Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

by John Lescroart

  "I hear you. I do, Gina. But he thinks he can get somewhere the police haven't gotten to with his own investigation."

  "Well, he's an idiot then. I've got good investigators. Stuart's met one of them, Wyatt Hunt. He just got a load of dirt today on Caryn's business partner. We're all over this case."

  "I believe you. But Stuart doesn't care about that. He doesn't have faith in the system, Gina. He doesn't think the innocent naturally go free. He thinks mistakes happen, this arrest warrant being a perfect example. He doesn't want any part of the process."

  "It's too late for that, Jedd. It's started without him. Now the trick is to contain the damage. And if he doesn't show up on his lawyer's arm in the next few hours, everything from here on out is going to be much worse. You know that."

  "I know that. You know it. Do you want me to call him first? Try to talk some sense into him. At least he'll probably pick up if it's me."

  "There's a heartening thought." Gina considered for a second. "All right, but promise you'll get right back to me."

  "As soon as I'm off, regardless of what he says. I'll give it my best shot."

  "I know you will. And Jedd?"

  "Yo."

  "Not that I didn't appreciate it and all, but next time you've got an innocent man referral for me to defend, maybe you'll want to resist the urge."

  At seven thirty that night, with no dinner inside her, Gina was driving south on the Bayshore Freeway on the way to San Mateo, where Stuart was staying near Coyote Point in Room 29 of the Hollywood Motel. Jedd Conley hadn't had any luck changing Stuart's mind, and neither had Gina in a second long talk with her client from her apartment. In spite of that, she still entertained some hope that the face-to-face discussion she'd talked him into might make him come around.

  But the knot in her stomach and nervous tic in one of her eyelids were better indicators of her odds.

  Dusk was well-advanced by the time she knocked quietly on the door, which faced a two-lane road perpendicular to the freeway and along the edge of San Mateo's municipal golf course. A light was visible in the room through the venetian blinds; a shadow moved across it in response to her knock, and then she was standing looking up at her client, who had his cell phone to his ear, motioning her in, closing the door behind her.

  "My daughter," he mouthed all but silently.

  Nodding, Gina moved into the room and sat in a chair beside a linoleum table against the wall. The room was large, with two queen beds and a half-kitchen behind her in the back. Stuart went back to the near bed and sat propped with the pillows he'd piled against the headboard.

  "That wasn't your fault, hon," Stuart said. "That was between your mother and me. It didn't have anything to do with you."

  Gina watched her client as he listened some more, his face a mask of pain and regret. Grimacing at something his daughter was saying, he brought his free hand up to the birthmark near his eye and rubbed it mechanically. "That's just how she was with everybody. No, especially the people she cared about. She was just one of those insecure people who needed what she did to matter more than who she was. So if she wasn't accomplishing something ... I don't know . . . something tangible, like her inventions or her operations . . . well, the rest of it didn't have as much meaning to her. Yeah. That was me, too. Well, of course it hurt, but by that time you and I were just getting in her way. I know she was your mother, hon. I know it's not fair . . ."

  Stuart looked across at Gina, gave her a distracted nod and held up a finger, asking for another minute or two. Nodding, she half listened to a long-suffering father trying to explain the inexplicable to his devastated daughter. With something of a shock, she suddenly saw the handgun in full view out on the stand under the reading light between the two beds. To take her eyes off it, and to give Stuart a bit more privacy with Kymberly, Gina stood up and walked back into the half-kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of water.

  The sight of the gun had roiled her stomach anew and, now having drunk the water, she put the glass down and leaned against the counter, arms straight and with her weight on her hands, her face up, her eyes closed. She exhaled heavily, telling herself that the sudden stab of nerves was irrational, yet recognizing it for what it was. It was fear.

  What had she been thinking?

  Before in her life, she had only defended guilty suspects, and now here she was alone with her client and his gun, with a warrant out for his arrest for a murder.

  Drawing a deep breath, her eyes still closed, she sighed again.

  The words seemed to explode in her ear, directly behind her. "Are you all right?"

