The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  Gina, annoyed, threw her a quizzical look. “I’d think that would be obvious enough. We need to talk about strategy and then he can catch me up on everything I’ve missed.”

  “You haven’t missed anything. Haven’t we just established here between us that he didn’t do anything wrong? He got home this morning and called emergency, then had the talk with your inspector, which you already seem…”

  Stuart butted in. “Deb. It’s okay. That’s why she’s here.”

  “But you need…I mean…” She couldn’t express exactly what she meant, and tried it again. “I don’t think we should have to go. We can be here to help you if you need anything.”

  “It’s the attorney-client privilege,” Jedd said. “If you talk to your lawyer and you let somebody else listen in, the privilege doesn’t apply.”

  “But,” Debra said, “this isn’t a good time for him to be alone.”

  “He won’t be alone,” Gina told her. Matter-of-factly, putting on a tight smile, she added, “I’m afraid that this isn’t really a request.” She spoke to Stuart. “It’s a condition.”

  Stuart nodded. “Don’t worry, Deb. I’ll be fine. She’s on our side.”

  Jedd was already on his feet. “Stuart’s right, Debra. The best thing we can do is let them go to work.”

  Worrying her lower lip, Debra seemed to be fighting it for another second, but finally she shrugged, huffed an “Okay, then,” and stood up. Stuart got up with her. She put a hand on his arm one more time and told him she’d be on her cell phone if he needed her. “Have you had anything to eat? I could bring you dinner when you’re done here. Or we could go out.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I’ve got to be picking up Kym sometime. She’s taking the bus up from Santa Cruz.”

  “Oh God, that’s right. Kym. We could go down to Greyhound and get her together. Just let me know.”

  “I will.”

  Jedd Conley was standing by the open door, holding it. “Gina, if you need anything else from me, you’ve got all my numbers. And again, thanks for coming.” He cast an expectant glance at Debra, motioned to the doorway.

  Debra turned and clipped a cold “Yes, thank you” in Gina’s direction.

  When they’d gone, Gina sat down in her chair and let Stuart get comfortable on the couch. Meeting his eyes, she smiled. Sitting back, adopting a casual air, she crossed her legs. “So,” she said, gently now, “how are you holding up?”

  The question caught him off guard. He rubbed a palm along his unshaved cheek. Finally, he drew in a lungful of air and let it out. “Not too well. I keep thinking this can’t be real, that I’m going to wake up and it won’t have happened.”

  “I know. That’s how it feels at first.” Gina took in her own deep breath. “My fiancé was killed a few years ago. Sometimes it still doesn’t feel real.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Gina shrugged. “You go on.” Regrouping, not having meant to reveal even so little about herself, she said, “But you’ve already told Inspector Juhle that you and your wife were having troubles.”

  “Having troubles doesn’t mean I wanted her to die.”

  “No, of course not. But how you felt about her may become an issue. It is an issue.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “This is one: Did you love her?”

  He hesitated, scratched at the birthmark near his eye. “Once upon a time I did.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “We just weren’t very compatible anymore. We didn’t like to do the same kinds of things. But until last Friday…I don’t know, I had more or less considered it another phase that we’d probably get through like we’d gotten through other ones. Our daughter just started college a couple of weeks ago, and the house felt different without her, but I figured it would settle back to normal sometime. Until then, I’d just wait it out.”

  “So you didn’t want the divorce? On your own?”

  “I wasn’t actively thinking about it before she mentioned it, if that’s what you mean.”

  Gina nodded. “Close enough. So you weren’t fighting?”

  “No. She worked all the time and I mostly tried to keep out of her way when she was home. But we hardly talked enough to fight.”

  Gina took a beat, then came out with it. “What about her sister?”

  Stuart’s face went dark. “What about her?”

  “You and her.”

  “What are you talking about? There’s no me and her. Deb and I are friends.”

  “Yes, I could see that. Your wife wasn’t jealous of her?”

  “No. Or, at least she had no reason to be.”

