John Lescroart - The Suspect

The screaming between male and female voices that the neighbors had heard? It had been Kym and Stuart, daughter and father; not Caryn and Stuart, husband and wife. And when the police had come, he and Caryn had put on the act together, going along as though it had been them fighting-again, to protect their daughter.

He was sitting on the bench, canted forward, staring out into nothing in front of him. A couple of seagulls had landed in the grass across the path and were raucously fighting over a french fry. Gina cleared her throat. "You could tell this to Juhle, you know. He doesn't think you're a wife-beater, a lot of this goes away."

But Stuart shook his head. "It'd get out. Kym's got enough to deal with."

"It might not get out. Juhle can keep a secret."

"I don't know. I just don't know. Anything." He let out a lungful of air. "You want to be moving again?"

After they'd covered some ground, Stuart continued. "There's just so much guilt about every part of this. I mean, the truth is that Kym's problems-Kym herself, even-got so she poisoned everything with Caryn and me. Caryn went into her world of position and money and I just withdrew so I didn't have to confront it the whole time. When I was around, I'd try to be a good husband and father, I suppose, but I knew that I couldn't do anything to help my daughter, or to make things better with Caryn. It was just what it was. And I was too weak or, I don't know, too… too goddamn impotent to do anything."

"You thought it was your fault."

"It was my fault. I'm the one who originally wanted a kid so bad. If it had been up to Caryn, it never would have happened, and everything would have been better."

"Maybe not better, Stuart. Maybe just different."

"Another different couldn't have been worse, believe me. No, Kym was my genes. Without that, Caryn and I… shit. I don't know."

"And this is where all the anger comes from, isn't it?"

"Some good percentage, I'd say, yeah. Why do you think I had to go away to get 'healed by water'? But then I'd come home and Kym wouldn't have taken her pills and she'd explode at me for something trivial or absolutely imaginary, and the frustration would knock me sideways again. And then Caryn, of course, would blame me if I lost my temper."

Gina had her arms crossed. A breeze had picked up and blew the hair off her forehead. When she spoke, she kept her eyes out on the water. "You said Kym and Caryn were on the outs when she went off to school?"

"Yeah, that happened this past summer." Stuart went on to say that suddenly the sides had shifted and-even on her medication- Kym had begun to fight much more with Caryn than she did with him. She began to use street drugs, self-medicating, the doctors called it. Kym was showing up at home with CDs and jewelry and other stuff they knew she hadn't bought; things around the house began to disappear; she was having more or less random sex, hanging out with difficult friends, constantly ignoring her curfew. Caryn would not have any "daughter of hers" acting that way, since it reflected on her. And in this way Caryn, more than Stuart, had become the hated, the enemy.

And that was how things stood until two weeks ago when, a blessing for both parents, Kymberly had finally gone off to school.

Stuart and Gina had made it down nearly to the Golden Gate Bridge, for the last couple of hundred yards walking in silence. But it was a more comfortable silence than they'd shared up until then. And Gina finally broke it. "So. Your book," she said, "Healed by Water."

"Note the awkward silence," Stuart said, "while the author decides whether he should ask the reader for an opinion or not."

"I've already told you I liked it a lot. But it was more than that. When I finished it-it really touched me. I was just so… relieved, I guess is the word."

"About what?"

"About taking on a client who was intelligent and innocent. I can't tell you how good that felt. That I'd finally be able to put my legal talents to the service of someone who might actually deserve them." She kept walking, eyes forward, hands in her pockets. "I said something yesterday about losing my fiance a few years ago. Well, since then, not that it matters to you, but…"

"Why wouldn't it matter to me?"

"I mean to your defense. In any event, since David, I've been having some trouble committing to things, to getting involved. And then suddenly, last night, I finished your book and was just so glad that I was going to get to do this. I mean, defend an innocent man. Do you know how many innocent clients I've had in twenty-some years as a lawyer?"

"I don't know. Ten? Fifteen?"

"Zero."

Stuart stopped walking, turned to face her. "You've got to be kidding me."

"No. You think that's unusual?"

"No innocent clients ever? Yeah, I'd say so."

"You'd be wrong. It's the norm, believe me. Public defenders, which is how I started, they get assigned cases out of the courtroom, and roughly a hundred percent of these people, they don't even pretend they didn't do what they're charged with. It's all just revolving doors, into and out of jail. They just want to cut a deal to lessen their time, or snitch out somebody to get back on the street, or convince a jury that whatever they did, yeah, they did it all right, but they can't be guilty of doing whatever it was because it just wasn't their fault. They were victims."

"Of what?"

"Anything you can think of, and probably a bunch you can't. Prejudice, bad childhood, Republicans, abusive spouses, drugs and alcohol, addictive personality disorder, sexual dysfunction, dumbshit syndrome, you name it. But whatever, the main thing is it wasn't their fault." Gina came to a full stop. "So anyway, last night the thought of getting to defend a righteously innocent client, it kind of filled me up with… I don't know-motivation. Hope, maybe. Something to try for."

An hour later, as they got back to the Marina, Gina had more to work with. Although Juhle, in his zeal to connect Stuart to his wife's murder, to date hadn't seemed too aware of the maelstrom of drama that apparently swirled in all corners of the life of Caryn Dryden, Stuart had lived inside of it for years. Once he'd gotten his arms around the fact that Caryn had probably been murdered, he amplified quite a lot of the information that they discussed the day before, reinforcing Gina's impression that at least two other people might have had a motive to kill her. Besides those definite two, Stuart told her that he thought it possible that his wife had been having an affair, or maybe serial affairs. Which opened up another whole world of possibilities.

In Stuart's opinion, the most likely suspect to have killed his wife-and for all he knew, to have been sleeping with her too-was her main business partner, Robert McAfee, with whom she had been trying to open her new practice. As Stuart had intimated yesterday, Caryn was trying to bring in a third partner, Michael Pinkert-a mediocre though very rich surgeon. This was infuriating McAfee, who didn't want to work with Pinkert any more than he wanted to split their potential profits three ways. The selling point of the deal for McAfee had always been the efficiency and professionalism and synergy of him and Caryn working together. But Pinkert could bridge the money gap that was threatening their start-up. Caryn and McAfee had taken out insurance policies against their business startup loans, and now with Caryn's death, McAfee would likely be able to open his own clinic and reap all the profits himself.

But even half of her own private clinic was nothing compared to Caryn's other major endeavor. She'd not just been your average, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen orthopedic surgeon. Instead, she was a total joint surgeon, specializing in total hip replacement, or arthroplasty. Beyond that (as if that weren't enough, Stuart had said), she'd done her undergraduate work, and then a couple of years of graduate school before she transferred to med school, in polymer chemistry. Evidently in her spare time, Caryn had invented a new plastic cup-side for the hip joint that marked a significant improvement in the plastic's unfortunate tendency to degrade in the body over time. PII, the company in whose lab she worked, had even named the thing the Dryden Socket, and after FDA approval, which was pending, it looked to become the worldwide gold standard hip joint. As such, projected sales would make it worth millions every year. But, as evidently was almost always the case when the FDA got near giving its final stamp of approval, some problems had surfaced.