The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  “Are you all right? You don’t sound good.”

  “I’m not good.” Wyatt hesitated. “I haven’t slept, Tam, not in a couple of days now. I feel like I’m kind of freaking out.”

  “What kind of freaking out?”

  “Maybe that’s not the right word. Maybe feeling a little panic, is all.”

  “What kind of panic?”

  “You know. Heart racing, shortness of breath.”

  “Wyatt, hang up and dial nine one one.”

  “No. It’s not that bad. It’s not an emergency or anything. It’s just all this stuff about who I really am and where I come from that I’ve never dealt with before. Never really even knew about. It feels like it’s all kind of punching its way up to the surface.”

  “All that stuff, as you call it, is serious.”

  “I’m getting that impression,” Wyatt said.

  “Did you find out something new today?”

  “It’s just been this amazing morning, Tam. You know Lynn, this reporter I’m working with? She found my grandmother, my actual grandmother! She’s alive and still vibrant and I went out and met her at this assisted-living place, which was incredible enough. But then she—her name’s Susan Page—she also verified our whole theory about my mother and Jim Jones. He was in fact abusing her and she ran away to California with him when he relocated the People’s Temple out there. And then I got another text saying it wasn’t Lionel . . .”

  “Wait a minute. New topic? You got another text?”

  “Yeah. A couple of hours ago.”

  “And they knew about Lionel?”

  “Enough to say it wasn’t him. I called Devin and told him—I mean, this is a major break in his case, right? But he’s not going there. He’s got his nice tight little wrapped-up package and it answers most of the questions and he’s not interested in taking his investigation any further, which means it’s down to us.”

  A silence.

  “Tam?”

  “I’m here.” She paused. “You sound pretty wound up.”

  “I am pretty wound up. There’s nobody left to talk to except my father, if he’s still alive.”

  “Talk to about what, though?”

  “Who Lionel hung out with back in the day. To understand what the whole scene was really about. There’s somebody else who’s been involved in this all along. It’s got to do with my mother and father and Spencer and Jones and all that madness, but the damn guy is just outside of my vision and he’s kept his role in all this hidden for forty years now. I’m going to find the son of a bitch and take him down. I swear to God.”

  Tamara’s voice was soft on the phone. “Wyatt.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Take a breath. Slow down.”

  “I know.”

  “No, I don’t think you do know. I mean literally. Stop. Right now. Close your eyes. Take a breath.”

  He followed orders. “All right,” he said. “Mission accomplished.”

  “Now do it again.”

  “How many times?”

  “Just once more.”

  “Okay. Done.”

  “Now. How are you feeling?”

  After a pause, Hunt said, “Really not very good.”

  “Do you want to come home?”

  “More than anything, but I don’t know if I can. Not yet. I think we’re close.”

  “That’s what you said before you left. Do you remember that?”

  “Closer,” he said.

  “Please don’t get hurt,” she said. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “That’s not in the plan.”

  “Yes, but that’s what seems to be happening, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s all inside me,” he said. “But I think I can beat it.”

  “Of course you do. That’s who you are. You can beat anything. But if it starts to get the better of you, do me a favor, will you? Call me again. Any time. No matter what.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  * * *

  WITH A FEW MORE MINUTES TO KILL before he had to leave for the Star, and by now having completely given up on sleep, Hunt put in a call to Father Bernard. His immediate physical symptoms—racing heartbeat, difficulty getting a full breath—had somewhat subsided during and after his talk with Tamara. Now, except for the recurrent blinking aura and general lack of sleep, he nevertheless felt revitalized enough that he thought he could power through the rest of the day, whatever it might bring.

  To Hunt’s relief, Bernard was home at the rectory. After giving the priest a short summary of the events since they’d last spoken, Hunt asked if he had had any luck at all contacting parishioners with whom Kevin might have worked or had some relationship. The short answer was no.

  “But there was one tiny bit of new information,” Bernard said, “although I don’t know what good, if any, it will do you. It’s really not much.”

