Hardy 11 - Suspect, The

by John Lescroart

"Do you know him? Stuart?"

  She shrugged. "Not really. I've never actually said hello to him or anything that I remember. He didn't come up here too much. If ever, really. So no, I can't say I know him."

  "How about when you first heard that Caryn had been killed? Do you remember your thoughts then? Your very first ones?"

  She shook her head. "Just that I couldn't believe she was dead, that it had to be some mistake. But of course it wasn't."

  "How about when you heard that it was a suspected murder?"

  "I don't know. I'm sorry. I guess I didn't really think anything except maybe it was a break-in at her house or something like that. And then they started talking about her husband."

  "So you had no reason to doubt it was Stuart?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like maybe something that was happening here at the hospital. Something you might have heard or seen, or simply known. Were you and Caryn friends?"

  "Outside of work? No. I don't think she had too many friends outside of work."

  "Okay, then how about here? How long had you worked for her?" “Four years.

  "Exclusively?"

  "Well, no, but mostly. I kept her book."

  "And you got along well?"

  "Really well. We just didn't do things together outside of work."

  "So in all that time, didn't you ever share any personal stories?"

  "Some, I guess. But really, not too many. Her daughter and my son, once in a while."

  "What about them? Were they together? Are they?"

  Cindy smiled broadly. "My son is seven. Her daughter is eighteen. No. Just mom stuff. But beyond that, she was a very busy person. One appointment to the next, boom boom boom. Then off to surgery. Time is money, you know."

  "She'd say that?"

  This brought another smile; it wasn't a bad memory. "Every day, I bet."

  Wyatt, half finished with his coffee, had nothing. Cindy Delgado seemed to take the world at face value and was clearly not a gossip. If he was going to get any useful information here, he was going to have to push her. Pushing his cup to the side, he leaned in over the table. "Cindy, let me be honest with you," he said. "Caryn's husband is in trouble. He swears he had nothing to do with her death, and my boss believes him. She thinks Caryn was having an affair."

  In a couple of seconds, Cindy's face went through a range of expressions. Initially, immediately after Wyatt's words, the suggestion— the very concept—obviously caught her off guard. Her vivid eyes registered first surprise, then perplexity, and finally some kind of resolution. But, covering well, she only said, "Why does your boss think that?"

  Wyatt shrugged. "When they found her, she was naked in her hot tub. There were two wineglasses. Caryn knew Stuart wasn't going to be home that night. My boss thinks she invited somebody over."

  "So you're saying that person came and killed her?"

  "That's our working hypothesis, yes." He lowered his voice. "Cindy, when I first mentioned this, you thought of something. I saw it in your face."

  "No, I—"

  "For what it's worth, some of the other doctors who knew her thought Caryn was seeing someone too. Starting sometime in the past few months. Did you notice any change in the way Caryn was acting, or seemed to feel about herself, back then?"

  Cindy's coffee cup was on the table in front of her and now she reached out and started to turn it slowly, staring at it as if it were a crystal ball. Without looking back up at Hunt, she said, "One day I opened the door to her office to deliver some X-rays. I thought she'd gone out to her new clinic, otherwise I wouldn't have just gone in. Anyway, she must not have heard me come in and I heard her say 'I love you too.' And then she hung up and turned around and saw me standing there, and it was like all of a sudden she was scared to death. She actually went white, saying I'd startled her, and then she blurted out, all panicked like, 'That was Stuart.' And I kind of made a joke of it and said, 'I would hope so.' " Now Cindy looked straight at Wyatt. "But maybe, I'm thinking now, it wasn't."

  "So who, thinking now, was it?"

  She thought another minute, biting her lip. Stopping herself, she went on. "But no, that would mean . . ." The perplexity was back in her eyes as she stared across the table at Wyatt.

  "It would mean he killed her."

  "No! I didn't say that!"

  "No, you didn't. I did. Cindy, this is too important to fool around with. Who are you talking about?"

  "I can't imagine that. I mean, Bob's got a family and—"

  "Bob McAfee? I thought he was divorced."

  "Yes, but the three kids. He's still in their lives. He couldn't have killed anybody."

