The Hunt Club (33 page)

Jeannette Palmer pursed her lips, then finally relaxed her mouth and nodded. “Cameron went away the summer before to a ski-racing camp. They brought Todd home in late April the next year. Not to be uncharitable, but it was a little bit hard not to draw that conclusion. Although, of course, no one ever said anything to them directly, not to Ward and Carol. And they never treated Todd differently or referred to him as anything but their own son.”

Hunt wasn't far
from the Little League field at the Presidio, so he swung by there to find that the evening's early games had all concluded almost an hour ago. Juhle and his family were nowhere to be found, probably out having a postgame meal at one of the city's five thousand eateries. But he tried calling Juhle's house first—you never knew, they might have just had their game and gone home for the first time in history.

But no, the streak was still secure.

He then tried Juhle's cell again, got the voice mail again. He left a much more specific message than the earlier one: “Todd Manion isn't Staci's brother. He's her son. You've got to talk to the Manions immediately, Dev. And bring your handcuffs. Call me.”

But all pumped up, Hunt wasn't inclined to drive out to Juhle's house and wait until his friend got home with his family from wherever they'd gone out to eat. He had at least enough now to give Juhle leverage to start a meaningful discussion with Carol Manion.

But his problems with proof continued to plague him.

He knew that even if Todd was adopted, and even if Staci was his birth mother and Cameron the father, so what? If there was no record of any phone conversation or other contact between any of the principals—Carol Manion, Palmer, Andrea, and Staci—then the Manions could deny that they'd had anything to do with Staci since her arrival in San Francisco and stonewall Juhle forever. And with the banks of top lawyers they could afford to hire, they would.

At the very least, to make any headway Juhle would need proof that Staci was indeed Todd's mother. Cameron had died last summer at the age of twenty-four. Staci had been twenty-two. They would have been sixteen and fourteen, respectively. And they would have met while he was at ski camp. And the closest Hunt could come to that with Staci was in Pasadena, four years ago.

But at least it was someplace.

Hunt had learned in the people-finding business that quite often you started with the easiest, most obvious solution. Still parked in the lot by the Little League field, he punched up information for the Rose Bowl city and not really even bothering to hope, asked for Rosalier, first name unknown. Not exactly Smith, he was thinking. But then the operator said, “I have one listing,” and he pushed his star key to get the number, which he scribbled on his pad while listening to the telephone ringing four hundred–odd miles to the south.

“Hello.” A cultured woman's voice.

“Hello. Am I speaking to a Ms. or Mrs. Rosalier?”

“Yes, this is Mrs. Rosalier, but if this is a sales call, the dinner hour on Friday night really isn't—”

“Not a sales call! Promise. My name is Wyatt Hunt and I'm a private investigator working out of San Francisco. I'm trying to locate the relatives of a Staci Rosalier. It's really very urgent.”

“Staci Rosalier?”
The woman paused, her voice harsh when she spoke again. “Is this some sort of prank call? Some twisted joke? I'm going to hang up now.”

“No! Please.”

But it was too late. She was gone. Immediately, Hunt hit his redial button, heard a busy signal, hung up, and tried one more time with the same result. When after a couple of minutes he calmed down, he started his car and checked the time on the dashboard, still a few minutes short of eight o'clock. The sky was turning dark overhead. Maybe he should go out to the Royal Thai and check to see if Staci had left any references, pass Juhle's house on the way, see if he was home. Or would it be worthwhile, perhaps, after all, to drop in on the Manions?

As he was leaving the Presidio, he hit his redial button again. This time, much to his satisfaction, the phone rang. Pulling quickly to the side of the road, he shut off his engine, and waited.

When a man's voice said hello, Hunt answered with, “This isn't a prank call. Please don't hang up.” He identified himself again and gave his phone number, telling the man he could call him back if he'd prefer. Repeating that it was an urgent matter.

