John Lescroart - The Suspect

As though appreciating the question for the first time, Conley nodded almost imperceptibly, his eyes narrowed. "All things being equal, pretty serious. Evidently in some of the clinical trials, there'd been problems."

"Like what?"

Conley hesitated. "Like, apparently, people dying."

"Apparently? People don't apparently die, Jedd. They actually die. Did Caryn know about this? She must have."

"She was trying to understand what had happened first. There was ambiguity."

"How could there be ambiguity? People either died or they didn't, right?"

"Right. Sure. But these deaths happened after the study had been published, so due to the length of time before the problem showed up, there was some question about whether it was the result of the hip replacement or not."

"And Caryn was trying to find out?"

"Essentially, yes. You know as a public service my office looks into certain kinds of business fraud on behalf of some of our constituencies, and Caryn asked if…"

"Jedd. You already got my vote. I'm sure you did what you needed to do. But you're saying Caryn might have been threatening to blow the whistle on PII about these deaths. Which would cost all of the investors big money, wouldn't it?"

"I don't know if she'd gotten to that yet, but it… I'd say she was in the process of deciding what she was going to do."

"And who was she talking to about this? Besides you? The guy in Palo Alto, Furth?"

"Mostly, yes, I believe. Fred Furth."

Elbow resting out the driver's side window, letting the warm and fragrant air swirl around him in the truck's cab, Stuart Gorman kept his pickup at the speed limit all the way on the "Country's Most Scenic Freeway," the 280 out of San Francisco down the forty-some miles to Palo Alto. He almost missed the small polished-granite sign indicating the headquarters of Sand Hill Equities Bank-a long, low, black glass building that appeared to be built directly into a tawny-brown hillside off Page Mill Road.

As he pulled into the parking lot, which was graciously shaded with olive trees, Stuart realized that his ride didn't exactly fit into the prevailing motif of luxury automobiles. He wondered about the location of the local dealership that obviously gave away all the Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses and the random Porsche, since he figured there was no way that this many people could afford to buy them.

Parking far over to one side to retain a tenuous obscurity, he got out of the cab in the now-impressive heat and caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the building's surface: jeans, T-shirt, hiking boots.

He couldn't put on his jacket in this weather to cover his S &W. Which meant that the gun remained wrapped in the jacket inside his duffel bag.

So much for preparation. "Idiot," he said. It didn't matter.

The receptionist somehow conveyed the impression that billionaires dressed any way they damn pleased. And when Fred Furth heard who was waiting outside in the lobby to speak to him, even though Stuart didn't have an appointment, he came right out.

In his mid-thirties, with a square jaw, perfect teeth, and an athlete's body molded into a two-thousand-dollar suit, he nevertheless managed to exude both sincerity and sympathy. "Mr. Gorman. Frederick Furth. Fred."

"Stuart."

Furth had a crushing grip. "It's good to meet you at last, although I wish it could have been under less difficult circumstances. We are all still devastated here about Caryn. And of course, anything we can do to help you…" He turned to his receptionist. "We'll be in my office, Carol. No calls, please. No interruptions. Mr. Gorman. Stuart. This way."

They walked in silence down a cool, wide, dove gray corridor and into a very spacious office made distinctive by a floor-to-ceiling window that covered two-thirds of the facing wall until it disappeared into the hillside into which the building had been built. Behind Furth's desk, the back wall-windowless-featured six inset computer terminals and two television screens, all of them on and, in the case of the TVs, with the sound turned down.

But Furth didn't head toward his desk, but instead to a seating area of functional leather chairs over where the room was brightest. As Stuart was sitting down, taking in his surroundings, the banker asked if he could get him anything. "If it helps you decide, I'm having coffee. Peet's."

"Sounds good," Stuart said. "Black's fine."

A high-tech, burnished-steel coffee machine claimed pride of place on the counter. Furth moved efficiently. He pulled mugs-not cups and saucers-down from the built-in cabinets, placed one under each spigot on the machine, and pushed one button. In less than a minute, the coffee was in front of them, and Stuart took a sip. "Thanks for seeing me. I know you must be busy. I probably should have called first, but I've been running on automatic for the past couple of days."

Furth waved that off. "I'd imagine so. I'd actually thought of calling you, but…" He paused.

"But you wanted to see if I got myself arrested first?"

A muted acknowledgment, shoulders slipping an inch, a quick twitch of an embarrassed smile. "Maybe a little of that. Sorry."

Stuart nodded. "For the record, I didn't kill my wife. The papers- everybody, in fact-seems to have it wrong. I wasn't there when it happened."

"All right," Furth said. "It wouldn't be the first time the media got things wrong. They need a story. For the moment you're the story. I've been there too. We can agree that it sucks. Now how can I help you?"

Stuart's drive down here had been an unraveling and evolving fantasy where he terrorized the men with whom Caryn had been involved, Furth the first of them. Now he was facing this charming and confident businessman in the flesh, and suddenly his very presence here struck him as somewhat ludicrous, even surreal. "To be honest with you, I'm not certain," he began. "I'm trying to get a handle on some parts of Caryn's life that I didn't know too much about. One of the first things I came across is I understand that she was having some issues with PII, financial and otherwise, and that you were the point man she talked to about all that."

"I'm not sure of everything you're talking about, but you're probably right. That was me. But if you're saying you think there's some connection between those issues and her death, I'd say you're wildly off the mark."

"I'm not saying that. Not yet, anyway. I don't even know what the issues were."

Furth killed a few seconds with his coffee, then put the mug down on the glass table in front of them and sat back in his chair, crossing a leg. It was the opposite of an antagonistic posture, relaxed and open. He seemed ready to talk. "You said 'financial and otherwise.' What's the otherwise?"

"I guess it would fall under ethics. She'd heard her socket had killed some people."

A cock of the head. "I thought you said you didn't know the issues."

"Not all of them. And I just found this one out an hour ago. So it's true?"

"Well," Furth said, "that's still to be determined. There are questions, certainly. And Caryn wanted them answered."

"Before final FDA approval?"

"That would have been her choice, yes."

"And what was holding that up? Getting answers?"

Furth brought his hand up to his Adam's apple and pulled at the knot of his tie. He cleared his throat. "Well, the company, PII, did the usual rigorous clinical testing, of course, as the FDA mandates on any new product, and the results of these tests assured the company and the investors that there was no problem with going into full production."

"Except that there was a problem?"

"Well, of course, when people die, you've got at the very least a perceptual problem." Now Furth uncrossed his legs and came forward a bit in his chair, a smile that begged for understanding. "But the fact is, the deaths were only reported long after the study period, so they were outside the study's parameters."