"All right, then, but what about if there are other suspects? How about that?"
"He finds some evidence, he'll look at them. But he won't go chasing down another motive, not until he's eliminated you. And that's no matter what I say or do."
"So I'm guilty until proven innocent?"
"To Juhle, probably."
"I thought it was supposed to be the other way round."
Hunt gave him a flat look. "You see much else in life that works the way it's supposed to, let me know, and I'll buy stock in it."
Gina put a hand on her client's arm. "Listen, Stuart, Juhle might not think so, but you are at least being considered innocent, which is why you're not in jail right now. They don't have enough proof, and that's the nut of it. And of course I'm going to communicate all of Caryn's relationships to the inspector, and he may follow up on some or all of them. I may even lodge a complaint about the course of the investigation thus far with the DA, who happens to be a friend of mine. Of course," she added, "that'll go nowhere, but it might be a fun exercise."
"So meanwhile, what am I supposed to do?"
Gina and Wyatt exchanged a look that might have been conspiratorial or skeptical. "Most people," Gina said in a relaxed tone, "wait it out. See what happens."
"Well, call me a pain in the ass," Stuart replied, "but that's what I've been doing the last couple of days, and any more of it doesn't really appeal to me."
A few minutes later, they'd moved downstairs to the living room and along to the question of the garage door. Stuart had typically brushed off Bethany's testimony that it had been him in his car and wanted to concentrate on the bare fact of somebody getting into his garage, concluding with what he had up to this moment always taken to be obvious. "But that means it had to be somebody we know, or that Caryn knew."
"Excuse me," Gina said, "but hasn't that been the assumption all along anyway? She was, after all, in the hot tub, naked."
"She always went in the hot tub naked," Stuart said. "But now I'm wondering. We don't know that whoever it was went in the hot tub with her, or even drank that other glass of wine. It might have been Caryn, who knocked the first glass off onto the deck where it broke. So she got out and cleaned up most of it. Then her killer showed up, snuck up and hit her with the bottle, then pushed her under. It didn't mean she was having an affair with him, or with anybody."
"That's true," Gina conceded.
"Maybe she wasn't," Wyatt agreed quickly. Stuart perhaps needed that belief, and Hunt was inclined to let him have it. "But let's go back to the garage door. You're saying Caryn must have known her killer because he had a device or some other way to open the garage door, which she'd presumably given him, is that it?"
"Right," Stuart said.
"Well no, sorry, but not necessarily," Hunt said. "Lots of cars, nowadays, they've got buttons in the visor or the roof and you can set them to the frequency of your garage door so you don't need the little box. So anybody who'd ever been around your garage-a meter reader, a tradesman, the gardener, the garbage man, anybody-could have essentially stolen your frequency if they wanted to."
"So you're saying maybe this TSNK guy…?"
"Not impossible," Hunt said. "Anybody."
Gina saw movement out the window and spoke up. "Here's Devin," she said.
Gina went to open the door and Juhle was one step inside, halfway through his greeting to her, when he stopped, glaring at Hunt. "Wyatt," he said with a measured calm, "what are you doing here?"
Hunt, standing with Stuart by the couch, shrugged. "Working too hard as usual." Starting off jovially, but when Juhle didn't respond, he said, "Gina had a computer question."
"So you've been on his computer?" Without waiting for a reply, his eyes now dark, Juhle spun back to Gina. "Did I dream telling you not to touch anything until I got here? Did you think that didn't include Wyatt?" Then back to Hunt. "How long have you been on this?"
Hunt shrugged again. "Gina called me and I drove right on out."
"I'm not talking this particular computer problem, Wyatt. You know that. I mean how long have you been involved in this case?"
"I just met him," Hunt said.
"Not what I asked," Juhle snapped.
But Gina stepped up into his space. "What are you getting at, Devin? I asked Wyatt to come out and look at Stuart's computer, see if he could tell where these threatening e-mails might have originated. That's all there is to it."
"No, it isn't. Wyatt's working for you while he's pumping me for information."
"No pumping was involved, Dev. You never asked. And for the record, I wasn't on anybody's clock. But while I'm on Stuart's case here, I've got to tell you this e-mail he's got is what I believe you inspectors would call a clue. And since you missed it and we're giving it to you so you don't wind up making a big mistake, maybe you could chill a bit on the accusations about whose side I'm on. I'm here for the same reason you are, Dev. Gina asked me. I think we'd all like to get a handle on who we're actually looking for. Caryn's killer. How's that?"
Juhle clearly still didn't like it. He threw a last malevolent glance at Hunt, another at Gina, even half-turned as though he would be going back out the door he'd just entered. But at last he got himself settled enough to talk. "So what have you actually got?"
Suddenly, though, and to everyone else's surprise, Stuart spoke up. "Before we get to that, Inspector," he said, "we should tell you about the garage door."
"What about it?"
Gina held out a flat palm, hoping to cut off her client. "Stuart…" "No," he said. "This is relevant. Wyatt was just telling us how anyone…"
"Stuart!" Gina's voice cut through the room, brooking no dissent. "I mean it. We don't want to hear it." "Maybe I do," Juhle said.
By now, Gina had moved up between the inspector and her client. "I'm sure you do, but you're not going to." She turned back to Stuart, making sure he was getting her message. Everything was strategy. Very little was truth. Let Juhle think that they'd found holes in his case, and let him convey that impression to the DA. "Now, Inspector," she continued, "I invited you out here to look at these e-mails. If you're interested, the computer's upstairs." She turned and started walking, and the men fell in behind her.
Hunt sat again at the keyboard and the rest of them huddled behind him in the small room. Hunt took them all back to the first e-mail. "And this was after what, again?" Juhle asked.
"An article in Sunset," Stuart replied. "Just recipes for cooking trout outdoors."
Juhle glanced briefly at the threatening e-mail. "Guy's obviously a nutcase."
"The point," Gina said, "is that it wasn't Stuart. He didn't send this."
"You got any way to prove that?"
From the console, Hunt spoke up. "That's the problem, Dev. We can't-"
But suddenly Stuart interrupted. "Excuse me, Gina. Permission to speak?"
She looked over at him. "Probably not. Not here, anyway."
"How about out there?" Stuart indicated the adjoining room. "It might be worthwhile."
"Okay." She spoke to the other men. "Give us a second, guys. Be right back."
Gina and Stuart were about five steps out of the room when Juhle started in. "I don't know if you've ever heard of it, Wyatt, but we've got this thing in law enforcement called obstruction of justice, where if you impede an investigation you can go to jail."
Hunt tapped idly at the keyboard. "Has somebody we know impeded an investigation?"