But even half of her own private clinic was nothing compared to Caryn’s other major endeavor. She’d not just been your average, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen orthopedic surgeon. Instead, she was a total joint surgeon, specializing in total hip replacement, or arthroplasty. Beyond that (as if that weren’t enough, Stuart had said), she’d done her undergraduate work, and then a couple of years of graduate school before she transferred to med school, in polymer chemistry. Evidently in her spare time, Caryn had invented a new plastic cup-side for the hip joint that marked a significant improvement in the plastic’s unfortunate tendency to degrade in the body over time. PII, the company in whose lab she worked, had even named the thing the Dryden Socket, and after FDA approval, which was pending, it looked to become the worldwide gold standard hip joint. As such, projected sales would make it worth millions every year. But, as evidently was almost always the case when the FDA got near giving its final stamp of approval, some problems had surfaced.
Lately Caryn had been far more upset about “her” socket and her dealings with PII and the project’s point man with the venture capital crowd—a Palo Alto investment banker named Frederick Furth, who’d arranged the mezzanine loan—than with anything about Bob McAfee.
As Gina had discovered last night, the mezzanine loan had left her cash-poor on her new practice offices when there were the inevitable and unavoidable delays in construction and start-up. And the Dryden Socket apparently remained in limbo.
If these facts and alternative suspects did not directly impact the evidence that Juhle was collecting on Stuart, Gina knew that at least they would be useful in muddying the prosecutorial waters. At this stage, that would be its own reward.
Still some long blocks from the Travelodge, and with most of their legal business out of the way for the moment, Gina found herself coming back to Stuart’s books, asking him which was his favorite.
“I like them all,” he said. “They’re all my babies, you know? But it’s gratifying that other people like them too. I’m very lucky I get to do what I do.”
“You do it very well. I identified with a lot of it, which I guess is what you’re going for.”
But Stuart shook his head. “No, I’m not really going for effects on the reader. I’m trying to get to something else. Sometimes I’m not so sure of what it is myself. Clarity, maybe.” He shrugged, almost swallowed the next word. “Truth. That sounds arrogant, I know. But it’s what I’m trying for. Something real.”
“Well, you got that. You really did.”
Shrugging that off, he cocked his chin at her. “If you don’t mind my asking, what did you identify with?”
“Really, quite a bit of it. The analogy—you were talking about being in the moment, the step after step after step of, say, getting to the top; you had it from Guitar Lake to Whitney. I’ve made that exact climb three times now. How it’s really not about getting to the top. It’s about the thin air, the pain in your legs, the keeping on when you don’t think you can…” Suddenly, she stopped. “I’ve done it, is my point,” she said in a huskier voice, “but I haven’t analyzed it very much, or expressed it the way you did. It was just something I needed to do. To get healed.”
“Your fiancé who died?”
She nodded.
Stuart nodded back at her. “With me, it was the family. My family. What I had to get healed from.”
“I picked that up.”
“Not that I didn’t find the experience of being married to a workaholic genius and raising an impossibly difficult child totally fulfilling. This is my great failing. And I’m not the kind of guy who can just ignore it, or have affairs, or be emotionally absent, or however else we’re supposed to cope. But sometimes I just had to get away for a few days to find myself again, to hear some silence, to get the strength to recommit to coming back to it, when so much of it didn’t seem that it would ever be worth it.”
“For me,” Gina said, “it was this whole…I guess it was the whole question of what life’s about. And I couldn’t get an answer here in the city. It was just too loud, too in-your-face. You know?” Then, “Of course you know.”
“It’s not particularly profound,” he said. “We’re all too much in it all the time. We’ve got to slow down, but we don’t. But I didn’t write it to try to teach anything. My goal was just to figure out for myself what worked and why it worked. That’s what the writing’s about—not the magazine articles so much, but the books. Figuring stuff out.”
“Taking other people there too.”
“Maybe, hopefully, that happens in the process if I write it right. Which I suppose is why the books sell. And that just shows that there must be a lot of us in the same boat. Maybe most of us.”
“So.” Gina hesitated, then figured what the hell. She wanted to know. “What about writer’s block? Do you ever get that?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Never?”
Now Stuart broke one of his first true smiles. “I’m talking to a writer, aren’t I?”
Gina lifted her shoulders, let them down. “Halfway through a bad legal thriller. Wondering how you get all the way to the end.”
“Just keep going.”
“Ha.”
“Well, it’s what I do. I suppose I get times where the ideas don’t exactly flow, but the best definition of writer’s block I ever heard was that it was a failure of nerve. It’s not something outside of you, trying to stop you. It’s your own fear that you won’t say it right, or get it right, or won’t be smart or clever enough. But once you acknowledge it’s just fear, you decide you’re not going to let it beat you, and you keep pushing on. Kind of like climbing Whitney. Except that if it’s never any fun, then maybe it’s something inside trying to tell you that you probably don’t want to be a writer. You’re not having fun with your book?”
“Not too much. Some. At the beginning. Then I got all hung up on whether anyone would want to read it and if they’d care about my characters and I started writing for them, those imaginary, in-the-future readers, whoever they might be.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s not why you write. You write to see where you’re gonna go. At least I do. And in your case, nobody’s paying you for your stuff yet, are they?”
“No. Hardly.”
“Well, then just do it for yourself and have some fun with it. Or start another story that you like better. Or take up cooking instead. Or get up to the mountains more. But if you want to write, write. A page a day, and in a year you’ve got a book. And anybody who can’t write a page a day…well, there’s a clue that maybe you’re not a writer.”
“A page a day…”
“Cake,” Stuart said.
