The Suspect Page 2

  Besides her shorts, she wore a long-sleeved buttoned shirt of some space-age fabric that wicked out perspiration and then dried almost immediately. The clothes were functional in the extreme. Over her bare feet her legs were well-muscled and tan, her ankles slim. She had stopped dyeing her hair a couple of years before, and now the wisps that showed from beneath the red handkerchief around her head were a shining, silvery gray.

  Laying the now-still fish in a small concavity at the top of the boulder, her movements bespoke a temperament of brisk competence. Removing a six-inch Buck knife from its sheath on her belt, she picked up the fish by its gills and turned back to the water, where she paused for a moment to appreciate the setting. In the dying sun she saw another person, small in the distance, sitting on a rock across the water.

  Returning to the task at hand, she inserted the tip of the Buck’s blade into the trout and slit up its belly to the gills. Pulling out its guts, she threw them out beyond the reach of the ledge, where they sank into the lake’s depth and disappeared from view. After she’d scraped the dark line of gunk along the backbone, she pulled off and threw away the gills, then dipped the trout in the water and rinsed it clean.

  She’d pitched her tent on a level spot back a ways into the trees. Campfires weren’t allowed here, but previous campers had left a clearing surrounded by large rocks for seating. As the far eastern end of the lake grew into shadow, she touched a flame to her small gas stove.

  For longer backpacking trips, Gina tried to keep her pack to under thirty-five pounds. Besides her portable stove, she’d carry a Girl Scout–style mess kit and a bear canister filled mostly with dehydrated fruits and ready-to-cook meals. But she’d planned this trip to be day hikes out of this base camp. She’d come up on Friday and would go home tomorrow morning. Beyond that, the camp was only a couple of relatively level miles from the Echo Lakes trailhead. She didn’t need to worry about her pack’s weight for this type of trip, and she’d loaded up her canister with GORP—good ol’ raisins and peanuts (and added M&Ms)—for quick energy, then for her lunches a couple of small loaves of San Francisco sourdough, a block of cheddar cheese, a chub of Italian dry salami.

  Heaven.

  For dinner tonight, she had even thought to carry a half-bottle of decent white wine. Using the mess kit’s covered pot, she’d boil her fresh green beans in a little lake water, finishing them with fresh minced garlic, pepper and salt, and olive oil. The trout was far too big for the mess kit frying pan, too long in fact for the ten-inch Calphalon from her own kitchen, so though the concept offended her, she was forced to cut the trout in half. A squeeze of olive oil from its little plastic container, salt and pepper, mixed Italian herbs, a few drops of Tabasco sauce.

  Beat that, Farallon, she thought as she laid the halves of trout into the oil and spices. Eat your heart out, Boulevard—Farallon and Boulevard being two of San Francisco’s finest restaurants.

  When she finished eating, she took some boiling water and the dishes she’d used down to the lake to wash them. Back at the camp, she settled against her rock and sipped at the last of her wine from her Sierra Cup. The moon was up, and so was Venus, in a wine-dark sky.

  The diamond in the ring on her left hand caught a glint from the bright moon and for a second she looked at the thing as though its presence there surprised her. There was no rational explanation for this reaction—she’d worn the ring now for almost three years, but in truth she didn’t often think of it because it was too painful.

  Now she stared at it for a long moment. Putting her wine down, she reached over, twisted it off her finger, and held it up in front of her. The facets in the diamond caught more moonlight as she turned it around and around, as though she were trying to find some secret magic within it.

  But she knew there was no secret. There was no more magic in her life anymore, not as there had been when David Freeman had stunned her by proposing marriage and then placed the ring on her finger. Freeman, much older than she was, and a legend in the law world of San Francisco, was a slovenly dressed, big-living, profane, cigar-smoking genius in an ancient gnome’s body whom, much to Gina’s initial surprise, she’d come to love.

