Treasure Hunt

by John Lescroart

  It had been bothering him at some subconscious level since late in the afternoon, and now suddenly it struck him as truly significant. Five minutes later, Hunt had used his computer wizardry and discovered her home address on Seacliff Avenue, and was in a cab on his way home.

  There he picked up his Cooper. It didn’t take him fifteen more minutes to pull up outside Nancy Neshek’s house on the cliffs overlooking Phelan Beach. When he got out of his car, he was struck, in spite of the size and stunning architecture of the homes, by how deserted the street felt, and how strongly the gusts blew off the ocean a hundred or more feet below. In the deepening dusk, the two-story Neshek home still exuded a pale yellow glow, although through its lower windows, all was dark inside. Hunt first went to the front door and rang the doorbell, hearing the chimes echo back through the house.

  He checked his watch. It was just eight o’clock. Abandoning the front porch, he walked down the driveway and around to the side of the garage, where a quick look revealed a car parked inside. Next, he crossed over a perfectly manicured gravel path and climbed the six steps up to the back door, a thick slab of oak whose large window let Hunt look into a kind of mudroom behind what appeared to be the kitchen.

  Going back to the car for his flashlight, he also slipped on a pair of gloves, his heart now pounding in his throat. He knew that he could be shot or restrained or arrested now as a cat burglar and no one would blink an eye. Returning to the back door, he tried the handle and verified that it was indeed locked. He shone a fast beam of light into the mudroom and kitchen and saw nothing unusual or out of place.

  Back down those rear stairs, he followed the gravel path again along the back of the house until he came abreast of another bank of windows. Stepping through the garden and getting to them, he saw that they made up the back wall of the dining room.

  In the neighbor’s house twenty feet over, a light came on, and he froze. An outside door opened over there, then slammed shut. Another gust rattled the trees and hedges behind him. Drawing a slow breath, he got back through the garden and now followed the lawn next to the gravel path—reducing the noise of his footsteps—around the side of the house, where the neighbors had just turned on their lights.

  Hunt estimated when he’d cleared the dining room windows and stepped up to the next bank of them. A dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood as he risked another brief beam from his flashlight. He shone the light over the floor and the leather couch, the rattan rug in the center of the living room, and then the matching chairs over on the piano side.

  He would never have seen it if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of a river stone fireplace mantel and leaned in at the window to follow the play of his beam over the stones. And there, with the side of his face pressed against the window, on the floor he saw a hand and a portion of an arm before the rest of the body disappeared from his angle of vision.

  Mickey rubbed the boneless goat-leg roast with olive oil, salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme. He inserted fifteen cloves of garlic into slits he’d made in the meat, and now the smell of the thing cooking with root vegetables in the oven infused the entire small apartment.

  Alicia sat on one side of the fold- down table, Tamara and Jim Parr on the other, and after throwing together a beet, arugula, and goat cheese salad, Ian had boosted himself up onto the kitchen counter. Mickey was just stirring the polenta into the pot of boiling and salted water. Ian had explained with no embarrassment at all that he was an addict and an alcoholic and couldn’t drink, but everyone else was having cheap rosé in heavy juice glasses.

  They were talking about surfing, which was what Alicia told them she had been doing all day out at Ocean Beach.

  “How did you not freeze?” Tamara asked.

  “Oh, you never go without a wetsuit. It’s not like surfing in Hawaii or even down south. If you didn’t have a wetsuit, you couldn’t last five minutes.”

  “How about the sharks?” Mickey said.

  But Alicia was shaking her head. “Not here. Up in Bolinas, maybe, but not here.”

  “Famous last words,” Ian put in. “I tell her she’s surfing around the general vicinity of Seal Rock. You know why it’s called Seal Rock? Right. You know the preferred diet of the great white shark? I rest my case.”

  But Alicia just shook her head. “I’ve never even seen a shark out there, Ian.”

  “Most people who get eaten don’t see ’em, either, except from the inside.”

