The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  He nodded. “I think it was sometime around noon. She was very much alive when I was with her, of course.” Changing the tone, working the story to try to fit the new facts, he went on, “I couldn’t very well admit I’d been over there that day. You understand that. I mean, the day she was killed. But it was all business.”

  “You weren’t anywhere near the hot tub with her?”

  “No. We never left the kitchen and living room. Look, Inspector, I know what you’re thinking. I even know what it looks like. But we weren’t having a physical relationship. The plain fact is that Stuart was jealous of me, and I had to try to keep him from ever seeing us together. She had a key to the back door of my office. I only came by her place when he wasn’t home. But I had a great deal of business and even some personal issues with Caryn—okay, I’ll admit that—but nothing more. Nothing inappropriate.”

  Juhle slowly took his paper cup of water and lifted it to his lips. Putting it down, he sighed, hoping to convey his reluctance to vocalize what had to come next. “Mr. Conley,” he said, “that shard of wineglass with the fingerprint on it that I mentioned? It was under the hot tub. And your car pulled into the garage at eleven thirty that night.”

  Juhle knew that Bethany Robley had identified the car as Stuart’s during the hearing. But he’d also been at the untaped portion of her interview with Gerry Abrams when the assistant DA had reminded her that Stuart’s license plate said GHOTI, and if it had been Stuart driving his car, that’s what she must have seen.

  Conley sat with Juhle’s damning words for a long time. Juhle could almost see him conjuring with the various escape possibilities as each new set of facts tightened the noose. Now Conley nodded, settled on his next course. “Okay. All right. We…we were…shit. Intimate. All right. It wasn’t anything I planned. It just happened.”

  Juhle said nothing.

  “I don’t know what happened to her that day,” Conley went on. “It must have been some kind of accident after I left. She fell against something. I know she’d been drinking, she’d taken some pills. That combination, with the hot tub, it can be dangerous by itself. But I swear to God, she was alive when I left.”

  “She stayed in the hot tub?”

  “She must have. Yes.”

  Juhle had his hands linked on the table in front of him. The clock on the wall told him they’d been at this for over an hour. On the one hand, it seemed to him as though it had been five minutes, but on the other, half a night. And now, he knew, it was coming to an end. “Mr. Conley. Sir,” he said, “the neighbor across the street saw you leave the house at twelve forty-five. Caryn was already dead at twelve forty-five. Which means if you do the math, and I have, that you either killed her or were someplace else in the house and she died. Maybe you fell asleep, came downstairs to find her dead, and panicked?”

  Conley’s stare was blank, his bank of ready lies about played out. Juhle decided he had to hit him with one last good question from another direction, put him down for good with a hint he’d gotten from Wyatt Hunt earlier while they’d been waiting for Conley’s car to pull up to Stuart’s house. “If we look, sir, and we’re going to, we’re going to find that you’ve got a standing order prescription for amytriptilene, aren’t we?”

  A long, faraway look, a thousand-yard stare, in the dead silent room.

  Jedd Conley was done.

  Juhle watched the second hand on the wall clock move from two to five. Then to six. Seven. When Conley finally spoke, it began in a whisper. “I had these incredible migraines for a year,” he said. “The doctor said it was probably stress.” A bitter little chortle escaped. “Yeah, doc, what was your first clue? You try being married to Lexi, to the whole fucking Horace Tremont family. You’ll find out about stress soon enough. Christ.” Conley hung his head. “You know what’s funny?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know why I recommended Roake to Stuart? Why I handpicked her?”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she never beat me in court. Never, not once. I think we did like fifteen trials against each other, and I killed her every time. Can you believe that?”

  “First time for everything.”

  Jedd squeezed his temples, rubbed his fingertips over the expanse of his forehead. Finally, he looked across at Juhle. “I don’t know what got into her.”

  “Who?”

  “Caryn. All of a sudden, she wanted us to get married. But that had never been in the plan—not for me, not for her. We had a deal. Both of us with our unhappy marriages. But hell, that was the price I’d bought in for. I knew what it would take, this career. It would take Lexi and her goddamn father and his goddamn money. But that would get me what I needed, what I had to have. And Caryn knew that too. At least she always had before. That was our deal.”

