THE TELEPHONE RANG on Tamara’s desk in the outer office.
“Timing is all,” Hunt said.
“I should get that.”
“You shouldn’t even think about getting that.”
“If I don’t, my boss will bust me.”
“I’ll talk to him and smooth things out.”
“It won’t work. He’s really mean. Besides, it might be important.”
“All right, go,” he said, releasing her, “but come back.”
She got to it on the third ring and he followed her over to the doorway and heard her say “Hi, Devin” and then “Sure. He’s here. I’ll tell him. Hold on.” She turned and gave him a “what can you do” smile. “He’s says it’s important.”
“Of course it is.”
Hunt went back to his desk and picked up the phone. “You talked to Rigby and he confessed,” he said.
“Not even close. Evie Spencer.”
“What about her?”
“You really haven’t got it yet? How long have you been in at work?”
“Since twenty minutes after I called you and left the message about her real name. Got what?”
“What happened to her. You really haven’t Googled her yet?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Do it. Now.”
Obediently, Hunt pulled his keyboard around, typed in the name Evie Spencer, and hit “Enter.” The screen filled up with its results, one hundred and forty thousand hits, several under that name on the very first page. When he clicked on one of them, a picture of a pixie-ish, somewhat spaced-out young woman came up centered over what looked like some kind of official document. Scanning down the left side, past Last Name, First Name, a.k.a., Date of Birth (4/19/1948), Age at Death (30), Residence, Race, Religion, Gender, Hunt paused briefly on Information on Source of Death to read “Home Foreign Affairs Committee Report” followed by an FBI document number.
Further down, another line popped: “Occupation Outside People’s Temple,” then “Entry in Guyana, 7/23/77.”
“You got it?” Juhle’s voice rasped with tension.
“I’m looking now. Is this what I think it is?”
“It couldn’t be anything else, Wyatt. Evie Spencer and her kids, they all died with Jim Jones at Jonestown.”
13
FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE DAY, Tamara and Wyatt never got another minute alone. Ivan Orloff came back to the office and needed to be at the LexisNexis portal in an open cubicle in the main reception area, just across from Tamara’s desk. Jill Phillips also returned to the office needing Hunt’s input and instruction on some work she was doing with a jury-selection expert who’d been hired by one of the firms they worked for. Hunt then had to run out himself to interview a witness they’d just located who’d been a former employee of the nursing home where their client’s grandfather had died. Monday also was the night Tamara’s brother put on multicourse dinner parties at private homes, where she helped him serve the food and clean up after.
HUNT JERKED AWAKE calling out in the middle of the night.
A faint glow through the upper windows from the streetlight in the alley behind his home kept his bedroom from total darkness, but only just. While his panic subsided, he looked around to get his bearings. The memory of his scream still seemed to hang in the air, somewhere. Reluctant to lie back down—fearful if he did that the dream would return—he swung his feet to the floor. The digital next to his bed read 3:11.
Padding down the hall in the sweats he’d been sleeping in, he turned on every light he passed and then opened the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of milk, sitting down with it at the kitchen table. By the time he’d finished, his hands had stopped shaking, so he brought the glass over to the sink, then retraced his steps halfway down the hallway to the door that led out to the wide open side of his warehouse.
Out here, having turned on all the lights as well, it was significantly cooler than the residence side of his building. He was barefoot, but the wooden floor of the basketball court was okay, much better than the concrete. Standing at the free throw line, he pumped in shot after shot, six in a row, then a miss, then four, miss, miss, eight, miss, following up each shot with a jog to retrieve the ball, dribble back to the line, the place echoing like a high school gym.
After about twenty minutes, he bounced the ball at the line one last time and then stopped without taking the shot. His breathing had slowed, though sweat dripped down his body.
Now he crossed over to his computers, pulled up his ergonomic chair, and booted up one of them. For the tenth or twentieth time that day, he typed up Evie Spencer and followed her to Jonestown and then took off on the various links to that tragedy. But, as he’d told himself every time he’d gotten here earlier in the day, what could any of this possibly matter? Evie had died with all the others on November 18, 1978. By that time, Margie was long dead. Kevin Carson had hung his second jury and disappeared four years before. And Wyatt was already living with the Hunts, now forging his own new and better life.
Evie Spencer’s connection to his birth mother, tenuous at best when they’d briefly been possibly good friends in 1970, was by 1978 so remote in time and memory as to be wholly irrelevant. And still Hunt kept returning to Google to see what he could find, to get any kind of spark.
Because he didn’t kid himself. If something didn’t turn up around Evie, the trail he’d been following for the past few days was at an end. His texter had told him that he had enough; he believed that the prodding texts were now going to stop.
Devin Juhle had called again before Wyatt had gone home this evening to tell him that he had finally worked up the guts to talk to ex–police chief Dan Rigby and had discovered nothing even marginally suspicious about Rigby’s connection both to the original child-endangerment call or to the arrest of Kevin Carson. Rigby had not remembered Margie Carson except, barely, as a name on a file—he hadn’t gotten defensive getting asked about his relationship to the case, either. If the case was still technically open, he welcomed Juhle’s efforts to solve it at last and would do anything he could to help him.
