John Lescroart: The Hunt Club

The old salt in me failed to respond to the analogy. So hire people who want to go out and do the work. But I dredged up a hopeful smile. "I like to think I'm cooperating, sir."

For a long moment, Mayhew chewed on his thin lower lip. Sighing heavily with apparently deep regret, he said, "We've got several promising young people we'd like to bring on here, Wyatt, and frankly they could start at a much lower salary than you're drawing right now. Even if you moved up to supervisor, the impact on our budget would be positive if we could bring some of these people on."

So now it was a budget issue. Mayhew was pulling out all the stops as I began to see the bottom line. He'd promised a job- my job -to the son or daughter of one of his cronies.

"Who would I be replacing?" I asked. "As supervisor?"

"Darlene's been out on maternity leave for five months already," he said. "Two more than she applied for. I don't think she's coming back."

"Can I give it some thought?" I asked.

"Sure." The shiny face beamed. "Take a few days, Wyatt, as much time as you need."

I said no.

Two weeks after my refusal, Mayhew announced an administrative shakeup in the department whereby the three caseworkers with the most experience-that would be me, Bettina Keck, and a ten-year vet with chronically poor attendance named Lionel Whitmore-would evaluate both the seriousness and the credibility of abuse reports and assign caseworkers as appropriate. This was essentially the role that our level-one supervisors had filled before, and it was full-time in-office work, but no raise was involved this time.

Every actual case of child abuse was serious, of course, but not every call to report abuse was legitimate. When I'd first started working, I was surprised at the number of these complaints to CPS that turned out to be bogus-called in by fathers wanting to get their baby's mama in trouble or neighbors as payback for other neighbors making too much noise at night or an ex-wife wanting to hassle an ex-husband while he had the kids for a weekend. These and dozens of others like them were the all-too-common ugly, stupid, petty scams in which kids were used as pawns in the adults' games. Citing the facts that we were chronically understaffed, hammered by budget constraints, and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of legitimate complaints, Mayhew decided that his experienced caseworkers would be just the ticket to separate the wheat from the chaff among the complaints and thereby improve the efficiency of the CPS as a whole.

Mayhew's plan was as obvious as it was simple. From his point of view, I wasn't a team player, Bettina was a candidate for rehab, and Lionel was useless. If he could keep me off the street, I'd probably quit before too long. And without me holding down the fort on the false complaints, Bettina and Lionel would both screw up eventually if not sooner, clearing not just one but three caseworker spots. Mayhew could then make three of his wealthy friends happy and maybe get himself a new car-or at least another silver samovar or photo op with a famous person.

But truly outraged now, I would be damned if I was going to let myself be so easily ousted from a career I cared about. I figured I could outlast Mayhew. He needed good, solid caseworkers or he would begin to look bad from the outside. I figured it would be a waiting game, and I'd play it until the worm turned, then I would get assigned back to the street. And thereby win.

Wrong.

Late one Friday afternoon in February, alone at my cubicle-both Bettina and Lionel gone AWOL earlier in the day-with a stack of complaints that needed to be evaluated before the weekend in front of me, I fielded a mandated report from the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital. A five-year-old Hispanic boy, Miguel Nunoz, had been admitted at a little before two o'clock that afternoon with a broken arm that struck hospital officials as unusual. I called the admitting station and talked to a Dr. Turner, who had discovered that this was the boy's third admission to three different hospitals-two broken bones and a dislocated shoulder-since his mother had taken up with a new boyfriend. Now they had casted the arm, and the mother was, even as we spoke, waiting to take Miguel home, but Turner thought somebody from CPS ought to get out there and talk to both the mom and her son and evaluate the situation before the doctor would feel comfortable releasing the boy back into his mother's custody.

I tended to agree.

Willa Cardoza and Jim Freed were just coming in for the swing shift. Inseparable, both were new hires within the past two years, which meant they were Mayhew's people. I'd never before had anything but professional interactions with either of them, and while not exactly gung ho, they showed up to work every day and seemed okay. At least, apparently, they went out on calls, filed decent reports, did the minimum. I also didn't know at the time-I was not a supervisor and so had no access to worker files-that neither of them had yet had to pull the trigger, i.e., forcibly remove a child from a parent's custody.

Nevertheless, they were the best, not to say only, choice at hand. My job was to evaluate the legitimacy of the complaint, and this one was no doubt as real as a heart attack. So I gave them the quick synopsis and told them they'd better hustle, the mom was sitting in the waiting room, anxious to take the boy home, and Dr. Turner wasn't going to be able to stall her forever.

By the time they left and I'd finished the last of my pile of evaluations, it was close to seven o'clock. Still concerned about the seriousness of the complaint, I swallowed my bile and went up to see if Mayhew was still in his office. His secretary had gone home, but he was there, drinking what looked like brandy in a snifter, talking to someone on the telephone. He made a fast excuse and hung up when he saw me in his doorway. It was my first audience with him since I'd turned down the promotion.

"Yes, Hunt, what is it?"

I'd been Hunt, not Wyatt, since the day. I briefed him on Miguel, told him whom I'd assigned, and said that I thought that this was a case he might want to keep an eye on over the weekend, to follow its disposition.

He thanked me for my responsibility in bringing this serious case to his attention and said that's just what he'd do.

Ms. Nunoz took Miguel homeon Friday night. On that Sunday, he was again brought to the hospital, but this time with a concussion from which he did not recover. At the inquest, Dr. Turner testified that he had spoken to me and that I'd assured him that CPS would have someone out to the hospital within an hour, two at the most, but that no one from the department had arrived.

In both of their individual testimonies, Cardoza and Freed admitted that I had given them the case, but that I'd put no particular emphasis on it. Certainly, I had put nothing in writing (and in my haste to get them moving, this at least was true). They'd even gone on another call first-they had the address and case number to prove it-and had arrived at the hospital long after Ms. Nunoz had gone home with her son. Believing that Dr. Turner would never have released the boy if he'd believed there to be danger, they had gone to their next call and left a follow-up note on the Nunozes for Monday morning.

Wilson Mayhew, while I was sitting in front of him in the same small room at the disciplinary hearing, calmly and emphatically denied that I'd ever mentioned the case to him in any context whatsoever.

When all the administrative hearingsand appeals ended, the bottom line was that I could stay with the CPS if I accepted a formal letter of reprimand they wanted to include in my personnel file. There was nothing else even remotely negative in that file, and I'd done nothing wrong in the Nunoz case. No power on earth was going to get me to take any part of the hit for Mayhew's betrayal and the incompetence and dishonesty of his protégés. I realized that the price for my refusal to accept the reprimand letter was my career at CPS.