John Lescroart: The Hunt Club

"He's lying."

"He may be. Although I have seen claims like his that turned out to be legitimate."

"I know the guy," I said, "and there's no way he helped somebody try to lift anything bigger than a paper clip."

She said, "You want to try to prove that?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, help us determine if his claim is legitimate."

"How would I do that?"

"Any way you could."

A hole opened in the conversation. Finally, I found a voice. "Haven't you got a bunch of private investigators you use for that kind of work?"

"Not a bunch, but some, yes."

"Then I don't get it. Why me?"

"Well, licensed, gun-toting PIs are expensive, at least if they're any good. Usually the firm does a preliminary investigation before we make the determination to bring in one of our PIs. We normally like to think there's some reason to suspect fraud before we send somebody out to make sure. Otherwise, we'd just be fishing on all our claims, and we'd have to go into the investigation business full-time, which we're not prepared to do. We're a law firm."

I sat with that for a moment. "That answers the general question of why, Amy. But not the 'Why me?' part."

"Well, frankly, don't be mad if I'm being presumptuous, but you've mentioned yourself that you were thinking about going back and looking for work. I thought you might be motivated about this, and besides, it might be good for you. Anyway, in the normal course of things, the firm would be spending a good deal of money over the next couple of weeks doing background on Mayhew's condition. We eventually might decide to put a tail on him, which will cost the firm more money, regardless of the outcome. But we may not, either. It depends on the preliminary findings."

"You want me to check."

She paused. "I've got to be clear that I'm not officially speaking for the firm, Wyatt. I'm not hiring you or even offering to hire you. I'm saying that in this case I'd be open to doing things a little bit backwards because it might save the firm considerable funds and man hours. If you told me you'd try to discover positive evidence of fraud in Mr. Mayhew's claim, I could be persuaded to put the preliminary legal steps on hold for a short while."

"And if I found something conclusive?"

"In that case, we could discuss some kind of reward contingency."

"I'll start tomorrow."

"Wow. Great. Just like that? You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

"You won't change your mind?"

"I won't."

"Okay, then." She paused. "You ought to try to be a little more decisive, you know. Nobody likes a waffler."

"I'm working on it. Meanwhile," I said, "tell me what I need to know."

I graduated from the Universityof San Francisco in 1989 and both because I craved life experience and because I didn't have any better ideas of what I was going to do for the rest of my life, I joined the army to see the world. Shortly thereafter, I got caught up in Desert Storm and sent to Iraq, which wasn't the part of the world I'd had in mind. As an English major with no job skills except the ability to write in complete sentences with verbs and nouns and other parts of speech in more or less the right order, I got assigned to the criminal investigation division to write up administrative and disciplinary reports.

Boring as the reports were, my experience with the CID was my first adult exposure to humanity's dark side. It's not something the army liked to advertise, but because of the tension, brutality, fatigue, emotion, crowding, and trauma to the human psyche, theaters of war are fertile breeding grounds for serious criminal behavior-predominantly rape and its variants but also murder and mayhem, theft, and general depravity. This is not breaking news, but it was to me. After a while, I got promoted and started to interview suspects, to go out on investigations. For the first time in my life, work was important and exciting-a rush, sometimes with an actual element of danger.

In my years with the CPS, many of the calls to the homes of abused children provided a similar buzz, and I came to realize that in some sense this feeling was my fix. In the five months since I'd been forced to quit, between my revenge fantasies and my anger issues, I'd given a lot of thought to the kind of professional path I eventually wanted to put myself on if I ever got myself out of the personal Dumpster. And one trait stood out. No matter what the eventual new career turned out to be, it wouldn't feature a whole lot of time in an office.

After Amy's call, I'd considered my options and finally pulled out my Canon 35 mm and my telephoto lens. I also owned a Sony video camera, which I dug out of the back of my bedroom closet. Miraculously, since I didn't even remember the last time I'd used either of them, both cameras seemed to have working batteries and film, and I put both of them and the ancillary junk into a backpack by the entrance to the alley in back off the kitchen. Then, turning off the brain, I went to bed.

When I opened my eyes to darkness for the fifth time, I finally gave up trying to sleep. Rain pelted the roof as I pulled on sweats and a windbreaker. By a little before six o'clock, the approaching dawn still not much in evidence, I was thoroughly soaked and making the turn at Cost Plus in Fisherman's Wharf, a mile and a half in eleven minutes. This was slower than I'd been at thirty, but I consoled myself with the news that it was undoubtedly faster than I'd be at forty-five.

Back home, I showered, changed, and decided to emulate Churchill while there was still time by opening a cold split of Veuve Clicquot champagne to have with my scrambled eggs. Coffee is my breakfast drink of choice as a rule, but what's the point of having a rule if you're not going to break it sometimes?

As the first order of business, I thought I'd wake him up for fun. Since I still had his home number from the CPS directory, I called him directly, heard his voice after the second ring, and hung up, smiling. I drove out to the address on Cherry Street that Amy had given me, a one-block dead end that adjoined the south border of the Presidio. It was just past eight o'clock. Parking on the opposite side of the street and a few houses away, I noticed the black Mercedes with the vanity plates that read KIDSTUF, his cute little play on words about the work he did at CPS. So I was at the right place. I checked my cameras one last time, still uncertain about exactly what I was planning to do. Amy had described Mayhew as partially ambulatory, but she'd also told me that he was receiving a full-disability pension. So I more or less expected that ambulatory in his case meant he could get up out of his wheelchair to walk into the bathroom or something like that.

Fifteen minutes into my first stakeout, the rain picked up again, falling in vertical sheets that partially obscured my view of the front door to Mayhew's large, two-story house, which was up twelve steps from the street level. My Lumina's windows, nearly closed against the precipitation, began to fog up. It dawned on me that if my target stayed indoors, confined to his bed or not, it was going to be a slow couple of weeks.

Not my idea of a good time.

Two options presented themselves: Call again, or knock on his door?

At CPS, the direct approach tended to produce the best results. So I waited for a slight break in the downpour, then let myself out of the car and jogged across the street and up the steps. It was still by most civilized standards a bit early for an unannounced visit, but he'd been awake enough to answer the phone an hour before, hadn't he? Compared to my half-contemplated plot to have the man murdered only a few weeks before, this interruption seemed nearly benevolent.

I rang the doorbell, waited, rang again. After another moment, I heard footsteps, and then the door opened. His wife, presumably. A well-preserved fifty, in a green housecoat. At this hour, she did not exude graciousness. "Can I help you?" She was brusque, no-nonsense. "It's rather early to be knocking on doors, don't you think?"