The Hunt Club (3 page)

“It's okay, honey,” her mother said, and the girl gingerly took the potato chips, pulled open the bag, and started eating them quickly, one by one.

I took advantage of the distraction to break the ice with her. “So, Keeshiana, you haven't been outside for a time?”

She looked a question at her mother, got a nod, came back to me. “No.”

“You ever want to?”

She ate another chip, this time looking down at the table in front of her. “It's 'cause I'm bad, Momma says. That's why he wants me.”

“I been prayin' every day,” Lettie said. “Every night. She gettin' better.”

I wasn't sure I understood, but I didn't like the sound of any of it. “How are you bad, Keeshiana? You don't seem bad to me.”

“Momma says.”

“No,” Lettie said. “I don't say. But Satan, he callin' her.”

“How does he do that? Lettie? Keeshiana?” I looked from one to the other. Finally settled on the mother. “Lettie. How long has it been since you've let her go outside?”

Her eyes went to her baby. She shook her head. “Since he got here.”

“The devil? When was that?”

“I don't know exactly.”

“A couple of weeks? A month?”

Lettie blinked against the onset of tears. “She go out and you can't fight him. He take her.”

“He won't take her,” I said. “I was just out there, and there was no sign of him.”

At that moment, the wind gusted with a low shriek, and the kitchen window shook above us. “There's your sign,” the mother said. “He laughin' at you, waitin' his chance.”

“That was the wind, Lettie. Just the wind.”

“No! He got you fooled.”

“Momma,” Keeshiana said. Now she was holding the Snickers bar. “Please.”

Lettie again nodded.

Trying to escape the absurdity, I resorted to harsh reality. “Lettie,” I said softly. “Mrs. Jefferson, listen to me. I need to know that you're going to let Keeshiana out of the apartment here so she can go back to school. Do you understand?”

“But I can't. I really can't. You can see that.”

I didn't want to get into threats that I would take the child. If I didn't make progress, I'd have to get to that soon enough. Trying to remove the girl from her mother's custody would always be a last resort, and it was the last thing I wanted to do. “I tell you what,” I said. “Why don't you and Keeshiana dress up warm and we go outside now for a minute all together? Lettie, we can each hold one of Keeshiana's hands. We see anything that makes us uncomfortable, we come right back in here. Promise.”

Lettie was frowning, shaking her head from side to side, but the young girl stopped her chewing and her eyes lit up. “You could just undo me a minute, Momma,” she said.

Struck by the phrase, hairs raising on the back of my neck with premonition, I said, “What do you mean, ‘undo,' Keeshiana?”

“You know.” She wriggled in the chair. “So I can get up?”

Frustration crowded out any other expression on Lettie's face. “You fine,” she said to her child, then spoke to me, her tone dispassionate, even reasonable. “She don't need to go gettin' up. She get up, she try an' go out.”

My flat gaze went from Lettie to her daughter. “Keeshiana, I'd like to see you stand up, please.”

Her eyes, panicked, flew to her mother.

Which was my signal. With an exaggerated slowness, I pushed back, stood up, and sidestepped to Keeshiana's end of the table. Pulling out her chair, I drew in a sharp breath. A clothesline wrapped perhaps a dozen times around her waist and legs held her in her place.

Devin Juhle,
the homicide cop from my childhood, fell in next to me as I emerged from the darkened pod into the bright and windswept cut of packed earth and glass that led out to the sidewalks. I was carrying Keeshiana in my arms, a blanket wrapped around her legs, her own arms around my neck.

“What are you doing?” Juhle asked.

“Getting her out of here. Her mother had her tied up.”

“She let you just take her?”

“I explained the situation, gave her the forms.”

“Still. Anybody sees you or she come screaming out raising a stink, the people here…”

“The mom's gonna learn to live with it. I do this for a living, okay? There's a technique.” I was walking quickly, breathing hard. “You got a car nearby?” I asked. “I'm three blocks away. Mistake.”

“Yeah, but anybody comes out—”

“That's why I'm in half a jog here, Dev,” I snapped, cutting him off. I indicated Keeshiana. “I'm worried about her.”

“My car's just down here, around the corner,” Juhle said, and led the way for us, double time.

Deputy Director Wilson Mayhew
left a polite note in my cubicle asking if I could please come to his office at my earliest convenience. There was nothing ominous about the summons except that it was the first time I'd had any personal contact with Mayhew since we exchanged cordial hellos at the Christmas party two years before. At that time, finger right on the pulse of those he supervised, he had asked me what my connection was to the CPS. Since I'd only been with the department for eight years back then, and ever since Mayhew himself had come aboard five years before, I told him to keep it between us, but that I was really FBI, working under-cover to ferret out the pimp who was running the illegal-alien child-prostitution ring out of the CPS. Surely he'd heard of it.

After that, at least he knew who I was.