  She brought a hand to her chest and whirled on him. "Oh my God. You scared me to death."

  "I'm sorry." He flicked on the kitchen light overhead, the blessed brightness dissipating the shadows. "And I'm sorry about the phone. I had to talk to Kymberly."

  "I heard. She's having a rough time?"

  "My heart's breaking for her. She doesn't understand why Caryn didn't love her. She wants to have a chance to ask her one time. What she did wrong."

  "What Kym did wrong? Why would she think she did anything wrong?"

  "It's a little circular, isn't it? Because her mother had stopped loving her. It wasn't just Kym not saying good-bye to Caryn when she left to go to college. Caryn didn't make any effort to say good-bye to her, either. She was all just 'Thank God that's over and she's gone. Now I can get on with my life.' "

  "Was she that hard, really? Kym?"

  Stuart searched the corners of the ceiling for an answer. He ran a hand through his hair. "I don't have anything to compare Kym to. Maybe all kids are hard on their parents, or their marriages. All I can say is she sucked the energy out of both of us. I kept thinking ... we both thought that somehow it was our fault. That we'd spoiled her. But really, I don't think it was that. From the beginning, she was just so hard."

  "But isn't that the norm?" Gina asked. "Everybody says once you have kids, your life is never the same."

  Stuart met Gina's eyes. "That's true, but there are degrees. Most of our friends, back when we had mutual friends, they'd joke about how their lives had changed. But there was always good to go with the bad. With us, from early on, it was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know, Kym didn't sleep through the night until she was four years old! You know how tired you get with four years of no sleep? She was in diapers until she was almost eight. I mean . . ." But he couldn't find the words. He shook his head, trying to shake the memories. "Sorry."

  "There's nothing to be sorry about. It must have been difficult."

  He almost laughed. "Difficult's a good word. So now, how am I supposed to console her? She drove her mother away. That's the truth. She wore us both down until Caryn just gave up. Maybe she would have come back to caring about Kym after she wasn't living with us full-time anymore, but now Caryn will never get the chance for that. And it's just killing my little girl." Suddenly, he checked himself, apologetic. "But you didn't come all the way down here to talk about Kym."

  "I'm happy to talk about Kym. Whatever you want. Obviously you're still trying."

  He shrugged. "What am I going to do? She's my daughter. I love her. But Lord, sometimes you wonder when it's going to get better. If things are ever going to improve."

  Gina was leaning back against the counter in the narrow kitchen. "Maybe the first step is believing that they can."

  He gave her a weak facsimile of a smile. "That would be a pretty thing to think." Then, perhaps not meaning to sound so dismissive, he added, "But maybe you're right."

  "I am right, Stuart. It happened with me. A year ago I would have told you I was a lost cause. I'm not. Change is not only possible, it's the only possibility." Gina had him listening, and she pressed on. "You know, Stuart," she began, "you're the one who told me you don't want to live with suspicion hanging over you for the rest of your life. Has it ever occurred to you that getting legally cleared, getting an acquittal, is the best way to put that suspicion behind you, once and for
all?"

  "You want to ask O.J. about that?"

  "He's the exception that proves the rule."

  "Okay, but who's to say there won't be another exception? Or, worse, I'm the innocent guy who pulls life in prison for the crime he didn't commit. No thanks."

  "And so you think this—what you're doing now—is helping your case?"

  "You mean doing my own investigation?"

  "I mean being on the run. Any chance you have of ever getting reasonable bail in this case evaporates if the cops have to run you down."

  He shook his head. "Being on the run is a nonissue. It goes away if I find something." He came forward. "Listen. I talked to both Fred Furth and Caryn's lab assistant today at PII. They both say that there's something seriously going wrong with the Dryden Socket and Caryn was blowing the whistle on it, maybe as early as this week. She was really going to make a stink about it."

  "And—this is your theory?—that because of this, somebody killed her to stop her?"

  "I think it's absolutely plausible."

  "So do I. So what?"

  "What do you mean, 'so what'? It's a strong motive."