  “But she changed her mind?”

  “Friday she told me she had to see me. She was divorcing Stuart. We needed to talk.”

  “So you set up the date, Sunday?”

  “It started out okay. But she’d had half the bottle by the time I got there, and then the more she talked, the more wound up she got. She knew I loved her more than I loved Lexi. She couldn’t live anymore the way she’d been doing.” He looked pleadingly across at Juhle. “She was going to tell Lexi. She told me that up front. Plus, I saw it in her eyes. She was going to do it. Then I’d be free and we could be together.”

  “So you hit her?”

  “I told her no. She flew into a rage, came at me with the bottle. It was self-defense, I swear. She fell and hit her head, then she got in the hot tub. I left. I never thought she’d drown. That was an accident. Really. I didn’t hurt her at all.”

  Juhle didn’t move, let him go on.

  “I just didn’t want to be with her, not that way.” Conley shook his head miserably, looking in vain for some sign of understanding or forgiveness from across the table. “Goddammit,” he said. “Not that way.”

  Gina opened her eyes to poor focus in an unfamiliar room. High-ceilinged, brightly lit above, though here where she lay the light somehow felt muted. She closed her eyes again; it was better with them closed. Acoustic guitar music was playing somewhere, barely in the range of her hearing. Gradually she became aware that something felt funny about her face and her scalp, but for a long moment she couldn’t seem to place what it might be. When it came back to her, all in a rush, she moved her hands up to the bandages, then in a small panic, tried to sit up far too quickly.

  Involuntarily she moaned, sinking back into the bed.

  Footsteps approaching, and then she dared open her eyes again. “Wyatt?” Her voice was cracked and dry. Her mouth tasted like blood.

  “She moves.”

  “No, she doesn’t.” In fact, she lay flat and immobile. “Where am I?” Then suddenly, she jerked up again. “Oh my God, the hearing! Oh!” Hands back to her head, she gently lowered herself down onto the pillow.

  Wyatt sat down on the side of the bed. “The hearing’s been taken care of. It’s over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Jedd Conley confessed.”

  “Jedd confessed? Then the garage door opened?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I never saw it. I remember pushing the button, then lights out. He really confessed?”

  “Enough. He said so many stupid things last night, they’ll probably get him on Kelley too. Devin sweated him and he broke.”

  “There you go. I knew the guy was good for something.”

  “Hey. Be nice.”

  “I thought I was being nice, giving him all those extra chances to finally get it right.” Closing her eyes again, she took a few conscious breaths against the pain. “So how bad am I?”

  “Not too, all things considered. You’ll probably live.” Then, more seriously. “You really don’t remember?”

  “The whole night’s kind of in and out.” A pause. “So how bad am I?”

  “The diagnosis? Best guess is you’ve got a co
ncussion. Plus a few really attractive stitches by your left eye. You’ll be glad to know that the thread color they used coordinates nicely with the black eyes.”

  “Color coordination. The secret to adult happiness.”

  “Well, you’ve got it. Oh, and you’re supposed to take it easy the next few days.”

  “That won’t be too hard.” Her eyes scanned the room. “So where am I?”

  “My place. You didn’t want to stay in the hospital.”

  “That’s because I hate hospitals.”

  “That became kind of clear.”

  “Was I difficult?”

  “Only a little. But they really wanted to make sure there’d be somebody to keep an eye on you in case you started dying or something. So I volunteered.”

  “It’s starting to come back.” She labored through a few more breaths. “What about Stuart? Somebody’s got to tell him.”

  “Already done. Devin was going to be on it.”

  “Is he out of jail?”

  “By now, he should be.”

  “Could you check, please? That’s got to happen.” She started to raise herself from the bed. “If Abrams tries to keep ahold of him…”

  Wyatt put a hand on her shoulder, gently pushing her back down. “Easy, easy. I’ll find out. If he’s not out by lunchtime, I’ll put Diz on it. It’ll happen. Promise.”

