Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

by John Lescroart

  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.

  On his e-mail screen, he stared at the latest threat for the briefest instant before hitting the Reply icon and typing his own message back. Out of habit, he reread what he'd typed for spelling mistakes and typos and, finding none, moved his mouse up to Send and clicked. The text: "Come and get me, you cowardly son of a bitch."

  Satisfied, he turned off the computer, picked up his S&W, and carried it into his bedroom, where he placed it carefully on the made-up bed. He did not own anything but a generic belt holster, and had no intention of using that. Nor did he have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, and that is what he fully intended to do.

  But first, he needed to throw some things together. He kept his travel duffel bag on a peg in his bedroom closet, and he put that next to the gun on the bed, then went to his dresser and pulled out a week's worth of socks and underwear. He didn't know how long this was going to take; at the moment, he couldn't have said with any specificity what "this" even was. His brain took him to the probable day of his wife's funeral—the following Monday or Tuesday?—but refused to go any further.

  All he knew was that he wasn't going to jail—not for a week, not for a day, not for an hour.

  In the bathroom, he gathered up a small selection of essential toiletries. He thought he might find himself having trouble with sleep over the next few days, so he threw in a truly ancient, perhaps no longer effective, half-consumed bottle of Dalmane sleeping pills that Caryn had needed for a while. And her remaining Vicodin, a few tablets.

  Back in the bedroom, he rolled up another pair of jeans, four T-shirts, a lightweight fleece undershirt and two identical brown pullover sweaters. It was warm today, but you never knew. This was San Francisco, and it could be midwinter by dinnertime.

  The telephone by his bed rang and he started to lift the receiver, but finally let it go until the machine picked up on the fifth ring. He heard a female voice downstairs on the answering machine, but couldn't tell who it was exactly. Debra? Gina? Kymberly? Some reporter? He couldn't say and didn't care.

  Finally, in the new jangling quiet, he stood in his closet, staring at his hanging clothes. He needed a moderately heavy jacket that allowed freedom of movement, that would call no attention to himself, that would cover where he intended, should the need arise, to tuck his gun into his belt at the center of his back. He chose a gray-green front-zipping parka from Mountain Hardwear and wrapped the gun in it, then stuffed it into the duffel and zipped it shut.

  Downstairs, leaving his duffel bag on the dining room table, Stuart went out to the hot tub area one last time. He leaned over the tub for most of a minute, but nothing in these surroundings stuck to him. He picked up no sense of Caryn's presence, of her ghost. There was only humidity and the faint whiff of chlorine, and a vast emptiness.

  The house had a side door that led to a walkway along the fence at the edge of his property. Aware of the growing probability of reporters lurking—Juhle had reported a sighting on the street when he'd come by, as had Gina and Hunt earlier—and wanting to avoid them at all costs, Stuart went down through the garage and out that door, then along the fence into his backyard, a small wasteland of yellowing grass and untended planter beds.

  Stopping on the grass and looking up at the back windows of his surrounding neighbors, he made sure that no one happened to be staring out just at that moment. Satisfied, he continued down to the end of the fence, where a gate opened into another steep uphill walkway between two other houses.

  Coming out on Larkin, he walked downhill for three driveways and stopped at the fourth, taking one last quick look around for reporters or bystanders. No one. He already had his key out, and now he put it where it belonged in the garage door, turned it and opened the door up. Scarce parking everywhere in San Francisco, but particularly here on Russian Hill, had forced him to rent this place for his old black Ford F-150 pickup truck for about the last seven years, beginning at eighty dollars a month—a hundred and fifty now, and considered a bargain at that.

  Throwing his duffel bag onto the floor on the passenger side, he slid in behind the wheel. He fished around in the glove box for his Leatherman tool, then got out with that and walked to the street, which was lined with parked cars. Picking out a vehicle at random, and making sure it didn't have the window sticker that identified it as one of the neighborhood cars, he squatted quickly down and removed the back license plate, replacing it with his own truck’s plate. He went to the front and repeated the process. In less than three minutes, the new plates were on his pickup. One minute later, he'd backed out, closed and locked the garage behind him, and driven off in the direction of Jedd Conley's office in North Beach.

  They sat drinking their coffees in the window of Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store, mostly a lunch-counter restaurant that sold cigars but only incidentally, at the corner of Columbus and Union. They were looking out at Washington Square Park with its contingent of tai chi classes, Frisbee-chasing dogs and, because of the sunshine, picnickers spread out over the grass.

