John Lescroart - Treasure Hunt

“It’s under control. But what would really help is I need to talk to Al Carter, as soon as you can find him. Is he up there today?”

“He was. He might still be.”

“Okay. So find him first, then see if anybody up there saw Jim.”

“No.” Lorraine Hess was in the middle of a celery-and-carrot-stick lunch at her desk. “I never saw him. And I would have loved to have seen him, since apparently I missed him at the memorial too. He’s a wonderful man. Are you sure he was here?”

Mickey shook his head. “No. I know where he was at around two, maybe two-thirty, but not if he ever actually made it down here. Would you mind if I ask around?”

“Not at all. Do whatever you need to do.” She took a quick nibble of carrot. “Most of the staff didn’t get back here until closer to three, though, just so you know. We opened up again at around three-fifteen. So maybe he got here and didn’t want to wait. Especially if he was outside in yesterday’s weather.”

“I realize that,” Mickey said. “And all of this may be a false alarm anyway. Jim’s been known to stay out overnight before. He also promised me he wouldn’t come out here asking questions and bothering people, so maybe on his way his conscience started to eat at him a little. Though, knowing him, that’s unlikely.”

“He always did have a mind of his own.” Hess spread her palms, gave him a sympathetic smile. “Well, if there’s anything I can do, anything you need… you’re sure you’re up to all this running around?”

Mickey tried without much success to put on a reassuring face. “My head’s felt better, but I’ll be fine.”

“Somebody out in the cubicles might have some painkiller.”

“I appreciate that. Maybe I’ll just go and see what I can find.”

He walked out into the lobby and noticed that the makeshift table where they’d earlier been preparing the pledge-card mailing was now doubling as a kind of study hall for half a dozen pairs of tutors and their students. Limping over to them, head truly pounding again, he knocked at one end of the table. “Excuse me,” he said, as twelve pairs of eyes turned to him, “did any of you notice an older guy hanging around here yesterday afternoon, inside the building or out? About six feet, skinny, maybe seventy years old?”

A sea of blank faces stared back at him. Not much of a surprise.

On his phone call, Hunt had told Mickey to locate Al Carter if he could and ask him to give a call. After he’d done that, Mickey was to abandon his alibi search and phone calls to COO members and devote his time to trying to discover what had happened to Jim. His disappearance, Hunt had made clear, was now looking more and more as though it might be somehow related to this investigation, and this was anything but good news. In fact, the new development had seemed so immediate and important to Mickey that he’d totally forgotten that his boss had told him-first-to find Carter and give him the message to call Hunt. Then Mickey was to start looking for Jim, getting a line on where he’d gone after Irving Pizza if he could.

Suddenly Mickey realized he’d forgotten the first part of the assignment. Back in the administrative cubicles where he’d been making his phone calls, he got some aspirin and learned that Carter was back in the parking lot-the city had returned the limo and he had gone out to make sure they hadn’t damaged it too badly.

Mickey found him sitting alone behind the wheel, apparently sleeping in the new-minted and welcome sunshine. The front windows were down and Mickey hesitated, then started to walk with his halting steps up to the driver’s side. When he was about five feet away, Carter spoke through his closed eyes. “The sound of your walking gives you away. Tell me I got the reward.”

“Sorry. Not yet. But my boss would like you to give him a call. You might be getting close.”

Mickey punched in Hunt’s number on Carter’s cell phone and handed the instrument back. He then moved away, out of earshot, and sat on the asphalt, his back up against the building, and settled into a drowsy seminumbness in the warming sunshine. In spite of himself, he dozed off. Seconds, or minutes, later, he started awake with Carter still on the phone, his side of the discussion consisting mostly of a series of yeses and noes. Except for his closing phrase, when Carter said, “I never thought of that.”

Then Carter walked over to where Mickey sat, and with a shrug, handed the phone down to him.

Hunt’s voice shimmered with intensity as he gave Mickey his new marching orders, and whether it was that or the short nap he’d slipped into or the aspirin kicking in, Mickey felt a sudden sense of clarity and purpose.

Hunt knew that Jim had already been drinking when he left Irving Pizza. Then the rain had come on at least close to the time that he was supposed to have started walking down to Ortega. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that a shower had caught up with him and driven him inside again, to another bar on the way. Hunt had Googled bars in the neighborhood and had located seventeen of them within walking distance of the Ortega campus. And now he gave Mickey those names and addresses.

At least these were places to look.

When he rang off, Mickey looked up at Carter and asked, “So what’d he say to you?”

And Carter replied, “He told me not to tell you.”

Devin Juhle, Sarah Russo, and Wyatt Hunt met at Lou the Greek’s, where they took an empty booth in the back. During their lunch in their car, Sarah had decided to phone Morton’s. That call had revealed that Alicia Thorpe had called in sick with the flu. She’d be out at least through the weekend, which, with her normal days off, meant until the following Wednesday. To both Juhle and Russo, this was a good enough sign that she’d gone underground or fled, and so the inspectors canceled their canvassing of Neshek’s neighborhood and arranged this meet with Hunt. Now the priority was to turn up the burners under Thorpe and bring her in for questioning, if they could find her.

“Hey,” Hunt said, “people get sick.”

Russo, a deep frown in place, took a good pull at her lemonade. “True,” she said, “but she’s not home in bed trying to get better. She’s not at her brother’s. She’s not in the hospital. We’re assuming she’s not with your boy, Mickey, either.”

Hunt kept his head down and refrained from comment.

“So what’s that leave?” Juhle asked. “She’s on the run.”

“Maybe you scared her off yesterday,” Hunt said. “She knew you had the scarf. It was only a matter of time.”

Juhle was tearing his cocktail napkins into tiny pieces. “Shit.”

Russo nodded. “Shit is right. We had her.”

“She’ll turn up,” Juhle said.

“Maybe in our lifetime,” Russo retorted.

Hunt noticed the obvious tension between the two inspectors, perhaps brought about by Juhle’s reluctance-due to his recent history, mostly with Gina Roake-to haul Alicia downtown to talk to her in one of the homicide interrogation rooms, where, due to the intimidating setting, results were often easier to obtain.

“So we wanted to get you and Mickey and even his sister on it too,” Russo added. “All of them know a lot of the same people, don’t they? We need you to put out the word.”

“Absolutely,” Hunt said, “we’ll get right on that.” Then, changing the subject, “Meanwhile, while we’re all here having such fun together, you manage to dig up anything on Keydrion?”

“Ah, Keydrion,” Juhle said. “How did you get to him?”

Hunt shrugged. “He’s a colonel or something in the Battalion out of Sunset, but he’s hanging around with Len Turner, and I was kind of wondering what his role was. You get anything on him?”