The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  “So meanwhile, what am I supposed to do?”

  Gina and Wyatt exchanged a look that might have been conspiratorial or skeptical. “Most people,” Gina said in a relaxed tone, “wait it out. See what happens.”

  “Well, call me a pain in the ass,” Stuart replied, “but that’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of days, and any more of it doesn’t really appeal to me.”

  A few minutes later, they’d moved downstairs to the living room and along to the question of the garage door. Stuart had typically brushed off Bethany’s testimony that it had been him in his car and wanted to concentrate on the bare fact of somebody getting into his garage, concluding with what he had up to this moment always taken to be obvious. “But that means it had to be somebody we know, or that Caryn knew.”

  “Excuse me,” Gina said, “but hasn’t that been the assumption all along anyway? She was, after all, in the hot tub, naked.”

  “She always went in the hot tub naked,” Stuart said. “But now I’m wondering. We don’t know that whoever it was went in the hot tub with her, or even drank that other glass of wine. It might have been Caryn, who knocked the first glass off onto the deck where it broke. So she got out and cleaned up most of it. Then her killer showed up, snuck up and hit her with the bottle, then pushed her under. It didn’t mean she was having an affair with him, or with anybody.”

  “That’s true,” Gina conceded.

  “Maybe she wasn’t,” Wyatt agreed quickly. Stuart perhaps needed that belief, and Hunt was inclined to let him have it. “But let’s go back to the garage door. You’re saying Caryn must have known her killer because he had a device or some other way to open the garage door, which she’d presumably given him, is that it?”

  “Right,” Stuart said.

  “Well no, sorry, but not necessarily,” Hunt said. “Lots of cars, nowadays, they’ve got buttons in the visor or the roof and you can set them to the frequency of your garage door so you don’t need the little box. So anybody who’d ever been around your garage—a meter reader, a tradesman, the gardener, the garbage man, anybody—could have essentially stolen your frequency if they wanted to.”

  “So you’re saying maybe this TSNK guy…?”

  “Not impossible,” Hunt said. “Anybody.”

  Gina saw movement out the window and spoke up. “Here’s Devin,” she said.

  Gina went to open the door and Juhle was one step inside, halfway through his greeting to her, when he stopped, glaring at Hunt. “Wyatt,” he said with a measured calm, “what are you doing here?”

  Hunt, standing with Stuart by the couch, shrugged. “Working too hard as usual.” Starting off jovially, but when Juhle didn’t respond, he said, “Gina had a computer question.”

  “So you’ve been on his computer?” Without waiting for a reply, his eyes now dark, Juhle spun back to Gina. “Did I dream telling you not to touch anything until I got here? Did you think that didn’t include Wyatt?” Then back to Hunt. “How long have you been on this?”

  Hunt shrugged again. “Gina called me and I drove right on out.”

  “I’m not talking this particular computer problem, Wyatt. You know that. I mean how long have you been involved in this case?”

  “I just met him,” Hunt said.

  “Not what I asked,” Juhle snapped.

  But Gina stepped up into his space. “What are you getting at, Devin? I asked Wyatt to come out and look at Stuart’s computer, see if he could tell where these threatening e-mails might have originated. That’s all there is to it.”

  “No, it isn’t. Wyatt’s working for you while he’s pumping me for information.”

  “No pumping was involved, Dev. You never asked. And for the record, I wasn’t on anybody’s clock. But while I’m on Stuart’s case here, I’ve got to tell you this e-mail he’s got is what I believe you inspectors would call a clue. And since you missed it and we’re giving it to you so you don’t wind up making a big mistake, maybe you could chill a bit on the accusations about whose side I’m on. I’m here for the same reason you are, Dev. Gina asked me. I think we’d all like to get a handle on who we’re actually looking for. Caryn’s killer. How’s that?”

  Juhle clearly still didn’t like it. He threw a last malevolent glance at Hunt, another at Gina, even half-turned as though he would be going back out the door he’d just entered. But at last he got himself settled enough to talk. “So what have you actually got?”

