The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  “So who’s your friend like?”

  “Lionel has a brother, Lance. The only problem is he’s got no evidence for it. And Lance is some kind of big player in the corporate world, so just knocking on his door when I’ve got nothing specific to ask him might not be the most productive use of my time. I wonder if you remember coming across that name in the Margie Carson case?”

  “Was he in the file? A witness at the trial? Anything like that?”

  “No.”

  The former chief grimaced. “This was forty years ago, Inspector. I can’t say the name just leaps out at me. I can tell you, though, that if he’s not in the file, he wasn’t part of the case. And from what you’re telling me, I’m hearing that you think he should have been our prime suspect, or at least one of them.”

  “I don’t know that, sir. At the time, there was no way anybody could have known. Without the Jim Jones connection, and that didn’t come about until a few years later, nothing connected these Spencer brothers to Margie or her death.”

  Rigby straightened up in his chair. “That’s the first I’ve heard about Jim Jones. You mention him, you got my attention. These guys were with him?”

  “Evidently. Both of them.”

  “How’d they get out alive?”

  “They didn’t go. Evie did, though. And her and Lionel’s children.”

  Rigby’s jaw worked as he digested this information. “The bastard.”

  “There’s one other thing,” Juhle said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “My PI friend went and talked to Jim Burg’s wife. She told him he—Burg—didn’t believe Kevin Carson was guilty, either. He had just made inspector and was starting to look into the case on his own when he then suddenly committed suicide. Just like Lionel Spencer committed suicide. Bullet in the head.”

  Now Rigby lowered his head, shaking it sadly at the unpleasant memory. “Jim was a good guy,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it was true when he did that. Now you’re telling me that maybe he didn’t.”

  “I don’t know if I’m saying that exactly yet, Chief. I was going to go over to Mrs. Burg’s place next and ask if the name Lance Spencer rings a bell. She couldn’t name her husband’s suspect last week, but if I come at it from people Burg might have known, who were in their lives somehow back then, it might spark something.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then maybe I’ve got enough to convince Glitsky and my partner that I’m not wasting all of our time.”

  “And where do I fit into the picture again? Not that I’m not enjoying the visit, Inspector, but I’m not exactly on everybody’s dance card lately, you may have noticed.”

  Juhle shrugged. “Where do you fit in? I don’t know, sir. I needed some credibility behind me if I’m going up against somebody like who this Lance is supposed to be. Glitsky and my partner think his case is closed, and I’m just not completely sure. I thought it was possible you knew something about these guys from back in the day.”

  “No,” Rigby said. “But I’ll tell you what. You’re telling me we got a dead cop and maybe it wasn’t a suicide. That’s enough motivation for me. I’ll ask around.”

  * * *

  RIGBY OBVIOUSLY STILL HAD JUICE.

  Martin Ingalls got Juhle on his cell phone and now, late in the day, the homicide inspector was sitting in another ex-cop’s house, which was remarkably similar to the former chief’s—or, for that matter, damn close to Juhle’s own. Ingalls could have been the poster adult for the elder retired San Francisco old-school cop—weathered, punched-in face, potbelly, gin-clear eyes, with a lot of laugh lines.

  They sat on two sides of a sectional sofa in the cramped but uncluttered living room, but Ingalls had been talking almost from the moment they’d shaken hands. Now he was going on. “. . . so if the chief tells me maybe I ought to talk to you, I figure that’s what I’ve got to do.”

  “Well, I appreciate it. And you said you knew Lance Spencer?”

  A dry chortle. “I don’t mean know in the sense that we hung out. I knew who he was, that’s all. Anybody like me working public events when Jim Jones started his voodoo magic downtown would have known who he was. He was, like, stuck to Jones’s side.”

  “His bodyguard?”

  A shrug. “More than that, I’d say. Maybe a little bodyguard, a lot enforcer. The guy had been in ’Nam and I’m guessing had seen action and a half. He had all the moves, anyway. Tough as nails.”

  “Abusive?”

