Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

by John Lescroart

  Faro pulled at his goatee. "Only if he drove the speed limit, which nobody does."

  "He might have if he'd just killed his wife and wanted to make sure he didn't get pulled over," Abrams said. "Which would have blown the alibi."

  But Juhle was shaking his head. "It doesn't matter if he was speeding. Even if we call it almost twice that, say three hours, he left the house here at quarter to one. He could have been there at quarter to four. More likely it was probably closer to two hours, so he's at the ARCO station at three a.m., max."

  Faro was leaning over Abrams' desk, consulting his copy of the original receipt. "Yeah, but that's too early. He bought his gas and his Coke at four fifteen."

  This wasn't an impediment to the assistant DA, who suddenly had a clue he might be able to use. Hands at his lips, Abrams was matter-of-fact. "So he hung out up here for a while, Len, trying to decide what to do. Maybe he just sat in his car."

  "Maybe." Faro pulled at his goatee. "I don't suppose I need to tell you guys that if he did kill his wife, going back home was dumb. He drives back up to his cabin and nobody would have known. She'd probably still be sitting in that hot tub right now, and nobody the wiser."

  Juhle shrugged and said, "Not to sound clichéd about it, Len, but murderers have been known to return to the scene of the crime, make sure they didn't leave any clues laying around."

  Faro wasn't going to fight about it. "I'm only making the point, Dev."

  Deep in his thoughts, Abrams held up a hand, cutting off any more discussion. "Let's stay on point here, guys. Gorman left his home at quarter to one, he was in Rancho Cordova at four fifteen. Devin, do you have his exact address up at, where was it?"

  "Echo Lake. Why don't you just try that?"

  Abrams typed again, and they all waited again. "Call it eighty miles even. One and a half hours."

  "Uh-oh," Juhle said.

  Abrams opened his eyes. "What?"

  "One and a half hours from two o'clock is three thirty."

  "Yes it is, Dev," Abrams said. "And this means?"

  What it meant obviously had jacked Juhle up. He crossed the tiny office, knocked on the opposite bookshelf a couple of times, and then turned back with a light in his eye. "Okay, follow me here. He drives up from San Francisco after doing his wife, all right, none of us have any problem with him hanging around killing time in Rancho Cordova until he gets gas and heads back down, right?" Without waiting, he went on. "But the same is not true if he's coming down from Echo Lake. This situation, he's on his way home. He's not going to kill forty-five minutes or more before gassing up. He's going to stop for gas and continue on his way."

  "Maybe he left later than two," Faro said.

  "Maybe he did, but he said it was actually a little before. He's got an extra forty-five minutes that just plain doesn't work, even if we use his own timetable."

  Finally, Abrams sat up straighter and stretched. "I like this," he said. "This a jury can understand. If he left Echo at two and didn't get to Rancho Cordova until four, unless he got a flat tire or there was some traffic problem—we'd better check with the Highway Patrol and nail that down—then what was he doing? Whereas if he left the city at one, he'd just wait around until he could put some space between him and the murder."

  "That's it," Juhle said. "We get him to give us a sworn, clean and specific timetable, we can hang him on it." He looked at his forensics guy. "This doesn't sing for you, Len?"

  Faro was back scratching at his beard. "No problem as far as it goes," he said. "But still no physical evidence. Unless I'm missing it, which I'm not."

  Abrams flashed a disappointed glance at Juhle, clucked once, and said, "Len’s a spoilsport, but he's not all wrong."

  Juhle returned to the homicide detail to find the place unusually jumping. Normally, this time late on a weekday afternoon, a few bodies might be sitting at desks reviewing transcripts of interrogations, or writing up reports, or reading. Of the fifteen homicide inspectors in the unit, six would be a big number present at any one time. But Devin had heard the low-volume but electric buzz out in the hallway and he came in to pretty much a full house. There was a little bullpen area just inside the entrance to the room, next to the doorway to Lieutenant Lanier's office, perennially open but now strangely closed. A couple of steps in, Juhle stopped. Dev!

