Wyatt Hunt 02 Treasure Hunt

by John Lescroart

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Also by John Lescroart

  A Plague of Secrets

  Betrayal

  The Suspect

  The Hunt Club

  The Motive

  The Second Chair

  The First Law

  The Oath

  The Hearing

  Nothing but the Truth

  The Mercy Rule

  Guilt

  A Certain Justice

  The 13th Juror

  Hard Evidence

  The Vig

  Dead Irish

  Rasputin’s Revenge

  Son of Holmes

  Sunburn

  Dutton

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of

  Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, January 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by John Lescroart

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Lescroart, John T.

  Treasure Hunt : a novel/John Lescroart

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17155-4

  1. Private investigators—Fiction. 2. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.E78T74 2010

  813’.54—dc22 2009032827

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Kathryn Detzer, Andy Jalakas, and again (always) to Lisa M. Sawyer

  It is one thing . . . that business between men and women, and there are many other more important things, including food.

  —Alexander McCall Smith

  1

  The day he found the body, Mickey Dade woke up under a tree on Mount Tamalpais.

  Sleeping outside a few nights a week had been going on as a regular thing with him for about four months now. He always kept a sleeping bag in his used Camaro’s trunk anyway, and starting around mid-May, when the weather got nice everywhere but in San Francisco proper, he’d finish work and leave town in whatever direction struck his fancy.

  Even in the urbanized, overcrowded Bay Area, there were innumerable places a guy could simply pull over, park, and crash on the ground under cover of trees or bushes or in the hollow of a sand dune in one of the city or county or even national parks, at the beaches, off back roads, even in the quiet “neighborhood watch” suburbs.

  Monday the past week, while it was still light out he’d driven down to Woodside, an exclusive semirural enclave nestled into the foothills behind Palo Alto, and slept out under an old stone bridge over a dry creek bed. Two days later, he’d parked a couple hundred feet down an unnamed, little-used dirt track cut into the woods behind Burlingame around Crystal Springs Reservoir. Last night, he’d gone north into Marin County, got halfway up Mount Tamalpais, and pulled under an old low-hanging scrub oak in a forgotten and unpaved parking lot.

  He always woke up at first light, so this morning he was on the Golden Gate Bridge by the time the sun cleared the hills behind Oakland. He had his iPod coming through his speakers. It was mid-September, and as usual this time of year, the coastal fog was taking a break. The morning clarity under the cloudless sky was startling. Mickey could easily make out the tiny dots of the Farallons twenty-some miles away over the deceptively still Pacific.

  He exited the bridge and soon found himself on Marina, cruising through the streets. The closely set, well-maintained, beautiful low-rise homes stirred some vestigial gene he must have picked up somewhere. Just driving through a neighborhood of real honest-to-God stand-alone homes always filled him with something like contentment, although it wasn’t quite that; it was more like hope that contentment and physical security were among life’s possibilities.

  This was something Mickey didn’t have much personal experience with. He couldn’t remember ever having lived in anything but an apartment house, although his parents had apparently rented a small bungalow in the Sunset before their divorce. His sister, Tamara, said she vaguely remembered that house. But she was two years older than he was. Mickey had been only two when his mom had taken them from their father and moved out.

  But Mickey didn’t get time to enjoy the Marina architecture this morning. A crowd was clogging the street up by the Palace of Fine Arts. At this location, he thought somebody was probably shooting a movie—the Palace had been a setting in both Vertigo and The Rock, among a host of other films. People loved the old domed structure that had been constructed for the Panama-Pacific Exhibition back in 1915. With its classical columns and its reflecting lagoon, the spot conjured both urban elegance and a hint of mystery. So he pulled into the Yacht Club parking lot, where he knew you could always get a spot at this time of the morning.

  When Mickey got ou
t of his car, he was surprised that the noises carrying from down by the Palace seemed distinctly ominous and angry. Someone was giving harsh orders on a bullhorn. He heard a full-throated chorus of discontent—maybe actors and extras emoting, but he didn’t think so.

  Mostly, it sounded like a fight.

