Hardy: The Suspect Part 30

"Yes. She thought he was really hot. I mean, she joked about it." She brought her hand up to her mouth. "But I probably shouldn't say that, should I? I don't mean she was having an affair with him. She just thought he was cute."

"Cute, maybe, but with a good alibi, so you don't have to worry about getting him in trouble." However, at her mention of Kelley Rusnak, Wyatt felt he owed Cindy some information in return for all of her cooperation. "This is not good news, but I should probably tell you. Maybe you've already heard, but Kelley, Caryn's a.s.sistant, apparently killed herself late last week."

The young woman's mouth hung open, her eyes flat. The fact nearly decked her.

"There's no apparent connection to Caryn," Wyatt continued, "at least that we've heard about yet. But it's a pretty big coincidence, if nothing else."

Finally, Cindy found her voice again. "She wasn't murdered too, then?"

"Apparently not," Wyatt said. "Sleeping pills."

"Man!" Cindy was shaking her head in disbelief. "I don't like this. This is too weird."

"n.o.body likes it, Cindy. But we don't know what it means, if anything."

"Well, it's got to mean something, don't you think? She didn't just randomly kill herself a couple of days after Caryn for no reason, did she?"

"We don't know, Cindy. We just don't know. You'd think there might be some connection, but we don't know what it is. But while we're still on PII, maybe you can tell me something about Jedd Conley?"

"Who?"

"Jedd Conley. a.s.semblyman from San Francisco. Evidently he was looking into some of the issues with PII for Caryn. Do you know if they talked a lot? Or met up somewhere?"

Still obviously shaken by the news about Kelley Rusnak, Cindy took a beat before she said, "I don't really even know the name. He's not in my book." She looked into Wyatt's face. "G.o.d, I still can't believe about Kelley."

"I know."

Cindy took a deep breath, let out a long sigh. "Wow." After a long moment of reflection on the tragedy, suddenly she remembered to check her watch. "Oh G.o.d," she said, "I've really got to get back to work."

While he was at Parna.s.sus, Wyatt took the opportunity to go down one floor and see if he could get a minute with Dr. Michael Pinkert. Even though no one seemed to consider him as a fitting candidate for Caryn's lover, the fact remained that he saw quite a bit of her and that she thought enough of him to invite him to join her and McAfee as a co-equal third partner in their clinic. So it would seem on the face of it that he could have had no motive to kill Caryn, since she was the one fighting McAfee for his inclusion in the clinic and its profits.

In fact, though, Wyatt realized that Pinkert fit as perfectly as any of the other possible suspects into Gina's theory of the case-that she was in the hot tub with her lover and took that moment to tell him of a decision she had come to that would have struck him, at the very least, as an immense personal betrayal. Something that perhaps would have a profound financial impact as well and that might, in fact, ruin his life entirely.

It took no imagination at all for Wyatt to hear Caryn telling Pinkert that she'd decided McAfee was right. They couldn't afford to take him on. So she reluctantly was withdrawing her offer to him as well as her physical favors. If, added to this, Pinkert also suffered from the neurosis of the month-chronically low self-esteem anyway because of a weight problem-and had become infatuated with Caryn, only to be summarily dumped after all the financial and personal promises he'd made to her, the risks he'd taken for her, Hunt had no doubt that there was plenty of motive here for murder.

Wyatt's luck and timing couldn't have been better. Pinkert was between surgeries, in his office. When his scheduling person told him that there was someone who wanted to talk to him about Caryn Dryden, he came right out and brought Wyatt back into his office with him.

"Sorry about the accommodations," Pinkert said. Besides the doctor's own chair by his tiny desk, the only place to sit was on the paper-covered examination table.

"No problem." Wyatt boosted himself up onto it. "I appreciate your seeing me without an appointment."

"If it's about Caryn, I'm going to be available if it's possible," he said. "I'm still in shock, if you want to know the truth. I've already talked with the police, so you must be with Stuart's team."

"That's right. That's not a problem for you?"

"Not at all. Why would it be?"

Wyatt shrugged. "You were close to Caryn. If you thought Stuart killed her, maybe you wouldn't want to help out his defense."

But Pinkert brushed that off. "Not a problem. I find that if you tell the truth, things tend to sort themselves out. Now, how can I help you?"