The guy heard him out, then said, “We know who Staci Rosalier is. She's the girl who got killed with the judge up in San Francisco.”

“That's right,” Hunt said. “I told the woman who answered before that we were trying to locate her relatives. I didn't mean to upset her.”

“You have the same name as somebody who gets killed, people tend to tell you about it. It's made my wife a little uptight. She thought you were some weirdo. We don't know any Staci Rosalier personally.”

In theory, that should have ended the call, but something about his answer struck Hunt. “I don't mean to be difficult, sir, but are you sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. What kind of question is that?”

“She would be twenty-two years old.”

This time, the hesitation was lengthier. “That's what we read.”

Now it was Hunt's turn to pause—if only for an instant. He didn't want to lose him. “You said you didn't know a Staci Rosalier personally. But it seemed that the name meant something to you.”

He spoke away from the phone. Hunt heard, “No, it's okay, I got it. He seems all right.” Then back to him. “It's just that, well, of course our last name is Rosalier. And we've got a daughter, Caitlin, who has just turned twenty-three.”

Hunt had no idea where Mr. Rosalier was going with this, but he intended to let him keep talking. “And?”

“And her best friend in high school was named Staci. Staci Keilly. She basically lived here with us for Caitlin's senior year. We used to joke that she really should be in the family.” The voice husked up a bit. “That's why when we heard about Staci Rosalier being the name of the woman shot with the judge—”

“Did you call the police?”

“No. We talked about it of course, but Staci Keilly really isn't Staci Rosalier. In the end, we decided it must just be a coincidence.”

Except, Hunt thought, that Juhle was right. There were no coincidences in murder cases. And of course the Rosaliers didn't want to become involved in any trouble involving a murdered federal judge. “If you'll bear with me a minute, sir, do you have any idea where Staci Keilly is now? Have you heard from her recently?”

“No. Not in a couple of years, anyway. Caitlin went back East to college. Middlebury. She was always kind of a nerd and a great student, and Staci was more…well, she had kind of a different life. She was very pretty and popular, the way high school girls are, you know. Anyway, after Caitlin left for school, we stopped seeing Staci.”

“What about her parents? Do they live in Pasadena?”

“I would imagine, yes. But we didn't know them. I gather the home wasn't very…not much like ours. They didn't seem to care how often Staci slept over here or how late she stayed. They weren't exactly the walking advertisement for quality foster care.”

Hunt felt an electric thrill that brought goose bumps to his arms. “You're saying Staci was a foster child?”

“Right. I mean, we got all this information secondhand from Caitlin, but the situation obviously wasn't very good. Which I suppose is why she hung out here.” He went silent for a beat. “You don't think the young woman up there…?”

“Was your Staci Keilly? I don't have any idea. That would depend on whether you think it's possible that Staci didn't like her foster parents so much that she renounced their name and took yours.”

“That sounds pretty extreme. But I just don't know. I've never heard of anybody doing that. She might have.” He cleared his throat. “In which case she's dead, isn't she?”

As her father had said,
Caitlin Rosalier was a nerd. Late springtime Friday night, and she was in her apartment in Boston alone, reading. “My parents gave you this number? Really?”

“You could call your home and ask them, Caitlin. I could call you back in three minutes.”

“If you don't mind, I think I will. And if I decide to talk to you, I'll call you back.” Her mother's daughter, all right. She hung up.

Three or more long minutes later, she called, sounding as though one of her parents, besides vouching for Hunt, had broken the bad news. The voice was tremulous, subdued. “They said you want to know a little more about Staci? I can't believe somebody killed her. Who would ever have done that?”

“That's what I'm trying to find out, Caitlin. Your dad said the Keillys were…well, maybe you could tell me what you know?”

“The main thing is I didn't know them too well. Just from what Staci told me mostly.”

“Which was what?”

“She didn't really like them, but also it didn't bother her too much. She was used to it, I guess. It wasn't like a real home exactly.”