  Darrell Bracco appeared from between the lockers that divided the room. With a quick come-on-in hand motion, he got Juhle moving forward again. Nodding around at his colleagues stuffed among the desks, Juhle threw a look toward his lieutenant's closed-up office.

  "Hey, Darrell. What's going on? Marcel all right?"

  "You didn't hear?"

  "I guess not. What?"

  "My old partner, Harlan Fisk? The supervisor? He got a tip at lunch that the Fab Five is on the way over here. They're gonna do Marcel. Is that perfect, or what? So till they get here, Sarah's in there keeping him tied up."

  "What do you mean, they're going to 'do' Marcel?"

  "The Fab Five, Dev, the Fab Five."

  "Right. But my kids aren't teenagers yet. Are they some band? I don't know them."

  Rolling his eyes, Bracco leaned in toward him. "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. They're going to do Marcel."

  "What are they going to do with him?"

  "Dev. Come on. Tell me you've never watched the show."

  "Okay. I've never watched the show."

  Overhearing the conversation, Emilio Thorsten butted in. "You gotta check it out, Dev. The show's a riot. These five gay guys, they find some prototypical straight—basically Marcel; I mean, he's perfect— who dresses wrong and wears the wrong shoes and glasses and lives in like a gym. And they fix him up. The house, the clothes, the look, the whole schmear."

  "Gay guys do this? Why?"

  "It's a TV show," Darrell said, "that's why. There's five of them. The Fab Five. They take some straight nerd and make him hip. Or more hip, anyway."

  "And they're doing this to Marcel today?"

  "Closing time, according to Harlan, who's never wrong. It's gonna be awesome."

  Juhle had been in Homicide for six years and he'd seen worse attendance at mandatory call-ups. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he was more than a little out of the loop among his peers. Not only had he never seen the show, he obviously hadn't been part of the grapevine of communication today that had connected every other person in the detail. "They're going to come with like TV lights and a crew and surprise Marcel?" he asked.

  "That's the idea."

  "Then I've got a good one too," Devin said. "A good idea, I mean."

  "What's that?" Bracco asked.

  "Somebody better get Marcel's gun off him. He's going to blow their asses off."

  * * * * *

  Supervisor Harlan Fisk missed on this one. After about an hour of progressively more disappointed waiting, Fisk called Bracco and told him his source had gotten it wrong. Fifteen minutes after that, six fully dispirited homicide teams had finally gone grumbling out of the detail and were on their way back to their beats, to their witness interviews, to their snitches, or to their homes. Marcel Lanier's door was open again, and the lieutenant appeared to have remained unaware the whole time of the gathering of his troops and their subsequent dispersal.

  Devin Juhle had subpoenaed Caryn Dryden's home telephone records, but he wouldn't have those numbers for a couple more days. In the meantime, he sat at his desk with a list of the numbers he'd taken from her cell phone, which had an easily accessible record of the last ten calls she'd both placed and received. He punched in one of them.

  "Hello." A young woman's voice.

  "This is Inspector Juhle of San Francisco Homicide. Who am I speaking to, please?"

  "This is Kym Gorman. Just a second." He heard the voice speaking to someone in the room with her. "It's the police." Then a man's voice. "This is Stuart Gorman. Who is this?"

  "Mr. Gorman, this is Inspector Juhle."

  "Jesus, Inspector, don't you guys ever give it up? Why a
re you harassing my daughter?"

  "I'm not. I'm calling numbers from your wife's cell phone. Your daughter called her twice over the weekend and she called her back once. Did you know that?"

  "No, not specifically. But last time I checked it wasn't a crime for a daughter and mother to talk on the phone."

  "No, sir, it's not. I was just checking the numbers, finding out who your wife talked to in the last days of her life. Your daughter's was the first number I tried."

  "All right, then, you've tried it." A pause. "Look, Inspector, she's having a bit of a hard time dealing with things right now, as you might understand. Would you mind please letting this go for a few days? Would that be too much of a problem for you?"

  "No, I could do that."

  "I'd appreciate it. I really would."