  “No, no, no. Polite as they come. But, like, mess with me and I’ll kill you without a thought. And I can’t say he had a lot of respect for the authority of the uniform. Mine, anyway. Any of us, really. He was important, Jones was important. Everybody else, not so much.”

  “Was his brother with him?”

  “Oh yeah. Larry or something . . .”

  “Lionel.”

  “That’s it. Like the train. I shoulda remembered that.” He tapped the side of his head. “I hate when I don’t remember.”

  Juhle waved that off. “What was he like? Lionel?”

  “Nothing, really. Lance was the muscle. Lionel was like second string. If they weren’t brothers . . .” He let the thought hang. “And then, you know, they were both pilots. That was part of it, too. Maybe the biggest part.”

  “Pilots for Jones?”

  Ingalls nodded. “Now we’re moving into rumor territory. After they all left town, we heard they were his couriers.”

  “Transporting what?”

  “People and money or both.”

  “To Guyana?”

  “Not just Guyana. Europe, South America, the Caribbean. Anywhere with banks they could hide the money. That, by the way, isn’t rumor. Jones had accounts everywhere.”

  “So what is the rumor?”

  “That they off-loaded hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bucks in cash out of Guyana just before the slaughter. Now maybe it was just luck they weren’t at Jonestown on that day, but you know the next time I saw Lance? And the last time, actually?”

  “When?”

  “Some fund-raiser here in town I’m working security at maybe five or six years after Jonestown. Except now he’s got a fleet of private planes he and his brother are leasing out to movie stars and corporations. I’m at the door and he comes in and recognizes me and has the balls to ask me if I’d like to take a ride on one of his jets. Rubbing my face in whatever he’d done, and now he was rich and if I didn’t like it, I was just a lowly cop and could bite him.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  Ingalls flashed an old cop smile. “About what you’d think.”

  29

  AS SOON AS HUNT had been back in cell phone range late last night in Phoenix, he’d gotten a voice mail that Callie had left him two days before. In it, she told him that she’d downloaded Lionel Spencer’s phone records from the night of Ivan Orloff’s death. She had the call from Ivan to Lionel at his home and then, within two minutes, an outgoing call from Lionel to another landline number with an account under the name of Lance Spencer. That call had gone on for nearly fifteen minutes and was the last call that Lionel Spencer had made from that phone in his life.

  For Hunt, this was yet more corroboration that this case was coming into clear focus. Lionel, the weak brother, had gotten the call from Orloff and he had immediately called his brother the soldier to find out what he should do.

  How should he handle this sudden and unexpected threat?

  And, playing the likely scenario in his mind, Hunt spun it out that Lionel had no doubt already made the appointment with Ivan at Original Joe’s. So Lance knew where Ivan would be. Lionel would keep Ivan at the restaurant until Lance had time to show up out front in his hijacked cab. (Hunt would have to call Callie back and have her make sure that Lance had in fact received a call from Original Joe’s number, which would have been Lionel describing Orloff and making plans for his own artful exit from the restaurant.) Then, having thought about it for the lon
g next day after Lance had done his cold-blooded business with Ivan, he’d driven up to his brother’s place, been admitted, and orchestrated the bogus suicide.

  All this, Hunt knew, was far too heavily dependent on speculation. Indeed, it was almost all speculation. Maddeningly, the evidence that he would need to supply to Juhle for any chance of an arrest or trial remained elusive. Hunt had to admit that there was nothing inherently sinister about a brother calling his brother and talking for fifteen minutes. The temporal proximity to Orloff’s call to Lionel might have had nothing to do with anything.

  But Hunt knew.

  He hadn’t wanted to wake Juhle in the middle of the night with the new fact of the phone call from Lionel to Lance and what it might mean. And so Wyatt had waited until the morning to call him and had been more than a little pleased and surprised to hear that Devin had softened in his intransigence about Lionel. Juhle had done some footwork on his own, going back yesterday to Chief Rigby and to Elinor Burg and to another ex-cop named Martin Ingalls, trying to plug Lance Spencer into the forty-year-old equation and getting, if not solid hits, then at least provocative information.

