"Would they have had an opportunity to get together here?" "What do you mean?"
"I mean physically get together. Conduct an affair. Here in the hospital."
Maybe Wyatt was going too fast, but he had Cindy talking about an uncomfortable topic and he didn't want to give her time between his questions to think about whether or not she should answer them. She kept twirling her paper cup in front of her, avoiding Hunt's eyes. "Well… I mean, it's a building full of rooms with beds in them.
What do you think?"
"So did you notice a change in Caryn's behavior over the summer?" "A little bit, maybe. But mostly I just thought she was feeling all gung ho about her clinic and her invention-you know about that?"
Hunt nodded.
"Except then both those things got complicated again." "She talked to you about them?"
"A little bit. The last couple of weeks she was pretty uptight, so I asked her."
"And what did she say?"
"That it was just business stuff. Maybe she'd spread herself too thin."
"Did she say anything specific about McAfee?" "Not that I remember." "How about Doctor Pinkert?" "No," she said. "No what, Cindy?"
"No, I don't think they were personally involved. Bob, maybe. Doctor Pinkert, I'd have to say no." With that, Cindy broke out of her uneasy trance. She stopped turning her cup, she glanced at the clock on the wall, double-checked it with her watch. "Uh-oh. I really should be getting back to my station." She pushed her chair back and started to get up.
"Could you do one or two more questions?"
With a small sigh, she settled back into her chair. "Just a couple, though. Okay?"
"Okay. Thank you. You kept her book. Was that just for her medical appointments and surgeries?"
"Mostly."
"But you'd have to know about her other activities so you avoid scheduling conflicts, right?" "Sure. Of course."
"So is there anybody else she saw on a regular basis? That was in her life, if you will."
"Well, you mean all that stuff down the Peninsula? There was Mr. Blair at PII, the president, you know. And Kelley, her lab assistant, and Mr. Furth, who was her broker. She liked him, I know."
"Mr. Furth?"
"Yes. She thought he was really hot. I mean, she joked about it." She brought her hand up to her mouth. "But I probably shouldn't say that, should I? I don't mean she was having an affair with him. She just thought he was cute."
"Cute, maybe, but with a good alibi, so you don't have to worry about getting him in trouble." However, at her mention of Kelley Rusnak, Wyatt felt he owed Cindy some information in return for all of her cooperation. "This is not good news, but I should probably tell you. Maybe you've already heard, but Kelley, Caryn's assistant, apparently killed herself late last week."
The young woman's mouth hung open, her eyes flat. The fact nearly decked her.
"There's no apparent connection to Caryn," Wyatt continued, "at least that we've heard about yet. But it's a pretty big coincidence, if nothing else."
Finally, Cindy found her voice again. "She wasn't murdered too, then?"
"Apparently not," Wyatt said. "Sleeping pills."
"Man!" Cindy was shaking her head in disbelief. "I don't like this. This is too weird."
"Nobody likes it, Cindy. But we don't know what it means, if anything."
"Well, it's got to mean something, don't you think? She didn't just randomly kill herself a couple of days after Caryn for no reason, did she?"
"We don't know, Cindy. We just don't know. You'd think there might be some connection, but we don't know what it is. But while we're still on PII, maybe you can tell me something about Jedd Conley?"
"Who?"
"Jedd Conley. Assemblyman from San Francisco. Evidently he was looking into some of the issues with PII for Caryn. Do you know if they talked a lot? Or met up somewhere?"
Still obviously shaken by the news about Kelley Rusnak, Cindy took a beat before she said, "I don't really even know the name. He's not in my book." She looked into Wyatt's face. "God, I still can't believe about Kelley."
"I know."
Cindy took a deep breath, let out a long sigh. "Wow." After a long moment of reflection on the tragedy, suddenly she remembered to check her watch. "Oh God," she said, "I've really got to get back to work."
While he was at Parnassus, Wyatt took the opportunity to go down one floor and see if he could get a minute with Dr. Michael Pinkert. Even though no one seemed to consider him as a fitting candidate for Caryn's lover, the fact remained that he saw quite a bit of her and that she thought enough of him to invite him to join her and McAfee as a co-equal third partner in their clinic. So it would seem on the face of it that he could have had no motive to kill Caryn, since she was the one fighting McAfee for his inclusion in the clinic and its profits.
In fact, though, Wyatt realized that Pinkert fit as perfectly as any of the other possible suspects into Gina's theory of the case-that she was in the hot tub with her lover and took that moment to tell him of a decision she had come to that would have struck him, at the very least, as an immense personal betrayal. Something that perhaps would have a profound financial impact as well and that might, in fact, ruin his life entirely.
It took no imagination at all for Wyatt to hear Caryn telling Pinkert that she'd decided McAfee was right. They couldn't afford to take him on. So she reluctantly was withdrawing her offer to him as well as her physical favors. If, added to this, Pinkert also suffered from the neurosis of the month-chronically low self-esteem anyway because of a weight problem-and had become infatuated with Caryn, only to be summarily dumped after all the financial and personal promises he'd made to her, the risks he'd taken for her, Hunt had no doubt that there was plenty of motive here for murder.
Wyatt's luck and timing couldn't have been better. Pinkert was between surgeries, in his office. When his scheduling person told him that there was someone who wanted to talk to him about Caryn Dryden, he came right out and brought Wyatt back into his office with him.
"Sorry about the accommodations," Pinkert said. Besides the doctor's own chair by his tiny desk, the only place to sit was on the paper-covered examination table.
"No problem." Wyatt boosted himself up onto it. "I appreciate your seeing me without an appointment."
"If it's about Caryn, I'm going to be available if it's possible," he said. "I'm still in shock, if you want to know the truth. I've already talked with the police, so you must be with Stuart's team."
"That's right. That's not a problem for you?"
"Not at all. Why would it be?"
Wyatt shrugged. "You were close to Caryn. If you thought Stuart killed her, maybe you wouldn't want to help out his defense."
But Pinkert brushed that off. "Not a problem. I find that if you tell the truth, things tend to sort themselves out. Now, how can I help you?"
Physically, Pinkert came as advertised. Probably closer to fifty years old than to forty, he needed to lose some serious weight. And yet he didn't strike Wyatt as obese so much as soft-a man who because he'd always been the class geek and always studied had possibly never done a lick of hard exercise in his life, and whose sedentary nature had gradually caught up with him. The handshake outside had been weak, with the skin of his hand feeling almost bloated, stretched over too much flesh, as were his cheeks and the folds in his face around his protuberant eyes. His lips were outsize too-purplish, wet and swollen, though this didn't appear to be a function of fat but of heredity, which made Hunt wonder, since the trait was singularly unattractive. He would have thought that people with those lips would have had more significant trouble finding a mate than their competitors, and that over time they would have selected themselves out of the gene pool.