  With a last token show of reluctance, she settled into the pillow again. “Okay. God, my head hurts.”

  “I’m not surprised. You took a few pretty good hits.” He took a beat. “Gina?”

  “Wyatt?”

  “How did you get so sure? It couldn’t just have been their cars being the same.”

  “No. That really wasn’t much of it, actually. It just turned the key. Then, once I got past my ego, I started to put the pieces together.”

  “What did your ego have to do with it?”

  The corners of Gina’s mouth went up a fraction of an inch, but she wasn’t smiling. “Everything, Wyatt. Everything.” After a pause, she continued. “This isn’t easy to talk about.”

  “Well, then, let it go. It’s all right.”

  “No. It’s not. I can’t just let it go. It’s smack in the middle of how I got it.” She drew a long, slow breath. “Hard as it was to deal with, I had to accept the fact that in the real world Jedd would never have called me in to handle a high-profile murder. He knows every great lawyer in town, and every one of ’em would be happy to do him a favor. And I think I always knew that even when we were together, he never really respected me as a lawyer.”

  “I didn’t realize you two had been together at all.”

  “Never seriously, and a long time ago, but that’s a different story probably not worth telling. The point is, once I could accept that Jedd didn’t pick me to win the case, the ugly truth finally dawned on me—that he’d picked me to lose it. The bastard. Anyway, once I realized that, a few other things came back as significant. I remembered your list of Jedd’s appointments, for example, one of them at the Haight Street Rape Crisis Center.” At Hunt’s vacant look, she prodded him. “Sam Duncan’s center?”

  “Wes’s Sam?”

  “Right. So I called her.” And found out, she told Wyatt, that Conley’s talk at the Rape Crisis Center had been about the date-rape drug, Rohypnol. Conley told the story during his visit there that although this drug was of course illegal, to prove how easily laws against it could be circumvented, he had some male members of his Sacramento staff pose as college students at one of the local campuses and return to his office the very next day with several doses. He’d then, of course, turned over his information and the drugs to the police. “Except,” Gina concluded, “it looks like he kept some of it. But Jedd even being around Rohypnol was pretty damn compelling to me. I just needed a connection to Kelley to be sure.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I called Stuart at the jail.”

  “And what did he know?”

  “He knew that Jedd had come to see him in jail last week and that they’d talked at length about Kelley Rusnak.” As it turned out, she told Wyatt, Stuart knew that Jedd himself owned a good chunk of PII stock—Caryn had talked him into buying it. So he wasn’t merely helping Caryn in her negotiations with the company out of altruism. Beyond that, evidently Jedd had convinced his father-in-law and some of his megarich friends that the stock was a can’t-miss investment, and many of them had invested heavily themselves. Gina didn’t yet have a specific motive for Jedd to have killed Kelley—maybe as Caryn’s lab partner, she’d known about her and Jedd’s affair, maybe it was to nip her whistle-blowing in the bud—but the previously unknown PII connection was all the symmetry Gina had needed. “It was Jedd, no doubt in my mind. So it followed that he had to have a way to open the garage.”

  “And what were you going to do if the garage didn’t open?”

  She shrugged. “I knew you and Juhle and some other cops would be there, Wyatt. I underestimated the danger, okay, but only because I didn’t plan on Jedd getting so physical so fast. But everything else was conjecture, something I knew but couldn’t prove. Without a way to open that garage door, Jedd walks. So what I did was the only thing I could have done. I had to take the risk.”

  “I hate it when it gets to that.”

  “Me too.”

  “So,” Wyatt asked, “you think you could eat something?”

  “Maybe later. For now, maybe I’ll just close my eyes a little longer. Would that be okay?”

  “It would be fine.”

  Mostly now, he went by the name of Walden.

  Stuart Gorman’s release from jail had been big news right through the weekend, and Walden wanted to give the story time to cool down before he took his action. It wouldn’t be wise to have hordes of journalists or even simply the curious lounging around in the street in front of Stuart’s house, keeping tabs on the celebrity. But Walden didn’t want it to be too long afterward, either, so that people might have already forgotten Stuart, who he was exactly, what he stood for.

