The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  “That was eight years after she died,” Hunt said. “When did she leave here?”

  “They all left as a group in ’65. He had convinced all of them that there was going to be a nuclear war—it sounds so fantastic now, I know, but that man could sell ice to Eskimos. Anyway, that was the last I ever saw of her.”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Page.” Lynn looked up from her notepad. “But did you try to stop her? Or call the police?”

  “The police here in Indianapolis? In the sixties?” Susan clearly found the idea ludicrous. “You must remember if you’re a reporter, this was the most notoriously corrupt police department in the United States back then. And Jones had all the city leaders in his pocket. Not to mention that Margie couldn’t have been stopped. If the authorities, any authorities, had brought her back, she’d just have flown off again. And Jones was such a force. Terrifying, really.” She shook her head again, reliving the despair. “It just didn’t seem possible to stop them. It wasn’t possible.”

  “Did you stay in touch at all?” Hunt asked.

  “I wrote her every few days for most of a year, until eventually the letters started getting returned unopened with no forwarding address.” Susan dabbed at her eyes and then came forward, speaking with more urgency. “And please listen to me, both of you. I know I was wrong. There’s no escaping it. I’ve lived with my failure about this for all of my life.

  “But her father had just died two years before. I was alone, trying to raise her by myself. And I know I never should have let her go, whether she would have kept fighting with me or not. Or run away again, and again. She was only sixteen years old. I should have found a way to keep her with me. And I didn’t. I just didn’t. I didn’t know how to do it. I wasn’t strong enough, or a good enough mother. And in the end, she just disappeared off the face of the earth. If I could do any one thing in my life over again…​but I just didn’t have the strength, or the courage, or whatever. I failed her, and I failed myself.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Lynn said gently. “You don’t need to beat yourself up over it anymore.”

  “I sometimes feel I can never beat myself up enough.”

  “I think she’d want you to forgive yourself,” Hunt said. “She’d moved on and started a new life. She’d grown up. She was better.”

  “I hope that’s true.” Looking squarely at Hunt, she said, “It’s so hard to believe that she’s really dead now after all this time. I don’t want to believe it.”

  “I know,” Hunt said. “I’m sorry to have been the one to tell you. But I thought you deserved to know. You needed to know.”

  Accepting that, Susan nodded. “And have I helped you? In your investigation.”

  “I think so. I needed to know for sure about the nature of her relationship with Jones.”

  “Why? What does that get you?”

  “It gets me a motive why she might have been killed.”

  “And what is that?”

  “She was a threat. Or at least Jones perceived her as a threat.”

  “How is that? How could she possibly threaten him?”

  “She could go public with her rape. A priest in San Francisco told me that there were other children involved. Never mind the criminal charges, credible evidence that he was raping eleven-year-olds would have ruined him. Obviously, Margie left the commune and came down to San Francisco, where she eventually meets a new guy named Kevin Carson and they get married. Four years later, this timing exactly works, Jones is making plans to come down and resettle in San Francisco. He’d have a much higher profile in the city, plus he’d make a ton more money. So he had feelers out to the community, City Hall, the mayor, you name it. By now she has escaped him. He doesn’t know what she’s thinking or who she’s talking to, but he knows what she knows.”

  “He was always about money,” Susan said. “That was the other thing.”

  Hunt nodded. “That’s what happens when you get a thousand people to sign over their welfare and social security checks to you. In any event, I think that one of his recent converts was a girl named Evie Spencer, who was a friend of your daughter’s. When she comes in all enthusiastic about Jones and tries to convert Margie back to the People’s Temple, she’s having none of it and tells Evie why. Needless to say, this is the worst possible news for Jones. Even if Margie doesn’t go public with it herself, if even the rumor of it gets out, he’s toast. Even in megatolerant San Francisco. He can’t risk it. And he’s got a soldier only too willing to do his work in the person of Evie’s husband.”

  “So he killed her? Evie’s husband?”

  “Lionel Spencer. Probably so, yes. I know the police in San Francisco think so.”

  “Are they going to arrest him?”

  “They don’t have to. He killed himself the other night. One of my investigators made it clear he was going to be hauled in. He took another way out.”

  Everyone seemed to settle back as Hunt reached his conclusion. Lynn closed her notebook. Susan gave Bessie’s head a rub before she looked hard at Hunt again and straightened up. “Can I ask you another question?”

  “Sure. Anything.”

  “Who is your client in all this?”

  Hunt cocked his head a little to one side and offered her a tight little smile. “At this point, I’d have to say that I’m doing it mostly on my own. With a little help from Lynn here.”

  “But why? What’s your interest?”

  Hunt delayed another second or two. He had already loaded enough baggage onto this woman for one day and did not think it impossible that another staggering revelation would be too much for her to handle. Still, they were both here now, and she’d brought it up, asking him these last questions. Much as she deserved to know about Margie’s death, she also deserved to learn about Hunt’s relationship to her. “Margie was my mother,” he said.

  Susan nodded as though reassuring herself about something she already knew. Though the reaction was low-key, her eyes betrayed her—they became glassy with unspent tears. “I knew it when I saw you,” she said. “There is so much of her in you.” She reached out and rested her hand on his knee.