  Suddenly, though, and to everyone else’s surprise, Stuart spoke up. “Before we get to that, Inspector,” he said, “we should tell you about the garage door.”

  “What about it?”

  Gina held out a flat palm, hoping to cut off her client. “Stuart…”

  “No,” he said. “This is relevant. Wyatt was just telling us how anyone…”

  “Stuart!” Gina’s voice cut through the room, brooking no dissent. “I mean it. We don’t want to hear it.”

  “Maybe I do,” Juhle said.

  By now, Gina had moved up between the inspector and her client. “I’m sure you do, but you’re not going to.” She turned back to Stuart, making sure he was getting her message. Everything was strategy. Very little was truth. Let Juhle think that they’d found holes in his case, and let him convey that impression to the DA. “Now, Inspector,” she continued, “I invited you out here to look at these e-mails. If you’re interested, the computer’s upstairs.” She turned and started walking, and the men fell in behind her.

  Hunt sat again at the keyboard and the rest of them huddled behind him in the small room. Hunt took them all back to the first e-mail. “And this was after what, again?” Juhle asked.

  “An article in Sunset,” Stuart replied. “Just recipes for cooking trout outdoors.”

  Juhle glanced briefly at the threatening e-mail. “Guy’s obviously a nutcase.”

  “The point,” Gina said, “is that it wasn’t Stuart. He didn’t send this.”

  “You got any way to prove that?”

  From the console, Hunt spoke up. “That’s the problem, Dev. We can’t—”

  But suddenly Stuart interrupted. “Excuse me, Gina. Permission to speak?”

  She looked over at him. “Probably not. Not here, anyway.”

  “How about out there?” Stuart indicated the adjoining room. “It might be worthwhile.”

  “Okay.” She spoke to the other men. “Give us a second, guys. Be right back.”

  Gina and Stuart were about five steps out of the room when Juhle started in. “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, Wyatt, but we’ve got this thing in law enforcement called obstruction of justice, where if you impede an investigation you can go to jail.”

  Hunt tapped idly at the keyboard. “Has somebody we know impeded an investigation?”

  “Briefing a suspect’s lawyer on the progress of an official investigation might even fall under aiding and abetting.”

  Hunt stopped with the keyboard, turned around. More impatient than angry, he laid it out straight. “Give it a rest, Dev. You know I work for Gina’s firm, you knew she was representing Stuart. If you chose not to put that together, that’s your problem, my friend, not mine. I never admitted nor denied anything about my involvement or lack thereof with Gina when we talked the other night, and you never asked, so what’s the issue?” Juhle started to say something but Hunt held up a finger, stopping him. “And you didn’t give me any information I wouldn’t have known by the next day, anyway. None of which, I might add, convicts Gorman of anything.”

  “Taken together, it well might, Wyatt.”

  But Hunt shook his head. “Which parts, taken together? That he was pissed off at his wife? That he yelled at a Highway Patrol guy?”

  Juhle shot back at him. “How about that he’s got a history of domestic violence? Or that he’s having an affair with his sister-in-law? That he’s suddenly worth several million more dollars? That his neighbor saw his car pull into his garage? I know, I know, it might not have been him driving. But guess what
? Who else could have been driving his car?”

  “Except if it wasn’t his car.”

  “Right. The neighbor girl who admits she likes Gorman also wants to nail him for murder, so she lies to put him at the scene. Come on, Wyatt, none of this speaks to you?”

  Pointing at the computer screen, Hunt said, “Not as loud as this stuff. You don’t really believe he sent these threats to himself?”

  “No, he probably didn’t. But I also don’t see them as much of a viable threat.”

  “Except that the wife is dead.”

  A shrug. “He just as easily could have gotten his last message from this lunatic on Friday and realized it would be a good distraction. In fact, it just as well might have been the thing that made him decide that this was a good time to do what he needed to do with his wife.”

  Hunt rolled the chair back from the computer desk, crossed his arms, looked up at his friend. “It’s unbelievable.”

  “What is?”