There remained no other obvious unexplored area he could think of to look into. If the solution wasn’t somehow tied to Evie Spencer, Hunt was stuck.
Of the dozens of ways to approach the Jonestown research, Hunt had started with one of the most obscure—the death of one of the cult’s members, and not a leading member at that. This time, spreading out and riding the information wave on Google, he found himself reading over again some of the facts about Jonestown and the People’s Temple.
The story of Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre had dominated the news in November of 1978, but of course Hunt had still been a young child at that time, and he had no firsthand memory of it. He’d already familiarized himself with the colony’s last days, the visit of U.S. Representative Leo Ryan and his party, which was the proximate cause of Jones’s decision to order the mass murder, or “revolutionary suicide,” of his followers. In all, 914 people died there that day, including Ryan and Jones himself. Hunt found himself staggered by that number. He’d known somewhere in his memory that there had been a significant disaster with many deaths down in Guyana featuring Jones and his cult of followers, but now for the first time, he let his mind wrap itself around the enormity of the number of dead—nine hundred and fourteen people! Including a U.S. congressman and some of his staff. Hundreds of children drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid administered by their own parents, who drank the stuff themselves, then laid down like cordwood to die in mostly neat rows. The pictures of the dead, even at a remove of more than thirty years, remained heartrending.
There were other almost unfathomable numbers. The colony had leased 3,842 acres of jungle from the Guyana government, which, like Jones himself, was Marxist. So this wasn’t some small agrarian community that had gone down there to do a little farming. In fact, it was a full-size settlement of what was to be a new “Promised Land.” The makeup of the settlers, too, was unusual:
Seventy-five percent of them were black, sixty-six percent were female, and a third were under eighteen.
By the time the settlement was three years old, rumors of the systematic mistreatment of its citizens—including physical punishments, bad food, horrible working conditions, tranquilizers and armed guards, nightly hours-long diatribes by Jones over loudspeakers, censored mail and phones—were filtering back to the United States, until eventually Congressman Leo Ryan had gone down with an entourage to investigate what was really going on. And it was this visit, and the fact that some of the settlers wanted to leave the colony, that had pushed Jim Jones over the edge.
Ryan chartered two airplanes—an Otter and a smaller Cessna—to transport the would-be defectors, but Jones blocked the runway with a tractor pulling a flatbed trailer. Inside the Cessna, a false defector opened fire, and this was the signal for the men on the trailer to fire on Ryan and the others waiting to board the Otter.
Knowing what was going on at the airfield, Jones gathered his followers, had them surrounded by armed guards, and directed them to use syringes to squirt the poisoned punch into their children’s mouths and then to drink the rest on their own. Astoundingly, Hunt thought, the armed guards apparently weren’t needed. Most of the murder/suicides simply complied.
Finally, Hunt was also stunned to learn that something on the order of fifty million dollars in cash and assets—perhaps much more—was part of the story, although a strict accounting of all the money seemed difficult to come by, particularly the cash part. A few people had evidently made it out of Jonestown with a lot of cash; one story had it that Jones had left his estate to the Communist Party and asked some of his followers to go to the Russian embassy and deliver it.
But now Wyatt decided to click on the background and personal history of Jim Jones himself. He didn’t get beyond the very first line of the Jones biography before he came across something that straightened him up in his chair, then brought him forward again, closer to the computer screen, with a fresh jolt of adrenaline.
THE FOG HAD RETREATED back to the coast and the sun had not yet cleared the Oakland hills when Tamara knocked and poked her head into Hunt’s office. “You’re here early.”
He cracked a weary smile. “You, too.”
“I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought I’d come in.”
“Same with me.”
She shifted from one foot to the other. “Can I get you some coffee?”
He touched the mug on his desk. “No, I’m good. You go ahead, though.”
She didn’t move.
“Are you all right, Tam?”
“I’m not sure. How I am kind of depends on how you are. If you’re not embarrassed or anything by our talk yesterday, or wish that nothing had happened between us.”
“None of the above.” Hunt got out of his chair and came around his desk. “In fact, I wish more had happened.”
“I was awake half the night worrying about us.”
“What about us?”
“Only everything.”
“You don’t have to worry. Nothing’s changed since yesterday.”
“No,” she said. “Really, Wyatt. Everything’s changed since yesterday.”
“Would a hug help?”
Nodding, she stepped into his embrace. They stood entwined for a long moment before Hunt brushed her hair away from the side of her face and kissed her cheek. “This has the potential to wreak havoc on intraoffice discipline around here, you know that?”
Still with her arms around him, she nodded. “We’d better be vigilant.”
THEY SAT TOGETHER IN THE LOVE SEAT in Hunt’s inner office, still a good half hour before they expected anyone else to arrive.
“More dreams?” she asked.
“Some.” He paused, then shrugged. “One, actually. It was pretty impressive, though. Where I’m coming up from under water to my board and there’s, like, six people already squeezed on it and I’m reaching up to get a hold and somebody is trying to keep me off it and pushing me back down so I’d drown.”
