"I'm a Peninsula guy. San Mateo."
"Really? I had you as a city boy all the way. I mean, how you know your way around. I've been here six years now, and take me outside of downtown or west of Van Ness, and I'm lost. I just figured somebody who knew the place like you do must have been born here."
"Nope. Moved here at twenty-five."
"Same as me."
"Except with me," Hunt said, "it wasn't six years ago. It was fifteen."
She furrowed her brow. "That math doesn't work."
Bowing, acknowledging the compliment. "You're too kind, but, yes, it does."
"All right, I'll believe you. But one more question?"
"One."
"How'd you get to be buddies with a homicide cop?"
"Actually," Hunt said, "it was pretty cool the way we reconnected. Dev and I used to be best friends. We played high school baseball. Then college, you know, and the army for me. Anyway, I hadn't seen him in something like ten years, then…" He gave her a truncated version of his reunion with Juhle-the Holly Park projects, Keeshiana tied up to her kitchen chair.
When he finished, Parisi was sitting forward, turned to him, one foot on the floor and the other tucked under her. "But that's an incredible story, Wyatt," she said. "Is that the kind of thing you did all the time?"
"No. Sometimes. Not all the time. Thank God. Anyway, after that," Hunt said, "Dev and I just kind of picked up where we'd left off in high school, except, of course, for the small details like him being married and the three kids."
"And what about you?"
"What about me?"
"Have you ever been married?"
"No."
"Kids?"
"Never married, no kids." He didn't want to lie to Andrea and this, technically, was the truth. Never married, no kids. Engaged, yeah, and only six weeks from a wedding. Sophie had been twenty-six years old, two months pregnant, in otherwise perfect health, when the aneurysm had struck her down.
He must have struck the right carefree tone. Andrea kept on. "Do you wish you had? I mean, all your years of working with children…"
He lifted his shoulders, came out with the response he'd perfected long ago: "I guess I've seen too much of the way a lot of families turn out."
"But not all."
"No, not all. That's true."
Parisi's expression had turned inward.
"What?" Hunt asked.
"I was just thinking about all I've been doing for all this time, with Spencer and…other guys before him and the relentless pursuit of this career and…" She let out a long breath. "Suddenly it all seems a little empty."
"All that food you put inside you, you can't be empty now."
He sensed that she understood what he was trying to do, which was to let her give all of her demons a little rest for a while. Her last twenty-four hours had been painful, humiliating, trying enough. She shouldn't beat herself up anymore. Not today.
She met his gaze, then stood up and walked over to stand in front of him. She put her hands behind his head and pulled it against her belly, holding him there. After a minute, she released him, and he stood up, cupped her face in his hands and brought his lips down to hers.
She pulled away enough to say, "I've got to take these clothes off to give them back to you, anyway."
Hunt would have stayed in her bed all afternoon, maybe all week, but she told him that she really needed to go and put in a few hours of work. But she would like to see him again that night. "Someplace nice for dinner, your choice, my treat?"
"What could beat what we just had?"
"Nothing," she said. "Although some people eat more than once a day, you know."
"I'll consider it," Hunt said. "But at the risk of bringing up a touchy subject, what about the Donolan gig?"
She shook her head. "The courtroom's dark today. I'll find out where that stands tomorrow, and probably go on until the damn trial is over."
"Okay, then." Hunt was holding the clothes of his that she'd worn. He stood at the open and rarely used front door. "If you're still up for it when you're through with your work. But if you would rather just go back to sleep, I get it."
"You're such a good guy," she said. "I mean it." Again, he read gratitude in her eyes. "How about we leave it open," she asked, "and I'll call you one way or the other. Say, by seven?"
"That sounds fair. One way or the other."
She nodded. "I'll call."
12
Predictable in retrospect, unforeseen at the time, the result of the interrogation at JV's Salon was that as soon as Juhle and Shiu left, Vanessa had called her sister and told her that whether or not she realized it, she was a suspect in the murder of her husband. The inspectors had made that abundantly clear.
By the time they left Adriano's, Shiu-showing by now nearly constant signs that the pressure to identify a suspect was affecting his judgment-was actually arguing that he was more than halfway to thinking they should go and have a discussion with one of the assistant district attorneys. Right now. They should lay out what they had on Jeannette and start talking about the logistics of charging her with murder-whether to arrest her before she could flee or do something equally precipitous such as kill herself or whether they should wait and bring their evidence to the grand jury for a formal indictment.
Juhle wasn't against either of those alternatives per se. In fact, he more than halfway believed what he'd been raving about to Shiu on the drive up-that they'd all but solved the case in a day. But regardless of the pressure to press charges against Jeannette, they simply didn't yet have the guns.
True, they had a window of the wife's time that they couldn't account for and during which she could conceivably have committed the murders for which she had a strong and even compelling motive-assuming she'd known about Staci Rosalier in the first place. But the fact that she probably hadn't gone to Adriano's to buy wine didn't come close to telling them anything about what she did do during those critical four hours. Besides, they hadn't even put the screws to Jeannette herself yet. It would be bad luck if they presented her as their suspect to the DA or to Lieutenant Lanier or worst of all to Chief Batiste, only to have her show up with a witness or two who'd seen her at her sister's house or talked to her at the grocery store.
Or anything.
After convincing Shiu that they had to talk to her again-and soon-Juhle called her on his cell phone to see if she'd be able to give them an hour or perhaps more of her time. This was when he learned that Vanessa had called her. Jeannette would, of course, be happy to see them whenever they'd like, but the meeting would have to take place at the San Francisco office of her attorney Everett Washburn. She gave him the address on Union Street, said she'd meet them there in forty-five minutes, say 4:30 P.M.
But their drive back down to the city was significantly extended when a deer decided to take a break from his rural environment on the Marin Headlands and seek a bit of impromptu urban culture, perhaps some nightlife, down in San Francisco. To do this, of course, he had to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. The three-mile crossing, ultimately successful with the help of a California Highway Patrol six-car escort, tied up traffic in both directions on the bridge for nearly four hours.
Everett Washburn was pushing seventy and affected a homespun style-baggy brown dress pants, red suspenders, an over-wide rep tie under a wrinkled rack sports coat. A walrus mustache and a florid, frankly beefy complexion gave him a vaguely Captain Kangaroo-ish appearance, although Juhle thought that the blue eyes under the mane of snow-white hair were about as warm and inviting as glacier ice. If Mr. Green Jeans pulled one of his dumb stunts on this guy, he'd take a bite out of his ass. Then again, Juhle realized, the lawyer had his game face on as he pulled open his front door, six or eight feet below street level under the Café de Paris. Ostentatiously, he consulted his watch.