The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  She took the opportunity to remove his hand entirely. “I would think that would have been obvious to you by now.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said. “And don’t get mad. You can’t really tell. But I’m sorry. No offense meant.”

  The hand went back to her thigh. She put hers over it again. “None taken. But maybe it would be better if you’d just drive.”

  “Here we are.”

  “Pretty dark,” Gina said. “Except look up there.”

  “Where?”

  “That top front window. Bethany Robley. The eyewitness. Her light’s still on, which means she’s up and doing homework. Damn. I forgot all about her. What if she sees us?”

  “You’re Stuart’s lawyer and I’m his old friend. No problem. Hey”—Jedd squeezed her thigh—“we’ve come this far. You can’t chicken out now. Well, you could, but it wouldn’t be fair. Besides, no guts, no glory.”

  She hesitated one last time, let out a heavy breath. “You’re right.” She squeezed his hand. “Are you ready?”

  “I am so ready,” Jedd said.

  Gina nodded. Gave him a last smile. “Me too. Let’s go do this bad thing.”

  Jedd opened his door, slid out, and closed it quietly behind him.

  Gina, her heart sledgehammering within her, her pulse an audible sound in her ears, immediately pushed the button to lock all the car’s doors and reached across to Jedd’s visor, where he had attached his garage door opener. She pushed on the bar of it, her eyes on the Gormans’ garage door off to her right, but nothing happened.

  God, she thought, what if he hadn’t parked close enough? Sometimes she had to get right to the front of her own automatic entrance at her condo before the gate would swing open. The signal on these things tended not to be too strong. She should have had him park in the driveway. But, stupid her, she hadn’t figured out a way to ask without giving herself away.

  Jedd was directly behind the car now, coming around.

  There was no light in the car, but when Conley had opened his door, Gina had seen the three buttons up by the rearview mirror. Now she reached up, found and pressed the first one, on her far left. “Okay,” she said. “Open up.” Her eyes were glued to the garage door.

  But it didn’t move.

  The second button. She pushed and held it for a long three-count. “Please please please.”

  Nothing.

  No longer aware of where Jedd had gotten to, she pressed the third button. “Come on,” she whispered urgently, “come on.”

  But nothing happened.

  Oh God! Don’t let me be wrong. I can’t be wrong.

  And then, right at her ear, a knock at her window. Jedd standing there, leaning over, looking in, a mild questioning look on his features. Gina whirled back to face him, made an elaborate shrugging motion, as if she didn’t understand exactly what was happening. The car’s door had locked somehow and she couldn’t get them open. She shrugged again. He tried the outside handle.

  He was reaching into his pocket for his keys. He’d open the door in seconds.

  She turned back toward the front, hitting his garage door opener’s bar and all three buttons again in quick succession, and got the same result. Nothing.

  And then suddenly, at her window, another sound, this time much louder than the polite knock on the glass. A slam. Conley’s flat palm up against her window. She looked out and up and saw his face, understanding now what she must be doing, and in a desperate fury. His palm slammed on the window again.

  But still maintaining some kind of control. “Gina! Gina, open up! What are you doing?”

  His keys were out now. He was trying to fit them into the lock below the door’s handle. Gina reached to her side and covered the pop-up locking button with her hand. As Conley turned the key outside, she pushed the button back down on the door. He tried again, and again she kept the door locked, but she could not keep this up for too much longer.

  Jedd wasn’t about to fight that battle either. He backed up a step and pushed at his key and Gina heard the distinctive “clunk” as all of the car’s locks, except the useless one she was trying to hold down, popped up.

  He was opening the passenger side back door, right behind her. “Gina, goddammit!”

  The glove compartment!

  Reaching down, praying that Jedd wasn’t one of the few paranoid souls who lived with his glove box perennially locked, she found the handle and gave it a pull just as from behind her Conley’s hands found the back of her shoulders, tried to get purchase around her throat.

  She tried to scream, but the sound, to her horror, was already choked off.

  Then he was coming over the center island between the seats, enough of him to get his power into what he was doing now. Gasping with the exertion, trying anything to save herself from his brute strength and determination, she reached out and scratched at his face, then threw an elbow that seemed to hit him in the throat.

  And for an instant, his grip lessened.

  It was her last and only chance. She fumbled blindly in the glove box as Jedd’s left fist connected with the side of her head, slamming it against the window. She had her hand around something plastic and rectangular—another garage door opener—and as the second blow sent pinwheels of light through her field of vision, she managed to press the bar. And hold it.

  Until another blow to the side of her head reduced her world to a sharp, searing pain, and then to darkness.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  AT JUHLE’S INSTRUCTIONS, THE TWO UNIFORMED officers who’d helped him with the sting had delivered Jedd Conley up here to the tiny interrogation room on the fourth floor of the Hall of Justice. Now the state assemblyman from San Francisco had been in the room, handcuffed to the table, and alone, for most of the past hour and a half. Dealing with the ambulance and other issues, Juhle had remained at the crime scene out on Greenwich Street for the better part of the first hour, then had come back here to his desk in the homicide detail and caught up with most of another hour’s worth of paperwork.