  “That’s not the same thing. I’m just telling you that if you have been having an affair with your wife’s sister, and it gets out, which it will if you were, it’s going to cause problems.”

  Stuart’s voice went up a notch. “It wouldn’t mean I killed Caryn, for Christ’s sake!”

  But Gina needed to nail down this fact. She uncrossed her legs and leaned toward him. “So for the record, Stuart, your relationship with Debra is not now and never has been intimate?”

  “No. Yes. Correct, is what I’m trying to say.”

  Sufficiently ambiguous, Gina thought, and nicely camouflaged. But she simply said, “Okay. Because if you were involved with her, it would be a very strong motive.”

  “I just said I’m not.”

  “I know you did.” She stared at him and waited.

  He returned her steady gaze for several long seconds, unbending. Finally, he came forward on the couch himself. “Besides which,” he said, “I was at Echo Lake when Caryn was killed, or died, or killed herself. I believe I’ve said this once or twice. So who cares what motive I might or might not have? I couldn’t have done it.”

  “Yes,” Gina said. “I know that.” Again she waited.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You’re not going to like what I’m going to ask you next, and I want you to know that I’m not being accusatory. I’m trying to get my arms around where you are.”

  This almost brought him to a resigned grin. “I think I can take it.”

  “All right. If you still loved Caryn enough to say that you were committed to your marriage before she mentioned divorce on Friday, I’m just wondering about where you’re putting any sign of grief. Are you sorry, or even sad, that your wife of twenty-some years is suddenly gone? Because if you are, I’m not getting much of a sense of it.”

  “I told you. It hasn’t sunk in yet. I’m probably in shock. I don’t know how I’m feeling, to tell you the truth. Conflicted, I guess. Confused. If there’s a book or something on proper feelings you’re supposed to have when your wife dies, I haven’t read it. I loved her once. We used to be great. Lately we haven’t gotten along very well. Last weekend I finally let myself get pretty pissed off at her, and this morning I come home and she’s dead.” His shoulders sank as he sat back, rubbed at his cheek again. “You mentioned sad. I don’t know if I’m sad. I don’t know how much I’m going to miss her. I’m sorry if that’s the wrong answer.”

  “There isn’t a wrong answer,” Gina said. “And even if there were, that was a pretty good one. So what was it that made you stop getting along?”

  He barked a one-note, bitter laugh. “Everything. Money, issues with Kymberly, money, me, her, time. Did I mention money?”

  “What about money?”

  “She became obsessed with it. I didn’t.”

  “Obsessed how?”

  “The way people get obsessed with anything. It’s all she thought about, cared about, worked on, you name it. If it wasn’t going to make her money, she wasn’t interested.”

  “And you didn’t feel the same way?”

  “Not even close.” He held up a hand. “It’s a flaw in my character, I know. And if you didn’t know, she’d tell you.”

  “Are you saying she complained about you to other people? In public?”

  “I imagine so. She complained about me
to me enough.”

  “But you weren’t fighting? Were you ever tempted to hit her?”

  “Tempted? Sure. Did I ever? No. Let me ask you one: Juhle really thinks somebody killed her? He thinks this was a murder?”

  Gina nodded. “I got the very strong impression he’s leaning that way.”

  This gave Stuart a moment of pause. His eyes scanned the corners of the ceiling, then came back to Gina. “I’m starting to be pretty glad they talked me into you,” he said.

  SEVEN

  JUHLE GOT GINA ROAKE’S MESSAGE THAT she was representing Stuart Gorman, but couldn’t do anything about it in the near term. He was only a few blocks away from the Travelodge, but he was on his way to Russian Hill to try to talk with some of the neighbors.

  He got lucky on his first try. Juhle was sitting in a breakfast nook, talking to Stuart’s next-door neighbor, Leesa Moore. Their conversation was competing with the low drone of a television set that sat on the kitchen counter next to the microwave, tuned to some talk show with a male host. Juhle had no idea who the host was or why anyone would want to listen to him talk to his similarly unfamiliar female guest about the details of the two months she’d apparently spent, from what Juhle could gather by half-listening, confined in a basement as a sex slave for three teenage boys in upstate New York.