  Hunt kept his voice neutral against the thrill of anticipation he felt. “Anything would be welcome, Father.”

  “Well, as I say, it’s a small enough thing, but Joe Phelan—he’s one of the people Kevin had worked for doing handyman work—I was questioning him, as you’d asked me to, if he’d ever heard from Kevin after he moved to Texas, and the question seemed to stump him for a minute before he told me that Kevin hadn’t moved to Texas.”

  “So where’d he move to?”

  “Mexico.”

  And suddenly Hunt’s heart told him that this was probably true. It accounted for the lack of social security information, the complete disappearance off the grid. And, more important, with another unneeded jolt of adrenaline, Hunt realized that it left open the possibility that his father was still alive.

  Bernard continued speaking over the rushing in Hunt’s ears. “He told Joe that after the two trials on his record, he just didn’t think he could ever have a chance of having any kind of real life in America again. Anything criminal that ever happened near wherever he decided to settle, the police would come to look for him first. So he’d kind of lost faith in the justice system here, with some reason. And he was going to start over down there, where he knew nobody and nobody knew him.”

  But another unwelcome thought surfaced. “What about the letter he wrote to me?” Hunt didn’t want to consider it but had to face the possibility that his father had lied in that letter. Because if he’d lied about planning to go to Texas, he might just as well have lied about whether he’d killed Margie.

  “I don’t know about that,” Bernard said. “I know he gave the box to me pretty soon after he got released from jail. He might have stayed around a few weeks and thought about Texas and then decided that wasn’t where he wanted to go, job or no job.”

  Hunt would reserve judgment on that, though to his relief it was reasonably plausible. He asked Bernard, “So did this Mr. Phelan say where he was going in Mexico? Did he mention any specific place?”

  “I asked him that myself,” Bernard said.

  “And?”

  “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t the best news. But no.”

  BY THE TIME HUNT GOT TO LYNN’S CUBICLE AGAIN, he’d come to believe that in fact Bernard’s information was potentially good news that might very well at last break up the logjam. The sheer volume of hits for Kevin Carson on the LexisNexis in his office, which he’d used in his first searches, had somehow blinded him to spending much time bothering to sort and locate by limiting parameters. Of course, he’d tried several, from his father’s probable age to Texas, but each search had still yielded too many hits to reasonably check out each one, or any, of them.

  But while there were thousands of Kevin Carsons in the world, and without doubt the great majority of them lived in the United States, Hunt would bet that the odds of there being even hundreds in Mexico were slight. And hundreds might prove a doable number, especially if they could further limit their search with the parameters Lynn had used to locate Susan Page—notably age. How many Kevin Carsons who were sixt
y-three years old, born in January of 1948, and without an active U.S. social security number lived in Mexico?

  The answer, as it turned out, was one.

  24

  IN SAN FRANCISCO, Tamara wasn’t having her best day.

  She sat in her tiny kitchen in midafternoon, gloomy outside, drinking her fourth cup of coffee of the day. Her grandfather had gone out to play bocce ball with his cronies, as he did most Saturdays. And Mickey had left early to forage at the farmers’ market and hadn’t yet returned, so she was alone in the apartment, fighting her own newfound concerns and worries.

  Wyatt, so far away, had sounded terrible on the phone, almost like a different person. Needy, then manic, and unable to control the swing between them. For the entire time that she’d known him, most of her life, she’d never seen him lose control. That defined his personality. He was strong, rock solid, confident, self-sufficient.

  But now this psychological upheaval over the search for his mother’s killer had him doubting himself, his instincts, maybe the very nature of who he was. Or at least, that’s what it had sounded like. It was obvious now to her that a large part of his seemingly natural resiliency had come from his denial of some of the fundamental truths of his early life.

  He’d lost his mother. His father had abandoned him. Several foster homes had given up on him. And each time, he’d found some kind of strength that allowed him to go forward, to believe that something positive could come from all of this rejection, bad luck, negative karma. Thank God, she thought, for the Hunts, who had provided such stability and support and love that Wyatt, finally, could grow into the man he’d become.

