John Lescroart - The Suspect

Lately Caryn had been far more upset about "her" socket and her dealings with PII and the project's point man with the venture capital crowd-a Palo Alto investment banker named Frederick Furth, who'd arranged the mezzanine loan-than with anything about

Bob McAfee.

As Gina had discovered last night, the mezzanine loan had left her cash-poor on her new practice offices when there were the inevitable and unavoidable delays in construction and start-up. And the Dryden Socket apparently remained in limbo.

If these facts and alternative suspects did not directly impact the evidence that Juhle was collecting on Stuart, Gina knew that at least they would be useful in muddying the prosecutorial waters. At this stage, that would be its own reward.

Still some long blocks from the Travelodge, and with most of their legal business out of the way for the moment, Gina found herself coming back to Stuart's books, asking him which was his favorite.

"I like them all," he said. "They're all my babies, you know? But it's gratifying that other people like them too. I'm very lucky I get to do what I do."

"You do it very well. I identified with a lot of it, which I guess is what you're going for."

But Stuart shook his head. "No, I'm not really going for effects on the reader. I'm trying to get to something else. Sometimes I'm not so sure of what it is myself. Clarity, maybe." He shrugged, almost swallowed the next word. "Truth. That sounds arrogant, I know. But it's what I'm trying for. Something real."

"Well, you got that. You really did."

Shrugging that off, he cocked his chin at her. "If you don't mind my asking, what did you identify with?"

"Really, quite a bit of it. The analogy-you were talking about being in the moment, the step after step after step of, say, getting to the top; you had it from Guitar Lake to Whitney. I've made that exact climb three times now. How it's really not about getting to the top. It's about the thin air, the pain in your legs, the keeping on when you don't think you can…" Suddenly, she stopped. "I've done it, is my point," she said in a huskier voice, "but I haven't analyzed it very much, or expressed it the way you did. It was just something I needed to do. To get healed."

"Your fiance who died?"

She nodded.

Stuart nodded back at her. "With me, it was the family. My family. What I had to get healed from." "I picked that up."

"Not that I didn't find the experience of being married to a workaholic genius and raising an impossibly difficult child totally fulfilling. This is my great failing. And I'm not the kind of guy who can just ignore it, or have affairs, or be emotionally absent, or however else we're supposed to cope. But sometimes I just had to get away for a few days to find myself again, to hear some silence, to get the strength to recommit to coming back to it, when so much of it didn't seem that it would ever be worth it."

"For me," Gina said, "it was this whole… I guess it was the whole question of what life's about. And I couldn't get an answer here in the city. It was just too loud, too in-your-face. You know?" Then, "Of course you know."

"It's not particularly profound," he said. "We're all too much in it all the time. We've got to slow down, but we don't. But I didn't write it to try to teach anything. My goal was just to figure out for myself what worked and why it worked. That's what the writing's about- not the magazine articles so much, but the books. Figuring stuff out."

"Taking other people there too."

"Maybe, hopefully, that happens in the process if I write it right. Which I suppose is why the books sell. And that just shows that there must be a lot of us in the same boat. Maybe most of us."

"So." Gina hesitated, then figured what the hell. She wanted to know. "What about writer's block? Do you ever get that?"

"No. I don't."

"Never?"

Now Stuart broke one of his first true smiles. "I'm talking to a writer, aren't I?"

Gina lifted her shoulders, let them down. "Halfway through a bad legal thriller. Wondering how you get all the way to the end." "Just keep going."

"Ha."

"Well, it's what I do. I suppose I get times where the ideas don't exactly flow, but the best definition of writer's block I ever heard was that it was a failure of nerve. It's not something outside of you, trying to stop you. It's your own fear that you won't say it right, or get it right, or won't be smart or clever enough. But once you acknowledge it's just fear, you decide you're not going to let it beat you, and you keep pushing on. Kind of like climbing Whitney. Except that if it's never any fun, then maybe it's something inside trying to tell you that you probably don't want to be a writer. You're not having fun with your book?"

"Not too much. Some. At the beginning. Then I got all hung up on whether anyone would want to read it and if they'd care about my characters and I started writing for them, those imaginary, in-the-future readers, whoever they might be."

"Well, yeah, but that's not why you write. You write to see where you're gonna go. At least I do. And in your case, nobody's paying you for your stuff yet, are they?"

"No. Hardly."

"Well, then just do it for yourself and have some fun with it. Or start another story that you like better. Or take up cooking instead. Or get up to the mountains more. But if you want to write, write. A page a day, and in a year you've got a book. And anybody who can't write a page a day… well, there's a clue that maybe you're not a writer."

"A page a day…"

"Cake," Stuart said.

They'd gotten to within sight of the Travelodge, and Gina recognized three of the local news channel vans double-parked in a row on Lombard Street. She put a hand on Stuart's forearm, stopping him in his tracks. "Looks like they've found you," she said.

"You really think they're here for me?"

"I think that's a safe assumption, yes."

"So what do we do?"

"You say nothing. I say 'no comment.' We get inside your room and close the door behind us and hope they go away. You ready?" "I guess so. As I'll ever be." "All right. Nice and relaxed. Let's go."

When Devin Juhle got back from his interview with Gorman at Gina's office, he was not in good spirits, and his mood wasn't much improved when, in spite of his discoveries the day before, Assistant DA Gerry Abrams wasn't moved to convene a grand jury to weigh his evidence just yet. In the first place, none of it was physical evidence. Abrams pointed out that an eyewitness seeing and possibly even identifying Gorman's car did not even under the most generous interpretation rise to the level of proof of anything about Stuart himself. And while the assistant DA found the two domestic disturbance calls compelling enough, these bore no direct relationship to the murder either.

Beyond that, forensics team boss Lennard Faro had come up with no fingerprints on the wine bottle, which Dr. Strout said was of a compatible shape to allow the inference, though not the absolute conclusion, that it was the weapon that had knocked Caryn unconscious. Microscopic traces of her blood on the label didn't hurt, either. There were partial fingerprints-not Caryn's-on pieces of the

broken wineglass in the garbage disposal, and a complete and clear print on the one large shard they'd discovered under the hot tub, but none of the prints matched Stuart's or anyone's in the criminal data bank. Forensics had found a few drops of blood in the garage-still tacky-but whether or not it was Stuart's would have to wait for the DNA results, for which no one was holding their breath. Juhle had his reluctant swab of Stuart's saliva, all right, but the actual testing and results could take days. And even then, so what? Stuart's blood in his garage meant nothing. He could have cut himself shaving, or lacerated his finger on his workbench that morning or a couple of days before.