Physically, Pinkert came as advertised. Probably closer to fifty years old than to forty, he needed to lose some serious weight. And yet he didn't strike Wyatt as obese so much as soft-a man who because he'd always been the cla.s.s geek and always studied had possibly never done a lick of hard exercise in his life, and whose sedentary nature had gradually caught up with him. The handshake outside had been weak, with the skin of his hand feeling almost bloated, stretched over too much flesh, as were his cheeks and the folds in his face around his protuberant eyes. His lips were outsize too-purplish, wet and swollen, though this didn't appear to be a function of fat but of heredity, which made Hunt wonder, since the trait was singularly unattractive. He would have thought that people with those lips would have had more significant trouble finding a mate than their compet.i.tors, and that over time they would have selected themselves out of the gene pool.

But apparently not. Beauty, obviously, continued to be in the eye of the beholder. On Pinkert's desk, Wyatt couldn't miss the large framed wedding photo of the doctor and his wife, even at a glance a really lovely Asian woman. Next to that formal wedding shot was another framed headshot of the wife. She had a particularly beautiful, model-quality face. Above the desk on the wall a more recent professional photo showed him and his wife and the four kids, two boys and two girls. The corkboard on the wall was a collage of maybe fifty snapshots held in place by pushpins-more family life-everyone smiling, healthy, happy.

"You've got a lovely family," Hunt said.

"Thank you. It's my greatest blessing." He followed Wyatt's gaze over to the pictures and let them replenish him for an instant. But then, solemn, he turned with a small sigh and said, "Now. Caryn."

"All right. Let's start with the clinic. I gather you're out of that now."

"It appears so. They needed my capital, and now Bob McAfee doesn't."

"How do you feel about that?"

"Well, disappointed, of course. I think the name-brand recognition Caryn was going to get because of her Dryden Socket was going to be a terrific marketing tool for the clinic. So I thought it was a tremendous opportunity. But there'll be others. All in all, it was a good learning experience. If Doctor McAfee does well with it, I might open a clinic of my own someday and this will have shown me how it could be done."

"So there's no hard feelings?"

"Not really, no. Not on my part anyway. It was just a business decision."

"All right. Do you mind if I ask you about your relationship with Caryn?"

A small, patient smile. "Did I kill her, do you mean?" But he held up a hand, stopping Wyatt's response. "It's all right. Obviously, if Stuart didn't, you're trying to find out who did. So my answer to you is that I liked Caryn very much, and respected her as a doctor. You may not know, but I've already told the police that I was at home on the night she was killed. My wife and I are hooked on Masterpiece Theatre. Sunday nights. Nine to eleven. We never miss it. Especially Jericho. We love Jericho. Of course, that means it'll probably be canceled." He threw a quick glance over to his wife's picture. "And I know, that leaves the time after eleven. I've told the police I'd be happy to take a lie-detector test if they felt they needed one, but I had two surgeries that next day, Monday, and to be fresh and rested for them, I needed to sleep, and that is what I did."

Wyatt didn't feel like he needed a lie-detector test. He believed Pinkert implicitly. But there were still a few questions. "Doctor, let me ask you this. Did you get any indication that Caryn was involved with anyone else besides her husband?"

"That a.s.sumes she was involved with her husband."

"Yes it does. She wasn't?"

"Well, at least not the way I am with my wife."

"How do you know that?"

"You pick these things up. He's a rather well-known authority on fly-fishing, you know, and a couple of years ago, Kiyoko gave me a fly rod for Christmas, so I asked Caryn if I should perhaps talk to him about getting lessons, or how to start, or any of that."

"And what did she say?"

"Well, it was the strangest thing. She just looked at me for a long minute, like she wasn't exactly sure what I was talking about, until she finally just shrugged at me and said she could give me his e-mail. That was her entire response." His torso heaved as he took a breath. "My point is that I was fairly excited about the whole idea, and usually, you know, well, my experience is that if someone shows an interest in your spouse's specialty or expertise, you tend to show a little excitement yourself. I mean, when people come to me about Kiyoko's paintings-she does incredible j.a.panese block prints-well, you see, I'm doing it there. But with Caryn and Stuart . . . with her, really, there just wasn't anything like that. It was like she didn't want to be reminded that he was in her life. Very odd, I thought."

"All right," he said, "so was she involved with anyone else?"

