Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

by John Lescroart

  But although Gina had been a practicing defense attorney for her entire career, and was a name partner in FFH&R, as time passed she took on less and less of the firm's law work. Her heart had gone out of it. She preferred to spend her time with physical exercise, with hikes and solitude, with the slowly accumulating pages of a novel—a legal thriller—that she was struggling without much passion to finish.

  "Oh, David," she whispered, sighing. A tear hung in the corner of her eye. "Help me out here, would you?"

  And suddenly, as she stared through the prisms of her engagement ring, she felt her shoulders relax as though relieved of a great load. She felt David's hovering ghost as an actual physical presence and realized that he was letting her go, telling her that she had mourned him enough.

  He was gone, never coming back, and it was time to move on. The writing, the constant exercise, the long, lonely hikes, even the beautiful moments such as this one—she all at once came to see what David would have had to say about all of them: "That's not you, Roake. That's avoidance. That's not what you do. You always attack life. You engage. Something's beating you up, you take it on and wrestle that motherfucker to the ground. Why are you still wearing that ring, anyway? So guys won't hit on you? You want to get old and live alone? I don't think so. You've got good years to live, so don't wimp out now by not living them."

  She was young, she told herself, or at least not yet old. Perhaps she was even desirable.

  She brought the ring up to her lips and pressed it against them. Then she put it on her third finger, but of her right hand this time, and stood up. Walking to her tent in the moonlight, she let herself in, crawled into her sleeping bag and almost immediately was asleep.

  2

  In his city-issue Taurus, Inspector Sergeant Devin Juhle pulled up and parked where the front walk of a house on Greenwich Street on San Francisco's Russian Hill met the sidewalk. He was responding to a dispatch he'd received just as he was leaving his home on Noriega. In the past eighteen months, Juhle's previous two partners had been killed. Now, in a compelling demonstration of the superstitious nature of his colleagues in Homicide, he worked solo.

  Two black-and-white squad cars were already at the scene, at the curb across the street. A Fire Department vehicle sat in the driveway. A knot of bystanders—three women, one man, four kids—had gathered at the corner, a hundred feet away. They all stared at the house as a unit, curious and intent, waiting for some official person to come over and tell them what had happened. Thus far, no media had arrived, but Juhle knew that this aberration in the natural order of things would soon correct itself.

  Juhle waited behind the wheel and let his mind switch to what he called his "detail gear." From here on out, he wanted to register everything he saw, heard, thought, or felt. He'd trained himself to pay attention from his first moments at any crime scene. Now, satisfied that he had taken in all he needed from the street, he looked at the house. A pair of uniformed patrol officers stood at its open door. The occupants of the second squad car, Juhle presumed, were inside.

  He checked his watch. It was just shy of 7:30 on Monday, September 12. Juhle exited his car and took one last look around. The morning was glorious, the sky blue and cloudless, the sun casting its long shadows down the street in front of him.

  He turned and walked toward the house.

  Stuart Gorman's hollow eyes stared into the distance over Devin Juhle's shoulder. "I'm sorry, what?"

  "You said you got home just before six. I asked you where you had been."

  Gorman brought his eyes back. "We've got a place at Echo Lake, up by South Tahoe. I was there for the weekend."

  "So you must have left there early."

  "A little before two. I couldn't sleep, so I figured I might as well come on home."

  "And you were up there alone?"

  "Yeah." Gorman raised his chin, thick with stubble. His face was drawn, the skin with a pronounced pallor even under the sunburn. The whites of his eyes were shot with capillaries. "I'm a writer. I went up there to do some work."

  They sat across from each other at a round, wooden table in a kitchen that was considerably more well-equipped than Juhle's own. A bank of windows in the eastern wall admitted a bright line of sunlight up where it met the ceiling and reflected off the surfaces of the bright copper pans that hung from the opposite wall. Juhle had faced Gorman so that he wouldn't have to watch the crime-scene techs and assistants to the medical examiner as they passed through the living room and out to the back porch, where Caryn Dryden's naked body still lay on the wooden slats of the deck next to the hot tub.