  "All right, then. But you know, while I've got you, can you tell me one small thing?"

  "You know what my lawyer says. I'd better not."

  "But you've already said this one thing."

  "Evidently I said a lot. And you've got it all on tape, right? Use that."

  "All I'm talking about," Juhle went on, "is what time you left your place at Echo Lake. You said a little before two. I just wondered if you've had a chance to rethink that."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm trying to get my timetable straight. You said a little before two last time. You want to change that now?"

  Juhle waited through some silence until Stuart said, "No. It was a little before two. I'm pretty sure."

  "There," Juhle said, "that wasn't so hard, was it?"

  14

  Kymberly was half-watching the turned-down television from the couch. She glanced at her father, slumped now in one of the room's reading chairs. "Daddy, are you okay?"

  Stuart threw her a weak smile. "I think I'm finally running out of gas here, hon." He drew in a shallow breath. "I didn't know you'd talked to Mom over the weekend."

  "Yeah, a little." After a hesitation, Kym shrugged. "Is that what the police wanted?"

  "He mentioned it, that's all. What did you guys talk about?"

  "Not much, really. I got her twice Saturday, but she was running around, so we only actually got to talk one time, on Sunday."

  "What was she running around doing on Saturday?"

  Another shrug. "You know. It was Mom. Something."

  "She didn't say?"

  Much as Stuart was striving to keep everything low-key, this question brought the beginning of a rise. Kym brought her eyes all the way away from the TV and over to her father. "What? Why are you looking at me like that? Do you think I'm trying to hide something from you?"

  "No. And I'm not looking at you any way. I thought your mother might have told you something about what she was doing, why she couldn't talk to you, and that might have had something to do with whoever killed her, since it wasn't me."

  "Jesus, Dad, are you saying ... do you think it was me?"

  Here we go, he thought. But said, "No. Don't be silly."

  She sat up straight now, eyes growing wider. "You do! You think it could have been me, don't you? God, I don't believe this."

  His hand went to his forehead. He'd learned that he could sometimes control the direction of his daughter's outbursts by refusing to continue the confrontation. "Kym," he said evenly, from behind his hand. "Let's not go here. I don't think that, and never could. I know you loved your mother. I'm trying to imagine who could have done what they did. And all I want you to believe is that I didn't have anything to do with it. That's all I want."

  Miraculously, it worked. Kym seemed to pull back within herself for a second, then she nodded and got up from the couch, crossing over to him, kneeling down in front of him, her hands on his knees. "Of course I believe that. How could I not believe that?"

  "The same way I couldn't believe it about you, sweetie. Never. Ever ever." Stroking her hair, he went on soothingly. "But with all those reporters who were out there . . . You saw them and you heard what Gina Roake said. They're going to make me the suspect because that's where the story seems to be right now. We should be ready for that. And not get mad. Getting mad isn't going to help anything."

  "I know," she whispered into her hands, "I know that."

  "I know you do," he said. "And that's why you're not going to be mad at me if I ask if you've taken your pills today."

  She raised her face to look at him and nodded solemnly. "I started again this morning. I'm sorry. I felt so good at school I thought. . . but then I came down here. There was this party I heard about where a bunch of the new kids like me were going down to Santa Cruz ..." She stopped. "I know. I'm sorry. I'm trying." He let that go. It was going to have to be good enough.

  "You went and saw Bethany? What did she say?"

  "She said it was your car."

  "But it couldn't have been. I wasn't here."

  "I know. But she thinks it was, Dad. She saw it. It opened the garage door and pulled in. Who else could it have been?"

  "Maybe nobody. Maybe she dreamed the whole thing. Did she notice the license plate?" Stuart had a personalized California plate that read GHOTI—a little private joke compliments of George Bernard Shaw. The "gh" sound from laugh, the "o" from women, the "ti" from action. So ghoti, if pronounced "correctly," spelled fish.

  "She didn't say, specifically."

  "Well, if she didn't see that, it wasn't my car."

  "I know. But. . ."

  "What I'm saying is that maybe she could try to remember that one little detail. Do you think she'd be willing to talk to me?"

