The Hunter

by John Lescroart

  En route, they would keep in contact through Lance’s cell phone. When they reached the Gulfstream on the tarmac at SFO, there were to be no police. The van would come to the bottom on the stairs that led into the plane—again, close in—and both men would enter the aircraft. Only after Lance had determined to his satisfaction that he had a clear runway, that the plane was prepped, fully gassed up, and flight ready, would he release the hostage.

  Except, of course, everybody knew that wasn’t what he was going to do to the hostage at all.

  HUNT PASSED THE OFFICER carrying Tamara in the alley. She was nearly unconscious but opened her eyes when he said her name, giving him a weak and terrified smile.

  Now, his hands bound behind his back by Juhle’s handcuffs and his shirtsleeves rolled up, he walked down the familiar stretch of asphalt behind his warehouse until he came to the small step that led up to his kitchen door, where he waited. Suddenly the door opened and he was looking at a man about his own size dressed in black jeans, tennis shoes, and a black T-shirt that hugged a well-developed body. A cold slab of a face, deathless eyes.

  He might be in his sixties, but Lance Spencer kept himself in excellent shape.

  He held a handgun centered on Hunt’s chest.

  “Get in. Close the door.”

  Hunt stepped up and into the kitchen, kicking the door closed behind him.

  “Women, huh?” Spencer said. “What a pain in the ass.”

  Hunt leaned back against the door and looked flat into Spencer’s eyes. “Why’d you kill Margie Carson?”

  “What do you care?”

  “She was my mother.”

  Spencer allowed himself the ghost of a smile as though a sudden revelation had just come to him. “Oh yeah, that’s right. Wyatt. The name. That’s how Dodie started to put all this together, isn’t it?”

  “Why’d you kill her?”

  “Who gives a shit?” He shrugged at the triviality of it. “Because I was ordered to. I had a boss who considered her a threat.”

  “Jim Jones?”

  He nodded. “As a matter of fact.”

  “A twenty-year-old mother of a baby was a threat?”

  Another shrug. “Threats are what they are. Age doesn’t come into it. Jones needed her gone, so she had to go.”

  “And what about Jim Burg?”

  “What is this, twenty questions? The cop, right? See if you can guess.”

  “He found something.”

  “Not yet, but Burg was already talking to Lionel, who was freaking out, so it was only a matter of time. I should’ve taken care of my brother back then, too, while I was at it. He was always the weak link.”

  Spencer pointed the gun at Hunt and said, “Turn around. Now. I told them to send in the cuff key with you. Where is it?”

  Hunt gestured to his shirt pocket.

  “Here’s how it goes. When we get in the van, you get in the front seat and I cuff you to the steering wheel. Make any little move in the meantime, I put a bullet in your head. Now turn around.”

  Spencer uncuffed one of Hunt’s hands, keeping the key, stepping back away. Pointing the gun at Wyatt, he said, “Don’t try anything clever with those free hands. Put ’em behind you. Get on the floor, now. Feet straight in front of you, back against the wall, hands behind.”

  The phone jangled again and Spencer picked up the receiver. “Talk,” he said. Then, “You’re making my day. Yeah, I’ll stay on; just bring that van down and tell me when it’s here.” Coming back to Hunt, he motioned with the gun and said, “Get up. Slow. We’re moving. When I give the word, you get the door.”

  Hunt half rolled to get to where he could maneuver himself upright. Through the door, he heard what sounded like the van backing its way into its place. He got to his feet, found the knob, held his hands on it.

  Spencer was aware of him, of course, but Lance’s greater attention was focused on the telephone he held to his left ear.

  The gun, its presence well established, hung down, pointing to the floor somewhere in the area between where the two men stood maybe eight feet apart.

  Ten seconds passed. Twenty.

  “All right,” Spencer said into the phone, then hung up and turned back to Hunt. “Let’s do this. Get the door, then wait for me. We’re going out together.”

  Hunt turned the knob, got himself another step closer to Spencer, then pulled the door open, in toward him, bracing a foot against it, reaching one free hand out as far as he could through the crack.