  “Well, I’m not planning to get eaten. Besides, you’ve got to take risks sometimes if you want to do what you want to do.” Suddenly she turned back to face her tablemates. “Am I right, Mr. Parr?”

  Flattered to be included, Parr nearly choked on his wine and then, coughing, was shaking his head up and down, laughing at himself. “No guts, no glory,” he said. “That’s my motto, and I managed to get myself old living with it.”

  “You’re not old, Mr. Parr.”

  “Jim, please.”

  “Jim, then. Who is not old in spite of a life of risk.” Then Alicia whirled back on her brother. “See?” And finally, to the rest of them, “Ian doesn’t want me sleeping out in my car either. Too dangerous.”

  “It is dangerous,” Ian said. “There’s all kinds of nuts out there.”

  Mickey turned away from the stove. “You sleep out in your car?” Alicia nodded. “Sometimes. Last night I did. I wanted the early morning waves.”

  “Actually in it?” Mickey asked.

  And Tamara clarified, adding, “Mickey’s been spending about half his nights sleeping outside.”

  “Mostly on the ground, though,” he said. “I can’t stretch out in my car.”

  “She can,” Ian explained. “She’s got a Honda Element. She can run laps in the damn thing if she takes the seats and her surfboard out.”

  “Why do you do it, Mick?” Alicia asked. “Sleep out, I mean.”

  He stirred the polenta for a moment. “I don’t know exactly,” he said. “It’s not structured. It’s peaceful. You feel free. You wake up with the sun.” He shrugged. “I just like it. How about you?”

  She sighed. “Well, here’s the thing. I get two days off a week, Monday and Tuesday. Otherwise, I’ve got to be in a dress and nylons and high heels and makeup. And sometimes, a lot of the time, I guess I feel like I’m trapped. So I drive off and sleep where I stop, and I don’t feel so . . . I don’t know, so regimented. Like I can still make some of my own decisions, and I’m not stuck in a life I don’t want to live. I mean,” she added, “look at all of us—maybe not you, Jim—but the rest of us. We’re just all marking time, trying to get into something that’s going to feel like our real lives, you know. You guys going to chef classes, and, Tamara, you starting your day job again.

  “Maybe I sleep out to remind myself that my real self is still there, I’ve still got time, I’ve got game, I’m going to be doing something that’s really me someday, that matters, and as long as I’m still that person who can just jump up and go sleep out somewhere, then that’s someone I recognize. I’m still here.” As though surprised by how much she’d revealed about herself, she ducked her head a bit into her shoulders and looked around at her audience. “Sorry,” she said. “TMI.” Too much information. “It’s my inner nerd. I can’t shut her up.”

  “That’s all right.” Tamara grabbed a bite of arugula from the bowl in front of her. “We’re a tolerant household. The nerd’s welcome too.”

  Mickey was looking in at the goat and now pulled it out of the oven, setting it on the top of the stove. He covered it with aluminum foil, then turned back to the table. “Ten minutes to let the meat rest while the polenta cooks, then we eat. And you said it better than I could, Alicia. That was pretty much exactly it.” In spite of her no-nonsense style of dress tonight—she wore old jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and hiking boots—Mickey had been fighting the temptation to stare at her since she’d come in. But now he braved a quick surreptitious look and noticed a faraway glaze and glassiness in her eyes. “Alicia? Are you o
kay?”

  Biting her lip, she nodded. “Just, you know, dealing with the Dominic thing again. That whole doing-something-that-matters is looking a little more distant right now, that’s all. But I’m okay. Really.”

  Parr tipped up his glass, then poured himself some more. “What about Dominic? Did you know him too?”

  “Did she know him?” Ian asked.

