The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  Wes shrugged. “Maybe sometimes you’ve just gotta take what’s available.”

  “No,” Stuart said. “Kym used to take amytriptilene. It was one of the first things we tried, but her current doc put her on lithium and it seems to work better. At least when she takes it the way she’s supposed to.”

  Gina’s fatigue was forgotten. She was still running on the adrenaline rush she’d picked up in Farrell’s office. Kelley Rusnak’s probable murder eliminated the last shred of doubt. Stuart hadn’t killed Caryn. Two women working on the same project for the same company had now been killed within three weeks of each other, and the idea that these murders were unrelated was too much for Gina to swallow.

  And not only were they related, in all probability they were committed by the same person. The Dryden Socket had now become the center of Gina’s case, and ironically enough, it was still no formal part of it; there was no evidence about it, no testimony related to it. She doubted if Gerry Abrams had ever heard of it.

  But what it meant for Stuart, of course, was that he was innocent. Gina thought she might even get Wyatt Hunt to persuade Juhle to give the matter some of his attention. But that would be for later, if at all.

  Now it was seven thirty and Gina had still not gone home, but rather had cabbed directly from her office down to the Hall of Justice again. She and Stuart were in the semicircular main Attorney Visiting Room at the jail—the glass block, the long table, the two chairs. Stuart had sustained several bruises on his arms and a couple more on his head, along with the one gash at his hairline that had bled so prolifically, but all he had to show for it was a two-inch-square bandage on his forehead. “So why do you want to know about Kymberly and amytriptilene?” he asked her.

  Gina considered her response, then decided she had to give it to him straight. “Because Kelley Rusnak died of an overdose of amytriptilene.”

  A confused frown passed over Stuart’s face. “I don’t see the connection. What could Kelley’s suicide have to do with Kymberly?”

  “I’m getting ahead of myself,” Gina said. “As it turns out, Kelley wasn’t a suicide after all.” Carefully leaving nothing out, she filled him in on Farrell’s information. “Anyway,” she concluded, “amytriptilene is a link. I wanted to see where it might connect.”

  “You’re not saying you think that Kymberly could have had a part in any of this?”

  Gina looked hard at his face, tortured now by this possibility. “I talked to her before the afternoon session today, Stuart,” she said gently. “I asked her what she’d been calling Caryn about on that last weekend. She told me she asked her for money, and that Caryn turned her down. You realize that if you’re in jail and Caryn’s dead, she’s going to have nearly unimpeded access to all of your money.”

  “You can’t believe any of this.”

  “What I’m wondering, Stuart, is why you can’t. Once Caryn was out of the way, who was the only person standing in the way of the Dryden Socket coming out on schedule? Kelley Rusnak. When Kymberly visited you here in jail, did you mention your visit down to Kelley? Did you tell her what you’d talked about?”

  “I told a lot of people. Everybody who came by. I wanted it clear. Kelley and Furth were proof I wasn’t running and hiding from Juhle.” He ran a hand down the side of his face. “She could never have killed her mother. And she didn’t have any amytriptilene anyway.”

  Keeping her calm, Gina asked, “Were her expired prescriptions refillable?”

  Suddenly slamming his hand flat on the table. “No! Goddammit! No!” Out of his chair now, he grabbed the back of it and Gina thought for a moment he was going to throw it in his fury, but he got himself back under control enough to look her in the eye and say, “We’re not going there, you hear me. We’re not doing this.”

  Abruptly, he turned from her and walked as far away as he could get. In the far corner, he stood with palms pressed against the glass block, his head down. After a long minute, Gina got up and walked over behind him. She touched his shoulder, her palm flat against his back. She felt his shoulders heave once, then again. Then they gave way altogether in a series of smaller, silent quakes. In the presence of such abject and obvious pain, memories of her own agonies over David Freeman—when her resolve and her spirit just broke—came swelling up over her, making her head swim, tightening her throat.

  She didn’t trust herself to move. “All right, Stuart,” she whispered. “All right.”

