Hardy 11 - Suspect, The (26 page)

"No. I'm sorry."

"No number?"

Gina had his home telephone number, and she'd reached him at the Travelodge yesterday, but—another failure—she hadn't bothered to get his cell number. She was badly out of practice, and her client was likely to suffer because of it. "The sister may be listed," she said. "The last name is Dryden."

"I'll look into that," Juhle said.

Another thought struck her, and Gina asked, "What about the reporters who were camped at his house? Didn't any of them see him leave?"

"There's a way out through the garage. A gate in the fence opens onto a walkway between a couple of houses out of the backyard."

"He was just avoiding the reporters," she said. "He'll be with his daughter, I'm sure."

"Well, I'll tell you what," Juhle said. His patience, thin to begin with, was clearly just about worn through. "Why don't we both keep looking? But if I don't hear from you or him by, say, five o'clock, I'm putting out the bulletin."

"That's only an hour from now, Inspector."

"That's right," Juhle said. "So we'd better get looking, shouldn't we?"

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"Jedd, this is Gina. I'm sorry to bother you at your office, but I'm in kind of emergency mode here. Have you heard from Stuart lately?"

"You can bother me anytime you want, Gina. Would lunchtime today count as lately?"

"You saw him at lunchtime? Where?"

"Over here in North Beach."

"Do you know where he is now?"

"No. But he said he was going down to Palo Alto to talk to some of Caryn's investment people. I assume that's where he went. What's the emergency? About him?"

"Only that they've issued a warrant for his arrest, and now they think he's on the run, armed and dangerous."

"Armed and dangerous? Stuart?"

"Evidently he left some ammunition out at his house and Juhle found it."

"Stuart owns a gun? He had a gun when he was with me?"

"I don't know about that. It sounds like it, though. I just wondered if you had a way to get ahold of him. He needs to know what's happened, and especially that he's wanted."

"He thought it might get to that, even without good evidence. That's why he took off."

"He told you that?"

"Word for word. He said he wasn't going to jail. The cops weren't looking for who might have really killed Caryn, so he was going to on his own. For the record, I told him to let you and your investigators do that, but he wasn't much convinced."

"Jedd, he's got to come in. He could get himself shot. I've got to talk to him. Do you have any way to reach him?"

"I've got his cell number, and you're welcome to it, but from what he was telling me today, you're not going to have an easy time talking him into coming in, especially if that means he's spending any time in jail. He was pretty firm on that."

"Jedd, they've got the warrant. He's going to jail."

"Not if they can't find him."

"Jesus, Jedd. On top of everything else, he doesn't want to be in the middle of a manhunt. Things are bad enough as it is."

"I hear you. I do, Gina. But he thinks he can get somewhere the police haven't gotten to with his own investigation."

"Well, he's an idiot then. I've got good investigators. Stuart's met one of them, Wyatt Hunt. He just got a load of dirt today on Caryn's business partner. We're all over this case."

"I believe you. But Stuart doesn't care about that. He doesn't have faith in the system, Gina. He doesn't think the innocent naturally go free. He thinks mistakes happen, this arrest warrant being a perfect example. He doesn't want any part of the process."

"It's too late for that, Jedd. It's started without him. Now the trick is to contain the damage. And if he doesn't show up on his lawyer's arm in the next few hours, everything from here on out is going to be much worse. You know that."

"I know that. You know it. Do you want me to call him first? Try to talk some sense into him. At least he'll probably pick up if it's me."

"There's a heartening thought." Gina considered for a second. "All right, but promise you'll get right back to me."

"As soon as I'm off, regardless of what he says. I'll give it my best shot."

"I know you will. And Jedd?"

"Yo."

"Not that I didn't appreciate it and all, but next time you've got an innocent man referral for me to defend, maybe you'll want to resist the urge."

At seven thirty that night, with no dinner inside her, Gina was driving south on the Bayshore Freeway on the way to San Mateo, where Stuart was staying near Coyote Point in Room 29 of the Hollywood Motel. Jedd Conley hadn't had any luck changing Stuart's mind, and neither had Gina in a second long talk with her client from her apartment. In spite of that, she still entertained some hope that the face-to-face discussion she'd talked him into might make him come around.

But the knot in her stomach and nervous tic in one of her eyelids were better indicators of her odds.

Dusk was well-advanced by the time she knocked quietly on the door, which faced a two-lane road perpendicular to the freeway and along the edge of San Mateo's municipal golf course. A light was visible in the room through the venetian blinds; a shadow moved across it in response to her knock, and then she was standing looking up at her client, who had his cell phone to his ear, motioning her in, closing the door behind her.

"My daughter," he mouthed all but silently.

Nodding, Gina moved into the room and sat in a chair beside a linoleum table against the wall. The room was large, with two queen beds and a half-kitchen behind her in the back. Stuart went back to the near bed and sat propped with the pillows he'd piled against the headboard.

"That wasn't your fault, hon," Stuart said. "That was between your mother and me. It didn't have anything to do with you."

Gina watched her client as he listened some more, his face a mask of pain and regret. Grimacing at something his daughter was saying, he brought his free hand up to the birthmark near his eye and rubbed it mechanically. "That's just how she was with everybody. No,
especially
the people she cared about. She was just one of those insecure people who needed what she did to matter more than who she was. So if she wasn't accomplishing something ... I don't know . . . something tangible, like her inventions or her operations . . . well, the rest of it didn't have as much meaning to her. Yeah. That was me, too. Well, of course it hurt, but by that time you and I were just getting in her way. I know she was your mother, hon. I know it's not fair . . ."