Hunt had his own fairly well-formed ideas about some foster-home environments, but every one was unique, and he needed to know about Staci's experience. “How was it different?”

“Almost all ways. Except first, I guess, they adopted her.” This was unusual, Hunt knew. As a general rule, foster care was intended to be short-term, with eventual placement either back with the original or with adoptive parents. But only rarely did foster parents adopt any of their charges. “I think she was one of the first ones they took in, when she was like three or four.”

“Do you know why she was in foster care in the first place?”

“I think—this sounds melodramatic, I know, but I think it's true—she was abandoned at birth. Then bounced around to a whole bunch of places when she was a baby. Evidently, she was pretty high-strung and colicky and cried a lot. In fact, that's what she used to call herself, the High-Maintenance Kid. Which she really wasn't, high maintenance, I mean, not when I knew her. Anyway, until she got placed with the Keillys, and they kept her.”

“But there were other kids in the house?”

“Well, that was the thing. By the time Staci and I started hanging out, the foster-care thing was more like a business to her parents. Neither of them had other jobs and, you know, they get paid by the day and by the kid. So they'd just get kids delivered to the house by one of the agencies or another, then keep them a day or a few weeks, maybe a month…”

“Yeah, I know how it works,” Hunt said.

“Okay, but what got to Staci was the change. Where suddenly, with all the coming and going, she didn't feel like they loved her or even wanted her as a daughter anymore. She'd caused them nothing but trouble and hadn't been worth it in the end. She wasn't bringing in any money. In fact, she was a drain on them.”

“How had she caused them so much trouble?”

“That I don't know. She wouldn't talk about it. Just that she was the High-Maintenance Kid. But I gathered it was before they moved to Pasadena. Something must have happened, though, that changed the whole relationship, where suddenly they didn't think much of her anymore. Like they gave up on her because she was just too much trouble.”

“When was that?”

“I think the end of her freshman year. I mean high school.”

“And where did they live before that?”

“Fairfield, I think. That's in Northern California.”

“I know. I'm calling from San Francisco.” He paused for a second. “Caitlin,” he said, “do you know if what happened is she got pregnant?”

She hesitated. “One day, we started talking about if we were going to get married and have kids someday. You know, the way you do when you're in high school with your friends. And she started crying. I mean really crying. And then when she finally stopped, I asked her what was the matter, and she said she just didn't want to talk about babies anymore. Never ever ever. Babies were just too painful to her.”

“Why was that?”

“She had a baby once. They just took him away.”

Hunt still sat parked
within the bounds of the Presidio by the side of the street in his Cooper. He had one more stop to make on this bleak road if he wanted rock-solid certainty, and he had to have it. He consoled himself that he was actually performing a service for Juhle as well—locating Staci Rosalier's next of kin. The Keillys, too, were listed in Pasadena, and two minutes after he'd hung up with Caitlin Rosalier, he was speaking through the cacophony in the background—television, music, screaming children—to Kitty Keilly.

“I'm sorry. Who is this again, please?”

Hunt told her, then waited while she told him she had to get to someplace a little less noisy. Listening to her progress through her home—“Turn that thing down!” “Jason, put that away!” “No more food. I mean it, you!” “Damn damn damn!”—he got a decent sense of the environment from which Staci had fled and never looked back. A door slammed, and she was back with him. “There,” she said at last. “I couldn't hear myself think in there. Now, Mr. Hunt, is it? You said you were a private investigator, calling about Staci?”

“I think so. Although I believe she changed her last name.”

“Is she in trouble again? That girl was made for trouble. But I don't know how I can help you. We haven't seen hide nor hair of her for years now, since a few weeks after she graduated by some miracle. Not that that's not what you expect, of course, you been at this as long as we have. I mean, they have their own lives, and there's certainly no such thing as gratitude for the people who raised you. We've seen that enough, God knows. If she needs money, you best tell her she's barking up the wrong tree. But all right, what's she done now?”