  Two seconds later, halfway to Hunt’s bedroom, a huge crash shook the walls as someone in the basketball court side tried to break down the hallway door to that side of the house.

  For a mere instant, the noise diverted Spencer’s attention. His head turned a fraction of an inch at the unexpected explosion of sound, and for Hunt, watching and waiting for that moment of distraction, that was enough.

  Hunt brought his hands around as he threw himself forward. After two quick steps, he slammed into Spencer’s body with all his force, pinning him up to the wall.

  The gun went off.

  His arms now wrapped around Lance, Hunt tried to throw him sideways to the ground, but his dress shoes slipped on the kitchen tile and he couldn’t get any purchase, so he came up all elbows and arms, knocking the gun free.

  It clattered to the floor behind him.

  Another tremendous crash got to the kitchen now from the door in the hallway just as Spencer managed to throw Hunt backward off balance and down onto the floor. Diving over him for the gun, scrambling, Spencer got his hand on the barrel and swung to bring it down.

  Hunt reached up and stopped the blow, grabbing the gun by its grip and rolling on his side to get away.

  Spencer dove at it and Hunt dodged, spun, realized he was still holding the gun.

  Lance had suddenly, somehow, gotten to his feet and lunged one more time.

  Wyatt’s arm came up, the gun in his hand, and he pulled the trigger.

  The shot drove Spencer back against the wall, where he stood staring down at Hunt with a quizzical look in his eye.

  Hunt wasted no more time. “Here’s for my mother,” he said, as he took careful two-handed aim and shot him twice more—Bam! Bam!— a double tap in the center of his chest.

  The two SWAT team officers, finally having broken down the hallway door with their battering ram, got to the entry to the kitchen a half second after the last shot, their own weapons drawn. “Drop it! Drop it!”

  Hunt threw the gun out onto the floor, where it skittered against the tile and came to rest against the wall under the telephone. His breath coming in ragged gasps, Wyatt raised his hands and held them above his head.

  He saw Spencer slide down the wall to the floor, a corona of red blossoming in the black of the T-shirt. As Hunt watched, Lance’s chest rose, then fell.

  Then rose. Then fell another time.

  And then his chest did not rise again.

  “BUT WHAT IF…?”

  Hunt put a finger up to Tamara’s lips. She lay on the gurney in the back of the ambulance, wrapped in a couple of blankets, an IV with pain meds hooked up to her left arm. They’d bandaged her upper leg where the bullet had passed through her thigh, missing her femur and each one of the major blood vessels, and now she was sitting up, holding Hunt’s hand in both of hers on top of the blankets.

  Wyatt, still coming down from his own adrenaline rush, was blown away by Tamara’s resilience. An hour ago she had been a captive, tied, wounded, and held at gunpoint, but once they were together again and out of danger, she had allowed herself a five-minute crying jag, holding Hunt possessively, but now, still groggy, her face drawn and blotched, just wanted to know what had happened, how Hunt had pulled it off.

  “ ‘What if’ didn’t happen,” he said gently. “It worked.”

  “I know it worked, but . . .”

  “Look,” Hunt said. “The first thing was I had to get you out of there. And once I knew he wanted a handcuff key, it was a no-brainer. I
t meant at some point he was going to take the cuffs off. And I figured that would be my chance.”

  “Okay, but how’d you know you’d be able to rush him?”

  “Improvise, adapt, overcome. I didn’t know. But I figured it would be my best shot. Which, if I do say so myself, wasn’t a bad idea.” He brushed a strand of hair from her face. “The crucial element was the wall telephone in the kitchen. We were already controlling the conversation, calling him on that phone, right? As long as he’s on that phone, he can’t be watching the Brannan Street door, can he? No, he can’t. It’s impossible. So while I’m standing by the kitchen door, he’s on that phone with Jarvik. Meanwhile, the SWAT guys use the key I’ve given them to let themselves into the courtside half with the ram for the inside door.”

  “But what if they hit that door and you weren’t ready?”

