Hardy: The Suspect Part 3

Stuart stared coldly at his old pal for a few seconds, and then the anger pa.s.sed and he settled back into his chair. "We don't need to argue about it."

A pause, and then Conley said, "When you're ready, there's somebody I'd recommend." Conley was back on the edge of the bed, and now he came forward. "Don't be an idiot, Stu. You have no idea how all this stuff works. Even if Caryn took some pills and drowned . . ."

"Hey. Read my lips: I was up at Echo Lake. Whatever happened last night, I wasn't any part of it."

"Can you prove that?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, did anybody see you up there? Did you have company last night? Did you talk on the phone?" When Stuart didn't respond, Conley continued, "I'm taking your silence as a no. And this in turn means that your alibi sucks and you're going to be on your cop's list."

"Okay. Maybe. If Caryn was murdered . . ."

Conley shrugged. "Maybe even if she wasn't. You remember that guy a couple of years ago? He was like a telemarketer or something, and she owned about half the real estate in the Western Addition? Anyway, the two of them went camping and the story was that she went out for a midnight swim all alone while he was sleeping, and didn't come back. Turns out she drowned and the husband stood to inherit like fifty million dollars. Did in fact inherit fifty million bucks. You don't think the cops considered him a suspect? You think the fact that she drowned was a defense against them thinking he killed her? You want to know the truth, you want to kill somebody, drowning them's probably the best way to do it, evidence-wise."

"Okay, but did they charge him? Did they have any evidence?"

This brought Conley up short. "Do me a favor, Stu. Don't ask your friendly inspector that kind of question."

"What kind of question?"

"Evidence questions. Whether or not crimes got charged. Legal questions."

"Why not?"

"Because they demonstrate what they call a degree of criminal sophistication. How about that? It could sound, to a trained investigator, like you had premeditated your actions and possibly even studied the rules of evidence."

"I was just asking you if they brought to trial the guy you were talking about."

Conley said, "In the end, no. But I was around at the DA's for a few of the discussions about whether they had enough to bring charges or not. The cops' position was that they had fifty million good enough reasons. And they came this close to taking it to the grand jury, even without a shred of evidence. And the grand jury would have indicted."

"So why didn't they charge it?"

"Because they would have lost at trial, and the DA knew it. And h.e.l.l, n.o.body doubted even for a minute that the husband had done it. He was there where she drowned, he was going to inherit, they'd been having troubles in their marriage, which I know you and Caryn . . ." Spreading his palms out, Conley continued. "Anyway, you see what I'm getting at. How much was Caryn worth on her own? Six, seven million? Plus your life insurance . . . ?"

"Jesus, Jedd!"

"Get used to it, Stu. You're going to hear it from the police, and you're going to have to know how to answer them. Or even whether or not to answer them. And you don't have a clue. Which can hurt you. A lot. Kymberly, too. That's all I'm saying. Friend to friend."

Finally, Stuart seemed to get the message. He settled back into his chair, chin down on his chest, his arms hanging over the sides. "So who do you know?" he asked.

"Oh, G.o.d! It's true, then, isn't it? It's really true."

Debra Dryden-Caryn's younger sister-stood just inside the room's doorway in front of Stuart, her face washed in anguish. Then she stepped into his embrace. Pressing herself up against him, holding him tightly, she began to shake. Stuart held her and let her go on, his hands locked around her back, over the silk of her blouse. "I know," he whispered. "It's all right." At last he extricated himself and stepped back.

"When I got your message, I didn't want to call you back," Debra said. "I didn't want it to be true."

Stuart nodded. "I know." He half-turned. "I don't know if you've met Jedd Conley."

Debra lifted a hand perfunctorily. "Thanks for being here for Stuart."

"I couldn't not be," Conley said.

The woman's obvious pain and suffering did nothing to camouflage, and perhaps even served to enhance, her physical beauty. Shoulder-length, white-blond hair surrounded a captivating face- turquoise eyes, finely pored light tan skin. Debra wore a short white skirt and teal silk blouse, a gold necklace and diamond earrings. She brought both hands up to her eyes and dabbed under them. She said to Stuart, "But what are you doing here? Why aren't you home?"

"They're not letting me go back there until they're finished with their investigation."

"But why? You said she drowned. In the hot tub. Is that possible?"

"She may have been drinking and then taken some pills ..."

"You're saying she might have killed herself?"

Stuart shook his head. "If she did, I don't think it was on purpose."

"Of course it wasn't," Conley said. "She wasn't suicidal."

Debra turned to him, a cold eye, at the interruption. "How do you know that?"