Pinkert's smile struck Hunt as sad. "I really couldn't say at all. I never saw her outside of a medical environment, and she was always strictly professional in that context. Beyond that, I spend my time either with my patients or with my family. I find that's plenty. So I tend not to notice little personal things that might be going on right under my eyes. Kiyoko makes fun of me about it, that I'm such a nerd, but I can't really help that. It's who I am."

"I wouldn't worry about it," said Hunt. "You seem fine to me."

"Well, I'm happy," Pinkert said, the large, unfortunate, ugly mouth turning up in a cheerful smile. "And happiness, I believe, is the key. Don't you think?"

"Your mouth to G.o.d's ear," Hunt said.

An hour later, Wyatt Hunt was in North Beach. Jedd Conley's office was on Powell between Stockton and Grant, around the corner from Moose's, one of everybody's favorite restaurants. So since his next stop was Conley's, he took the opportunity to eat a real lunch at one of the best bars in the city. He ordered a simple Moose Burger, which bore little relation to the fast food item of the same name at your local burger stand, consisting as it did of freshly ground prime beef, grilled over mesquite-blood rare in defiance of the food police and their ubiquitous threats of E. coli-on a freshly made sourdough bun, with lettuce and tomato and onion (grilled, if requested) and a pickle made on the premises.

Sated, Wyatt walked back out into the drizzle and turned left. Turning left again, he walked uphill for half a block until he came to the storefront whose etched front window announced that it housed the offices of the a.s.semblyman for the 13th District of California.

Inside, a counter divided the well-lit s.p.a.ce. Two doors in the back indicated the presence of some private suites, or possibly one big one. A large poster of a beaming Jedd Conley commanded one wall. It was surrounded by smaller framed shots of the a.s.semblyman posing with what looked like at least one representative of each and every demographic unit San Francisco had to offer, which made for a crowded wall. The opposite wall featured an enormous map of the city and also the official framed photo of Arnold, which struck Hunt as somewhat incongruous since the Governator was a Republican.

"Can I help you?" A sweet-looking, matronly woman in her mid-fifties had gotten up from one of the two desks behind the counter. The other desk was clean, with only a computer terminal and a telephone. The woman seemed to be the only person here, which Wyatt thought surprising until he realized that Conley's main office was in Sacramento. This was merely a satellite office he used as a local base.

And in turn, this gave him an idea and an opening, since he realized that walking in and announcing that he was looking to establish an alibi for Conley in a murder case probably wouldn't get him a whole lot of cooperation.

"Well, I don't know, really," he began with a self-conscious, tentative handshake. "My name is Wyatt and I'm a graduate student in poly sci out at San Francisco State, and I'm thinking about doing a report kind of like . . . well, do you know William James's book called The Varieties of Religious Experience?"

The woman looked at him warily. "I'm sorry, but no, not really. This is a.s.semblyman Conley's office. Maybe you want to go to the Archdiocese."

"No, I don't think so. I know it's Mr. Conley's office. And it's all right not knowing about William James," Wyatt said. "I only said that because I'm thinking about my report and calling it 'The Varieties of Political Experience.' So you see, it's not entirely stupid."

"No. It doesn't sound stupid. Actually, that sounds very interesting."

"Well, I don't know yet. I hope it will be. But I thought I'd come down and talk to somebody who was in the business, so to speak, and see if I could get a good place to start. You're not too busy, are you? I don't want to bother you."

The woman ostentatiously looked over Wyatt's shoulder, then turned around both ways and came back to him smiling. "I think I'll be able to squeeze you in," she said. "My name's Maggie Even. Long 'e.' And I wish it was Evans too, but it's just not. It's Maggie Even. When I was dating Jack, my husband, I used to tell all my friends, 'What I'm going out with him for-my plan is I'm going to get even.' And I did. Jack, I mean. Now it's my name too. Little did I know." She shook her head. "Anyway"-she put out her hand again- "Maggie."

"Wyatt."

"That's what you said."

"Just to let you know it hasn't changed." He grinned at her. They were now pals. "Anyway, I was hoping to get some record of the kinds of stuff Mr. Conley does in the course of, say, his average month. Like fund-raising, or talking to groups-everything, really."

