"The truth? I would have preferred her office." He shrugged. "My position, I can't afford even the appearance of impropriety. This thing tonight's going to be a bitch to spin. I don't know what I'm going to do. But beyond that, my wife's got serious issues with infidelity. Frankly, so do I. Plus, so you know—and I'm laying it all out for you here as honest as I can—Gina and I had a spent a few nights together before I was married. I didn't know she was still carrying a torch." He shrugged, a victim of Gina's feminine wiles. "But I knew she needed help with Stuart's defense, and he's my bud, and that's where she was, at home. So I went."
"But when you got picked up, you weren't at her home?"
He shrugged. "Because right after I walked in the door, I knew I had to get out of there."
"Why was that?"
"Why do you think? She'd poured us both a couple of stiff shots of scotch. She had on a pretty provocative top. It didn't look to me like her plan was to parse the law. She said she had the key to Stuart's, and said maybe we ought to go by there, give the house another look. Maybe we'd find something you guys—the police—had missed."
"And how'd you react to that?"
"It seemed weird to me. But she was trying to get all over me by then, and I thought it would be a good idea to get out of the house. I didn't know what was going on, but I didn't want to offend her. Okay? So we drove over to his place and I don't know if her drink had hit her or what, or if maybe she'd had more alcohol before I got to her place, but she was getting pretty worked up before I even pulled over. She still loved me from before, that kind of thing. I never should have stopped seeing her. She was letting herself get pretty hysterical."
"And then what?"
A deep sigh. "She tried to come over and kiss me, but I wasn't going there."
"What did you do?"
"I told her it wasn't going to work. If she wanted, we could see if we could find anything that might have been missed at Stuart's. Otherwise, I was going to drop her back at her place and go home. I just got out of the car, hoping she'd calm down. But she didn't."
Juhle, all in all impressed with the story Conley had concocted in the lengthy time he'd been stewing in the interrogation room, was moderately curious to find out how Conley was going to explain the fact that he'd been coming out of the back passenger door when the officers had apprehended him—maybe the love-crazed Gina Roake pretended that she couldn't get her seat belt off, intending to ravage him sexually as he reached across her to unfasten the lock, but Jedd guessed what she was planning, so he came in the back door to undo the seat belt from there. And that's when she'd finally attacked him for rejecting her. Over the seat.
Juhle didn't think so.
And besides, he'd heard enough. "But as the officers pulled up, they distinctly saw you pounding on the door, trying to get into the car."
Conley licked his lips. "Well, yes," he said. She had accidentally locked him out, and he'd become frustrated with the situation, but the cops were wrong if they thought they'd seen him attack her, and he had no idea where the garage door opener had come from. Roake must have brought it—got it from Stuart, perhaps.
"Well, no, sir," Juhle said. "I'm afraid that won't work either. In fact, the officers didn't just happen by. They were watching the house. And so was I."
"The house is a murder scene. I assumed it must have been under some kind of surveillance."
"Actually, no, though. That wasn't it. In fact, Gina Roake had her investigator call me up earlier in the night. He asked me to come on down to Stuart Gorman's place and wait for you and Gina to drive up in your car and stand by." Juhle's statement seemed to shake something loose in Conley, who hesitated slightly, his mouth open to refute a charge that Juhle hadn't quite made. "The idea was that she could open Gorman's garage door from your car."
Another small but obvious hit. Quick as a bird, Conley looked away, blinked, looked back. "Why would she want to do . . . ? How was she going to do that?"
"She thought you'd programmed your car so you could get in and out of the Gormans' garage without leaving your car on the street. And also, of course, so you wouldn't be seen coming and going. Or else so that people, at a glance, would assume it was Stuart, as Bethany Robley did."
"Who's she?"
"The neighbor across the street. She saw your car open the garage on the night Caryn Dryden was killed."
"Well, no. That wasn't me. It couldn't have been me. I wasn't anywhere near the house that night. I was at an event for Greenpeace, I remember. She must have planted that garage door opener."