  There would be one perfect window of opportunity and now, two weeks to the day after the Friday that Stuart returned to his home, Walden considered the timing to be ideal. As far as targets went, Stuart had gone from adequate, back when he was merely a moderately popular outdoor writer, to superb—a high-visibility media presence. If you were ever really going to get your message out there, to make a long-term difference, you needed a vehicle like Stuart Gorman. Now, although probably for not too much longer, Stuart was as close to a household name as he was ever going to get.

  Stuart, Walden had discovered in the past week, was pretty much a creature of habit. Every morning he seemed to wake up at or near the same time; every morning he came outside and picked up his morning newspaper off his steps. Last night, the lights had gone off when they usually did, around ten thirty. So he was probably on his regular schedule. If he was slightly off, Walden could always just come by tomorrow, or the day after that. It was a limited window of opportunity, true, but a day or so one way or the other wouldn’t make any difference.

  Now, just short of seven o’clock in the morning, Walden sat at the curb, peering through the fog at the front door of Stuart Gorman’s house. His shotgun lay halfway across the passenger seat, its muzzle down on the floor of the stolen Honda Accord. Walden had already rolled the passenger window down. There was very little traffic on the street, and no pedestrians.

  Suddenly, the light came on over the front door, and Walden turned the ignition key, then grabbed for the shotgun. At the house, the door opened and Stuart, with a coffee mug in his hand, started down the steps. One. Two. Three.

  The newspaper was on the sixth step down. Walden had had a little trouble seeing it, making sure it was already there when he’d driven up. He’d even brought another paper to throw onto the steps, just in case. But no, it had been there.

  Four. Five.

  Walden raised the barrel of the gun.

  Six.

  He pulled
the trigger.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  City Talk

  By Jeffrey Elliott

  The police shootout and killing yesterday at the Sausalito home of San Rafael High School biology instructor Enos Crittenden added yet another bizarre chapter to the ongoing story that began last September with the hot tub drowning of Dr. Caryn Dryden. The drama connected to this series of events continued through the assassination attempt on Dr. Dryden’s husband, the outdoor writer Stuart Gorman, later in the fall by a shadowy figure only tentatively identified at the time variously as “Walden” or as an e-mail presence who signed off with the words “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

  Also connected to this extraordinary chain of events has been the decertification by the FDA of the Dryden (Hip Replacement) Socket, several dozen subsequent lawsuits against its manufacturer, Polymer Innovations, Inc. (PII), the bankruptcy filing of PII and the suicide in February of that company’s chief executive officer, William Blair. With the trial of former California Assemblyman Jedd Conley for the murders of Dr. Dryden and Kelley Rusnak, her lab assistant at PII, scheduled to begin next week, the story’s eventual ramifications may endure for years to come.

  Yesterday’s developments began about a week ago when one of Crittenden’s students hacked into a private e-mail site linked to his regular teacher’s website. Discovering threatening letters written to several prominent public figures, as well as links to other websites dedicated to environmental terrorism, the student informed first his parents, and then the police. When authorities appeared at San Rafael High to question Crittenden, he fled, leading police on a chase back to his home, where he opened fire on them. He held the SWAT team at bay for nearly an hour before a sniper bullet to his chest ended the standoff.

  Crittenden, 34, had a lengthy history of activism on animal rights and other “green” issues, although no criminal record. In his basement, police discovered a large cache of weapons and ammunition as well as several boxes of literature on various environmental issues. Much more threateningly, they discovered over 500 pounds of the fertilizer ammonium nitrate and several gallons of the fuel oil nitromethane, ingredients that had been used in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. According to Homeland Security spokesman Marshall Brice, plans on Crittenden’s website indicated that he was planning to bomb a “large target” in San Francisco to protest the sale of meat and meat products. (Sources close to the investigation, speaking under condition of anonymity, have told this reporter that the intended target was the Ferry Building.)