The Hunt Club (43 page)

“No ‘kind of' about it. You were hot.”

“I was hot,” she admitted with a rueful look. “And then when it turned out I'd been kidnapped and then getting rescued the way I did…the way that
you
did, I mean…all of that, you know. Then all the interviews and stories.”

Hunt had something of a vague recollection.
Time
,
Newsweek
, CNN. Basically, everywhere—he'd been a small part of the frenzy himself. He decided to make it easier for her. “They want you now.”

She couldn't quite hide the pride in her small smile as she nodded. “Yes. Yes, they do. Without doing anything myself to make it happen, it seems now I've got name recognition.”

Hunt forced his own brave smile. He brought a finger up and touched her cheek. “And pretty-face recognition.”

“Maybe even that,” she said, “if you can believe it.”

“Oh, I believe that all right. So have you told your boss here yet?”

“Gary? Well, that's the other thing. Things at work, at Piersall, have been…well, I've told you a little about this. It seems Gary has come to think I might have been personally involved with Judge Palmer….”

“That's all right, Andrea. I don't need…”

“No.” Her eyes bored into his, signaling her complete honesty, begging him to believe her because she was being so sincere. “But I just need to tell you that I would never have done that. It would have been completely unethical. We were working on huge cases together, Judge Palmer and me, millions and millions of dollars, and anything personal between us would have jeopardized every single case we touched.”

“Okay,” Hunt said, his heart tightening in his chest. For an instant, he considered telling her that it didn't matter. People weren't perfect; everybody made mistakes. It wasn't his place to judge her. What hurt him now was that she felt she had to lie to him, that perhaps it was okay, even noble, to lie to him if it would keep his vision of her intact.

As though he had ever wanted the vision.

He'd wanted the person.

And now that person irrevocably was someone who could look him in the eye and not tell him the truth. Because though he might never be able to prove if she had had her rumored affair with Judge Palmer, he knew that her denying it now with these rehearsed lines was a lie. And now suddenly what might have been had become what never could be.

She was going on. “Gary said that even a hint of that suspicion, any sign at all, and Jim Pine would fire the whole firm. All of our work for them would be suspect, subject to appeal or lawsuits, worthless.” She drew a breath. “Anyway, I don't know if there's any more law work for me in this town anymore. For what it's worth, Gary seemed to recognize that. The severance package was pretty good.”

Hunt forced another smile. “So it's all worked out?”

“Yes, except for…” She paused. “Well, that you and I never really had a chance to…”

Gently, he raised a hand and pressed two fingers against her lips. “Don't worry about you and me,” he said. “You're a star, Andrea. Go be a star.”

She nodded, sighed, smiled up at him. “I knew you'd understand, Wyatt.”

“I do. Completely.” One last attempt at a smile. “So when are you going?”

“Can you believe it? They want me Monday. I fly out tomorrow.”

Hunt was sitting
on the cooler in the alley, hands around a plastic cup full of beer as Connie came out the back door. “Can I take a minute with Mr. Hunt?” she asked.

“You can take an hour if you want, although Devin might be upset.”

“No. He likes me to spend time with other guys. He says it always makes him look so much better by comparison.”

Hunt had to grin. “He's one of a kind, all right.”

“He's not all wrong, not most of the time, anyway.”

Hunt put an arm around her. “If you're flirting with me, you've got a half an hour to cut it out.”

“I'll time it,” she said. Looking back over her shoulder, making sure they were out of earshot, she said, “I just want to tell you, seriously, how grateful I am—we all are—to you. And how proud.”

He turned to look at her. “What for?”

“Well, maybe it slipped your mind in the crush of events, Wyatt, but while you were getting all the fame and glory for finding Andrea Parisi, the important thing to me is that you also saved my man's life. He knows you did, too.”

“I didn't—”

“Don't go all modest on me, Wyatt. It's unbecoming. You saved his life. You saved all their lives. I will never be able to thank you enough, nor will the kids, and they don't even have any kind of real understanding of it yet.”

“Not being modest, Con, but it was really just circumstances. It could have gone another way, and he would have saved me. I mean, he's not the cop of the year for nothing.”