"You remember that specific night, do you? Among all those events you go to?"
"I happen to remember that one, yes. I mean, after hearing about Caryn, the night stuck in my memory."
"So you were never at Caryn's house on that Sunday?"
"No. Of course not."
"But you know, as it turns out," Juhle said almost apologetically, "and you might not have noticed with all the excitement, but Gina did open their garage tonight from inside your car. That was our signal to come running. And she had a tape recorder in her purse, so we know whose idea it was to go to the house." The inspector's blood was starting to run high, but it would not do to show anything. Helpful, courteous to a fault, he went on. "You're certain you weren't there on that Sunday?"
"I told you that. No, of course not."
"But you'd been there recently, at least?"
"Not even that. Lexi and I didn't see them socially. I haven't been to their house in several years."
Sadly, Juhle shook his head. "I'm afraid that's not going to do, sir. Even if it isn't your fingerprint on the one large shard of broken wineglass we found—and I think it is—some of your fingerprints are going to be somewhere in the house, don't you think? Probably in the bedroom. The problem was, we didn't have your fingerprints in the criminal database the last time we looked. And now, of course, that won't be a problem. Same thing with the blood we found in the garage. With your DNA sample, we're going to get a match, aren't we? God," Juhle said, "this is thirsty-making work. Can I get you a Coke or a water or something? I'll be right back."
Juhle walked out the door and crossed the homicide room to get a couple of paper cups full of water. On the way back, he looked in to check the video screen again. The camera was camouflaged into the wall and Conley, though he probably suspected that he was being filmed and/or recorded, couldn't know for sure, and that uncertainty would help to keep him off-balance. His head was whipping from side to side, up to down, as though searching the room for a place to hide or escape. Juhle watched until that stopped and Conley rested his head down upon his open palm.
Coming back into the interrogation room, Juhle pushed the water across at his suspect. "I don't know if you realize it, sir, but at the hearing, Gina Roake made a damn good case for the fact that Caryn might not have been killed at all. Somebody being there at her house on Sunday doesn't necessarily mean that they killed her. It might very well have been an accident. I can understand why you wouldn't want it to come out that you were there. Maybe you really weren't having an affair. Maybe it was just a harmless business meeting, but you were afraid of how it would look. This is really important now. I can't imagine that you would have killed her, but you have to tell me what happened."
The lifeline thrown, Conley stared at it for a long moment, then made a reach for it—the only move he had left. "All right. But it was early in the day. She was a wreck about her invention. You know about that, don't you? The Dryden Socket. She wanted my advice about what she should do."
Same as with Gina, Juhle noticed—a woman needed his advice. Maybe Conley's creativity was drying up under the stress. "So in fact you did go by on that Sunday?"
He nodded. "I think it was sometime around noon. She was very much alive when I was with her, of course." Changing the tone, working the story to try to fit the new facts, he went on, "I couldn't very well admit I'd been over there that day. You understand that. I mean, the day she was killed. But it was all b
usiness."
"You weren't anywhere near the hot tub with her?"
"No. We never left the kitchen and living room. Look, Inspector, I know what you're thinking. I even know what it looks like. But we weren't having a physical relationship. The plain fact is that Stuart was jealous of me, and I had to try to keep him from ever seeing us together. She had a key to the back door of my office. I only came by her place when he wasn't home. But I had a great deal of business and even some personal issues with Caryn—okay, I'll admit that—but nothing more. Nothing inappropriate."
Juhle slowly took his paper cup of water and lifted it to his lips. Putting it down, he sighed, hoping to convey his reluctance to vocalize what had to come next. "Mr. Conley," he said, "that shard of wineglass with the fingerprint on it that I mentioned? It was under the hot tub. And your car pulled into the garage at eleven thirty that night."
Juhle knew that Bethany Robley had identified the car as Stuart's during the hearing. But he'd also been at the untaped portion of her interview with Gerry Abrams when the assistant DA had reminded her that Stuart's license plate said GHOTI, and if it had been Stuart driving his car, that's what she must have seen.
