Hardy: The Suspect Part 15

"It's not so much Caryn. It's me. I'm the one who's going to have to live with the suspicion for the rest of my life, people thinking that I killed my wife. You think I want to look into my daughter's eyes and have her not be absolutely certain that I didn't do this? To say nothing of my friends, acquaintances, publishers. I can't have it. I won't have it." The small outburst seemed to settle something in him. "They're not locking me up. Whoever did this . . ."

"Whoever did it," Gina said, "will have made some mistakes, Stuart. When Juhle widens the net a little, he'll get to them."

"He's not looking. There's no net."

"There will be, though. I promise. It's only been two days and he's been spending his time eliminating you."

" Wasting his time eliminating me. And after four days, murders don't get solved, do they? Well, this one has to get solved." Stuart again put his hand into the lukewarm water. He kept it there, moving it slowly back and forth. "Okay," he said, as though he'd been arguing with himself and had reached a conclusion. "Okay, then."

16.

Wyatt Hunt was upstairs in the small office, sitting at Stuart's computer. Gina and Stuart were packed in, standing behind him. "There's no way," Hunt was saying, "that you can identify where this came from."

"Can't we go to the server?" Stuart asked. "I mean, it's at Gmail dot com. Don't they have to have an account?"

"Sure, but what does that tell you? Nothing. There's no physical address. They probably signed up online, work out of a laptop. If it's in a public place, we could maybe locate the computer, but so what? They could be anywhere. But wait." Hunt held up a finger. "Another idea strikes. Hold on." His fingers danced over the keyboard. He stared at the screen, typed some more. Did it all again. Finally he pushed back, shaking his head. "Nope. An idea, but not a good one."

"What'd you do?" Gina asked.

"Googled 'TSNK.' Also 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' Other than Bible sites, no record of anything like it, as you can see here. And if there's no record on Google, it doesn't exist. Maybe it is really just a lone crackpot, like you thought originally."

"But what's all this 'I know where you live'?"

A shrug. "Cheap terror tactics, that's all. They've written two of these before and done nothing, right? No attempt on you. The guy might be holed up in some cabin in Idaho or Maine or anywhere. Why should this time be any different?"

"This time," Stuart said, "my wife's dead. I think that's different enough."

"Of course," Hunt said. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking."

"It's all right," Stuart replied. "That seems to be going around. I wasn't thinking either the last few days. I'm only just starting to now." He looked over to Gina, back down at Hunt. "So what you're saying is that I could have done just what Juhle said, e-mailed myself from anywhere with this threatening stuff?"

"Essentially, right." Hunt swiveled halfway around toward the others. "Maybe if we found the actual computer this was e-mailed from, we could download the hard drive and prove the threat had come from that machine. But again, so what? We'd know who owned it. By itself, it wouldn't do us any good."

"Just to be clear, Wyatt," Gina said, "since we can't identify who sent it, Devin isn't going to be able to rule out Stuart on this, is he?"

"No. I don't think so."

"Wait a minute," Stuart said with some sharpness to Wyatt. "You know this guy?"

"What guy?"

"Juhle. Who both of you are suddenly calling Devin."

Hunt glanced up at Gina, shrugged. "Yeah. We go back. Why?"

"Because maybe he needs somebody he trusts telling him that I didn't do this."

Hunt coughed, made a noise in his throat, and Gina waded into the edgy silence. "Um, that's not really the way it's played, Stuart."

"I don't give a d.a.m.n about how it's played, Gina. This isn't a game, it's my life."

Hunt, recovering, said, "Okay, it's your life, but Devin doesn't trust anybody that much. Not me, not his wife, n.o.body. He's a cop, he follows the evidence."

"In spite of the fact that he's got none on me?"

Hunt's shrug was a little more elaborate this time. "You're the spouse, sir. The spouse usually did it. That's where he's got to start."

"All right, then, but what about if there are other suspects? How about that?"

"He finds some evidence, he'll look at them. But he won't go chasing down another motive, not until he's eliminated you. And that's no matter what I say or do."

"So I'm guilty until proven innocent?"

"To Juhle, probably."

"I thought it was supposed to be the other way round."

Hunt gave him a flat look. "You see much else in life that works the way it's supposed to, let me know, and I'll buy stock in it."