  "Agreed. Strong motive. And again, so what? Do you have a specific person in mind who had a way to get into your garage? Then have a glass of wine with your wife—"

  "That's not how it happened!" Stuart snapped back at her, his voice rising. "He snuck up on her and hit her from behind."

  "Do you know that? How do you know that?" Gina pointed a finger at him. "No, you don't know that, Stuart. In fact, the much more likely possibility is that whoever it was didn't come over with the intention of killing her. He came over to have sex with her."

  "No! She was . . ."

  But Gina pressed ahead. "Don't be ridiculous! Listen to yourself. Think about the reality, not what you wish might have happened to spare everybody's delicate feelings. She was naked in the hot tub. He got there because they'd been having an affair for a while and that's what they'd arranged. You with me so far?"

  "You don't know any of this."

  "I know it as much as you know anything about the motive. Forget the motive for a minute. The facts point to him being in the tub with her, and for the obvious reason. She knew you were going to be gone. Kym was already gone. She had the house alone, and they set it up together. They were being romantic, having a glass of wine. Everything was cool. And then they had some disagreement about something—probably not something like the Dryden Socket, which had been simmering for weeks or even months. Something personal, some change in their status quo. Maybe she told him she wanted to stop, and she told him this was their last time. Maybe anything. The point is, he couldn't deal with it. So he got out of the tub, went behind her, did what he did, and got out of there."

  His face set, Stuart nodded. "All right. Suppose we go with that. The problem is, Juhle thinks that mystery man must have been me. Same scenario, exactly. She told me she wanted the divorce and I lost it and killed her. Except that I didn't. It wasn't me."

  "Right," Gina said. "I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on that part. In fact, I don't think it was you, Stuart. If it was you, I don't think you would have come back down the next morning. You never would have done the CPR. And mostly, I don't think you would have done it to Kym."

  He looked across at her. "Never," he said. "Never."

  "I know. But my real point is, you're not going to get to any of this yourself. Not solo. Not even with me and Wyatt looking. And certainly not while the police are trying to find you. Who's going to talk to you once the word is out in the news? There's no chance."

  "So what am I supposed to do?"

  Gina drew a breath and held it for a minute. "You're supposed to come in with me, Stuart."

  He glared at her defiantly. "I can't do that."

  "You have to," she said. "There's no alternative, if you don't want to be taken by force when they find you, which they will. And then, if you don't actually get shot when they come to arrest you—which is not impossible—then you start off not only as a murder suspect, but as an armed fugitive, in which case you're in twice as deep shit as you are now."

  Stuart stood unmoving. "I know there's something going on with the socket."

  "Ya-fucking-hoo," Gina said. "I'm sure you're right. And there's also something going on with Bob McAfee. Wyatt had a long talk with him today, and his alibi isn't as strong as Juhle would like to have us believe."

  "Then why have they decided to arrest me?"

  She stared at him. "Are you kidding me, Stuart? Nobody's that naïve. Not even you."

  "What?"

  "You send your daughter to talk to a critical prosecution witness. She conveys the message that her testimony is inconvenient. What does that look like to you? You're lucky Kym's not in jail herself right now for witness intimidation." Her client's unyielding and uncomprehending expression pushed her into a rage. "Goddammit to hell, Stuart! They think you're dangerous. Get it? Dangerous. Killer on the loose. Armed. Threatening witnesses." Gina shook her head. "What the hell is the matter with you? Do you understand that the first cop that sees you will be ready to shoot you dead?"

  "But that's not... I mean, none of that is ..."

  They could go around like this forever. Gina reined in her anger, controlled her tone. She had to close the deal. "Look, Stuart. The good news is that we can get a hearing in ten days, and if they don't have their evidence by then, the judge might not hold you to answer at trial."

  "Might not." Stuart held out his hands, pleading with her. "I don't get it. Even if they really think it was me, why would they go ahead if they've got no way to prove it? Why wouldn't they wait?"

