Her nostrils flared in righteous anger. “You can’t do that. You gave me your word. You swore on your mother’s grave. But beyond that, I’ll deny everything you say. Then what? You’ll look like a fool.”
“I’ve looked like a fool before. At least it would be a chip to play against Lance. If the cops know that he’s my suspect and I wind up dead, now he’s really got a problem, doesn’t he? At least it might slow him down.”
She shook her head emphatically. “You don’t know Lance. Slowing him down isn’t stopping him. You’ll still wind up dead.”
“And you’re willing to let that happen?”
“It wouldn’t be my fault. Not if you go to the police about me. I’m telling you not to do that. I will not testify, and I’m his wife, they can’t make me. You simply need to find something else.”
“You don’t think I’ve been looking?”
“You’ll have to look harder.”
Hunt sat back and grabbed a breath, shocked in spite of himself at the power of greed in the form of this beautiful woman, perfectly willing to continue in the lie that was her life, and even perhaps to let him die, just so long as she got to keep her money.
Hunt got to his feet. Dodie stood, too, and, astoundingly, came up and placed a chaste kiss on his cheek. “I know you’ll do the right thing,” she said, as though she would recognize the right thing if it were writ large in the clouds by the hand of the Almighty Himself. “For now, though, if you’d just give me a minute to let me get out first, it might be good if people didn’t see us leaving together and start to talk.”
31
THE HUNT CLUB OFFICE had been running on fumes for the past couple of weeks, with their real work pretty much on hold while Wyatt checked out of his everyday job to work on his mother’s case and then, much more disruptively, while they all dealt with the aftereffects of Ivan’s death. Tamara and Wyatt missing most of this week hadn’t helped matters, either.
So Tamara spent the afternoon catching up on paperwork, trying to get a handle on what Jill and Mickey had been able to accomplish alone over the past few days—really a gratifying amount, as it turned out—and reassuring sometimes gnarly clients about scheduling, billing, deadlines, and the reasons things had been so relatively unstable lately. She told one and all that they were hoping to bring on two or three new staff in the next few weeks and had in fact already begun interviewing, not an absolute lie since Wyatt had solicited Juhle on that topic a couple of weeks before.
The law firms with whom they did most of their work all had heard about Ivan and expressed their understanding and sympathy, but they were, after all, law firms, and as such not particularly given to accepting excuses—except possibly death—for lack of performance. And even death could be suspect, Tamara knew, depending on the circumstances. So the calls, one after another all afternoon, tended to be lengthy, friendly, apologetic, and—especially after a day that had started while it was still dark that morning in Phoenix—exhausting.
At 5:30, she shut off her computer, made sure Jill and Mickey weren’t hiding back in their offices but had really gone for the day, turned out the lights, and walked out into the corridor, locking the office door behind her. She knew that Wyatt had scheduled a secret appointment at 4:30, and he’d told her he didn’t know how long it would go on. She shouldn’t wait for him, but depending on how the meeting went, if he didn’t check in by close of business, he would call her later at home and maybe they could go out to dinner. Or stay in.
Taking the elevator down to the ground floor, she thought about stopping in for a glass of wine at Boulevard but realized that in her state of fatigue it would probably be smarter to keep all her wits about her and wait until she got home before she had anything to drink, so she turned and walked out the back door, on the sidewalk by the Embarcadero. Daylight saving time had ended the previous weekend, but she and Wyatt had missed it in their travels, and now the dusk felt unusually disorienting.
She looked at her watch, still set at 6:18, an hour late.
On the spur of the moment, she decided to surprise Wyatt and go directly to his place instead of her own, meet him perhaps with a light supper foraged from his refrigerator and a cocktail when he got home. Or maybe they’d just go to bed, order some Chinese afterward. She still had his keys from when she’d gone to get his passport, and after the time they’d spent together over the past few days, she knew he would be happy to see her.
