John Lescroart - The Suspect

"Well, what did you think was going to happen?" "I don't know. I just answered his questions." "Well, you gotta change your answers." "How am I going to do that?"

"Just tell them you made a mistake. You remembered wrong."

"But I didn't, Kym."

"You had to, Bethany. It wasn't my dad. If you say it was, they're going to get him. You can't let that happen."

"But if…"

Kymberly slapped down hard at her own pants leg. "Listen to me! Forget the 'buts' and the 'ifs.' You've got to change what you told them. That's all there is to it."

"You mean lie?"

Kymberly, perhaps frustrated by her inability to get her message across more clearly, fixed her with another menacing glare. "Look, Bethany, it's pretty simple, okay. Either you lie, or…"

"Or what?"

"God, do I have to spell it out for you? Or something really bad is going to happen. Okay? Get it?"

The walk along the Marina from Fort Mason to Crissy Field is perhaps the most scenic stroll in a city justly renowned for its physical beauty. Today, with a cloudless, nearly purple sky above, the vista showed itself at its best.

Stuart and Gina were in shirtsleeves, hands in pockets, keeping up a pace. Before long they'd reached the deep green sycamore and pine hillsides of the Presidio. The pink-domed Palace of Fine Arts presided over the rooftops of the Marina District. To Gina's right, a forest of sailboat masts swayed gently at their berths, while beyond them the shimmering blue bay nurtured the rest of the fleet, a riot of billowing, multicolored sails cutting in and out of one another, flirting often dangerously with the huge transport and/or cruise ships that churned through the channel beneath the impossibly close rusty red cables and steel of the Golden Gate Bridge. In spite of all the full sails out on the water, here on shore only a breath of a breeze blew over them.

The Michael Douglas trivia had not by a long shot dissipated all of the friction between attorney and client from their morning session at Gina's office. Tension had thrummed between the two of them during Juhle's interrogation itself as Gina continually stepped in, answering-or more precisely, advising Stuart not to answer- many of the questions for which Juhle had already gotten answers the day before. Had Stuart loved his wife? Or hated her? Precisely when had she told him she'd wanted a divorce? What had been those exact circumstances? What time had he come home? Left Echo Lake? How much did he stand to inherit? And so on.

Neither Juhle nor Stuart had appreciated her efforts. It hadn't helped that the only time Gina had thought it appropriate to cooperate fully with Juhle-when he'd wanted to take a saliva swab for DNA-Stuart had strongly objected. In the end, Gina had prevailed. A DNA sample was something that the police could get by search warrant in any event. There was nothing to be gained by refusing to provide one now. Nevertheless, something about it had galled Stuart immensely, and his reaction had brought to a boil again the simmering anger that Gina had been fighting to suppress all morning. If he was innocent as he said, why would he possibly object?

Finally, after Juhle had gone, they'd had the money discussion. Sixty-five thousand down, cashier's check or money order, in her office as soon as possible, but no later than the end of the week. Gina wasn't working for free, and this was going to be taking all of her time if it went to a murder charge. Stuart could of course feel free to find other counsel but, she cautioned him, "Like everything else, you tend to get what you pay for."

Now, to the casual eye, they might have been a long-married couple power-walking for their exercise, making sure they got their hours in, talking of mundane things-the house, the grandkids. But a closer look would reveal a deeper intensity. Stuart had been telling Gina about his daughter-the good and the rather more considerable bad of her.

"Well, which is it, if you had to choose one?" Gina asked. "Wonderful or difficult?"

"That's the thing. She's both. The wonderful part would be her mother's incredible brains and drive and even a goodly portion of the Dryden natural beauty. When she chooses to, she can be very, very pretty, but… that leads us to the difficult part. In fact, everything leads to the difficult part." He walked on. "I don't know how to say this without it sounding pretty bad, but she's just never really been easy in any way. We called her the Original High Maintenance Kid. And that's when we were feeling good about her."

"Okay."

"Well, not really okay. You don't even want to hear about her eating habits, which ranged over the years from gorging herself early on to some pretty intense bulimia over the last couple of years. And let's not talk about mastering all the rudiments of hygiene-hair, fingernails, everything else. You know what she was wearing when she got in yesterday? Salvation Army camo." "That's the style, Stuart."

"All right, but why does she wear that baggy shit when she could be… attractive? I just don't get it."

"Maybe she doesn't want to be attractive. Maybe the attention threatens her. I've got a friend who's the same way. She puts on a dress or wears a tank top and guys driving by crash their cars into things. I've seen it happen. She hates it. I don't think that's so abnormal."

"No, we haven't gotten to the abnormal stuff yet."

"Which is what?"

"The true mental stuff, which is really what nearly broke up Caryn and me a long time ago." Stuart gave Gina the extended version- how during Kym's adolescence, she'd tried their collective patiences with every kind of acting out in the book, until finally Caryn had decided that she suffered from "classic" Attention Deficit Disorder and should be on a regular, heavy regimen of Ritalin. "Problem was," he continued, "that I don't really believe in a lot of the versions of ADD that Caryn's high-end medical crowd tends to embrace."

"Embrace as what?"

"A one-size-fits-all explanation for high energy and disruptive behavior in young people. I thought that if my daughter needed attention so badly, maybe it was because she wasn't getting enough from her parents, myself included. So I started to take her places with me, the wilderness, the woods, the usual." He shrugged. "For a while, it seemed to help. And at least I wasn't drugging her."

"So what happened?"

"So, in the end, it turned out that, as usual, Caryn was more right than I was." Now he came to a full stop and looked Gina in the face. "The truth is we found out that Kym's bipolar, which used to be called manic-depressive. She does need to be on a regular dose of lithium, or she doesn't function right in the real world. And unfortunately, the classic situation, which she fits, is she forgets or refuses to take her pills. When she's on them, she's okay but everything in life is kind of low-key and boring, and she hates that. She wants the high of being manic. So she stops the pills and crashes and burns. You know that time…" But suddenly he stopped, looked out over Gina's head to the cloudless sky. "No," he said all but to himself. "Never mind."

But Gina put a hand on his arm. "Never mind what? What time?"

Stuart sighed and pointed to a bench next to the walkway. "You want to sit a minute?" And he told her what had really happened when the neighbors had called the police five years before, when "plates had gotten thrown."

Pulling a trick out of his writer's bag, Stuart had purposely used the passive voice when he'd told Gina about this before. The plates had gotten thrown all right, he said, and Caryn had gotten cut, but he hadn't thrown them-Kymberly had.

And Stuart and Caryn at least agreed that they weren't going to let their daughter be charged in the attack. Her life was going to be difficult enough-even if she got everything together and religiously took her medication-without the added burden of a criminal record. She'd gone off her pills again last summer, and this had precipitated the many huge and highly vocal fights between Kym and both of her parents.