John Lescroart - The Suspect

"Okay, that's possible." McAfee's smile came and went haphazardly. Hunt's presence and questions clearly were rattling him. "But I thought you'd more or less settled on Stuart?"

"He's in the mix, Doctor, but as I said there's been no arrest yet. The media's made up its mind, if it has one, but there are some questions."

Hunt's intention wasn't to let his cop impersonation intimidate the witness; he wanted to get him relaxed and talking. He looked over McAfee's shoulder to where construction sounds could be heard and put some enthusiasm into his tone. "I love these infill projects. I live in a converted warehouse myself down on Brannan. How close are you to being finished here?"

"Well, now, with Caryn gone, that's all a bit up in the air. If you'd like a quick tour while we talk, I'd be happy to show you around a little."

"That'd be great. I'd like that. Thanks."

McAfee's relief at leaving the immediate subject of Caryn's death was palpable. He turned to indicate the reception area. "Well, where we are here, this is pretty much finished." He led Hunt behind the counter, showing off the stations, the computer outlets, the phone bank.

"How many patients were you planning on handling?"

"We hoped to get up to eight a day."

"Eight a day? That many people need new hips?"

"And shoulders, and knees. And yes, even hips alone, eight a day, at least."

"You and Caryn were going to do four operations each, every day?"

Perhaps this struck McAfee as funny. Perhaps he was still nervous. At any rate, he had a loud, uninhibited laugh, though he cut it off after the first couple of notes. "I'm sorry," he said, "but no. We hoped to be able to bring in associates, fellow orthopedic specialists, and have them on staff here within a year or two. Any one doctor shouldn't do more than one total joint surgery in any given day. Although there are some who try."

Hunt decided to take a risk. "Michael Pinkert?"

The name stopped him, wiped the joviality from McAfee's face. "Yes, he'd be one of them. Have you been talking to him?"

"Not yet."

"But obviously you know that he'd been in some negotiations with Caryn."

"And with you, right? You want to talk about it?"

Clearly, McAfee didn't. He looked back over his shoulder quickly as though considering whether he should take his inquisitor on the next leg of the clinic tour, but finally flashed another false smile and leaned back against the wall. "You have to understand that Caryn and I, we went back as far as our residencies together. She was an incredible woman-smart, driven, a workaholic really, like me. With so much going on in her brain all the time. It was-she was-a joy to be around. Not that everybody saw that part of her, of course. She could be very… abrupt, I suppose. And short-tempered. Impatient with stupidity, that was all."

"She wouldn't have liked me," Hunt said, trying to keep his witness at least marginally on his side for as much time as he could, which he was afraid wouldn't be much longer.

"I think you're being modest, Inspector," McAfee said. "In any event, what I'm getting at is that she and I were an immensely compatible team from very early on. We shared the same work ethic, the same approach to our practices. Dr. Pinkert has a different philosophy than either Caryn or me. I didn't see him working well with us."

"Don't take offense at this, Doctor, but were you and Caryn intimate?"

McAfee let out a breath, and with it went some of the confidence in his posture. "I should have expected it would come to this," he said mostly to himself. Then he nodded. "For about a two-week interval about twenty years ago. No, more like eighteen. Soon after Kymberly-her daughter-was born. She and Stuart were having troubles. The girl was evidently…" He shook his head. "Anyway, she decided she wasn't going to leave him or end the marriage back then-I don't know why-but she and I… we both realized it was a mistake." Meeting Hunt's eye, he said, "I know this looks bad, but we haven't been together since then, and that's the truth. We were friends and business partners, that's all."

"And suddenly she was betraying you by asking Pinkert to join you both on this clinic?"

"Well, not betraying me. That's a bit strong. We disagreed about it, sure, but… I didn't kill her, Inspector. I wasn't her lover anymore."

"You're saying she had one?"

"I can't say for sure."

"But still, you think it's true?"

McAfee wrestled with the question for a moment.

"The reason it's important," Hunt said, "is if she was having an affair, her lover might have been her killer. I'm not looking for a name, Doctor. Just a yes or a no."

Finally, McAfee nodded. "All right, then, I'd say yes. Although who it is, or was, I don't have any idea. But I think so."

"Why? Anything specific?"

"Nothing I could put my finger on. But as I told you, I knew her very well and for a very long time. You pick up on changes. Sometime last summer, she changed."

"In what way?"

"Well, over the past couple of years, she'd become grim. It was all money and business, or responsibilities with her family, and she did it all with a kind of lockjawed determination. She wasn't going to let it beat her that things were hard, that life was work and nothing else." He shrugged, took a beat. "Then her daughter-have you met Kymberly?"

Though he hadn't, Hunt nodded.

"Well, on top of everything else, Caryn was going through a particularly difficult time right around Kym's graduation. Very difficult. I'd hold her hand-not literally-but I'd listen to her complaints. She was at the end. Evidently Kym had a new boyfriend she'd started sleeping with and she was staying out all night and doing drugs and stealing things and for a while there, Caryn seemed to lose the ability to cope with it all. She felt it wasn't ever going to end, that her home life with Stuart and Kym was this chain around her neck that was choking her, and she'd never get it off."

"So what happened?"

"So one day, suddenly, she came in here and she was… I don't know how to describe it other than radiantly happy. Really like her old self. The change was so dramatic, I had to ask her what had happened."

"And what did she say?"

"She said she'd just realized how beautiful she was. I told her that of course she was, and she just smiled at me and said I had no idea. That was all. Except that after that she started to take more care with her looks-not that she needed to, but… I don't know how to put it, exactly. She looked more obviously attractive-bought some new clothes, wore her makeup differently, smiled more. She had more energy for her work. She was just different."

"And not because anything changed at home?"

"No. I'm sure of that. Rather the opposite, in fact. I remember she found out Kym had pierced herself in a very private area around this time, and rather than agonizing over it as she would have a few months before, she was almost breezy. She said, 'I've just got to give her a home until she goes off to college. I owe her that much. Then I'm free.' And never a word about Stuart. It was like he simply ceased to exist."

Hunt pulled out the small tape recorder he kept in the pocket of his sports coat. "I'm not so hot at taking notes," he said, echoing the disengenuous and universal theme. "You mind if I record what we say? I want to make sure I get it exactly right."

"No. Go ahead."

Satisfied, Hunt looked up. "Let's cut to the chase, Doctor. Do you think it was Pinkert?"

Again, the unexpected guffaw; again, cut off quickly. "I suppose I just inadvertently gave my answer away." In all seriousness, he continued. "I'd be surprised if it was Mike."

"Why?"

"First, you've got to know him. He needs to lose fifty pounds. Caryn hates extra weight on people. The other reason might be me. When Caryn and I had our thing, one of her big worries was that word would get out around the hospital. She told me that if she was going to do that again, it wasn't going to be with anybody she worked with. She didn't want gossip. She didn't want to hurt her husband.