Hardy: The Suspect Part 39

"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. G.o.d, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 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 circ.u.mvented, 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 d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.senger seat, its muzzle down on the floor of the stolen Honda Accord. Walden had already rolled the pa.s.senger 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.

38.

CityTalk 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 a.s.semblyman Jedd Conley for the murders of Dr. Dryden and Kelley Rusnak, her lab a.s.sistant 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 nitro-methane, 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.) It also appears certain from books, newspaper clippings, e-mails, and other material discovered in Crittenden's bas.e.m.e.nt, that it was he, identifying himself as Walden, who had shotgunned and critically wounded Stuart Gorman in the days following the outdoor writer's release from jail after charges that he had drowned his wife had been dropped in favor of a.s.semblyman Conley.

In a chilling bit of irony, Mr. Gorman, who professes himself completely recovered from the a.s.sa.s.sination attempt (although he still walks with a p.r.o.nounced limp), will be signing copies of new paperback editions of his three books, Reflections on a Lake, The Mysterious Stream, and Healed by Water, at 7:00 this Friday night at Book Pa.s.sage in the Ferry Building.

Gina waited back among the shelves until the other customers had gone. There had been close to a hundred of them. Stuart remained seated alone at the small writing table, pulling copies of his books over from the pile on his left and signing them one by one, methodically, moving them to a growing pile on the right as he finished. Finally, she came up to him. "Hey."

He broke a smile. "Hey, yourself. I'd get up and give you a hug, except I'm still having a little trouble with the hip. How are you, Gina?"

"I'm good, Stuart. How about you?"

"Getting by. It's been a bit of a year, in case you haven't noticed."

"Yeah. I read about the wedding, too. It's kind of what made me decide to come down and say hi. That and Jeff's article reminding me."

"I'm glad you did." He shrugged. "It's weird. I can't seem to avoid making the news anymore. Beware of what you wish for."

"I never thought you wanted fame."

"No. I never wanted money. Fame was all right. Fame opens doors. It's okay."

"And how's Debra?"

"She's good." He shrugged, perhaps with some embarra.s.sment. "We're good. I never thought I'd marry my wife's sister, but there you go. I never thought I'd get tried for murder, either."

"You never did," Gina said.

He shrugged. "Close enough. Anyway, the whole Debra thing. She's been good with Kymberly. I never thought I'd say that, either. I'm starting to think there might be hope for her. Maybe even me getting shot wasn't all a bad thing. It made her realize she could lose me too, and she finally didn't want that. She's even back at school."

"That's good. I'm glad to hear that."

"It is good," he said. For a moment, a silence built. "And you'll be glad to hear I've finished the new book."

"So you said."

"You were here all along? Tonight, I mean?"

"Hiding out in the back. I didn't want to get in the way of your talk. It's a little bit of a different t.i.tle for you, isn't it? The Imposter Syndrome T "Yeah. Breaking out of fishing psychology and into true self-help. It's a bit of a leap, but my publisher thinks it's a winner. It's the idea that came to me in the courtroom that day, you know. You remember?"

"I remember you getting it. Not what it was, though."

"Well, you'll have to read the book, but it's all about figuring out why I felt like I had to keep protecting Kym, instead of confronting her and trying to help her deal with her problems. It was because I couldn't really do anything else except write, and writing's one of those things-sometimes you lose the sense that it has any real intrinsic value. So if I can't do anything else, and what I can do doesn't have any real quant.i.tative worth, what became important was the illusion that I was at least a good father. Raising a successful child is something you can point at that you've done."

"But you are a successful writer, and it sounds like you're on the way to having raised a successful child."

"Well, let's hope," he said. "Maybe. Anyway, the book takes off from there and goes off on my usual tangents. I got something out of writing it, and that's what's important. That and keeping things together with the family." Suddenly remembering, he squinted up at her. "And how's your writing going? Still at it?"

"Actually," Gina couldn't keep some pride out of her voice, "I just finished mine, too. It's probably no good, but I least I got to the end."

"That's the hardest part. Now you just go back and fix everything you don't like."

Gina laughed. "That's all, huh?"

"Pretty much. But I'll bet you won't need to do too much. Not if you did trial scenes like you did at my hearing."

"Well . . . that's nice of you to say, but we'll see. Anyway, I just had to come down and make sure you were okay and say hi. I'm so happy for you. You deserve a little peace."

"And the only reason I've got any is because of you. Don't think I don't realize that."

Gina looked down at her former client. She reached out and touched his shoulder. "Take care of yourself, Stuart. Stay out of trouble."

"Don't worry," he said. "That's my new motto."

Gina had started on the vigorous circle hike around the lake at a little after noon, and now, coming into sight of her camp, the sun was just about to go down behind the mountains. Her critic was still sitting where she'd left him three hours ago, the stack of pages next to him telling her practiced eye that he was probably getting pretty close to the end.

No way was she going to interrupt him now, so she cut off the trail and walked down to the lake. She stood still for several minutes on the sh.o.r.eline, drinking in the beauty around her, never tiring of its ability to refresh and nourish her. Then, sitting on a boulder, she undid her shoelaces and pulled off her hiking boots and socks. Hot and sweaty, she unb.u.t.toned her shirt and dropped it and her shorts to the ground, then got rid of her underwear.

The first few steps into the cold water were shocking, as they always were, but she walked through the shallows, grinning like an idiot, until it was deep enough to let her dive. She stayed underwater, eyes open, for as long as she could, pushing the water behind her with strong and broad strokes, skimming over the seaweed, hoping to catch sight of a trout.

When she came back up, she treaded water for a second, and gloried in another eyeful of wilderness. But with the water temperature under fifty degrees, she couldn't stay in it too long, so she went under again and pulled for sh.o.r.e. When she got to where she knew she could stand, she stopped and surfaced.

He was standing on the sh.o.r.e, holding her pages.

"It's great," he said.

"You really think so?" She was coming toward him. "I want the real truth."

"I just gave you the real truth. It's fantastic. I couldn't put it down. It's really good, Gina. I mean it."

She was out of the water now, standing right in front of him. "You're not just saying it because you're hoping I'm going to let you kiss me, are you?"

"Would that work?"

"No. I'd be able to tell you were lying."

"But I'm not lying."

"All right, then, Wyatt Hunt," she said. "Then you can kiss me."

end.