  But she did not have to try hard to imagine the pain he was now trying to deal with. She had felt much the same way herself, although at ten years old she’d been much older when her mother had died than Wyatt had been when he lost his. She’d had to deal with the pain and loss at the time it occurred—there was no real way of denying it. But she had shared it with her brother, no small difference from Wyatt, who had suffered it alone. She and Mickey had cried together and apart until there were no more tears left to shed. They’d worked through their anger, their fear, their abandonment not by denial but by gradual, hard-won acceptance. This was their lot. They had to deal with it.

  It shocked her to think that her inner core of strength might be stronger than Wyatt’s, that he might have to lean on her if all this became too much for him to bear.

  Not that she was unwilling. Far from it.

  But the realization that he’d called her this morning because he needed her strength frightened her on one level while it reassured her on another.

  It frightened her to hear Wyatt sound this way, to realize that he was in such a weakened state that he truly could not get himself together. He needed her. The idea that Wyatt Hunt could not handle a problem—any problem—on his own was terrifying.

  On the other hand, that reality brought with it a sense of calm. With their age difference, with Wyatt’s far greater life experience, his unflagging confidence and adult power, she had always harbored the secret belief that any relationship between them would be doomed in the long run because of their basic inequality.

  She was attractive to men. She knew that. And she had no trouble believing that Wyatt found her desirable. But that physical connection, while strong, could not be enough. Her looks would fade; he would get old before she did. If she were not his true equal in strength and security, they could never make it.

  And now, suddenly, she saw with absolute clarity that this was what she had become.

  His equal.

  He hadn’t called Gina Roake or Devin Juhle or any other of his guy friends. He’d called her because he knew that she could help him, she could calm him, get him through this. She knew what he was dealing with, who he was, in a way that maybe even he was only beginning to understand.

  Perhaps she had been his equal all along, but she might never have known for certain if these convulsions over the losses and pains he’d never before acknowledged had not so shaken him.

  And he might never have known, either.

  SHE WAS POURING the largely untouched coffee into the sink when the phone rang in the other room, and she ran in to answer it.

  “Hello.”

  “Tam.” Hunt’s voice, in one syllable, manic. “Thank God you’re still home. I found him.”

  “Who?”

  “My father. Kevin Carson. He’s in Mexico. I’m sure it’s him. I’m going down to talk to him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “A little village south of Oaxaca.”

  “And you know he’s there? He’s still alive?”

  Wyatt hesitated. “I don’t know that. But he’s the last piece. I’ve got to go find him and talk to him. He’ll know about Evie and Lionel Spencer and who they hung out with. And one of those people killed my mother.”

  “If he’s alive.”

  “I’ve got to believe he’s alive, Tam. He’s the last chance. Which is what I’m calling you about. I need you to run down to my place and go in my safe and get my passport and FedEx it out here to me at my hotel for early-morning delivery. I’ve got a flight to El Paso at noon, so if you can get it here by nine, we’re good.”

  “And then what?” Tamara asked. “After El Paso?”

  “Then I connect to Oaxaca and I’m down there by seven or so. Then Monday morning I drive down to this village and find him and we talk and I find out what he knows.”

  “Wyatt.” She stopped, swallowing her original question, and came out with another, more innocuous, one. “How’s your Spanish?”

  “Adequate. Probably a little rusty. But he’ll speak English, so that won’t be a problem.”

  “Except if he’s dead. Are you thinking about that?”

  “He’s not dead, Tam. Lexis didn’t have him dead. He was alive a couple of years ago. I need to talk to him.”

  “If.”

  “Okay, if. But I don’t know why you’re not excited. This is what I’ve been looking for all this time, Tam. This is the answer. I know it is.”

  “It seems a little…​desperate, don’t you think? Flying all the way down there, not even knowing he’s alive. To say nothing of the drug wars. Haven’t something like thirty thousand people been killed down there? You want to go down into the middle of that? If they cut your head off, I’ll come down and kill you again.”

