From her office, Gina placed a call to Wyatt Hunt, computer whiz. She was at Stuart's house a half hour later. "Is it possible Juhle missed this?"
They were in the kitchen, a room in which Stuart felt marginally comfortable. He was sitting on the counter by the sink. "Wouldn't he have told us if he saw it?"
"It may be why he hasn't arrested you."
"Well, there's one way to find out."
Gina placed the call from the kitchen phone and got the inspector on his cell phone. He was down in Hunters Point, interviewing another witness in a suspected gang slaying, but he wasn't making much headway-the homey ain't be 'membrin' nothin'. "No, I'm out on the stoop now, hoping nobody shoots at me. What's up, Gina?"
She told him, and read the latest message.
The bare fact of it made very little impact on the inspector. "It's an e-mail? No. We didn't download his files, but thanks for the idea."
"Devin, this looks to me like a threat to Stuart and maybe to his family. It says that they know where he lives. That it's the last warning."
"Are you sure he didn't go to some Internet cafe and mail it to himself?"
"Reasonably sure, yes. He got two other similar notes in the past year from the same sender. On the second one, he notified the authorities."
"When was that?"
"I don't know exactly. Four or five months ago."
"He could have been planning it back then. Set up the story."
Gina said, "Look, Inspector, I'm giving you the courtesy of this phone call. If you want to come here to look for yourself, my client would let you in without a warrant. It's your call."
"No. I'll be there. Don't erase anything. Don't touch anything. Give me an hour."
"One hour," Gina said, hanging up. She softened her tone to Stuart. "He was underwhelmed, but he'll be here. He doesn't think it's impossible you sent it to yourself."
Stuart's smile showed a few teeth. "They get an idea in their heads, they hold on to it pretty hard, don't they? Okay, so even forget this Thou Shalt Not Kill guy. Isn't Juhle looking at anybody else? Any other suspects?"
"I don't know. He should be. That's all I can say." She hesitated, looked out the window over his shoulder, came back to him, made an involuntary grimace.
"What are you thinking?" he asked. "Something."
"I'm thinking I'd like to see where it happened, if you could deal with it."
He took a beat, then said, "Sure," and boosted himself off the counter. "Out here."
The hot tub was still uncovered, still filled with water, although someone had turned it off, and the temperature was now tepid. They'd left the blackout blinds open, and the backs and sides of the neighboring homes and backyards were visible on all sides. Stuart dipped a hand into the water and stirred it.
Outside, the early autumn weather kept imitating summer. From a feeder by the back fence, birdsong punctuated the stillness. A smell of chlorine hung in the air, a hint of humidity. Stuart didn't turn around, but spoke quietly. "I'm starting to believe somebody drowned her. Somebody hit her on the head and pushed her under. I've got to find out who that was."
"We've talked about that, Stuart. That's the police."
A bitter laugh. "They're not motivated like I am." He turned back to her. "Now you want to ask: If I didn't love her anymore, why would it matter so much?"
"All right. That did occur to me."
"It's not so much Caryn. It's me. I'm the one who's going to have to live with the suspicion for the rest of my life, people thinking that I killed my wife. You think I want to look into my daughter's eyes and have her not be absolutely certain that I didn't do this? To say nothing of my friends, acquaintances, publishers. I can't have it. I won't have it." The small outburst seemed to settle something in him. "They're not locking me up. Whoever did this…"
"Whoever did it," Gina said, "will have made some mistakes, Stuart. When Juhle widens the net a little, he'll get to them."
"He's not looking. There's no net."
"There will be, though. I promise. It's only been two days and he's been spending his time eliminating you."
" Wasting his time eliminating me. And after four days, murders don't get solved, do they? Well, this one has to get solved." Stuart again put his hand into the lukewarm water. He kept it there, moving it slowly back and forth. "Okay," he said, as though he'd been arguing with himself and had reached a conclusion. "Okay, then."
Sixteen
Wyatt Hunt was upstairs in the small office, sitting at Stuart's computer. Gina and Stuart were packed in, standing behind him. "There's no way," Hunt was saying, "that you can identify where this came from."
"Can't we go to the server?" Stuart asked. "I mean, it's at Gmail dot com. Don't they have to have an account?"
"Sure, but what does that tell you? Nothing. There's no physical address. They probably signed up online, work out of a laptop. If it's in a public place, we could maybe locate the computer, but so what? They could be anywhere. But wait." Hunt held up a finger. "Another idea strikes. Hold on." His fingers danced over the keyboard. He stared at the screen, typed some more. Did it all again. Finally he pushed back, shaking his head. "Nope. An idea, but not a good one."
"What'd you do?" Gina asked.
"Googled 'TSNK.' Also 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' Other than Bible sites, no record of anything like it, as you can see here. And if there's
no record on Google, it doesn't exist. Maybe it is really just a lone crackpot, like you thought originally."
"But what's all this 'I know where you live'?"
A shrug. "Cheap terror tactics, that's all. They've written two of these before and done nothing, right? No attempt on you. The guy might be holed up in some cabin in Idaho or Maine or anywhere. Why should this time be any different?"
"This time," Stuart said, "my wife's dead. I think that's different enough."
"Of course," Hunt said. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking."
"It's all right," Stuart replied. "That seems to be going around. I wasn't thinking either the last few days. I'm only just starting to now." He looked over to Gina, back down at Hunt. "So what you're saying is that I could have done just what Juhle said, e-mailed myself from anywhere with this threatening stuff?"
"Essentially, right." Hunt swiveled halfway around toward the others. "Maybe if we found the actual computer this was e-mailed from, we could download the hard drive and prove the threat had come from that machine. But again, so what? We'd know who owned it. By itself, it wouldn't do us any good."
"Just to be clear, Wyatt," Gina said, "since we can't identify who sent it, Devin isn't going to be able to rule out Stuart on this, is he?"
"No. I don't think so."
"Wait a minute," Stuart said with some sharpness to Wyatt. "You know this guy?" "What guy?"
"Juhle. Who both of you are suddenly calling Devin." Hunt glanced up at Gina, shrugged. "Yeah. We go back. Why?" "Because maybe he needs somebody he trusts telling him that I didn't do this."
Hunt coughed, made a noise in his throat, and Gina waded into the edgy silence. "Um, that's not really the way it's played, Stuart."
"I don't give a damn about how it's played, Gina. This isn't a game, it's my life."
Hunt, recovering, said, "Okay, it's your life, but Devin doesn't trust anybody that much. Not me, not his wife, nobody. He's a cop, he follows the evidence."
"In spite of the fact that he's got none on me?"
Hunt's shrug was a little more elaborate this time. "You're the spouse, sir. The spouse usually did it. That's where he's got to start."