Hardy: The Suspect Part 34

33.

Wyatt dropped Gina at her Sutter Street office. The now-constant rain hadn't speeded up the commute any, and they didn't get back until about four forty-five. It had already been a long and exhausting day. Was it only this morning that she'd learned of Kelley Rusnak's death? And gone jogging with Hunt? It seemed impossible.

As she was coming up the stairway to the firm's main offices on the second floor (they'd expanded the first-floor offices to accommodate an influx of new a.s.sociates and a new word processing department), a wave of exhaustion suddenly washed over her. She actually stopped a few steps short of the top and put her briefcase down, wrestling with the idea of simply turning around, catching a cab for home, and maybe even squeezing in a short uninterrupted nap before the inevitable written or dictated recap of her day at the hearing. And then of course she'd also want to go over all of her discovery again to be sure that nothing escaped her in the continuing crush of events.

Plus, she'd be needing to review Bethany Robley's statement so she'd be ready for her cross-examination tomorrow. Or, at least, she hoped it would be tomorrow. Clair Robley's courtroom attack on Stuart today might have repercussions beyond those anyone expected, and she had to be ready for them, too.

And then she needed to check on Stuart, to see how seriously he'd been hurt. And make sure she got Wyatt's latest news after he and his crew interviewed the people about McAfee's alibi. And then she had to remember to call Fred Furth, whom she'd subpoenaed along with Kelley to corroborate Stuart's explanation of why he'd "disappeared" down the Peninsula.

And maybe segue somehow from Furth's testimony into some of the PII issues. And then . . .

Stopping herself, she realized she was already beginning to spin out of control. She had to keep her focus. The minute her mind started to relax-even standing in her stairwell-a half dozen other ideas, ch.o.r.es and responsibilities a.s.saulted her consciousness. Maybe she'd manage a few hours of sleep before dawn, but that was all she could realistically expect, or allow herself.

She picked up her briefcase and finished her climb.

Only to be greeted by Phyllis as soon as the receptionist saw her. "Ah, Ms. Roake." In the rarefied and humorless world of the firm's ancient spinster of a receptionist, attorneys did not possess first names. "Mr. Farrell wanted to see you the minute you got in. On the Gorman matter. Shall I tell him you're on your way up?"

Gina looked across the lobby to the stairs leading up. In her present state of fatigue, the dozen or so steps suddenly seemed as insurmountable as the final ascent to the peak of Whitney, or Shasta, or Kilimanjaro, all of which she'd summited in the past three years. But there was nothing for it-Wes wanted to see her right away about her case. But she still couldn't quite get herself to move, to start the climb. In her short hesitation, staring wearily over at the steps, Phyllis read her mind and, in response, cleared her throat. "If you won't be needing it up there, you could leave your briefcase behind the counter here with me. I'll keep an eye on it."

Gina's briefcase, of a kind specially built for lawyers in trial or other litigation, was more than a foot thick and, loaded as it was with reference materials and other law books, her file folders, copies of all the discovery, Wyatt Hunt's interrogation tapes and other junk he'd collected in his investigations, and so on, it weighed more than twenty-five pounds. If she was going to be forced to make the ascent to Farrell's lair, at least she could do it without carrying the added weight.

Smiling weakly, she put the briefcase down and pushed it behind the counter. "Thank you, Phyllis. That's a good call."

A crisp nod. "I'll tell him you're on your way."

It wasn't, after all, such a long or difficult journey. Ten steps across the lobby, fourteen stairs, another few steps to Farrell's well-decorated door. In keeping with his T-shirt motif, Farrell had much of his office door covered with liberal b.u.mper and otherwise tasteless stickers, sometimes both at once: SOMEBODY GIVE BUSH A b.l.o.w. .j.o.b SO WE CAN IMPEACH HIM; LAWYERS, GUNS & MONEY, THE OIL HAs. .h.i.t THE FAN; MY LAST GOOD CASE WAS ANCHOR STEAM BEER. But Gina had already read them all and today they didn't even register. She knocked once, cracked the door. "You decent?"

"Probably not. Come on in. Watch out Gert doesn't escape." Wes was over by his refreshment counter, watching espresso drain into a tiny cup, and turned as she entered. His T-shirt today read A FRIEND WILL HELP YOU MOVE. A REALLY GOOD FRIEND WILL HELP YOU MOVE A BODY.

"Phyllis said you looked like you could use some coffee," he said.

"How much you got?" Gina asked. "She's a dear, that woman."

"Actually," Wes replied, "company secret, but she's a robot. And the next generation, supposedly, they're making them with personalities. I can't wait." He handed her the demita.s.se. "So guess what? Kelley Rusnak was probably murdered."

The cup stopped halfway to Gina's mouth. That had been her a.s.sumption all along, but it was nice to get the formal verification, and the vindication.

Farrell leaned back against the counter. "My guy down in Redwood City called me about an hour ago. Kind of an interesting sequence of events, actually. His theory, anyway. You want to hear it all?"

"As opposed to what? Half of it?"

"Don't get snippy," he said.

"Don't ask dumb questions and I won't. All of it. Yes, please."

"Okay. The first thing a little weird was she had three mostly undissolved pills-Tylenol with codeine-in her mouth."

"Undissolved. How could that happen?"

"Well, one way, somebody could put them in her mouth after she was already dead, or close to it."

"Again, though, why?"

"Maybe because that was the only drug she had on hand with the prescription made out to her. The empty bottle was next to her bed where they found her, which is why they initially thought it was straight OD. But it wasn't. Why? No codeine in her blood."

"None?"

"Zero. She died from an overdose of Elavil, also called amytriptilene. Which is a prescription antidepressant."

Gina put her untouched coffee down on the table, lowered herself onto the couch, absently stroking the dog who'd come over. "But let me guess. There was no bottle for this stuff in her place, with her name on it?"

"Right. But wait, listen, it gets better. The other thing she had on board was Rohypnol."

Gina knew what that was. "The date-rape drug."

"Exactly. And she could have taken it herself, of course, technically, but the odds are she didn't. My guy thinks somebody was with her and got it into her drink. Then when she was woozy, popped her full of amytriptilene. She would have been feeling funny anyway, dizzy and/or sick. Maybe he told her it was aspirin. They're tiny pills, and it looks like he gave her a lot of them. So the roofie"-the street name for Rohypnol-"kept her from waking up as she went into tachycardia from the amytriptilene. And after she was out, somebody tried to throw off the investigation-at least for a while-by trying to force some codeine down her throat as well."

"That's a bizarre way to kill someone," Gina said.

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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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! G.o.ddammit! 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 gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l. 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."

34.

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 s.p.a.ce, 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.