The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  HUNT SPENT FORTY-FIVE MINUTES driving into downtown and parking, then another hour in the redbrick multistory headquarters of The Indianapolis Star, getting bounced around. Adrienne had been right about the friendliness quotient of the locals; everybody he chatted with wanted to help, although nobody had any good idea about how to find what he was looking for, so they passed him along to somebody else who might.

  The last of these was a woman of about sixty named Lynn Sheppard, who was in the middle of a coffee break in the staff lounge when Hunt found her, introduced himself, gave her his card, and went into the short version of his spiel, at the end of which she said, “If you’ll pardon me saying so, young man, you look exhausted.”

  Hunt acknowledged the sentiment with a chuckle and a nod. “I guess I am a little tired. It shows, does it?”

  “Just a bit.” She pointed at her cup. “The coffee in here really isn’t as bad as you’d think. And the price is right.”

  “You sold me.”

  “You sit down, dear. I know where the mugs are.”

  Two minutes later, they were sitting across from one another at a metal and plastic table, both with their hands around their steaming mugs. “To address your main question,” Lynn said, “you’re not likely to be able to find a child in the newspaper in the late 1960s unless there was some major news story associated with her. Caylee Anthony, Casey’s baby, that kind of thing? Did your mother have any kind of notoriety like that?”

  “Not until she was murdered, but that was in San Francisco.”

  “Oh, my dear, I am so sorry.”

  Hunt shrugged. “That, too, was a long time ago. Nineteen seventy.”

  “Still.” Lynn let out a wistful breath. “You were a baby.”

  “Three years old. I really have no memory of it.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “It would be interesting if that were true.”

  “It’s pretty true,” he said.

  “As a reporter, I’ve learned that pretty true and true are often not the same thing.”

  Hunt hesitated, broke a small smile. “Okay. Lately, a few things have started coming back. I think maybe I sublimated some stuff when I was young to get through it. If it would let me sleep, that’s what I’d still be doing.”

  “Sublimating?”

  “Ignoring, maybe.”

  “But it’s not letting you sleep?”

  A sheepish grin. “Sleep does seem to be taking a hit. But as soon as I get to the bottom of this, everything ought to go back the way it was. That’s what I keep telling myself.”

  “And isn’t it pretty to think so?”

  “What does that mean, Mrs. Hemingway?”

  “It means that things don’t go back to the way they were. That never happens. You learn something, you feel something, and it changes you forever. And then you adjust to the new you.”

  “The new me. I can’t wait.”

  Lynn sat back and scrutinized him carefully. “Wyatt. It is Wyatt, right? When you first came in here, you said you were looking for some advice on how to find information about your mother when she was a young girl. Now you tell me she was murdered and you’re trying to get to the bottom of that. But that search is having more of an impact on you than you want to admit, isn’t it?”

  Hunt gathered his thoughts for a moment, unable to raise his eyes to look at her.

  “I’m prying,” she said. “Professional failing, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

  “No. That’s all right. You’re right. It’s kind of ripping me up, to tell you the truth. It’s like this current, this undertow. I don’t know what it is. Churning everything up. I’m just trying to do my job and it’s like something is stopping me. Stopping my body. Like with the sleep thing. I can’t get focused. Everything goes so far and then just shuts down and stops. I think it should be obvious by now, but I can’t get my arms around it. It’s like I don’t really want to find out what I need to know, like I don’t trust who I am.”

  “Maybe it’s a scary thing. Maybe you’re afraid of it.”

  “I can’t rule that out. But if that’s it, it’s not conscious.”

  “It sounds like your conscious and your subconscious are at war with one another.”

  “That’s what it feels like, too. I can’t seem to get control over it.”

  “And control is a big thing?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s the main thing.”

  “Really?” She skewered him with a penetrating look. “It sounds like some part of you doesn’t want to let you believe that.”

  “Now, that,” he said, “would be scary. That is not happening.”

