“You sign a contract, did you?”
“We have an understanding.”
“Really? Well, understand this: If we figure out a way to get to this guy, and it turns out you withheld information that could have allowed us to get him sooner, or God forbid he kills somebody else in the interim, including your texter . . .”
Hunt held up a hand, stopping him. “You’ll get any information I get as soon as I can get it to you, Devin. I just can’t give you the source of it.”
Juhle sat with a stony visage for the better part of a minute. Then, abruptly, he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Lunch is on you,” he said. “See you when I do.”
30
THE SASSAFRAS ROOM at the Mission Club on Nob Hill was not much more than a closet featuring two doors and one window to outdoors, with every inch of the minimal wall space covered with framed old random black-and-white photographs of San Francisco—the earthquake and fire, Coit Tower as it was going up and again finally completed, both bridges during their construction, Market Street in 1913, Ghirardelli Square, various photos of women who had presumably once been household names among the social set.
Too nervous to sit still for long, Hunt paced in front of the small and empty fireplace, back and forth about three steps each way between the two Queen Anne chairs that comprised the room’s only furniture. It was 4:45 and he’d been here for fifteen minutes or so; after leaving Juhle, he first checked in at the office, where he had done a little fence-mend marketing with the clients he’d been ignoring for the past week or more. He then went back home to change again into suitable garb for this appointment—a charcoal pinstripe suit, white dress shirt, muted cranberry tie, Italian lace-ups.
She was at least fifteen minutes late and he was starting to worry that she might not appear at all, despite the urgency of his request to her, albeit under false pretenses. He had told her on the phone that in following up his investigation of Judith Black’s suitability for membership in the club, he had come upon some possible bookkeeping improprieties that he thought she would want to know about and address as quickly as possible. They were quite sensitive and he didn’t feel comfortable talking about them on the telephone—perhaps they could meet quietly in one of the club’s private rooms?
Hunt checked his watch for the tenth time, sick that she must have seen through the makeshift ruse, when at last there was a soft knock on the door just before it opened and she came in. Closing the door behind her, she turned with her radiant Grace Kelly smile, advancing toward him, hand outstretched. “Wyatt. You’re getting to be a regular here. A woman could get used to seeing your face.”
Here it was again, that flirtatious persona that she seemed to employ as a matter of course, at once flattering, irresistible, and untouchable. So, Hunt thought, either she believed the nonsense he’d made up about the club, or she was going to try to brazen it and pretend to be ignorant, or he was wrong and she was not his texter.
Except that Hunt knew he wasn’t wrong. It was she.
Dodie Spencer, the wife of Lance Spencer, CEO of Execujet.
He took her hand and told her he was glad that she was able to meet him on such short notice.
“Well, you made it sound so mysterious I couldn’t very well refuse, could I?”
“I don’t suppose you could,” Hunt said. “Why don’t we sit down?”
“Why don’t we?”
But as soon as they had, Hunt flashed a grin at her and then found it impossible to keep up the charade. It must have showed on his face.
“That’s an awful solemn look, Mr. Hunt. Is it that serious?”
“It’s very serious,” he said, “and it’s not about the club.” He met her eyes. “As I believe you know.”
He had to admire her control. She fell into a mild expression of confusion, cocked her lovely head to one side, then increased the wattage on her smile. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do, Dodie.” Hunt drew a breath. “I understand why you’re afraid. You’ve got every reason to be afraid. But the fact that you’ve come down here to meet me tells me that you know there’s only one way out of this, and that’s for you to come out of hiding.”
She eyed him uncertainly. “No,” she said ambiguously.
“Is that why you were so late getting here?” he asked her. “Deciding yes, you were going to come down and meet me, then changing your mind? How many times did you go back and forth?” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Dodie, look at me. Listen to me.”
She sat with her back straight, her lips pursed, casting her eyes to the corners of the room, still controlled enough that she did not convey any sign of panic. She was biding time. Until she said something, until she admitted that she knew what Hunt was talking about, she could tell herself that she still had plausible deniability. Any small deviation from her plan now, any break in the facade she was presenting to Hunt, would be a full capitulation, and she was hanging on lest she do something irrevocable before she consciously decided that this was what she had to do.
Hunt spoke in his most soothing voice. “The fact that you’re still sitting here, you realize, is an answer in itself.”
Still she didn’t break. She came back to him with that quizzical look for a brief flash, her lips quivering, wavering between a smile and an apology. At last, she seemed to come to her decision. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to speak to someone about this,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m sorry you’ve felt the need to do something like this. You’re frightening me, getting me here under a false pretext. I don’t think we’ll be able to use your services here anymore. I’ll just let myself out.”
She turned around, stepped toward the door.
“Dodie, please.”
Her hand was on the doorknob—Hunt heard the meshing gears as she started to turn it.
“No one can hear us in here.” He was speaking to her back. “That’s why I picked this place. No one will ever know. I will never tell, I swear on my mother’s grave, on everything that’s sacred. But he has to be stopped.”
Her shoulders rose, then fell. Rose, then fell. Finally, she lowered her head and went still.