Conley sat with Juhle's damning words for a long time. Juhle could almost see him conjuring with the various escape possibilities as each new set of facts tightened the noose. Now Conley nodded, settled on his next course. "Okay. All right. We . . . we were . . . shit. Intimate. All right. It wasn't anything I planned. It just happened."
Juhle said nothing.
"I don't know what happened to her that day," Conley went on. "It must have been some kind of accident after I left. She fell against something. I know she'd been drinking, she'd taken some pills. That combination, with the hot tub, it can be dangerous by itself. But I swear to God, she was alive when I left."
"She stayed in the hot tub?"
"She must have. Yes."
Juhle had his hands linked on the table in front of him. The clock on the wall told him they'd been at this for over an hour. On the one hand, it seemed to him as though it had been five minutes, but on the other, half a night. And now, he knew, it was coming to an end. "Mr. Conley. Sir," he said, "the neighbor across the street saw you leave the house at twelve forty-five. Caryn was already dead at twelve forty-five. Which means if you do the math, and I have, that you either killed her or were someplace else in the house and she died. Maybe you fell asleep, came downstairs to find her dead, and panicked?"
Conley s stare was blank, his bank of ready lies about played out. Juhle decided he had to hit him with one last good question from another direction, put him down for good with a hint he'd gotten from Wyatt Hunt earlier while they'd been waiting for Conley's car to pull up to Stuart's house. "If we look, sir, and we're going to, we're going to find that you've got a standing order prescription for amytriptilene, aren't we?"
A long, faraway look, a thousand-yard stare, in the dead silent room.
Jedd Conley was done.
Juhle watched the second hand on the wall clock move from two to five. Then to six. Seven. When Conley finally spoke, it began in a whisper. "I had these incredible migraines for a year," he said. "The doctor said it was probably stress." A bitter little chortle escaped. "Yeah, doc, what was your first clue? You try being married to Lexi, to the whole fucking Horace Tremont family. You'll find out about stress soon enough. Christ." Conley hung his head. "You know what's funny?"
"What's that?"
"You know why I recommended Roake to Stuart? Why I hand-picked her?"
"Why's that?"
"Because she never beat me in court. Never, not once. I think we did like fifteen trials against each other, and I killed her every time. Can you believe that?"
"First time for everything."
Jedd squeezed his temples, rubbed his fingertips over the expanse of his forehead. Finally, he looked across at Juhle. "I don't know what got into her."
"Who?"
"Caryn. All of a sudden, she wanted us to get married. But that had never been in the plan—not for me, not for her. We had a deal. Both of us with our unhappy marriages. But hell, that was the price I'd bought in for. I knew what it would take, this career. It would take Lexi and her goddamn father and his goddamn money. But that would get me what I needed, what I had to have. And Caryn knew that too. At least she always had before. That was our deal."
"But she changed her mind?"
"Friday she told me she had to see me. She was divorcing Stuart. We needed to talk."
"So you set up the date, Sunday?"
"It started out okay. But she'd had half the bottle by the time I got there, and then the more she talked, the more wound up she got. She knew I loved her more than I loved Lexi. She couldn't live anymore the way she'd been doing." He looked pleadingly across at Juhle. "She was going to tell Lexi. She told me that up front. Plus, I saw it in her eyes. She was going to do it. Then I'd be free and we could be together."
"So you hit her?"
"I told her no. She flew into a rage, came at me with the bottle. It was self-defense, I swear. She fell and hit her head, then she got in the hot tub. I left. I never thought she'd drown. That was an accident. Really. I didn't hurt her at all."
Juhle didn't move, let him go on.
"I just didn't want to be with her, not that way." Conley shook his head miserably, looking in vain for some sign of understanding or forgiveness from across the table. "Goddammit," he said. "Not that way."