  "I don't know. I think maybe now it would scare her a little. I don't think she really got it that she was telling the police that it must have been you who killed Mom. Until I told her, and then she was all 'I didn't mean to say that.' Except she's sure it was your car."

  "You know how many dark-colored SUVs there are? Black, green, blue, brown. Come on. And she never saw me, personally, did she? Get out of the car or anything like that?"

  "No. But who else could it have been? I mean, who else had an automatic opener to get in the garage? That would mean Mom and . . . and somebody ..."

  "I know, hon. I know what it would have to mean."

  At about eight thirty they'd finished dinner, and the suspect walked out of Izzy's Steaks & Chops with his daughter on one arm and his sister-in-law, Debra, on the other. Immediately, a swarm of news people closed in around them, cameras flashing, voices raised and demanding.

  "Stuart! Give us a comment, huh?"

  "Why'd you kill your wife?"

  "How much was she worth?"

  "How much are you worth now?"

  "Who are these women?"

  "You got a girlfriend, Stuart?"

  Stuart finally stopped at the corner of Lombard and faced them. "I know you people are only trying to do your job," he said, "but I'd like to ask you all politely to leave me and my family to our privacy and our grief. On my left, this is my daughter, Kym, and this is my sister-in-law, my wife's sister, Debra. I did not kill my wife, and I'm going to cooperate in every way I can with the police in helping them to find who did kill her."

  A reporter said, "You know that the police consider you the prime suspect. What do you have to say about that?"

  "They're welcome to their opinion. You notice I haven't been arrested, though. If they had evidence, I'd be in jail. They don't, and they won't get it because it doesn't exist. I didn't kill my wife. That's all I've got to say. Now if you'll all excuse us."

  "You saw the picture, of course?" Gina asked him on the phone.

  "Me and Debra? They led the eleven o'clock news with it. Yeah, I saw it."

  "Whatever you say, people are going to think she's the other woman, you know that?"

  "Let them."

  "It won't help you."

  "All this public stuff is stupid, Gina. It won't hurt me if there's no evidence, and I don't see any evidence. Do you?"

  "No, but it probably wasn't the smartest move in the world to rub that in Juhle'
s face on television, either."

  "He'll get over it. Maybe it'll teach him not to share his suspicions with the media. He's going to fight me there; I'm going to fight him back. In fact, I'm half inclined to sue him for slander already. You do slander?"

  Gina gave a little laugh. "Not this week. I've got a murder case that seems to be heating up. My client keeps talking."

  "Freedom of speech. Use it or lose it. And speaking of which . . ." He told her about this earlier conversation with Juhle, the disputed time he'd left Echo Lake.

  "And you told him maybe it hadn't been two?"

  "No, I told him it was."

  "Have I mentioned that the preferred term of art is just to say 'no comment'?"

  "I tried. I tried."

  A silence. And finally Gina said, "So how's your daughter?"

  "She's a wreck. She cried all night. Her mom's gone and it's starting to sink in. That, and all the things left unsaid between them."

  "That's hard, those unresolved issues."

  "When she went off to Oregon to school, I told you about some of it today, they'd just had it out about what she was bringing up—or, more, what she wasn't bringing up. No makeup. One change of clothes. People up there weren't going to be shallow like they are down here, caring about all that external stuff. So, bottom line, she didn't even give Caryn a hug. She didn't come in and say good-bye. She just walked out the door. And the next thing she knows is her mother is dead. She's trying to find a place to put all that."

  "Does she have somebody she can talk to? A regular counselor?"

  "Are you kidding? A shrink a day, that's our motto. But I'm not sure that's what she needs right now."

  "Is she taking her medicine?"

  "As of today, maybe, if I believe her." Do you?

  "About as much as usual. Say, sixty percent."

  Gina asked, "And how about you? How are you doing?" She waited. "Stuart?"

  His voice was different. Gruff, unprotected. "It's started to hit me, too, I think. It's ..." He sighed heavily. "It's hard. I get the feeling it's going to get harder."