Hardy: The Suspect Part 14

"About as much as usual. Say, sixty percent."

Gina asked, "And how about you? How are you doing?" She waited. "Stuart?"

His voice was different. Gruff, unprotected. "It's started to hit me, too, I think. It's ..." He sighed heavily. "It's hard. I get the feeling it's going to get harder."

"Missing her?"

It took him a second. "Caryn? Not really. Just this emptiness. Like the s.p.a.ces around me are all too big or something. I'm all disoriented. I'm not saying it very well."

"You're saying it fine."

"I'm not. You remember how you said you were waiting for me to show some grief?"

"Yes."

"Well, I don't know when, or even if, that's ever going to happen." He paused, then went on in a rush. "What I've been hit by is this sense that what Caryn and I really had for the last several years- at least what I was convinced we had-was a commitment more than anything else. Certainly more of a commitment than actual love, whatever that is. We weren't going to cheat, I thought. We weren't going to embarra.s.s each other. We were going to do as good as we could with Kymberly, try not to get in each other's ways, support each other's career choices.

"But somewhere along the way, it stopped being . . . being anything personal, really. We shared the house and were basically polite to each other. And I thought it would change back someday, maybe when Kym left, maybe later. But now I'm just starting to realize that even if she wasn't dead, that was never going to happen. And that's what I feel this emptiness about. It's like with her gone I'm suddenly allowed to feel what's been there and what I've been denying all along for five, six, maybe ten years. I know I should feel more grief, I feel guilty that I don't, but there it is. In some ways, I feel like I'm starting to wake up. How wrong is that?"

"It's not so wrong, although I wouldn't go out of my way to mention it to the press."

"I'll try to resist."

"And while we're on it, there's something else you might try to avoid around reporters."

"What's that?"

"Debra."

"I told you, there's nothing ..."

"I know what you told me, but I'm talking about perception. She's beautiful, and whether or not you like it, her body language is claiming you. Wait up an hour and watch it again on the late news and you'll see what I'm talking about. She isn't there with you now, is she?"

"She didn't even come in, Gina. She left after we had dinner."

"Okay. And Stuart? She may be the nicest woman in the world. That's not my point. My point is the reporters have now seen her. So she's in the story. And if there's any way she could get a bigger part in it, that will happen without either of you doing anything. So, for the last time, there's no bigger part for her in this, is there?"

Nothing.

"Stuart?"

He sighed into the receiver. "What I've told you is true. We've never been involved. We've never had s.e.x. Okay, clear enough?"

"Except that I hear a 'but.' "

Another pause. "Three years ago, when she was going through her divorce, Caryn suggested that I take her away from all the madness she was going through. So I took her up to the lake and we hiked around up there a while."

"How long?"

He hesitated. "Five days."

"Five days? You're in a loveless marriage and she's getting divorced. And nothing happened?"

"We didn't have s.e.x, if that's . . ."

"Of course that's what I'm saying. Don't go all Bill Clinton on me."

"There's not. She would have . . . maybe she wanted to. Maybe I was tempted. I thought it was a good idea to cut off the last two days, and we came home early. I was married to her sister, for Christ's sake. We had a deal and I wasn't going to break it. And that's the truth."

"Swell. Who else knows you guys went up there? Who might tell?"

"Well, certainly her ex-husband, maybe some of her friends."

Gina's voice went flat. "So it's going to come out. And it'll be part of your motive."

"Except that nothing happened. And nothing is going to happen, I promise you. People can believe it or not."

"I'm not thinking about people in general, Stuart. I'm thinking about nineteen specific people on the grand jury. Or maybe twelve in a murder trial."

"I'll just tell them the truth."

"Stuart, you just told me the truth, and I'm not too sure it helped."

"Well, I don't know what else I can do. Did you hear what else I told those reporters tonight? Something else that was true?"

"What's that?"

"That I'm willing to cooperate with whoever it takes, even the police, to find who killed Caryn. In fact, just between you and me, maybe I'm going to try to find out myself."

"Not a good idea. This is why we have police."

"Except at the moment they think I did it."

"No, they're just saying you're a person-"

"A person of interest. I know, I know. And that means I'm the prime suspect as soon as they find something they can use as evidence. And then I'm in jail. I don't want to go to jail, even for a day."

"No. You're right there. You don't."

"Well, then, what's my option? Sit around and wait until Juhle piles up enough innuendo and hearsay to bring charges against me? Listen, Gina, if he's not looking for somebody else, then he's not looking for whoever did this, because I didn't. Have I mentioned that before?"

"A couple of times, I believe. And that brings us to some good news at last."

"What's that?"

"Your lawyer is starting to believe you."

15.

The Travelodge did not have room service, so Stuart let his daughter sleep and went out to pick up breakfast and a newspaper. So at about 8:15, Stuart and Kymberly were drinking their Starbucks and eating croissants at the coffee table in his hotel room. His daughter turned a page of the paper, leaned forward over it for a minute, then looked up. "You've made USA Today, Dad. 'Writer Denies Implication in Doctor Wife's Death.' Oh, G.o.d. Nationwide."