  From the outskirts of the crowd, Mickey could make out at least three distinct groups, not including the vans from two of the local television stations.

  The police, at least twenty of them, six of them mounted on horseback, held a line near the shoreline of the lagoon. The nonequestrian cops were turned out in “hats and bats”—full assault gear, helmets with tinted face masks, batons out. A larger, homogeneous, and clearly hostile group of maybe fifty citizens milled around on the sloping banks of the lagoon as if waiting for instructions to charge the police line. In front of them, a tall bearded guy in camo gear was right up in the face of the lead cop with the bullhorn. Finally, down by the water’s edge, a smaller group of perhaps twenty people in the uniforms of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department huddled fearfully by a small fleet of rowboats laden with what looked like netting of some kind.

  The camo guy started a chant, “Hell, no, don’t let them go!” and in seconds the crowd was in full throat behind him, pressing forward toward the police line. The cops brought up their batons as the bullhorn exhorted the crowd to “Back away! Back away!”

  “Hell, no, don’t let them go!”

  A white-haired man in a bathrobe and tennis shoes with his arms crossed and wearing a bemused expression stood on a lawn across the street. Mickey sidled up next to him. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  The man shook his head. “Idiots.”

  “Who?”

  “All of ’em.”

  “But what’s it about?”

  The man looked over, askance. “You don’t know about the ducks? Where you been?”

  “What about the ducks?”

  “They’re moving ’em, or trying to.” He shook his head again. “Lunatics. Stupid idea, bad planning, insane timing. But what else do you expect nowadays, huh? You really don’t know about this? Moving the ducks down to Foster City?”

  “Ahh.” So that’s what this was. Mickey had read all about it over the past few months, but hadn’t realized that it was coming to a head so soon. Now the whole story came back to him.

  The city had approved a $22 million restoration for the Palace and its grounds, and part of that project included buttressing the remainder of the shoreline of the lagoon, most of which was already bounded by a low rock-and-concrete wall. But the rest of the shoreline, closest in toward the Palace itself, had become degraded over time—in the past year alone, a couple of kids had fallen in when the banks had collapsed under them. It wasn’t so much dangerous as it opened the city to possible litigation issues, and so the supervisors had given the plan the green light, and put up $7.5 million to get the project started. The rest would, somehow, be funded by private benefactors. And lo, it had come to pass.

  But to do any of this work, first the lagoon had to be drained.

  Enter the ducks. And the San Francisco Palace Duck Coalition. And a former Berkeley tree sitter who, for the present campaign, had adopted the nom de guerre of Eric Canard. Mickey only now came to recognize the man in his camo gear. Usually he did photo ops in a full duck suit.

  The Palace ducks, of course, along with its swans, herons, seagulls, and other birds, called the lagoon home. And if the lagoon were drained, Canard had argued to the Board of Supervisors, they would become homeless. Temporarily, but truly. And in a city that prided itself on being a haven to the homeless, this was simply unacceptable.

  So the supervisors, caving in—to widespread derision in the media and on the street—had set about finding a solution to the problem. In spite of the fact that San Francisco had several nice and completely serviceable ponds, those ponds had their own populations of ducks whose environments, Canard argued, would be compromised by the wholesale relocation of the Palace ducks to their own home waters. So, eventually, the decision was made to relocate the ducks to Foster City, a residential community with Venice-like canals, and few permanent resident ducks, twenty miles south down the Peninsula.

  This would have been a workable, though of course still wildly foolish, idea except for one thing: Six months before, Foster City had encountered its own problem with its indigenous ground squirrel population. These animals were burrowing in the city’s levees and destroying them, threatening homes with the very real possibility of imminent flooding. In response to this crisis, Foster City had decided to poison the levee-dwelling critters en masse. This slaughter passed largely unnoticed in Foster City itself, but did not escape the keen eye of Eric Canard. And when San Francisco announced its intention to remove its Palace ducks to Foster City, Canard had gone ballistic.

  Surely, if the ducks were sent to Foster City, the heartless bureaucrats there would not treasure and protect them. These people had shown their true colors around the plight of defenseless animals and would obviously treat the ducks as they had treated their own squirrels if given half a chance. And Canard was not going to let that happen.