  “How little any of what we actually know makes any difference. You realize that. It’s all mind-set. You think because he’s the spouse, he did it, so everything reinforces that. I know the same facts, and nothing proves he did it. Do you know for a fact he’s boinking the wife’s sister? I mean, do you have hotel receipts, pictures, anything real?”

  “Not yet. We’re looking.”

  “Very strong. It’s all guesswork.” Hunt looked up at his friend.

  “You know what this reminds me of, me and you? Remember when Cheney shot that guy last year, the hunting accident? So I’m out with some guys and one of ’em makes a joke about how dangerous it is going hunting with the vice president. And another guy across the table, knee-jerk, he says he’d rather go hunting with Cheney any day than get in a car with Ted Kennedy.”

  “That reminds you of me and you?”

  “My point is that Cheney could have done anything, killed the guy even, and no matter what the facts were, his supporters didn’t care. No matter what Cheney does, Ted Kennedy’s always going to be worse. That’s what I’m talking about. Fixed positions.”

  “Except I’m not fixed, Wyatt. I’m trying to build a case, and many elements of what I’ve found so far point to the same conclusion.”

  “Are you looking at anybody else?”

  “Nobody else has popped up as too likely.”

  “How about the business partners?”

  Juhle shrugged. “I’ve talked to three of ’em so far. Furth from her investment group down in Palo Alto, and her two medical partners, McAfee and Pinkert. And yep, there might be some motive, but also there’s lots of alibi.”

  “Midnight Sunday night? Good alibis? That’s a little weird itself, don’t you think? I mean, if they weren’t home sleeping.”

  “They were. All of them.”

  Hunt chuckled. “Well, there you go again. They have wives? You ask them?”

  “One divorced, two blissfully married, and no. No reason to, not yet. Nothing points to any of them, Wyatt. You or Roake get me something that looks real, I’ll look into it, I promise. Meanwhile, it’s all Gorman all the time. Why? Because he did it, that’s why. He’s made some mistakes, guaranteed. I just haven’t found any of them yet.”

  Gina was back at the doorway, Stuart behind her. “What haven’t you found yet?”

  Juhle didn’t miss a beat. “Any way to tie these threats to a person or even a location. It’s going to make it tough. What have you two been up to out there?”

  Indicating her client, Gina said, “Stuart’s got some diaries he keeps up, notes on his trips, pictures. Since we know the dates of these e-mails, he wanted to check if he was out in the wilderness when they got sent, which would pretty much eliminate him as the sender, right?”

  “Possibly. And?”

  “Well, the first date, August twenty-third, last year. He was in the middle of a six-day hike in the Bitteroots with two friends of his, one of them Jedd Conley. California Assemblyman Jedd Conley? Who probably wouldn’t lie about whether or not they’d brought computers along. They didn’t. Here’s the photo of the three of them, identities and dates on the back.” Gina thought the photo was persuasive enough as she passed it over to Juhle, three guys with loaded backpacks gathered around the hood of Stuart’s SUV. “And Stuart didn’t send these messages, Inspector. They’re legitimate threats, and the last one appears to have been carried out.”

  Juhle took in that information with a stone face.

  Wyatt Hunt twisted around to look at him and said, “Well?”

  “It’s a complication,” Juhle conceded. “Except that the threats weren’t really directed at Caryn, were they?”

  Juhle having gone, the defense team was back downstairs in the kitchen. Hunt sat across from Gina at the table, his hands folded in front of him. From his perch on the counter, Stuart said, “Facts aren’t going to make any difference, are they? Juhle’s not seeing them.”

  Gina said, “He’s going to have to deal with this latest stuff on some level. All things being equal, we bring these e-mails up in front of a jury, we’ve got a good leg up on reasonable doubt right there.”

  “Okay, but I don’t want to keep talking about being in front of a jury. That means I’m arrested. We’ve got to keep it from getting to there.”

  “Granted,” Gina said. “But we’ve got to be realistic too. And prepared.”

  “So what are you saying?” Stuart asked. “That he’s going to arrest me no matter what? Even if he doesn’t find any new evidence?”

  “What do you mean, ‘new’?” Hunt asked. “He doesn’t have any yet, does he?”

