Nick shrugged.
“You were a pretty good student, as I recall,” Sundquist said.
“Not especially.”
Sundquist looked amused, tilted his head. “Okay, maybe ‘indifferent’ would be closer to the mark. I don’t think I ever persuaded you about the glories of polar coordinates. Your interest in trig was more practical. All about what angle you could use to slap a puck between the goalie’s legs.”
“I remember your trying to sell me on that at the time. Nice try, though.”
“But you always did okay on the exams. And, Christ, you were a popular kid. The school’s blue-eyed boy. Brought Fenwick Regional to the state semifinals, twice, isn’t that right?”
“Semifinals one year. Finals the next.”
“That’s one area where we haven’t kept up. Caldicott has kicked our ass for the past four years.”
“Maybe you need a new coach.”
“Mallon is supposed to be good. Gets paid more than me, anyway. It’s always hard to know when to blame the coach and when to blame the players.” Sundquist broke off. “I know how busy you are, so let me get right to the point.”
“Luke’s been having problems,” Nick said with a twinge of defensiveness. “I realize that. I want to do whatever I can.”
“Of course,” Sundquist said, sounding unconvinced. “Well, as I told you, Lucas is being suspended. A three-day suspension. He was caught smoking, and that’s what happens.”
So Lucas would have even more time to light up. That was really going to make things better. “I remember when there used to be a smoking area.”
“Not anymore. Smoking is forbidden on the entire campus. We’ve got very tough rules on that. All the kids know it.”
Campus was new. When Nick was at school, the school only had grounds. Campuses were for colleges.
“Obviously I don’t want him smoking at all,” Nick put in. “I’m just saying.”
“Second offense, Lucas gets thrown out of school. Expelled.”
“He’s a good kid. It’s just been a rough time for him.”
Sundquist looked at him hard. “How well do you know your son?”
“What are you saying? He’s my kid.”
“Nick, I don’t want to overstate the situation, but I don’t want to understate it, either. It’s pretty serious. I spent some time this morning talking to our crisis counselor. We don’t think this is just about smoking, okay? You need to appreciate that we have the right to search his locker, and we may do some surprise searches, with the police.”
“The police?”
“And if drugs are found, we will let the police prosecute. That’s the way we do it these days. I want to warn you about that. Lucas is a troubled kid. Our crisis counselor is very concerned about him. Lucas isn’t like you, okay?”
“Not everybody has to be a jock.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Sundquist said, not elaborating. Another glance back at the manila folder on his desk. “Besides which, his grades are going to hell. He used to be an honor student. With the grades he’s been getting, he’s not going to stay in that track. You understand what that means?”
“I understand,” Nick said. “I do. He needs help.”
“He needs help,” Sundquist agreed, tight-lipped. “And he hasn’t been receiving it.”
Nick felt as if he were being graded as a father, and getting an F. “Jerry, I just don’t see how suspending him or—God forbid—expelling him is the right thing to do. How is that helping him?” he asked. Then he wondered how many times those words had been spoken in that office.
“We have these rules for a reason,” Sundquist said smoothly, leaning back a little in his chair. “There are almost fifteen hundred kids in this high school, and we have to do what’s in the best interests of all of them.”
Nick took a deep breath. “It’s been hard for him, what happened. I get that he’s a troubled kid. Believe me, this is something that’s very much on my mind. I just think that he’s been hanging out with a bad crowd.”
“One way to look at it.” Sundquist’s gaze was unwavering. “Of course, there’s another way to look at it.”
“How do you mean?” Nick asked blankly.
“You could say that he is the bad crowd.”
“Luke.”
“What?” He’d picked up his cell phone on the first ring. The deal was that if he failed to answer a call from his father, he’d lose the phone.
“Where are you?”
“Home. Why?”
“What the hell happened at school?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Three guesses. Mr. Sundquist called me in.”
“What’d he tell you?”
“Don’t play this game, Luke.” Nick tried to stay calm. Talking to Lucas was like dousing a fire with lighter fluid. “You were smoking, and you got caught. Forget about what I think about smoking—you know the rules on smoking at school. You just got a three-day suspension.”
“So? It’s all bullshit anyway.”
“Suspension from school is bullshit?”
“Yeah.” His voice shook a bit. “Because school is bullshit.”
An instant message popped up on his monitor from Marge:
Compensation Committee meeting right now, remember?
“Luke, I’m furious about this,” he said. “You and I are going to have a talk about this later.”
Yeah, Nick thought. That’s telling him.
“And, Luke—?”
But Lucas had hung up.
50
No sooner had Audrey returned to the squad room than Bugbee found her. He approached her desk holding a mug of coffee in one hand, a sheaf of papers in the other, looking pleased about something.
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “The shrink spilled it all about his looney-tunes patient.”
Now she understood his self-satisfied look. He was gloating, yes, but it was something more. It was the told-you-so look she’d seen LaTonya give the boys when they got in trouble for doing something she’d told them not to.
“He gave me some useful background on schizophrenia and violence,” she said.
“Stuff you could have read in a textbook, I’m figuring. But he wouldn’t talk about Stadler, would he? Doctor–patient confidentiality, right?”