  She often felt that he’d literally cast some spell on her. She would look at his ill-fitting brown suits, his scuffed shoes, the rheumy eyes under unruly and wiry eyebrows, the rosacea-scarred nose—Freeman didn’t appear to be joking when he said that he liked to think of himself as mythically ugly—and during the six months she had lived with him, she couldn’t think of a more attractive man of any age. Objectively, he was a frog, but she could see only the prince. It had to be sorcery. But whatever it was, it had worked and she had fallen under his spell, satisfied and happily in love at forty-four, for the first time in her life.

  And Freeman, for his part, a seventy-something lifelong bachelor and notorious womanizer, apparently felt the same way about her. When he’d proposed, nervous as a schoolboy, this man who could be eloquent in front of the Supreme Court could barely get the words out. They were already living together most of the time in David’s apartment, although Gina had kept her own place as well, and they decided to have a small, no-frills civil ceremony within the week.

  But then David, who considered himself “bulletproof,” had decided to walk home from work one night that week after he’d finished at the office. At the time, he’d been embroiled in some highly contentious litigation with a local mobster, and the gang leader’s men had set upon the old barrister and beaten him into a coma from which he never recovered. When he died three days later, Gina felt a part of herself die with him.

  But unbeknownst to her, in those last months of his life, David had changed his will, and Gina found herself the owner of the Freeman Building, downtown on Sutter Street. The large, gracious, recently renovated, three-story structure, complete with underground parking, housed the forty-odd employees of David’s firm, Freeman & Associates, as well as one rogue “of counsel” tenant named Dismas Hardy. In the months following David’s death, Gina, Dismas, and another colleague named Wes Farrell had reconsolidated the firm as Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, and it had become somewhat of a power player in the city.

  But although Gina had been a practicing defense attorney for her entire career, and was a name partner in FFH&R, as time passed she took on less and less of the firm’s law work. Her heart had gone out of it. She preferred to spend her time with physical exercise, with hikes and solitude, with the slowly accumulating pages of a novel—a legal thriller—that she was struggling without much passion to finish.

  “Oh, David,” she whispered, sighing. A tear hung in the corner of her eye. “Help me out here, would you?”

  And suddenly, as she stared through the prisms of her engagement ring, she felt her shoulders relax as though relieved of a great load. She felt David’s hovering ghost as an actual physical presence and realized that he was letting her go, telling her that she had mourned him enough.

  He was gone, never coming back, and it was time to move on. The writing, the constant exercise, the long, lonely hikes, even the beautiful moments such as this one—she all at once came to see what David would have had to say about all of them: “That’s not you, Roake. That’s avoidance. That’s not what you do. You always attack life. You engage. Something’s beating you up, you take it on and wrestle that motherfucker to the ground. Why are you still wearing that ring, anyway? So guys won’t hit on you? You want to get old and live alone? I don’t think so. You’ve got good years to live, so don’t wimp out now by not living them.”

  She was young, she told herself, or at least not yet old. Perhaps she was even desirable.

  She brought the ring up to her lips and pressed it against them. Then she put it on her third finger, but of her right hand this time, and stood up. Walking to her tent in the moonlight, she let herself in, crawled into her sleeping bag and almost immediately was asleep.

  TWO

  IN HIS CITY-ISSUE TAURUS, INSPECTOR Sergeant Devin Juhle pulled up and parke
d where the front walk of a house on Greenwich Street on San Francisco’s Russian Hill met the sidewalk. He was responding to a dispatch he’d received just as he was leaving his home on Noriega. In the past eighteen months, Juhle’s previous two partners had been killed. Now, in a compelling demonstration of the superstitious nature of his colleagues in Homicide, he worked solo.

  Two black-and-white squad cars were already at the scene, at the curb across the street. A Fire Department vehicle sat in the driveway. A knot of bystanders—three women, one man, four kids—had gathered at the corner, a hundred feet away. They all stared at the house as a unit, curious and intent, waiting for some official person to come over and tell them what had happened. Thus far, no media had arrived, but Juhle knew that this aberration in the natural order of things would soon correct itself.