  “All right, all right.” She shifted in her chair, reached for her coffee and sipped. “So what are you really trying to find?”

  “Really? What I said. I’m here to find my mother. The truth about my mother. Why she was murdered.”

  “In San Francisco? In 1970? And you think you’ll find out something about that here in Indianapolis back in the sixties? How does that happen?”

  Hesitating, Hunt drummed his fingers on the table. “This sounds far-fetched, I know, but I’m trying to verify if she had a connection to Jim Jones.”

  “Jim Jones.” Lynn Sheppard went still for a long beat. “What kind of connection? How old would she have been?”

  “Eleven to fifteen, somewhere in there. I’m thinking she might have been…​I don’t know the word. Abused.”

  “Raped would be the word, Wyatt. A grown man has sex with an eleven-year-old, it’s rape. You think Jones might have killed her?”

  “No. Whoever did that, he’s still alive, I’m sure. I think he killed one of my associates in San Francisco the other night.”

  She leveled her gaze at him, pushed farther back from the table, and crossed her legs. “You’re telling me you’re working on a forty-year-old murder case that stretches down into the present that might have a tie to Jim Jones?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t prove any of it. It’s all conjecture.”

  “What would you need to prove it?”

  Hunt shrugged. “Somebody who knew my mother back then. Some kind of record. I don’t know. That’s what I’m here to find out. Although the trail, again, seems to stop here.”

  “And if you do prove it? If Jones was raping her, then what?”

  “Then we’re that much closer to knowing why my mother was killed, and my associate, too, and maybe even who did it.”

  Lynn, her coffee forgotten, her eyes locked on the middle distance between herself and Hunt, seemed to reach some decision and brought her hands together. “Wyatt,” she said, “you might not know exactly what you’re looking for, but I’ve got to tell you that you’re one hell of a motivator.”

  “I am? What am I motivating?”

  “Not what, who. And the answer is me.” She stood up. “Do you realize what you’ve got here? You’ve got a long-dead case, multiple murders, a tortured private investigator, child abuse, Jim Jones and Jonestown. You know what that spells?” She waited a second. “Pulitzer.”

  HUNT WOUND UP TALKING to Lynn Sheppard at her desk in the city room for another hour or so, bringing her up to date on as many of the details of his investigation as he could remember. Taking notes on her computer, with every twist she seemed more galvanized, from the earliest text messages (But who is sending them? And why? You don’t have any idea?), then Wyatt’s father and the letter he’d left him, to the labyrinthine hunt for Evie See Christ/Spencer, the undoubted and verifiable correlation to Jonestown, if not to Jim Jones himself, and finally to the murder this week of Ivan Orloff.

  Wyatt told her that the next day he planned to go visit the Disciples of Christ main office in Indianapolis as well as the Human Relations Commission, with both of which Jones had been closely involved. There might be some oldster or historian in or around one of those organizations who remembered his mother and her relationship, if any, to Jones. From there, Hunt would play it by ear, but if nothing substantive about his mother materialized, he
would leave his card with a lot of people and hope something turned up, and then planned to fly back home in time for Ivan’s memorial service on Saturday, when he would try to patch things up with Tamara and hope that Juhle had something positive to report on Ivan’s murder.

  Finally, realizing anew that he’d slept very little and eaten not at all last night or today, he cut things off with Lynn. She was going to go to her own collection of sources, some of them ancient, all of them confidential, and see what she could dig up, and she’d get in touch with him if she had any success.

  By the time he got back to his car, it was rush hour. Hunt had turned his cell phone off while he’d been in the newspaper building, and now he checked it—he had thirty-seven e‑mails, no text messages, and fourteen voice mails, including two from Juhle and none from Tamara. He punched up Juhle’s first voice mail: “Your case is solved, dude,” his friend said. “Might as well come on home, although nobody misses you, so you could also stay away and no one would care.”

