The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  “I’ve got no reason to think that, ma’am. I’d just like to ask her a couple of questions about what, if anything, she might have seen last night. From her window.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all. Promise.”

  The mother half turned and Juhle caught a glimpse of a young woman of about his own height. She was wearing a Galileo High sweatshirt, a short black skirt, white tennis shoes.

  “I’m gonna be with you the whole time,” Mrs. Robley said.

  “Fine with me.”

  A few seconds passed, and then the large woman sighed and moved to the side to let her daughter come forward. Bethany stepped up into the doorway—a clear, wide forehead and a solemn expression on her face. A keen intelligence seemed to emanate from a penetrating gaze out of deeply set eyes. To Juhle, she looked far too serious for a young woman of her age; she could easily have passed for twenty-five.

  And Juhle immediately recognized a key truth: If Bethany was going to be one of his witnesses—and he thought that was a reasonable likelihood at this stage—he couldn’t have asked for a better one. “I won’t take up much of your time,” he began. He looked behind Bethany to her mother, held up his tiny tape recorder. “I’d like to record what we say here.” He shrugged apologetically. “It’s just that I don’t take really good notes, and I want to make sure I’ve got it exactly right. Is that all right with you, Mrs. Robley?”

  “Ask my daughter.”

  Bethany shrugged with a slight awkwardness. “That’s okay, I guess.”

  “Thank you.” Juhle quickly dictated his standard intro into the device, then came back to his subject. “Well, Bethany, I was just over at Mrs. Sutcliff’s house talking to her, and she told me that you were one of the people with her standing on the corner this morning when I pulled up. Do you remember that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, she—Mrs. Sutcliff, I mean—she told me that you said you saw Mr. Gorman get home last night. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you happen to remember roughly what time that was?”

  “Actually, I remember exactly. He got home at eleven thirty. That’s my lights-out time on a school night, and I was just finishing at my desk when I saw him turn into the driveway.”

  “And where’s your desk?”

  “Just under the window there that looks down on the street.”

  Juhle paused to consider his next question. “And you’re sure it was Mr. Gorman? Did you see him get out of the car?”

  “No. But it must have been him. He opened the garage automatically and went inside. Then closed it behind him. So I never saw him. But it was his car.”

  “You know his car on sight?”

  Her lip curled downward, the question apparently striking her as insulting. “Sure. I’ve gone skiing in it with Kym maybe ten times. So yes, I know the car.”

  “I didn’t mean any offense,” Juhle said. “I guess I’m just asking how sure you are.”

  “What? That it was Stuart? I don’t know. I told you I didn’t see him. But if he was driving his car, it was him. Because that was his car.”

  “And how did you know that?”

  “I don’t know. I just knew.”

  Mrs. Robley decided to put in her two cents. “She knows what she knows, Inspector. She’s not lying to you.”

  “Of course not. There’s no question of that.” Juhle spoke matter-of-factly to Bethany. “I’m sorry if I sound critical. That’s not my intention. I’m just trying to make sure of what you’re saying. So now, getting back to Stuart, you watched him pull his car into his garage across the street and then close the garage door behind him?”

  “No.” Again, the question seemed to frustrate her. “Look, I’m sure. No. I just saw him pull up and I’m like, ‘Oh, Stuart’s getting home,’ and then went over and got in bed. I didn’t think anything about it, except that I noticed it. The end. And I didn’t sit at the window and watch until he closed the garage door behind him. Why would I do that? It wasn’t all that interesting, dull though the rest of my life might be.”

  Juhle hesitated, a fragment of a barely remembered something nagging at him. “But I believe you said…can you give me just a second?”

  “Sure. More, if you need.”

  He thanked her, then walked a few steps down to the sidewalk and rewound the tape recorder. In a minute, he was back up at the door with Bethany. “Here,” he said, “listen to this.”