  "Guys with children kill people every day, Cindy. How well do you know him?"

  "To talk to, you know. Like all the doctors here, maybe a little better because he was around more, setting up the new clinic with Caryn."

  "Would they have had an opportunity to get together here?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean physically get together. Conduct an affair. Here in the hospital."

  Maybe Wyatt was going too fast, but he had Cindy talking about an uncomfortable topic and he didn't want to give her time between his questions to think about whether or not she should answer them. She kept twirling her paper cup in front of her, avoiding Hunt's eyes. "Well ... I mean, it's a building full of rooms with beds in them. What do you think?"

  "So did you notice a change in Caryn's behavior over the summer?"

  "A little bit, maybe. But mostly I just thought she was feeling all gung ho about her clinic and her invention—you know about that?"

  Hunt nodded.

  "Except then both those things got complicated again."

  "She talked to you about them?"

  "A little bit. The last couple of weeks she was pretty uptight, so I asked her."

  "And what did she say?"

  "That it was just business stuff. Maybe she'd spread herself too thin."

  "Did she say anything specific about McAfee?"

  "Not that I remember."

  "How about Doctor Pinkert?"

  "No," she said.

  "No what, Cindy?"

  "No, I don't think they were personally involved. Bob, maybe. Doctor Pinkert, I'd have to say no." With that, Cindy broke out of her uneasy trance. She stopped turning her cup, she glanced at the clock on the wall, double-checked it with her watch. "Uh-oh. I really should be getting back to my station." She pushed her chair back and started to get up.

  "Could you do one or two more questions?"

  With a small sigh, she settled back into her chair. "Just a couple, though. Okay?"

  "Okay. Thank you. You kept her book. Was that just for her medical appointments and surgeries?"

  "Mostly."

  "But you'd have to know about her other activities so you avoid scheduling conflicts, right?"

  "Sure. Of course."

  "So is there anybody else she saw on a regular basis? That was in her life, if you will."

  "Well, you mean all that stuff down the Peninsula? There was Mr. Blair at PII, the president, you know. And Kelley, her lab assistant, and Mr. Furth, who was her broker. She liked him, I know."

  "Mr. Furth?"

  "Yes. She thought he was really hot. I mean, she joked about it." She brought her hand up to her mouth. "But I probably shouldn't say that, should I? I don't mean she was having an affair with him. She just thought he was cute."

  "Cute, maybe, but with a good alibi, so you don't have to worry about getting him in trouble." However, at her mention of Kelley Rusnak, Wyatt felt he owed Cindy some information in return for all of her cooperation. "This is not good news, but I should probably tell you. Maybe you've already heard, but Kelley, Caryn's assistant, apparently killed herself late last week."

  The young woman's mouth hung open, her eyes flat. The fact nearly decked her.

  "There's no apparent connection to Caryn," Wyatt continued, "at least that we've heard about yet. But it's a pretty big coincidence, if not
hing else."

  Finally, Cindy found her voice again. "She wasn't murdered too, then?"

  "Apparently not," Wyatt said. "Sleeping pills."

  "Man!" Cindy was shaking her head in disbelief. "I don't like this. This is too weird."

  "Nobody likes it, Cindy. But we don't know what it means, if anything."

  "Well, it's got to mean something, don't you think? She didn't just randomly kill herself a couple of days after Caryn for no reason, did she?"

  "We don't know, Cindy. We just don't know. You'd think there might be some connection, but we don't know what it is. But while we're still on PII, maybe you can tell me something about Jedd Conley?"

  "Who?"

  "Jedd Conley. Assemblyman from San Francisco. Evidently he was looking into some of the issues with PII for Caryn. Do you know if they talked a lot? Or met up somewhere?"

  Still obviously shaken by the news about Kelley Rusnak, Cindy took a beat before she said, "I don't really even know the name. He's not in my book." She looked into Wyatt's face. "God, I still can't believe about Kelley."

  "I know."

  Cindy took a deep breath, let out a long sigh. "Wow." After a long moment of reflection on the tragedy, suddenly she remembered to check her watch. "Oh God," she said, "I've really got to get back to work."

