"Who?"
"Caryn. All of a sudden, she wanted us to get married. But that had never been in the plan-not for me, not for her. We had a deal. Both of us with our unhappy marriages. But hell, that was the price I'd bought in for. I knew what it would take, this career. It would take Lexi and her goddamn father and his goddamn money. But that would get me what I needed, what I had to have. And Caryn knew that too. At least she always had before. That was our deal."
"But she changed her mind?"
"Friday she told me she had to see me. She was divorcing Stuart. We needed to talk."
"So you set up the date, Sunday?"
"It started out okay. But she'd had half the bottle by the time I got there, and then the more she talked, the more wound up she got. She knew I loved her more than I loved Lexi. She couldn't live anymore the way she'd been doing." He looked pleadingly across at Juhle. "She was going to tell Lexi. She told me that up front. Plus, I saw it in her eyes. She was going to do it. Then I'd be free and we could be together."
"So you hit her?"
"I told her no. She flew into a rage, came at me with the bottle. It was self-defense, I swear. She fell and hit her head, then she got in the hot tub. I left. I never thought she'd drown. That was an accident. Really. I didn't hurt her at all."
Juhle didn't move, let him go on.
"I just didn't want to be with her, not that way." Conley shook his head miserably, looking in vain for some sign of understanding or forgiveness from across the table. "Goddammit," he said. "Not that way."
Gina opened her eyes to poor focus in an unfamiliar room. High-ceilinged, brightly lit above, though here where she lay the light somehow felt muted. She closed her eyes again; it was better with them closed. Acoustic guitar music was playing somewhere, barely in the range of her hearing. Gradually she became aware that something felt funny about her face and her scalp, but for a long moment she couldn't seem to place what it might be. When it came back to her, all in a rush, she moved her hands up to the bandages, then in a small panic, tried to sit up far too quickly.
Involuntarily she moaned, sinking back into the bed.
Footsteps approaching, and then she dared open her eyes again. "Wyatt?" Her voice was cracked and dry. Her mouth tasted like blood.
"She moves."
"No, she doesn't." In fact, she lay flat and immobile. "Where am I?" Then suddenly, she jerked up again. "Oh my God, the hearing! Oh!" Hands back to her head, she gently lowered herself down onto the pillow.
Wyatt sat down on the side of the bed. "The hearing's been taken care of. It's over."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean Jedd Conley confessed."
"Jedd confessed? Then the garage door opened?"
"You don't remember?"
"I never saw it. I remember pushing the button, then lights out. He really confessed?"
"Enough. He said so many stupid things last night, they'll probably get him on Kelley too. Devin sweated him and he broke."
"There you go. I knew the guy was good for something."
"Hey. Be nice."
"I thought I was being nice, giving him all those extra chances to finally get it right." Closing her eyes again, she took a few conscious breaths against the pain. "So how bad am I?"
"Not too, all things considered. You'll probably live." Then, more seriously. "You really don't remember?"
"The whole night's kind of in and out." A pause. "So how bad am I?"
"The diagnosis? Best guess is you've got a concussion. Plus a few really attractive stitches by your left eye. You'll be glad to know that the thread color they used coordinates nicely with the black eyes."
"Color coordination. The secret to adult happiness."
"Well, you've got it. Oh, and you're supposed to take it easy the next few days."
"That won't be too hard." Her eyes scanned the room. "So where am I?"
"My place. You didn't want to stay in the hospital." "That's because I hate hospitals." "That became kind of clear." "Was I difficult?"
"Only a little. But they really wanted to make sure there'd be somebody to keep an eye on you in case you started dying or something. So I volunteered."
"It's starting to come back." She labored through a few more breaths. "What about Stuart? Somebody's got to tell him."
"Already done. Devin was going to be on it."
"Is he out of jail?"
"By now, he should be."
"Could you check, please? That's got to happen." She started to raise herself from the bed. "If Abrams tries to keep ahold of him…"
Wyatt put a hand on her shoulder, gently pushing her back down. "Easy, easy. I'll find out. If he's not out by lunchtime, I'll put Diz on it. It'll happen. Promise."
With a last token show of reluctance, she settled into the pillow again. "Okay. God, my head hurts."
"I'm not surprised. You took a few pretty good hits." He took a beat. "Gina?"
"Wyatt?"
"How did you get so sure? It couldn't just have been their cars being the same."
"No. That really wasn't much of it, actually. It just turned the key. Then, once I got past my ego, I started to put the pieces together." "What did your ego have to do with it?"
The corners of Gina's mouth went up a fraction of an inch, but she wasn't smiling. "Everything, Wyatt. Everything." After a pause, she continued. "This isn't easy to talk about."
"Well, then, let it go. It's all right."
"No. It's not. I can't just let it go. It's smack in the middle of how I got it." She drew a long, slow breath. "Hard as it was to deal with, I had to accept the fact that in the real world Jedd would never have called me in to handle a high-profile murder. He knows every great lawyer in town, and every one of 'em would be happy to do him a favor. And I think I always knew that even when we were together, he never really respected me as a lawyer."
"I didn't realize you two had been together at all."
"Never seriously, and a long time ago, but that's a different story probably not worth telling. The point is, once I could accept that Jedd didn't pick me to win the case, the ugly truth finally dawned on me-that he'd picked me to lose it. The bastard. Anyway, once I realized that, a few other things came back as significant. I remembered your list of Jedd's appointments, for example, one of them at the Haight Street Rape Crisis Center." At Hunt's vacant look, she prodded him. "Sam Duncan's center?"
"Wes's Sam?"
"Right. So I called her." And found out, she told Wyatt, that Conley's talk at the Rape Crisis Center had been about the date-rape drug, Rohypnol. Conley told the story during his visit there that although this drug was of course illegal, to prove how easily laws against it could be circumvented, he had some male members of his Sacramento staff pose as college students at one of the local campuses and return to his office the very next day with several doses. He'd then, of course, turned over his information and the drugs to the police. "Except," Gina concluded, "it looks like he kept some of it. But Jedd even being around Rohypnol was pretty damn compelling to me. I just needed a connection to Kelley to be sure."
"So what'd you do?"
"I called Stuart at the jail."
"And what did he know?"
"He knew that Jedd had come to see him in jail last week and that they'd talked at length about Kelley Rusnak." As it turned out, she told Wyatt, Stuart knew that Jedd himself owned a good chunk of PII stock-Caryn had talked him into buying it. So he wasn't merely helping Caryn in her negotiations with the company out of altruism. Beyond that, evidently Jedd had convinced his father-in-law and some of his megarich friends that the stock was a can't-miss investment, and many of them had invested heavily themselves. Gina didn't yet have a specific motive for Jedd to have killed Kelley- maybe as Caryn's lab partner, she'd known about her and Jedd's affair, maybe it was to nip her whistle-blowing in the bud-but the previously unknown PII connection was all the symmetry Gina had needed. "It was Jedd, no doubt in my mind. So it followed that he had to have a way to open the garage."