Debra's eyes had gone glassy again. She reached out to touch Stuart's arm, then moved a step closer to him. "Let's not think about that right now, okay? Let's all just try to get through what we need to do here and now."
"Good idea," Conley said. "Maybe you could help talk Stuart into getting himself a lawyer. I've got someone in mind. And with this divorce in the mix, he's going to need one."
Her hand still on his arm, Debra nodded. "Stuart," she said softly, "I think you ought to listen to your friend."
Five
In the normal course of events, Devin Juhle would not have heard word one about the autopsy of Caryn Dryden for at least a few days. But in the great yin and yang of the city's population, this turned out to be a slow weekend for death. San Francisco's homicide rate-with about two killings every week-was not comparable, say, to Oakland's, eleven miles across the bay, with its two hundred and twenty murders a year, but since autopsies were mandated not just for violent deaths, but for deaths of the homeless, deaths anywhere with an element of suspicion to them, usually the medical examiner's office had an autopsy backlog of at least a couple of days after the body arrived at the morgue.
But today, still hungry from his lack of lunch at Lou's, Juhle wasn't ten seconds back inside the door to the homicide detail on the fourth floor in the Hall of Justice when his lieutenant, Marcel Lanier, saw him and called out his name.
The door to Lanier's small office, built into the corner of the cluttered room that served as headquarters for the city's fifteen homicide
inspectors, was open. Behind it, at his outsized desk, the lieutenant was having his lunch-an enormous construction of marbled rye bread stuffed with three or four inches' worth of what looked like pastrami or corned beef with cheese and pickles. Lanier finished chewing, took a sip from his can of Diet Coke, swallowed, and said, "This is impossible if it's true, so it's probably a hoax. But Strout"- this was John Strout, San Francisco's septuagenarian medical exam-iner-"called and said they're done with the preliminary cutting on your girl and maybe you'll want to go down and see where they're at."
Juhle would normally have attended the autopsy if he'd known it was going to happen, but he'd never expected it so soon. "They've got something?"
"That's what it sounded like. I can't see him calling us up if he didn't have something to talk about."
"Yeah. That wouldn't make any sense."
"Okay, then." Lanier sunk his teeth again into the sandwich.
"You going to eat all of that, Marcel? I'd pay you five dollars for a bite."
Lanier chewed another few seconds, drank, swallowed, smiled. "Why am I thinking you had lunch at the Greek's?" "If you want to call it that. Lunch, I mean." "What's the Special today?"
"I don't know what it was. Some kind of fish eggs and this rubbery, doughy stuff. I couldn't eat two of 'em. I don't know how the guy stays in business."
"Clucks like yourself."
"Okay, then, ten bucks. One bite. Come on."
Juhle wanted to get to Strout's office, but the sandwich was going to come first, dammit. Lanier took pity on him and, since very few mortals could eat an entire pastrami and swiss on rye from David's Deli at one sitting anyway, he gave him half of it. For free! Said if his legendary generosity went toward motivating his troops, that was enough thanks for him.
So feeling motivated at least in spirit, Juhle left Lanier's office and poured himself a cup of coffee, then went to his desk to eat. Juhle couldn't believe how good the sandwich tasted. The pastrami was still warm, the Swiss cheese nearly melted, the mustard pungent enough to get his eyes watering. It somehow made even the stale coffee more than palatable. For a second, he idly wondered if maybe Lou or his wife hadn't yet heard of the concept of "sandwich" as a possible lunch item. Maybe Juhle could swing by David's and buy a few pounds of lunch meats and cheeses, a selection of condiments and some loaves of rye bread, deliver it all across the street, and leave Chui written assembly instructions. Fresh sandwiches on the menu at Lou the Greek's might improve the dining experience for the city's entire criminal law community for generations to come. As the source of the bounty, Juhle could become a cultural hero.
Meanwhile, though, he thought as he ate the last delectable bite, he was a cop on a case that, if his gut was right, looked like it was about to become a righteous, high-profile homicide. Suddenly energized, he pushed back from his desk and went out the door, where he turned left and began to jog down the hallway toward the elevators.
The ambient temperature in the medical examiner's lab was fifty-five degrees. Since this was very close to the average San Francisco temperature regardless of season or time of day or night, most of the time visitors to the morgue were dressed in enough layers of clothing that they didn't notice the chill. Today though, the city basked in its sixth consecutive day of an unusually warm Indian summer and Juhle was in shirtsleeves. In his hurry to get downstairs after dawdling in his sandwich reveries, the jog had worked up a light sweat. Now, standing with Strout over the table where Caryn Dryden's body lay, he found he was having to fight himself to keep his teeth from chattering.
Oblivious to his visitor's discomfort, lost in his work as he always was, the medical examiner had paused in his perusal of the internal organs, most of which-Juhle was happy to see-were thankfully still inside the body cavity. Now Strout probed at a spot in the skull at the temple in front of the right ear, the surrounding area of which he'd shaved bare. "I went ahead and measured the diameter of the depressed skull fracture, which here you can see. I've concluded this was probably caused by an object with a rounded cylindrical surface like, say, a baseball bat."
"Why do you say that?"
"No cut. Nothing with an edge, anyway. This looks like some-thin' round hit her."
"You got a round indentation in the skull?"
Strout nodded. "I'd say enough to knock her out, which might have been the point of it."
Juhle persisted. "But something round?" "Looks like that from the fracture." "A wine bottle?" "Coulda been."
Juhle folded his arms over his chest for warmth. "There was a wine bottle in the trash compactor."
Strout nodded, then spoke in his trademark Southern drawl. "You want to go get it from evidence and bring it on down, I could tell you if that's probably what hit her. They ought to check that sucker for prints and blood and hair, which you're probably already doin', right? Although, the guy had any brains, he washed it before…" Suddenly the ME frowned. "The trash compactor?"
"Yep. In the kitchen."
Strout wagged his head. "Most folks here in the city, don't you think, if we get glass, we recycle it?"
Strout was right. Most San Franciscans of a certain economic level-and the Gorman/Drydens fit within it-recycled glass and paper as a matter of course. The city even provided separate receptacles for regular pickup. The people he was talking about simply did not normally throw an empty wine bottle into a trash compactor. "So what does that say to you, John?" Juhle asked.
"Well, two things. One, whoever threw it away wasn't thinking straight, maybe in a panic over what he'd just done. Two, maybe he didn't know where they normally threw away the recycling." "I don't like that one so much," Juhle said.
"Why not?"
"It would tend to eliminate the husband."
"Yes, I s'pose it would. You thinkin' it was him?"
Juhle played it close. "He called it in. It would help if I knew what time she died, since he says he didn't get into town until six this morning."
"Well, if that's true, it wasn't him. Although due to the hot tub immersion, the exact timin's goin' to be squishy, I'm afraid." "I don't want to hear that."
An amused flicker crossed Strout's face. "Somehow I didn't think you did, Inspector, but even so there might be enough to hang your man."