But Devin already had it unholstered and was looking at the display. He held it up as if Connie could see it. “It’s Sarah,” he said. Sarah Russo was his sometime partner, and if she were calling him at home at dinnertime, it was something he wanted to know about. “I’ll just get it out in the living room.” He pointed around the table. “If any of you kids touch one of the meatballs on my plate, I will have you arrested.”
Amid the general laughter, Connie with a sinking heart watched him walk through the archway to the other side of the house and wasn’t at all surprised when, two minutes later, he reappeared but stopped to lean against the side of the arch, his face drawn.
“We’ve got a problem downtown,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”
JUHLE DIDN’T WANT TO TELL CONNIE and the kids where he really had to go, which was the Tenderloin district. Though technically downtown, it was a blighted area that was home to a host of bums, prostitutes, drug dealers and users, pimps, and other assorted lowlifes. Even a policeman like Juhle driving a city car risked losing his ride if he parked it too far from where he had to go.
The sidewalk in front of Original Joe’s was already marked off with yellow tape, lit up with kliegs, the concrete shining with the mist that had condensed out of the air. The coroner’s van waited at the mouth of the adjacent parking lot, and Juhle pulled in there, too, for a minute, before spotting Sarah down near the end of the block with a team of other cops and paramedics, then flashing his ID to the patrolman guarding the scene by the van.
There were no news vans, though. People dying in the Tenderloin didn’t really count as news. Nobody mattered here in this wasteland.
As Juhle walked down, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, broken glass crunched under his feet. In the bright artificial light, he counted no fewer than six used syringes in the gutter, three empty liquor bottles, and a dead rat. The smell everywhere was rancid with urine and garbage, but near the Dumpster in the street halfway to Sarah, the odor was all but overwhelming. Maybe someone else had died and was stashed in there, too. And who knew? If somebody bothered to check it, they might find out. But Juhle wasn’t going to do it.
Glad that he didn’t have much in his stomach, he got down to the knot of his colleagues and waited at their periphery until Sarah came over to him from where the body still lay in the gutter.
“Sorry about this,” she said. She was a few years his junior, smart and no-nonsense. “But I thought you’d want to know.”
“You sure it’s him?”
“Well, not a hundred percent, tell you the truth. He got robbed, so there’s no ID or cell phone, but he had some business cards in his jacket pocket, and look at how he’s dressed. He’s not one of our homeless. I figured if it was him, you’d make him solid.”
With a heavy sigh, Juhle nodded. “Let’s go have a look.”
They crossed over to where the body lay on its side, facing away from them. No one had moved it yet—the crime-scene photographer was still snapping pictures. In the bright, artificial light, it didn’t take a skilled investigator to see the hole in the back of the man’s head, nor the stream of congealing red-turning-black stuff that had gathered in the gutter under him.
Juhle knew who it was before he’d even gotten around to see the face, but he stepped over the torso and looked down to be sure. There was no doubt. He straightened up, stepped back over the body, got next to Sarah. “That’s Ivan all right,” he said. Then added, “It’s bad enough when you don’t know ’em.”
Sarah touched his shoulder. “I hear you.” The techs were getting ready to move in and start their work in earnest, and Sarah issued a few crisp instructions, then backed away and came back over to Juhle. “I pulled this solo, and I notice you’ve been doing the same lately, if you want to be part of it.”
“Absolutely. You got anything at all?”
Sarah snorted a broken laugh. “Oh, sure. Helpful neighborhood witnesses lining up out by the restaurant.”
“Nobody saw nothing?”
She nodded. “Actually, you won’t believe this, but we have one witness who was coming out of the restaurant behind him, who called nine one one. Other than that, the usual from the locals, though we did get a second nine one one call. Beyond that, nobody heard anything, either, which is slightly harder to believe seeing as that looks like a big hole in Ivan’s head. But nobody heard the shot.”
“Funky acoustics down here,” Juhle said. “Sounds get swallowed up.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“So who’s the witness?”
