Hardy 11 - Suspect, The (12 page)

"All right. I'll see you there."

9

With a porcelain saucer resting on
the arm of his chair in Dismas Hardy's office, Wyatt Hunt sat back comfortably and sipped from his cup of freshly brewed coffee. It was Tuesday morning, about a half hour before the offices officially opened. In spite of that, in the space behind them a dozen or more employees had already started their workday. Hardy's office door was still open, and outside from the lobby came the sounds of phones ringing, Xerox machines humming, random bits of conversation.

They were waiting for Gina. Across from Hunt by the well-equipped coffee counter, Hardy finished pouring his own cup and turned around. "So when you talked to Juhle, you didn't let on you were working for us?"

"I don't believe it came up, specifically." Hunt sipped again, broke a grin. "Besides, I thought it might make for a stilted conversation. He asked if I'd seen Gina, and I told him not since lunch, which was technically true. It's not my fault he didn't ask if I'd talked to her. And he seemed to be in the mood—he'd been on Gorman all day and had nobody to talk to about it. This will shock you, but it seems his wife sometimes gets a little tired of cop talk at home."

"How could that possibly be?"

"I know," Hunt said. "Weird, but there you go. Anyway, he really wanted to tell somebody about everything he'd found out, and I happened to call."

"Lucky break for the good guys."

"That's what I thought. Maybe not so lucky for the client, though, unless you consider an eyewitness lucky."

"Sometimes it can be."

"I'm pretty sure this isn't one of those times, Diz." Hunt glanced toward the door. "Ah, the woman of the hour."

Gina stopped in the doorway. "Sorry I'm late, guys. Working the bugs out of what may be the new work schedule."

Hardy checked his watch. "I've got eight o'clock straight up, so you're on the dot. You want coffee?"

"As the predator wants the night."

Hardy gave her a look and said, "That'd be black, no sugar?"

"Sorry," Gina said. "I've been reading my client. The style rubs off. Sugar, please."

"How do you like him?" Hunt asked. "As a writer, I mean."

"He's okay. He says some good stuff. Kept me up till midnight last night."

"So I could've called you," Hunt said, "after my talk with Juhle."

Hardy handed her a cup and she turned to Wyatt. "So you got to him? What did he have to say?"

"I was just starting to tell Diz. He thinks he's got a case."

"With Stuart? How's he getting around the alibi?"

Hardy had crossed the room and propped himself against his cherry desk. Now he put in his two cents' worth. "Wyatt was just telling me about an eyewitness."

Gina slumped into a chair. "To what? The killing? He couldn't have killed her. He wasn't there."

"Well," Hunt said, "that may be a question." He placed his cup in his saucer and came forward on his chair. "Seems a neighborhood girl—lives right across the street, friends with his daughter—she saw him pull into his garage Sunday night. Then leave a couple of hours later."

"She
saw
him?"

"That's what Juhle says. His car."

"Which was it? Him or his car?"

Hunt looked the question over to Hardy, who said, "Who else would have been in his car, Gina?"

Hunt picked it up. "His story doesn't have anybody else driving his car, does it?"

Gina sat back in her chair. "Shit."

"Yes, ma'am," Hunt said. "And that's not including a few other things Devin kind of wanted to brag about."

"I'm listening," Gina said.

"Two domestic disturbance calls."

"
Two?"

Hunt nodded. "One this summer, and when Juhle ran it down on the computer, he got another hit about five years ago. Your new client got himself arrested on that second one."

"He told me they'd never had a physical fight. I asked him specifically."

At his desk, Hardy frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. "Maybe he forgot."

"Did he also forget to mention the ticket he got last Friday night?"

Gina was sitting all the way back now, legs crossed.
"Friday
night?" she asked.

Another nod from Hunt. "Driving up to Echo Lake. Got pulled over by the Highway Patrol. Juhle found the officer and talked to him."

"He's been busy," Gina said.

Hunt agreed. "He thinks he's got a big, live one. They don't come around every day."

"So what'd the officer say? He remembered him?"

"Oh, yeah. No problem with that. He recognized the name. He's a fan too. Of Stuart’s writing. Which is why he didn't arrest him."

"Oh, Lord." Gina shook her head in disbelief. "What was he going to arrest him for?"

"He told Juhle he would have thought of something. Disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, threatening a police officer ..."

"He threatened him?"

"He swore at him. Close enough for most cops. But here's the bad part."

"That wasn't it?"

"Well, you decide. After the guy, the officer, recognized who Stuart was, he calmed down a little and told him about the awful fight he'd just had with his wife. That she'd told him she wanted to leave him. He told the guy he was heading up to the mountains because if he would have stayed down with her, he would have killed her."

"Those words?" Gina asked.

"According to Dev, pretty much verbatim," Hunt said.

Hardy broke in again. "And this guy Stuart, your client, Gina, he's coming up here when?"

Gina looked at her watch. "About an hour. Juhle's coming around at ten."

"Did Inspector Juhle mention anything about handcuffs?" Hardy asked.

"Last night he said he hadn't applied for a warrant." Gina's face was pure disgust. "Devin say anything about an arrest to you, Wyatt?"

"No. He wants more evidence. Apparently there are other issues?" A question.

"Oh, nothing important," Gina said with heavy sarcasm. "Only a three-million-dollar insurance policy, several more millions that he's going to get control over, to say nothing of a possible love affair with his dead wife's sister."

"You're kidding about that last one, right?" Hunt said.

She leveled her gaze at him. "Well, he denied it. And judging from what I've just learned since I got here this morning, that means it must be true."