She caught the jammed Muni at the corner and it let her off two dark and desolate blocks up from Hunt’s warehouse. When she got to it, she opened the Brannan Street door and hit the light switch next to it. The basketball court and the high lights shining down from the ceiling illuminated the rest of the fantastic place. She stood still for a moment, taking it in with a different eye. It wasn’t impossible to think that this place might someday in the not too distant future be part of her everyday life.
The idea seemed to wash away her fatigue with a jolt of contentment. What she was feeling here, she recognized, was pride of ownership. Maybe a little bit prematurely, all right, but this whole thing with Wyatt could really work out, she believed. It was already working out.
She cast her eyes over the space—the motorcycle, the surfboards, the baseball mitts and bats and other sports stuff everywhere, the guitars and amps and computers, and hell, don’t forget the damned basketball court!—and loved the fact that he was such a guy, and yet a guy who had allowed himself, and trusted her enough, to break down in her presence, to lay bare his soul.
Closing the door and locking it behind her, she actually half skipped over the concrete until she got to the wood of the court, where she put down her purse and picked up one of the three basketballs just sitting there. She took a shot from behind the free throw line and when it went in without even touching the rim, she allowed herself a surge of hope that would have been unimaginable only a few weeks before.
But she wasn’t going to push her luck. She’d made the one shot, now she’d go in on the residence side of the warehouse and see what the refrigerator might yield…or maybe she’d just take off her clothes, get in the shower, go back to bed, and wait for him.
She opened the connecting door and hit the light switch.
The doorknob suddenly got jerked out of her hands and somebody spun her around and pushed her, slamming her up against the wall, one hand to her throat and the other holding—the hole of the barrel centered on the middle of her face—a black handgun.
Reflexively, stupidly, Tamara reached up with one hand and slapped the gun aside while she clawed at the man’s eyes with her other one. The grip on her throat loosened and she raised a leg, trying to get a knee into his groin. Grunting with the exertion, she swung a fist at his face.
The gunshot was deafening in the narrow hallway.
She felt a physical blow, almost as though she’d been hit with a baseball bat. Then a searing pain.
BADLY SHAKEN BY HIS INTERVIEW with Dodie Spencer, Hunt waited in the Sassafras Room for a lot longer than the minute she’d recommended so that people wouldn’t gossip about them. He sat in his ornate chair surrounded by the photo images that spoke of mankind’s progress through adversity and setbacks. Bridges and monuments going up. A city rising from its ashes. More than a hundred years of matriarchs gazing out serenely into the world of culture and resurrection and beauty they’d helped create.
The thought that educated, graceful, well-spoken, impeccably tasteful, and physically stunning Dodie Spencer, all things being equal, would in all probability one day be enshrined here as a beacon of probity was deeply unsettling. In fact, he realized, she was nothing but a whore—heartless, charming, amoral, and totally driven by greed and her own comfort.
But then he remembered that he was sitting in a room on Nob Hill, a neighborhood settled in the late 1800s by the railroad robber barons, who had raped and pillaged and cheated their way into fortune and the appearance of respectability.
What else did he expect? For certain people,
it was and always would be all about money. And more money. Gobs of it, never enough, unending amounts of money against which all honor and beauty and morality paled to insignificance.
Finally, thoroughly sick at heart, after dusk had begun to descend, he let himself out of the club. The Top of the Mark sparkled above him in the still-warm air. He put his hands in his pockets and walked up to the Fairmont Hotel, then along California Street past the Flood Mansion, over to Grace Cathedral. This was Gina Roake’s neighborhood and he knew it well.
Venticello, the romantic restaurant he and Tamara had eaten at last week, was only a few blocks away. It suddenly struck him that he could use a shot of Tamara’s levelheaded goodness, her common sense, her decency. Herself.
Together they’d decide what he was going to do about Lance Spencer. About Dodie.
