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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Turow, Scott, author.

  Title: Suspect / Scott Turow.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2022.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022019464 | ISBN 9781538706329 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781538726587 | ISBN 9781538740057 | ISBN 9781538740064 | ISBN 9781538740071 | ISBN 9781538706350 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3570.U754 S97 2022 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019464

  ISBN: 9781538706329 (hardcover), 9781538706350 (ebook), 9781538726587 (large print), 9781538740057 (signed edition), 9781538740064 (special signed edition), 9781538740071 (special holiday signed edition)

  E3-20220713-DA-PC-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Something Weird

  2. The Chief

  3. The Weird Guy Next Door

  4. Tonya

  5. Another Strange Thing

  6. I’m Like a Lot of Women

  7. I Ring Tonya

  8. The Hearing Begins

  9. Where Is TWO going?

  10. The Cross of Walter Cornish

  11. It Takes Me Two Days to See Tonya

  12. Where Does TWO Head After His Workout?

  13. My Nights at the Chief’s

  14. Primo Takes the Stand

  15. I Don’t Have the Greatest Luck

  16. Shooting Dad

  17. Frito

  18. The Commissioners Confer

  19. Rik Is Right

  20. Koob Comes Back

  21. Standstill

  22. I Am Waiting for Koob When Tonya Calls

  23. In His Cowboy Boots and Blue Jeans

  24. For Advice

  25. Squirrel Hill North

  26. Koob Materializes

  27. This Has to Be the Dude

  28. Time Has Laid a Thick Hand on Her

  29. After I Leave the Chief’s

  30. Dead End

  31. The FBI Interrogation of Walter Cornish

  32. You Have It Wrong

  33. The Chief Decides

  34. Walter Loves Spilling

  35. As Soon as I Enter My Apartment

  36. The Session with the Bureau Techs

  37. The Meet

  38. Sitting on My Ratty Love Seat

  39. For a Few Days Nothing Happens

  40. By 10:30 Friday Night

  41. We Got a Little Bit of Ruh-ro

  42. The Greenwood Sheriff’s Police Arrive

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Scott Turow

  For Julian and Stacee

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  Suspect

  verb

  sə'spekt

  1. to believe something is probable without certain proof

  //I suspect she is telling the truth

  2. to doubt or distrust

  //I suspect his motives

  noun

  'səs'pekt

  a person thought to be possibly guilty of wrongdoing

  //She is a suspect in the investigation

  adjective

  'səs'pekt

  doubtful or questionable

  //His explanation is suspect

  1. Something Weird

  There is something weird with the dude next door to me,” I tell Rik. Across the conference room table, his small, weary eyes rise reluctantly from the file he’s reviewing. His brain seems to chase after my words for a second, then he hits me with a sneaky little grin.

  “Oh, I get it,” I say. “‘Look who’s talking,’ right? But he’s weird. Maybe not me-weird, but he’s strange.”

  “You mean he doesn’t have a nail through his nose?”

  “Ha,” I answer. It isn’t even in today. And it isn’t even real, just old Goth jewelry I bought used, the head and blunted point of a framing nail worn as separate studs on each side. It’s been kind of my trademark look for years now. But Rik says I might as well hang one of those road signs around my neck that warns, ‘Sharp Curve Ahead.’ Before I started here two years ago as the investigator in his law office, I promised to ghost the nail when I’m doing interviews or meeting clients. In fact, because Rik is so stressed about this case, I’ve put on one of my three dresses, a shapeless blue sheath whose long sleeves hide some of my most outrageous ink.

  “You can mock me,” I say, “but something’s up with this guy. He moved in like a month ago and he doesn’t talk to anybody. He has no visitors. He doesn’t go to work. The inside walls in that building are like those Japanese screens, but it’s been weeks since I heard anything from next door. It’s like he’s one of those silent monks—no voices, no phone, no music. He doesn’t own a car, as far as I can see. And he’s never even cleaned out his mailbox from the prior tenant. The post lady has to dump his mail on the floor, and he walks right over it. Just a very weird dude.”

  Rik says, “He sounds like a guy who wants to be left alone. Which means you should leave him alone.”

  “I have a creepy feeling about him,” I answer.

  Rik holds up a soft hand.

  “Pinky, please,” he says. “We’ve got ten minutes before our first real meeting with this client. Let’s make a good impression.”

  The case has been breaking the Internet—days of headlines in various papers and even a few national hits on the gossipy TV shows. Our client, the chief of police here in Highland Isle, has been accused by three officers of demanding sex in exchange for promotions on the force—‘sextortion’ as a couple grocery-store tabloids have labeled it. A complaint before the local Police and Fire Commission, ‘P&F’ as it’s called, is asking for Chief Gomez to be fired. Worse, the United States Attorney has launched a federal grand jury investigation, which could even mean jail time. The Chief is in deep.