Hunt did not trust himself to speak again. Without even realizing it, he’d gotten to his feet as well and now he stood, hanging in anticipation, waiting for her to commit.
At last, she shook her head slightly from side to side, then turned around with a half smile and spoke conversationally. “He really is evil incarnate, you know. No one has any idea.”
The tension bled from Hunt’s body as he lowered himself back into his chair. He didn’t want to push her. He said nothing and waited.
She finally took her own seat and fixed him with a look of surpassing calm and condescension. “And while of course I was hoping you could stop him, you must understand there is no way I’m going to jeopardize myself any more than I have. How did you find me?”
“When you texted and said it wasn’t Lionel and I learned there was a Lance, there weren’t many other options. I think on some level you knew that if you left off the name Spencer, you were telling me it was another Spencer, just not Lionel. I think that’s when you started wanting me to find you.”
She gave a brief and chilling tinkle of laughter. “No. I never wanted that. I don’t want it now. I’m just not entirely sure what to do about it.”
Hunt was suddenly aware that he’d become an inconvenience and that if she could simply wish him away, he’d be gone in an instant. “All right,” he said. “Why didn’t you just originally go to the police? When you suspected about my mother?”
“I didn’t suspect.” Her voice now measured and low. “I knew,” she said. “He told me.”
“He told you?”
She nodded. “Three years ago, maybe four. He’d hit me, beat me really. I could barely walk afterward. I couldn’t go out anywhere for a couple of weeks.” She paused and took a breath, then another. “Anyway,
it was the third time he’d done that and I made up my mind I was going to leave him, just take Jamie and move out and sue him for everything I could get my hands on.”
“Jamie?”
“My son. Not Lance’s son, my first husband’s son. James died. Jamie’s fourteen now. He’s my joy.” Glancing at each of the two doors—were they locked? Were they safe in here?—she came back to Hunt. “So where was I?”
“You were going to leave your husband.”
“Right. Right. But then Lance took me aside and told me if I ever tried to leave, he’d never let us. He would kill us both. Jamie first.” She brought her hands to her face. “Oh my God, did this really happen? In any event, I told him I didn’t believe him. He’d never do that. He just laughed at me and told me if I thought I knew what he was capable of, I had a different think coming.”
She glanced around at the doors again.
“No one’s coming in here,” Hunt said.
“No, I know. It’s just . . .” She blew out heavily. “Okay, so the next day he leaves for work, I think, and I start packing. I’m going to go to school and pick up Jamie after and we’re getting away.
“But then it turned out that Lance hadn’t gone to work. In the middle of my packing he comes back in and sits down, calm as you please, and starts telling me that, really, killing isn’t any big deal for him. It was important that I believe that. He’d killed at least a hundred gooks—he called them gooks—in Vietnam, and a couple of his own officers over there, too. Laughing about it. Friendly fire. Hah!
“If I thought it was any different killing women, maybe I should look up a woman named Margie Carson who got herself killed here in the city back in 1970. That was to him, plain and simple, just a job.
“He really didn’t want to kill me, he said. He loved me, whatever that means to him. But he’d do it in a heartbeat if I really was going to go. He’d hunt me down and find us both and kill us. Jamie first.”
Hunt swallowed. “So you stayed?”
“I didn’t think I had a choice. So I negotiated. He couldn’t hit me anymore. He couldn’t hit Jamie ever. We could start over. I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
“You’re doing fine,” Hunt said. “Go on. Margie Carson.”
“It’s an easy name to remember,” she said. “One day I looked it up. The murder. The family. The trials. The whole thing. One of the details that stuck was that her child was named Wyatt, a fact I never really thought about until about four months ago or whatever it was, when I met you.”
“I remember.”
“And in the interview I learned that you had been adopted. It just came up in the conversation. And after that, remember how personal I got? Did you remember your birth parents? How old were you? All that. I was starting to get a feeling you might have been him. Margie’s son.”
“I am,” Hunt said.
“I know.” She took another short break, pulling out of the reverie for a moment. “I didn’t know how all of this was going to turn out.”
“People generally don’t,” Wyatt said.
“I mean, the other murders . . .”
Hunt nodded. “We still don’t know how it’s going to turn out, Dodie. It’s not done yet. And I’m afraid I still don’t understand why you didn’t just go to the police. Why you don’t go even now.”
“You don’t?” She chirped out a small little laugh. “Do you really believe that once I did that, they could keep me out of it?”
“Why would they have to? You’d be their star witness. If he confessed to you, that’s direct testimony, not hearsay. That could be enough, all by itself.”
“And what about me and Jamie?”
Hunt shrugged. “They put you in witness protection. Your husband goes away forever. You’re free of him.”
Again, Dodie seemed to find Hunt’s worldview slightly amusing. “Do you really not see this?” she asked.
“See what?”