  But they weren't paying any attention to the scenery or to their drinks. Stuart had just told him that he was going down the Peninsula to talk to some of Caryn's business connections down there. Conley's face was drawn in concentration as he spun his coffee cup slowly in its saucer. "You want the truth, I don't think it's a particularly brilliant idea, Stu. You don't know anyth
ing about these guys, what they're like, and if one of them killed Caryn ..."

  "I'm going on the assumption that one of them had to have killed Caryn, Jedd."

  "Not necessarily. Maybe it was this 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' guy."

  Stuart went still for a second before shaking his head. "If it was him, he'll try for me next time regardless of what I do now."

  "But you just told me ..."

  "I know, I know. And if it keeps Juhle off-balance for a day or two, it's all to the good. But look at this. In the first place, he doesn't quietly come into my home while I'm not there, and apparently without a weapon. No, he's at least got a gun. He's not coming to my house to stab me in my sleep. The guy's writing me threats on the Internet, for Christ's sake, Jedd. He's never going to risk letting me see him, or get me into some kind of hand-to-hand combat. If he does anything, he's going to shoot me, probably from a distance. Plus, he wants me, not Caryn."

  "Maybe to punish you?"

  "I don't think so. And there's no sign of a struggle, which there would have been. If she heard the garage door, and she would have, she would have thought it was me coming home early. And that would have got her out of the tub with a towel around her, at the very least."

  "Maybe not. Maybe while you were gone she thought about the reality of you two getting divorced and changed her mind."

  Stuart's mouth curved up, but it wasn't quite a smile. "That's a kind thing to say, Jedd, but that didn't happen."

  "So what are you saying?"

  "I'm saying she knew who it was. She was expecting him."

  Conley suddenly seemed to remember his coffee and took a sip, then put the cup down with exaggerated care. "So you want to talk to who?"

  "Everybody I outlined to Gina, the people Caryn did business with. All the other suspects. My other suspects, I should say."

  "But you said they all had alibis."

  "No. Juhle said that. They were all sleeping in their homes, apparently. Or maybe not. It could have been any of them."

  "So what do you expect to accomplish?"

  "I talk to them all, maybe I'll flush the one who did it."

  "And then what?"

  A shrug. "Play it by ear, I suppose. Break the guy's story, take it to Juhle. Or Gina."

  "Or maybe, since he's already killed once, he'll just take you out too." Conley shook his head. "Listen, Stu, this is a bad idea. You said Gina's got an investigator working for her. He does this stuff every day, right? Questions witnesses, checks out alibis, huh? Let him do it."

  "And meanwhile, what do I do? Sit around and wait for Juhle to come and arrest me?"

  "You've got funeral arrangements, don't you? You've got Kym. You got Debra."

  "I'm not spending any time in jail."

  "Well, that's what Gina ..."

  "No!"

  The vehemence of the answer brought Conley up short. "Hey! Easy." He straightened up in his chair. " 'No' what, Stu?"

  "You're talking about Gina and her investigator, but the fact of the matter is that neither of their jobs have anything to do with keeping me out of jail. If I'm arrested, I'm sure they'll be great, but listen to them—all of them: Gina, Hunt, Juhle. Listen to them talk and you get the impression that the whole arrest scenario isn't really in anybody's hands. It can just happen when some kid of a DA gets a wild hair."

  "But Gina's kept it from happening up till now."

  "Not exactly true. It's either her or the fact that Juhle can't find evidence that I did it. In spite of my blabbing my guts out to him on day one." Finally, Stuart's features seemed to relax to a degree. "I'm not complaining about Gina, Jedd. I'm glad she's on board, for which I have you to thank. But I can't sit around and wait until somebody decides I need to be in jail. I've got to do something."

  "Understandable." Conley cocked his head. "So you've come back to me? Not that I wouldn't help you in any way I can, but I can't really afford to get mixed up in this in a public way, Stu."

  "I get it. Politics. Hanging out with a murder suspect is bad form. The help I want wouldn't be any more public than we are right now."

  Conley finished off the dregs of his coffee, during which time he came to his decision. "All right," he said. "What are friends for? What do you need?"

  Stuart cast a glance around the tiny restaurant, then leaned in across the table. "You said you'd talked to Caryn on Friday. You'd been working with her on some of the problems with PII and the socket. How serious were they?"

  As though appreciating the question for the first time, Conley nodded almost imperceptibly, his eyes narrowed. "All things being equal, pretty serious. Evidently in some of the clinical trials, there'd been problems."

