Hardy 11 - Suspect, The (19 page)

"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."

"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 damn 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, nobody. 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 relationships 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 ass," 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 assumption 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 glass of wine. It might have been Caryn, who knocked the first glass 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 buttons 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.

*
    
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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 space. "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.