  Leesa Moore was a well-preserved sixty-three-year-old who had lived in this house for twenty-six years, the last five of them alone after her husband had died. She was a retired schoolteacher who volunteered five mornings a week at a library branch in the Marina. “Especially this past summer,” she was saying, “it seemed the fighting was just about constant.”

  “Between Stuart and Caryn?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Did you hear anything like a threat?”

  “Like what, exactly?”

  “Like, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ Anything like that?”

  “Well, no. Not specifically that. But swearing, a lot of swearing. It surprised me, coming from a doctor like she was. And such a respected writer. You’d think he’d have a better vocabulary. But it was a lot of ‘F-this,’ and ‘F-that,” and ‘F-you.’ I’m sure you can imagine.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Juhle had used a few F-thises in his life and thought there were worse crimes, but he had his witness talking and wanted to keep her in the mood. “Do you know if the argument had ever led to anything else?”

  “Not to my knowledge.” Eyes on her television, suddenly Leesa Moore came alive. “Oh my God,” she said. “I don’t believe it. Do you mind, Inspector, for a minute?” She pointed over to the TV, then reached and turned up the volume. “Look at this. They’ve got the boys on the show too.”

  And it was true. The host was explaining that they’d all been released from jail by now and were in their twenties. The poor woman, to whom this turn of events was evidently a surprise, was stuck to her chair, mouth agape, between tears and hysteria. The television audience was going wild.

  “That’s got to be staged,” Juhle said.

  “No, no. He does this kind of thing all the time. It’s a great show.”

  Juhle and his witness followed the action together on the screen. After the woman had finally left her chair, got her language beeped as she swore at the host, and ran off the stage in tears, Leesa Moore turned the volume down again to a conversational level and brought her attention back to the inspector. “I’m sorry. Where were we?”

  “We were talking about if Stuart and Caryn’s yelling at one another had ever led to anything else. Something physical, I mean. And you said you didn’t know about it if it had.”

  “That’s right.” She squinted in concentration, finally reaching over again and turning the TV sound off entirely. “Except, oh wait, maybe there was one time in the middle of last summer. I don’t know if it was because they’d had a fight or something, but I got home from work and there was a police car parked in front of the house.”

  “Stuart and Caryn’s house? Next door?”

  “Yes. I stopped and stood by it for a minute, wondering if I should knock and see what had happened and if there was anything I could do to help. But in the end I just came home. When I looked out later—not too much later—it was gone.”

  “You’re sure it had come to their house?”

  “Well, no, I wasn’t at first, although it was parked right in front of their place. But after it was gone, I called over there and asked Stuart if everything was all right, that I’d seen the police car and all. And he said everything was fine. That it had just been a misunderstanding.”

  “A misunderstanding?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “About what? Did you ask him?”

  “No. He didn’t seem anxious to talk very much about it.”

  “Did you ever notice any kind of marks on Caryn? A black eye? Anything like that?”

  She shook her head. “But I didn’t see as much of her anyway.”

  “So you never found out why the police car was there?”

  “Well, not from them.” The answer seemed to embarrass her. She went on. “Have you talked to the Sutcliffs yet? The neighbors on the other side?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, Harriet—Mrs. Sutcliff—she was the one who had called the police. She thought somebody was going to get killed over there.”

  Q: Three, two, one. Case number 07-232918. This is Inspector Devin Juhle, badge 1667. The time is quarter after fifteen hundred hours on Monday, September 12th. I am at a residence at 1322 Greenwich Street and speaking with a sixty-four-year-old Caucasian woman who identifies herself as Harriet Sutcliff, the owner of the residence. Mrs. Sutcliff, I appreciate your agreeing to talk with me. How long have you been neighbors with Stuart and Caryn Gorman?

