"And what were you going to do if the garage didn't open?"
She shrugged. "I knew you and Juhle and some other cops would be there, Wyatt. I underestimated the danger, okay, but only because I didn't plan on Jedd getting so physical so fast. But everything else was conjecture, something I knew but couldn't prove. Without a way to open that garage door, Jedd walks. So what I did was the only thing I could have done. I had to take the risk."
"I hate it when it gets to that."
"Me too."
"So," Wyatt asked, "you think you could eat something?" "Maybe later. For now, maybe I'll just close my eyes a little longer. Would that be okay?" "It would be fine."
Mostly now, he went by the name of Walden.
Stuart Gorman's release from jail had been big news right through the weekend, and Walden wanted to give the story time to cool down before he took his action. It wouldn't be wise to have hordes of journalists or even simply the curious lounging around in the street in front of Stuart's house, keeping tabs on the celebrity. But Walden didn't want it to be too long afterward, either, so that people might have already forgotten Stuart, who he was exactly, what he stood for.
There would be one perfect window of opportunity and now, two weeks to the day after the Friday that Stuart returned to his home, Walden considered the timing to be ideal. As far as targets went, Stuart had gone from adequate, back when he was merely a moderately popular outdoor writer, to superb-a high-visibility media presence. If you were ever really going to get your message out there, to make a long-term difference, you needed a vehicle like Stuart Gorman. Now, although probably for not too much longer, Stuart was as close to a household name as he was ever going to get.
Stuart, Walden had discovered in the past week, was pretty much a creature of habit. Every morning he seemed to wake up at or near the same time; every morning he came outside and picked up his morning newspaper off his steps. Last night, the lights had gone off when they usually did, around ten thirty. So he was probably on his regular schedule. If he was slightly off, Walden could always just come by tomorrow, or the day after that. It was a limited window of opportunity, true, but a day or so one way or the other wouldn't make any difference.
Now, just short of seven o'clock in the morning, Walden sat at the curb, peering through the fog at the front door of Stuart Gorman's house. His shotgun lay halfway across the passenger seat, its muzzle down on the floor of the stolen Honda Accord. Walden had already rolled the passenger window down. There was very little traffic on the street, and no pedestrians.
Suddenly, the light came on over the front door, and Walden turned the ignition key, then grabbed for the shotgun. At the house, the door opened and Stuart, with a coffee mug in his hand, started down the steps. One. Two. Three.
The newspaper was on the sixth step down. Walden had had a little trouble seeing it, making sure it was already there when he'd driven up. He'd even brought another paper to throw onto the steps, just in case. But no, it had been there.
Four. Five.
Walden raised the barrel of the gun. Six.
He pulled the trigger.
Thirty-eight
CityTalk
By Jeffrey Elliott
The police shootout and killing yesterday at the Sausalito home of San Rafael High School biology instructor Enos Crittenden added yet another bizarre chapter to the ongoing story that began last September with the hot tub drowning of Dr. Caryn Dryden. The drama connected to this series of events continued through the assassination attempt on Dr. Dryden's husband, the outdoor writer Stuart Gorman, later in the fall by a shadowy figure only tentatively identified at the time variously as "Walden" or as an e-mail presence who signed off with the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill."
Also connected to this extraordinary chain of events has been the decertification by the FDA of the Dryden (Hip Replacement) Socket, several dozen subsequent lawsuits against its manufacturer, Polymer Innovations, Inc. (PII), the bankruptcy filing of PII and the suicide in February of that company's chief executive officer, William Blair. With the trial of former California Assemblyman Jedd Conley for the murders
of Dr. Dryden and Kelley Rusnak, her lab assistant at PII, scheduled to begin next week, the story's eventual ramifications may endure for years to come.
Yesterday's developments began about a week ago when one of Crittenden's students hacked into a private e-mail site linked to his regular teacher's website. Discovering threatening letters written to several prominent public figures, as well as links to other websites dedicated to environmental terrorism, the student informed first his parents, and then the police. When authorities appeared at San Rafael High to question Crittenden, he fled, leading police on a chase back to his home, where he opened fire on them. He held the SWAT team at bay for nearly an hour before a sniper bullet to his chest ended the standoff.
Crittenden, 34, had a lengthy history of activism on animal rights and other "green" issues, although no criminal record. In his basement, police discovered a large cache of weapons and ammunition as well as several boxes of literature on various environmental issues. Much more threateningly, they discovered over 500 pounds of the fertilizer ammonium nitrate and several gallons of the fuel oil nitro-methane, ingredients that had been used in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. According to Homeland Security spokesman Marshall Brice, plans on Crittenden's website indicated that he was planning to bomb a "large target" in San Francisco to protest the sale of meat and meat products. (Sources close to the investigation, speaking under condition of anonymity, have told this reporter that the intended target was the Ferry Building.)
It also appears certain from books, newspaper clippings, e-mails, and other material discovered in Crittenden's basement, that it was he, identifying himself as Walden, who had shotgunned and critically wounded Stuart Gorman in the days following the outdoor writer's release from jail after charges that he had drowned his wife had been dropped in favor of Assemblyman Conley.
In a chilling bit of irony, Mr. Gorman, who professes himself completely recovered from the assassination attempt (although he still walks with a pronounced limp), will be signing copies of new paperback editions of his three books, Reflections on a Lake, The Mysterious Stream, and Healed by Water, at 7:00 this Friday night at Book Passage in the Ferry Building.
Gina waited back among the shelves until the other customers had gone. There had been close to a hundred of them. Stuart remained seated alone at the small writing table, pulling copies of his books over from the pile on his left and signing them one by one, methodically, moving them to a growing pile on the right as he finished. Finally, she came up to him. "Hey."
He broke a smile. "Hey, yourself. I'd get up and give you a hug, except I'm still having a little trouble with the hip. How are you, Gina?"
"I'm good, Stuart. How about you?"
"Getting by. It's been a bit of a year, in case you haven't noticed."
"Yeah. I read about the wedding, too. It's kind of what made me decide to come down and say hi. That and Jeff's article reminding me."
"I'm glad you did." He shrugged. "It's weird. I can't seem to avoid making the news anymore. Beware of what you wish for." "I never thought you wanted fame."
"No. I never wanted money. Fame was all right. Fame opens doors. It's okay."
"And how's Debra?"
"She's good." He shrugged, perhaps with some embarrassment. "We're good. I never thought I'd marry my wife's sister, but there you go. I never thought I'd get tried for murder, either."
"You never did," Gina said.
He shrugged. "Close enough. Anyway, the whole Debra thing. She's been good with Kymberly. I never thought I'd say that, either. I'm starting to think there might be hope for her. Maybe even me getting shot wasn't all a bad thing. It made her realize she could lose me too, and she finally didn't want that. She's even back at school."