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.
“Last night. But not to give information. To ask a question.”
“And you don’t have any idea was the question was?”
“Not a clue.” Hunt shook his head. “Except I’m pretty sure it wasn’t if I knew how to compute the circumference of a circle.”
“Pi-R-squared,” Juhle said.
But Hunt kept shaking his head. “Nope. That’s the area. I think it’s pi-D, but that wasn’t what she called about anyway.”
Juhle hesitated. “So what got you out here?”
Hunt ran it down for him-the original call with its sense of urgency, her lack of availability at both of her phone numbers during the whole day. “But really, bottom line,” he concluded, “it was just a hunch.”
“Hunches are good.”
“I’ve got another one, then. Whoever did this, did Como.”
“Not impossible, maybe even probable.” He indicated the house.
“Let’s see if whoever it was left something for us in the way of evidence. And by us I mean the police, not you and me.”
“I thought we were all about share and share alike.”
“Wrong. In fact, you’re lucky you’re not sitting in an interview room downtown, and you know it.” As far as it went, this was probably true. Who was to say that Hunt hadn’t in fact come out here to speak to Neshek and had gotten inside the house, where for some reason he struck her down with the poker, then set the house alarm, locked up, walked out, and called Juhle? Certainly, both Juhle and Russo had been overtly aware enough of this possibility that they hadn’t permitted Hunt to enter the house and thus have a ready and benign explanation if they found trace evidence of his presence there-a fingerprint, a hair follicle. Hunt had spent time answering questions in police custody before, and knew that the only thing that stood between him and another interrogation room right now was the forbearance of Juhle and Russo. “And in any event,” Juhle went on, “I’ll want a taped interview from you by tomorrow, let’s say high noon.”
“Dev, come on, it’s-”
“It’s the only offer you’re getting from me, Wyatt, and it’s a damn good one. I’d suggest you take it before I get Sarah involved and ask her opinion, which I think would be somewhat less lenient.”
Wyatt came forward on his chair. “You realize, Dev, that I didn’t even have to call this in. I could have gone home and let somebody else discover the body in three days or a week or whenever.”
“You could have, but that would have been a crime. A private eye sees a body, he’s supposed to report it. It’s kind of like our rule that if you find a body, we’re going to want a statement. It’s all about having a complete file. This really isn’t negotiable, Wyatt. And it’s a favor I probably shouldn’t even offer. But really, really, in my heart, I don’t see you killing our victim out there.”
Hunt managed to chortle. “Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome. So, tomorrow, noon.”
Hunt gave it a last try. “You know Como’s memorial service is tomorrow at eleven? I was planning to go to that, see who showed up, talk to a few people.”
