The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  “Well, I don’t know what else I can do. Did you hear what else I told those reporters tonight? Something else that was true?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I’m willing to cooperate with whoever it takes, even the police, to find who killed Caryn. In fact, just between you and me, maybe I’m going to try to find out myself.”

  “Not a good idea. This is why we have police.”

  “Except at the moment they think I did it.”

  “No, they’re just saying you’re a person—”

  “A person of interest. I know, I know. And that means I’m the prime suspect as soon as they find something they can use as evidence. And then I’m in jail. I don’t want to go to jail, even for a day.”

  “No. You’re right there. You don’t.”

  “Well, then, what’s my option? Sit around and wait until Juhle piles up enough innuendo and hearsay to bring charges against me? Listen, Gina, if he’s not looking for somebody else, then he’s not looking for whoever did this, because I didn’t. Have I mentioned that before?”

  “A couple of times, I believe. And that brings us to some good news at last.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your lawyer is starting to believe you.”

  FIFTEEN

  THE TRAVELODGE DID NOT HAVE room service, so Stuart let his daughter sleep and went out to pick up breakfast and a newspaper. So at about 8:15, Stuart and Kymberly were drinking their Starbucks and eating croissants at the coffee table in his hotel room. His daughter turned a page of the paper, leaned forward over it for a minute, then looked up. “You’ve made USA Today, Dad. ‘Writer Denies Implication in Doctor Wife’s Death.’ Oh, God. Nationwide.”

  “Can I see?”

  She passed the pages over, and he scanned the article quickly. It wasn’t long, maybe two hundred words in the Regional News section under San Francisco. Before he had a chance for any kind of a comment, the telephone on the side table next to the couch rang once and Stuart grabbed it. “Hello. Yes, speaking.” But after that he wasn’t speaking—he listened for a minute, at the end of which he said, “All right, thanks.” Then sat holding the phone.

  “Dad?”

  Startled out of his reverie, Stuart smiled awkwardly at his daughter, then hung up and lifted his coffee cup to his mouth. “That was the police,” he said. “We can go back home.”

  “Home,” Kym said. “What’s home going to be like now?”

  He met his daughter’s eyes, saw the incipient tears, and put his arm around her, bringing her in next to him, holding her as she broke.

  Kym didn’t think she could stand to be inside the house where her mother had been slain. She wasn’t sure she could ever go back through that front door again. And fortunately, before they’d even finished their coffee, Debra had shown up unbidden at the hotel. She volunteered to take her niece shopping for some clothes (no argument about the shallowness of fashion this time from Kym) and then out to lunch someplace nice. After that, they could both go back to Debra’s apartment, where Kym was welcome to stay with her as long as she wanted, and at least until the funeral. The medical examiner hadn’t released the body, so they weren’t sure yet when that would be. Certainly no sooner than next Monday.

  So at a little before noon, after wandering aimlessly in the empty house for most of an hour, Stuart found himself alone upstairs at his computer in his small writing office next to his bedroom. He hadn’t checked his e-mails since Thursday night, and now he was scrolling down through nearly a hundred of them. It did not appear that the police who’d searched his house so thoroughly over the past couple of days had opened his files, and this surprised him; but maybe they’d dumped his hard drive data onto a disk and taken it downtown to peruse at their leisure.

  The correspondence was mostly predictable—fully half, in spite of his spam-blocking software, was unwanted, unsolicited mail of one kind or another; eight or ten were messages from people who’d enjoyed one of his books or others of his writings; both his agent and his publisher, offering any kind of assistance (but possibly not exactly heartbroken over the commercial possibilities of him being in the news); another twenty forwarded jokes that he routinely deleted; fifteen or so from people who’d heard about Caryn.

  He had almost gotten to the bottom of the queue when he saw a familiar sender’s moniker—TSNK—that brought him up short and caused his stomach to go hollow. Stuart had heard from TSNK before, twice. The first time had been a little over a year ago, a few days after Sunset had published a short piece that featured some of Stuart’s favorite outdoor recipes for cooking trout.

