"I hear you. But I noticed you called Mr. Gorman Stuart. Do you know him well?"
"Not well, no. But he's Kym's dad. I know him okay. He doesn't like to be called Mr. Gorman."
"And you and Kym are friends?"
"Well, kind of. She's a little up and down, you know. Hyper up and then kind of a drag down. And lately not so much. Actual friends, I mean, except we ski together sometimes. Anyway, we've known each other since fourth grade." She brought a finger to her mouth and chewed the end of it. "This is going to kill her."
"Were she and her mom close?"
"No. I mean her dad."
"What about her dad?"
"Well, you just said. What you were investigating. I mean, if he killed her."
"I didn't say that, Bethany. We don't have any one suspect right now. But you're saying Kymberly and her mom didn't get along?"
The girl shrugged. "Her mom was pretty busy most of the time." Reaching back, she touched her own mother's hand briefly, then came back to Juhle. "Caryn wasn't really that bad."
"Did people say she was?"
Bethany shrugged. "Sometimes the two of them-Stuart and Kym-they'd be a little sarcastic. But they both loved her, I think.
You don't think Stuart killed her, do you? I can't believe he'd do anything like that."
Juhle kept it matter-of-fact. "I'm just talking to people, Bethany. Trying to get to what happened. I might have to talk to you again.
Would that be all right?"
"Sure. I guess."
Juhle peeked around behind her. "Mrs. Robley?" "If it's okay with her."
"All right, then. Thank you both for your time."
Eight
Stuart was standing by the couch, stretching. He and Gina had been going over issues for the past couple of hours when suddenly he'd become aware of the time and jumped up. "Well," he was saying, "whether or not we hit most of it, I've got to get going if I want to be on time for Kym, and I do. If Juhle calls you, maybe you can just set up a time we can all talk. But not tonight, okay, please. My girl's going to need me. That's the most important thing right now."
"Sure. Of course." Gina had pulled her heavy satchel over in front of her and dropped her well-used legal pad into one of its sections. "We'll just stay in wait-and-see mode until we hear from Juhle. If he calls me tonight, I'll tell him you need time with your daughter and ask if we can set up a time tomorrow or the next day."
"You think he will? Call you tonight?"
"Maybe not, unless there's been some break in the case we don't know about. Either way, I'll try to check in with him again, get some sense of things." She looked up at him. "Are you sure you're all right?"
He shook his head, weariness now all over him. "Just thinking about Kym." Staring into empty space across the room, he blinked rapidly a few times. "And Caryn. She's really gone, isn't she?"
"I'm afraid so."
Squeezing at his temples, he sighed deeply, then looked across at her. "Jesus, what a waste. What an unbelievable, colossal fucking waste."
The Travelodge was barely a mile from Gina's condominium. Most of it was uphill, true, but to Gina's mind, that just made it a better exercise opportunity. So after she told Stuart that he should go on ahead, that she'd let herself out and get the door, she waited until he'd gone, then took off her black pumps, dropped them into the satchel and replaced them with the pair of tennis shoes that she always carried in her bag.
Outside, the evening was still warm, although the ocean breeze had increased enough to stir up the occasional wisp of dust or debris in the gutters. Gina walked with an athletic ease, her satchel converted to a backpack. Ahead of her, across Van Ness Avenue, the street began its steep climb that summitted at the oft-photographed view of Lombard as the "crookedest street in the world."
When she got to the top, Gina was breathing hard. Good. That's what exercise was-breathing hard. She stopped a minute to take in the view. In front of her, down in the valley, North Beach, the towers of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, and a slice of Fisherman's Wharf, with Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower beyond them. Behind her, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presidio, and from this height the glint of the sun off the Pacific Ocean on the horizon as well.
She was aware of course that on a lot of days and nights-maybe even most of them-the fog could be so thick here that you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, but when the place conspired with the weather at a moment like this, Gina thought a person could live here for a hundred years and still not grow tired of it.
By the time she got home, down and up another hill and fifteen minutes later, she was ready for a shower. And when that was done, she put on some jeans and a pullover and went into her living room. Like the rest of the condo it was only as big as it needed to be, but very well appointed in an eclectic, comfortable style. A couch with a matching loveseat diagonally faced the brick fireplace with a Navajo rug in front of it. A pair of reading chairs-she had bought the second for David-bracketed the large front window. Built-in bookshelves rose to greet a ten-foot ceiling on both sides of the fireplace.
Now she went to the well-stocked, mirror-backed wet bar in the back corner of the room and took a very small, four-ounce plain leaded crystal glass off the shelf. David had given her a set of four of these, and she loved the feel and the look of them. Pouring an inch of Oban neat, she crossed to her reading chair, where she set the drink on the Chinese lacquered side table and picked up the notes she took when she'd talked to Stuart.
Caryn Dryden, it turned out, had lived a very full and complicated life, replete with personal and medical interactions, investment schemes, research opportunities and business connections. Stuart didn't know the details of most of it, but he'd done the best he could filling Gina in after she'd finally convinced him that if someone had in fact killed his wife, it probably hadn't been random.
Apparently, there were two unrelated areas of activity that had consumed his wife's time and energy in recent months.
The first was that she had been within a couple of months of opening a new, independent practice with a fellow orthopedic surgeon, Robert McAfee. The plans had been in the works for the better part of two years, but Stuart had picked up that something had changed in the past couple of months-he thought she might have been trying to bring in a third partner. She'd complained that she was short of cash, and evidently this third guy could bridge or mitigate the shortfall. But McAfee hadn't been happy. Wasn't happy. He'd been calling her day and night for the past month, threatening to pull out of the deal, but was already so financially committed that that would have been suicide.
Gina sipped her Oban and went on to read over her notes on Stuart's comments when she'd asked him why or how Caryn had run short of money. How did that happen if she was the money wizard who brought in the big bucks?
It was because, Stuart said, she was planning on making even more of the big bucks. Huge bucks. Fuck-you money, she had called it. Caryn had been involved for several years in the development and then the clinical trials for a new replacement hip, the Dryden Socket, which degraded at a much slower rate than the current state-of-the-art hip. The device was evidently very close to full FDA approval and, when approved, it promised to make gazillionaires out of all of its early investors. Of whom Caryn had not only been one, but the inventor as well. Apparently, this investment, too, had run into some kind of last-minute financial difficulties. The investment group's banker had come back to the original investors and offered something called mezzanine loans to hold the company over until government approval.
Stuart didn't know what mezzanine loans were, but Gina did. Very high risk and very short term, they were a common feature of a lot of deals that were close to viable but needed additional capital while the business geared up to profitability. Caryn had plunked more than two million dollars in cash into a mezzanine loan for the Dryden Socket within the past six months. Thereby leaving herself short on her new practice offices when there were the inevitable and unavoidable delays in construction and start-up.