  When he pushed the recorder’s play button, they heard her voice saying, “No. He opened the garage automatically and went inside. Then closed it behind him. So I never saw him. But it was his car.”

  “See?” he said. “You hear it?”

  “What?”

  “You say, ‘Then closed it behind him.’ Which you just said you didn’t see him do.”

  “I didn’t. See him close it, I mean.”

  “Well, which is it?”

  “It was closed.”

  “Okay.” Juhle rubbed away the crease in his forehead. He killed another few seconds fast-forwarding his tape recorder to the end again, and turned it back to record. Then he said, “Excuse me, Bethany, for being so dumb. But then how did you know it was closed behind him if you didn’t see him close it?”

  For a brief moment, the question seemed to stump her. Her normally grave expression turned to a look of near-despair before she suddenly broke into a surprisingly quite lovely smile. “Because I saw him open it later,” she said. “So it had to be closed.”

  “You saw him open it? When was this?”

  “Twelve forty-five. Pretty much exactly again.” She brought her shoulders up in a shrug. “I had insomnia. I always have insomnia. I hate it. But then I had to get up and go to the bathroom and I noticed it had been an hour and fifteen minutes already that I’d been awake, which made me start freaking out about how tired I’d be for school today.” She let out a heavy sigh. “And which I am. Was. God.”

  “So what happened? You looked out the window and…”

  “And Stuart was backing out again…”

  “Backing out? At quarter to one in the morning?”

  “I know. I thought that was a little weird too. But really, I wasn’t thinking too much about him or anything else except getting some sleep.” Stifling a sudden yawn, she smiled again. “Sorry. Just talking about it, sometimes, you know…”

  “I hear you. But I noticed you called Mr. Gorman Stuart. Do you know him well?”

  “Not well, no. But he’s Kym’s dad. I know him okay. He doesn’t like to be called Mr. Gorman.”

  “And you and Kym are friends?”

  “Well, kind of. She’s a little up and down, you know. Hyper up and then kind of a drag down. And lately not so much. Actual friends, I mean, except we ski together sometimes. Anyway, we’ve known each other since fourth grade.” She brought a finger to her mouth and chewed the end of it. “This is going to kill her.”

  “Were she and her mom close?”

  “No. I mean her dad.”

  “What about her dad?”

  “Well, you just said. What you were investigating. I mean, if he killed her.”

  “I didn’t say that, Bethany. We don’t have any one suspect right now. But you’re saying Kymberly and her mom didn’t get along?”

  The girl shrugged. “Her mom was pretty busy most of the time.” Reaching back, she touched her own mother’s hand briefly, then came back to Juhle. “Caryn wasn’t really that bad.”

  “Did people say she was?”

  Bethany shrugged. “Sometimes the two of them—Stuart and Kym—they’d be a little sarcastic. But they both loved her, I think. You don’t think Stuart killed her, do you? I can’t believe he’d do anything like that.”

  Juhle kept it matter-of-fact. “I’m just talking to people, Bethany. Trying to get to what happened. I might have to talk to you again. Would that be all right?”

  “Sure. I guess.”

  Juhle peeked around behind her. “Mrs.
Robley?”

  “If it’s okay with her.”

  “All right, then. Thank you both for your time.”

  EIGHT

  STUART WAS STANDING BY THE COUCH, stretching. He and Gina had been going over issues for the past couple of hours when suddenly he’d become aware of the time and jumped up. “Well,” he was saying, “whether or not we hit most of it, I’ve got to get going if I want to be on time for Kym, and I do. If Juhle calls you, maybe you can just set up a time we can all talk. But not tonight, okay, please. My girl’s going to need me. That’s the most important thing right now.”

  “Sure. Of course.” Gina had pulled her heavy satchel over in front of her and dropped her well-used legal pad into one of its sections. “We’ll just stay in wait-and-see mode until we hear from Juhle. If he calls me tonight, I’ll tell him you need time with your daughter and ask if we can set up a time tomorrow or the next day.”