  At that time, he’d printed out the offending e-mail but then decided to ignore it. It had to be from some crank. Stuart hadn’t considered calling the police or the FBI. He never even mentioned it to Caryn. Stuart, though, had kept the message, but he’d never had to go back and look at it to remember it in its entirety: “It is bad enough when the ignorant kill God’s and nature’s noble animals in the name of food or sport. But when someone who glorifies himself as the friend and benefactor of nature does it, the crime rises to the level of evil. Now we know who you are. Punishment for your crime might come at any time. Prepare yourself. THOU SHALT NOT KILL.”

  TSNK.

  He’d heard from them, or him, or her, one other time four months ago, in the wake of another article he’d done—this one published in Field & Stream—on an albacore run he’d taken with a party boat out of Morro Bay.

  The seventy-foot party boat had left the dock at midnight, and after a night running southwest for about sixty miles, they’d hit a good-size school of tuna. Although every one of the twelve other anglers hooked up, in the aftermath of bringing the fish aboard, Stuart had been appalled by the general greediness on the boat. The common attitude seemed to be that suddenly all of the boatmates were potential enemies, intent on stealing each other’s catch. Two fights broke out, fists actually flung, when one of the mates tagged a bigger fish (they were all within three pounds on either side of forty!) as the catch of one man, when another was sure he had boated it. Afterward, when the run was over, the men sat apart, guarding their burlap sacks of catch, lest another fisherman substitute his name tag to try to get more fish.

  The story Stuart wrote for Field & Stream had been his knee-jerk solution to the rampant avidity. Wasabi and soy sauce in hand, he’d gone up to the first mate and asked him to bring up the largest fish Stuart had caught and cut up half of it—fifteen pounds of fillet—into sushi for breakfast for every man on the boat. The other half he gave to the short-order cook in the galley and told him to make as many variations of albacore as his heart desired to keep the crew and his fellow fishermen happy. So, besides the sushi, they’d all fed like lords on fresh breaded albacore, on seared sesame albacore, on garlic stir-fried albacore, and on albacore with butter, lemon and capers. By the end of the day, the men—even the earlier pugilists—were all friends, sharing recipes, tips and even tackle, trading their fresh tuna for each other’s canned, planning other fishing trips as a group.

  Stuart had thought it a very successful story about how an example of simple sharing could break the grip of irrational territorialism on a bunch of alpha males. TSNK apparently didn’t have the same opinion: “You’ve been warned once, and you have not heeded. Your influence could heal, and instead you choose to let it harm the helpless creatures of the deep. The albacore shall have their vengeance. THOU SHALT NOT KILL.”

  This second time, Stuart did report the e-mail to the police, who directed him to the FBI, who in turn told him they would pass it either to Fish & Game or up the chain to Homeland Security as a possible threat from a terrorist organization. But Stuart had never heard another word about it from anyone, and in his heart he believed that the authorities considered the whole thing more or less a joke. And, in truth, he knew it was highly unlikely that Al-Qaeda cared much about whether he killed the fish he caught. On the other hand, there were organizations that did; if you said the word “terrorism
” on U.S. soil before 9/11, you would have probably been more likely, and accurately, to conjure up images of Timothy McVeigh or the work of PETA or the Earth Liberation Front than of Osama bin Laden and his followers.

  These people were serious. And they, or someone perhaps sufficiently like them, had him in their sights.

  In the emotional devastation he’d been enduring since last Friday when Caryn had told him she wanted a divorce, the thought of his most recently published article, an atypical foray outside of the fishing world in Western Sportsman, hadn’t crossed his mind. Since he’d handed it in six weeks before, though, he’d worried sporadically that his tale of the boar hunt he’d gone on in the Sierra foothills might draw the attention of TSNK.

  Now, the simmering of his all-too-familiar anger welling up again within him, he clicked twice on the message. It was dated last Friday, at 2:00 in the afternoon: “The beasts of the fields are sacred unto God, and now you have taken to slaying them as well as their brothers in the waters. This is intolerable. We know where you live. There will be no more warnings. Soon you will suffer as your victims have suffered. TSNK.”