She didn’t answer at work or on her cell phone, which he thought was a little strange, but not unheard of. After leaving a message on her cell, he then called at her home. Her grandfather told him that she wasn’t home yet, but he’d give her the message when she got in. All dressed up anyway, Hunt decided to cross the street, stop at the bar of the Huntington Hotel, and kill some time until he heard back from her.
WHERE ARE YOU? Come home. I’m here.
Hunt heard the message tone and, enduring a disapproving look from the Huntington’s bartender, took his phone from his belt and read the message from Tamara.
He wasn’t making much of a dent in his beer anyway, so he pushed his glass away and dropped a ten on the bar, saying, “Keep it.” Then he got up and walked through the well-dressed and buzzing crowd out again to the street, punching up Tamara’s number.
“YOU DON’T LOOK LIKE WYATT HUNT to me.” The white-haired older man was growling at her. “Now what the hell am I supposed to do with you?”
One of the secrets to his success was adhering to the mantra: Do your business and get out.
You waited around, even for seconds, and you invited all kinds of problems. People hear a noise. Somebody gets a glimpse of you. Not good.
No. You struck and you struck fast. And then you were gone.
That had been the plan and the execution for Margie Carson, for Jim Burg, and then those fools from last week, including his clown of a brother, the gutless wonder who’d gone from zero to a state of high panic at the very first sign of trouble. Trouble that was way off on the horizon.
But just hearing his brother’s voice on the phone, Lance had known that Lionel would crack under even the slightest interrogation pressure from the police. So Lance had made up his mind: Lionel would have to be eliminated, and in the same way as Jim Burg, those many years ago. No one would miss him. No one would even care. Lionel had lived as a lonely and worried hermit for the past five years or more. It was time for him to go, especially when his death would serve Lance’s purpose so perfectly.
The symmetry of apparent suicide was beautiful—it explained away so much, especially in the absence of any other forensic evidence.
But now, suddenly, with this girl showing up out of the blue, doing his business and getting out wasn’t going to be an option.
His business, in this case, was straightforward, as it always was in these situations. This time, he was here to cut off the head of the snake, and that was this guy Wyatt Hunt, Orloff’s boss. He had some suspicions as to how Hunt and his minions had come to start looking into the Margie Carson murder, and he’d deal with them in good time. No, make that in short order. Was Dodie really so naïve as to believe that he wouldn’t have kept a close eye on her as soon it became clear that someone was looking into the events around Margie Carson’s death? Apparently so.
She didn’t just pick up and “go to the club,” as she had this afternoon, for “a meeting I forgot all about.” Ha! Her life was as orchestrated as an opera. Did she think her nerves weren’t betraying her? Did she really believe he wouldn’t see it and put things together? Didn’t she know he would have already been aware of this Wyatt Hunt through the Orloff matter? Wouldn’t have done his homework? Find out where he lived, what he looked like, learn his routines.
Did she think he was an idiot?
Bragging about Margie Carson to her had been a mistake. He saw that now. He should have cut his losses and just let her go. But her physical goddamn beauty, he thought. Strongest force on the earth. You couldn’t help but want it, touch it, own it. Well, at least he’d had it for a few more years than he would have otherwise. He’d go find some more when all this was done.
But in the meanwhile, here at Hunt’s warehouse home, the bullet seemed to have gone through and through the girl’s leg, maybe hit a bone, maybe not. Considering what had to happen to her anyway, it didn’t really matter. Nevertheless, he’d stopped the bleeding with a towel. No use in having her bleed out in case he needed her alive later.
Now in the bedroom he had her trussed hands and feet with clothesline rope he’d found in the kitchen closet, with a pair of socks stuffed into her mouth. What was he supposed to do with her?
If he simply killed her now in Hunt’s house and left—the obvious solution if he kept to his mantra—it would prompt another investigation, far more serious than any he’d yet weathered. He could make it look like a botched burglary or a sexual assault, but with Hunt’s suspicions about him already probably part of the record somewhere, that investigation could not help but come back to him.