  “You think he will? Call you tonight?”

  “Maybe not, unless there’s been some break in the case we don’t know about. Either way, I’ll try to check in with him again, get some sense of things.” She looked up at him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  He shook his head, weariness now all over him. “Just thinking about Kym.” Staring into empty space across the room, he blinked rapidly a few times. “And Caryn. She’s really gone, isn’t she?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Squeezing at his temples, he sighed deeply, then looked across at her. “Jesus, what a waste. What an unbelievable, colossal fucking waste.”

  The Travelodge was barely a mile from Gina’s condominium. Most of it was uphill, true, but to Gina’s mind, that just made it a better exercise opportunity. So after she told Stuart that he should go on ahead, that she’d let herself out and get the door, she waited until he’d gone, then took off her black pumps, dropped them into the satchel and replaced them with the pair of tennis shoes that she always carried in her bag.

  Outside, the evening was still warm, although the ocean breeze had increased enough to stir up the occasional wisp of dust or debris in the gutters. Gina walked with an athletic ease, her satchel converted to a backpack. Ahead of her, across Van Ness Avenue, the street began its steep climb that summitted at the oft-photographed view of Lombard as the “crookedest street in the world.”

  When she got to the top, Gina was breathing hard. Good. That’s what exercise was—breathing hard. She stopped a minute to take in the view. In front of her, down in the valley, North Beach, the towers of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, and a slice of Fisherman’s Wharf, with Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower beyond them. Behind her, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio, and from this height the glint of the sun off the Pacific Ocean on the horizon as well.

  She was aware of course that on a lot of days and nights—maybe even most of them—the fog could be so thick here that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, but when the place conspired with the weather at a moment like this, Gina thought a person could live here for a hundred years and still not grow tired of it.

  By the time she got home, down and up another hill and fifteen minutes later, she was ready for a shower. And when that was done, she put on some jeans and a pullover and went into her living room. Like the rest of the condo it was only as big as it needed to be, but very well appointed in an eclectic, comfortable style. A couch with a matching loveseat diagonally faced the brick fireplace with a Navajo rug in front of it. A pair of reading chairs—she had bought the second for David—bracketed the large front window. Built-in bookshelves rose to greet a ten-foot ceiling on both sides of the fireplace.

  Now she went to the well-stocked, mirror-backed wet bar in the back corner of the room and took a very small, four-ounce plain leaded crystal glass off the shelf. David had given her a set of four of these, and she loved the feel and the look of them. Pouring an inch of Oban neat, she crossed to her reading chair, where she set the drink on the Chinese lacquered side table and picked up the notes she took when she’d talked to Stuart.

  Caryn Dryden, it turned out, had lived a very full and complicated life, replete with personal and medical interactions, investment schemes, research opportunities and business connections. Stuart didn’t know the details of most of it, but he’d done the best he could filling Gina in after she’d finally convinced him that if someone had in fact killed his wife, it probably hadn’t been random.

  Apparently, there were two unrelated areas of activity that had consumed his wife’s time and energy in recent months.

  The first was that she had been within a couple of months of opening a new, independent practice with a fellow orthopedic surgeon, Robert McAfee. The plans had been in the works for the better part of two years, but Stuart had picked up that something had changed in the past couple of months—he thought she might have been trying to bring in a third partner. She’d complained that she was short of cash, and evidently this third guy could bridge or mitigate the shortfall. But McAfee hadn’t been happy. Wasn’t happy. He’d been calling her day and night for the past month, threatening to pull out of the deal, but was already so financially committed that that would have been suicide.

  Gina sipped her Oban and went on to read over her notes on Stuart’s comments when she’d asked him why or how Caryn had run short of money. How did that happen if she was the money wizard who brought in the big bucks?