  Hunt covered her hand with both of his own.

  They stayed on at Indy-Gardens for about two more hours. Susan wanted to know everything about Hunt’s life, how he’d grown up, his adopted family. All the details of Hunt’s functional and relatively normal childhood with the Hunts seemed to bring her some solace. All her failure with her daughter had not, evidently, followed down through to the next generation. Trailing the shadow of her now-devoted Bessie, she insisted on introducing him, the “miracle” of her grandson, to the other residents.

  Hunt, for his part, was not entirely unmoved, either. This poor, lonely woman struck some atavistic chord in him to which he could not help but have some emotional response, quite possibly heightened by his fatigue and low-level but by now nearly constant head pain. Before he and Lynn left, Hunt and his grandmother were holding hands as she led them around, and they embraced—she weeping—as they said good-bye, exchanging numbers and promising to stay in touch forever.

  23

  HUNT AND LYNN WERE SITTING TOGETHER like conspirators in a booth at a diner around the corner from the Star building. Lynn had finished her burger and fries, still working on her milk shake, and something like a second or third wind had kicked in for her. “The one thing I’m still missing,” she said, “is the connection back to your texter.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I just did. The one thing I’m still missing . . .”

  “Lynn.” Hunt held up a hand, stopping her. “I heard you.” He’d felt hungry when he’d come in, since he hadn’t eaten since the night before at his hotel, but when the food arrived he’d only been able to pick at it. Now he moved a French fry through a pool of ketchup on his plate and brought it up to his mouth. “Which leads in a straight line to Lionel Spencer . . .” He let the thought hang. Then came back to it. “It’s just too pat.”

 
“What are you so mopey and negative about?” she asked. “We just got your corroboration on your mother’s connection to Jones, which is what you came all the way out here for, and you got to meet your grandmother for the first time to boot. I’d have to call that a pretty successful morning, and you’re still looking like something the cat dragged in. We’re winning here, Wyatt. You ought to be happy.”

  Hunt shook his head. “We’re still missing the link between Lionel and Jones.”

  “No, we’re not. Didn’t he tell your cop friends he was in People’s Temple with his wife? That puts him with Jones, does it not?”

  Hunt chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. “Jones had a thousand people with him, Lynn. It could have been any one of them. Why was it Lionel? He wasn’t a Jonestown survivor. I don’t think you’ve got your whole story, and I know I don’t have mine, until we have some reason to believe that Jones could essentially have asked Lionel to kill somebody and he would just go do it.”

  “We believe it because those are the kind of people Jones cultivated. That’s exactly what happened at Jonestown, you recall. People who didn’t want to drink the Kool-Aid got themselves shot.”

  “But Lionel wasn’t one of those guards. He wasn’t there.”

  “So he was an early incarnation of the type who happened to drop out.” Lynn slurped at her shake. “And now he’s dead and that’s the end of it.”

  “I don’t accept it. As you say, and you’re right, there’s a gap between my texter and Lionel shooting himself. My texter’s goal wasn’t to get somebody to shoot himself. I was going to prepare a case, something the cops could use. That was the whole idea.”

  “So it didn’t go exactly according to plan. That happens all the time. So what?”

  “So nobody’s looking anymore. That’s the point. Certainly not the cops. Lionel being dead ends the investigation. Doesn’t that make you even a little bit suspicious? And this whole idea of killing yourself so you don’t have to go to trial? For a murder that happened forty years ago? When there is no new evidence that even remotely points to you? I mean, come on. And how come Ivan is dead, then? If Lionel’s going to kill himself, he kills himself. He doesn’t steal a cab, assassinate the driver, shoot Ivan, then go home and kill himself a day later. What’s the point of all that? If he’s really that afraid of being caught, he puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. End of story.”

  Lynn didn’t agree. “He wasn’t worried about the old case, your mother, Wyatt. He thought he’d screwed up somehow with killing your guy, Ivan, and the cab driver. Didn’t you say there was a witness who identified him? No, he was going to get caught for one of those and he knew it. Under those conditions, I could easily see him doing it.”

  “Okay, but here’s my advice. Don’t write your story until . . .”

  Hunt’s cell phone chirped its message tone and he stopped midsentence and reached for it, reading what was on the screen. “This,” he said, “is the hand of God.”

  And showed her the message: It isn’t Lionel.

  “SO WHAT’S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?” Juhle asked.

  “What? You think it’s ambiguous?”

  “No. What I think it is, is bullshit. Somebody’s playing with you.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Dev. This is the person, this texter, who started all this.”

  “You know that? You know who it is now?”

  “No. But . . .”

  “Did you succeed in tracing that last message?”

  “No. There wasn’t any time. It was just the one line.”

  Juhle said, “Look, Wyatt, since we last talked, we got ballistics on the cabbie’s bullet and on Lionel’s, which are a match, and which also are both consistent—same caliber—with the slug that killed Orloff. These are three gunshot deaths from the same gun, guaranteed. There is no doubt. Oh, also, three bullets missing out of the magazine.”

  “Okay, but . . .”