  Checking the clock on the wall, seeing it was now 12:45 a.m., Juhle knew that he had delayed long enough. He had to start his interrogation of Jedd Conley before too long. But he had some serious problems.

  Critically, the provenance of the all-important garage door opener was unproveable. Trying to get Stuart off on his murder charge, Gina could have bought the damn thing at Home Depot and easily, with her access to Stuart’s house, have set it to the frequency that would open the garage door. She could have carried it with her over there tonight in her purse.

  Now, with Conley’s brutal assault on Gina, Juhle had grounds for much more than a simple and general discussion with the assemblyman. But time was running out, and with all of Conley’s powerful connections, Juhle felt great trepidation that if he let him walk out of here tonight without confessing to Caryn Dryden’s murder, and maybe even Kelley Rusnak’s, he’d never get his hands on him again.

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  At last, he went to the control room to make sure that both the audio and video feeds were running, then knocked on the door and opened it up, talking as he entered. “Sorry to have kept you,” he said breezily. “Lots of stuff to take care of back at the scene. I got a little hung up. How you doin’?”

  “How am I doing? What is that, some kind of a joke?” His suspect, his face scratched from fingernails and now swollen at his jawline and around his eyes, held up the handcuffs. “I’m exhausted. I’m hurt. I’m ready to go home. It’s intolerable that I should be kept in here like this for all this time. I won’t have it.”

  “Well,” Juhle said. “I’m afraid some of that’s out of my control. At least I can take off your handcuffs. The patrolmen tell me that you got picked up in the act of assaulting a woman. I find that hard to believe. Did the officers Mirandize you on the way down here?”

  “What for? This whole thing is ridiculous. Look at my face. She was trying to kill me. It was self-defense.”

  Ju
hle remained calm. “I figured it must be something like that. But in the meanwhile, you’re a lawyer, aren’t you? You know the drill. I’ve got to tell you you’re under arrest and read you your rights. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand this right?”

  “Of course. You don’t have to—”

  But Juhle held up a hand, stopping Conley’s objection. “You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. Do you understand this right?”

  “Jesus. Yes.”

  Juhle continued. The end of this litany could end with the words, “Having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to me now?” But the courts had ruled that Miranda would be deemed served without them, so Juhle skipped them, and simply started in. “There’s a laundry list of formal questions we’ve got to fill out, and the sooner we’re done, the sooner it’s over, okay? Okay. For the record, your name?”

  “Jedd Conley.” And with those simple two words, the assemblyman waived his right to demand an attorney for this interrogation. Juhle walked him through a few perfunctory questions—his address, age, occupation—just to get him to keep talking. Then Juhle said, “So tell me what was happening out there tonight.”

  “All right. It started when Gina—the woman, Gina Roake…”

  “Yeah, I know who she is.”

  “Well, she called me around nine and asked me to come over to her house.”

  “And why would she do that?”

  “You know this, Inspector. I know who you are. She’s defending Stuart Gorman. Maybe you don’t know he’s an old friend of mine. I don’t practice law actively anymore, so when Stuart got in trouble and came to me, I told him he ought to get together with Gina. Big mistake.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she just wasn’t any good. If anything, she just got him dug in deeper. Now her hearing’s going in the toilet, and she wanted to ask my advice about what she should do.”

  “At her house?”

  “The truth? I would have preferred her office.” He shrugged. “My position, I can’t afford even the appearance of impropriety. This thing tonight’s going to be a bitch to spin. I don’t know what I’m going to do. But beyond that, my wife’s got serious issues with infidelity. Frankly, so do I. Plus, so you know—and I’m laying it all out for you here as honest as I can—Gina and I had a spent a few nights together before I was married. I didn’t know she was still carrying a torch.” He shrugged, a victim of Gina’s feminine wiles. “But I knew she needed help with Stuart’s defense, and he’s my bud, and that’s where she was, at home. So I went.”

  “But when you got picked up, you weren’t at her home?”

  He shrugged. “Because right after I walked in the door, I knew I had to get out of there.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Why do you think? She’d poured us both a couple of stiff shots of scotch. She had on a pretty provocative top. It didn’t look to me like her plan was to parse the law. She said she had the key to Stuart’s, and said maybe we ought to go by there, give the house another look. Maybe we’d find something you guys—the police—had missed.”

  “And how’d you react to that?”

  “It seemed weird to me. But she was trying to get all over me by then, and I thought it would be a good idea to get out of the house. I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t want to offend her. Okay? So we drove over to his place and I don’t know if her drink had hit her or what, or if maybe she’d had more alcohol before I got to her place, but she was getting pretty worked up before I even pulled over. She still loved me from before, that kind of thing. I never should have stopped seeing her. She was letting herself get pretty hysterical.”

  “And then what?”

  A deep sigh. “She tried to come over and kiss me, but I wasn’t going there.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told her it wasn’t going to work. If she wanted, we could see if we could find anything that might have been missed at Stuart’s. Otherwise, I was going to drop her back at her place and go home. I just got out of the car, hoping she’d calm down. But she didn’t.”