  Juhle waited behind the wheel and let his mind switch to what he called his “detail gear.” From here on out, he wanted to register everything he saw, heard, thought, or felt. He’d trained himself to pay attention from his first moments at any crime scene. Now, satisfied that he had taken in all he needed from the street, he looked at the house. A pair of uniformed patrol officers stood at its open door. The occupants of the second squad car, Juhle presumed, were inside.

  He checked his watch. It was just shy of 7:30 on Monday, September 12. Juhle exited his car and took one last look around. The morning was glorious, the sky blue and cloudless, the sun casting its long shadows down the street in front of him.

  He turned and walked toward the house.

  Stuart Gorman’s hollow eyes stared into the distance over Devin Juhle’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You said you got home just before six. I asked you where you had been.”

  Gorman brought his eyes back. “We’ve got a place at Echo Lake, up by South Tahoe. I was there for the weekend.”

  “So you must have left there early.”

  “A little before two. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I might as well come on home.”

  “And you were up there alone?”

  “Yeah.” Gorman raised his chin, thick with stubble. His face was drawn, the skin with a pronounced pallor even under the sunburn. The whites of his eyes were shot with capillaries. “I’m a writer. I went up there to do some work.”

  They sat across from each other at a round, wooden table in a kitchen that was considerably more well-equipped than Juhle’s own. A bank of windows in the eastern wall admitted a bright line of sunlight up where it met the ceiling and reflected off the surfaces of the bright copper pans that hung from the opposite wall. Juhle had faced Gorman so that he wouldn’t have to watch the crime-scene techs and assistants to the medical examiner as they passed through the living room and out to the back porch, where Caryn Dryden’s naked body still lay on the wooden slats of the deck next to the hot tub.

  They were just getting started. Juhle had his small tape recorder concealed and running in his pocket. To any homicide cop, the death of a spouse always entails initial suspicion of the surviving partner. When husbands got killed, you looked first to the wife, and vice versa. And even though the death of Caryn Dryden might, from what he now knew, be ruled a suicide, the possibility of murder lurked somewhere in the back of Juhle’s mind.

  But the last thing Juhle wanted was to raise a flag with the husband at this point. He kept his questions innocuous. “Did you get any writing done?”

  “No.” Gorman ran a workingman’s hand down a ravaged cheek. “I might as well tell you. The last time I saw Caryn was here at the house on Friday afternoon. She told me she wanted a divorce. That’s all I could think about while I was up there.”

  “How’d you feel about that, getting a divorce?”

  Gorman’s gaze went off again, then came back. “You married, Inspector?”

  “I am.”

  “You love your wife?”

  Juhle nodded. “Most of the time.”

  “Me too. Except when I hated her.”

  “That happen a lot?”

  “Most of this weekend, to be honest with you.”

  “So you didn’t want to divorce her?”

  Gorman said, “The word—we called it the D-word—it wasn’t something I allowed myself to entertain. I figured once you’re saying it out loud to yourself, it starts having its own reality. Caryn and I were together and committed and that was that, I thought, for better or worse. So I never wanted to give myself that option.”

  Juhle nodded. “Okay. But she wanted out?”

  “And got herself out, didn’t she?”

  Juhle leaned back in his chair. “You think she killed herself?”

  “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  “By drowning? That’s a reasonably difficult trick to pull off by yourself.”

  If Gorman’s shrug struck Juhle as chillingly nonchalant, his actual words were perhaps colder. “She was a doctor. You check, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t a drowning after all. She kept a stash of Vicodin upstairs. Take some pills, have a few drinks, go sit in the hot tub turned up to one-oh-five. Adios.”

  Absorbing this intelligence, Juhle felt all of his senses sharpen. Stuart Gorman had just supplied him with chapter and verse on a perfectly plausible scenario for Caryn’s death—one that, if adopted by the medical examiner and the police, would remove him, the husband, from any suspicion. If he’d been involved in his wife’s death, this was a slick, high-stakes gamble—smart and dangerous.