“No. I know that. But he also wouldn't be the cop of the year if something hadn't got him back into being who he is.”

“I think that might have been a little bit you, too.”

She nodded. “Acknowledged, but you lit the fire under him. You made it happen. I think you saved more than his life, Wyatt. You brought him back to who he is.”

“Well, he's a great guy.”

“Yes, and he always has been, although sometimes he forgets it. But when
he
does, he's got me to remind him. You. I don't think you get reminded often enough that you're pretty special yourself. So I thought I'd take a minute and tell you.” She put her hand on his arm. “Do you hear me?”

Hunt let out a breath. “I hear you. Thank you.”

“You're welcome.” Connie leaned into him briefly and then stood up and looked back behind her. “Okay,” she said. “Where did she go? I didn't get to say ten words to her.”

“Who?”

“‘Who?' he asks. The famous Andrea Parisi? Perhaps your girlfriend, not that I'm asking.”

Hunt tried to keep it light. “She had to leave. She got a new job in New York and starts on Monday.”

“In New York. But what about you?”

“What about me? I'm fine.”

“You're not. You liked her. You liked her a lot.”

But he shook his head. “I never really knew her, Con, except that she was beautiful and smart and fun and nice.”

“Well, my friend, that doesn't sound all bad. Some people, they look for those things in people they date.”

“They're good qualities, I admit, as far as they go.”

“But they don't go far enough? Is that it?”

Hunt considered for a second. “That's a nice way to put it,” he said. As he turned to Connie, this time his smile was genuine. “It's for the best, Con. I really think it's for the best.”

My first and most important acknowledgment is to my mate, friend, partner, and muse, Lisa Sawyer. Without a solid and happy home front, nothing creative is possible for me, and Lisa's strength, good sense, and fundamental joy in life makes her the best lifelong companion imaginable. Contributing mightily to our domestic tranquility as well as to the tone of these books, our son Jack Sawyer Lescroart remains constant in his role as best pal, jokester, plot checker, general all-around mensch.

Also close to home, my longtime collaborator Al Giannini has once again walked the walk with me from the earliest stages of this effort. His take on the most labyrinthine inner workings of the legal community, his encyclopedic knowledge of both the law and of human nature, and his creative instincts have been part and parcel of the underpinnings of every one of my San Francisco books, and my debt to him cannot be overstated. For thirty or so years, Andy Jalakas worked in child protective services in New York, and many of his experiences led me to the backstory for this novel's lead character. At Andy's suggestion, I also read and drew from a powerful and important book, Marc Parent's
Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children at Risk
. I also tip my hat in thanks to David Corbett, a very, very fine writer and former private investigator, who was very generous with his time, expertise, and insight. My assistant, Anita Boone, continues in her role as majordomo, efficiency expert, fact checker, and general right-hand person. She's a terrific help and perhaps the world's most patient human being, especially around sometimes angst-ridden writers.

Over the past several years, my Internet correspondence has assumed an important role in helping me communicate directly with my readers, some of whom have recommended concepts that might be fun to explore. Before I even began to think about
The Hunt Club
, one of my correspondents, Joe Phelan, recommended that I take a look at the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (the CCPOA), or prison guards' union. That suggestion came to play a central role in this book, and I'm grateful to Joe for all of his references. That said, I reiterate that though the CCPOA material in the book is based on actual facts and occurrences, this is a work of fiction, and I took substantial liberties with both the organizational structure and leadership of the union. (I love hearing from my readers and can be contacted through my Web site, www.johnlescroart.com.)

For technical advice on various topics, I'd like to thank San Francisco Police Officer Shawn Ryan for the chilling details of his own firefight; my friend Peter J. Diedrich, Esq., for the odd, obscure legal nugget that helps to season this narrative; and Frank Seidl for his wide-ranging knowledge of Napa County and the wine industry, which much to my delight I've finally had an opportunity to exploit. Karen Hlavacek is an incredible proofreader whom I can't thank enough.

This book, to say the least, did not write itself. In fact, in the early stages, it sometimes felt as though it would never get truly started. But helping me out of the blocks were my two great friends who also happen to toil in these fields of words—John Poswall and Max Byrd.