  And for the next twenty minutes, until the dinner was halfway gone—everyone loving the goat—they covered the common ground between Jim and Alicia as Como’s drivers, some of the life and politics up at Sunset, how things were the same, and how they had changed. “Yeah, but even with all the changes,” Parr was saying, “everything I hear is that what Dominic did was essentially the same. He drives around, talks to people, helps wherever he can. Serves food. Drives nails. He was just a hands-on guy. I’m never going to believe Dominic was stealing money. And irregularities? A business this big, there’s always going to be paperwork problems. But if somebody was taking money, it wasn’t Dominic.”

  “But do you think that’s what this is about?” Mickey asked. “Somebody taking money and Dominic found out?”

  “This is what’s been getting to me,” Alicia said. “I can’t imagine what it’s about. Given who Dominic was, the man he was, it just defies belief.”

  “Well.”

  All eyes went to Parr.

  “But I promised my good-cooking grandson I wouldn’t go out there and ask around.”

  Ian was sitting in the visitor’s chair at the end of the table. “And what would you ask about?”

  Parr put his fork down. “Just what we’ve all been talking about here. Somebody taking money. Maybe somebody who just wanted to take over. I mean, look at it. Dominic’s been doing it his way forever. So long as he’s there it’s going to keep getting done the same way. But now there’s more money and more organization all around, am I right? More decisions that he’s got to take part in, but he’s not really interested. He wants to be on the street ’cause that’s who he is.”

  Mickey, though, was shaking his head. “It’s a good theory, Jim, but let’s not forget that Dominic wasn’t exactly Saint Francis of Assisi living with a vow of poverty. Just his legit salary was six hundred and fifty grand a year in this job.” He held up a hand at the expected opposition around the table. “Not that he didn’t earn it, but he was also the rainmaker who brought in most of that money.”

  “And is that a bad thing?” Alicia asked.

  “Not at all. But let’s remember that whoever took him out killed the goose who kept laying the golden egg, year after year. Alicia, Jim here is talking about serving food and driving nails, but how often did Dominic do fund-raisers too? Almost every day, right? At least four days a week?”

  “At least,” she had to admit.

  Mickey shrugged. “I’m just saying I haven’t seen any sign he was slowing down in the job. In fact, the more we talk about this, the more I’m inclined to start with what Al Carter said—Dominic was meeting somebody he knew over how he could help him. That sounds like Dominic, doesn’t it? Hands-on, one-on-one. Even if the appointment was just an excuse to get Dominic alone, at least he believed it.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Al Carter again, Mickey,” Alicia said.

  And Mickey nodded. “The thought has crossed my mind.”

  Hunt had sat in his car and pondered for most of fifteen minutes, then had placed a call to Gina Roake. She advised him to leave the scene and to make an anonymous call to the Police Department reporting what he’d seen. Maybe even disguising his voice. He wanted, she had told him, nothing to do with discovering the body of Nancy Neshek, if indeed it was she, which he did not doubt.

  But they both knew he could not do that without running the risk of losing his license. More than that, he just didn’t see himself operating like that. So about twenty minutes ago, he had called Juhle and then gone back to sit in his car at the curb.

  The first police vehicle to appear was a black-and-white SFPD squad car. This might turn out to be a dicey moment, Hunt realized, since his precise role here was nebulous at best. Especially when the crime was murder and the scene was a locked-up, darkened mansion in one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods.

  Nevertheless, there was nothing to do but brazen it out, so he flashed his lights briefly at the squad car as it pulled up, and emerged from his Cooper into the lights of the squad car with his identification held out in front of him. “I’m a private investigator named Wyatt Hunt,” he announced. “I’m the one who called Inspector Juhle.”

  One of the officers—the name badge over his pocket read “Sorenson”—jerked a thumb in the direction of the house. “There’s a body in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw it from the window.” He didn’t want to go into too much detail about which window and what he’d been doing out here in the first place. Maybe they wouldn’t ask.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Reasonably, yeah.”

  “Okay.” The cop opened the back door of his squad car. “Please have a seat and we’ll be right back.”