  Juhle, all in all impressed with the story Conley had concocted in the lengthy time he’d been stewing in the interrogation room, was moderately curious to find out how Conley was going to explain the fact that he’d been coming out of the back passenger door when the officers had apprehended him—maybe the love-crazed Gina Roake pretended that she couldn’t get her seat belt off, intending to ravage him sexually as he reached across her to unfasten the lock, but Jedd guessed what she was planning, so he came in the back door to undo the seat belt from there. And that’s when she’d finally attacked him for rejecting her. Over the seat.

  Juhle didn’t think so.

  And besides, he’d heard enough. “But as the officers pulled up, they distinctly saw you pounding on the door, trying to get into the car.”

  Conley licked his lips. “Well, yes,” he said. She had accidentally locked him out, and he’d become frustrated with the situation, but the cops were wrong if they thought they’d seen him attack her, and he had no idea where the garage door opener had come from. Roake must have brought it—got it from Stuart, perhaps.

  “Well, no, sir,” Juhle said. “I’m afraid that won’t work either. In fact, the officers didn’t just happen by. They were watching the house. And so was I.”

  “The house is a murder scene. I assumed it must have been under some kind of surveillance.”

  “Actually, no, though. That wasn’t it. In fact, Gina Roake had her investigator call me up earlier in the night. He asked me to come on down to Stuart Gorman’s place and wait for you and Gina to drive up in your car and stand by.” Juhle’s statement seemed to shake something loose in Conley, who hesitated slightly, his mouth open to refute a charge that Juhle hadn’t quite made. “The idea was that she could open Gorman’s garage door from your car.”

  Another small but obvious hit. Quick as a bird, Conley looked away, blinked, looked back. “Why would she want to do…? How was she going to do that?”

  “She thought you’d programmed your car so you could get in and out of the Gormans’ garage without leaving your car on the street. And also, of course, so you wouldn’t be seen coming and going. Or else so that people, at a glance, would assume it was Stuart, as Bethany Robley did.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “The neighbor across the street. She saw your car open the garage on the night Caryn Dryden was killed.”

  “Well, no. That wasn’t me. It couldn’t have been me. I wasn’t anywhere near the house that night. I was at an event for Greenpeace, I remember. She must have planted that garage door opener.”

  “You remember that specific night, do you? Among all those events you go to?”

  “I happen to remember that one, yes. I mean, after hearing about Caryn, the night stuck in my memory.”

  “So you were never at Caryn’s house on that Sunday?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “But you know, as it turns out,” Juhle said almost apologetically, “and you might not have noticed with all the excitement, but Gina did open their garage tonight from inside your car. That was our signal to come running. And she had a tape recorder in her purse, so we know whose idea it was to go to the house.” The inspector’s blood was starting to run high, but it would not do to show anything. Helpful, courteous to a fault, he went on. “You’re certain you weren’t there on that Sunday?”

  “I told you that. No, of course not.”

  “But you’d been there recently, at least?”

  “Not even that. Lexi and I didn’t see them socially. I haven’t been to their house in several years.”

  Sadly, Juhle shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not going to do, sir. Even if it isn’t your fingerprint on the one large shard of broken wineglass we found—and I think it is—some of your fingerprints a
re going to be somewhere in the house, don’t you think? Probably in the bedroom. The problem was, we didn’t have your fingerprints in the criminal database the last time we looked. And now, of course, that won’t be a problem. Same thing with the blood we found in the garage. With your DNA sample, we’re going to get a match, aren’t we? God,” Juhle said, “this is thirsty-making work. Can I get you a Coke or a water or something? I’ll be right back.”

  Juhle walked out the door and crossed the homicide room to get a couple of paper cups full of water. On the way back, he looked in to check the video screen again. The camera was camouflaged into the wall and Conley, though he probably suspected that he was being filmed and/or recorded, couldn’t know for sure, and that uncertainty would help to keep him off-balance. His head was whipping from side to side, up to down, as though searching the room for a place to hide or escape. Juhle watched until that stopped and Conley rested his head down upon his open palm.

  Coming back into the interrogation room, Juhle pushed the water across at his suspect. “I don’t know if you realize it, sir, but at the hearing, Gina Roake made a damn good case for the fact that Caryn might not have been killed at all. Somebody being there at her house on Sunday doesn’t necessarily mean that they killed her. It might very well have been an accident. I can understand why you wouldn’t want it to come out that you were there. Maybe you really weren’t having an affair. Maybe it was just a harmless business meeting, but you were afraid of how it would look. This is really important now. I can’t imagine that you would have killed her, but you have to tell me what happened.”

  The lifeline thrown, Conley stared at it for a long moment, then made a reach for it—the only move he had left. “All right. But it was early in the day. She was a wreck about her invention. You know about that, don’t you? The Dryden Socket. She wanted my advice about what she should do.”

  Same as with Gina, Juhle noticed—a woman needed his advice. Maybe Conley’s creativity was drying up under the stress. “So in fact you did go by on that Sunday?”