"I just talked to her Friday afternoon . . ."

Stuart spoke with some surprise. "You did?"

"Sure." Conley went on. "You know that, Stu. She was all in a tizzy about her invention. Remember she'd asked me to have my office look into some questions with her VC"-venture capital-"people. I'd been reporting back to her pretty regularly."

Debra asked, "What does your office have to do with that?"

"Nothing specific," Conley said. "But I'm with the State a.s.sembly, and Caryn thought I could find out some stuff that wasn't public yet. And she may not have been all wrong about that."

"What was the news Friday?" Stuart asked.

"It wasn't anything that was going to make her want to kill herself. We'd found some evidence that PII"-this was Polymed Innovations, Inc., the manufacturer of the Dryden Socket, which Caryn had invented-"hadn't reported some negative results in the clinical trials-post-op leg clots-that apparently they'd known about. Caryn was furious about it. And furious is pretty much the opposite of suicidal."

"Maybe she started out furious," Debra said, "but over the weekend it turned into depression."

"If she had gotten herself depressed by last night, it wasn't about business," Stuart said. He drew a breath. "Both of you might as well hear it from me, since it's going to come out eventually. She wanted a divorce."

Debra said, "That's not wanting to kill yourself either. That's wanting to move on. Ask me how I know. I'm three years free and haven't regretted a day of it."

"I don't want to believe it was a done deal," Stuart said. "But it is what she told me."

"She couldn't have wanted to leave you," Debra said. "I mean, you're . . ." She came at the thought again: "In what way exactly have you not been the perfect husband?"

Stuart said, "A lot of ways, Debra. Too many, believe me."

Conley touched his friend's arm. "You're getting whacked every which way but loose here, aren't you, Stu? Why'd she want to leave you? Did she say? Maybe a boyfriend?"

A quick shake of the head. "I don't think it was that. When would she have had the time? But I don't know for sure. It could have been anything. Or everything. She just wasn't happy with us together."

Debra's eyes had gone gla.s.sy again. She reached out to touch Stuart's arm, then moved a step closer to him. "Let's not think about that right now, okay? Let's all just try to get through what we need to do here and now."

"Good idea," Conley said. "Maybe you could help talk Stuart into getting himself a lawyer. I've got someone in mind. And with this divorce in the mix, he's going to need one."

Her hand still on his arm, Debra nodded. "Stuart," she said softly, "I think you ought to listen to your friend."

5.

In the normal course of events, Devin Juhle would not have heard word one about the autopsy of Caryn Dryden for at least a few days. But in the great yin and yang of the city's population, this turned out to be a slow weekend for death. San Francisco's homicide rate-with about two killings every week-was not comparable, say, to Oakland's, eleven miles across the bay, with its two hundred and twenty murders a year, but since autopsies were mandated not just for violent deaths, but for deaths of the homeless, deaths anywhere with an element of suspicion to them, usually the medical examiner's office had an autopsy backlog of at least a couple of days after the body arrived at the morgue.

But today, still hungry from his lack of lunch at Lou's, Juhle wasn't ten seconds back inside the door to the homicide detail on the fourth floor in the Hall of Justice when his lieutenant, Marcel Lanier, saw him and called out his name.

The door to Lanier's small office, built into the corner of the cluttered room that served as headquarters for the city's fifteen homicide inspectors, was open. Behind it, at his outsized desk, the lieutenant was having his lunch-an enormous construction of marbled rye bread stuffed with three or four inches' worth of what looked like pastrami or corned beef with cheese and pickles. Lanier finished chewing, took a sip from his can of Diet c.o.ke, swallowed, and said, "This is impossible if it's true, so it's probably a hoax. But Strout"- this was John Strout, San Francisco's septuagenarian medical examiner-"called and said they're done with the preliminary cutting on your girl and maybe you'll want to go down and see where they're at."

Juhle would normally have attended the autopsy if he'd known it was going to happen, but he'd never expected it so soon. "They've got something?"

"That's what it sounded like. I can't see him calling us up if he didn't have something to talk about."

"Yeah. That wouldn't make any sense."

"Okay, then." Lanier sunk his teeth again into the sandwich.

"You going to eat all of that, Marcel? I'd pay you five dollars for a bite."

Lanier chewed another few seconds, drank, swallowed, smiled. "Why am I thinking you had lunch at the Greek's?"

"If you want to call it that. Lunch, I mean."

"What's the Special today?"

"I don't know what it was. Some kind offish eggs and this rubbery, doughy stuff. I couldn't eat two of 'em. I don't know how the guy stays in business."

"Clucks like yourself."