  She shrugged that off. "You want more? Beyond all of the above? Okay, you're a name. Your wife was important. When important people get killed, the public wants to see somebody charged, and if nobody is, the DA comes under fire. So Gerry Abrams is protecting the reputation of his boss. And at the same time, if Abrams convicts you, he makes his name."

  "So it's just politics? Stupid city politics?"

  "Politics. Ambition. Bad luck. You name it. But whatever it is, these are the cards we got dealt, and the only choice is to play them. I'm sorry, Stuart, but there it is. That's why I came down here tonight. There's no other option. The alternative—you hiding out this way—only puts off the inevitable. And you have to believe me, it would be much, much worse."

  "I could leave the country."

  "You could," Gina agreed. "Never see your daughter again, live with the constant fear of extradition, have everybody in the world believe you killed Caryn. Then your passport expires. What do you do then? You want to do that?"

  Stuart closed his eyes; his body sagged. Finally, he looked over at her. "I don't know if I can do jail, Gina. The idea of being with those guys scares the shit out of me."

  "I know. I don't blame you. But there's a separate section in the jail, outside of the general population, called Administrative Segregation, Adseg for short. It's where they keep at-risk prisoners. After you surrender, I'll try to make sure that that's where you wind up."

  "Surrender?"

  "Just a word, Stuart. Just a word."

  "Shit."

  "I couldn't agree more."

  22

  Gina parked her Jetta in her space under her building and, making sure that the garage door had closed behind her, took the inside stairs to the back door of her condo. Walking up the short hall, turning lights on all the way, she went directly to her kitchen and opened the freezer section of her refrigerator, where she had a stash of commercially frozen dinners as well as several labeled plastic containers of her own preparations.

  The largest of these was a deep, square Tupperware holder with a piece of tape on the side that read LASAGNA/SAUSAGE and she pulled that out, took off the cover, re-covered the dish with a paper towel and stuck it in the microwave, setting the timer for ten minutes. She walked over to the bar area and flicked on the radio which, since David, she'd kept tuned to classical.

&
nbsp; To the strains of a flute and guitar performance, she went to her bedroom, took off her clothes and got into a hot shower. Gina considered herself a no-nonsense person, and never more so than when she showered. In five minutes, she was clean and dry again except for her hair, which she toweled for half a minute, then combed out damp. From her dresser, she grabbed an old comfortable pair of blue jeans and one of David’s white button-down dress shirts, washed over the years now to a frayed near-translucence, soft as silk.

  Back in the kitchen nook, barefoot, she opened one of the straw bottles of Chianti that she'd bought at Cost Plus a month before, and poured herself a glass. She laid out a regular setting, complete with placemat, cloth napkin, fork, knife, pepper and salt, Tabasco and Parmesan cheese on the small table by the front window, and had just finished watering her early blooming Christmas cactus in its tiny pot on the same table when the microwave beeped.

  She brought the steaming lasagna over to her place. It wouldn't be cool enough to eat for a few more minutes, but Gina sat down anyway, picked up her wineglass, took a healthy drink from it. The guitar and flute on the radio had given way to chamber music, perhaps a Mozart concerto. She sat back, let out a long, deep breath and took another sip of Chianti, smaller this time, and started going over the events of the last couple of hours in her mind.

  She'd finally convinced Stuart that he had no choice, that he had to give himself up. In his presence at the motel, she'd called Juhle on his cell phone and told him that she was ready to surrender her client. How about tomorrow, say 10:00 a.m.?

  She also wanted to make clear to the inspector that Stuart was not now and had never been armed. He'd simply taken some money from his safe for random expenses and had to take out the box of ammunition to get at it; then in his haste to get out on the road he'd forgotten to put it back. He'd snuck out the back way to avoid reporters, not to evade capture. Aside from those small lies, she'd basically told Juhle the truth of what Stuart had been doing all day—talking to people who might know something he didn't about Caryn. He hadn't been running from the police and from his arrest; he hadn't even heard about the warrant. They'd be at the Hall of Justice at ten o'clock sharp the next morning.