  It was because, Stuart said, she was planning on making even more of the big bucks. Huge bucks. Fuck-you money, she had called it. Caryn had been involved for several years in the development and then the clinical trials for a new replacement hip, the Dryden Socket, which degraded at a much slower rate than the current state-of-the-art hip. The device was evidently very close to full FDA approval and, when approved, it promised to make gazillionaires out of all of its early investors. Of whom Caryn had not only been one, but the inventor as well. Apparently, this investment, too, had run into some kind of last-minute financial difficulties. The investment group’s banker had come back to the original investors and offered something called mezzanine loans to hold the company over until government approval.

  Stuart didn’t know what mezzanine loans were, but Gina did. Very high risk and very short term, they were a common feature of a lot of deals that were close to viable but needed additional capital while the business geared up to profitability. Caryn had plunked more than two million dollars in cash into a mezzanine loan for the Dryden Socket within the past six months. Thereby leaving herself short on her new practice offices when there were the inevitable and unavoidable delays in construction and start-up.

  Now, Stuart had said, with Caryn’s death, McAfee’s ass was saved, since Caryn had been well insured on the project. But the Dryden Socket was apparently still having some problems—serious enough that Caryn had called Jedd Conley’s office to look into them. Although what Jedd had had to do with it was a mystery to Stuart.

  Outside it had come to dusk. Gina finished her reading and her drink at the same time and sat back in her chair to consider what she thought she now knew. Listening to Stuart’s recounting of the labyrinthine convolutions of Caryn’s business life, she had by now concluded that murder, and neither accident nor suicide, was going to be a good bet in this case. Add to that Devin Juhle’s comment at lunch that Caryn probably wouldn’t be naked in a hot tub, thinking her husband was gone for the weekend, having a glass of wine with somebody she didn’t know, and the bet became a near certainty.

  And—the thought brought Gina up in her chair—if Caryn had told Stuart she wanted a divorce on Friday, would she have been naked in the hot tub with him?

  Or maybe she’d just been alone relaxing and he’d unexpectedly come home.

  But he hadn’t gotten home until this morning. He had that gas station receipt to prove it. And having talked to Stuart all afternoon, Gina didn’t think that he had paid someone else to kill his wife. All of which didn’t mean he still couldn’t be the target of a major investigation. But at least it did n
ot appear that her client was guilty. At this early stage, that was about the best she could hope for.

  Feeling good about the way things were going, she decided what the hell, she’d pour herself another small drink. Live a little.

  She was back in the game with that rara avis, the innocent client.

  This was going to be fun.

  Here is the fundamental irony of the wilderness experience: Its principal lesson is that we are not alone.

  I am standing in the middle of a stream at the hour when the sun begins to clear the ridge out to the east. The shadow of the mountain recedes and reveals a world of vibrant color—beyond gray of rock and indigo sky, suddenly the field explodes into wildflowers—yellows and greens, reds and pinks and blues and whites. A movement out of the corner of my eye turns out to be a buff coyote stalking prey. Downstream, a deer stops for a drink. A jackrabbit breaks from its cover. Overhead, a hawk circles in a rising thermal. On the water, the hatch begins and the air above the stream fills with clouds of mayfly, or caddis, or mosquito.

  I cast and a trout strikes.

  There are no other humans in sight. From the direct evidence of my senses, there may be none on the planet. And yet my state of being is suffused with a sense of belonging in this place, at this time. I am in the midst of the dream of the Buddhist who, requesting a hamburger, says: “Make me one with everything.”

  One with everything.

  It is singular that this experience of a healing solitude without any sense of loneliness occurs, for me, only in the wilderness. Perhaps it is because there are so few of the expectations of others to accommodate. Here I am responsible only to myself, only for my survival. A day or two out of the blandishments and distractions of daily life—away from the traffic and the small talk and the advertisements, away from the constant assault of vulgar and voracious media of all kinds—and I become increasingly aware of a deep sensory awareness that roots me to the here and now in a profound and fundamental way.