When Juhle didn't answer his telephone, neither Shiu nor Poggio were tempted to free Hunt from the cuffs. It was greatly to their advantage to show that they had responded to an actual threat to the client's security from time to time, and if that threat were exacerbated by the inherent danger of a concealed weapon, so much the better. The Manions were paying top dollar to keep their home safe, and if there was never a legitimate threat to that safety, they might be tempted to consider cutting back on their preparedness-and their security forces.
Under no circumstances were Shiu and Poggio going to let this incident end without an official report of some kind. Hunt's new Sig Sauer P232 was not the weapon listed on his concealed weapons permit, and that was all they needed. So they called for a squad car to pick up their suspect and take him back to the local station for questioning.
Shiu, of course, knew all about Hunt's involvement with Juhle, but he'd been very much on edge and chafing all day-in fact for the past several days-under Juhle's not-so-subtle ridicule. Telling him to exert his authority at the lab. Joking about the San Quentin hamburger stand. Not funny. Well, Shiu would see how funny Devin would think this was-Wyatt Hunt behind bars overnight. Trespassing. In possession of an unregistered weapon.
Shiu closed his phone and walked back to where Poggio stood with Hunt. "What we do is, if we're looking for something," Poggio was saying, "we get a warrant based on probable cause, signed by a judge. Maybe you've heard something about this? So given that, maybe you could tell us what you were doing?"
"I've been working on the Palmer/Rosalier case and I had some questions I wanted to ask the Manions," Hunt said. "I was out here in the area, anyway, and I figured I would see if they were home." He turned to Shiu. "You know I'm on this. Tell him."
Shiu shook his head. "I know you've been working with Dev, sure, but I don't know anything about what you're doing here, and Dev's not answering his phone, so it doesn't look like your lucky night. What are you doing here, since we're talking?"
"I wanted to have a word with the Manions."
Poggio chuckled. "That's good. Except, you notice, they don't seem to be home. So you just happened to be passing by and were going to knock on the door? This time of night?"
Hunt lifted his shoulders. "I wanted to see if any lights were on, maybe look in the garages."
Shiu said, "That's funny. We've got you on videotape an hour ago ringing the doorbell that time, too. And you've been parked here in the street since before that. You think they showed up while you were sitting out in front and maybe you just missed them?"
To which Hunt could make no response that wouldn't dig him in deeper.
In another minute or two, the squad car pulled up. As they finally unlocked the handcuffs, each man took one of Hunt's arms and together they stuffed him into the backseat, slamming the door locked behind him. Shiu pulled the driver aside. "You can write it up as a twelve-oh-twenty-five"-concealed weapon violation-"but don't send him downtown or he'll just bail out. Keep him at the station until the next shift shows up in another hour, then we'll be down to talk to him."
30
Mickey Dade was a serious food-and-wine guy. When Hunt had called him earlier in the night asking him to drive up to wine country, if he'd realized that this was the weekend of the Napa Wine Auction or, as they were calling it this year, Auction Napa Valley-the Holy Grail of American haute everything-he'd have told his boss he wouldn't have missed it for the world.
In celebration of the day, all of the great local restaurants were going to have special tasting menus, some available at prices affordable to the hoi polloi. There'd be grills set up in parking lots, world-class chefs roasting spring lamb and quail and asparagus, oysters and sausages and eggplant, the air redolent with herbs and mustard and smoke from vine cuttings.
So Mickey had made his three hundred and fourteen dollars, plus fifty-one in tips on his regular shift, which ended at two in the morning. Dropping his cab off at the dispatch house, he picked up his own used Camaro, and then, sick of fog and not remotely interested in sleep, he pointed the car north on 101 and took it over the Golden Gate Bridge, by JV's Salon in Mill Valley, then past Vanessa Waverly's home in Novato. Turning east on 37, he averaged eighty-two miles per hour until he got to the Napa/Sonoma turnoff at 121, then jammed it up over the Carneros grade and onto Highway 29 in just a little over twenty minutes. Forty-eight minutes, all told, a new personal best.
Once in the valley, under a clear and cool night sky, he took the Oakville Crossroads over to the Silverado Trail-the other north/south artery in the valley-and turned north. In a few miles, he pulled left off the road into the driveway for Manion Cellars, obvious and visible even in moonlight. In front of him, the château itself looked down from a small promontory. Off to either side, the vineyards traced sinuous lines over an undulating landscape. Slightly to his right and up ahead, the promontory fell off into more vineyards, but above them, he could make out the line of four newly excavated caves back into the limestone rock, the doors that Manion Cellars was using for its logo.
The gate to the estate was closed across the driveway, so Mickey backed out and proceeded north on the Silverado Trail up as far as St. Helena and Howell Mountain Road, where he knew a few good hiding places, and here he parked on the side of a side street under a low canopy of oak. He carried a sleeping bag in his trunk for emergencies such as this, and within five minutes of setting his brake, he was sound asleep on the soft ground next to his car.
At five forty-five, Juhle got the paper from his front porch and brought it back to his kitchen table, where he laid it out next to his coffee. His shoulder had tightened up again overnight, but he'd made the decision to leave the sling at home, and he was going to stick with it. When his administrative miseries had concluded and they'd brought him back to work, Connie had given him as a present a device called, he thought-his French wasn't much-a café filtre that made coffee by filling a cylinder with very fine ground beans and hot water, and then pressing down on a strainer. It had been too painful to use since the burnout game he'd had with Malinoff, but this morning, in his new spirit of healing, as he forced the strainer through the black liquid, he realized that even the broken bones in his catching hand were truly on the mend.
The coffee was far thicker than anything he'd ever made at home, and he had developed a taste for the bitterness, albeit tempered with two teaspoons of sugar. Now he sipped, savored, opened the newspaper, looking for the picture of Staci's brother. Or was he, as Hunt now believed, Staci's son? Or was it a picture of Todd Manion, to whom Juhle had been cursorily introduced when he and Shiu had first interrogated Carol Manion earlier in the week?
Away on the Presidio Little League diamond, and then watching the Giants' game at the Malinoffs' last night, he'd missed the many times the photograph had been televised, and now he wanted to examine it again in light of Hunt's information.
He found the photo effortlessly enough, well positioned on the top of page five, but looking at it, he found himself disappointed and somewhat hard-pressed to place the face before him with that of the boy he'd shaken hands with a few days ago. In the first place, the fuzziness of the original photograph had been magnified by the half-tone reprint. Beyond that, the Todd Manion he'd met for only a few seconds was still clearly older than the smiling boy in this snapshot-indeed, neither he nor Shiu had remarked on any similarity between the two when they'd first come upon the picture in Rosalier's condo.