  “That would have been bad,” Hunt said, “which is why I had them wait until I gave them the sign.”

  “You had a sign?”

  “Gotta have a sign, Tam. It’s one of the rules.”

  “And what was it, this sign?”

  “Opening the alley door. If I open it and stick one hand out, either cuffed or my free hand, it doesn’t matter, the cop on the roof with binoculars knows my hands are free and signals the SWAT guys waiting outside to go, they hit the hall door full force with their ram, and at that moment I jump Spencer.”

  “But what if…?” she started to ask.

  “Tam,” he said. “He’d already killed at least five people connected to my mother. He wasn’t going to let me go at the airport. It had to work.”

  “But . . .”

  “Hey, hey, hey. Easy.” He leaned in with a soft kiss. “ ‘What if’ didn’t happen, Tam. It worked.”

  33

  SUSAN PAGE AND LYNN SHEPPARD had developed something of a personal relationship over the past few weeks as Lynn had worked the background details of her story. Now the two women sat in the Indy-Gardens dining room having lunch together, Bessie the dog nestling quietly on Susan’s feet under the table. When they had finished their salads and caught up on some personal gossip—Lynn was seeing a new man, Wyatt Hunt had invited Susan to his family Thanksgiving and was paying her way out and putting her up at the St. Francis Hotel—Susan finally got around to asking how Lynn’s story was coming along.

  “I’ve pretty well gotten the whole thing written. They’re talking about running it in seven parts starting next Sunday, so it will at least get a lot of visibility.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It is. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  Lynn fussed with her napkin, pushed some food around on her plate. Finally, she smiled with a little air of embarrassment. “If I tell you, I might blow my reputation as a hard-hitting investigative journalist.”

  “That’s not the way I think of you anyway. I think of you as my new best friend.”

  “Well, thank you. I’m starting to think of you the same way. But the truth is, I’m a little scared.”

  “What of?”

  “That’s the scariest part. It’s all nebulous and really makes no sense, since the story itself, Wyatt’s story looking for your daughter and his father, has great closure. We know what this man Lance Spencer did and pretty much how he did it, and he’s dead, so there shouldn’t be any further issues.”

  “But there are?”

  Again, Lynn hesitated. “It’s the money.”

  Susan nodded. “It’s always the money, isn’t it?”

  “Often enough,” Lynn said. “But in this case, maybe even more so.”

  “You mean still? After all this time?”

  “You know how much we’re talking about, dear? When I first started looking into this, I was thinking the People’s Temple’s total worth came to somewhere around the realm of one or two million dollars, possibly as much as five.”

  “But there was more.”

  Lynn might have been scared, but she was clearly proud of her research. “Estimates go as high or higher than fifty million, and this is in 1978 dollars, remember. Of which only about thirty-five million has been recovered or accounted for to this day. So clearly the Spencer boys weren’t the only ones moving money around and siphoning off the occasional suitcase of cash for their own use.”

  “The Spencer boys? So it was both of them?”

  “Oh yes. Lionel and Lance were both pilots for Jones and his people. They just never settled in Jonestown permanently and weren’t there during its last days, so they never even made the survivors’ lists. Essentially, they’d become invisible.”

  “So what did Jones need these private planes for?”

  “Well, to transport people and money, of course.”

  “But to where?”

  Lynn put a hand on Susan’s arm. “This is what is so amazing to me. This money turned up in banks in San Francisco of course, but also L.A., Switzerland, France, the Bahamas, Venezuela, and five or six other countries. Curaçao, Grenada, Guyana. Oh, and don’t forget the Vatican, which set up like a dozen ghost companies in Panama to transfer Temple money. And that’s just the money the court-appointed receivers actually found. The point is that this was mostly a huge, global, money-laundering racket, which makes the tragedy there even greater, since the average person in Jonestown thought this was about saving their souls, when that was barely even incidental to the real work.”

  “It is so sad,” Susan said.

  “More than that, though,” Lynn said, “it’s frightening. There’s still a ton of money out there, and all the people who stole it. They’re not going to want to get all this stirred up again. And my editors are already asking me if I could run down another of the money trails and see where it’s gotten to today. Find out if the story’s still alive. Which, as we learned from the Spencers, it is.”