  “Come on, Tam. I really don’t think we have to worry about that.”

  “Knock on wood,” Tamara said as she tapped a knuckle against her bedstead. “Can I ask you one other thing?”

  “If you promise you’ll then go get my passport.”

  “All right, I promise. So here’s my question: Have you thought about how you’re going to handle it if your father is down there, if he’s alive?”

  “Sure. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  “Like you were a couple of hours ago?”

  “This is different. I’ve gotten all that stuff out of my system.”

  “All that about not sleeping? Freaking out? Panic?”

  She almost heard him shrug over the line. “It got the better of me for a minute.”

  “And that’s it? You’re going to give it a whole minute?”

  Wyatt took a beat. “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.” She hesitated. “I’m worried about you.”

  “You don’t have to be. I appreciate it, but I’m okay.”

  “You’re in control,” she said.

  “Mostly. Really.”

  “Okay.” She sighed. “So what’s the address of your hotel?”

  After Hunt gave it to her, she hung up and then stood in her living room/bedroom for a moment before she said, “Clueless,” out loud, and went to get her coat.

  FOR ALL OF HIS PROFESSED CERTAINTY to Hunt about his evidence and his suspect, Devin Juhle didn’t like the idea that Hunt’s mysterious texter had contacted him again, this time calling into question the basic fact of Lionel Spencer’s guilt in the m
urders. To say nothing of his own suicide. Juhle didn’t forget for a second that this entire affair had gotten its start from these cell messages to Hunt, and they had never been anything but accurate. And the farthest thing in the world from frivolous. It was unnerving, to say the least, that the case, which had apparently ended with such a satisfying sense of closure, might not be solved at all.

  Might, in fact, be ongoing. And with no one except Hunt even thinking now about pursuing the actual culprit.

  Juhle had been pondering it all day, through the kids’ soccer games, through his visit with Alexa to the Kaiser emergency room for what he hoped was just a sprained ankle and not a broken foot. He thought about it while Alexa went in after a three-hour wait to get the damn foot X-rayed (broken), and then again back at home finally at 8:30 while he reheated his now really well-done (ruined) filet mignon dinner that he was going to get to eat all alone, since everyone else, even Alexa with her cast, had gone to the pre-Halloween party at the neighbor’s house down the street that Devin just hadn’t had the energy to gear up for.

  Try as he might, he couldn’t see where his evidence was betraying him, if it was. As he’d told Hunt, he was positive about the ballistics results. True, they didn’t have a slug from Ivan Orloff’s murder, but they knew it matched the caliber of the bullets that had killed the cabbie and Spencer. And those two slugs had definitely come from the same gun.

  Which, granted, could not be traced to anyone, so there was no absolute proof that it was Lionel’s. But, Juhle knew, untraceable weapons were as common in the city as tree rats in the Presidio, maybe more so. So its presence on the floor by Lionel’s outstretched hand did nothing to disprove his ownership of it.

  But Hunt’s call in the morning had bothered Juhle enough that he had double-checked with the lab, which had miraculously called him back on a Saturday. They told him that there was in fact gunshot residue on Lionel’s right hand, which had been bagged at the scene routinely. That at least was consistent with suicide.

  That left the time line for the killings, and again, here Juhle was certain that he was on solid ground. Orloff’s call to Lionel had been a little over an hour before they had met for dinner. Lionel had been seen and was identified by at least three witnesses leaving Original Joe’s and getting into a Yellow Cab. Orloff had stayed at the restaurant to have dessert—cheesecake with fresh fruit puree—a cappuccino, and then, afterward, an Amaretto. (By the way, all ordered by Lionel, no doubt to give him enough time to eliminate the cabbie and return to be outside Joe’s upon Orloff’s exit.) Then, the following night, for whatever reason—guilt, remorse, despair, fear—he’d taken his own life. No doubt he’d already been dead when Hunt had knocked on his door.