They sat across from each other at a round, wooden table in a kitchen that was considerably more well-equipped than Juhle's own. A bank of windows in the eastern wall admitted a bright line of sunlight up where it met the ceiling and reflected off the surfaces of the bright copper pans that hung from the opposite wall. Juhle had faced Gorman so that he wouldn't have to watch the crime-scene techs and assistants to the medical examiner as they passed through the living room and out to the back porch, where Caryn Dryden's naked body still lay on the wooden slats of the deck next to the hot tub.

They were just getting started. Juhle had his small tape recorder concealed and running in his pocket. To any homicide cop, the death of a spouse always entails initial suspicion of the surviving partner. When husbands got killed, you looked first to the wife, and vice versa. And even though the death of Caryn Dryden might, from what he now knew, be ruled a suicide, the possibility of murder lurked somewhere in the back of Juhle's mind.

But the last thing Juhle wanted was to raise a flag with the husband at this point. He kept his questions innocuous. "Did you get any writing done?"

"No." Gorman ran a workingman's hand down a ravaged cheek. "I might as well tell you. The last time I saw Caryn was here at the house on Friday afternoon. She told me she wanted a divorce. That's all I could think about while I was up there."

"How'd you feel about that, getting a divorce?"

Gorman's gaze went off again, then came back. "You married, Inspector?"

"I am."

"You love your wife?" Juhle nodded. "Most of the time." "Me too. Except when I hated her." "That happen a lot?"

"Most of this weekend, to be honest with you." "So you didn't want to divorce her?"

Gorman said, "The word-we called it the D-word-it wasn't something I allowed myself to entertain. I figured once you're saying it out loud to yourself, it starts having its own reality. Caryn and I were together and committed and that was that, I thought, for better or worse. So I never wanted to give myself that option."

Juhle nodded. "Okay. But she wanted out?"

"And got herself out, didn't she?"

Juhle leaned back in his chair. "You think she killed herself?" "That's what it looks like to me."

"By drowning? That's a reasonably difficult trick to pull off by yourself."

If Gorman's shrug struck Juhle as chillingly nonchalant, his actual words were perhaps colder. "She was a doctor. You check, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a drowning after all. She kept a stash of Vicodin upstairs. Take some pills, have a few drinks, go sit in the hot tub turned up to one-oh-five. Adios."

Absorbing this intelligence, Juhle felt all of his senses sharpen. Stuart Gorman had just supplied him with chapter and verse on a perfectly plausible scenario for Caryn's death-one that, if adopted by the medical examiner and the police, would remove him, the husband, from any suspicion. If he'd been involved in his wife's death, this was a slick, high-stakes gamble-smart and dangerous.

"Can we go back," Juhle said, "to how you found her?"

Gorman indicated the room behind him. "I already told those guys. What's it matter?"

Because now I've got you on tape, Juhle thought to himself. And in fact, it probably wouldn't really matter, but Juhle's aim was to keep him talking. "Just making sure we get the record straight. You've said you got here a little after six and parked in your garage under the house…?"

"All right." He sighed. "I expected her to be up by then. She usually is on Monday. But the house was quiet, so I figured she was sleeping in and I thought I'd let her. Maybe she'd had the kind of weekend I'd just had. So I make a pot of coffee and go out to get the paper. I finish them both and it's still quiet. I don't hear the shower yet, so I go upstairs and she's not in bed. It's still made. So I figure maybe she took off someplace for the weekend herself."

"Where would she have gone?"

"I don't know. Her sister's, maybe. Or up to visit…" The first real sign of distress. Gorman brought a hand to his forehead. "Oh,

Christ. Kym. Our daughter. She's up at college in Portland. She just started a couple of weeks ago. Oh, Jesus. This is going to destroy her. I've got to call her."

Juhle didn't want to stop in the middle of his interview. He said, "Are you sure you don't want to let us do that for you? I can call the Portland police and have somebody with her."

Juhle watched Gorman pull himself heavily to his feet and cross to the phone on the kitchen counter. "No." There he paused again, his hands flat on the counter, all of his weight on them. His head flopped forward and Juhle heard the deep exhale of a sigh. "Oh, Jesus," he said again. He picked up the receiver, brought it to his ear, then placed it back down on the counter. "I've got to do this myself."

Juhle left him like that, working up the strength to make the call.

Leaving the kitchen, the inspector looked left through the large, high-ceilinged living room. Beyond the cop stationed at the front door, he could see that, sure enough, a couple of Minicams and their news crews had arrived. He wasn't about to talk to them, not at this stage anyway. Instead he turned to his right and walked through a leather-couch kind of book-lined den and out onto the enclosed deck.

The body lay covered now with a sheet that still clung in wet places. A police photographer was snapping pictures of the hot tub and deck. Behind him, some ME assistants were wheeling a collapsible gurney through the house. Two other officers in uniform were down the steps in the backyard, conversing on the tiny fenced lawn.

In shirtsleeves, Lennard Faro, lean and dark with a well-trimmed black goatee, was a lab specialist with the Crime Scene Investigation unit. Seeing Juhle at the back door, he closed his cell phone and walked over.

"He break yet? The husband?" Faro asked.

"He wasn't here. He was up in the mountains. You're saying this is a homicide?"

A shrug. Faro wasn't going to commit until the medical examiner had drawn his conclusions and he himself had spent some time in the lab. Still, he said, "She's got an impressive, and I'd guess recent, bump over her right ear."

"Enough to kill her?"

"We won't know until the autopsy, but I'd say it's not impossible." "How long has she been dead?"

Faro frowned. "The hot tub's going to screw that calculation up for a while. Nobody's going to know until we get cutting on her. Body temp's way up, but that's what you'd expect when the water's still at one-oh-five."

The number struck a chord. "Exactly one-oh-five?"

"Pretty close. The thermometer's still… why? That a magic number?"

"No. It's nothing." Juhle didn't want to start a rumor. He'd get what he could, then see where it led him. "Any sign of what caused the bump?"

"Maybe. We found some broken glass, plus one big piece, up against the bottom of the tub. Some still have a whiff of wine on 'em. Another empty glass was in the sink. The rest of the broken glass and an empty bottle was in the compactor in the kitchen."

"So she was drinking?"

"Maybe. Blood alcohol will tell."

"The husband said she's got Vicodin upstairs in their bedroom. He thinks it's a suicide."

Faro pulled at his goatee. "She hit herself on the head?"

"Maybe she fell first. Slipped on the wet wood."

Faro was still scratching at his beard, without comment, as the two uniforms came up the four steps and onto the deck. The older one-thirty pounds on the wrong side of healthy, with jowls and a walrus mustache-introduced himself as Captain Allen Marsten from Central Station on Vallejo. The other man was Jerry Jarrett. Marsten told Juhle that they had been the first ones to arrive after the 911 call. He was just getting off his graveyard shift when the call had come in.