  From her office, Gina placed a call to Wyatt Hunt, computer whiz. She was at Stuart’s house a half hour later. “Is it possible Juhle missed this?”

  They were in the kitchen, a room in which Stuart felt marginally comfortable. He was sitting on the counter by the sink. “Wouldn’t he have told us if he saw it?”

  “It may be why he hasn’t arrested you.”

  “Well, there’s one way to find out.”

  Gina placed the call from the kitchen phone and got the inspector on his cell phone. He was down in Hunters Point, interviewing another witness in a suspected gang slaying, but he wasn’t making much headway—the homey ain’t be ’membrin’ nothin’. “No, I’m out on the stoop now, hoping nobody shoots at me. What’s up, Gina?”

  She told him, and read the latest message.

  The bare fact of it made very little impact on the inspector. “It’s an e-mail? No. We didn’t download his files, but thanks for the idea.”

  “Devin, this looks to me like a threat to Stuart and maybe to his family. It says that they know where he lives. That it’s the last warning.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t go to some Internet café and mail it to himself?”

  “Reasonably sure, yes. He got two other similar notes in the past year from the same sender. On the second one, he notified the authorities.”

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Four or five months ago.”

  “He could have been planning it back then. Set up the story.”

  Gina said, “Look, Inspector, I’m giving you the courtesy of this phone call. If you want to come here to look for yourself, my client would let you in without a warrant. It’s your call.”

  “No. I’ll be there. Don’t erase anything. Don’t touch anything. Give me an hour.”

  “One hour,” Gina said, hanging up. She softened her tone to Stuart. “He was underwhelmed, but he’ll be here. He doesn’t think it’s impossible you sent it to yourself.”

  Stuart’s smile showed a few teeth. “They get an idea in their heads, they hold on to it pretty hard, don’t they? Okay, so even forget this Thou Shalt Not Kill guy. Isn’t Juhle looking at anybody else? Any other suspects?”

  “I don’t know. He should be. That’s all I can say.” She hesitated, looked out the window over his shoulder, came back to him, made an involuntary grimace.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked. “Something.”

  “I’m thinking I’d like to see where it happened, if you could deal with it.”

  He took a beat, then said, “Sure,” and boosted himself off the counter. “Out here.”

  The hot tub was still uncovered, still filled with water, although someone had turned it off, and the temperature was now tepid. They’d left the blackout blinds open, and the backs and sides of the neighboring homes and backyards were visible on all sides. Stuart dipped a hand into the water and stirred it.

  Outside, the early autumn weather kept imitating summer. From a feeder by the back fence, birdsong punctuated the stillness. A smell of chlorine hung in the air, a hint of humidity. Stuart didn’t turn around, but spoke quietly. “I’m starting to believe somebody drowned her. Somebody hit her on the head and pushed her under. I’ve got to find out who that was.”

  “We’ve talked about that, Stuart. That’s the police.”

  A bitter laugh. “They’re not motivated like I am.” He turned back to her. “Now you want to ask: If I didn’t love her anymore, why would it matter so much?”

  “All right. That did occur to me.”

  “It’s not so much Caryn. It’s me. I’m the one who’s going to have to live with the suspicion for the rest of my life, people thinking that I killed my wife. You think I want to look into my daughter’s eyes and have her not be absolutely certain that I didn’t do this? To say nothing of my friends, acquaintances, publishers. I can’t have it. I won’t have it.” The small outburst seemed to settle something in him. “They’re not locking me up. Whoever did this…”

  “Whoever did it,” Gina said, “will have made some mistakes, Stuart. When Juhle widens the net a little, he’ll get to them.”

  “He’s not looking. There’s no net.”

  “There will be, though. I promise. It’s only been two days and he’s been spending his time eliminating you.”

  “Wasting his time eliminating me. And after four days, murders don’t get solved, do they? Well, this one has to get solved.” Stuart again put his hand into the lukewarm water. He kept it there, moving it slowly back and forth. “Okay,” he said, as though he’d been arguing with himself and had reached a conclusion. “Okay, then.”