Stuart looked across at Gina, gave her a distracted nod and held up a finger, asking for another minute or two. Nodding, she half listened to a long-suffering father trying to explain the inexplicable to his devastated daughter. With something of a shock, she suddenly saw the handgun in full view out on the stand under the reading light between the two beds. To take her eyes off it, and to give Stuart a bit more privacy with Kymberly, Gina stood up and walked back into the half-kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of water.

The sight of the gun had roiled her stomach anew and, now having drunk the water, she put the glass down and leaned against the counter, arms straight and with her weight on her hands, her face up, her eyes closed. She exhaled heavily, telling herself that the sudden stab of nerves was irrational, yet recognizing it for what it was. It was fear.

What had she been thinking?

Before in her life, she had only defended guilty suspects, and now here she was alone with her client and his gun, with a warrant out for his arrest for a murder.

Drawing a deep breath, her eyes still closed, she sighed again.

The words seemed to explode in her ear, directly behind her. "Are you all right?"

She brought a hand to her chest and whirled on him. "Oh my God. You scared me to death."

"I'm sorry." He flicked on the kitchen light overhead, the blessed brightness dissipating the shadows. "And I'm sorry about the phone. I had to talk to Kymberly."

"I heard. She's having a rough time?"

"My heart's breaking for her. She doesn't understand why Caryn didn't love her. She wants to have a chance to ask her one time. What she did wrong."

"What Kym did wrong? Why would she think she did anything wrong?"

"It's a little circular, isn't it? Because her mother had stopped loving her. It wasn't just Kym not saying good-bye to Caryn when she left to go to college. Caryn didn't make any effort to say good-bye to her, either. She was all just 'Thank God that's over and she's gone. Now I can get on with my life.' "

"Was she that hard, really? Kym?"

Stuart searched the corners of the ceiling for an answer. He ran a hand through his hair. "I don't have anything to compare Kym to. Maybe all kids are hard on their parents, or their marriages. All I can say is she sucked the energy out of both of us. I kept thinking ... we both thought that somehow it was our fault. That we'd spoiled her. But really, I don't think it was that. From the beginning, she was just so hard."

"But isn't that the norm?" Gina asked. "Everybody says once you have kids, your life is never the same."

Stuart met Gina's eyes. "That's true, but there are degrees. Most of our friends, back when we had mutual friends, they'd joke about how their lives had changed. But there was always good to go with the bad. With us, from early on, it was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know, Kym didn't sleep through the night until she was four years old! You know how tired you get with four years of no sleep? She was in diapers until she was almost eight. I mean . . ." But he couldn't find the words. He shook his head, trying to shake the memories. "Sorry."

"There's nothing to be sorry about. It must have been difficult."

He almost laughed. "Difficult's a good word. So now, how am I supposed to console her? She drove her mother away. That's the truth. She wore us both down until Caryn just gave up. Maybe she would have come back to caring about Kym after she wasn't living with us full-time anymore, but now Caryn will never get the chance for that. And it's just killing my little girl." Suddenly, he checked himself, apologetic. "But you didn't come all the way down here to talk about Kym."

"I'm happy to talk about Kym. Whatever you want. Obviously you're still trying."

He shrugged. "What am I going to do? She's my daughter. I love her. But Lord, sometimes you wonder when it's going to get better. If things are ever going to improve."

Gina was leaning back against the counter in the narrow kitchen. "Maybe the first step is believing that they can."

He gave her a weak facsimile of a smile. "That would be a pretty thing to think." Then, perhaps not meaning to sound so dismissive, he added, "But maybe you're right."

"I am right, Stuart. It happened with me. A year ago I would have told you I was a lost cause. I'm not. Change is not only possible, it's the only possibility." Gina had him listening, and she pressed on. "You know, Stuart," she began, "you're the one who told me you don't want to live with suspicion hanging over you for the rest of your life. Has it ever occurred to you that getting legally cleared, getting an acquittal, is the best way to put that suspicion behind you, once and for all?"

"You want to ask O.J. about that?"

"He's the exception that proves the rule."

"Okay, but who's to say there won't be another exception? Or, worse, I'm the innocent guy who pulls life in prison for the crime he didn't commit. No thanks."

"And so you think this—what you're doing now—is helping your case?"

"You mean doing my own investigation?"

"I mean being on the run. Any chance you have of ever getting reasonable bail in this case evaporates if the cops have to run you down."

He shook his head. "Being on the run is a nonissue. It goes away if I find something." He came forward. "Listen. I talked to both Fred Furth and Caryn's lab assistant today at PII. They both say that there's something seriously going wrong with the Dryden Socket and Caryn was blowing the whistle on it, maybe as early as this week. She was really going to make a stink about it."

"And—this is your theory?—that because of this, somebody killed her to stop her?"

"I think it's absolutely plausible."

"So do I. So what?"

"What do you mean, 'so what'? It's a strong motive."

"Agreed. Strong motive. And again, so what? Do you have a specific person in mind who had a way to get into your garage? Then have a glass of wine with your wife—"

"That's not how it happened!" Stuart snapped back at her, his voice rising. "He snuck up on her and hit her from behind."

"Do you know that? How do you know that?" Gina pointed a finger at him. "No, you don't know that, Stuart. In fact, the much more likely possibility is that whoever it was didn't come over with the intention of killing her. He came over to have sex with her."