  This sounded like a request, but Hunt knew that squad car doors didn’t open from the inside when you were in the backseat and that a cage separated him from access to the cop’s stuff in the front. He was being detained in the nicest possible manner.

  Sorenson said, “Let’s go, Lou,” and they walked together up to the now-dark front porch where Sorenson tried the door, rang the bell, and called out “Police” a couple of times, to no response. Meanwhile, his partner was shining a flashlight beam through the windows on either side of the front door. After a short discussion, they walked back to the squad car and opened the door.

  “It’s all locked up.”

  “I know.”

  “The back too?”

  “Right.”

  “We didn’t see anything,” Sorenson said.

  Hunt got out. “It’s farther to your left,” he said. “Way over by the corner.”

  “You saw something over there? We didn’t see a thing.”

  “It was lighter out.”

  Hunt was starting to wish he’d taken Gina’s advice and placed an anonymous call when another figure approached on the street to his right. “Excuse me,” the man said. “I live just across there. What’s going on here?”

  But Sorenson was within hearing and moved a few steps down the pathway to the door. “Would you please stay back, sir? This is a potential crime scene.”

  “A crime scene. What happened?”

  Sorenson had the neighbor and Hunt both in his flashlight now. “We’re not sure,” he said, as another car pulled up behind Sorenson’s squad car.

  “Here’s the sergeant,” his partner said.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Eventually Juhle arrived in his personal Camry, but not before another squad car, a van from Channel 3 that must have picked up the dispatch call, an ambulance (in case the person wasn’t in fact dead and needed medical attention), and six other locals—neighbors who had materialized out of the once-deserted street. By the time Juhle got there, none of the other five policemen on the scene with their flashlights, and looking through the door and front windows, had been able to spy the body.

  Hunt knew he was going to have to admit he’d been over to the side window, snooping, and was starting to get a bad feeling about it.

  It was a windblown night and late, now at least two hours since Hunt’s original phone call to his friend. Within five minutes after Juhle had arrived, and after trying to finesse what he’d actually done for a little longer, Hunt had finally directed Juhle to the side window, where he’d seen enough of the body to authorize a break-in. Then, after a brief discussion, deciding they could just crawl in and get inside the house if they could unlock and open a window, Sorenson had punched out a small pane of glass from the bay window on the ground floor opposite the room where the body lay. Within a minute or so, someone had
climbed through the window, turned on some lights, and opened the front door.

  And, of course, discovered the completely dead body of Nancy Neshek.

  Meanwhile, breaking the window had set off the burglar alarm, which brought apparently all of the rest of the neighbors out—they numbered at least thirty—along with four more squad cars to control the crowd. Hunt leaned back up against the hood of his Cooper, arms crossed, freezing in his light jacket.

  He knew that one day he would laugh about this entire scenario, since to the tune of the deafening school-bell alarm, there were now six squad cars, two of them with rotating blue and red strobelike lights, thirteen cops not including Juhle, three paramedics and their ambulance, and another news van and its crew capturing the absurdity as it unraveled.

  But there wasn’t anything really funny about it now.

  Finally, the alarm company managed to turn off the bells—the sudden silence like a vacuum in the night.

  “This sucks. It really does,” Juhle said.

  “I’m not so wild about it myself,” Hunt replied.

  By now it was midnight.

  Nancy Neshek’s body still lay in the living room where someone had hit her more than once with a fireplace poker and where she had subsequently died. The crime scene technicians were working and still photographing the scene. The coroner’s assistant was in with them, waiting until they were finished before she would order the body moved. For the moment, she was having a conversation with Sarah Russo, who’d finally arrived an hour ago in high dudgeon from her night impounding the limo and an interrupted late dinner. She very obviously didn’t even want to see Hunt, and not so much Juhle either.

  So Hunt and Juhle sat outside in the van that served as the mobile command center for SFPD, away from the action and the hostility.

  “Neshek actually called you on this reward thing?” Juhle asked.