Carole Baron, though no longer at the helm at Dutton, has been a guiding force and cheerleader for my work from the very beginning, and she contributed mightily to the original concept here. Day to day, my editor, Mitch Hoffman, has kept the process on its course with several interim readings (and astute comments). Don Matheson, perennial best man, provides my regular gumption fix, without which the pages would pile up far too slowly and would be far less fun to write.

Several characters in this book owe their names (although no physical or personality traits, which are all fictional) to individuals whose contributions to various charities have been especially generous. These people (and their respective charities) include Doug Malinoff, Yolo County Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA); Sue Kutschkau, Cal State Fullerton Foundation; and Betsy Sobo, the American Repertory Ballet. Lastly, I am extremely grateful as always to my agent, Barney Karpfinger, who embraced the perhaps risky idea of this book from its conception and helped to keep the seed alive until it came to fruition.

Read on for a preview of John Lescroart's riveting new novel

THE SUSPECT

Available now from Dutton

On a clear, still,
and silent Sunday at the end of the second week in September, a fifty-year-old outdoor writer named Stuart Gorman sat on a flat-topped rock at the edge of a crystalline lake set in a bowl of granite near the California Desolation Wilderness Area a few miles southwest of Lake Tahoe. The lake's mirrored surface, unsullied by even the trace of a breeze, perfectly reflected the opposite shoreline—more granite, studded with pine and a purple sky above.

Stuart could barely be seen to breathe. In the warm afternoon, he'd removed his T-shirt and placed it beside him. Now he wore only his hiking boots and a pair of brown shorts. Though he had a good head of medium-length dark brown hair, the gray in his two-day stubble and on his chest betrayed the bare fact of his age. Without the gray, the developed torso, perhaps dangerously tan, could have been that of a man half Stuart's years. His solid barrel chest spoke of hours spent outdoors in vigorous exercise; there was a hollow of tight skin under his rib cage where most men his chronological age carried their fat.

There was age, though, in the face. Lines scored the skin around the deeply set blue eyes and at the corners of his mouth. The stubble wasn't long enough to camouflage the strong jaw or the nearly surgical cleft in his chin; neither did the lines mar the clear expanse of his forehead. The only obvious flaw in his face, although some might not call it that, was a silver dollar–sized port-wine stain high on his right cheek.

Stuart held a fly rod easily across his lap. He wasn't fishing yet. The evening hatch wasn't due for at least another half hour, until the sun ducked out of sight behind the foothills to the west. Then a few feeding trout would subtly ripple Tamarack Lake's smooth and calm surface, and on a typical evening Stuart would find his spot and play-out line, and place his dry fly in the center of one of the few ripples and hope for a strike. The trail ran along Tamarack's shore, so there was a great deal of pressure on the lake's fishery. The few trout that remained tended to be larger, and wily, and Stuart relished the challenge. Normally, in the last moments before the beginning of the true gathering of dusk, while he waited for the first mosquitoes to hit the water, he felt closest to peace. In moments such as this one, and in the poetry, solitude, and even athleticism of the fly fishing that would follow, he'd come to define who he was, what he was made of.

The sun kissed the top of Mount Ralston, and Stuart caught a glimpse of the first ripple—actually a rare splash—as a fish broke through the surface of the water somewhere across the lake. Normally, this would have been his signal to stir himself, but this evening he remained where he sat, unmoving.

And very far from a state of peace.

Two days before, he'd driven up from his beautiful home on San Francisco's Russian Hill to his family's rustic cabin at Upper Echo Lake. His mood, dark enough as he'd left the city, faded to deep black when he got pulled over for speeding a few miles east of Sacramento. At that moment, his rage with the world in general and at his wife in particular had boiled over and had so nearly overtaken him that he'd lost his temper at the highway patrolman who was writing him up. Even if he was “barely” exceeding the speed limit, every other car on the road was passing him, so Stuart wanted to know why
he
was the one getting a goddamn ticket. In response, the officer then had him get out of his car and take a field sobriety test, followed by a warning that he was “this close” to getting himself arrested. In the middle of this, Stuart lucked out when the patrolman suddenly recognized the name Stuart Gorman—the man was a fisherman who'd read two of his books and loved them.