  Juhle also told Hunt that Elinor Burg, for her part, had nearly jumped out of her chair when he’d mentioned the name Lance Spencer. True, she’d never heard her husband make any connection between Lance and the investigation into Margie Carson’s murder, but when Jim Jones came to the city in 1972, her husband had often been assigned to crowd control at public events where Jones was present. And he had mentioned Lance to her more than once as an officious prick who thought he had the authority to order police officers around. Martin Ingalls had basically sung the same song.

  So when Hunt and Tamara landed at SFO at 10:20 on a gloriously beautiful day by the bay, he dropped Tamara off at her home and then made it to his own place to change into clean clothes, leave his car, and walk around the corner to Lou the Greek’s, where he and Devin had made plans to meet for lunch.

  THE SPECIAL ON THIS WEDNESDAY at Lou the Greek’s broke new culinary ground even for a place that invented new Sino-Greek dishes on a regular basis. Today’s masterpiece featured eggplant and octopus layered as a kind of moussaka over a bed of sticky rice, heavily seasoned with garlic and Mae Ploy sweet/hot sauce under the cheese-laden béchamel that covered the whole thing. Lou told everybody who came in that it was going to be such a giant hit that it needed an easily remembered catchy name like Yeanling Clay Bowl and he was holding a contest to come up with a winner. Grand prize: a lifetime of free eating whenever it was the featured special.

  So far, he had three names written on the blackboard behind the bar: Pulpo Diablo, Lulu’s Delight, and Fishegg, all of which Hunt thought were pretty weak, especially the last one: “Where do they get ‘Fishegg’?”

  Juhle chewed and swallowed. “Octopus, fish, egg, eggplant. Fishegg.”

  Hunt shook his head. “Nobody’s going to get it. You don’t see the word fishegg and think of what we’re eating here. You’re thinking of fish eggs. Way different than this stuff.”

  Juhle shrugged.

  “Also,” Hunt went on, “what if you come up with the winning name and don’t like this actual dish?”

  “I’m sure Lou would let you work something out. Maybe trade for something you like better.” Not liking the dish was clearly not Juhle’s problem. He was shoveling food with enthusiasm. “Or maybe you could have a raffle or an auction or something and sell off the rights, make yourself a lot of money. But who wouldn’t like this? Lou’s right. This thing’s an instant classic.”

  “That wouldn’t be a bad name.”

  “What wouldn’t be a bad name?”

  “Instant Classic,” Hunt said. “The only problem being who’d get credit for it, you or me.”

  “I would, obviously.” Juhle forked in another bite. “I’m the one who said it.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t recognize it for what it was. That was me.”

  “We could split the prize.”

  “Then how would Lou keep track? He’d have to make a punch card or something, and then we’d have to remember to carry it around in our wallets and pass it back and forth whenever we used it and it was the other guy’s turn.”

  “That would be a hassle,” Juhle said. “Maybe we should forget the whole name thing. Let somebody else get all the glory.”

  Just at this moment, Lou was passing their table on the way to the kitchen and Juhle snagged him, pointing down at the dish. “Instant Classic. That’s the name, Lou. Instant Classic.”

  The proprietor nodded in approval. “I’ll put it on the board,” he said.

  “Wyatt and me. We both came up with it.”

  Lou shook his head no. “One winner only. You can flip for it.”

  “Who decides who wins anyway?” Hunt asked.

  “Everybody. I’m passing ballots around next week.”

  “What day?” Juhle asked.

  “I don’t know yet. It’s a secret until I pass ’em out. Otherwise, everybody brings their friends on the day, you know, and they stuff the ballot box. That wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Rampant voter fraud,” Hunt agreed, “could be a huge problem.”

  “I’m trying to avoid it,” Lou allowed. “What was your name again?”

  “Still Wyatt,” Hunt said.

