Treasure Hunt

“All right.” Juhle sat next to her. “God damn it. I’ll do it.”

“Aw, Dev. You’re so cute when you get all guy-protective.” She held out a hand to him. “But, I’m good, really. I’m a mom, after all. I’ve already waded through tons and tons of shit. And this is only mud. I’ll think of it as a spa treatment. But you, Wyatt,” she added, “you better point me straight at it or I’ll arrest your sorry ass on any charge I can think of or even one I make up.”

Hunt turned to Juhle. “She’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“You want to see harsh, point me even a little bit the wrong way.” And so saying, she finished tucking her socks into her shoes. Next she rolled up the bottoms of her pants and swung herself around, lowering herself into the mud, into which she sank as far as her ankles. “For the record,” she said, “this is not warm spa mud.” After a good shiver, she added, “Okay, Wyatt, point.”

Hunt stood at the charcoal X that Rand had drawn with his cigar the night before. He had a decent idea of the location of the tire iron and pointed out a tree on the opposite bank that Russo should head for. “It’s ten or twelve feet before you get to the water. You can’t miss it.”

She turned back to him. “I’d better not, ’cause I tell you right now I’m not going to spend a lot of time mucking around looking for it.”

It was, truly, one slippery step at a time, and she walked gingerly. When she was about halfway there, Hunt said, “I’d have thought you’d have dragged this lake already.”

“We did. We took out six Dumpsters of shit.”

“So how’d you miss this?”

“I don’t know. Murphy’s Law.” Juhle grunted. “Anyway, we’re here now, for all the good it’s going to do us.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because the water washes away the trace evidence. Except not all of it, not all the time. We’ll see.”

Just at this moment a black-and-white police car pulled to the curb above them and emitted a short one-note blast of his siren. Hunt and Juhle turned and saw two uniformed policemen coming out of the car and down the grass, looking stern and ready for action. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” the lead cop said, “would you mind telling me…?”

But Juhle already had stepped in front of Hunt with his ID out. Introducing himself, saying the magic word homicide, Juhle instantly transformed the cops into two nice guys who wanted to know if there was anything they could do to help.

“She’s got it,” Hunt said.

And sure enough, Russo was straightening up out in the middle of the mud, waving her arms.

Juhle turned back to the cops. “Actually, guys, you can help. One of you please call dispatch and have ’ em get CSI down here as fast as they can move. Tell them it’s the Como one eighty-seven.”

Lorraine Hess, associate director of the Sunset Youth Project, stood wringing her hands in her office doorway, facing the two police inspectors. “But you’re saying you don’t know if it’s from the limousine yet, is that right?”

“That’s right.” Sarah Russo, naturally taking point with the obviously distracted woman, nodded and spoke in her well-modulated, educated, nonthreatening voice. “All we’ve done so far is sent the tire iron itself directly down to the police laboratory for analysis. And all we know so far is that it’s the basic kind of tire iron that comes standard on a lot of cars, including the Lincoln Town Car. There’s a small chance, if it was the murder weapon, that it will still have at least traces of Mr. Como’s hair or blood or something recoverable through DNA, although maybe not. In any event, though, the thing’s a mess and it’s going to take some time, maybe a lot of time, to find out what we’re dealing with there for sure.” She trotted out her professional smile, which looked entirely genuine. “In the meanwhile, Inspector Juhle and I got to talking and realized that it would probably be worth our while to see if there was still a tire iron in Mr. Como’s limousine.”

“But why?” Hess asked. “I thought the limousine was back here by the time he was murdered. That’s what we’ve heard.”

Juhle decided to speak up. “That may be true, but-”

“It is true, I believe, Inspector.”

“Well, be that as it may, if the tire iron is in fact missing”-Juhle shrugged, nonchalant-“it at least opens the door to the possibility that someone from here at Sunset might have been involved in the murder.”

“But the tire iron could be gone from the limo and still not have been the murder weapon.”

“Yes, of course,” Sarah said. “And by the same token, if it isn’t gone, then we’re pretty much back where we started. It could be any tire iron from any one of hundreds of cars in the city. Anyway, the point is, with your permission we’d just like to look.”

Hess brushed a vagrant hair away from her forehead. “Well, sure. I mean, that goes without saying, but don’t you need a warrant or something like that?”

Juhle flashed a glance at Russo at the unexpected question. He cleared his throat. “A warrant would give us the absolute right to take that car apart and look all through it,” he said, “and I’m sure we could get one in short order. But we thought we could save some time and energy trying to find Mr. Como’s killer by just coming out here and asking if we could check the trunk, that’s all.”

“Right,” Hess said. “Of course.”

“Parked along the side, right?” Russo asked. “Do you have a set of keys?”

“Yes, and, yes, I’m sure I’ve got a spare bunch of them here somewhere, or maybe in Dominic’s office. Can you give me a minute?”

Russo nodded. “All the time you need.”

Hess turned and went back into her office, opened a drawer or two, sighed, closed the drawers again, then came by the inspectors again and walked across the lobby and into Como’s office.

“A little nervous, don’t you think?” Juhle whispered.

“She doesn’t want to think it’s one of her people.”

“I’d think she’d be happy for the chance to prove it’s probably not any of them. I mean, if the tire iron’s there…”

“I know what you’re saying. But the more I think about it, what does that really mean? If it’s there, it means nothing. If it’s not there, by itself it means nothing either.”

“It means somebody took it out.”

“Big deal. When? Six months ago? Yesterday? And even if our very own tire iron from the lagoon is what killed him, how do we know it’s that particular limo’s tire iron after all?”

“We don’t. That’s what makes this job so much fun. But it might, in fact, narrow the field. And you agreed to come out here, if you remember.”

“I just don’t know what we’re going to do if we find it’s gone.”

“If it is, it’ll lead to something. You just watch.”

“Great,” she said. “Words to live by.”

And then Lorraine Hess emerged from Dominic Como’s office, holding up a set of keys, wearing a smile that managed to be hopeful and fearful at the same time.

After swearing that she’d walked down to Union Square and bought a hot dog with lemonade and fries for lunch, Tamara gave Mickey the three names on the phone when he called in after the complete strikeout with Damien Jones.

But hearing about the duck people and Belinda the psychic, Mickey decided he’d be damned if he was going to talk to any of them. Getting together with nutcases who at least had some kind of a whacked-out story-Damien or the Blimp Lady-was one thing; but wasting his time with automatic fruitcakes like Belinda, for example, wouldn’t help the police or the Hunt Club. There was such a thing as an automatic, commonsense pass on certain people, and he’d make that point to Wyatt the next time he saw him. Meanwhile, he told Tamara to call him if the mysterious Hang-up Lady or any more or less legitimate crazy person called back and needed to have their evidence debunked, but meanwhile he was going to try to call on another source for inside information about Dominic Como.