They’d gotten to within sight of the Travelodge, and Gina recognized three of the local news channel vans double-parked in a row on Lombard Street. She put a hand on Stuart’s forearm, stopping him in his tracks. “Looks like they’ve found you,” she said.
“You really think they’re here for me?”
“I think that’s a safe assumption, yes.”
“So what do we do?”
“You say nothing. I say ‘no comment.’ We get inside your room and close the door behind us and hope they go away. You ready?”
“I guess so. As I’ll ever be.”
“All right. Nice and relaxed. Let’s go.”
THIRTEEN
WHEN DEVIN JUHLE GOT BACK FROM his interview with Gorman at Gina’s office, he was not in good spirits, and his mood wasn’t much improved when, in spite of his discoveries the day before, Assistant DA Gerry Abrams wasn’t moved to convene a grand jury to weigh his evidence just yet. In the first place, none of it was physical evidence. Abrams pointed out that an eyewitness seeing and possibly even identifying Gorman’s car did not even under the most generous interpretation rise to the level of proof of anything about Stuart himself. And while the assistant DA found the two domestic disturbance calls compelling enough, these bore no direct relationship to the murder either.
Beyond
that, forensics team boss Lennard Faro had come up with no fingerprints on the wine bottle, which Dr. Strout said was of a compatible shape to allow the inference, though not the absolute conclusion, that it was the weapon that had knocked Caryn unconscious. Microscopic traces of her blood on the label didn’t hurt, either. There were partial fingerprints—not Caryn’s—on pieces of the broken wineglass in the garbage disposal, and a complete and clear print on the one large shard they’d discovered under the hot tub, but none of the prints matched Stuart’s or anyone’s in the criminal data bank. Forensics had found a few drops of blood in the garage—still tacky—but whether or not it was Stuart’s would have to wait for the DNA results, for which no one was holding their breath. Juhle had his reluctant swab of Stuart’s saliva, all right, but the actual testing and results could take days. And even then, so what? Stuart’s blood in his garage meant nothing. He could have cut himself shaving, or lacerated his finger on his workbench that morning or a couple of days before.
They just didn’t have enough.
In Abrams’ cramped third-floor office, Juhle, with a haunch on the opposite desk and sucking on a pencil eraser, sat staring between his two companions. “So what’s it going to take, Gerry? We just ignore his motive?”
“Yeah but, you know, motive.” Abrams shrugged. All of these law professionals knew that while motive was a nice plus if you could get it, by itself it meant next to nothing.
“Okay.” In spite of his frustration, Juhle didn’t want to appear to push. He kept his argument low-key. “We’ve got the history of domestic violence. We do have the girl identifying his car. If he acknowledges that he had the car with him all night…”
But Abrams was shaking his head. “She never said she saw him. It won’t fly, Dev.”
“It will if we can put him and only him in his car. He’s more or less said the same thing, putting him there himself. In fact,” Juhle’s face lit up as he reached into his jacket pocket, “look at this.” He passed the plastic evidence bag across the desk.
Faro, who’d been slouching by the door, moved up a few steps to take a peek. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s his alibi, but it just occurred to me that maybe it’ll hang him.”
Abrams opened the baggie and pulled out the crinkled piece of paper, holding it up. “Is this the original?”
“Yep. I got it this morning from him and his lawyer. They kept a copy.”
“What is it?” Faro asked again.
“It’s a gas station receipt from Monday morning, four fifteen a.m., from Rancho Cordova, up beyond Sacramento on fifty.”
Abrams put the thing flat on his desk and, as Faro picked it up, assumed his thought position—feet up, hands templed at his lips. “What’s this supposed to prove? Why’d he give it to you?”
“He says it proves he left Echo Lake at two a.m. It’s where he stopped to get gas on the way back to town. But I’m thinking, what if he left the city after doing his wife, high-tailed up to Rancho Cordova and found this place so he could get the receipt and drive back down?”
“What’s that get him?” Faro asked.
“If we believe it, it keeps him out of town until his wife’s dead. So he couldn’t have done it. But what it also does is prove he was in his car in Rancho Cordova at four fifteen a.m. Which means—if the timing works and we can place the car in San Francisco at the time of the murder, and we can—that he was the one driving it. It couldn’t have been anyone else. We could make Bethany seeing his car the factual equivalent of seeing him.”
Abrams kept his eyes closed, his lips moving unconsciously. Finally he said, “Even if the timing is right, it’s still got problems, but with everything else added on, maybe it’s getting closer.”
“Rein it in, Ger,” Faro said. “We don’t want you going all enthusiastic on us.”
“I like it,” Juhle said.
“It might be a start,” Abrams agreed, “if the timing’s right. And we ought to be able to find that out in about two minutes.” Pulling himself up straight, Abrams reached for his computer mouse and the screen on his desk lit up. “What’s Gorman’s address here in town?”
Juhle gave it to him. Abrams typed it in.
Faro moved over to look. “What’re you doing?”
“MapQuest.” Abrams drew the receipt closer to him and looked up again at Juhle. “And this is the address of the place he stopped at four fifteen? We know this?”
“Pretty certain,” Juhle said. “I called them, and they’ve got a videotape running twenty-four seven which we’ll be getting tomorrow. Stuart went in to get a Coke when he stopped. He ought to be on it.”
Abrams typed in the address. Faro moved over as Juhle came around to look.
After about ten seconds, Abrams pushed his chair back and glanced up at his colleagues with a look of mild satisfaction. “Ninety-seven and a half miles. One hour, forty-two minutes.”
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 t
wo 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.”
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