Gina opened her eyes to poor focus in an unfamiliar room. High-ceilinged, brightly lit above, though here where she lay the light somehow felt muted. She closed her eyes again; it was better with them closed. Acoustic guitar music was playing somewhere, barely in the range of her hearing. Gradually she became aware that something felt funny about her face and her scalp, but for a long moment she couldn't seem to place what it might be. When it came back to her, all in a rush, she moved her hands up to the bandages, then in a small panic, tried to sit up far too quickly.
Involuntarily she moaned, sinking back into the bed.
Footsteps approaching, and then she dared open her eyes again. "Wyatt?" Her voice was cracked and dry. Her mouth tasted like blood.
"She moves."
"No, she doesn't." In fact, she lay flat and immobile. "Where am I?" Then suddenly, she jerked up again. "Oh my God, the hearing! Oh!" Hands back to her head, she gently lowered herself down onto the pillow.
Wyatt sat down on the side of the bed. "The hearing's been taken care of. It's over."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean Jedd Conley confessed."
"Jedd confessed? Then the garage door opened?"
"You don't remember?"
"I never saw it. I remember pushing the button, then lights out. He really confessed?"
"Enough. He said so many stupid things last night, they'll probably get him on Kelley too. Devin sweated him and he broke."
"There you go. I knew the guy was good for something."
"Hey. Be nice."
"I thought I was being nice, giving him all those extra chances to finally get it right." Closing her eyes again, she took a few conscious breaths against the pain. "So how bad am I?"
"Not too, all things considered. You'll probably live." Then, more seriously. "You really don't remember?"
"The whole night's kind of in and out." A pause. "So how bad am I?”
"The diagnosis? Best guess is you've got a concussion. Plus a few really attractive stitches by your left eye. You'll be glad to know that the thread color they used coordinates nicely with the black eyes."
"Color coordination. The secret to adult happiness."
"Well, you've got it. Oh, and you're supposed to take it easy the next few days."
"That won't be too hard." Her eyes scanned the room. "So where am I?”
"My place. You didn't want to stay in the hospital."
"That's because I hate hospitals."
"That became kind of clear."
"Was I difficult?"
"It's starting to come back." She labored through a few more breaths. "What about Stuart? Somebody's got to tell him."
"Already done. Devin was going to be on it."
"Is he out of jail?"
"By now, he should be."
"Could you check, please? That's got to happen." She started to raise herself from the bed. "If Abrams tries to keep ahold of him . . ."
Wyatt put a hand on her shoulder, gently pushing her back down. "Easy, easy. I'll find out. If he's not out by lunchtime, I'll put Diz on it. It'll happen. Promise."
With a last token show of reluctance, she settled into the pillow again. "Okay. God, my head hurts."
"I'm not surprised. You took a few pretty good hits." He took a beat. "Gina?"
"Wyatt?"
"How did you get so sure? It couldn't just have been their cars being the same."
"No. That really wasn't much of it, actually. It just turned the key. Then, once I got past my ego, I started to put the pieces together."
"What did your ego have to do with it?"
The corners of Gina's mouth went up a fraction of an inch, but she wasn't smiling. "Everything, Wyatt. Everything." After a pause, she continued. "This isn't easy to talk about."
"Well, then, let it go. It's all right."
"No. It's not. I can't just let it go. It's smack in the middle of how I got it." She drew a long, slow breath. "Hard as it was to deal with, I had to accept the fact that in the real world Jedd would never have called me in to handle a high-profile murder. He knows every great lawyer in town, and every one of ’em would be happy to do him a favor. And I think I always knew that even when we were together, he never really respected me as a lawyer."
"I didn't realize you two had been together at all."
"Never seriously, and a long time ago, but that's a different story probably not worth telling. The point is, once I could accept that Jedd didn't pick me to win the case, the ugly truth finally dawned on me—that he'd picked me to lose it. The bastard. Anyway, once I realized that, a few other things came back as significant. I remembered your list of Jedd's appointments, for example, one of them at the Haight Street Rape Crisis Center." At Hunt's vacant look, she prodded him. "Sam Duncan's center?"
Hardy 11 - Suspect, The Page 35