  As Rik is rereading the file, I say, “I just can’t figure this dude. I mean, he goes out once every day around noon with his gym bag. And he grabs some carryout at dinner. Seven days a week, same same. So what’s his deal? Is he stalking somebody? Is he in witness protection?”

  Glancing up again, Rik clearly can’t even remember what I’m talking about. You might call Rik and me family, depending on how you’re counting. His dear dead mom, Helen, married Pops, my grandfather Sandy Stern, not long after I was born. As I remember Rik from my childhood, he was this uber-nerdy chubby college student, still super messed-up after his parents’ divorce, who managed to flunk out of Easton College by not attending a single class for forty-nine straight days. Even when he got it together enough to go back, he drifted through college and barely made it into law school.

  Now, about twenty-five years later, he’s got the shape of an autumn gourd. His little remaining mouse-colored hair looks like dirty soapsuds that will blow away any second. Still, I sometimes think it would be okay to end up like him, a person who learned from his troubles back in the day and, as a result, is kind to everyone.

  After playing rewind in his head, Rik is frowning about me going off again about my neighbor.

  “Pinky, your imagination must be one of the most interesting places on earth. It’s like living in 4-D. All this stuff that never could happen, and you’re running it as the feature attraction.”

  “Hey, I have great instincts, right? Don’t you say like sometimes I have ESP?”

  “Sometimes ESP,” he says. “And sometimes PES.”

  I take a second. “PES?”

  “Piles of Erroneous Shit.” Teasing me is one of Rik’s favorite office pastimes. Since I was little, being the object of a joke starts a near-riot close to my heart, but with Rik I can mostly ride with it. He is the best boss ever and gets his biggest chuckl
es at his own expense (like how in high school he decided to drop the c in ‘Rick,’ actually hoping that axing one little letter would make him cool). Plus him and Helen always seemed to like me better than most people in my own family.

  “Let’s stay on task,” he says. “I don’t want the Chief changing her mind. You know what this case could do around here.”

  Rik doesn’t do much legal work that attracts big attention. I was a paralegal in my grandfather’s law office before Pops closed shop. He and my aunt represented all the richest crooks in the Tri-Cities, and our space had the quiet atmosphere and heavy furnishings of a bank lobby. With Rik, I’m kind of in the working class of the legal world. Our office, in a recovering part of Highland Isle, is cramped, with the same cheap paneled walls people put up in their basements. We do a lot of workman’s comp and quick-hitting personal injury cases to keep the electricity flowing in the sockets. Rik would love to handle headline defenses like Pops, but most of the criminal cases that come through the door here are rumdum misdemeanors—bar fights and first-time DUIs and drunken stunts by teenagers. At fifty-two, Rik thinks Chief Gomez’s case might help him finally step up.

  “I thought you’d been retained,” I say.

  “We had a get-together at a coffee shop for about ten minutes before the Chief went on vacation. But Mr. Green has not arrived.” He’s referring to a retainer. In criminal, you have to get paid up front, since clients don’t send many checks from prison. “Supposedly, we’ll see it today.”

  His attention returns for a second to the P&F complaint, then he suddenly stops cold and squints at me.

  “How’s he look?” Rik says.

  “Who?”

  “Your wacky neighbor. You’ve been keeping quite an eye on him. What’s he look like?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Asian.”

  “He’s going to the gym two hours a day, so he must be in good shape, right?”

  The man is definitely lean and fit, but what’s most striking is his skin, a rich shade I’ve never seen before, close to what was called ‘ochre’ in my crayon box but with a more lustrous undertone. He’s tall too, around six foot three.

  “Point?” I ask.

  “Point is maybe you’re a little hot for him.”

  “Nah,” I say. “This guy’s maybe forty-five. You know my story, Rik—older women, younger men.”

  “Pinky,” he says, “it’s none of my business, but your story seems to be anybody born human.”

  “Ha,” I say again, although he’s probably right.

  Nomi, Rik’s assistant, peeks around the door.

  “Chief Gomez is here,” Nomi says.

  Not the kind to wait, Lucia Gomez-Barrera sweeps in with a burst of positive energy that fills the room. She immediately opens her arms to Rik for a hug.

  2. The Chief

  As Rik tells it, the Chief and him were tight in high school. She was one of those superhot chicks who left a lot of the guys in heat just by walking down the hall, and Rik was her assigned lab partner in Bio who was basically no threat. (Besides, he had already pretty much bonded for life with Marnie, his wife, a fact that, frankly, makes my head explode. At thirty-three, I still regard one person forever as impossible, let alone coupling up before you’re old enough to drive.)

