if they know who killed my mother, or think they do, and that person is still out there . . .”

  “Then they’d better be a little careful,” Tamara said.

  “More than a little, Tam. A lot more than a little.”

  6

  THE NEXT TEXT came in at a little after six as Hunt was finishing a workout on the gym side of his warehouse—crunches and push-ups in his sweats. The two-tone text ring sounded, and Hunt, in the middle of his forty-third push-up, sprang to his feet and grabbed the cell phone. The message on it was the same as the last one: Progress?

  Yes.

  Short, sweet, and fast. He had to phone Callie Lucente and get her moving on tracking the call. Trying to recall her laughably simple instructions—suddenly in the moment much more complex—he put the phone into call mode, hit Callie’s contact information, flipped back to his text screen and typed, My mother was killed.

  Hearing Callie’s phone start to ring. Once, twice. “Come on, come on, pick up,” he said, and then her voice, no prologue.

  “Are we live?”

  “Just started.” Wyatt stared down at the screen.

  Her killer is still alive. You need to find him and take him down.

  Hunt tapped at his screen. You know who he is?

  Yes.

  “Okay,” Callie said. “Closing in. It’s in the Marina.”

  Hunt, now, barely registering Callie’s information. Who is he? My father?

  No.

  Why can’t you tell me?

  Not can’t. Won’t. Can’t be involved.

  Why not? You’re involved now.

  “Whoever it is,” Callie said, “is parked at the Marina Safeway parking lot. Can you keep him on? Call some of your people and send them out there?”

  “I’ve already got two lines going, Callie.”

  “It’s the same process, dude.”

  And in the meanwhile, on the screen. Not true. He would kill me, too.

  Who are you? I’ll meet you.

  Find him. Get him arrested.

  How?

  “I don’t want to lose the screen,” Wyatt said.

  “You won’t. Just go back like when you called me. I’ll hang here. Oops.”

  “What?”

  “The signal’s gone.”

  TAMARA, MICKEY, AND THEIR GRANDFATHER, Jim Parr, lived in a one-and-a-half-bedroom top-floor unit in an eighty-year-old building on Irving Street. The total cluttered floor space was less than seven hundred square feet, and they were rent controlled since the midnineties at six hundred thirty-five dollars. The next best thing about the place, after the price, was the roof, not usable about ninety percent of the time because of the fog and the wind but sometimes spectacular with red and purple sunset views, a glimpse of the treetops in Golden Gate Park.

  The meal Mickey had been texting about the day before turned out to be barbequed alligator, which he’d
picked up at the Bi-Rite out in the Mission. Dirty rice, grilled fennel, arugula, and avocado salad. The four of them were drinking variants on the tequila theme in juice glasses, sitting at the card table they’d brought up, draped with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. The dusk was still and warm, the sun putting on a kaleidoscope of a light show out over the ocean in its last moments. The alligator steaks perfumed it all with a kind of generic “smoking meat” smell.

  “This person knows who killed your mother?” Mickey asked.

  “That’s the message.” Hunt sipped his drink. “You can read it for yourself.” He passed his phone over.

  Mickey scanned down the screen. “They want you to get him arrested? How are you supposed to do that?”

  “Dig up evidence, somehow. Forward it along to the police.”

  “But if this person knows,” Tamara put in, “then they’ve already got some kind of evidence, wouldn’t you think? They’d have to.”

  “Not necessarily.” Jim Parr was old but far from feeble or slow. “They could have heard something, or a bunch of somethings, put them together, don’t want to get in the guy’s face. Maybe they’re afraid of him.”

  “Maybe they should be,” Tamara said. “If it’s a ‘him.’ ”

  “Yeah, well, either way,” Hunt said, “this would be easier if we could talk with whoever’s sending these things.”

  “Well, you’re halfway there,” Mickey said. “You got ’em at the Marina Safeway, so they’re local anyway. Keep them on the phone longer; before they trash the phone, we could posse up.”

  Hunt shook his head. “We’re talking two, three minutes at the most. They’d have to be calling from my bathroom.”

  “You can’t keep ’em on longer?” Tamara asked.

  “That was longer. And I’m thinking that might be the last text.”

  “Why’s that?” Mickey asked.

  Hunt shrugged. “Well, now I’ve got my marching orders, right? So the next order of business is to march.”

  “Maybe not,” Jim said. “You want to catch this person, let’s assume they’re watching you, or they’re at least aware of your movements.”

  “Not so much, Jim. They didn’t know I’d made any progress until I told them. That argues they’re not watching me.”

  “Okay,” Tamara said, “they’re not watching you, which means you’ll get more texts. Bottom line is they want to know your progress. That’s what the last text was about. They’re going to want to keep up, maybe even for their own protection. So the trick is we’ve got to be ready to roll as soon as you hook up.”

  “To the Marina Safeway?” Hunt asked.

  Tamara liked the idea. “Wherever they might be. It’s a small town. We might get lucky. Can you call us when you’re on the phone with Callie and your texter both?”

  “In theory. Callie showed me, and it’s easy. A child could do it, and apparently many do. But in the heat of the moment, I could not.”

  “You will next time,” Mickey said.

  Wyatt shrugged. “If there is a next time.”

  “You wait,” Tamara said. “There’ll be a next time.”

  WHEN MICKEY COOKED, which was almost always, Tamara did the dishes. Jim got a pass on that chore out of general respect for his age and seniority and also because he tended to drink too much and pass out early.

  Now it was full dark, and Mickey was off to his girlfriend Alicia’s studio, where he’d probably spend the night without having to worry if they’d made too much noise and woken up Jim and Tamara.