"Okay, then, ten bucks. One bite. Come on."

Juhle wanted to get to Strout's office, but the sandwich was going to come first, dammit. Lanier took pity on him and, since very few mortals could eat an entire pastrami and swiss on rye from David's Deli at one sitting anyway, he gave him half of it. For free! Said if his legendary generosity went toward motivating his troops, that was enough thanks for him.

So feeling motivated at least in spirit, Juhle left Lanier's office and poured himself a cup of coffee, then went to his desk to eat. Juhle couldn't believe how good the sandwich tasted. The pastrami was still warm, the Swiss cheese nearly melted, the mustard pungent enough to get his eyes watering. It somehow made even the stale coffee more than palatable. For a second, he idly wondered if maybe Lou or his wife hadn't yet heard of the concept of "sandwich" as a possible lunch item. Maybe Juhle could swing by David's and buy a few pounds of lunch meats and cheeses, a selection of condiments and some loaves of rye bread, deliver it all across the street, and leave Chui written a.s.sembly instructions. Fresh sandwiches on the menu at Lou the Greek's might improve the dining experience for the city's entire criminal law community for generations to come. As the source of the bounty, Juhle could become a cultural hero.

Meanwhile, though, he thought as he ate the last delectable bite, he was a cop on a case that, if his gut was right, looked like it was about to become a righteous, high-profile homicide. Suddenly energized, he pushed back from his desk and went out the door, where he turned left and began to jog down the hallway toward the elevators.

The ambient temperature in the medical examiner's lab was fifty-five degrees. Since this was very close to the average San Francisco temperature regardless of season or time of day or night, most of the time visitors to the morgue were dressed in enough layers of clothing that they didn't notice the chill. Today though, the city basked in its sixth consecutive day of an unusually warm Indian summer and Juhle was in shirtsleeves. In his hurry to get downstairs after dawdling in his sandwich reveries, the jog had worked up a light sweat. Now, standing with Strout over the table where Caryn Dryden's body lay, he found he was having to fight himself to keep his teeth from chattering.

Oblivious to his visitor's discomfort, lost in his work as he always was, the medical examiner had paused in his perusal of the internal organs, most of which-Juhle was happy to see-were thankfully still inside the body cavity. Now Strout probed at a spot in the skull at the temple in front of the right ear, the surrounding area of which he'd shaved bare. "I went ahead and measured the diameter of the depressed skull fracture, which here you can see. I've concluded this was probably caused by an object with a rounded cylindrical surface like, say, a baseball bat."

"Why do you say that?"

"No cut. Nothing with an edge, anyway. This looks like some-thin' round hit her."

"You got a round indentation in the skull?"

Strout nodded. "I'd say enough to knock her out, which might have been the point of it."

Juhle persisted. "But something round?"

"Looks like that from the fracture."

"A wine bottle?"

"Coulda been."

Juhle folded his arms over his chest for warmth. "There was a wine bottle in the trash compactor."

Strout nodded, then spoke in his trademark Southern drawl. "You want to go get it from evidence and bring it on down, I could tell you if that's probably what hit her. They ought to check that sucker for prints and blood and hair, which you're probably already doin', right? Although, the guy had any brains, he washed it before . . ." Suddenly the ME frowned. "The trash compactor?"

"Yep. In the kitchen."

Strout wagged his head. "Most folks here in the city, don't you think, if we get gla.s.s, we recycle it?"

Strout was right. Most San Franciscans of a certain economic level-and the Gorman/Drydens fit within it-recycled gla.s.s and paper as a matter of course. The city even provided separate receptacles for regular pickup. The people he was talking about simply did not normally throw an empty wine bottle into a trash compactor. "So what does that say to you, John?" Juhle asked.

"Well, two things. One, whoever threw it away wasn't thinking straight, maybe in a panic over what he'd just done. Two, maybe he didn't know where they normally threw away the recycling."

"I don't like that one so much," Juhle said.

"Why not?"

"It would tend to eliminate the husband."

"Yes, I s'pose it would. You thinkin' it was him?"

Juhle played it close. "He called it in. It would help if I knew what time she died, since he says he didn't get into town until six this morning."

"Well, if that's true, it wasn't him. Although due to the hot tub immersion, the exact timin's goin' to be squishy, I'm afraid."

"I don't want to hear that."

An amused flicker crossed Strout's face. "Somehow I didn't think you did, Inspector, but even so there might be enough to hang your man."

"I'm listening."

"Well, the plain fact is that by the time we got my people there this morning, she was in full rigor, meaning she'd been dead at least an hour."