  A: Since they moved in here. That was, I guess, fifteen or so years ago.

  Q: Did you find them to be good neighbors?

  A: Yes. At first. We liked them very much. Especially Art—my husband?—when he found out that Stuart wrote those fly-fishing books. Art’s a fisherman himself. So it was really exciting for him getting to know a celebrity like that. But the last couple of years, we haven’t seen too much of them.

  Q: And why is that?

  A: It just seemed that they changed. First they seemed to stop doing social things together. And certainly with us. Stuart would still come by sometimes and talk to Art, but we almost never saw them together anymore. And then, by the summer, they seemed to just be fighting all the time.

  Q: You heard them fighting?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Just words, or more than that?

  A: More, I’d say.

  Q: Like what?

  A: Well, I definitely heard some things breaking over there. As though they were thrown. It was hard not to hear when that happened. And then one day last summer, I didn’t want to but I felt I had to call the police. I thought somebody was going to get hurt.

  Q: And so you did, in fact, call the police?

  A: Yes. And a car came. It stayed a short while, but I don’t think anything ever came of that. And since then I haven’t talked to either Stuart or Caryn very much. I think they must have figured out that I’d been the one that called and they were mad at me.

  Q: Did there continue to be fights after that one?

  A: A couple, I think. But none so bad.

  Q: Did you hear anything like a fight last night over there?

  A: No. We—Art and I—we went to a movie and got back about ten thirty, and it was all quiet over there. Dark. And we were asleep by the time Stuart got home.

  Q: By the time Stuart got home?

  A: Right.

  Q: And what time was that?

  A: I don’t know exactly. I gather pretty late.

  Q: You mean this morning?

  A: No, I don’t think so. I believe he got home last night.

  Q: Why do you believe that? If you were asleep and didn’t hear him?

  A: Well, I didn’t see it myself, but because that’s what B
ethany said. There was a bunch of us from the block that gathered at the corner this morning. We didn’t know what else to do, so we were all standing there waiting for someone to tell us what had happened, although we knew it was probably bad, with all the police and everything.

  Q: I’m sorry, Mrs. Sutcliff. Can we go back to Bethany for a minute. Bethany is who?

  A: Bethany Robley. She lives across the street, that stucco place right there two houses up. She and Kymberly know each other.

  Q: And Bethany told you that Stuart came home last night?

  A: That’s what she said. She said it was around eleven thirty.

  Q: Why did she think that?

  A: I got the impression that she saw him. Her bedroom’s right in that upstairs front window. You can see it from here, see? I can’t believe he actually killed her, though I guess somebody must have. He really seems like such a nice man.

  Q: Well, that’s still kind of an open question.

  The door at the stucco house across the street opened to a heavyset, gray-haired African American woman in a brown jogging outfit. “Yes? Can I help you?”

  Introducing himself, Juhle had his badge out, and held it up in his wallet. “Is this the home of Bethany Robley?”

  “It is.”

  “I’d like to ask her a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “Maybe I do. I’m her mother. What’s this about? What’s she done?”

  “She’s done nothing, ma’am. It’s about your neighbors across the street there. The Gormans. You may have heard that Mrs. Gorman died this morning.”

  “There wasn’t any Mrs. Gorman. There was Dr. Dryden, Caryn, married to Stuart, if that’s who you mean.” Mrs. Robley had her arms crossed, and stepping forward, she completely blocked the door. “And that’s got nothing to do with my daughter. She had nothing to do with them.”

  “I understand she was a friend of Kymberly’s, their daughter.”

  “Okay, that. They know each other, all right, but Kym’s gone up to school and she hasn’t been over there since…”

  Behind Mrs. Robley, Juhle heard a younger voice. “It’s okay, Mom. I can talk to him.”

  “Not unless I say so, you can’t.” The mother came back at Juhle, holding her daughter back with an extended palm. “Are we going to be wanting a lawyer here, Inspector? You think my little girl had anything at all to do with Caryn’s dying?”