“There has to be a way to get access to Stadler’s medical records.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell Bugbee he was right any more directly than that.
“What would Jesus do, Audrey? Get a search warrant.”
She ignored the crack. “That won’t do it. The most we can get out of a search warrant is dates of admission to the hospital and such. The medical records are still protected. Maybe a Freedom of Information request.”
“How many years you got?”
“Right.”
“Speaking of search warrants,” Bugbee said, waving the sheaf of papers in his left hand, “when were you planning on telling me you requested the phone records of the Stratton security guy?”
“They came in already?”
“Not my point. What’d you want ’em for?”
Bugbee must have picked them up from the fax machine, or maybe he’d seen them in her in-box. “Let me see,” she said.
“Why are you so interested in Edward Rinaldi’s phone records?”
Audrey gave him a long cold look, the sort of look LaTonya was so skilled at. “Are you holding them back from me, Roy?”
Bugbee handed the papers right over.
Boy, she thought, I’m going to have to take LaTonya Assertiveness Training. She felt a pulse of triumph and wondered whether this was a worthy feeling. She thought not, but she enjoyed it guiltily all the same. “Thank you, Roy. Now, in answer to your question, I wanted them because I’m curious as to whether Rinaldi ever made any phone calls to Andrew Stadler.”
“How come?”
“Well, now, think about it. He called our records division to find out if Stadler had any priors, right? Stad
ler’s the only former Stratton employee he called about. That tells me he was suspicious of Stadler—that he must have suspected Stadler of being the stalker who kept breaking into Nicholas Conover’s home.”
“Yeah, and maybe he was right. There haven’t been any more break-ins at Conover’s house since Stadler’s murder.”
“None that he’s reported,” she conceded. “But it’s only been a week or so.”
“So maybe Stadler was the guy. Maybe Rinaldi was on to something.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me if the security director called Stadler and warned him to stay away from Nicholas Conover’s house. You know, said, ‘We know it’s you, and if you do anything again you’ll regret it.’”
The computer-generated phone record faxed over by Rinaldi’s cell-phone provider was dense and thick, maybe ten or twenty pages long. She gave it a quick glance, saw that most of the information she’d requested was there, but not all. Dates and times of all telephone calls he’d placed and received—all those seemed to be there. But only some of the phone numbers also listed names. Some did not.
“I assume you already looked through this,” Audrey said.
“Quick scan, yeah. Guy has a pretty active social life, looks like. Lot of women’s names there.”
“Did you come across Andrew Stadler’s name?”
Bugbee shook his head.
“You looked closely at the day and night when the murder took place?”
Bugbee gave her his deadeye look. “Phone numbers don’t all have names.”
“I noticed that. There doesn’t seem to be a logic to it.”
“I figure if a number’s unlisted, the name doesn’t pop up automatically.”
“Makes sense,” she said. She hesitated, tempted to be as stingy with praise as Bugbee always was. But wasn’t it written in Proverbs somewhere that a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver? “I think you’re right. Very good point.”
Bugbee shrugged, a gesture not of modesty but of dismissiveness, his way of letting her know that clever thinking was second nature to him. “That means a hell of a lot of cross-referencing,” he said.
“Would you be able to take a crack at that?”
Bugbee snorted. “Yeah, like I got free time.”
“Well, someone’s got to.”
A beat of silence: a standoff. “Did you get any more on that hydroseed stuff?”
Bugbee gave a lazy smile, pulled from his pants pocket a crumpled pink lab request sheet. “It’s Penn Mulch.”
“Penn Mulch? What’s that?”
“Penn Mulch is a proprietary formula marketed by the Lebanon Seaboard Corporation in Pennsylvania, a fertilizer and lawn products company.” He was reading from notes prepared by someone else, probably a lab tech. “The distinctive characteristic is small, regular pellets half an inch long by an eighth of an inch wide. Looks kinda like hamster shit. Cellulose pellets made up of freeze-dried recycled newspaper, one-three-one starter fertilizer, and super-absorbent polymer crystals. And green dye.”
“And grass seed.”
“Not part of the Penn Mulch. The lawn company mixes in the grass seed with the mulch and a tackifier and makes a kind of slurry they can spray on the ground. Kind of like a pea soup, only thinner. The grass seed in this case is a mixture of Kentucky Bluegrass and Creeping Red Fescue, with a little Saturn Perennial Ryegrass and Buccaneer Perennial Ryegrass thrown in.”
“Nice work,” she said. “But that doesn’t really mean much to me—is this a pretty common formula for hydroseed?”
“The grass seed, that varies a lot. There’s like nine hundred different varieties to choose from. Some of it’s cheap shit.”
“The lawn companies don’t all use the same mix, then?”
“Nah. The shit they use along the highway, the contractor mix, you don’t want to use on your lawn. The better the mulch, the better results you get.”
“The Penn Mulch—”
“Expensive. Way better than the crap they normally use—ground-up wood mulch or newspaper, comes in fifty-pound bags. This is pricey stuff. Doubt it’s very common. It’s what you might use on some rich guy’s lawn—rich guy who knows the difference, I mean.”