  Since she was never going to get anything like a night’s sleep in her life again anyway, when Wyatt called her at home at ten thirty, she told him he could stop by and talk to her in person on his way back to his place. When she opened the door, he grinned wearily and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  But that was as light as it got before it got heavy again. Before he’d even gotten a chance to report on Bob McAfee, she told him about Kelley Rusnak and her fears about Kymberly. “At least now we know why she’s laying so low. Why she didn’t want to come to the courtroom. I need you to find her, Wyatt. I need to find out where she was and what she was doing last Friday. Drop everything else. I’ve got her cell number. If she picks up even for a few minutes, Juhle can somehow get at least her approximate location.”

  “Maybe Juhle can, Gina, but I’m not sure I can get him to do that for us.”

  “Could you call in a favor?”

  “From Devin? After what you did to him on the stand today? Probably not.”

  “Well, I need to find her. Maybe if you tell Devin about Kelley being murdered?”

  Hunt shook his head. “Not in his jurisdiction. He’s not interested.”

  “He’s got to be. Kelley’s got to be part of Caryn. He has to see that. It’s still his case. Here’s his chance—if he solves the mystery, he can still be a hero. If it turns out it doesn’t make any difference, he’s still the dedicated cop who spares no effort in the pursuit of the truth.”

  Clearly, from Hunt’s expression, he thought it was an extreme long shot, but he finally shrugged. “What the hell. Can’t hurt to ask. You mind if we sit down?”

  Gina, who’d been on a tear of intensity for longer than she could remember, felt the tension in her break. “Sure, I’m sorry. I’m a little wound up. You feel like a drink or a beer or something?”

  “Why? Do I look like one?” He waved it off. “No, I’m good,” he said. “But with all this talk about Kelley and Kymberly and how everything’s all got to be related, I hope you haven’t given up completely on the good Doctor McAfee.”

  Gina rolled her eyes. “Don’t even tell me. Why?”

  “Because it appears that he forgot to mention taking his car out of his garage sometime around ten or so the night Caryn got killed.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  Hunt held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  “Somebody specifically remembered that? Three weeks ago? How’d that happen?”

  “Young love to the rescue once again.” He had his little pocket notepad out and was flipping the pages. “Here you go,” he said. “Lloyd Phipps and Abby Loran, number 17-B, same building as McAfee. In fact, Lloyd knows him enough to borrow stuff. The ID is rock solid.”

  “Okay, what about them?”

  “Abby moved in with Lloyd that night, so they remember the date. They’re still doing weekaversaries. It’s kind of cute. Anyway, there they are, down in the garage, moving up the last carload of her stuff, and McAfee comes out, says he’s having trouble sleeping, he’s going down to buy some Ovaltine…”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “I’m not. It’s what happened.”

  “Did they see him come back?”

  “No.”

  “No, of course not.” She closed her eyes and let out a sigh. “So I’m going to have to subpoena them. And McAfee, too.”

  “Shouldn’t be a big problem,” Hunt said. “I’ve got their addresses at work. I told them it might be happening. Didn’t bother either of them. Of course, I could have told
them I was the grim reaper and it wouldn’t have bothered them much either. Long as they could go together.”

  “Young love,” Gina said wistfully.

  “You really can’t knock it,” Hunt replied. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  GINA WAS IN HER OFFICE BY six o’clock the next morning, and worked straight through until eight thirty, when she took a cab down to the Hall of Justice. She spent the time drawing up subpoenas for her new potential witnesses from Wyatt Hunt’s travels last night. Whether or not he succeeded in finding Kymberly today, Gina also wanted to have a subpoena ready for her, not only to see if she could get to the critical amytriptilene and PII issues, but far more prosaically in case she’d need Kymberly to rebut Bethany Robley’s version of the threatening conversation. While she was at it, though for different reasons, she also wanted to be able to call Fred Furth and Bob McAfee if the need arose.

