Faro was leaning over Abrams' desk, consulting his copy of the original receipt. "Yeah, but that's too early. He bought his gas and his Coke at four fifteen."
This wasn't an impediment to the assistant DA, who suddenly had a clue he might be able to use. Hands at his lips, Abrams was matter-of-fact. "So he hung out up here for a while, Len, trying to decide what to do. Maybe he just sat in his car."
"Maybe." Faro pulled at his goatee. "I don't suppose I need to tell you guys that if he did kill his wife, going back home was dumb. He drives back up to his cabin and nobody would have known. She'd probably still be sitting in that hot tub right now, and nobody the wiser."
Juhle shrugged and said, "Not to sound cliched about it, Len, but murderers have been known to return to the scene of the crime, make sure they didn't leave any clues laying around."
Faro wasn't going to fight about it. "I'm only making the point,
Dev."
Deep in his thoughts, Abrams held up a hand, cutting off any more discussion. "Let's stay on point here, guys. Gorman left his home at quarter to one, he was in Rancho Cordova at four fifteen. Devin, do you have his exact address up at, where was it?"
"Echo Lake. Why don't you just try that?"
Abrams typed again, and they all waited again. "Call it eighty miles even. One and a half hours."
"Uh-oh," Juhle said.
Abrams opened his eyes. "What?"
"One and a half hours from two o'clock is three thirty."
"Yes it is, Dev," Abrams said. "And this means?"
What it meant obviously had jacked Juhle up. He crossed the tiny office, knocked on the opposite bookshelf a couple of times, and then turned back with a light in his eye. "Okay, follow me here. He drives up from San Francisco after doing his wife, all right, none of us have any problem with him hanging around killing time in Rancho Cordova until he gets gas and heads back down, right?" Without waiting, he went on. "But the same is not true if he's coming down from Echo Lake. This situation, he's on his way home. He's not going to kill forty-five minutes or more before gassing up. He's going to stop for gas and continue on his way."
"Maybe he left later than two," Faro said.
"Maybe he did, but he said it was actually a little before. He's got an extra forty-five minutes that just plain doesn't work, even if we use his own timetable."
Finally, Abrams sat up straighter and stretched. "I like this," he said. "This a jury can understand. If he left Echo at two and didn't get to Rancho Cordova until four, unless he got a flat tire or there was some traffic problem-we'd better check with the Highway Patrol and nail that down-then what was he doing? Whereas if he left the city at one, he'd just wait around until he could put some space between him and the murder."
"That's it," Juhle said. "We get him to give us a sworn, clean and specific timetable, we can hang him on it." He looked at his forensics guy. "This doesn't sing for you, Len?"
Faro was back scratching at his beard. "No problem as far as it goes," he said. "But still no physical evidence. Unless I'm missing it, which I'm not."
Abrams flashed a disappointed glance at Juhle, clucked once, and said, "Len's a spoilsport, but he's not all wrong."
Juhle returned to the homicide detail to find the place unusually jumping. Normally, this time late on a weekday afternoon, a few bodies might be sitting at desks reviewing transcripts of interrogations, or writing up reports, or reading. Of the fifteen homicide inspectors in the unit, six would be a big number present at any one time. But Devin had heard the low-volume but electric buzz out in the hallway and he came in to pretty much a full house. There was a little bullpen area just inside the entrance to the room, next to the doorway to Lieutenant Lanier's office, perennially open but now strangely closed. A couple of steps in, Juhle stopped. "Dev!"
Darrell Bracco appeared from between the lockers that divided the room. With a quick come-on-in hand motion, he got Juhle moving forward again. Nodding around at his colleagues stuffed among the desks, Juhle threw a look toward his lieutenant's closed-up office.
"Hey, Darrell. What's going on? Marcel all right?"
"You didn't hear?"
"I guess not. What?"
"My old partner, Harlan Fisk? The supervisor? He got a tip at lunch that the Fab Five is on the way over here. They're gonna do Marcel. Is that perfect, or what? So till they get here, Sarah's in there keeping him tied up."
"What do you mean, they're going to 'do' Marcel?"
"The Fab Five, Dev, the Fab Five."
"Right. But my kids aren't teenagers yet. Are they some band? I don't know them."
Rolling his eyes, Bracco leaned in toward him. "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. They're going to do Marcel."
"What are they going to do with him?"
"Dev. Come on. Tell me you've never watched the show."
"Okay. I've never watched the show."
Overhearing the conversation, Emilio Thorsten butted in. "You gotta check it out, Dev. The show's a riot. These five gay guys, they find some prototypical straight-basically Marcel; I mean, he's perfect- who dresses wrong and wears the wrong shoes and glasses and lives in like a gym. And they fix him up. The house, the clothes, the look, the whole schmear."
"Gay guys do this? Why?"
"It's a TV show," Darrell said, "that's why. There's five of them. The Fab Five. They take some straight nerd and make him hip. Or more hip, anyway."
"And they're doing this to Marcel today?"
"Closing time, according to Harlan, who's never wrong. It's gonna be awesome."
Juhle had been in Homicide for six years and he'd seen worse attendance at mandatory call-ups. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he was more than a little out of the loop among his peers. Not only had he never seen the show, he obviously hadn't been part of the grapevine of communication today that had connected every other person in the detail. "They're going to come with like TV lights and a crew and surprise Marcel?" he asked.
"That's the idea."
"Then I've got a good one too," Devin said. "A good idea, I mean."
"What's that?" Bracco asked.
"Somebody better get Marcel's gun off him. He's going to blow their asses off."
Supervisor Harlan Fisk missed on this one. After about an hour of progressively more disappointed waiting, Fisk called Bracco and told him his source had gotten it wrong. Fifteen minutes after that, six fully dispirited homicide teams had finally gone grumbling out of the detail and were on their way back to their beats, to their witness interviews, to their snitches, or to their homes. Marcel Lanier's door was open again, and the lieutenant appeared to have remained unaware the whole time of the gathering of his troops and their subsequent dispersal.
Devin Juhle had subpoenaed Caryn Dryden's home telephone records, but he wouldn't have those numbers for a couple more days. In the meantime, he sat at his desk with a list of the numbers he'd taken from her cell phone, which had an easily accessible record of the last ten calls she'd both placed and received. He punched in one of them.
"Hello." A young woman's voice.
"This is Inspector Juhle of San Francisco Homicide. Who am I speaking to, please?"
"This is Kym Gorman. Just a second." He heard the voice speaking to someone in the room with her. "It's the police." Then a man's voice. "This is Stuart Gorman. Who is this?"
"Mr. Gorman, this is Inspector Juhle."
"Jesus, Inspector, don't you guys ever give it up? Why are you harassing my daughter?"
"I'm not. I'm calling numbers from your wife's cell phone. Your daughter called her twice over the weekend and she called her back once. Did you know that?"