Apologizing, and somewhat mollified, Stuart explained that he was still reacting to a terrible fight that he'd had with his wife, that he was coming up to his mountain retreat to get his head straight. The cop had still left him with a speeding ticket, but then he'd gotten his autograph and let him go.

But now he'd been up here for two days and his head didn't feel any straighter. In fact, if anything, he had grown more angry, frustrated, and depressed at the realization that his twenty-two-year-old marriage to his charismatic, brilliant, difficult, headstrong, and still-pretty orthopedic surgeon wife, Caryn, seemed to be over. In almost every imaginable way, they had grown apart. Her thriving practice, her investments, and the new medical office she was starting with her business partners had taken almost every spare minute of her life for the past couple of years.

Now, a purple dusk gathering swiftly around him, Stuart looked out over the water and saw a few promising signs of trout feeding, but he couldn't even bring himself to move from where he sat to throw his line. His mind refused to leave the familiar rut it had been plumbing since he'd come up here.

How could his life with Caryn have come to this?

They'd met when he'd been a guide on a Snake River rafting trip her parents had given her for a graduation present. He had been twenty-eight to her twenty-two, and they were soul mates from the minute they'd laid eyes on each other. She was going to med school at Stanford in the fall, but nothing was going to stand in the way of their being together. Stuart moved from Wyoming out to California, and they were married in the second week of November.

In those early days, their lives complemented each other's. Caryn studied round the clock. Stuart submitted his writings everywhere he could think of and augmented his meager writer's income working as a word processor in the law offices of Jedd Conley, one of his friends from college.

At home, Stuart kept the apartment clean, made their dinners, did the dishes, quizzed Caryn on her classes. She read and helped him edit his articles and early manuscripts and took every chance to get into wilderness with him—the Bay Area was good for that. They jogged together three or four times a week, talking the whole while. They liked the same music, the same books; they laughed at the same jokes. Busy lives notwithstanding, they found time to make love often. They would often brag to each other that in the history of the world, nobody had ever been as happy as they were.

If that had been true then, Stuart thought, then now there were few, if any, couples as miserable.

On Friday, the fight had erupted when Caryn came home for lunch after her hip-replacement patient had caught a cold and cancelled on her at the last minute. So her entire afternoon loomed open and free, and when she got home, she was in a foul humor. Stuart, who'd been planning to drive up to Echo Lake anyway and get some writing done, suggested that she take advantage of the unexpected opportunity and accompany him.

She had no interest. No, she didn't have other plans, but why would she want to come up to
his
cabin for an entire weekend? What did he think they would do that she would remotely enjoy? Another
hike
? She'd done her share of Stuart's hikes. Eight or ten or fifteen miles up and down steep and difficult terrain. Two or three or even six thousand vertical feet in one day? Wow, what a good time that was! And all to accomplish what? To get some outdoor exercise or a variation of a nice view that they'd both already seen a thousand times?

She'd pass, thanks. She'd outgrown all of that.

He had offered to stay down in the city, then. Maybe they could go out to dinner, or even eat at home, get some overdue and richly deserved quality time together, maybe reconnect.

“You mean sex?” she'd asked.

“That wouldn't be the worst idea in the world. But I wasn't just thinking of sex….”

“No surprise there.”

“What does that mean?” The thing heating up between them.

“You haven't thought of sex at all in a couple of months, Stuart.”

“I've thought of it all right, Caryn. It's just never been at a good time for you.”

“Oh, so it's all my fault?”

After which it had gotten ugly fast, Caryn finally admitting that she was sick of the sham marriage between them. Kymberly, their incredibly high-maintenance daughter, whose birth had forever altered the dynamic of their life together, was gone off to college now. There was no reason to stay together.

She wanted a divorce.

Stuart had slammed out of the house. Yesterday he'd walked for miles in the grip of an incoherent rage that seemed to grow with each passing minute. Last night, he'd drank off most of a quart bottle of vodka that had lain untouched in the cabin's freezer for five years. When he woke up, he found that he'd trashed his cabin, thrown dishes around, broken two chairs, and smashed the framed family photos. He woke up still mostly drunk and with little memory of what he'd done. But today, monstrously hungover, feeling ashamed and sorry for himself, he'd hiked for a grueling six-hour loop before taking a long afternoon nap and then walking up here to Tamarack, hoping the evening peace would soothe him.