"Can I see?"

She pa.s.sed the pages over, and he scanned the article quickly. It wasn't long, maybe two hundred words in the Regional News section under San Francisco. Before he had a chance for any kind of a comment, the telephone on the side table next to the couch rang once and Stuart grabbed it. "h.e.l.lo. Yes, speaking." But after that he wasn't speaking-he listened for a minute, at the end of which he said, "All right, thanks." Then sat holding the phone.

"Dad?"

Startled out of his reverie, Stuart smiled awkwardly at his daughter, then hung up and lifted his coffee cup to his mouth. "That was the police," he said. "We can go back home."

"Home," Kym said. "What's home going to be like now?" He met his daughter's eyes, saw the incipient tears, and put his arm around her, bringing her in next to him, holding her as she broke.

Kym didn't think she could stand to be inside the house where her mother had been slain. She wasn't sure she could ever go back through that front door again. And fortunately, before they'd even finished their coffee, Debra had shown up unbidden at the hotel. She volunteered to take her niece shopping for some clothes (no argument about the shallowness of fas.h.i.+on this time from Kym) and then out to lunch someplace nice. After that, they could both go back to Debra's apartment, where Kym was welcome to stay with her as long as she wanted, and at least until the funeral. The medical examiner hadn't released the body, so they weren't sure yet when that would be. Certainly no sooner than next Monday.

So at a little before noon, after wandering aimlessly in the empty house for most of an hour, Stuart found himself alone upstairs at his computer in his small writing office next to his bedroom. He hadn't checked his e-mails since Thursday night, and now he was scrolling down through nearly a hundred of them. It did not appear that the police who'd searched his house so thoroughly over the past couple of days had opened his files, and this surprised him; but maybe they'd dumped his hard drive data onto a disk and taken it downtown to peruse at their leisure.

The correspondence was mostly predictable-fully half, in spite of his spam-blocking software, was unwanted, unsolicited mail of one kind or another; eight or ten were messages from people who'd enjoyed one of his books or others of his writings; both his agent and his publisher, offering any kind of a.s.sistance (but possibly not exactly heartbroken over the commercial possibilities of him being in the news); another twenty forwarded jokes that he routinely deleted; fifteen or so from people who'd heard about Caryn.

He had almost gotten to the bottom of the queue when he saw a familiar sender's moniker-TSNK-that brought him up short and caused his stomach to go hollow. Stuart had heard from TSNK before, twice. The first time had been a little over a year ago, a few days after Sunset had published a short piece that featured some of Stuart's favorite outdoor recipes for cooking trout.

At that time, he'd printed out the offending e-mail but then decided to ignore it. It had to be from some crank. Stuart hadn't considered calling the police or the FBI. He never even mentioned it to Caryn. Stuart, though, had kept the message, but he'd never had to go back and look at it to remember it in its entirety: "It is bad enough when the ignorant kill G.o.d's and nature's n.o.ble animals in the name of food or sport. But when someone who glorifies himself as the friend and benefactor of nature does it, the crime rises to the level of evil. Now we know who you are. Punishment for your crime might come at any time. Prepare yourself. THOU SHALT NOT KILL."

TSNK.

He'd heard from them, or him, or her, one other time four months ago, in the wake of another article he'd done-this one published in Field & Stream-on an albacore run he'd taken with a party boat out of Morro Bay.

The seventy-foot party boat had left the dock at midnight, and after a night running southwest for about sixty miles, they'd hit a good-size school of tuna. Although every one of the twelve other anglers hooked up, in the aftermath of bringing the fish aboard, Stuart had been appalled by the general greediness on the boat. The common att.i.tude seemed to be that suddenly all of the boatmates were potential enemies, intent on stealing each other's catch. Two fights broke out, fists actually flung, when one of the mates tagged a bigger fish (they were all within three pounds on either side of forty!) as the catch of one man, when another was sure he had boated it.

Afterward, when the run was over, the men sat apart, guarding their burlap sacks of catch, lest another fisherman subst.i.tute his name tag to try to get more fish.

The story Stuart wrote for Field & Stream had been his knee-jerk solution to the rampant avidity. Wasabi and soy sauce in hand, he'd gone up to the first mate and asked him to bring up the largest fish Stuart had caught and cut up half of it-fifteen pounds of fillet- into sus.h.i.+ for breakfast for every man on the boat. The other half he gave to the short-order cook in the galley and told him to make as many variations of albacore as his heart desired to keep the crew and his fellow fishermen happy. So, besides the sus.h.i.+, they'd all fed like lords on fresh breaded albacore, on seared sesame albacore, on garlic stir-fried albacore, and on albacore with b.u.t.ter, lemon and capers. By the end of the day, the men-even the earlier pugilists-were all friends, sharing recipes, tips and even tackle, trading their fresh tuna for each other's canned, planning other fis.h.i.+ng trips as a group.