"Well," Maggie Even said, "we've got a little problem because I'm just a volunteer until they hire another full-time person and I'm pretty new here myself. But if you want to come around"-she indicated the hinged opening in the counter-"I'm pretty sure I could find a record of his appointments somewhere."

30.

Today's Special at Lou the Greek's was Salt-Baked Merides- oven-roasted baby smelt over rice, served with a searingly spicy sweet red sauce on the side. The consensus at Gina's table-herself, Hardy, Farrell and Jeff Elliott in his wheelchair-was that possibly because she had done essentially nothing to a fresh and delicious single ingredient, Chui had conceived and executed her best-ever Greek/Chinese meal. The novelty of the unexpectedly excellent food brought the table to silence for a moment, and this served to punctuate the end of the shoptalk that had been going around since they'd come over from the Hall-mostly about Gina's stellar performance at the morning session.

Now Jeff Elliott said, "So Gina, after we got off the phone this morning, I did a little research and Googled the Dryden Socket, then got Bill Blair on the phone before I came down here. He didn't seem all that happy to be hearing from me."

Gina put her fork down. Turning to her two partners, she quickly filled them in on the Kelley Rusnak suicide and where it either intersected or not with Stuart's case. When she'd finished, she turned back to Jeff. "Talk to me."

"Well, first, I'm sure you're going to like this, but the main thing I had to understand is that no matter what I might have read online or anywhere else, 'There is nothing wrong with the product. It sailed through the clinical trials. It's already been used on hundreds, soon to be thousands, of happy patients. Ninety-nine percent of the alleged problems came in long after the trials were complete and the reports written. And those reports haven't been vetted yet either. So there's no story.

"So you thanked him for his time and hung up," Hardy said.

"I really wanted to, but force of habit, danged if just one more question just kind of slipped out before I could stop it."

"What was that?" Gina asked.

"I asked him if it were true that Kelley Rusnak and Caryn Dry-den had both been working on the socket. And whether or not their two deaths in the past two weeks might have been in some way connected to their work at PII. Or to each other."

"That would have been the part he didn't like," Farrell said.

Jeff nodded. "Not too much, you're right."

Gina normally would have tolerated if not joined the banter, but today she was all attention. "So what'd he say?"

"That Caryn had been murdered, and Kelley had been depressed and was a suicide. There was no connection between them."

"But Stuart told me she wasn't depressed at all."

"Have they done the autopsy on her yet?" Hardy asked. "If not, I'd call down to San Mateo and see if you can talk somebody into putting a rush on it."

"I've already done that this morning," Gina said with a resigned shake of her head. "I called the homicide DA and asked him to call the coroner. They were either going to get to it right away or else they weren't.

"I know somebody in the coroner's office down there," Farrell said. "No promises, but I could make a call."

"That'd be good," Gina said. "If Kelleys a murder, then she was killed when Stuart was in jail. . ."

"That's a good alibi for him," Jeff said.

"Better than that," Hardy said. "Two murders makes it way harder to pretend they're not related. Even for Abrams, I'd bet."

"That's a beautiful thought," Gina said, "but old Gerry's hung his hat on Stuart, Diz. He's not going to let another murder get in his way."

Jeff wanted to get back to his point. "But here's the thing about Blair, guys. I pushed a little bit about why he didn't see fit to mention anything about Caryn Dryden in his statement to the press about Kelley. He said, and I quote, 'Honestly, it never occurred to me.' "

"Did he say, 'At that particular point in time'?" Farrell asked. "I love it when they add that at the end."

Gina ignored Wes. "But that's got to be a lie," she said to Jeff.

"Obviously. And since I had him lying anyway," Jeff continued, "I thought I'd see if he had anything to say about his relationship with Caryn."

"Did he have one?" Gina asked. "Personal, I mean."

A shrug. "They showed up together a lot on Google. They evidently did a lot of show and tells for investors, and not just in Silicon Valley."

"They traveled together?" Gina asked. "Overnight?"

"At least. I didn't have the time to go looking for hotel reservations and airplane tickets, but there'll be a paper trail and maybe witnesses if you send somebody to look into it."

"So what did this guy Blair say?" Hardy wanted to know. "About their personal relationship?"

"They had none," Jeff said. "Naturally. Everything between them was pure business. She was an immensely talented inventor and scientist, and he was a marketing and sales guy. Although of course he was devastated by her death."