"I'm listening."
"Well, the plain fact is that by the time we got my people there this morning, she was in full rigor, meaning she'd been dead at least an hour."
"One hour? I thought-"
"I know what you thought-that rigor kicks in at about two hours. But the heat speeds it up and it can be well advanced in an hour."
"Which would have given the husband plenty of time." "Maybe it would have. 'Cept for one thing." "What's that?"
For an answer, Strout reached out and grabbed Caryn's arm by the wrist, lifting it to bend at the elbow. When he let it go, it fell back down to the table. "The rigor's pretty well passed, as you can see. Time we got her in here and on the table, which was eight forty-three exactly, it had already got to where you could move her joints if you exerted some pressure. So full rigor, which is from about hour three to hour eight, was over. And that makes the latest time of death at twelve forty-three, or sometime the hour before."
"What about her body temperature?"
Strout shook his head. "Useless here, I'm afraid. She cooked up to right around one-oh-five. Her core temp when my staff arrived at her house was a hundred and three. When she got here it was still over a hundred. You want, you can put on some gloves and get a feel for where she's at right now. Go ahead."
"I'll pass, John, thanks."
"Well, suit yourself." He put his own rubber-gloved hand into the cavity he'd cut below her chest, and nodded as though verifying something to himself. "Damn close to what you and me are right now," he said. "My guess is she was in the tub most of the night, and that agrees with the time of death we're talking about."
Juhle folded his arms and tried to rub some life into them. "So she didn't drown?"
"You cold, Inspector? We could get you a lab coat. No?"
"I'm fine, thanks."
"Can't let it get too warm in here. You know what I'm sayin'? But to answer your question. Yes, she did drown. Probably got knocked out first, then held under the water. But definitely drowned."
"The blow to the head? Would it have killed her if she didn't drown first?"
"No. My guess is somebody pushed her down and held her. Probably didn't take thirty seconds. And, of course, she probably couldn't put up much of a fight. But it's going to be a hell of a thing to prove."
Juhle frowned. "Why's that?"
Strout lovingly ran his rubber-gloved thumb over the shaved contusion. "Well, this area around the fracture we're looking at. You can see it's got some swelling, which means blood flowed to it after she got it. Any good defense attorney is going to say that she just banged her head sometime before she hopped in the tub, and there's no real solid way anybody's gonna prove she didn't. And by the way, her blood alcohol was point one one, so she was legally drunk, plus she had what looks on the first scan like she had some opiate on board…"
"Vicodin," Juhle said.
Strout shrugged. "Don't know yet, but could be. The point is, she could have just passed out from the wine and drugs and heat and slipped under the water and drowned. No way to prove she didn't."
"So you're not going to call it a homicide?"
Strout knew the game intimately, and his enjoyment of it played on the features of his face. "Well, it's a homicide, you know, until I rule otherwise. And from what I'm seeing here, with this bump, I'm not going to call it suicide. So the door's still open for you anyway."
"But you're not ready to call it a homicide?" Juhle broke an easy grin. "I'd buy you a nice lunch at Lou's."
"Can't. Sorry. Not there yet. If it was a murder, and just between us I'm thinkin' it probably was, you got yourself a tough row to hoe. Guy did a hell of a good job, just speakin' from a professional point of view. Gonna be damn hard to prove a righteous murder since I can't swear on the stand that it even was one. They'll ask me if it could have been an accident or even a suicide, and I'm gonna have to tell them yes. And that's not what you want to hear, is it?"
"Okay, but here's the other image I can't seem to get out of my mind."
After he left Strout, Juhle had stopped upstairs on the third floor where the DAs worked, and in particular the cramped office of an assistant district attorney named Gerry Abrams. Juhle was seated in the uncomfortable wooden chair behind the desk of Gerry's office mate, who was in court for the afternoon. "Stuart Gorman gets home at the ungodly morning hour of what? Six o'clock, six thirty, somewhere in there, right? You ever start a drive at two a.m.? Me? Never. Anyway, he putzes around for a while, goes upstairs and sees the bed is empty, then goes down and out to the hot tub and finds his wife. You with me?"
Abrams, feet up on his desk, hands templed at his mouth, opened his eyes and inclined his head about an inch. He was paying close attention. He made a circle in the air with his index finger, indicating that Juhle should keep talking.
"Okay, so he pulls her out of the tub and when the first cops arrive, he's doing CPR on her." Juhle stopped. "Get it?" he asked.
Abrams opened his eyes again. "What's the problem with that? If he knows CPR, he's going to try…"
But Juhle held out his palm. "Not so fast, Tonto. The problem, according to what I just heard from Strout, is that this would have been while she was still in absolutely full rigor. She was stiff as a board. And I don't care how much experience somebody has with seeing dead people. Even if it's your first time, you're not going to mistake a body that's already stiffened up with somebody who's got a chance to get resuscitated."
"Probably true." Abrams' eyes flicked the corners of the room. "And the point is?"
"The point," Juhle said, "is that Gorman obviously had to know his wife was dead. How could she not be? He was putting on a show for when the guys from Central Station answered the emergency call and showed up. They come in and see him doing CPR… you see what I'm saying? He looks like he's trying to help, not like he killed her."
"Maybe he just panicked and was really trying to save her." "Gerry, she'd been dead underwater for six hours. This isn't like a close call."
"In real life, maybe not. But it's colorable, as they say, to a jury. If I'm defending him, I can hear myself: 'Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in the intense emotion of finding his beloved wife of twenty years dead in the hot tub, Mr. Gorman couldn't think of any other response than to try and breathe some life back into her, even if it seemed impossible. He loved her so much, maybe that love could produce a miracle. There was literally nothing else he could do.' " Abrams spread his hands. "This flies on gilded wings, Dev. Two or three out of your twelve are going to completely accept it, no problem."
«t v j?
"I can't."
"Well, of course not. It's ridiculous on the face of it. So since when has that been a reason not to make an argument to a jury?" Abrams finally brought his feet to the floor and pulled himself up in his chair, elbows on his desk. "How's his alibi?"
"He says he was on the road, driving down from Echo Lake, a little southwest of Tahoe. Leaving, as I believe I've mentioned, at two o'clock because he couldn't sleep."
"So he could have left at say, eight the night before, and who would know?"
"Right. Nobody."
"So you think it's him?"
While he'd been talking, Juhle had straightened out a paper clip and now he was bending it around his finger. "I'll tell you what I got in some kind of order and then you tell me. First, she'd told him just Friday that she wanted a divorce. Second, she made a ton of money- I mean, evidently a large ton-and now it's all his, although he's never really cared much about money."
"No," Abrams said. "Me neither."
"Few are so shallow," Juhle agreed. "Then the CPR thing. Except really for truly, it doesn't strike me that he's in any kind of mourning. Their daughter being hurt by all this, okay, that got to him. But the wife? They were over anyway."
"You got all that from him? From Gorman?"
"Most of it. Not the CPR. But everything else, horse's mouth. Finally, he plants this scenario with Vicodin and alcohol and a hot tub with a temperature of exactly a hundred and five degrees, which he just happens to mention to me in case I needed to have a theory for how she died. And which, p.s., fits the facts perfectly."