Stuart had thought it a very successful story about how an example of simple sharing could break the grip of irrational territorialism on a bunch of alpha males. TSNK apparently didn't have the same opinion: "You've been warned once, and you have not heeded. Your influence could heal, and instead you choose to let it harm the helpless creatures of the deep. The albacore shall have their vengeance. THOU SHALT NOT KILL."

This second time, Stuart did report the e-mail to the police, who directed him to the FBI, who in turn told him they would pa.s.s it either to Fish & Game or up the chain to Homeland Security as a possible threat from a terrorist organization. But Stuart had never heard another word about it from anyone, and in his heart he believed that the authorities considered the whole thing more or less a joke. And, in truth, he knew it was highly unlikely that Al-Qaeda cared much about whether he killed the fish he caught. On the other hand, there were organizations that did; if you said the word "terrorism" on U.S. soil before 9/11, you would have probably been more likely, and accurately, to conjure up images of Timothy McVeigh or the work of PETA or the Earth Liberation Front than of Osama bin Laden and his followers.

These people were serious. And they, or someone perhaps sufficiently like them, had him in their sights.

In the emotional devastation he'd been enduring since last Friday when Caryn had told him she wanted a divorce, the thought of his most recently published article, an atypical foray outside of the fis.h.i.+ng world in Western Sportsman, hadn't crossed his mind. Since he'd handed it in six weeks before, though, he'd worried sporadically that his tale of the boar hunt he'd gone on in the Sierra foothills might draw the attention of TSNK.

Now, the simmering of his all-too-familiar anger welling up again within him, he clicked twice on the message. It was dated last Friday, at 2:00 in the afternoon: "The beasts of the fields are sacred unto G.o.d, and now you have taken to slaying them as well as their brothers in the waters. This is intolerable. We know where you live. There will be no more warnings. Soon you will suffer as your victims have suffered. TSNK."

From her office, Gina placed a call to Wyatt Hunt, computer whiz. She was at Stuart's house a half hour later. "Is it possible Juhle missed this?"

They were in the kitchen, a room in which Stuart felt marginally comfortable. He was sitting on the counter by the sink. "Wouldn't he have told us if he saw it?"

"It may be why he hasn't arrested you."

"Well, there's one way to find out."

Gina placed the call from the kitchen phone and got the inspector on his cell phone. He was down in Hunters Point, interviewing another witness in a suspected gang slaying, but he wasn't making much headway-the homey ain't be 'membrin' no thin'. "No, I'm out on the stoop now, hoping n.o.body shoots at me. What's up, Gina?"

She told him, and read the latest message.

The bare fact of it made very little impact on the inspector. "It's an e-mail? No. We didn't download his files, but thanks for the idea."

"Devin, this looks to me like a threat to Stuart and maybe to his family. It says that they know where he lives. That it's the last warning."

"Are you sure he didn't go to some Internet cafe and mail it to himself?"

"Reasonably sure, yes. He got two other similar notes in the past year from the same sender. On the second one, he notified the authorities."

"When was that?"

"I don't know exactly. Four or five months ago."

"He could have been planning it back then. Set up the story."

Gina said, "Look, Inspector, I'm giving you the courtesy of this phone call. If you want to come here to look for yourself, my client would let you in without a warrant. It's your call."

"No. I'll be there. Don't erase anything. Don't touch anything. Give me an hour."

"One hour," Gina said, hanging up. She softened her tone to Stuart. "He was underwhelmed, but he'll be here. He doesn't think it's impossible you sent it to yourself."

Stuart's smile showed a few teeth. "They get an idea in their heads, they hold on to it pretty hard, don't they? Okay, so even forget this Thou Shalt Not Kill guy. Isn't Juhle looking at anybody else? Any other suspects?"

"I don't know. He should be. That's all I can say." She hesitated, looked out the window over his shoulder, came back to him, made an involuntary grimace.

"What are you thinking?" he asked. "Something."

"I'm thinking I'd like to see where it happened, if you could deal with it."

He took a beat, then said, "Sure," and boosted himself off the counter. "Out here."

The hot tub was still uncovered, still filled with water, although someone had turned it off, and the temperature was now tepid. They'd left the blackout blinds open, and the backs and sides of the neighboring homes and backyards were visible on all sides. Stuart dipped a hand into the water and stirred it.

Outside, the early autumn weather kept imitating summer. From a feeder by the back fence, birdsong punctuated the stillness. A smell of chlorine hung in the air, a hint of humidity. Stuart didn't turn around, but spoke quietly. "I'm starting to believe somebody drowned her. Somebody hit her on the head and pushed her under. I've got to find out who that was."

"We've talked about that, Stuart. That's the police."

A bitter laugh. "They're not motivated like I am." He turned back to her. "Now you want to ask: If I didn't love her anymore, why would it matter so much?"

"All right. That did occur to me."