  While he was at Parnassus, Wyatt took the opportunity to go down one floor and see if he could get a minute with Dr. Michael Pinkert. Even though no one seemed to consider him as a fitting candidate for Caryn's lover, the fact remained that he saw quite a bit of her and that she thought enough of him to invite him to join her and McAfee as a co-equal third partner in their clinic. So it would seem on the face of it that he could have had no motive to kill Caryn, since she was the one fighting McAfee for his inclusion in the clinic and its profits.

  In fact, though, Wyatt realized that Pinkert fit as perfectly as any of the other possible suspects into Gina's theory of the case—that she was in the hot tub with her lover and took that moment to tell him of a decision she had come to that would have struck him, at the very least, as an immense personal betrayal. Something that perhaps would have a profound financial impact as well and that might, in fact, ruin his life entirely.

  It took no imagination at all for Wyatt to hear Caryn telling Pinkert that she'd decided McAfee was right. They couldn't afford to take him on. So she reluctantly was withdrawing her offer to him as well as her physical favors. If, added to this, Pinkert also suffered from the neurosis of the month—chronically low self-esteem anyway because of a weight problem—and had become infatuated with Caryn, only to be summarily dumped after all the financial and personal promises he'd made to her, the risks he'd taken for her, Hunt had no doubt that there was plenty of motive here for murder.

  Wyatt's luck and timing couldn't have been better. Pinkert was between surgeries, in his office. When his scheduling person told him that there was someone who wanted to talk to him about Caryn Dryden, he came right out and brought Wyatt back into his office with him.

  "Sorry about the accommodations," Pinkert said. Besides the doctor's own chair by his tiny desk, the only place to sit was on the paper-covered examination table.

  "No problem." Wyatt boosted himself up onto it. "I appreciate your seeing me without an appointment."

  "If it's about Caryn, I'm going to be available if it's possible," he said. "I'm still in shock, if you want to know the truth. I've already talked with the police, so you must be with Stuart's team."

  "That's right. That's not a problem for you?"

  "Not at all. Why would it be?"

  Wyatt shrugged. "You were close to Caryn. If you thought Stuart killed her, maybe you wouldn't want to help out his defense."

  But Pinkert brushed that off. "Not a problem. I find that if you tell the truth, things tend to sort themselves out. Now, how can I help you?"

  Physically, Pinkert came as advertised. Probably closer to fifty years old than to forty, he needed to lose some serious weight. And yet he didn't strike Wyatt as obese so much as soft—a man who because he'd always been the class geek and always studied had possibly never done a lick of hard exercise in his life, and whose sedentary nature had gradually caught up with him. The handshake outside had been weak, with the skin of his hand feeling almost bloated, stretched over too much flesh, as were his cheeks and the folds in his face around his protuberant eyes. His lips were outsize too—purplish, wet and swollen, though this didn't appear to be a function of fat but of heredity, which made Hunt wonder, since the trait was singularly unattractive. He would have thought that people with those lips would have had more significant trouble finding a mate than their competitors, and that over time they would have selected themselves out of the gene pool.

  But apparently not. Beauty, obviously, continued to be in the eye of the beholder. On Pinkert's desk, Wyatt couldn't miss the large framed wedding photo of the doctor and his wife, even at a glance a really lovely Asian woman. Next to that formal wedding shot was another framed headshot of the wife. She had a particularly beautiful, model-quality face. Above the desk on the wall a more recent professional photo showed him and his wife and the four kids, two boys and two girls. The corkboard on the wall was a collage of maybe fifty snapshots held in place by pushpins—more family life—everyone smiling, healthy, happy.

  "You've got a lovely family," Hunt said.

  "Thank you. It's my greatest blessing." He followed Wyatt's gaze over to the pictures and let them replenish him for an instant. But then, solemn, he turned with a small sigh and said, "Now. Caryn."

  "All right. Let's start with the clinic. I gather you're out of that now."

  "It appears so. They needed my capital, and now Bob McAfee doesn't."

  "How do you feel about that?"

