John Lescroart - The Suspect

Darrell Bracco appeared from between the lockers that divided the room. With a quick come-on-in hand motion, he got Juhle moving forward again. Nodding around at his colleagues stuffed among the desks, Juhle threw a look toward his lieutenant's closed-up office.

"Hey, Darrell. What's going on? Marcel all right?"

"You didn't hear?"

"I guess not. What?"

"My old partner, Harlan Fisk? The supervisor? He got a tip at lunch that the Fab Five is on the way over here. They're gonna do Marcel. Is that perfect, or what? So till they get here, Sarah's in there keeping him tied up."

"What do you mean, they're going to 'do' Marcel?"

"The Fab Five, Dev, the Fab Five."

"Right. But my kids aren't teenagers yet. Are they some band? I don't know them."

Rolling his eyes, Bracco leaned in toward him. "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. They're going to do Marcel."

"What are they going to do with him?"

"Dev. Come on. Tell me you've never watched the show."

"Okay. I've never watched the show."

Overhearing the conversation, Emilio Thorsten butted in. "You gotta check it out, Dev. The show's a riot. These five gay guys, they find some prototypical straight-basically Marcel; I mean, he's perfect- who dresses wrong and wears the wrong shoes and glasses and lives in like a gym. And they fix him up. The house, the clothes, the look, the whole schmear."

"Gay guys do this? Why?"

"It's a TV show," Darrell said, "that's why. There's five of them. The Fab Five. They take some straight nerd and make him hip. Or more hip, anyway."

"And they're doing this to Marcel today?"

"Closing time, according to Harlan, who's never wrong. It's gonna be awesome."

Juhle had been in Homicide for six years and he'd seen worse attendance at mandatory call-ups. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he was more than a little out of the loop among his peers. Not only had he never seen the show, he obviously hadn't been part of the grapevine of communication today that had connected every other person in the detail. "They're going to come with like TV lights and a crew and surprise Marcel?" he asked.

"That's the idea."

"Then I've got a good one too," Devin said. "A good idea, I mean."

"What's that?" Bracco asked.

"Somebody better get Marcel's gun off him. He's going to blow their asses off."

Supervisor Harlan Fisk missed on this one. After about an hour of progressively more disappointed waiting, Fisk called Bracco and told him his source had gotten it wrong. Fifteen minutes after that, six fully dispirited homicide teams had finally gone grumbling out of the detail and were on their way back to their beats, to their witness interviews, to their snitches, or to their homes. Marcel Lanier's door was open again, and the lieutenant appeared to have remained unaware the whole time of the gathering of his troops and their subsequent dispersal.

Devin Juhle had subpoenaed Caryn Dryden's home telephone records, but he wouldn't have those numbers for a couple more days. In the meantime, he sat at his desk with a list of the numbers he'd taken from her cell phone, which had an easily accessible record of the last ten calls she'd both placed and received. He punched in one of them.

"Hello." A young woman's voice.

"This is Inspector Juhle of San Francisco Homicide. Who am I speaking to, please?"

"This is Kym Gorman. Just a second." He heard the voice speaking to someone in the room with her. "It's the police." Then a man's voice. "This is Stuart Gorman. Who is this?"

"Mr. Gorman, this is Inspector Juhle."

"Jesus, Inspector, don't you guys ever give it up? Why are you harassing my daughter?"

"I'm not. I'm calling numbers from your wife's cell phone. Your daughter called her twice over the weekend and she called her back once. Did you know that?"

"No, not specifically. But last time I checked it wasn't a crime for a daughter and mother to talk on the phone."

"No, sir, it's not. I was just checking the numbers, finding out who your wife talked to in the last days of her life. Your daughter's was the first number I tried."

"All right, then, you've tried it." A pause. "Look, Inspector, she's

having a bit of a hard time dealing with things right now, as you might understand. Would you mind please letting this go for a few days? Would that be too much of a problem for you?"

"No, I could do that."

"I'd appreciate it. I really would."

"All right, then. But you know, while I've got you, can you tell me one small thing?"

"You know what my lawyer says. I'd better not." "But you've already said this one thing."

"Evidently I said a lot. And you've got it all on tape, right? Use that."

"All I'm talking about," Juhle went on, "is what time you left your place at Echo Lake. You said a little before two. I just wondered if you've had a chance to rethink that."

"Why?"

"Because I'm trying to get my timetable straight. You said a little before two last time. You want to change that now?"

Juhle waited through some silence until Stuart said, "No. It was a little before two. I'm pretty sure."

"There," Juhle said, "that wasn't so hard, was it?"

Kymberly was half-watching the turned-down television from the couch. She glanced at her father, slumped now in one of the room's reading chairs. "Daddy, are you okay?"

Stuart threw her a weak smile. "I think I'm finally running out of gas here, hon." He drew in a shallow breath. "I didn't know you'd talked to Mom over the weekend."

"Yeah, a little." After a hesitation, Kym shrugged. "Is that what the police wanted?"

"He mentioned it, that's all. What did you guys talk about?"

"Not much, really. I got her twice Saturday, but she was running around, so we only actually got to talk one time, on Sunday."

"What was she running around doing on Saturday?"

Another shrug. "You know. It was Mom. Something."

"She didn't say?"

Much as Stuart was striving to keep everything low-key, this question brought the beginning of a rise. Kym brought her eyes all

the way away from the TV and over to her father. "What? Why are you looking at me like that? Do you think I'm trying to hide something from you?"

"No. And I'm not looking at you any way. I thought your mother might have told you something about what she was doing, why she couldn't talk to you, and that might have had something to do with whoever killed her, since it wasn't me."

"Jesus, Dad, are you saying… do you think it was me?"

Here we go, he thought. But said, "No. Don't be silly."

She sat up straight now, eyes growing wider. "You do! You think it could have been me, don't you? God, I don't believe this."

His hand went to his forehead. He'd learned that he could sometimes control the direction of his daughter's outbursts by refusing to continue the confrontation. "Kym," he said evenly, from behind his hand. "Let's not go here. I don't think that, and never could. I know you loved your mother. I'm trying to imagine who could have done what they did. And all I want you to believe is that I didn't have anything to do with it. That's all I want."

Miraculously, it worked. Kym seemed to pull back within herself for a second, then she nodded and got up from the couch, crossing over to him, kneeling down in front of him, her hands on his knees. "Of course I believe that. How could I not believe that?"

"The same way I couldn't believe it about you, sweetie. Never. Ever ever." Stroking her hair, he went on soothingly. "But with all those reporters who were out there… You saw them and you heard what Gina Roake said. They're going to make me the suspect because that's where the story seems to be right now. We should be ready for that. And not get mad. Getting mad isn't going to help anything."