  “You can always refuse, can’t you?”

  “And then what kind of a reporter would I be?”

  “A live one.”

  Lynn again patted her companion’s arm. “When you say it like that, it sounds so melodramatic. I’m probably just getting the heebie-jeebies waiting for the story to run. I don’t really have a choice, anyway, do I? It’s about those people who died down in Jonestown. It’s up to us to remember, and it’s up to me to help fill in the rest of the story, at least as much as I can. There’s no statute of limitations on something like that, not morally anyway.”

  “But you will be careful, won’t you?”

  “Of course, dear. Don’t you worry,” Lynn said. “Careful is my middle name.”

  ELINOR BURG DID NOT WANT an elaborate ceremony, so it was a relatively small group that assembled in the back room of the Fior d’Italia on the Wednesday a week before Thanksgiving. Besides Elinor, her three children, and their spouses and children, the guests seated at the long table included the chief of police Vi Lapeer and homicide chief Abe Glitsky (both in full dress uniform), Devin Juhle, Wyatt Hunt, and the PD’s press secretary Donna Gigliani.

  After the lunch dishes had been cleared and the coffee poured, Vi Lapeer stood up at the head of the table, and Devin Juhle tapped his water glass a few times to signal for quiet. When she had everyone’s attention, Lapeer began:

  “We are here today in some small way to help correct an injustice that occurred thirty-six years ago. At that time, James A. Burg, a recently coined inspector for this city’s police department, decided on his own initiative to pursue an investigation into the murder of a young woman named Margie Carson. Margie’s husband, Kevin, had already been tried twice for this killing, and twice a jury of his peers had declined to convict him.

  “Jim Burg had known Kevin Carson and he, too, believed that Mr. Carson was not guilty. In a short time, Inspector Burg’s investigation came to center on a pair of brothers, Lionel and Lance Spencer, who were acquaintances of the victim and who had become involved as self-styled soldiers in Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, which had in the past couple of years relocated to the city.

&nb
sp; “Shortly after his interrogations of Lionel Spencer, Inspector James Burg died of an apparent, though inexplicable, suicide. San Francisco homicide conducted an investigation into Inspector Burg’s death and regrettably failed to uncover the evidence that demonstrated that Inspector Burg died in the line of duty while investigating an open murder case. Because of this, Inspector Burg has never before been publicly acknowledged among the ranks of his brother and sister officers who have fallen in the line of duty, their names inscribed in granite on the Memorial Wall of Honor in the Hall of Justice.

  “Today we are gathered to present to you, Mrs. Burg, a commemorative plaque from the city, approved by myself and the Board of Supervisors, and signed by the mayor, stating that your husband, Inspector James A. Burg, died gallantly in the line of duty, and directing that his name be added to the Memorial Wall of Honor.”

  As Elinor Burg stood up with tears in her eyes to thank the chief, Juhle turned toward Hunt and rolled his eyes.

  “Don’t be so cynical,” Hunt whispered to him. “Look at her. This is all she’s ever wanted.”

  “WYATT. Hey, it’s Lynn Sheppard. Out in Indianapolis?”

  “As opposed to the Lynn Sheppard I know in Albuquerque?”

  He heard her chuckle.

  “I guess so. Am I interrupting you? Is this a good time?”

  He was in the office at 5:30. “It’s always a good time for you, Lynn. How’s it going?” And then, a thought occurring, “Is Susan all right?”

  “Susan’s fine. In fact, I just saw her the other day. She told me you’d asked her out for Thanksgiving. That was very nice.”

  “It was pure selfishness,” Hunt said. “I love that woman.”

  “I think she feels the same way.”

  “I know. It’s kind of a miracle. So what can I do for you?”

  After a beat, she said, “I mentioned this to Susan, but then I realized that it’s you I ought to be talking to.”

  “About what?”

  She let out a heavy breath. “Well, this Jonestown stuff. The money.”