"What?"
An embarrassed chuckle. "Well, it was a joke Andrea and I had with one another. Whenever she called on union business, she'd start by saying, 'Start your engines, Mike.'"
"Start your engines?"
"It meant we were on billable time from the git-go. This call, though, my secretary told me it was Andrea on the line, I picked up and said, 'I'm revving 'em up,' and she said, 'Not this time I'm afraid.' So it wasn't the union. Is this what you wanted?"
"I'm not sure. It certainly doesn't hurt."
"Good." Then, "Mr. Hunt?"
"Yes?"
Eubanks hesitated. "Do you think there's any chance she's still alive?"
"No one's found her body yet." Hunt's next words came out before he'd thought about them. "Until it turns up, I'm going to choose to keep hoping."
"That's good to hear, especially since the rest of the goddamn world's already got her in the grave. I hope I was some help."
He was going to make a few calls right away, but it was closing in on five o'clock and there might be something on TV that he'd want to see first.
Hunt had bought his television so he could watch sports and the very occasional rented movie. He hadn't tuned in to a single regular network or even cable show in years. People he knew sometimes used to talk about Seinfeld or Friends and lately now The Sopranos or Deadwood or those reality-show stupidities. He didn't get it-maybe it was a habit he'd just never developed. Even if he had the downtime, which was rare enough, he would always prefer to do something active, keep the body or the brain engaged.
But now he had his set turned on to the news. For a new all-time low in tastelessness, he gave big points to the first channel that came on, with its picture of a smiling Andrea Parisi in the corner of the screen, the caption "Andrea Watch," and a continually scrolling digital display under it counting the hours, minutes, and even seconds that she had been missing. 50:06:47.
Counting from the phone call to her cell phone, three o'clock Wednesday.
Changing the station, he caught a moment of anchor gravitas: "…who refused to be identified confirmed a few minutes ago that Andrea Parisi is now being considered a possible suicide and is, quote, not an impossible suspect, unquote, in the shooting deaths last Monday of Federal Judge George Palmer and his alleged mistress Staci Rosalier. San Francisco police would neither confirm nor deny this characterization, but…"
Enough already.
Hunt flipped to Trial TV. Rich Tombo was doing his part of the Donolan wrap-up out in front of the Hall of Justice, just around the corner. It seemed as though it had been forever since this morning in the street outside the Piersall offices when Spencer Fairchild had accused Hunt of colluding with Andrea in concocting this elaborate publicity stunt. When Tombo finished with his analysis of the prosecution's day in court, he staggered even the cynical Hunt by starting to introduce the new woman who would be taking over for the departed Andrea Parisi and providing insight into the defense…
Hunt couldn't even look to find out who it was.
Back on network TV, the next station he tuned to had moved along to the inability of authorities to identify any Rosalier next of kin. They had been supplied with a copy of the out-of-focus photograph of Staci's brother, and now the boy smiled out at Hunt while the female anchor's voice urged anyone who recognized this boy to either call the police or the number at the bottom of the screen.
But suddenly Hunt didn't see the kid's face anymore.
He saw the shape and color of what he was standing in front of. It, too, was out of focus, in the background, but once seen, unmistakable. In a second or two, he was back at his computer. Mickey's pictures of the Manion castle. The terra-cotta tower, the bougainvillea. He checked the other shots of the house from different angles, even finding the place where he supposed Todd Manion must have been standing when the picture from Staci's condo had been taken.
Back to Mickey's shot of Carol Manion and her son, coming down to the limo. And something else, at the edge of that shot.
He went back through the pictures again. One straight on of the front elevation, then one of the tower on the right, the triple garages and wide driveway to the left of the entrance portico. Hunt stopped on this one, leaned in to the terminal, although he saw it clearly enough-on the driveway, gleaming in yesterday's bright sunlight, a black BMW Z4 convertible.
27
Hunt knew Juhle was off coaching Little League, and so called his cell phone, where he got voice maiclass="underline" "Dev. The picture of Staci Rosalier's brother was taken in front of Carol Manion's house out in Seacliff. I don't know what this means exactly, but it's provocative as all hell to me. You might also want to see if there's a record of any phone calls between Palmer and Manion, office to office, home to home, anything. In any event, call me as soon as you get this. Go Hornets."
He next considered calling the Manion home, even going so far as to pick up the phone, but he stopped himself. What was he going to say? This was after all a family of extreme wealth and prominence with an exquisite sensitivity to privacy. They had a full-time publicist whose job it was to keep their name out of the newspapers except in preapproved fashion in the society or business pages. You didn't just call them up out of the blue on a Friday night, tell them you're a private investigator, and ask them questions about their son, their relationship-if any-with a murdered federal judge, his mistress, and a missing lawyer. As a homicide inspector, Juhle could perhaps make that kind of a call, but even he would be hamstrung again by their constant limitation in this entire affair: a lack of physical evidence of any kind. What was he going to hang his questions on?
And what did Hunt have, exactly? A completely legitimate phone call about an already scheduled appointment from a wealthy woman to her prospective attorney. A picture of a young boy probably taken in front of Carol Manion's house. A black convertible.
Yahoo.
Six hours ago, Hunt felt he'd had more on Arthur Mowery and Jim Pine and even Gary Piersall, and the pursuit of those chimeras had wasted a lot of his time and gotten him precisely nowhere. He needed something real, something tangible and compelling that would at least supply Juhle with a wedge he could use to open some kind of an interrogation.
Since he was already at his computer, he got on the Net and Googled the enormous Manion hit list again, trying different combinations to narrow the field somewhat. When he combined Federal Judge George Palmer and Ward and Carol Manion, he found that the families must have known each other at least socially since they had attended a slew of the same fund-raising events in the city. He tried Staci Rosalier with Manion-zip-then with Todd Manion alone and got no hits with both, although Todd had nearly a thousand of his own, all but four of them mentioning one or both of this parents. The four independent listings were evidently captions from pictures of him without his parents that had appeared on one society page or another.
After fifteen minutes and no new leads, Hunt gave up the computer search. Something might be there among all the information on the Manions, but unless he had a more exact idea of what he was looking for-and he didn't-finding it would take forever. Like Mickey with his pictures of the Manions' home, he had to come at it from a different angle.
Before he left his place, Hunt changed again, out of his sweats into slacks, street shoes, a heavy black sweater.
A half dozen cars clogged the small circular driveway and the immediate curb space around Judge Palmer's home on Clay Street. He parked seven or eight houses away, got out of the Cooper, and walked along the fog-draped sidewalk, still unsure of exactly what he was going to do. All he knew was that he had to act, to do something, look under rocks, talk to someone, get out of his place and away from the temptation of doing legwork on his computer. If nothing else, now at least he had a focus, a general thrust to what he wanted to discover.