  So he’d sued. And lost.

  And had threatened to sue again. Which gave the city a window in which to make its move.

  Across the street, the chant was wearing down, but Mickey could still hear a strong voice—undoubtedly Canard—yelling now at the lead cop.

  “So how’d this start today?” Mickey asked the old man. “I thought it was still in the courts.”

  “No. The brains down at City Hall decided they’d just go ahead and round up the birds. The whole thing is nuts. And it’s all moot anyway. They started draining the lake a couple of days ago before they were ready for the ducks—in secret, I might add, and that’s never a good idea—so word got out to Canard and his people that something was happening down here, and the whack jobs started gathering before sunrise this morning. Uh-oh.”

  Off in the distance, the sound of sirens, police reinforcements on the way. Another news van pulled in, screeching to a stop.

  The way this thing was developing, Mickey thought the story had a good chance to go national.

  But Mickey had to get home, cleaned up, and to work. So he thanked the older man for his company, said good- bye, and crossed the street about a half block north of the crowd. Turning right, still hugging the shoreline, he followed it around to where it veered away from the view of the crowd.

  Here the lower water level of the lagoon was much more obvious than it was up by the demonstration. The clumpy roots of the cattails shone black with the gunky bottom mud in the morning light. The low-hanging tree branches, which normally kissed the water’s surface, now looked trimmed off a foot and a half or so above the waterline. An asphalt pathway came down to the water’s edge off the parking lot, and Mickey took it as the shortcut back to where he’d parked.

  But he hadn’t gone more than a couple of steps when one of the tree roots sticking up from the brackish water stopped him in his tracks. It was funny the way these things growing wild in nature could so closely resemble shapes you’d expect to find in other species, in animals, even in people. Those roots, emerging from the water, could easily, he thought, be the hand of a man.

  In fact, it seemed so near a resemblance that he forced himself to step off the pathway and look closer. He came right down now to the water’s edge, where from this vantage he could dimly make out, six or eight inches under the water, an all-too-recognizable shape.

  As Mickey stared in dawning belief, suddenly the water seemed to move and a trail of bubbles rose out from underneath the submerged form, turning it over and raising what was now clearly a body until its head broke the water’s surface and the dead man’s eyeless face stared up at him, caught and silenced in midscream.

  2

  At ten minutes past noon, Mickey walked up the single flight of stairs that led from the Grant Street entrance, in the heart of Chinatown, to the front
door of his workplace, a private investigations firm called the Hunt Club.

  Although the word firm was a bit of a misnomer, especially lately.

  Six months before, the business had been successfully humming along in pretty much the same circumstances it had enjoyed for the first six and a half years of its existence. At that time, the owner—Wyatt Hunt—didn’t seem to have too much trouble keeping himself and his two-and-a-half-person staff busy most of the time, working primarily for several of the city’s well-heeled law firms.

  Mickey’s sister, Tamara, had held down the front-desk duties and often did light field- and interrogation work, especially when women witnesses or children were involved. A junior associate—Tamara’s old boyfriend Craig Chiurco—had done the lion’s share of the legwork locating witnesses, serving subpoenas, accompanying clients to depositions, and performing the other standard grunt work that made up the business.

  Mickey, in addition to occasional subpoena service to the Hunt Club, had mostly driven a cab for a living, but was pretty much on call full-time to supply transportation to Wyatt or Craig should they need it, as they often did. In a city where parking was always so problematic, access to immediate transportation turned out to be a highly valued and oft-used service.

  Wyatt Hunt himself was the computer whiz and the basic brains behind the organization. A natural- born marketer, Hunt also pulled in the actual jobs that kept everyone busy.

  Until recently anyway. When bad luck, withering publicity over one huge failed case, a faltering economy, and possibly some questionable judgment had created a perfect storm that was threatening to shipwreck the enterprise.

  Tamara had simply walked away from her job and had fallen into a profound funk from which she’d still not emerged. And with the exception of piecemeal work with the law firm Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, where Hunt had several close friends and one girlfriend—the business had all but evaporated.