  “Not much physical evidence, no,” Gina said. “And as I say, today might actually have slowed him down.” She threw a glance at her client. “But realistically, we’ve got to be aware that it’s not going to take too much more, Stuart. Maybe just the DA saying he wants to go for it. It’s high profile enough that Gerry Abrams just might want the opportunity.”

  “Who’s Gerry Abrams?”

  “An assistant DA,” Hunt said. “A tad ambitious, as Gina will attest.”

  She nodded. “Gerry does love a challenge.”

  “Terrific,” Stuart said. “So what do I do in the meanwhile?”

  Gina and Wyatt shared a glance. Neither of them had an answer for him.

  SEVENTEEN

  NO, THANKS, HE DIDN’T HAVE MUCH of an appetite and didn’t want to join Gina and Wyatt for lunch.

  When they’d gone, Stuart paced in a cold fury from the hot tub on the enclosed porch in the back, out through the library, back into the kitchen, across the dining room and then the large living room and up the stairs to their—now his—bedroom. Down the hallway to Kymberly’s room at the front of the house, he peeked through one of the two windows, through slats in the blinds, and noticed Bethany’s window in the house directly across the way.

  Her own blinds were open, the room’s light thoughtlessly left on, and if he squinted through the still-bright noon sunlight, Stuart could just make out what appeared to be a poster on Bethany’s bedroom wall. Scanning down, he got to Bethany’s front door. Abruptly stepping back from the window, he realized how close the two buildings were—a hundred feet? Less? He could clearly read the greenish brass numbers of their street address set in the stucco next to the door. Bethany’s identification of his car, even in the dark, would be credible if not compelling if she got it in front of a jury.

  The thought of himself in front of a jury turned him around and brought him beyond the master bedroom to the back end of the house. There, beside his tiny office, in a closet filled with file cabinets, piles of manuscript pages, rarely worn clothing, and free samples of fishing and other outdoor gear he’d endorsed, he moved an old blanket and some sweaters and junk out of the way and got down on one knee. With the door open behind him for the light, he worked the combination on his safe, reached in and felt the old Crown Royal bag in which he kept his gun wrapped, and pulled it out.

  As always, the Smith & Wesson 9GVE pistol felt
heavier than he knew it to be. Its empty, unloaded weight was less than two pounds, but the thing always had what he considered to be a psychic heft that made up for its diminutive size. At four inches of barrel length, the gun was a short, snubby, recreational weapon that he’d bought on a lark long before his marriage and rarely used since. He’d bought it, basically, for fun.

  But today, in his nonreflective mood, he stood with the velvet bag and its gun in one hand, its two clips and one box of bullets in the other, and crossed the room to sit at his desk. Moving his keyboard out of the way, he reached in and pulled out the gun. Doubly wrapped as it was in an old, oil-stained T-shirt, he unwrapped the package and set it down in front of him.

  He always kept it clean and well oiled, and now he felt a modicum of satisfaction that it was ready to shoot. Checking the date on his nearly full box of 9mm bullets, he realized that he must have bought the ammunition on his last trip to the range at the beginning of the summer. More good news. He didn’t want to have to stop and buy more bullets and face even the cursory questions of a clerk or, worse, possible recognition.

  Pulling each bullet out individually, he checked them for external imperfections, but found none in any of the nine (eight for the clip and then, after racking a round, one in the chamber) that he slapped into the pistol’s handle. Neither were there any bullet problems for the second clip that he slipped into the pocket of his Levi’s.

  The gun loaded now, the safety on and double-checked, Stuart stood up, and leaving his empty Crown Royal bag and half box of bullets on the computer table, he went back to the safe. Reaching in, he grabbed from a pile of fifty-dollar bills that he kept there for just such an emergency. Flipping through the money, it seemed to him that it was significantly less than he thought he’d put away, but there were still several hundred dollars all told, plenty to get by on for a while. Closing the door and twisting the combo lock, he went back to his computer, moved the ammunition box out of the way, and put the loaded gun onto the desk proper. In his ergonomic chair, he brought the keyboard back down in front of him.