She came forward in her chair and spoke in a condescending tone, almost as if she were explaining to a child. “I’m not going to change my identity, Wyatt. I’m not putting me and my son through that. After all I’ve worked for and achieved to become who I am? To support Jamie in what he wants to become? You’ve got to be kidding me. Witness protection? At the mercy of idiot government bureaucrats who think they can tell me where I need to live and how I need to act? For the rest of my life? Do you really think I’d put myself in that position? Never. Never. It’s simply out of the question. And also . . .”
“Also?”
She paused. “Oh, come, you must realize you’re forgetting a crucial element in all this.”
“What’s that?
“The money, Wyatt. The money.”
Hunt shook his head. “I’m sorry?”
“The minute Lance finds out I’m involved, even if they hide me away for my protection, the first thing he does is cut me and Jamie out of his estate. We’re talking like fifty million dollars, Wyatt, give or take. Do you know how much money that is? If I do anything that Lance gets wind of, I lose access to any part of the estate and, with his lawyers, I never get any of it back. And after all I’ve been through with him, the time I’ve put in, the personal sacrifices I’ve made—as I think you can imagine—I’m not willing to let that happen. And if I go to the police, that’s exactly what would happen. Beyond which, as I believe I already said, I don’t for a second think that the police would be able to keep me and Jamie physically safe.”
Hunt sat back, incredulous at the baldness of her rationale. Crossing an ankle over his knee, feigning nonchalance, he asked, “So you chose me?”
Apparently, Dodie saw no issue, moral or otherwise, with this decision. She even nodded with some enthusiasm. “It was the ideal solution. I hope you see that.”
“Not too clearly, I’m afraid.”
“Come on, Wyatt. If there was a case to be brought against Lance, you were a professional investigator. You could build it. It was your own mother’s death, after all, so your motivation would be off the charts. And if you succeeded and Lance got arrested and then even convicted, from his perspective, I’m still his loyal wife.”
“Still on the payroll.”
She gave him a disapproving little moue. “I don’t know if I’d put it like that. This is millions and millions of dollars we’re talking about here, Wyatt, not some allowance I’d get if I were nice. This is my son’s future. Mine, too.”
Hunt struggled to keep his tone civil. “It was also, it turns out, the end of the future for one of my people.”
She let her head drop as though she did in fact feel perhaps a pang of sympathy for Ivan Orloff. “I’ve already told you I didn’t know what was going to happen. I do feel sorry for that boy, for his family, but it wasn’t anything anyone could have predicted, and it certainly wasn’t my fault. This all began with Lance, and a good way to look at it is that your friend was just another one of his victims. In fact, literally one of his victims.”
“You know that absolutely?”
“As much as anybody can know anything.”
“You want to tell me how you’re so sure?”
“Well, he got the call from Lionel—two of them, actually—and went out in a rush at dinnertime that night. He was gone till midnight. Then, the next night—the night he went back and killed Lionel—I saw him take the gun out of the bed board and it wasn’t there the next morning and hasn’t been since. He killed them all. How’s that?”
“That’s a good start, but we’re left facing the same problem you started with, Dodie. Plus a brand-new one.”
“What are those?”
Hunt heaved a sigh. “Well, the first one is evidence. I may believe everything you do, but I still don’t have anything to bring to the police. You yourself admit he’s gotten rid of the gun. The only real evidence left here is you. If you’re not willing to testify, there’s no case. Do you realize that?”
Now visibly impatient, Dodie brushed that off. “That’s non
negotiable,” she said with a small shake of her head. “I’m not testifying. That’s not happening, period.” Then, moving on, “What’s the new problem?”
“It’s one that hits a little closer to home, Dodie. How long do you think before your husband realizes that Ivan Orloff wasn’t working alone when he called Lionel?”
This pretty much unassailable interpretation hit Dodie with some force—perhaps she realized, as Wyatt intended, that her own anonymity and safety would be in jeopardy once Lance came to understand or intuit her connection to Hunt. She opened her mouth to say something but couldn’t get anything to come out.
“Ivan was working for me,” Hunt went on. “He wasn’t the real threat. I’m the real threat. And here’s the fun part. I still am.”
“If he thought that, he would have already done something about it.”
“Except I’ve been out of the state, out of the country. He couldn’t get to me because nobody knew where I was. He can now.”
“Well, it appears you have a real problem, then.” She looked down at her bejeweled fingers. “I don’t suppose you’d like to solve that problem proactively. That would keep you safe and leave me comfortable. And you would find that I am both grateful and generous.” She raised her eyes and locked them on his. “We’re talking fifty million dollars here, Wyatt.”
Hunt came right back at her. “We’re talking about my life, Dodie.”
She shrugged her shoulders dismissively. “Well, if you’re not willing to help yourself, then I don’t know what to tell you.”
Hunt pulled at the knot in his tie, which suddenly seemed to be choking him. He uncrossed his legs and moved forward to the edge of his chair, leveling his gaze at her. “Dodie, please. You’ve got to go to the police. I can take you right now. They can pick up Jamie at school and have Lance in custody by tonight. It’s multiple murders, which is special circumstances. He won’t be able to get bail. This is doable. More than that, it’s the only way. And if you can’t do it, I may have to go to the cops myself.”
The Hunter Page 30
