John Lescroart - The Suspect

"You're not saying you think that Kymberly could have had a part in any of this?"

Gina looked hard at his face, tortured now by this possibility. "I talked to her before the afternoon session today, Stuart," she said gently. "I asked her what she'd been calling Caryn about on that last weekend. She told me she asked her for money, and that Caryn turned her down. You realize that if you're in jail and Caryn's dead, she's going to have nearly unimpeded access to all of your money."

"You can't believe any of this."

"What I'm wondering, Stuart, is why you can't. Once Caryn was out of the way, who was the only person standing in the way of the Dryden Socket coming out on schedule? Kelley Rusnak. When Kym-berly visited you here in jail, did you mention your visit down to Kel-ley? Did you tell her what you'd talked about?"

"I told a lot of people. Everybody who came by. I wanted it clear. Kelley and Furth were proof I wasn't running and hiding from Juhle." He ran a hand down the side of his face. "She could never have killed her mother. And she didn't have any amytriptilene anyway."

Keeping her calm, Gina asked, "Were her expired prescriptions refillable?"

Suddenly slamming his hand flat on the table. "No! Goddammit! No!" Out of his chair now, he grabbed the back of it and Gina thought for a moment he was going to throw it in his fury, but he got himself back under control enough to look her in the eye and say, "We're not going there, you hear me. We're not doing this."

Abruptly, he turned from her and walked as far away as he could get. In the far corner, he stood with palms pressed against the glass block, his head down. After a long minute, Gina got up and walked over behind him. She touched his shoulder, her palm flat against his back. She felt his shoulders heave once, then again. Then they gave way altogether in a series of smaller, silent quakes. In the presence of such abject and obvious pain, memories of her own agonies over David Freeman-when her resolve and her spirit just broke-came swelling up over her, making her head swim, tightening her throat.

She didn't trust herself to move. "All right, Stuart," she whispered. "All right."

Since she was never going to get anything like a night's sleep in her life again anyway, when Wyatt called her at home at ten thirty, she told him he could stop by and talk to her in person on his way back to his place. When she opened the door, he grinned wearily and said, "We've got to stop meeting like this."

But that was as light as it got before it got heavy again. Before he'd even gotten a chance to report on Bob McAfee, she told him about Kelley Rusnak and her fears about Kymberly. "At least now we know why she's laying so low. Why she didn't want to come to the courtroom. I need you to find her, Wyatt. I need to find out where she was and what she was doing last Friday. Drop everything else. I've got her cell number. If she picks up even for a few minutes, Juhle can somehow get at least her approximate location."

"Maybe Juhle can, Gina, but I'm not sure I can get him to do that for us."

"Could you call in a favor?"

"From Devin? After what you did to him on the stand today? Probably not."

"Well, I need to find her. Maybe if you tell Devin about Kelley being murdered?"

Hunt shook his head. "Not in his jurisdiction. He's not interested."

"He's got to be. Kelley's got to be part of Caryn. He has to see that. It's still his case. Here's his chance-if he solves the mystery, he can still be a hero. If it turns out it doesn't make any difference, he's still the dedicated cop who spares no effort in the pursuit of the truth."

Clearly, from Hunt's expression, he thought it was an extreme long shot, but he finally shrugged. "What the hell. Can't hurt to ask. You mind if we sit down?"

Gina, who'd been on a tear of intensity for longer than she could remember, felt the tension in her break. "Sure, I'm sorry. I'm a little wound up. You feel like a drink or a beer or something?"

"Why? Do I look like one?" He waved it off. "No, I'm good," he said. "But with all this talk about Kelley and Kymberly and how everything's all got to be related, I hope you haven't given up completely on the good Doctor McAfee."

Gina rolled her eyes. "Don't even tell me. Why?"

"Because it appears that he forgot to mention taking his car out of his garage sometime around ten or so the night Caryn got killed."

"You're kidding me."

Hunt held up three fingers. "Scout's honor."

"Somebody specifically remembered that? Three weeks ago? How'd that happen?"

"Young love to the rescue once again." He had his little pocket notepad out and was flipping the pages. "Here you go," he said. "Lloyd Phipps and Abby Loran, number 17-B, same building as McAfee. In fact, Lloyd knows him enough to borrow stuff. The ID is rock solid."

"Okay, what about them?"

"Abby moved in with Lloyd that night, so they remember the date. They're still doing weekaversaries. It's kind of cute. Anyway, there they are, down in the garage, moving up the last carload of her stuff, and McAfee comes out, says he's having trouble sleeping, he's going down to buy some Ovaltine…"

"You're making this up." "I'm not. It's what happened." "Did they see him come back?"

"No."

"No, of course not." She closed her eyes and let out a sigh. "So I'm going to have to subpoena them. And McAfee, too."

"Shouldn't be a big problem," Hunt said. "I've got their addresses at work. I told them it might be happening. Didn't bother either of them. Of course, I could have told them I was the grim reaper and it wouldn't have bothered them much either. Long as they could go together."

"Young love," Gina said wistfully.

"You really can't knock it," Hunt replied. "It's a beautiful thing."

Gina was in her office by six o'clock the next morning, and worked straight through until eight thirty, when she took a cab down to the Hall of Justice. She spent the time drawing up subpoenas for her new potential witnesses from Wyatt Hunt's travels last night. Whether or not he succeeded in finding Kymberly today, Gina also wanted to have a subpoena ready for her, not only to see if she could get to the critical amytriptilene and PII issues, but far more prosaically in case she'd need Kymberly to rebut Bethany Robley's version of the threatening conversation. While she was at it, though for different reasons, she also wanted to be able to call Fred Furth and Bob McAfee if the need arose.

Though she fully intended to spend some quality time figuratively holding Stuart's hand in the cell behind the courtroom before what was likely to be a devastating, and in any case upsetting, day of testimony, with all the last-minute preparation, she never got around to it.

It probably wasn't technically cuttable, but the tension was thick in the courtroom. Predictably, the news outlets-both print and video- had a banner opportunity with Clair Robley's courtroom attack of the defendant who'd threatened her daughter, and they weren't going to let it go by. The Chronicles lead headline had screamed, "Disorder In The Court," and some sneaky reporter had obviously gotten past the guards with his photo-cell phone intact, and had caught a dramatic, albeit uncredited, photo of the cane coming down on a cowering Stuart Gorman.

Probably in large part because of this, the soon-to-be-seasoned Judge Toynbee had ordered a secondary screening of every person who would be allowed in the courtroom for the morning's session, and the line of reporters and lookie-loos had stretched the length of the second-floor hallway and down the stairs into the Hall's lobby. It would be fair to say that none of the people in this queue seemed patient and tranquil. As a matter of fact, building security had to be called to break up three shoving matches of rivals fighting for their space, and a sketch artist for one of the cable news stations got himself arrested at the door to the courtroom when the errant F-word escaped his lips, directed at the guard right at the courtroom door, leading to denial of the artist's access, which in turn impelled him to throw a right hook at the cop's face.