Sarah checked her notepad. “Mike Morrisey.” She motioned toward the doorway to Original Joe’s, maybe forty feet away, where a saggy, middle-aged man in a business suit and topcoat, hands in his pockets, stood next to a uniformed policeman. “He’s not positive the victim was in the restaurant. He doesn’t remember him specifically. But Mike was just coming out the door when he sees our guy walking toward a Yellow Cab as though he had just flagged it, and then suddenly he hears the big bang and the guy goes down and the cab flies off.”
“Wait a minute. Somebody shoots him from inside a cab?”
“That’s what Morrisey saw.”
“He get the plate?”
“No.”
“No. Of course not.”
Sighing seemed to be the preferred means of communication for the evening, and Sarah added one more riff. “So Mike’s standing there, just dumbstruck, he says, and before he can move, some other guy, a street guy, Mike says, is suddenly over the body, so Mike figures he’s checking on the guy and pulls out his phone and calls nine one one. But in actual fact, the street guy wasn’t seeing if the victim was all right. He’s taking his wallet. At least, the wallet’s gone. So’s the cell phone. Gone in ten seconds, and so was the guy.”
“Working with the shooter?”
“Who knows? I’d say unlikely, but what do I know?”
“A cab?”
“I know. I did have one thought. If he was on a job for your friend Hunt, maybe that’s part of this.”
“That’s worth checking.” He paused, then swore under his breath. “I don’t think he was thirty yet, you know that?” He looked back over at the body. “I should let Wyatt know.”
“And everybody else,” Sarah said, meaning his parents, wife or girlfriend, children if any. It was going to be a very long night.
They had turned the body onto its back. The entry wound high on the forehead looking something like a small clump of black mud leaking into his hairline. Juhle glanced down.
And just as quickly looked away.
15
THE QUIETER SPOT to which Wyatt and Tamara retired turned out to be the intimate Venticello, perhaps the city’s most romantic restaurant. They had no reservation, but early on a Tuesday night, luck had been with them. They had apparently reached a mutual and tacit agreement not to talk about Wyatt’s continued pursuit of his mother’s killer. Instead, they’d both had the petrale and split a bottle of Gavi di Gavi, talking about their history together, the mostly ill-timed ebb and flow of their various eras of attraction to each other—Tamara’s crush on Hunt when she was eighteen, and again at twenty-two; Hunt’s infatuation with her when she was first working for him but going out with another of his employees; then the current phase that had led to him breaking things off with Gina Roake.
Now the warehouse’s large garage door slammed down behind them. Hunt turned off the engine, which also extinguished the Cooper’s lights, and they sat in the muted darkness with their fingers intertwined.
“Well?” Tamara said. “Here we are.”
“Taken us long enough, hasn’t it?”
“Just long enough,” she said. “Just the right amount of time.” She squeezed his hand.
“Should we go in?” he asked.
“I was thinking we might.”
They both opened their doors. “Shoot some hoops first?” he asked.
She came around the car and reached for his hand again. “Maybe later.”
As t
hey got to the door that led to the residential part of his building, Hunt’s cell phone rang. “This is not happening,” he said, taking the phone from its holster and muting it. “Devin,” he said, glancing down at the screen. “Devin can wait.”
But they hadn’t gone five steps down the hall toward Hunt’s bedroom when the house phone rang. “It’s a conspiracy,” he said. “Somebody’s got surveillance cameras on us.” When they got to the bedroom door, Hunt gave her a quick kiss and said, “Let me just run back and unplug the damn thing.”
He turned around, heard his answering message, and then Devin Juhle’s voice kick in just as he got to the kitchen. “Wyatt. Pick up. It’s urgent. And it’s bad.”
Behind him, framed in the entryway to the kitchen, Tamara stood with her face set in hard stone, arms crossed over her chest. “You better get it.”