  Though she fully intended to spend some quality time figuratively holding Stuart’s hand in the cell behind the courtroom before what was likely to be a devastating, and in any case upsetting, day of testimony, with all the last-minute preparation, she never got around to it.

  It probably wasn’t technically cuttable, but the tension was thick in the courtroom. Predictably, the news outlets—both print and video—had a banner opportunity with Clair Robley’s courtroom attack of the defendant who’d threatened her daughter, and they weren’t going to let it go by. The Chronicle’s lead headline had screamed, “Disorder In The Court,” and some sneaky reporter had obviously gotten past the guards with his photo–cell phone intact, and had caught a dramatic, albeit uncredited, photo of the cane coming down on a cowering Stuart Gorman.

  Probably in large part because of this, the soon-to-be-seasoned Judge Toynbee had ordered a secondary screening of every person who would be allowed in the courtroom for the morning’s session, and the line of reporters and lookie-loos had stretched the length of the second-floor hallway and down the stairs into the Hall’s lobby. It would be fair to say that none of the people in this queue seemed patient and tranquil. As a matter of fact, building security had to be called to break up three shoving matches of rivals fighting for their space, and a sketch artist for one of the cable news stations got himself arrested at the door to the courtroom when the errant F-word escaped his lips, directed at the guard right at the courtroom door, leading to denial of the artist’s access, which in turn impelled him to throw a right hook at the cop’s face.

  Backstage, it wasn’t much better. As soon as both Abrams and Gina were in their places at their respective tables, Toynbee called them back to his chambers and told them both that until further notice they were under a gag order: Pointedly he ordered Abrams to stop his leaking to whomever it was, and then he stunned Gina by expressly forbidding her to share her opinions of the case with Jeff Elliott. (His “CityTalk” column on elements of the PII story and how they might relate to Stuart Gorman’s hearing had appeared in the morning edition.)

  Gina, though chastened, nevertheless felt emboldened by her new knowledge about the probable murder of Kelley Rusnak, and tried to open a discussion with the judge concerning the relevance of PII issues to the matter at hand. Unfortunately for Gina, in his free time yesterday afternoon, Toynbee had reviewed the proposed testimony of Bethany Robley and had found it reasonably compelling. Clearly, in spite of the incredible unlikelihood of Kelley’s and Caryn’s murders being unrelated, Stuart still seemed very much the main suspect in Caryn Dryden’s murder in Toynbee’s mind. This was disconcerting, to say the least, and made Gina wonder if the judge was somehow privy to information she’d not been made aware of.

  She was about to find out.

  When she walked into the courtroom from behind the judge’s bench, she was immediately struck by the hostility in the air. It was ugly back there, the gallery packed with many more people than there had been yesterday, when it was merely SRO. Abrams still had most of his usual allies: Jackman for the second day in a row, when his presence in a courtroom was normally a newsworthy event on its own; more uniforms; the neighbors she recognized as witnesses; Bethany Robley today in the front row, next to an obviously angry black man who, Gina thought, must be her father.

  She wondered about the psychology of the mob. Stuart, after all, was the one who’d been attacked. And yet, somehow, this crowd seemed, if possible, more weighted against him than the one yesterday. When the bailiff opened the back door and let Stuart into the courtroom—this was before Toynbee had taken the bench—the ominous rumble behind her in the gallery was enough to make the hairs on Gina’s neck stand up. What was that about? she wondered.

  Her client still sported the bandage from yesterday’s attack, and looked positively worn down and exhausted. They should feel sympathy for him, if for anybody. At least, Gina thought that until she realized that most of these people undoubtedly still believed that Stuart had killed his wife—after all, he’d been arrested for it!—and on top of that, that he’d threatened this young, sweet, shy, A-student witness, whom the Chronicle had also profiled that morning.

  For his part, Stuart got to the table and paid no attention to the gallery, instead leaning over and whispering to Gina, “I’m so sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to yell at you. You’re the only one holding this together. I’m just not ready to accept Kym as any part of this. Can you understand that?”