  "Like what?"

  Conley hesitated. "Like, apparently, people dying."

  "Apparently? People don't apparently die, Jedd. They actually die. Did Caryn know about this? She must have."

  "She was trying to understand what had happened first. There was ambiguity."

  "How could there be ambiguity? People either died or they didn't, right?"

  "Right. Sure. But these deaths happened after the study had been published, so due to the length of time before the problem showed up, there was some question about whether it was the result of the hip replacement or not."

  "And Caryn was trying to find out?"

  "Essentially, yes. You know as a public service my office looks into certain kinds of business fraud on behalf of some of our constituencies, and Caryn asked if. . ."

  "Jedd. You already got my vote. I'm sure you did what you needed to do. But you're saying Caryn might have been threatening to blow the whistle on PII about these deaths. Which would cost all of the investors big money, wouldn't it?"

  "I don't know if she'd gotten to that yet, but it... I'd say she was in the process of deciding what she was going to do."

  "And who was she talking to about this? Besides you? The guy in Palo Alto, Furth?"

  "Mostly, yes, I believe. Fred Furth."

  18

  Elbow resting out the driver's side window, letting the warm and fragrant air swirl around him in the truck’s cab, Stuart Gorman kept his pickup at the speed limit all the way on the "Country's Most Scenic Freeway," the 280 out of San Francisco down the forty-some miles to Palo Alto. He almost missed the small polished-granite sign indicating the headquarters of Sand Hill Equities Bank—a long, low, black glass building that appeared to be built directly into a tawny-brown hillside off Page Mill Road.

  As he pulled into the parking lot, which was graciously shaded with olive trees, Stuart realized that his ride didn't exactly fit into the prevailing motif of luxury automobiles. He wondered about the location of the local dealership that obviously gave away all the Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses and the random Porsche, since he figured there was no way that this many people could afford to buy them.

  Parking far over to one side to retain a tenuous obscurity, he got out of the cab in the now-impressive heat and caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the building's surface: jeans, T-shirt, hiking boots.

  He couldn't put on his jacket in this weather to cover his S&W. Which meant that the gun remained wrapped in the jacket inside his duffel bag.

  So much for preparation. "Idiot," he said.

  It didn't matter.

  The receptionist somehow conveyed the impression that billionaires dressed any way they damn pleased. And when Fred Furth heard who was waiting outside in the lobby to speak to him, even though Stuart didn't have an appointment, he came right out.

  In his mid-thirties, with a square jaw, perfect teeth, and an athlete's body molded into a two-thousand-dollar suit, he nevertheless managed to exude both sincerity and sympathy. "Mr. Gorman. Frederick Furth. Fred."

  "Stuart."

  Furth had a crushing grip. "It's good to meet you at last, although I wish it could have been under less difficult circumstances. We are all still devastated here about Caryn. And of course, anything we can do to help you ..." He turned to his receptionist. "We'll be in my office,
Carol. No calls, please. No interruptions. Mr. Gorman. Stuart. This way."

  They walked in silence down a cool, wide, dove gray corridor and into a very spacious office made distinctive by a floor-to-ceiling window that covered two-thirds of the facing wall until it disappeared into the hillside into which the building had been built. Behind Furth's desk, the back wall—windowless—featured six inset computer terminals and two television screens, all of them on and, in the case of the TVs, with the sound turned down.

  But Furth didn't head toward his desk, but instead to a seating area of functional leather chairs over where the room was brightest. As Stuart was sitting down, taking in his surroundings, the banker asked if he could get him anything. "If it helps you decide, I'm having coffee. Peet's."

  "Sounds good," Stuart said. "Black's fine."

  A high-tech, burnished-steel coffee machine claimed pride of place on the counter. Furth moved efficiently. He pulled mugs—not cups and saucers—down from the built-in cabinets, placed one under each spigot on the machine, and pushed one button. In less than a minute, the coffee was in front of them, and Stuart took a sip. "Thanks for seeing me. I know you must be busy. I probably should have called first, but I've been running on automatic for the past couple of days."

  Furth waved that off. "I'd imagine so. I'd actually thought of calling you, but. . ." He paused.

  "But you wanted to see if I got myself arrested first?"

  A muted acknowledgment, shoulders slipping an inch, a quick twitch of an embarrassed smile. "Maybe a little of that. Sorry."

  Stuart nodded. "For the record, I didn't kill my wife. The papers— everybody, in fact—seems to have it wrong. I wasn't there when it happened."