  SIXTEEN

  WYATT HUNT WAS UPSTAIRS IN THE small office, sitting at Stuart’s computer. Gina and Stuart were packed in, standing behind him. “There’s no way,” Hunt was saying, “that you can identify where this came from.”

  “Can’t we go to the server?” Stuart asked. “I mean, it’s at Gmail dot com. Don’t they have to have an account?”

  “Sure, but what does that tell you? Nothing. There’s no physical address. They probably signed up online, work out of a laptop. If it’s in a public place, we could maybe locate the computer, but so what? They could be anywhere. But wait.” Hunt held up a finger. “Another idea strikes. Hold on.” His fingers danced over the keyboard. He stared at the screen, typed some more. Did it all again. Finally he pushed back, shaking his head. “Nope. An idea, but not a good one.”

  “What’d you do?” Gina asked.

  “Googled ‘TSNK.’ Also ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’ Other than Bible sites, no record of anything like it, as you can see here. And if there’s no record on Google, it doesn’t exist. Maybe it is really just a lone crackpot, like you thought originally.”

  “But what’s all this ‘I know where you live’?”

  A shrug. “Cheap terror tactics, that’s all. They’ve written two of these before and done nothing, right? No attempt on you. The guy might be holed up in some cabin in Idaho or Maine or anywhere. Why should this time be any different?”

  “This time,” Stuart said, “my wife’s dead. I think that’s different enough.”

  “Of course,” Hunt said. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s all right,” Stuart replied. “That seems to be going around. I wasn’t thinking either the last few days. I’m only just starting to now.” He looked over to Gina, back down at Hunt. “So what you’re saying is that I could have done just what Juhle said, e-mailed myself from anywhere with this threatening stuff?”

  “Essentially, right.” Hunt swiveled halfway around toward the others. “Maybe if we found the actual computer this was e-mailed from, we could download the hard drive and prove the threat had come from that machine. But again, so what? We’d know who owned it. By itself, it wouldn’t do us any good.”

  “Just to be clear, Wyatt,”
Gina said, “since we can’t identify who sent it, Devin isn’t going to be able to rule out Stuart on this, is he?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Wait a minute,” Stuart said with some sharpness to Wyatt. “You know this guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “Juhle. Who both of you are suddenly calling Devin.”

  Hunt glanced up at Gina, shrugged. “Yeah. We go back. Why?”

  “Because maybe he needs somebody he trusts telling him that I didn’t do this.”

  Hunt coughed, made a noise in his throat, and Gina waded into the edgy silence. “Um, that’s not really the way it’s played, Stuart.”

  “I don’t give a damn about how it’s played, Gina. This isn’t a game, it’s my life.”

  Hunt, recovering, said, “Okay, it’s your life, but Devin doesn’t trust anybody that much. Not me, not his wife, nobody. He’s a cop, he follows the evidence.”

  “In spite of the fact that he’s got none on me?”

  Hunt’s shrug was a little more elaborate this time. “You’re the spouse, sir. The spouse usually did it. That’s where he’s got to start.”

  “All right, then, but what about if there are other suspects? How about that?”

  “He finds some evidence, he’ll look at them. But he won’t go chasing down another motive, not until he’s eliminated you. And that’s no matter what I say or do.”

  “So I’m guilty until proven innocent?”

  “To Juhle, probably.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be the other way round.”

  Hunt gave him a flat look. “You see much else in life that works the way it’s supposed to, let me know, and I’ll buy stock in it.”

  Gina put a hand on her client’s arm. “Listen, Stuart, Juhle might not think so, but you are at least being considered innocent, which is why you’re not in jail right now. They don’t have enough proof, and that’s the nut of it. And of course I’m going to communicate all of Caryn’s relationships to the inspector, and he may follow up on some or all of them. I may even lodge a complaint about the course of the investigation thus far with the DA, who happens to be a friend of mine. Of course,” she added, “that’ll go nowhere, but it might be a fun exercise.”