So that October afternoon, I found myself standing in front of the DD's desk in his third-floor office on Otis Street. Though the furnishing and decor of the rest of the CPS offices could have been case studies in drab bureaucratic aesthetics, heavy on grays, greens, and metal surfaces, Mayhew's workplace, like the man himself, was done up in a semblance of style if not taste. The desk was an enormous redwood burl, polished and asymmetrical, without any apparent drawers, and a flat surface only large enough to hold a phone and a nearly empty in-and-out box. There was no sign of a computer or workstation of any kind. He had three Walter Keane paintings—large-eyed children on the verge of tears (get it?)—framed and hung to cover any free wall space. A teak credenza hugged the wall to my right, opposite the windows. It was covered by a large crocheted doily on which stood what appeared to be an actual silver Russian samovar. The bookshelves behind him held very few books and mostly featured silver-framed photographs of Mayhew with the past three mayors, the chief of police, Governor Gray Davis, Boz Scaggs, Danielle Steel, and a few other celebrities I couldn't identify. The top shelf was entirely devoted to Lladró ceramics. Touching.

Mayhew stood. His Armani couldn't disguise the extra forty pounds he carried. His round, faintly cherubic face glistened slightly over the double chin, as though perhaps he'd overscrubbed it. A high forehead wasn't improved or mitigated by his decision to comb what hair there was straight back. His own mother probably wouldn't have called him attractive, but he nevertheless exuded a confidence born of the exercise of power. The fat older white guy who'd made it, and if you didn't like how he looked, you could bite him.

He pushed his bulk up from in his chair and reached over the desk to shake my hand and thank me for coming so promptly. He was back in his seat by the time I answered.

“Sure. What's up? Is there a problem?”

“No, no. No problem at all. In fact, rather the opposite.”

“Great.” I waited.

“So how long have you been on the street now, working cases?”

“Eight years, sir.”

He emitted a low whistle. “That's what I'd understood. Do you realize that you're the senior caseworker downstairs?”

“I hadn't really thought about it.”

“And you've had nothing but glowing evaluations all that time.”

I shrugged. “I care about the work, sir.”

“Obviously. Obviously.” Sitting back, he linked his hands over his stomach. “The point is that you've got a lot of firsthand street knowledge you could pass on to new caseworkers coming up into the department.”

“I try to help when I can.”

“Yes, well…but I was thinking we might want to formalize that relationship a bit.” He came forward, his small eyes locking into mine, a smile of sorts appearing. “I'll put it right to you, Wyatt. Have you ever considered stepping up to supervisor?”

“I've never applied, no, sir.”

“Why not?”

I gave it a moment's thought. “I guess I like being on the street.”

“That's commendable. Where the action is, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Would you consider moving up?”

Again, I didn't answer right away. I must have appeared to be looking around the room at his pictures and trophies.

He blindly read it as envy. “With your stellar record to date,” he said, “it's not out of the question you could be sitting here where I am in a matter of years.”

Oh, be still, my heart.

Besides, this was a blatant lie. Mayhew himself had never worked the street. I didn't even know for sure that he had a master's in social work, which was a prerequisite for us street types. But casework was not one of the prerequisites for deputy director. Political connection was. Mayhew was the brother of a city supervisor, Chrissa Mayhew. I neither had nor wanted to have any part of that.

But we were being friendly, and I saw no reason to change the tone. “Well, it's flattering that you should consider me…”

He jumped in again before I could outright refuse. “It's quite a significant bump in salary, you know.”

I shook my head. “It's not that.”

“What is it, then?”

“What I said. I guess I'm just not much of an office person. I like going out on calls.”

Sitting back, slumped in the chair again, Mayhew's face had closed down. “And you often go out alone.”

It wasn't a question. Still, I said, “Yes, sir, I do.”

“Why is that?”

Because most of my coworkers, whom you've hired, are unmotivated, you idiot.
But I said, “Sometimes it's hard to coordinate schedules.”

“And do you think that's particularly efficient?”

“Sometimes in the field, an inexperienced partner can be more a hindrance than a help.”

“But how are they to gain that vital hands-on experience if veteran caseworkers won't go on calls with them?”

“Well…it's not a matter of ‘won't.' Some of the people downstairs feel like they have to write up their reports, and that's their priority. And sometimes that keeps them at their desks.” We were leaving the faux friendly arena quickly. “As to efficiency, you said I've had good performance reviews.”

“On the calls themselves, yes. But we've got a ship to run here, and we need all the sailors to cooperate if we're going to keep it afloat.”

The old salt in me failed to respond to the analogy.
So hire people who want to go out and do the work.
But I dredged up a hopeful smile. “I like to think I'm cooperating, sir.”

For a long moment, Mayhew chewed on his thin lower lip. Sighing heavily with apparently deep regret, he said, “We've got several promising young people we'd like to bring on here, Wyatt, and frankly they could start at a much lower salary than you're drawing right now. Even if you moved up to supervisor, the impact on our budget would be positive if we could bring some of these people on.”

So now it was a budget issue. Mayhew was pulling out all the stops as I began to see the bottom line. He'd promised a job—
my job
—to the son or daughter of one of his cronies.

“Who would I be replacing?” I asked. “As supervisor?”

“Darlene's been out on maternity leave for five months already,” he said. “Two more than she applied for. I don't think she's coming back.”

“Can I give it some thought?” I asked.

“Sure.” The shiny face beamed. “Take a few days, Wyatt, as much time as you need.”