  “Can we go back,” Juhle said, “to how you found her?”

  Gorman indicated the room behind him. “I already told those guys. What’s it matter?”

  Because now I’ve got you on tape, Juhle thought to himself. And in fact, it probably wouldn’t really matter, but Juhle’s aim was to keep him talking. “Just making sure we get the record straight. You’ve said you got here a little after six and parked in your garage under the house…?”

  “All right.” He sighed. “I expected her to be up by then. She usually is on Monday. But the house was quiet, so I figured she was sleeping in and I thought I’d let her. Maybe she’d had the kind of weekend I’d just had. So I make a pot of coffee and go out to get the paper. I finish them both and it’s still quiet. I don’t hear the shower yet, so I go upstairs and she’s not in bed. It’s still made. So I figure maybe she took off someplace for the weekend herself.”

  “Where would she have gone?”

  “I don’t know. Her sister’s, maybe. Or up to visit…” The first real sign of distress. Gorman brought a hand to his forehead. “Oh, Christ. Kym. Our daughter. She’s up at college in Portland. She just started a couple of weeks ago. Oh, Jesus. This is going to destroy her. I’ve got to call her.”

  Juhle didn’t want to stop in the middle of his interview. He said, “Are you sure you don’t want to let us do that for you? I can call the Portland police and have somebody with her.”

  Juhle watched Gorman pull himself heavily to his feet and cross to the phone on the kitchen counter. “No.” There he paused again, his hands flat on the counter, all of his weight on them. His head flopped forward and Juhle heard the deep exhale of a sigh. “Oh, Jesus,” he said again. He picked up the receiver, brought it to his ear, then placed it back down on the counter. “I’ve got to do this myself.”

  Juhle left him like that, working up the strength to make the call.

  Leaving the kitchen, the inspector looked left through the large, high-ceilinged living room. Beyond the cop stationed at the front door, he could see that, sure enough, a couple of Minicams and their news crews had arrived. He wasn’t about to talk to them, not at this stage anyway. Instead he turned to his right and walked through a leather-couch kind of book-lined den and out onto the enclosed deck.

  The body lay covered now with a sheet that still clung in wet places. A police photographer was snapping pictures of the hot tub and deck. Behind him, some ME assistants were wheeling a collapsible gurney through the house. Two other officers in uniform were down the steps in the b
ackyard, conversing on the tiny fenced lawn.

  In shirtsleeves, Lennard Faro, lean and dark with a well-trimmed black goatee, was a lab specialist with the Crime Scene Investigation unit. Seeing Juhle at the back door, he closed his cell phone and walked over.

  “He break yet? The husband?” Faro asked.

  “He wasn’t here. He was up in the mountains. You’re saying this is a homicide?”

  A shrug. Faro wasn’t going to commit until the medical examiner had drawn his conclusions and he himself had spent some time in the lab. Still, he said, “She’s got an impressive, and I’d guess recent, bump over her right ear.”

  “Enough to kill her?”

  “We won’t know until the autopsy, but I’d say it’s not impossible.”

  “How long has she been dead?”

  Faro frowned. “The hot tub’s going to screw that calculation up for a while. Nobody’s going to know until we get cutting on her. Body temp’s way up, but that’s what you’d expect when the water’s still at one-oh-five.”

  The number struck a chord. “Exactly one-oh-five?”

  “Pretty close. The thermometer’s still…why? That a magic number?”

  “No. It’s nothing.” Juhle didn’t want to start a rumor. He’d get what he could, then see where it led him. “Any sign of what caused the bump?”

  “Maybe. We found some broken glass, plus one big piece, up against the bottom of the tub. Some still have a whiff of wine on ’em. Another empty glass was in the sink. The rest of the broken glass and an empty bottle was in the compactor in the kitchen.”

  “So she was drinking?”

  “Maybe. Blood alcohol will tell.”