HUNT GAVE TAMARA HIS KEY and the Cooper so she could drive herself home while he took the Kawasaki and made it to Joe’s in less than five minutes.
Hunt pulled up and flashed his ID to the patrolman guarding the scene. “Inspector Juhle down there,” he pointed, “just called me and told me to get down here. The victim is one of my employees.”
The cop nodded and asked Hunt to wait while he went down to the homicide inspectors and cleared the request, but Hunt fell in a couple of steps behind him. The patrolman didn’t notice or didn’t care, but either way, Hunt tagged along to the small group that included Juhle and Sarah Russo, who all stood on the far side of the sidewalk, away from where Ivan’s body still lay on the cold, wet concrete.
Hunt nodded vaguely in the direction of the group. Then, motioning a question with his head, Hunt got a grim silent assent from Juhle, and the two of them walked across where two people from the coroner’s van were just laying out a bag next to the body.
“Can you guys give us a second here?” He put a hand on Hunt’s arm. “You all right?”
“No part of me is all right,” Hunt said. He went down to a squat and reached out to uselessly feel for a pulse in Ivan’s neck, then moved his hand and rested it inside the fold of his jacket, on his shirt over his heart. There was still some warmth in the body. Standing up, he took a few deep breaths, then scanned the street both ways. “What the hell was he doing down here?”
“Eating at Joe’s, we think. Probably. We’re thinking it might have been something he was working on. Somebody just pulled up in a cab and whacked him.”
“In a cab?”
Juhle nodded. “We’ve got a witness. That’s what happened. You know what he was working on?”
“Generally, yeah. Five or six things. If he had a witness down here he needed to interview, I don’t know who it was.” Hunt stared away into the distance for a long moment before he came back to Juhle. “You know the first thing that springs to mind? The Spencer connection.” Hunt ran a hand down the side of his face. “I really don’t want to think that’s what got him killed.”
“I’m blanking. What’s the Spencer connection?”
“Evie Spencer. Evie See Christ.”
“Again?”
Hunt nodded. “The woman just won’t go away.”
* * *
HIS EYES BURNING—the time was 11:52—Hunt sat at the LexisNexis monitor in his front office, set up in a cubicle in the northwest corner. Windows flanked it on both walls, one looking out on the now mostly deserted Embarcadero, up past the Ferry Building, and one facing the bay with a slice of the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island off to the right.
Ivan had definitely been working on Spencer when he’d last sat here. He’d pulled up about a hundred of them in San Francisco, and maybe that’s where Hunt would start tomorrow, with those first one hundred. He would have printed them out, but each history ran a minimum twenty pages, some many more.
And paper was already eating him up.
Available only by subscription to accredited entities such as police departments, government offices, newspapers, and law firms (and through those law firms, sometimes to private investigators), the basic LexisNexis record begins in the present with an individual’s name, date of birth, social security number, and last known or current address. Then it goes back through other addresses, other names associated with those addresses, census data for the geographical region of the address, real property records, businesses and fictitious businesses associated with the individual, previous owners (if any) of those businesses, potential relatives, a.k.a.’s, associated persons, neighbors, employment history, and so on. In all, the service is a tremendously powerful search engine and person-locator tool.
In Hunt’s estimation, the only real drawback was that the information in the records tended to be rife with misspellings, so that if you went searching for specific data, quite often the automated aspect of the system wouldn’t give you your result. And then you had to go through the records manually anyway. Nevertheless, if you were willing to put in the time, you could almost always get the information you sought.
But Hunt had no stomach to even start printing pages out now, at this time of night. Still, all in all, it had probably been wise to have come right down to the office from the terrible street scene in front of Original Joe’s. The history function of LexisNexis cleared itself every midnight. When Hunt had left Juhle, he felt there had been no time to lose, and it was compelling that Ivan had been looking at Spencers.