In fact, killing Hunt by itself posed that risk, but not as great as the one the private eye posed by remaining alive. As long as Hunt breathed, and especially if this girl got herself killed at Hunt’s home, Lance knew he would be on the defensive at best, and the ongoing target of Hunt’s own investigation in any event.
He also knew he could buy an alibi for tonight if he had to, as he had for last Tuesday and Wednesday, but this whole business was getting old—you could only buy so much alibi, and trusting whoever you bought it from never ceased to be a problem. He might very well become a suspect, the suspect. The fabric of his life was all this close, he knew, to unraveling, to coming undone.
He swore out loud.
He wasn’t really aware that he’d said anything, but the girl moaned on the bed.
He pointed the gun at her and said, “Shut up or I’ll shoot you in the face.”
HER DAMN CELL PHONE rang again in her purse, the third time in the forty-five minutes they’d been here.
Twice before, he’d decided he would just have to shoot her and be done with it. Find out a way to come back and take care of Hunt later if he still needed to at that point. The police would investigate this girl’s death, of course, but he’d proven time and again—the whole time that Kevin Carson had been on both trials, for example—that he was smarter than the cops. He’d covered his tracks with Margie and never wasted a second worrying that any of those losers would get wise to him. And they never had.
So nobody could say he couldn’t take the heat. But there was no reason to put yourself in a difficult position voluntarily.
He wasn’t really as worried about the police as he was about Hunt. If Lance killed this girl, he had the feeling that Hunt would never rest. The police? Give them a week or two and a lack of physical evidence—which Lance had pretty much mastered by now—and they would move on to the next homicide. There was always another homicide, the fresher ones becoming the low-hanging fruit.
Hunt, he knew, would be a different proposition.
The girl unexpectedly stopping by here was not ideal. No question, her showing up was a problem. But by far, the best solution now would be if Hunt simply got here, too. Then two quick shots point-blank and Lance would be gone, leaving the cops to sort out what had happened. Lance would have an alibi. He’d have permanently ditched the gun and his clothes before he even got back home. Hunt himself, a private investigator, would undoubtedly have other cases with an element of personal risk. Eventually, this case would cool down and go stone-cold.
Lance could tough it out.
But he had to have Hunt
.
Lance was prepared to wait all night, but the longer he waited, the more time he’d have to account for. Best would be for Hunt to show up soon. Get it over with.
If Lance could somehow . . .
He’d been sitting, thinking, the gun in his lap, across from where the girl lay bound on the bed. Suddenly, he got up and in a few steps reached down to pick her purse off the floor. The girl was staring up at him wild-eyed either with fright or perhaps believing she could do him some damage since he was, for a moment, so close.
He pointed the gun at her head. “Don’t even think about it,” he said.
Back at his chair, he rummaged through the purse and came out with a cell phone. The gun trained on the girl, he punched the voice mail button and listened to the three messages, two from Wyatt Hunt just trying to get in touch and one from somebody named Mickey telling her Hunt was trying to reach her. She should call him.
Or at least text.
Good idea, he thought. Text from Tamara’s phone.
He sat holding the instrument on his lap for a long moment. Then he started tapping the phone’s face.
IN LANCE SPENCER’S HAND, the cell phone rang with an old-fashioned telephone ringtone. It announced itself on the screen as Hunt’s return call. For a moment, he froze.
Another jarring ring.
Screw it, he thought. This isn’t going to work. Too much hassle. Time to cut his losses and get out of here.
But there was so much advantage if he could just get Hunt here. Wherever Hunt was now, Lance could still do the girl before he got home. And even if he was just outside the door, coming up Brannan Street right now, then Lance would prevail anyway. Blow him away as he came inside. Then disappear.
Brrriinnngg!
As the connection flipped over to voice mail, Lance put down the gun for a second so he could punch in a text with both thumbs, as fast as he could. He still had a chance to lure Hunt in here. Can’t talk right now. Busy. Come home.
The Hunter Page 31