Gina put a hand on her client's arm. "Listen, Stuart, Juhle might not think so, but you are at least being considered innocent, which is why you're not in jail right now. They don't have enough proof, and that's the nut of it. And of course I'm going to communicate all of Caryn's relations.h.i.+ps to the inspector, and he may follow up on some or all of them. I may even lodge a complaint about the course of the investigation thus far with the DA, who happens to be a friend of mine. Of course," she added, "that'll go nowhere, but it might be a fun exercise."

"So meanwhile, what am I supposed to do?"

Gina and Wyatt exchanged a look that might have been conspiratorial or skeptical. "Most people," Gina said in a relaxed tone, "wait it out. See what happens."

"Well, call me a pain in the a.s.s," Stuart replied, "but that's what I've been doing the last couple of days, and any more of it doesn't really appeal to me."

A few minutes later, they'd moved downstairs to the living room and along to the question of the garage door. Stuart had typically brushed off Bethany's testimony that it had been him in his car and wanted to concentrate on the bare fact of somebody getting into his garage, concluding with what he had up to this moment always taken to be obvious. "But that means it had to be somebody we know, or that Caryn knew."

"Excuse me," Gina said, "but hasn't that been the a.s.sumption all along anyway? She was, after all, in the hot tub, naked."

"She always went in the hot tub naked," Stuart said. "But now I'm wondering. We don't know that whoever it was went in the hot tub with her, or even drank that other gla.s.s of wine. It might have been Caryn, who knocked the first gla.s.s off onto the deck where it broke. So she got out and cleaned up most of it. Then her killer showed up, snuck up and hit her with the bottle, then pushed her under. It didn't mean she was having an affair with him, or with anybody."

"That's true," Gina conceded.

"Maybe she wasn't," Wyatt agreed quickly. Stuart perhaps needed that belief, and Hunt was inclined to let him have it. "But let's go back to the garage door. You're saying Caryn must have known her killer because he had a device or some other way to open the garage door, which she'd presumably given him, is that it?"

"Right," Stuart said.

"Well no, sorry, but not necessarily," Hunt said. "Lots of cars, nowadays, they've got b.u.t.tons in the visor or the roof and you can set them to the frequency of your garage door so you don't need the little box. So anybody who'd ever been around your garage-a meter reader, a tradesman, the gardener, the garbage man, anybody-could have essentially stolen your frequency if they wanted to."

"So you're saying maybe this TSNK guy . . . ?"

"Not impossible," Hunt said. "Anybody."

Gina saw movement out the window and spoke up. "Here's Devin," she said.

Gina went to open the door and Juhle was one step inside, halfway through his greeting to her, when he stopped, glaring at Hunt. "Wyatt," he said with a measured calm, "what are you doing here?"

Hunt, standing with Stuart by the couch, shrugged. "Working too hard as usual." Starting off jovially, but when Juhle didn't respond, he said, "Gina had a computer question."

"So you've been on his computer?" Without waiting for a reply, his eyes now dark, Juhle spun back to Gina. "Did I dream telling you not to touch anything until I got here? Did you think that didn't include Wyatt?" Then back to Hunt. "How long have you been on this?"

Hunt shrugged again. "Gina called me and I drove right on out."

"I'm not talking this particular computer problem, Wyatt. You know that. I mean how long have you been involved in this case?"

"I just met him," Hunt said.

"Not what I asked," Juhle snapped.

But Gina stepped up into his s.p.a.ce. "What are you getting at, Devin? I asked Wyatt to come out and look at Stuart's computer, see if he could tell where these threatening e-mails might have originated. That's all there is to it."

"No, it isn't. Wyatt's working for you while he's pumping me for information."

"No pumping was involved, Dev. You never asked. And for the record, I wasn't on anybody's clock. But while I'm on Stuart's case here, I've got to tell you this e-mail he's got is what I believe you inspectors would call a clue. And since you missed it and we're giving it to you so you don't wind up making a big mistake, maybe you could chill a bit on the accusations about whose side I'm on. I'm here for the same reason you are, Dev. Gina asked me. I think we'd all like to get a handle on who we're actually looking for. Caryn's killer. How's that?"

Juhle clearly still didn't like it. He threw a last malevolent glance at Hunt, another at Gina, even half-turned as though he would be going back out the door he'd just entered. But at last he got himself settled enough to talk. "So what have you actually got?"

Suddenly, though, and to everyone else's surprise, Stuart spoke up. "Before we get to that, Inspector," he said, "we should tell you about the garage door."

"What about it?"