I said no.

Two weeks after my refusal, Mayhew announced an administrative shakeup in the department whereby the three caseworkers with the most experience—that would be me, Bettina Keck, and a ten-year vet with chronically poor attendance named Lionel Whitmore—would evaluate both the seriousness and the credibility of abuse reports and assign caseworkers as appropriate. This was essentially the role that our level-one supervisors had filled before, and it was full-time in-office work, but no raise was involved this time.

Every actual case of child abuse was serious, of course, but not every call to report abuse was legitimate. When I'd first started working, I was surprised at the number of these complaints to CPS that turned out to be bogus—called in by fathers wanting to get their baby's mama in trouble or neighbors as payback for other neighbors making too much noise at night or an ex-wife wanting to hassle an ex-husband while he had the kids for a weekend. These and dozens of others like them were the all-too-common ugly, stupid, petty scams in which kids were used as pawns in the adults' games. Citing the facts that we were chronically understaffed, hammered by budget constraints, and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of legitimate complaints, Mayhew decided that his experienced caseworkers would be just the ticket to separate the wheat from the chaff among the complaints and thereby improve the efficiency of the CPS as a whole.

Mayhew's plan was as obvious as it was simple. From his point of view, I wasn't a team player, Bettina was a candidate for rehab, and Lionel was useless. If he could keep me off the street, I'd probably quit before too long. And without me holding down the fort on the false complaints, Bettina and Lionel would both screw up eventually if not sooner, clearing not just one but three caseworker spots. Mayhew could then make three of his wealthy friends happy and maybe get himself a new car—or at least another silver samovar or photo op with a famous person.

But truly outraged now, I would be damned if I was going to let myself be so easily ousted from a career I cared about. I figured I could outlast Mayhew. He needed good, solid caseworkers or he would begin to look bad from the outside. I figured it would be a waiting game, and I'd play it until the worm turned, then I would get assigned back to the street. And thereby win.

Wrong.

Late one Friday afternoon in February, alone at my cubicle—both Bettina and Lionel gone AWOL earlier in the day—with a stack of complaints that needed to be evaluated before the weekend in front of me, I fielded a mandated report from the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital. A five-year-old Hispanic boy, Miguel Nunoz, had been admitted at a little before two o'clock that afternoon with a broken arm that struck hospital officials as unusual. I called the admitting station and talked to a Dr. Turner, who had discovered that this was the boy's third admission to three different hospitals—two broken bones and a dislocated shoulder—since his mother had taken up with a new boyfriend. Now they had casted the arm, and the mother was, even as we spoke, waiting to take Miguel home, but Turner thought somebody from CPS ought to get out there and talk to both the mom and her son and evaluate the situation before the doctor would feel comfortable releasing the boy back into his mother's custody.

I tended to agree.

Willa Cardoza and Jim Freed were just coming in for the swing shift. Inseparable, both were new hires within the past two years, which meant they were Mayhew's people. I'd never before had anything but professional interactions with either of them, and while not exactly gung ho, they showed up to work every day and seemed okay. At least, apparently, they went out on calls, filed decent reports, did the minimum. I also didn't know at the time—I was not a supervisor and so had no access to worker files—that neither of them had yet had to pull the trigger, i.e., forcibly remove a child from a parent's custody.

Nevertheless, they were the best, not to say only, choice at hand. My job was to evaluate the legitimacy of the complaint, and this one was no doubt as real as a heart attack. So I gave them the quick synopsis and told them they'd better hustle, the mom was sitting in the waiting room, anxious to take the boy home, and Dr. Turner wasn't going to be able to stall her forever.

By the time they left and I'd finished the last of my pile of evaluations, it was close to seven o'clock. Still concerned about the seriousness of the complaint, I swallowed my bile and went up to see if Mayhew was still in his office. His secretary had gone home, but he was there, drinking what looked like brandy in a snifter, talking to someone on the telephone. He made a fast excuse and hung up when he saw me in his doorway. It was my first audience with him since I'd turned down the promotion.

“Yes, Hunt, what is it?”

I'd been Hunt, not Wyatt, since the day. I briefed him on Miguel, told him whom I'd assigned, and said that I thought that this was a case he might want to keep an eye on over the weekend, to follow its disposition.

He thanked me for my responsibility in bringing this serious case to his attention and said that's just what he'd do.

Ms. Nunoz took Miguel home
on Friday night. On that Sunday, he was again brought to the hospital, but this time with a concussion from which he did not recover. At the inquest, Dr. Turner testified that he had spoken to me and that I'd assured him that CPS would have someone out to the hospital within an hour, two at the most, but that no one from the department had arrived.

In both of their individual testimonies, Cardoza and Freed admitted that I had given them the case, but that I'd put no particular emphasis on it. Certainly, I had put nothing in writing (and in my haste to get them moving, this at least was true). They'd even gone on another call first—they had the address and case number to prove it—and had arrived at the hospital long after Ms. Nunoz had gone home with her son. Believing that Dr. Turner would never have released the boy if he'd believed there to be danger, they had gone to their next call and left a follow-up note on the Nunozes for Monday morning.