  They were just getting started. Juhle had his small tape recorder concealed and running in his pocket. To any homicide cop, the death of a spouse always entails initial suspicion of the surviving partner. When husbands got killed, you looked first to the wife, and vice versa. And even though the death of Caryn Dryden might, from what he now knew, be ruled a suicide, the possibility of murder lurked somewhere in the back of Juhle's mind.

  But the last thing Juhle wanted was to raise a flag with the husband at this point. He kept his questions innocuous. "Did you get any writing done?"

  "No." Gorman ran a workingman's hand down a ravaged cheek. "I might as well tell you. The last time I saw Caryn was here at the house on Friday afternoon. She told me she wanted a divorce. That's all I could think about while I was up there."

  "How'd you feel about that, getting a divorce?"

  Gorman's gaze went off again, then came back. "You married, Inspector?" 1 am.

  "You love your wife?"

  Juhle nodded. "Most of the time."

  "Me too. Except when I hated her."

  "That happen a lot?"

  "Most of this weekend, to be honest with you."

  "So you didn't want to divorce her?"

  Gorman said, "The word—we called it the D-word—it wasn't something I allowed myself to entertain. I figured once you're saying it out loud to yourself, it starts having its own reality. Caryn and I were together and committed and that was that, I thought, for better or worse. So I never wanted to give myself that option."

  Juhle nodded. "Okay. But she wanted out?"

  "And got herself out, didn't she?"

  Juhle leaned back in his chair. "You think she killed herself?"

  "That's what it looks like to me."

  "By drowning? That's a reasonably difficult trick to pull off by yourself."

  If Gorman's shrug struck Juhle as chillingly nonchalant, his actual words were perhaps colder. "She was a doctor. You check, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a drowning after all. She kept a stash of Vicodin upstairs. Take some pills, have a few drinks, go sit in the hot tub turned up to one-oh-five. Adios."

  Absorbing this intelligence, Juhle felt all of his senses sharpen. Stuart Gorman had just supplied him with chapter and verse on a perfectly plausible scenario for Caryn's death—one that, if adopted by the medical examiner and the police, would remove him, the husband, from any suspicion. If he'd been involved in his wife's death, this was a slick, high-stakes gamble—smart and dangerous.

  "Can we go back," Juhle said, "to how you found her?"

  Gorman indicated the room behind him. "I already told those guys. What's it matter?"

  Because now I've got you on tape, Juhle thought to himself. And in fact, it probably wouldn't really matter, but Juhle's aim was to keep him talking. "Just making sure we get the record straight. You've said you got here a little after six and parked in your garage under the house . . . ?"

  "All right." He sighed. "I expected her to be up by then. She usually is on Monday. But the house was quiet, so I figured she was sleeping in and I thought I'd let her. Maybe she'd had the kind of weekend I'd just had. So I make a pot of coffee and go out to get the paper. I finish them both and it's still quiet. I don't hear the shower yet, so I go upstairs and she's not in bed. It's still made. So I figure maybe she took off someplace for the weekend herself."

  "Where would she have gone?"
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  "I don't know. Her sister's, maybe. Or up to visit . . ." The first real sign of distress. Gorman brought a hand to his forehead. "Oh, Christ. Kym. Our daughter. She's up at college in Portland. She just started a couple of weeks ago. Oh, Jesus. This is going to destroy her. I've got to call her."

  Juhle didn't want to stop in the middle of his interview. He said, "Are you sure you don't want to let us do that for you? I can call the Portland police and have somebody with her."

  Juhle watched Gorman pull himself heavily to his feet and cross to the phone on the kitchen counter. "No." There he paused again, his hands flat on the counter, all of his weight on them. His head flopped forward and Juhle heard the deep exhale of a sigh. "Oh, Jesus," he said again. He picked up the receiver, brought it to his ear, then placed it back down on the counter. "I've got to do this myself."

  Juhle left him like that, working up the strength to make the call.

