"No. It doesn't sound stupid. Actually, that sounds very interesting."
"Well, I don't know yet. I hope it will be. But I thought I'd come down and talk to somebody who was in the business, so to speak, and see if I could get a good place to start. You're not too busy, are you? I don't want to bother you."
The woman ostentatiously looked over Wyatt's shoulder, then turned around both ways and came back to him smiling. "I think I'll be able to squeeze you in," she said. "My name's Maggie Even. Long 'e.' And I wish it was Evans too, but it's just not. It's Maggie Even. When I was dating Jack, my husband, I used to tell all my friends, 'What I'm going out with him for-my plan is I'm going to get even.' And I did. Jack, I mean. Now it's my name too. Little did I know." She shook her head. "Anyway"-she put out her hand again- "Maggie."
"Wyatt."
"That's what you said."
"Just to let you know it hasn't changed." He grinned at her. They were now pals. "Anyway, I was hoping to get some record of the kinds
of stuff Mr. Conley does in the course of, say, his average month. Like fund-raising, or talking to groups-everything, really."
"Well," Maggie Even said, "we've got a little problem because I'm just a volunteer until they hire another full-time person and I'm pretty new here myself. But if you want to come around"-she indicated the hinged opening in the counter-"I'm pretty sure I could find a record of his appointments somewhere."
Thirty
Today's Special at Lou the Greek's was Salt-Baked Merides- oven-roasted baby smelt over rice, served with a searingly spicy sweet red sauce on the side. The consensus at Gina's table-herself, Hardy, Farrell and Jeff Elliott in his wheelchair-was that possibly because she had done essentially nothing to a fresh and delicious single ingredient, Chui had conceived and executed her best-ever Greek/Chinese meal. The novelty of the unexpectedly excellent food brought the table to silence for a moment, and this served to punctuate the end of the shoptalk that had been going around since they'd come over from the Hall-mostly about Gina's stellar performance at the morning session.
Now Jeff Elliott said, "So Gina, after we got off the phone this morning, I did a little research and Googled the Dryden Socket, then got Bill Blair on the phone before I came down here. He didn't seem all that happy to be hearing from me."
Gina put her fork down. Turning to her two partners, she quickly filled them in on the Kelley Rusnak suicide and where it either
intersected or not with Stuart's case. When she'd finished, she turned back to Jeff. "Talk to me."
"Well, first, I'm sure you're going to like this, but the main thing I had to understand is that no matter what I might have read online or anywhere else, 'There is nothing wrong with the product. It sailed through the clinical trials. It's already been used on hundreds, soon to be thousands, of happy patients. Ninety-nine percent of the alleged problems came in long after the trials were complete and the reports written. And those reports haven't been vetted yet either. So there's no story.' "
"So you thanked him for his time and hung up," Hardy said. "I really wanted to, but force of habit, danged if just one more question just kind of slipped out before I could stop it." "What was that?" Gina asked.
"I asked him if it were true that Kelley Rusnak and Caryn Dry-den had both been working on the socket. And whether or not their two deaths in the past two weeks might have been in some way connected to their work at PII. Or to each other."
"That would have been the part he didn't like," Farrell said.
Jeff nodded. "Not too much, you're right."
Gina normally would have tolerated if not joined the banter, but today she was all attention. "So what'd he say?"
"That Caryn had been murdered, and Kelley had been depressed and was a suicide. There was no connection between them."
"But Stuart told me she wasn't depressed at all."
"Have they done the autopsy on her yet?" Hardy asked. "If not, I'd call down to San Mateo and see if you can talk somebody into putting a rush on it."
"I've already done that this morning," Gina said with a resigned shake of her head. "I called the homicide DA and asked him to call the coroner. They were either going to get to it right away or else they weren't."
"I know somebody in the coroner's office down there," Farrell said. "No promises, but I could make a call."
"That'd be good," Gina said. "If Kelley's a murder, then she was killed when Stuart was in jail…"
"That's a good alibi for him," Jeff said.
"Better than that," Hardy said. "Two murders makes it way harder to pretend they're not related. Even for Abrams, I'd bet."
"That's a beautiful thought," Gina said, "but old Gerry's hung his hat on Stuart, Diz. He's not going to let another murder get in his way."
Jeff wanted to get back to his point. "But here's the thing about Blair, guys. I pushed a little bit about why he didn't see fit to mention anything about Caryn Dryden in his statement to the press about Kelley. He said, and I quote, 'Honestly, it never occurred to me.' "
"Did he say, 'At that particular point in time'?" Farrell asked. "I love it when they add that at the end."
Gina ignored Wes. "But that's got to be a lie," she said to Jeff.
"Obviously. And since I had him lying anyway," Jeff continued, "I thought I'd see if he had anything to say about his relationship with Caryn."
"Did he have one?" Gina asked. "Personal, I mean."
A shrug. "They showed up together a lot on Google. They evidently did a lot of show and tells for investors, and not just in Silicon Valley."
"They traveled together?" Gina asked. "Overnight?"
"At least. I didn't have the time to go looking for hotel reservations and airplane tickets, but there'll be a paper trail and maybe witnesses if you send somebody to look into it."
"So what did this guy Blair say?" Hardy wanted to know. "About their personal relationship?"
"They had none," Jeff said. "Naturally. Everything between them was pure business. She was an immensely talented inventor and scientist, and he was a marketing and sales guy. Although of course he was devastated by her death."
"Maybe we ought to send Wyatt down and see if we can get him to have a talk with this guy," Hardy said. "Find out where he was when both these women were killed, or killed themselves, if only to tell it to the judge in there."
"Not that that's going to matter too much at this stage," Farrell, ever helpful, added.
Struck by the phrase, Gina turned on him. "What do you mean by that, Wes?"
Farrell meant no offense. "I mean you'll have all these answers by the time you go to trial. You don't really need them for this hearing, where they're not going to make any difference anyway."
"Well," Gina said, "what if I'm not willing to concede that just yet? That this hearing is a lost cause, I mean. I killed them in there this morning."
"Yes, you did," Farrell agreed. "I never meant to imply that you didn't."
"But I'm going to lose anyway?"
Farrell held up his hands. "Hey, you might not."
Kymberly Gorman was smoking marijuana with her boyfriend, Trevor Stratton, in the Volkswagen camper van in which they'd lived for most of the past weeks, except for the few days after her mother's death when she'd stayed with her aunt Debra. The two young people were parked at almost the precise spot where Wyatt Hunt and Gina Roake had turned around during their jog that morning, in one of the parking spaces where Beach Street dead-ended beyond the Maritime Museum at Aquatic Park. Although in theory a two-hour parking limit applied, in practice it was a good place to lay low, since very few cops ever ventured down the foreshortened street, and even the meter maids typically avoided the tight turnaround at the end, preferring to shoot up Polk Street for easier pickin's. Kymberly and Trevor's parking place was also less than six blocks from the Gorman/Dryden home, currently unoccupied.