“Not about your parents?”
“Not that I noticed. I didn’t see them on the board.”
“Did you recognize anybody?”
“No. It was just a clustered mass of people.”
“Kicking you out, keeping you out of your home?”
“It wasn’t my home. It was a surfboard.”
“Oh. Okay. Huge difference.”
Hunt turned his face to her. “I didn’t try to analyze it. I just wanted to get away from the dream.”
“So before you got with the Hunts, how many foster homes kicked you out?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. It was over a three-year period. I think I might have heard five or six.”
“And this is the first time you’ve dreamed about it?”
“That I know of. If you accept your interpretation.”
“Do you have a better one?”
Hunt shook his head no. “This stuff’s really messing with me, isn’t it? All this birth parent stuff, the early years.”
“Getting dumped by your birth father, and then dumped again…what? Six times? So that every time you start to get close to somebody, they dump you? Where the world is a place where you get abandoned?”
“I don’t think that. I don’t want to think that.”
“It’s not like you get to choose, Wyatt. That’s the hand you’ve been dealt, in case you’re wondering why commitment seems to be a recurring theme in your life.”
Wyatt had his arm around her and tightened his hand on her shoulder. “I want it to end. I need it to end, Tam. I’ve got to fix it. To get to the bottom of all this stuff.”
“Closure,” she said.
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“JIM JONES WAS BORN and grew up in Indiana. His first church was there.”
“Okay,” Tamara said. “And this is important because…?”
“Because my mother was from there, too. Father Bernard told me she ran away from a bad situation in Indiana when she was fifteen.”
“A bad situation?”
“Some kind of abuse.”
“Well, that narrows it down.” She gently touched his face. “I don’t mean to dampen your enthusiasm, Wyatt, but isn’t Indiana kind of big? Lots of people, too, if I’m not mistaken. The odds of your mother having some connection to one other guy in the entire state of Indiana are pretty steep against, don’t you think?”
“Very. But on the other hand, it’s the only place left to look.”
“Maybe you’ll get another text.”
“No. I don’t think so. Those are done. I don’t need any more texts. They don’t want to risk getting caught by my mother’s killer, sending any more of them. And they said I was close.”
“Well, there you go. Indiana isn’t close.”
“No, not physically close. Close to the answer. As soon as I mentioned Evie Spencer, I was suddenly right on top of it. The exact quote was ‘Be careful, you are close.’ It couldn’t mean anything else.”
“Okay, it means your texter thinks that Evie was involved somehow in your mother’s death. But how many years after that was Jonestown?”
“Eight. And I know what you’re saying. How could they possibly be related? But guess what? Jones was out in California starting in ’65 and straight through until he moved to Guyana.” At her skeptical glance, he asked, “What?”
“I was just going to say that California is even bigger than Indiana, but I believe you already know that. More people, too. Was Jones anywhere near here, in the city?”
“He moved here in ’72.”
Tamara cast a glance toward the ceiling. “A mere two years after your mother’s death. Where was he before that?”
“A place called Redwood Valley, about a hundred miles north of here.”
“Practically in your mother’s lap.”
“Sarcasm ill becomes you.” Wyatt sat back. “I’m not convincing you.”
<
br /> “Not really, no.”
FERRILL MOORE DIDN’T HIDE his displeasure when he opened his door and saw Wyatt Hunt standing there at nine o’clock on this Tuesday morning. His mouth turned down sharply as if he’d encountered a sour taste, but then he dredged a thin smile, although stopped short of extending his hand. “Mr. Hunt, again, isn’t it?”
“You’ve got a good memory.”
“Yes, I do. Indispensable tool of the trade, I’m afraid. Better not become a lawyer if you have trouble remembering things. You’re still on the Carson case, I presume.”
Hunt nodded. “Taking a little bit of a different tack. I wonder if you could spare me some time?”
The smile got thinner. “I thought I was doing just that.”
This was as close to outright rude as it could get and Hunt had to fight back the temptation to respond in kind. “As of course you are,” he said, “but I was hoping to have more of an extensive chat.” He broke what he hoped was a conciliatory smile. “I’m not trying to undermine the work you did in that case.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes, you are if you’re questioning your father’s guilt.”
“That’s not really my main interest, to tell you the truth. I’m not even so sure it was last time we talked. I just got caught up in the emotion of it. Bastard, killer, son of a bitch, whatever he might have been, Kevin Carson was my father, after all. I was still just getting used to that idea.”
Moore cocked his head. “So what’s your focus now?”
Hunt shifted his feet, thrust his hands deeper into his jacket pockets against the cold. “I’ve been looking a little into the background of my mother’s life and I’ve run across something that we think is kind of provocative. Do you remember ever running across the name Evie Spencer, also known as Secrist, or See Christ?”
For the first time in any of his interviews, Hunt thought he detected a spark of recognition in Moore’s eyes. “I don’t believe she made it to the trial.”
The Hunter Page 12