  HUNT SAT AT THE COUNTER of the restaurant in his hotel. In front of him was a glass of milk. On his plate was what little remained of a large serving of breaded pork tenderloin, an Indianapolis specialty of which he was sure Mickey would not approve. Nevertheless, it hit the spot at the moment—hearty, bland, comforting, filling. Mashed potatoes and a really pretty good red cabbage dish as the sides rounded everything out nicely.

  He felt the buzz of his cell phone at his belt before he heard its guitar-strumming ringtone. He’d played phone tag and left a message with Juhle and didn’t plan to pick up for anyone except him or Tamara, and sure enough, here he was.

  “What do you mean, the case is solved?”

  “Is there a possible second meaning?”

  “Come on. Talk to me.”

  “I will. After a backbreaking day of following up leads and talking to idiots, we found the cab last night, abandoned down by Maritime Park. There was a dead guy in the trunk. Shot in the head.”

  “Another dead guy.”

  “Yeah. The driver. So meanwhile I’d had this scintillating discussion with a crackhead gentleman named Chewey who had seen the shooter in the cab down at Original Joe’s and described him as Caucasian, old, and white-haired, which you may not know happens to fit the description of your favorite person named Spencer.”

  “Lionel.”

  “The very same.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Easy, I’m getting there. So Maritime Park is, like, just down the street from Spencer’s place, and Sarah and I go up in the middle of the night and it’s still lit up the way you described it. But nobody answers when we ring.”

  “He ran. He killed Ivan and then ran.”

  “Not really. He was busier than that. He killed the cabbie, then killed Orloff, then went home and must have gotten nervous that we were going to catch him, which we were about to, and either execute him or throw him in jail for the rest of history, not just for Orloff but for your mother, too. And the cabbie. So instead, he went into his nice telescope room and shot himself in the head.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure he shot himself in the head? It’s kind of a hard thing to miss, Wyatt.”

  “No, are you sure it was him? A suicide.”

  “Pretty much. We’re running ballistics on the gun, and we’ve got a slug from the cabbie, which is the same caliber as Orloff. It’s about as clean as you can get, dude. He killed these people because your man was getting close, and then freaked out when he realized he was going to get caught, and soon.”

  Hunt forced himself to swallow. “So he killed my mother, too.”

  “That’s got to be our assumption, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just so…​I mean, this was fast, Dev. From nothing to done.”

  “That’s how it happens sometimes. You ought to feel good about it.”

  “I know. But there’s still Ivan and…​the others. I don’t feel like dancing.”

  “No. I hear you. Of course. But still . . .”

  “Still. Jesus.”

  “Yeah.” Juhle took a beat. “You fly safe,” he said.

  “I will. See you.”

  22

  AFTER HE SIGNED FOR HIS DINNER BILL, Hunt went upstairs to his generic airport hotel room. He lowered himself into the desk chair and looked out the window over the runways to the flat landscape beyond. The sun was low enough to now appear sporadically but not brightly under the cloud cover, a brooding blood-orange ball. Every few minutes, an airplane would take off or land in the foreground to an accompanying roar that the window did little to mitigate.

  Hunt was so bone tired that he felt nearly tethered to the chair but paradoxically felt no urge to push himself up, cross the room, and lie down on the bed. Not only was it too early, but also he hadn’t worked out the details of his deep dissatisfaction with the news that Juhle had delivered.

  If Lionel Spencer had been Ivan’s killer, and his mother’s, then the question about Hunt’s texter might forever remain unanswered, and that was profoundly unsettling. Hunt had envisioned in a nebulous way that the solution of the one mystery would somehow provide a key to the second. Instead, they now had a dead suspect and a conveniently solved case that, for Hunt, left as many questions as it resolved.

  He tried calling Tamara and left a voice message when she didn’t pick up.