Gina held out a flat palm, hoping to cut off her client. "Stuart. . ."

"No," he said. "This is relevant. Wyatt was just telling us how anyone ..."

"Stuart!" Gina's voice cut through the room, brooking no dissent. "I mean it. We don't want to hear it."

"Maybe I do," Juhle said.

By now, Gina had moved up between the inspector and her client. "I'm sure you do, but you're not going to." She turned back to Stuart, making sure he was getting her message. Everything was strategy. Very little was truth. Let Juhle think that they'd found holes in his case, and let him convey that impression to the DA. "Now, Inspector," she continued, "I invited you out here to look at these e-mails. If you're interested, the computer's upstairs." She turned and started walking, and the men fell in behind her.

Hunt sat again at the keyboard and the rest of them huddled behind him in the small room. Hunt took them all back to the first e-mail. "And this was after what, again?" Juhle asked.

"An article in Sunset," Stuart replied. "Just recipes for cooking trout outdoors."

Juhle glanced briefly at the threatening e-mail. "Guy's obviously a nutcase."

"The point," Gina said, "is that it wasn't Stuart. He didn't send this."

"You got any way to prove that?"

From the console, Hunt spoke up. "That's the problem, Dev. We can't-"

But suddenly Stuart interrupted. "Excuse me, Gina. Permission to speak?"

She looked over at him. "Probably not. Not here, anyway."

"How about out there?" Stuart indicated the adjoining room. "It might be worthwhile."

"Okay." She spoke to the other men. "Give us a second, guys. Be right back."

Gina and Stuart were about five steps out of the room when Juhle started in. "I don't know if you've ever heard of it, Wyatt, but we've got this thing in law enforcement called obstruction of justice, where if you impede an investigation you can go to jail."

Hunt tapped idly at the keyboard. "Has somebody we know impeded an investigation?"

"Briefing a suspect's lawyer on the progress of an official investigation might even fall under aiding and abetting."

Hunt stopped with the keyboard, turned around. More impatient than angry, he laid it out straight. "Give it a rest, Dev. You know I work for Gina's firm, you knew she was representing Stuart. If you chose not to put that together, that's your problem, my friend, not mine. I never admitted nor denied anything about my involvement or lack thereof with Gina when we talked the other night, and you never asked, so what's the issue?" Juhle started to say something but Hunt held up a finger, stopping him. "And you didn't give me any information I wouldn't have known by the next day, anyway. None of which, I might add, convicts Gorman of anything."

"Taken together, it well might, Wyatt."

But Hunt shook his head. "Which parts, taken together? That he was p.i.s.sed off at his wife? That he yelled at a Highway Patrol guy?"

Juhle shot back at him. "How about that he's got a history of domestic violence? Or that he's having an affair with his sister-in-law? That he's suddenly worth several million more dollars? That his neighbor saw his car pull into his garage? I know, I know, it might not have been him driving. But guess what? Who else could have been driving his car?"

"Except if it wasn't his car."

"Right. The neighbor girl who admits she likes Gorman also wants to nail him for murder, so she lies to put him at the scene. Come on, Wyatt, none of this speaks to you?"

Pointing at the computer screen, Hunt said, "Not as loud as this stuff. You don't really believe he sent these threats to himself?"

"No, he probably didn't. But I also don't see them as much of a viable threat."

"Except that the wife is dead."

A shrug. "He just as easily could have gotten his last message from this lunatic on Friday and realized it would be a good distraction. In fact, it just as well might have been the thing that made him decide that this was a good time to do what he needed to do with his wife."

Hunt rolled the chair back from the computer desk, crossed his arms, looked up at his friend. "It's unbelievable."

"What is?"

"How little any of what we actually know makes any difference. You realize that. It's all mind-set. You think because he's the spouse, he did it, so everything reinforces that. I know the same facts, and nothing proves he did it. Do you know for a fact he's boinking the wife's sister? I mean, do you have hotel receipts, pictures, anything real?"

"Not yet. We're looking."

"Very strong. It's all guesswork." Hunt looked up at his friend. "You know what this reminds me of, me and you? Remember when Cheney shot that guy last year, the hunting accident? So I'm out with some guys and one of 'em makes a joke about how dangerous it is going hunting with the vice president. And another guy across the table, knee-jerk, he says he'd rather go hunting with Cheney any day than get in a car with Ted Kennedy."

"That reminds you of me and you?"