“So we need to find out what lawn companies in the area use Penn Mulch.”
“That’s a lot of phone calls.”
“How many lawn companies in Fenwick? Two or three, maybe?”
“Not my point,” Bugbee said. “So you find the one company that sometimes uses Penn Mulch in its hydroseed mix. Then what?”
“Then you find out whose lawns they used Penn Mulch on. If you’re saying it’s so expensive, there can’t be all that many.”
“So what do you get? Our dead guy walked over someone’s lawn that had Penn Mulch on it. So?”
“I don’t imagine there are too many fancy lawns down in the dog pound, Roy,” she said. “Do you?”
51
During the drive from the high school back to Stratton, Nick found himself thinking about Cassie Stadler.
She was not only gorgeous—he’d had more than his share of gorgeous women over the years, especially during college, when Laura had wanted them to “take a break” and “see other people”—but she was so smart it was scary, eerily perceptive. She seemed to understand him fully, to see through him, almost. She knew him better than he knew himself.
And he couldn’t deny the physical attraction: for the first time in over a year he’d had sex, and he felt like a sexual being again. This was a sensation he’d almost forgotten about. The pump had been primed. He felt horny. He thought about yesterday afternoon and got hard.
Then he remembered who she was, how he’d come to know her, and his mood collapsed. The guilt came surging back, worse than ever.
A voice in his head: Are you kidding me? You’re screwing the daughter of the man you murdered?
What’s wrong with you?
He didn’t understand what he was doing. If he allowed himself to get close to her…Well, what if she found out, somehow? Could he keep up this crazy balancing act?
What the hell am I doing?
But he badly wanted to see her again. That was the craziest thing of all.
It was late afternoon by now, and he didn’t have to return to the office. He pulled over to the side of the road and fished a scrap of paper out of his jacket pocket. On it he’d scrawled Cassie Stadler’s phone number. Impulsively—without heeding that chiding voice in his head—he called her on his cell.
“Hello,” he said when she answered. His voice sounded small. “It’s Nick.”
A beat. “Nick,” she said, and stopped.
“I just wanted to…” His voice actually cracked. Just wanted to—what? Turn back the clock? Reverse what happened That Night? Make everything all better? And since that wasn’t possible, then what? He just wanted to talk to her. That was the truth. “I was just calling…”
“I know,” she said quickly.
“You okay?”
“Are you?”
“I’d like to see you,” he said.
“Nick,” she said. “You should stay away from me. I’m trouble. Really.”
Nick almost smiled. Cassie didn’t know what trouble was. You think you’re trouble? You should see me when I’ve got a Smith & Wesson in my hands. Acid splashed the back of his throat.
“I don’t think so,” Nick said.
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”
He felt something like an electric jolt. Hadn’t he done enough? That was one way of looking at it. “Excuse me?”
“Not that I didn’t appreciate it. I did. All of it. But we need to leave it there. You’ve got a company to run. A family to hold together. I don’t fit into that.”
“I’m just leaving an appointment,” he said. “I can be there in about five minutes.”
“Hey,” Cassie said, opening the dusty screen door. Carpenter-style jeans, white T-shirt, flecks of paint. Then she smiled, a smi
le that crinkled her eyes. She looked better, sounded better. “I didn’t think you’d come back.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know, buyer’s remorse. Regret over what you’d done. The usual male stuff.”
“Maybe I’m not your usual male.”
“I’m getting that idea. Bring me anything today?”
Nick shrugged. “Sorry. There’s a bottle of windshield-wiper fluid in the trunk.”
“Forget it,” Cassie said. “That stuff always gives me a hangover.”
“Might have a can of WD-40 around, too.”
“Now that’s more promising. I’m really digging the idea of having the CEO of Stratton as my personal grocery boy.”
“Point of pride with me. Nick Conover buys a mean turkey sandwich.”
“But should I take it personally that you got me nonfat yogurt?” She brought him inside. “Let me make you some of the tea you bought.”
She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment. She had a CD on, a woman singing something about, “I’m brave but I’m chicken shit.”
When she came back, Nick said, “You look good.”
“I’m beginning to feel more like myself again,” she said. “You caught me at a low point the other day. I’m sure you know how it goes.”
“Well, you look a lot better.”
“And you look like shit,” she said, matter of fact.
“Well,” Nick said. “Long day.”
She stretched herself out on the nubby brown sofa, with the gold thread woven through the upholstery like something out of the 1950s.
“Long day, or long story?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to hear a grown man bitch and moan about troubles at the shop.”
“Trust me, I could use the distraction.”
Nick leaned back in the ancient green La-Z-Boy. After a few moments, he began to tell her about the Rumor, leaving out a few details. He didn’t mention Scott by name, didn’t go into Scott’s disloyalty. That was too painful a subject right now.
Cassie hugged her knees, gathering herself into some tight yoga-like ball, and listened intently as he explained.
“And if that weren’t enough, I get a call from Lucas’s school,” he went on. He stopped. He wasn’t accustomed to talking about his life that way. Not since Laura’s death. Somehow he’d gotten out of practice.
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