  “Also, you might be surprised to learn that we went over Lionel’s place the way we do whenever there’s a violent death, and there is nothing there, nada, that points to an intruder or even a second person in the room or even in the house. The dude killed himself, Wyatt, gun up against his own head. Now by extension we can perhaps infer that he also killed your mother, but if you’re not happy with that, you are free to go on searching for whoever that might have been and I will try my best not to impede your continuing investigation. In fact, now that I think about it, maybe that’s the only murder your texter was talking about, your mother’s. Maybe Lionel didn’t kill her. But I’ll tell you one thing for absolute sure: Lionel’s gun did kill Orloff and it did kill our cabbie and it killed him. That you can take to the bank. As for the other stuff, it’s all yours.”

  Juhle cut the connection and Hunt stared for a minute at the face of his cell phone, then returned it to his belt. “You heard most of that, I presume,” he said to Lynn.

  “Enough, anyway. He seems convinced. And if the ballistics are right, he’s pretty persuasive.”

  “I’m sure the ballistics are fine,” Hunt said. “I’m sure there was no sign of forced entry or an invader in Lionel’s house. But I’m even more sure that whoever sent me that text wasn’t lying and wasn’t guessing. Lionel didn’t kill my mother. And he didn’t kill those other guys or himself, either. That was my guy, too.”

  “So who is he?”

  Hunt grimaced. “That’s where I started. That’s where I’m still at.” He picked up another French fry, looked at it, and placed it back on his plate. “It’s somebody who knew Lionel, still knows him. Somebody he talked to after he heard from Ivan.”

  Pulling his phone back up, he drew up his Contacts list and pressed the screen to connect him. “Callie. Wyatt…Can you get me the list of every call in and out to Lionel Spencer’s phone from last Tuesday? Lionel’s number is the last one Ivan talked to.…I’d ask Devin if I could see his list, if he’s even run the report, but he’s not sharing with me anymore.…You’re a doll, thanks.”

  Hunt put his phone away, brought his hand up and squeezed his temples.

  “Are you still hurting?” Lynn asked.

  “I don’t know what’s happening. My focus is a little off. My heart’s beating about triple time and I can’t seem to get a breath.” He pasted on a broken smile. “Otherwise, I’m good.”

  “Maybe you should wait for this friend of yours, Callie, to call you back and try to get some sleep?”

  He shook his head. “That might be two days, maybe more. And if Lionel got the call from Ivan on one phone and then made his call to his eventual killer on another phone, we may never find it. I’ve got to keep at this. There’s got to be somebody who knew Lionel back . . .” Stopping, he wiped his hand down the side of his face, around the neckline of his shirt.

  “What are you thinking?” she said.

  “My father.” His jaw went slack at the realization. “I’ve got to find my father.”

  HUNT HAD BEEN IN IRAQ for the First Gulf War, where he had been in the Criminal Investigation Command, and where the stress level was relatively high. After that, in civilian life for about ten years his job with Child Protective Services had entailed taking children away from their abusive or neglectful parents, and that career had set a standard of stress for which he had come to believe there was no equal.

  Until now.

  He was back in his hotel room, where he splashed water on his face and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. The person looking back at him, with bloodshot eyes and a heavy stubble over slightly sunken cheeks, was not altogether familiar. He really should shave, he told himself, take a shower and get cleaned up. It wouldn’t take him fifteen minutes, total.

  But it was too much work.

  Instead, he dried his face and went to lie down on his bed again. It was early afternoon and Lynn was back in her cubicle, hopefully finding something about Hunt’s father that they could use.

  If the man wasn’t dead.

  What Wyatt ne
eded more than a shower and shave was a little snooze. He set the alarm next to the bed for four o’clock and also set his cell phone alarm as a backup.

  But he was unable to get to any sort of a comfortable position. It wasn’t just his brain, or his head, although he was hyperaware of the blood pulsing behind his eyes, providing a nearly subsonic backbeat in his ears.

  He closed his eyes and waited for sleep to come and overtake him, but instead he flipped into frustration about what he hadn’t yet figured out and then he would glance at the clock on the night table and see that twenty minutes had gone by and he still hadn’t fallen asleep.

  Maybe he would never sleep again.

  This thought brought him to the very edge of real panic, his heart pounding now, a heavy methodic bass drum thudding in his rib cage. Rivulets of sweat dripped down his side under his shirt. His breath was starting to come in ragged gasps.

  Finally, swearing in a rage, he jerked upright.

  Seventeen more minutes had passed. Now he only had an hour and ten minutes of the time he’d allotted himself to get some rest before he was scheduled to show up at Lynn’s desk for another brainstorming session, depending on what she’d been able to find on her computers.

  He lay down, closed his eyes again, willed his breathing to slow. But now here was his grandmother in his mind’s eye, standing there next to his mother with Jim Jones, and suddenly his heart just would not fall into its natural beat but took up again with the incessant drumming.

  Maybe he would never sleep again.

  “COULD YOU JUST TALK TO ME for a minute?”

  “There is nothing I’d rather do, Wyatt,” Tamara said. “Longer than a minute if you need. Where are you?”

  “In my hotel in Indianapolis.”