  Lou rolled his eyes. “The dish. The name of the dish.”

  “Instant Classic.”

  He nodded. “I like it. I’ll put it on the board.”

  “NO, I HAVEN’T TALKED TO LANCE,” Juhle was saying over his coffee. “It’s been forty years. I think it could go another couple of days without too much harm.”

  “If he doesn’t kill somebody else first.”

  “And let’s hope he doesn’t. Which is a good bet, since the Spencer-Orloff-cabbie hat trick is a closed circle. So Lance isn’t threatened by us or anybody else just now. But there’s also the point that before I go and knock on his door, I wanted to have something substantive to talk to him about. And by substantive, I mean evidence to connect him to any one of these five murders. Of which, let me remind you, we have none.”

  “Five? So you’re thinking he killed Burg, too.”

  “Not impossible. Same m.o. as Lionel Spencer. If it worked so well once . . .”

  Hunt scratched at the table for a moment. “All right,” he said. “We’ve got the phone call to him from Lionel right after the Orloff call. If we get the other call that Lionel must have made from Original Joe’s . . .”

  “Which we don’t have.”

  “Yet. We’ll get it.”

  “Okay, but even if we did, then we’ve got two phone calls from one brother to another. So what?” Juhle wasn’t having any of it. “Fatally weak. Not even worth considering.”

  “Devin. The guy did it.”

  Juhle swallowed his coffee and nodded. “He might have. I even agree with you. But the sad truth is that there’s no case. At least not yet. And you might have noticed that I’m severely constrained in trying to build one, what with both my partner and my boss going on the assumption that there are no questions left unanswered.”

  “Of course there are. What do you think we’re talking about here?”

  “Name one. A question, I mean.”

  “Okay, where did Lance get his money?”

  “From Jones. He smuggled it out of Jonestown a hundred years ago. So what? Everything you can say about him you can say about Lionel, too. Any other questions?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “I can hear the gears turning. Take your time.”

  Hunt stared off across the restaurant. “I could go rattle his cage, piss him off, wear a wire, get him to admit something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Anything. I could tell him I’m Margie’s kid, out for revenge. Tell him I know he did it.”

  “And this would accomplish what, exactly?” Juhle’s tolerance for this conversation was clearly wearing thin. “Except maybe get you arrested,
get him lawyered up, maybe lose your license while you’re at it. Yeah, that’s a swell plan.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  Chewing on the question, Juhle finally spoke. “What about your texter?”

  “What about her?”

  Juhle straightened. His eyebrows went up. “Why do you say it’s a her?”

  “Because it is a her.”

  “How do you know that? You know who she is?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Over the last few days.”

  “So who is she?”

  “You’re going to hate this, but I can’t tell you.”

  Juhle’s indignation couldn’t have been more thorough or more immediate. Eyes blazing, he leaned in across the table. “Bullshit, Wyatt. Of course you can tell me. You have to tell me.”

  “No, I don’t. I can’t. Not until I talk to her first anyway. I’ve got to make sure it’s her.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I find out what she knows, what got this whole thing started.”

  Juhle, disgusted, settled back into his chair, his arms crossed over his chest. “And at what point do you deign it appropriate to include the police, if I may ask?”

  “When I’ve got something you can use.”

  “You don’t think we’re capable of determining that?”

  “That’s not it, Devin.” He blew out in frustration. “I’ve got to go on the belief that the deal we’ve had all along is that she stays out of it. I build the case, then pass it off to you guys, then you bring him in.”

  “That’s all well and good if we’re talking about your mother forty years ago, Wyatt. But this is two, maybe three homicides last week. If she knows something about those, whatever it is, it’s not up to her to decide if she wants to be involved. We get to make that call. You see that?”

  “I understand why you see it like that,” Hunt replied evenly. “But I’ve got to play this my way. I owe her.”

  “You owe her? Please.”

  “She’s filled in my whole life story, Devin. You might not think that’s such a big thing, but it’s pretty major to me. And the deal is she stays out of it.”