When Phyllis buzzed into Gina’s office and said that her client was out in the lobby, Gina said she'd be right out, but she didn't move right away. For the past quarter of an hour, ever since she'd come down from Hardy's office, she'd been sitting as far down as she could get in her deepest stuffed chair. Like Wes Farrell upstairs, she had no formal desk in her corner office. So she sat with her hands clasped tightly in front of her, trying to come to grips with the veritable tsunami of rage that had unexpectedly enveloped her in the wake of Wyatt Hunt's disclosures about her client and his rapidly deteriorating story.

She looked down at her hands. All of her knuckles were white, her joints stiff as she separated her hands and forced her fingers open. She brought her hands up to her face, pulled down on her cheeks. Finally, taking a deep breath, she whispered, "All right," and pushed herself up from her chair.

Oddly aware of her own crisp and echoing footfalls as she walked down the long hallway to the receptionist's station, Gina got to the lobby and pasted the semblance of a smile onto her face as she approached Stuart with her hand outstretched. "Good morning," she chirruped, falsely bright. "And right on time."

"Aiming to please," he said in his aw-shucks delivery, though it seemed to cost him. Stuart had shaved, combed his hair and put on nicer clothes—slacks and a pullover—but he looked, if anything, more ravaged than he had the day before, bleary-eyed and sallow complected. "The police show up yet?"

"Not for a while. If you want to follow me back this way . . ."

She wanted to avoid idle chitchat, so she turned and started walking. They reached her office and she preceded him through the door and crossed over to the ergonomic chair by the library table on which she kept her computer. Sitting down, she whirled around to face him. He was standing a couple of steps inside the room, hands in his pockets, reminding her of nothing so much as a dog waiting to be told what to do. She obliged him. "You want to get the door?"

That done, he turned back to the room. "Anywhere?" he asked.

She waved her hand. "Wherever. It doesn't matter."

He chose the couch, perhaps because it was facing her. Sitting back, ankle on opposite knee, he stretched his left arm out along the cushions and leaned back. "So," he said.

"So." Gina wasn't tempted to give him any help, but she waited for a long beat and when nothing came from him, she relented. Whatever he had actually done—and she was furious with him over what that might have been—he was the man she'd been reading last night, who had stirred something in her soul. "You tired?" she asked. "You look tired."

His shoulders heaved as though the question were funny. But there was no humor in the eyes. "I take a week off and sleep around the clock, I might get back to tired. But that's not looking too likely, is it? Not with Inspector Juhle on his way down here."

"Not very, no. You want some coffee?"

He shook his head. "I'm already three cups down. Any more and I'd float away. Anyway, it's nothing coffee would help."

Thinking that this might be an opening of some kind, maybe even a confession, Gina said, "So what is it?"

He exhaled heavily and shook his head, the picture of frustration. "Kym," he said. "My daughter. Our daughter." He met Gina's gaze. "You have kids?"

No.

"Don't, then."

Gina gave a mirthless chuckle. "It's a little late. In any event, they're not on the agenda; I wouldn't worry. She's taking this pretty hard, is she?"

Stuart pinched the bridge of his nose. "I don't know what to do with her. I don't know what to do." Looking up, he said, "It's knocked her off the rails." Another sigh. "She and Caryn had some issues they hadn't worked out, and now of course they never will. When she left for college it wasn't very pretty between them. That's not making it any easier on her now."

"No, I don't suppose it is. Where is she now?"

"I left her back at the hotel. She cried all night and finally crashed sometime around six this morning, so I thought I'd just let her sleep. She ought to be all right for a few hours anyway." He hesitated. "Debra came by early, just in case, and said she'd stay until Kym woke up and be there for her. But this is killing Kym. I don't know what she's going to do. I don't know what I'm going to do with her."

Gina decided to douse him with a little reality. "Stuart," she said. "Did you tell her that you're under suspicion here?"

He couldn't have looked more startled if she'd slapped him, though he recovered quickly. "After you called me last night, I told her I was meeting you to talk with the cops today. So she knows as far as it goes. Which isn't very far. Today ought to be the end of it, right?"

Gina was tempted to ask him if he was joking with her, but she kept it straight. "Frankly, no, Stuart. I don't think today's going to be the end of it. There have been a few developments."

10

"Bethany said she saw me? How
could she have seen me?"

"She said she saw your car."

"She saw me pull into my garage?"

"Yes. Then leave a couple of hours later."

"So she saw Caryn's killer come and then go."

"That would be Inspector Juhle's assumption, I believe. And he came in your car."

"No he didn't. Not possible."

Deep inside, Gina was somewhat heartened by the unequivocal denial. Either Stuart was an extraordinarily good liar, or he was telling the truth. "Okay, leaving the car for a minute, let's talk about you and your wife not fighting, specifically about you never having hit her."

"Okay." Forward now on the couch, Stuart's blood was up. "What about 'never' don't you get?"

"I guess the part about the domestic disturbance call to the police last summer."

Stuart grimaced. "They found that already?"

"That's one question. A better one is, what about it? And as for them finding out about it already, I told you yesterday that they're going to find out everything about you, every little thing you've ever done, and they're going to drag it in front of the whole world, so it's way to your advantage to come out with it right up front—anything that's going to look bad when they bring it up later. Like, for example, hitting your wife."

The little tirade found its mark. Stuart shifted defensively back on the couch—legs crossed, arm out along the cushions, stalling for time while he decided what he was going to say. When he made the decision, he kept it simple. "I never hit her."