  Leaving the kitchen, the inspector looked left through the large, high-ceilinged living room. Beyond the cop stationed at the front door, he could see that, sure enough, a couple of Minicams and their news crews had arrived. He wasn't about to talk to them, not at this stage anyway. Instead he turned to his right and walked through a leather-couch kind of book-lined den and out onto the enclosed deck.

  The body lay covered now with a sheet that still clung in wet places. A police photographer was snapping pictures of the hot tub and deck. Behind him, some ME assistants were wheeling a collapsible gurney through the house. Two other officers in uniform were down the steps in the backyard, conversing on the tiny fenced lawn.

  In shirtsleeves, Lennard Faro, lean and dark with a well-trimmed black goatee, was a lab specialist with the Crime Scene Investigation unit. Seeing Juhle at the back door, he closed his cell phone and walked over.

  "He break yet? The husband?" Faro asked.

  "He wasn't here. He was up in the mountains. You're saying this is a homicide?"

  A shrug. Faro wasn't going to commit until the medical examiner had drawn his conclusions and he himself had spent some time in the lab. Still, he said, "She's got an impressive, and I'd guess recent, bump over her right ear."

  "Enough to kill her?"

  "We won't know until the autopsy, but I'd say it's not impossible."

  "How long has she been dead?"

  Faro frowned. "The hot tub's going to screw that calculation up for a while. Nobody's going to know until we get cutting on her. Body temp's way up, but that's what you'd expect when the water's still at one-oh-five."

  The number struck a chord. "Exactly one-oh-five?"

  "Pretty close. The thermometer's still . . . why? That a magic number?"

  "No. It's nothing." Juhle didn't want to start a rumor. He'd get what he could, then see where it led him. "Any sign of what caused the bump?"

  "Maybe. We found some broken glass, plus one big piece, up against the bottom of the tub. Some still have a whiff of wine on ’em. Another empty glass was in the sink. The rest of the broken glass and an empty bottle was in the compactor in the kitchen."

  "So she was drinking?"

  "Maybe. Blood alcohol will tell."

  "The husband said she's got Vicodin upstairs in their bedroom. He thinks it's a suicide."

  Faro pulled at his goatee. "She hit herself on the head?"

  "Maybe she fell first. Slipped on the wet wood."

  Faro was still scratching at his beard, without comment, as the two uniforms came up the four steps and onto the deck. The older one—thirty pounds on the wrong side of healthy, with jowls and a walrus mustache—introduced himself as Captain Allen Marsten from Central Station on Vallejo. The other man was Jerry Jarrett. Marsten told Juhle that they had been the first ones to arrive after the 911 call. He was just getting off his graveyard shift when the call had come in.

  Did Juhle need anything else from him? If not, since now the scene was secure, he wouldn't mind going home and getting some shut-eye, and he didn't think Sergeant Jarrett would mind it either.

  "Anything either of you feel like I ought to know?" Juhle asked.

  Marsten looked at his partner, got a shrug, then worked his lips for a moment under his hanging mustache. "Nothing jumps out at me. He—the husband—left the front door open for us and we made it here in I'd say two, three minutes after the call came in. We come inside and he's got her out of the tub and on the deck where she's lying now, still trying to do CPR on her, although you could see a mile away it was too late for that."

  "So he must have thought she'd only recently gone under?"

  "I don't know about that. We took a pulse and called him off."

  "And what'd he do?"

  "He just stopped, no fight in him. Breathing hard, you know. Then he stood up and tried to cover her up with that towel over there."

  "What do you mean, 'tried'?"

  "Well, it was too small for all of her. And, you can see, she's a little bent up. He started low, then moved it up, then over her face, then back down. It was kind of pathetic, tell the truth. Then finally Jerry here walked him off and sat him down inside."

  Sitting on the counter, still on the telephone, Stuart Gorman was crying silently, making no attempt to stem the flow of tears. His shoulders were hunched, one arm tucked under the other one. He barely whispered, saying, "I know" and "Yeah, baby, I don't know," and Juhle could watch no more. Instead he went back outside to the deck and stood in silence as they bagged the body and began to lift it and load it onto the gurney.