But in spite of the glut of Spencers, the situation really wasn’t all that promising. There were about a million of them, or at least so many that it made no sense to keep checking the name. True, he and his staff could over the next few weeks call every one of the five hundred or so Spencers living in San Francisco, and then branch out to the greater Bay Area for the next few thousand, but ultimately that seemed a futile exercise. He had to come up with something else or a reason to settle on one individual. And that he did not have yet. Not close.
Finally, stretching, sick in his gut, Hunt logged off the machine and got to his feet, then walked by Tamara’s desk and his own office and down the hallway to Ivan’s small workspace, where he opened the door and turned on the light. The room featured its own window, an IKEA chair and desk with a computer monitor and some framed photographs, and a four-drawer filing cabinet. On the wall, Ivan had pinned up a Giants “Torture to Rapture” poster.
Hunt pulled out the top filing drawer and stared for a minute at the neatly organized Pendaflex folders with their alphabetized tabs before he reached in and, more or less at random, lifted out the file labeled “Doyle,” which he vaguely remembered as a sub-rosa case from a year ago about Mr. Doyle’s bad back and his workers’-comp claim. In the folder was a write-up for the insurance company, some field notes, and a CD that Hunt knew contained the pictorial evidence of Mr. Doyle’s fraud.
Replacing that file’s contents, then putting the whole thing back in its place, he closed the drawer and opened the second, then the third one, which contained “R” to “Z.” Although there was no actual filed “Z” entry. There was no Spencer, either.
Hunt let himself down into Ivan’s chair, then came forward and picked up a framed picture of the poor guy with a pretty brunette, Lucy, whom Hunt had met once or twice. They were outside on a sunny day, smiling with the ocean in the background. Putting the picture back, he looked at the others—Lucy with a black cat in her arms, an elderly couple somewhere that looked like Las Vegas, Ivan in a group of people his age, maybe his brothers and sisters and their spouses, maybe just some pals.
This was getting him nowhere.
With the weight of his forehead on his hand, he hung in the chair and closed his eyes. Rousing himself, he got up again, turned out the light and left the office, and came back to his own desk. On his cell phone, he went to his Contacts list and touched a number. The phone rang four times, then picked up with Ivan’s voice telling him to leave a message and he’d get right back to him.
Except…not.
He punched up his Contacts list again and this time sent a text to Callie Lucent, typed in I
van’s cell number, and asked, Two quick ones: Can you ping this phone and tell me where it is? We can get a warrant if it’s necessary, but meanwhile can you get me recent records on calls to or from this same number? He’s one of my employees and he’s been killed.
* * *
“M INGYA” —another of Callie Lucent’s private cache of exclamations—“Wyatt, is this some kind of sick joke?”
“I can’t believe you’re awake.”
“Damn straight I’m awake. I never sleep. But really, this is one of your guys?”
“Really.”
“And he was killed? Like murdered?”
“Shot in the face, Cal. About as murdered as it gets. So I’m trying to narrow down what he was working on. Maybe his killing had something to do with whatever that was and I’m thinking there might be a clue on his cell, but whoever shot him took it.”
“Well, let me try to ping it right now if he’s left it on.”
“I’ll wait.”
After his original text to Callie, Hunt had prowled the office in frustration, back and forth, until finally he had stretched out just for a second on the couch in his office. Now he checked his watch and saw that it was 2:04. He switched his cell phone to speaker.
“I’m not getting anything,” Callie said. “They must have taken out the battery.”
“Or just turned it off.”
“No. That wouldn’t do it, Wyatt. Even off, we can get a ping. But not without the battery.”
Swearing to himself, Hunt went back over to his desk. “How about checking his cell’s history? Do you need a warrant for that?”
Callie’s laugh echoed in the quiet offices. “Warrants? Please. Wyatt, I can pull up whatever I want whenever. It just might take a little time, that’s all.”
“How long?”
“A day, maybe two.”
“Well, whatever you can do. Yesterday would be good, though.”
“I’m on it even as we speak. Where’d he get killed?”
“In the Tenderloin. Why?”
The Hunter Page 15
