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?”
“He’s clean,” Juhle said. Then added, “As an adult. ’Course, he’s only been out off the youth farm for seven months, so he’s barely had time to get his sea legs back. As a kid, though, he was reasonably badass. Went in for manslaughter when he was sixteen, though there was some question about maybe it should have gone down as murder one. The DA almost charged him as an adult, but I hear our friend Mr. Turner applied some influence and suddenly Keydrion needed rehab and consolation.”
“You think Keydrion is somehow involved in all this?” Russo asked.
“Not impossible,” Hunt said. “But I wouldn’t mind knowing for sure.”
“I wouldn’t mind knowing anything for sure,” Juhle said.
Hunt didn’t miss a beat. “Anthony,” he said.
“What’s Anthony?”
“My middle name. Something you can be sure of.”
Juhle just shook his head while Russo gave Hunt a dead eye. “I appreciate that you’re worried about him, Wyatt, but Keydrion’s a low priority for us,” she said. “We’re looking for Alicia Thorpe, and if you want to be any help to us, you’ll be doing that too.”
“You putting out a bulletin?” Hunt asked.
Russo’s head slowly tracked its way back and forth. “Can’t. Not yet. Not officially. Officially, we just want to talk to her again.”
Juhle said, “But first we’ve got to find her.”
Hunt nodded. “All right. I’m with you guys. We’ll see what we can do.”
Hunt sat in his office with his stomach in a knot. After the last half hour, if Juhle and Russo ever found out, even after the fact, that Alicia was or had been at his place, he was dog meat. It was not impossible that he could face charges for obstructing justice or anything else they wanted to throw at him, and earn himself some jail time. And that’s if he was right.
If he was wrong-if the inspectors were right and Alicia was in fact a multiple murderer, as he himself had believed until only a couple of hours ago-it might be much worse than that.
But he hadn’t been able to come clean with them. He couldn’t even include them in his slowly forming plan, because that plan depended on what Mickey discovered-on what he had to discover-and Hunt hadn’t yet heard back from him. From where Hunt sat right now, from what Alicia and then Al Carter had told him, he only had a strong inkling of the truth, not a forged linkage that could withstand any assault.
He had to wait. He could only wait.
And the waiting was doubly excruciating because if Mickey came back with the answer Hunt was hoping for, the result he expected, it was the last thing he actually wanted, because it almost assuredly meant that Jim Parr was dead.
“Come on, Mickey,” he said aloud. “Come on.”
Another cleverly named place on Noriega Avenue, the Noriega Lounge, was the closest bar north of the Ortega campus, only one block away. Unfortunately, it wasn’t on Nineteenth Avenue and couldn’t be seen from that main thoroughfare, and Mickey had decided to be his usual thorough self and start all the way south by San Francisco State University and move north to Golden Gate Park.
He’d already made eight stops by the time he got to the Noriega at four o’clock. Mickey thought that although it was rather generally unsung, the place might in fact be the location of “San Francisco’s Happiest Happy Hour,” which would formally begin in a half hour-two-for-one drinks, nothing over two bucks, and free hors d’oeuvres. A decent mixed crowd was getting itself in the mood to get more in the mood, a loud sound system with a very strong bass boost played disco music, and two silent televisions-one featuring Oprah, and the other ESPN-vied for space and attention over the bar.
Every stool was taken.