  Juhle didn't want to watch that, either. Reflecting that there weren't that many fun things to do at homicide scenes, he went back to the kitchen. He pulled around a chair and sat on it.

  The phone conversation continued a few more minutes before Gorman said, "Do you need me to come up there? You're not. Where are you? You've only been up there two weeks and . . . ? Okay, okay, you're right, it doesn't matter. Call me when you get close, and I'll come get you."

  He clicked the phone off and, as though it were a high explosive, placed it next to him on the counter. He closed his eyes and, for a long moment, didn't move.

  Finally, Juhle spoke. "She going to be all right?"

  Gorman tried and largely failed to arrange his face into a controlled expression. "I don't know," he said. "I don't have any idea." He exhaled heavily. "I don't believe this. This can't be happening."

  Juhle resisted his urge to leave the man to his miseries. If he had in fact killed his wife—and his obvious pain and possible remorse now did not in the slightest degree rule out that possibility—then this was the time to exploit his vulnerability. Juhle needed to get him talking again, so he asked, "What school does she go to?"

  "Reed. My alma mater. Although it turns out she's down in Santa Cruz now. Don't ask me why. But she's enrolled at Reed." He paused. "She's smart and weird, like her dad, and the place worked pretty well for me."

  "How were you weird?"

  A dry chuckle caught in Gorman's throat. "How was I not weird? I just never fit in as a kid. I was big, gangly, ugly." He pointed to the birthmark on his face. "This thing. I liked solitude. I wanted to write. That by itself is weird enough. When I think about it, that was probably half the problem with me and Caryn. She wanted someone normal, and I wasn't him."

  "Normal in what way?"

  "Motivated by money, for example. Guys my age, we're supposed to be driven by money. It's how we gauge our success in the world, right?" He shrugged. "I don't really think too much about money and never have."

  "And this bothered your wife?"

  Gorman smiled, but there wasn't any humor in it. "Are you kidding me? What greater failing can a man have than not to be the primary wage earner in his family?"

  "You weren't that?"

  Another shrug. "I make more than decent enough money, I think. Eighty or a hundred grand a year, give or take. I'm a writer, so there's good years and bad years. But eighty grand to me is a fortune. It's not like I don't publish, like I'm not putting out good work. It just doesn't pay enough
to suit Caryn."

  "She wanted you to make more?"

  He shook his head impatiently. "It wasn't so much that. With her income, we certainly didn't need any more money. She made enough for most third-world countries."

  Juhle cast a quick glance around—the eight-burner stove, the Sub-Zero refrigerators, the shining copper pots and pans, all the gadgets on display on the counters, the other creature comforts he'd noticed everywhere. To say nothing of the size and location of the house itself—probably four to six million dollars in real estate and furnishings alone. "So she felt she was carrying you financially, was that it? Did she resent that?"

  Gorman paused. "I don't know what she felt anymore, Inspector. I didn't think she was anywhere near asking me for a divorce until Friday, but then she did. I mean, after Kym left for school, we both knew there'd be ... adjustments. But here it's only been a couple of weeks and that's it. It's all over, like we never had anything together, like everything we'd ever done was just a fucking stupid charade." He stopped abruptly, then started again more calmly. "She was just waiting for Kym to go. After that, there wasn't any reason for us to stay together."

  "No discussion?"

  "More like an announcement. 'My life with you is over. Do whatever you want. You're nothing to me.' "

  "That bother you?"

  "No. I fucking loved it. What do you think? Did it bother me? Give me a break, Inspector."

  "Taking that as a yes, then."

  Gorman's eyes narrowed. He visibly reined himself in. "You don't know how hard I tried to keep it together. And she wasn't easy, let me tell you. She was never easy the last few years. You know what that's been like? And then hearing that you're a nonentity, that her world is just so much more important than yours, more financially rewarding, more everything. How's that make me feel? Like a piece of shit. Like a worthless piece of shit."