  "Well, disappointed, of course. I think the name-brand recognition Caryn was going to get because of her Dryden Socket was going to be a terrific marketing tool for the clinic. So I thought it was a tremendous opportunity. But there'll be others. All in all, it was a good learning experience. If Doctor McAfee does well with it, I might open a clinic of my own someday and this will have shown me how it could be done."

  "So there's no hard feelings?"

  "Not really, no. Not on my part anyway. It was just a business decision."

  "All right. Do you mind if I ask you about your relationship with Caryn?"

  A small, patient smile. "Did I kill her, do you mean?" But he held up a hand, stopping Wyatt's response. "It's all right. Obviously, if Stuart didn't, you're trying to find out who did. So my answer to you is that I liked Caryn very much, and respected her as a doctor. You may not know, but I've already told the police that I was at home on the night she was killed. My wife and I are hooked on Masterpiece Theatre. Sunday nights. Nine to eleven. We never miss it. Especially Jericho. We love Jericho. Of course, that means it'll probably be canceled." He threw a quick glance over to his wife's picture. "And I know, that leaves the time after eleven. I've told the police I'd be happy to take a lie-detector test if they felt they needed one, but I had two surgeries that next day, Monday, and to be fresh and rested for them, I needed to sleep, and that is what I did."

  Wyatt didn't feel like he needed a lie-detector test. He believed Pinkert implicitly. But there were still a few questions. "Doctor, let me ask you this. Did you get any indication that Caryn was involved with anyone else besides her husband?"

  "That assumes she was involved with her husband."

  "Yes it does. She wasn't?"

  "Well, at least not the way I am with my wife."

  "How do you know that?"

  "You pick these things up. He's a rather well-known authority on fly-fishing, you know, and a couple of years ago, Kiyoko gave me a fly rod for Christmas, so I asked Caryn if I should perhaps talk to him about getting lessons, or how to start, or any of that."

  "And what did she say?"

  "Well, it was the strangest thing. She just looked at me for a long minute, like she wasn't exactly sure what I was talkin
g about, until she finally just shrugged at me and said she could give me his e-mail. That was her entire response." His torso heaved as he took a breath. "My point is that I was fairly excited about the whole idea, and usually, you know, well, my experience is that if someone shows an interest in your spouse's specialty or expertise, you tend to show a little excitement yourself. I mean, when people come to me about Kiyoko's paintings—she does incredible Japanese block prints—well, you see, I'm doing it there. But with Caryn and Stuart . . . with her, really, there just wasn't anything like that. It was like she didn't want to be reminded that he was in her life. Very odd, I thought."

  "All right," he said, "so was she involved with anyone else?"

  Pinkert's smile struck Hunt as sad. "I really couldn't say at all. I never saw her outside of a medical environment, and she was always strictly professional in that context. Beyond that, I spend my time either with my patients or with my family. I find that's plenty. So I tend not to notice little personal things that might be going on right under my eyes. Kiyoko makes fun of me about it, that I'm such a nerd, but I can't really help that. It's who I am."

  "I wouldn't worry about it," said Hunt. "You seem fine to me."

  "Well, I'm happy," Pinkert said, the large, unfortunate, ugly mouth turning up in a cheerful smile. "And happiness, I believe, is the key. Don't you think?"

  "Your mouth to God's ear," Hunt said.

  An hour later, Wyatt Hunt was in North Beach. Jedd Conley’s office was on Powell between Stockton and Grant, around the corner from Moose's, one of everybody's favorite restaurants. So since his next stop was Conley’s, he took the opportunity to eat a real lunch at one of the best bars in the city. He ordered a simple Moose Burger, which bore little relation to the fast food item of the same name at your local burger stand, consisting as it did of freshly ground prime beef, grilled over mesquite—blood rare in defiance of the food police and their ubiquitous threats of E. coli—on a freshly made sourdough bun, with lettuce and tomato and onion (grilled, if requested) and a pickle made on the premises.

  Sated, Wyatt walked back out into the drizzle and turned left. Turning left again, he walked uphill for half a block until he came to the storefront whose etched front window announced that it housed the offices of the Assemblyman for the 13th District of California.