"It really could be some time."
"If I get stir-crazy, I'll walk around. How's that?"
"Your call, sir, but please don't leave this area in the front of the house." He walked around the car and paused by Juhle's window. "Excuse me, but it just occurred to me. You're with homicide? Is this bad news? I mean, for the family? I do have a number to reach them, but only in an absolute emergency."
"Just routine." Juhle offered nothing else.
After a second or two, the young man shrugged and walked away.
Juhle sat in the car with the window down for a short while, enjoying the warmth and the sunshine. From his vantage point up here, he could see for miles in both directions up and down the valley. The green of the budding vines against the reddish soil, the jagged peaks studded with granite on the eastern slope, the cerulean cloudless sky with a lone turkey vulture circling in a thermal. It was a stunning panorama.
Closer in, he noticed that while the traffic wasn't exactly thin on the Silverado Trail below him, it was moving. If Hunt was correct in his assumptions-and he had been so far-Carol and Ward wouldn't be long.
It eventually got too hot in his seat, so he opened the door, slid out, and walked to the front edge of the parking area where the promontory fell off steeply below him. Here, with the foreground up close, the view wasn't as magical. With something of an effort given the grandeur of the rest of the setting, he reminded himself that vineyards, after all, were basically just farms that grew grapes as their crop.
And, indeed, in a little hollow to the side of the new caves, Juhle caught the jarring note of a truly dilapidated ancient redwood barn surrounded by what seemed to be an inordinate amount of rusting old farm tools, as well as some of the newer heavy machinery that had obviously been used in the recent excavations, gradings, and plantings-a couple of tractors, backhoes and rotary hoes, huge bits and drill parts, shovels and spades, mattocks and rakes. Some were glinting in the sun; most had fallen into hopeless, permanent disrepair. The land itself around the cave entrances was still scratched and stripped of its soil, the bare limestone shining like animal bones in the bright sunshine.
But he'd come here for a specific purpose, and much to his satisfaction, Juhle saw that he wasn't going to have the time to take any more inventory of the château and surrounding grounds up here. Just below him, a black BMW Z4 convertible crested the rise beyond the gate.
Juhle backed up a couple of steps until he was lost to the view of the car's passengers. By the time they cleared the promontory and broke onto the olive-shaded area where he'd been waiting, he'd put on his sunglasses and was walking toward them, his badge extended in front of him, his face locked down into impassivity.
His footfalls crunching noisily on the gravel of the parking surface, Juhle walked directly to Carol's side of the car, spoke before it had rolled to a complete stop. "Mrs. Manion? Inspector Juhle from San Francisco homicide. You might remember me. If you could spare some time, I'd like to have a few more words with you."
34
"I must insist," Ward said. "As you can see, this really isn't a good time, inspector. My wife is really feeling quiteill. We just had to leave the auction preview because of it, and I assure you we would not have done that if it wasn't quite serious."
The two men stood face-to-face in the circular, vaulted marble foyer. The fact that they'd acquiesced to this point and in essence invited Juhle inside the château represented a colossal logistical error on the Manions' part-if they'd made him stay outside, he would have needed a warrant to enter without their express permission, but once he'd been admitted, it would be a lot tougher psychologically to kick him out.
As soon as they'd come inside, Carol, in the attitude of someone overcome by heat, had collapsed into one of the wing chairs along the walls. Now she rested an elbow on the arm of the chair and, eyes closed, supported her forehead with the first two fingers of her right hand. Juhle's unexpected presence, appearing out of the blinding whiteness of the afternoon, had dealt her the day's second psychic blow and rocked her.
This had been Hunt's intention, the crux of his plan, and clearly it was working.
Juhle kept up the pressure. "Mr. Manion, I've driven all the way up here from San Francisco to ask your wife just a very few questions after which I'll be on my way. But I'm in the middle of the murder investigation of a federal judge, and it's critical that I have your wife's statement. If you'd like to take a few minutes to get her a glass of water or freshen up a bit, that would be fine, but this is really very urgent."
Ward Manion looked down at his wife, over to Juhle. "This is intolerable. I'm going to call my lawyer."
"By all means," Juhle said. "That's your right. But if you've got nothing to hide, the easiest thing might be to just answer my questions."
Manion raised his voice. "Nothing to hide? This is preposterous! You get out of this house right now. You can't talk to us like this…"
But Carol suddenly got to her feet, came up from behind her husband, and touched his arm. "Ward."
He whirled, nearly knocking her over. "Carol, sit back down. I've got this…"
"No. No, it's all right. I'll talk to him. I don't need a lawyer. As you know, we haven't done anything wrong."
"No, of course we haven't. But all this is so…so wrong. They're treating you like a common criminal, barging in like this…" Ward shook his head in disgust. He came back to Juhle. "This is absurd. What do you want to know?"
"What do you want to ask me?" Mrs. Manion said.
Juhle got out his portable tape recorder, turned it on, and put it on the umbrella stand next to the front door. "When was the last time you spoke to George Palmer?"
She sighed heavily, threw a weary glance at her husband, and sank back into her armchair. Finally she raised her eyes to Juhle. "On last Monday afternoon. He called me at my house to invite me to a party."
It went on for nearly a half hour. It all came out-the long-ago relationship between Staci Keilly and her natural son Cameron, the connection between Staci Rosalier and Palmer, the photograph, her son Todd's true identity. To everything, her answers were straightforward and unambiguous. She admitted to the incredible coincidence factor. But she really hadn't known who Staci Rosalier was. She'd never heard the name before it had been in the press last Wednesday. If the victim's name had been Staci Keilly, of course, she would have notified the authorities. As to the photograph, naturally she'd noticed some similarity between the boy in the picture and her son Todd, but given the fact that she knew she'd never met this Staci woman-and why would this strange person have a picture of Todd?-she wrote it off as another in what was turning out to be a bizarre string of coincidences. But for the record, she didn't think the other boy looked exactly like Todd, anyway.
Finally, Juhle brought it around to Andrea Parisi, and Carol again said that she'd already told him about her original telephone call to Andrea, the invitation to be the celebrity emcee at the Library Foundation benefit, the appointment that Parisi had never kept. What was the problem?
Juhle hammered at the apparent discrepancies: Why did she wait three hours before calling Parisi's office after the time of the meeting when Parisi hadn't shown up? Why didn't she call while she would have been waiting in frustration? Why had Parisi told colleagues at her law firm that their meeting was going to concern custody issues? Given that, did Carol expect Juhle to believe that Mrs. Manion and Staci, Palmer, and Parisi were not already involved in negotiations over the child to whom they both had a claim?