  Her jaw set, Gina could only nod. Just.

  “Miss Robley,” Abrams began. “Would it be okay if I called you Bethany?”

  She answered in a small voice, her voice shaky, her eyes darting over to Stuart, out to her father, back to Abrams. Terrified. “That would be fine,” she said.

  “Bethany, would you tell the court what you were doing at around eleven thirty on Sunday night, September eleventh, of this year.”

  “Sure.” But she hesitated before beginning, chancing one more look at all these adults who were either tormenting or supporting her.

  In the last couple of weeks, especially since those terrible first days before she had told her mother about the threat to her that Kymberly had delivered, she had come to some fundamental decisions about who was on her side and who wasn’t. Before, she had always liked Mr. Gorman—enough to be comfortable calling him Stuart, for example—but she’d always known that when he lost his temper, he could be terrifying.

  The time that stuck in her mind the most was once when they all were skiing and this snowboarder came from out of nowhere from behind them and smashed into Kymberly, going pretty much full speed. After Stuart made sure that his daughter wasn’t seriously injured, he skied down to where the boarder had fallen, moaning in the snow. Bethany would never forget not only the look in Stuart’s eyes, but the true sense she had that he was going to stab the kid with his pole. As it was, he picked him up—an adult-size kid—and yelling and swearing at him the whole time that he ought to watch where the fuck he was going, he slammed him back down onto the hard-packed snow a couple of times before he got himself back under control.

  He had talked about it half the way home, too, saying he wished he had hurt the kid more. He’d missed his chance. But at least he’d intimidated the snowboarder enough to get his address and phone number, in case there were complications with Kymberly. He told the girls he was still considering looking the guy up and hunting him down. Bethany thought at the time he was mostly kidding, blowing off steam—but even so, it wasn’t funny kidding. She believed he really might do it.

  Now she dared a quick glance at this man who, she’d convinced herself, had absolutely clearly told her that if she went ahead and testified against him, something really bad was going to happen to her. That was all the proof she needed that he’d actually killed his wife.

  Watching the young woman’s hesitation as she assessed the danger Stuart posed to her, as she then turned and waited for the nods of assurance from Gerry Abrams and from her father, Gina suddenly felt a stab of panic. She had studied and well knew the psychology of
terror—from the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages came to admire and even love their captors, to a situation such as this one.

  Gina’s instinct now told her that Bethany had come to the unshakeable conclusion that Stuart was a dangerous man who needed to be put away, and that was all there was to it. In the past ten days, that nascent belief had grown to a dead certainty within her. The stress and responsibility placed on her, her willingness and even need to please her protectors, and the intense coaching she’d received from Gerry Abrams and her parents—there was much literature documenting that factors such as these could actually conspire to change Bethany’s wiring, down to the level of her synapses, and this in turn might affect the actual details in her memory. Her certainty about what she must have seen in her mind might now be indistinguishable from what she actually had seen. And if that were the case, they were in big, big trouble.

  Gina leaned over and whispered to Stuart. “Don’t look back at her. And no matter what she says, stay cool.”

  And now, on the stand, Bethany brought her gaze back to the center of the courtroom. Getting a confident nod from her protector, Gerry Abrams, she began. “Well, I was doing homework in my room, but it was getting to be about eleven thirty, which is my bedtime. I closed my books and was going in to brush my teeth and get ready for bed when I looked out my bedroom window and saw a car pulling up to the house across the street. And then the garage door coming open.”

  “Did you recognize the car, Bethany?”

  “Yes. I’d ridden in it many times. It belonged to my neighbor across the street.”

  “And do you see that neighbor in the courtroom today?”

  Desperate to break up the rhythm of Bethany’s testimony, Gina recognized an early opportunity and stood up. “Objection. I’m sorry, Your Honor. Vague. Does counsel mean the neighbor who owns the car? Because there’s been no testimony that the witness saw the driver of the car that night.”