  Rik introduces me as his ‘ace investigator’ and the Chief offers her hand. Even today, many police brass have no taste for people like me, inked from neck to ankle and with a magenta Mohawk (and a blue undercut on one side). But Chief Gomez comes on warm as a kindergarten teacher, with a smile that’s 100,000 lumens of pure light, and—get this—dimples. A police chief with dimples!

  I have a kinda/sorta ex who never unfriended me and was on the job in HI last I checked. Just to give myself some cred, I ask about her, Tonya Eo.

  “Tonya’s the Real Police,” the Chief says, which is top praise. “Just made detective sergeant. Friend?”

  “We were cadets in the Kindle County Academy together.”

  “Back more than a decade? Did you get sworn?”

  “No, I fucked up,” I say. I flamed out on a drug test, the last week. “Story of my life.”

  I receive a sweet, sympathetic smile. I’m getting a positive feel about Chief Gomez, which is kind of a surprise. I don’t really like most people to start, and they definitely don’t like me. I tend to get up in their grills almost as soon as we say hello. It took me a while—and a therapist or two—to realize I’m still basically a kid, scared of strangers.

  First thing, she slides an envelope over to Rik.

  “I took a second on my house, Ricky. I hope you’re worth it, man.”

  The Chief is in her dress uniform in Highland Isle’s puke-worthy shade of blue green, which I would call Sick Teal. The long jacket, which is probably covering her weapon, has gold braiding on each shoulder and double-breasted rows of brass buttons, and her actual police star, also gold, over the left breast. The light in here is not what they would choose at the beauty counter: harsh fluorescents and no windows. Even so, in the flesh, Lucia Gomez is prettier than she appears on TV, although, just saying, there is a fair amount of flesh. I make her as five two and maybe 150 pounds. She has a round face with movie-star cheekbones, huge dark eyes and great skin, ‘Warm Beige,’ as they call the shade at Sephora.

  Just to get rolling, Rik starts by going over her biographical details. After high school, they pretty much lost touch, and even once they found each other again here in Highland Isle, their contacts have generally been limited to lunch every now and then. Still, given what most cops think of defense lawyers, Rik isn’t surprised that in the current crisis she’s turned to someone she’s known forever.

  As for her background, the Chief grew up in Highland Isle, with six brothers and sisters in a three-bedroom bungalow with one bath. Dad was a welder, Ecuadorian, Mom Mexican, and both are gone now. The Chief enlisted in the Army a month after high school graduation, because she figured the GI Bill was the only way she’d get to college. After surviving Desert Storm, she enrolled at Greenwood County JC, which was where she heard about the veterans’ preference on law-enforcement hiring. The Kindle County Unified Police Force offered her space in the academy.

  “I never made you for a cop,” Rik says.

  “Me neither. But I loved it from the start—except riding with the Ritz, who was my first training officer. But I felt like this is what I was meant to do, something where you could make a difference every day. I took the time to listen to everyone—the victims, the witnesses, even the dude in cuffs.”

  She kept going to school at night, got a BA in criminology, then a master’s, and made detective in Kindle County in less than six years.

  “They were looking for women by then.” She offers a humble shrug.

  She married another detective, but the fact that she was moving up faster than Danny created issues. Hoping to save things, she left Kindle for Highland Isle, where the marriage cratered anyway, while her career continued to boom. She reached commander, number two in the department, in record time.

  When the old chief, Stanley Sicilino, got the boot twelve years ago from Highland Isle’s first reform mayor, Amity DeFranco Nieves, the Chief became the consensus choice to replace him. Latinx. Raised in HI. Strong educational credentials. By now, she says, she’s made her share of enemies, but that’s how it goes.

  With that soft start, Rik turns to the real business, the P&F complaint. Pops used to tell me that clients come in two flavors: the ones who can’t talk about their cases enough and the others who will do anything to avoid the subject. You might think the talkers are innocent and outraged, but Pops said a lot of bad guys think the next best thing to not having done the crime is to make somebody else believe that. By contrast, the wrongly accused—a smaller group, frankly—are often struggling to get a grip.

  The Chief definitely has not been looking forward to this conversation. Once she hired Rik, she took off two weeks for her older daughter’s wedding and promised not to think about any of this, and clearly meant it. Rik says he had to call her four times to get her to come in.

  For me, though, it’s easy to see why she’d be having a hard time dealing with the charges, which have seemed totally sketchy to me since Rik first explained them.