  So Jim’s snoring, regular and sonorous, echoed out through the door to his bedroom and on into the kitchen, where Wyatt held a dish towel and was taking plates from Tamara after she rinsed them.

  “I keep going back and forth,” he was saying. “One minute all I want to do is find who this texter is, and the next I ask myself why that matters. The main thing is my mom’s murder. I’m still trying to get my arms around the idea of somebody killing her, and it’s just not fitting anywhere.” He paused and let out a sigh. “I’m trying to fit her in, too. Just the fact of her. It’s kind of hollowed me out a little.”

  Tamara let the water go another minute, then shut it off and turned toward him. “Kind of a little, huh?”

  “Maybe more than that.”

  “And there’s something wrong with that?”

  “No. I don’t know.” It was a tiny kitchen and he leaned back against the counter at a right angle to the sink. “I didn’t tell you about the pictures, did I?”

  “What? Of her murder?”

  “No. The priest had some snapshots of my mom and dad when I was a baby, a toddler, say two or three. The thing is…​I . . .”

  “Wyatt.”

  “I’m all right.” He took a breath. “There’s this one of me on the merry-go-round over in the park. I mean, I remember that day, Tam. I remember the smell of it, and the feel of it, and it’s right there. I can put out my hand and touch it, it’s so real. I close my eyes and it jumps back out at me, this real thing that actually happened, like some kind of ghost. And you know what the unbelievable thing is in all of this?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Where was it, that memory? Where did it go all these years?”

  “Maybe into that place that now feels hollow because it used to be full of the stuff you wouldn’t look at.”

  “It wasn’t wouldn’t, Tam. I didn’t even know it was there.”

  “All right. Either way. Now you do.”

  Hunt went on in a flat voice. “There’s another one of me on my dad’s shoulders. You should see it, we’re both incredibly…​happy. I’m holding on to his hair and we are both just completely radiant. And Mom, so young, and obviously just really blissful, too, with me at the merry-go-round. I mean, you look at these pictures, there’s no way these people chose to leave me.”

  “Well, now you know they didn’t.”

  “Something happened. Something ruined their lives. Somebody.”

  “And yours.”

  “Well, I’m a big boy. I handled it all right.”

  “Maybe so did your dad. You don’t think it’s him, do you? Sending the texts? He learns about you, maybe sees your name in the paper, your job, somehow gets your cell number, maybe you can find something that clears his name.”

  Hunt nodded. “But it is cleared. They never convicted him.” Picking up the dish towel, he continued, “But you’re right. That’s the first question next time. If it’s him, he should come in.”

  “If it’s him.”

  “If it’s him,” Wyatt repeated. “You want to get back to these dishes?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “They’re way more fascinating than you and what happened to your family.” She poked his arm. “You’re allowed to talk about this, Wyatt. You should talk about it, if not to me, then to Gina or your dad or somebody. This is real stuff, the way you feel.”

  “I thought I was talking about this, to you,” Wyatt said. “And not to change the subject, but I’m guessing I haven’t mentioned about me and Gina breaking up.”

  Tamara’s eyes went wide. She backed away a half step and then narrowed them. “I didn’t get that memo, no. What happened?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing specific. Just general attrition. We ran out the warranty period. She’s been gone a lot. I’ve been working a lot.”

  “So how do you feel about that?”

  “More feelings, huh?”

  “It’s cool how you pretend not to have them. Very macho.”

  “Well, thanks. I work on it.” He picked up a plate and ran his dish towel around over it.

  “You already dried that one,” she said.

  “Not enough. Obviously not enough. Finally, at last, it’s really dry to my exacting standards.” He put the plate back in the rack. “Now. How do I feel about me and Gina?” He took a beat. “It was the right thing to do. Hard, but right. We’d kind of stopped going in the same direction. She started talking about us maybe moving in together and I g
ot to feeling a little pushed around about my space. That, plus the one time I wanted to get married didn’t feel the same as what Gina and I had.”

  “How can I not know this? You wanted to get married? When? To who?”

  “It was a long time ago, Tam. Sophie. Her name was Sophie.”

  “What happened?”

  “She died. Cerebral hemorrhage.”

  “I’m so sorry, Wyatt.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well, it happened. Anyway, after that…​talk about feeling hollowed out. I wasn’t going to set myself up for any more pain like that. I mean, if some kind of blazing passion came and took me over, maybe. And Gina’s great, but she wasn’t that.”

  Tamara took the dish towel from Wyatt, turned half away and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath and she came back around to face him. “So let’s go back to this parent thing,” she said.

  “What part of it?”

  She boosted herself up onto the counter. “How about the part you don’t want to talk about?”

  Hunt tried a quick grin, then slumped a little, shook his head. “I’m not trying to be evasive, Tam. I don’t know what to do with it. Part of me wants to know everything I can about this, but something’s also telling me I might want to just let it be, because I’m not going to like what I find. I mean, I’ve been doing fine without knowing all this time.”

  “But now you’ve got a big old hollow space you need to fill.”

  “Maybe I don’t need to fill it.”

  “Of course not. Maybe you don’t.”

  “I like that little eye-roll thing you do. It’s fetching.” He broke a small but real smile. “But just to refresh my memory, why do I need to fill that space up?”

  “I already said you don’t.”

  “Yes, you did. But you weren’t being sincere. I could tell.”

  “I think you know the answer.”

  “I don’t, Tam. Or it’s not clear.” His face went serious. “This is just you and me talking now, and I’m not kidding you. Something about this scares the crap out of me. Not just the part about somebody killing my mother. There’s this other thing, a personal terror or something.”