John Lescroart - The Suspect

And maybe segue somehow from Furth's testimony into some of the PII issues. And then…

Stopping herself, she realized she was already beginning to spin out of control. She had to keep her focus. The minute her mind started to relax-even standing in her stairwell-a half dozen other ideas, chores and responsibilities assaulted her consciousness. Maybe she'd manage a few hours of sleep before dawn, but that was all she could realistically expect, or allow herself.

She picked up her briefcase and finished her climb.

Only to be greeted by Phyllis as soon as the receptionist saw her. "Ah, Ms. Roake." In the rarefied and humorless world of the firm's ancient spinster of a receptionist, attorneys did not possess first names. "Mr. Farrell wanted to see you the minute you got in. On the Gorman matter. Shall I tell him you're on your way up?"

Gina looked across the lobby to the stairs leading up. In her present state of fatigue, the dozen or so steps suddenly seemed as insurmountable as the final ascent to the peak of Whitney, or Shasta, or Kilimanjaro, all of which she'd summited in the past three years. But there was nothing for it-Wes wanted to see her right away about her case. But she still couldn't quite get herself to move, to start the climb. In her short hesitation, staring wearily over at the steps, Phyllis read her mind and, in response, cleared her throat. "If you won't be needing it up there, you could leave your briefcase behind the counter here with me. I'll keep an eye on it."

Gina's briefcase, of a kind specially built for lawyers in trial or other litigation, was more than a foot thick and, loaded as it was with reference materials and other law books, her file folders, copies of all the discovery, Wyatt Hunt's interrogation tapes and other junk he'd collected in his investigations, and so on, it weighed more than twenty-five pounds. If she was going to be forced to make the ascent to Farrell's lair, at least she could do it without carrying the added weight.

Smiling weakly, she put the briefcase down and pushed it behind the counter. "Thank you, Phyllis. That's a good call."

A crisp nod. "I'll tell him you're on your way."

It wasn't, after all, such a long or difficult journey. Ten steps across the lobby, fourteen stairs, another few steps to Farrell's well-decorated door. In keeping with his T-shirt motif, Farrell had much of his office door covered with liberal bumper and otherwise tasteless stickers, sometimes both at once: somebody give bush a blow job so we can impeach him; lawyers, guns & money, the oil has hit the fan; my last good case was anchor steam beer. But Gina had already read them all and today they didn't even register. She knocked once, cracked the door. "You decent?"

"Probably not. Come on in. Watch out Gert doesn't escape." Wes was over by his refreshment counter, watching espresso drain into a tiny cup, and turned as she entered. His T-shirt today read a friend will help you move. a really good friend will help you move a body.

"Phyllis said you looked like you could use some coffee," he said.

"How much you got?" Gina asked. "She's a dear, that woman."

"Actually," Wes replied, "company secret, but she's a robot. And the next generation, supposedly, they're making them with personalities. I can't wait." He handed her the demitasse. "So guess what? Kelley Rusnak was probably murdered."

The cup stopped halfway to Gina's mouth. That had been her assumption all along, but it was nice to get the formal verification, and the vindication.

Farrell leaned back against the counter. "My guy down in Redwood

City called me about an hour ago. Kind of an interesting sequence of events, actually. His theory, anyway. You want to hear it all?"

"As opposed to what? Half of it?"

"Don't get snippy," he said.

"Don't ask dumb questions and I won't. All of it. Yes, please." "Okay. The first thing a little weird was she had three mostly undissolved pills-Tylenol with codeine-in her mouth." "Undissolved. How could that happen?"

"Well, one way, somebody could put them in her mouth after she was already dead, or close to it." "Again, though, why?"

"Maybe because that was the only drug she had on hand with the prescription made out to her. The empty bottle was next to her bed where they found her, which is why they initially thought it was straight OD. But it wasn't. Why? No codeine in her blood."

"None?"

"Zero. She died from an overdose of Elavil, also called amytripti-lene. Which is a prescription antidepressant."

Gina put her untouched coffee down on the table, lowered herself onto the couch, absently stroking the dog who'd come over. "But let me guess. There was no bottle for this stuff in her place, with her name on it?"

"Right. But wait, listen, it gets better. The other thing she had on board was Rohypnol."

Gina knew what that was. "The date-rape drug."

"Exactly. And she could have taken it herself, of course, technically, but the odds are she didn't. My guy thinks somebody was with her and got it into her drink. Then when she was woozy, popped her full of amytriptilene. She would have been feeling funny anyway, dizzy and/or sick. Maybe he told her it was aspirin. They're tiny pills, and it looks like he gave her a lot of them. So the roofie"-the street name for Rohypnol-"kept her from waking up as she went into tachycardia from the amytriptilene. And after she was out, somebody tried to throw off the investigation-at least for a while-by trying to force some codeine down her throat as well."

"That's a bizarre way to kill someone," Gina said.

Wes shrugged. "Maybe sometimes you've just gotta take what's available."

"No," Stuart said. "Kym used to take amytriptilene. It was one of the first things we tried, but her current doc put her on lithium and it seems to work better. At least when she takes it the way she's supposed to."

Gina's fatigue was forgotten. She was still running on the adrenaline rush she'd picked up in Farrell's office. Kelley Rusnak's probable murder eliminated the last shred of doubt. Stuart hadn't killed Caryn. Two women working on the same project for the same company had now been killed within three weeks of each other, and the idea that these murders were unrelated was too much for Gina to swallow.

And not only were they related, in all probability they were committed by the same person. The Dryden Socket had now become the center of Gina's case, and ironically enough, it was still no formal part of it; there was no evidence about it, no testimony related to it. She doubted if Gerry Abrams had ever heard of it.

But what it meant for Stuart, of course, was that he was innocent. Gina thought she might even get Wyatt Hunt to persuade Juhle to give the matter some of his attention. But that would be for later, if at all.

Now it was seven thirty and Gina had still not gone home, but rather had cabbed directly from her office down to the Hall of Justice again. She and Stuart were in the semicircular main Attorney Visiting Room at the jail-the glass block, the long table, the two chairs. Stuart had sustained several bruises on his arms and a couple more on his head, along with the one gash at his hairline that had bled so pro-lifically, but all he had to show for it was a two-inch-square bandage on his forehead. "So why do you want to know about Kymberly and amytriptilene?" he asked her.

Gina considered her response, then decided she had to give it to him straight. "Because Kelley Rusnak died of an overdose of amytriptilene."

A confused frown passed over Stuart's face. "I don't see the connection. What could Kelley's suicide have to do with Kymberly?"

"I'm getting ahead of myself," Gina said. "As it turns out, Kelley wasn't a suicide after all." Carefully leaving nothing out, she filled him in on Farrell's information. "Anyway," she concluded, "amytrip-tilene is a link. I wanted to see where it might connect."