  Hunt had to go on the assumption that his texter’s life would be somehow improved, and perhaps drastically, by the solution to his mother’s murder. Else why bother with the whole exercise to begin with? And from all Hunt knew, Spencer lived alone. So Hunt guessed the next question would be To whom would his death make a difference? And he had no idea, not a soul to consider.

  Beyond that, Hunt had an issue with the supposed motivation for Lionel to have killed himself. Was it because the police were going to deduce, perhaps already had figured out, that he’d killed Orloff and the cabbie? Would this make a cold-blooded killer—as Lionel must have been to have wasted his two victims so mechanically—decide to take his own life? Without any kind of fight or legal battle? It seemed an untenable stretch.

  And yet, apparently, that’s exactly what Lionel had done. And how did you argue with uncontested facts? Hunt would, of course, find out the details from Juhle, but they must have been damn convincing if the two homicide inspectors accepted the scenario they appeared to support.

  Hunt placed another call to Tamara, which again went unanswered, and this time he did not leave a message, which would have been the same as the first.

  At last, as the sun settled below the horizon, Hunt opened his laptop and reserved his flights out of town for the next day. The best option, maddeningly, leaving here at eleven for Minneapolis, another couple of hours of layover there, then the flight to San Francisco that would get him in at five o’clock Saturday, thank God for the time change.

  Reserving the flights took him twelve minutes.

  Dusk now well advanced, Hunt broke down and texted her: I hate not talking to you. Do you realize we’ve talked just about every day for the past three years? I don’t know what to do without your input. I’m sorry about our disagreement. I understand why you’re mad. But people who love each other can disagree and be mad and get through it, it’s a proven fact. It will probably happen again sometime with us. I want to be with you. If you’d call me, I could grovel appropriately and tell you in person that I’m coming home. Juhle says the case is solved, so maybe I didn’t need to come out here after all, which was, I believe, your opinion to begin with. Call me. Please.

  Hunt put his phone on the desk next to his computer and, closing his eyes, brought his hands again up to his temples. He’d been trying to ignore the onset of the little pinpoints of light that had presaged his headache the night before, but it was becoming more difficult. Popping now like flashbulbs going off at the periphery of his vision, the light show finally prodded him into movement.

  In the bathroom, all the lights out in th
e room because lights seemed to make it worse, he swallowed four aspirin and then soaked a washcloth in cold water. Now lying on the bed in his clothes, he draped the wet cloth over his eyes and tried to will his mind into emptiness.

  What the hell was this?

  Last night, the pain had kicked in—a steel band tightened down over his temples and around his head—and had nearly made him black out, but there was very little of that tonight, at least not yet. Just a coming and going sense of vertigo and nausea that getting horizontal seemed to help.

  * * *

  HE’D EVENTUALLY FALLEN ASLEEP, he supposed. The light show had dissipated and though still disoriented, he got over to where his cell phone was ringing on the desk, without any dizziness. The phone’s clock said that three hours had passed.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Thank you for calling,” he said.

  “Are you all right? Did I wake you up?”

  “A little.”

  “That’s an automatically wrong answer, Wyatt. I can call back tomorrow.”

  “No. Now’s good. Don’t hang up.”

  “I won’t. You don’t sound good.”

  “I’m having this weird headache, though it’s gone now. I was just taking a nap.”

  “What’s weird about the headache?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like exploding lights and it’s hugely painful.”

  “You’re having a migraine, Wyatt. Have you seen a doctor? No, let me guess.”

  “Tam, it’s just a headache.”

  “Unless it’s an aneurism or spinal meningitis or something.”

  “Then it wouldn’t go away, or I’d be dead. Anyway, it’s gone now.” He paused. “I’ve taken a few aspirin.”

  “Oh, okay, then, we don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  “Are we having another fight? I don’t want another fight.”

  “It’s probably still part of the first one.”

  “Probably. Maybe we could declare a truce.”

  He heard the relief in her voice. “A truce would be good. I’d vote for a truce.”