He wasn't really interested in tracing all the roots of his anger, though the strength and depth of it left him in a kind of shock, and exhausted. God knows there had been reasons enough. The past few years Caryn had all but abandoned him emotionally and physically, but he'd stayed on because he believed you fought to save your marriage, even when it looked impossible. He'd stayed on, too, in order to carry the vast amount of the load of raising Kymberly because his wife didn't have the time. He'd stayed on in all of his own good faith, trying to get to compatibility with Caryn again, from which he hoped they might again approach affection. Until Friday—just two days ago!—he'd repeatedly told her that he loved her, he loved her, he loved her. In these admissions, he realized that he was probably culpable of dishonesty, but he thought they might help, might bring her back. And if he said it enough and she came around, it might even become true.

Now, after all that sacrifice and despair, all the hope and commitment, all the pain and constant work, she wanted to end it anyway. He had been such a fool, and he hated himself for that almost as much as he hated her.

Tamarack Lake had grown dark and still again. The hatch and the bite were over, and the only sound off the lake was a whisper where the water met the shoreline.

Stuart forced his stiff body to its feet. He could get back to his cabin by the moonlight, to his car and back to the city by midnight—have it out with her one last time on his schedule for a change, and not hers. It would be great to wake her up, which would make her miss a day of her precious work. It would do her good to see him in the full flower of his outrage at how she'd used and abused him, his naïve belief, his basic good nature.

He broke into a jog, in a hurry now to get on the road and finally give her the real piece of his mind he'd been holding in for too long while he tried to be fair, to be patient, to give her and their marriage yet one more chance. To be a good guy.

What an idiot he was. What a loser. What a goddamn pansy.

Well, all that was over, he thought. Now and forever. If she was done with him, he was done with her, too. And good riddance.

As he ran, his footsteps crunched on the granite. Riding the wave of his anger, he wasn't consciously aware that he was saying anything, but to the rhythm of every footfall, he fell into the mantra and let it escape into the night on every exhale:
Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her
.

The fish that Stuart
heard breaking water at the first sign of the hatch was very large for a Sierra Nevada alpine lake—a fourteen-inch rainbow trout. It rose to the sight of a mosquito larva shimmering off the surface of the lake, slurped at the insect in the gentle way of all trout, then exploded in sudden fury out of the water as it felt the set of the tiny barbless hook.

Gina Roake, a forty-seven-year-old attorney, fought the fish on very light 6x line for about five minutes—a really nice fight with at least four good runs—before she netted it. She stood in her moss green hiking shorts on a shallow submerged ledge that reached out about fifteen feet into the lake. When she saw the size of the fish, she whistled in satisfaction, then turned and, dipping the trout and her net into the water, walked back to the shore. There, grabbing the fish through the netting, with a humane efficiency she slapped its head hard once into the side of a large granite boulder.

Besides her shorts, she wore a long-sleeved buttoned shirt of some space-age fabric that wicked out perspiration and then dried almost immediately. The clothes were functional in the extreme. Over her bare feet, her legs were well muscled and tan, her ankles slim. She had stopped dyeing her hair a couple of years before, and now the wisps that showed from beneath the red handkerchief around her head were a shining silvery gray.

Laying the now-still fish in a small concavity at the top of the boulder, her movements bespoke a temperament of brisk efficiency. Removing a six-inch Buck knife from its sheath on her belt, she picked up the fish by its gills and turned back to the water, where she paused for a moment to appreciate the setting. In the dying sun, she saw another person, small in the distance, sitting on a rock across the lake.

Returning to the task at hand, she inserted the tip of the Buck's blade into the trout and slit up its belly to the gills. Pulling out its guts, she threw them out beyond the reach of the ledge, where they sank into the lake's depth and disappeared from view. After she'd scraped the dark line of gunk along the backbone, she pulled off and threw away the gills, then dipped the trout in the water and rinsed it clean.