“Something set it off, and I went downstairs to check it out. It was nothing, as far as I could see, but I was a little anxious. You can understand, I’m sure, with what had just happened.”
She nodded, compressed her lips, jotted a note. Didn’t meet his eyes.
“Eddie, Stratton’s security director, had just had one of his guys put in this fancy new alarm system, and I wasn’t sure if this was a false alarm or something I should be concerned about.”
“You didn’t call the alarm company?”
“My first thought was to call Eddie—I asked him to come out to the house and check it out.”
She looked up. “You couldn’t check it out yourself?”
“Oh, I did. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t something faulty in the system. I didn’t want to call the cops for what was sure to be a false alarm. I wanted Eddie to check it out.”
“At two in the morning?”
“He wasn’t happy about it.” Conover grinned again. “But given what I’ve been through, we both agreed it was better safe than sorry.”
“Yet you told me you slept through the night.”
“Obviously I got the days mixed up. My apologies.” He didn’t sound at all defensive. He sounded quite casual. Matter-of-fact. “Tell you something else, I’ve been taking this pill to help me sleep, and it kind of makes the nights sort of blurry for me.”
“Amnesia?”
“No, nothing like that. I don’t think Ambien causes amnesia like some of those other sleeping pills, Halcion or whatever. It’s just that when I pass out, I’m zonked.”
“I see.”
He’d just altered his story significantly, but in a completely believable way. Or was she being too suspicious? Maybe he really had mixed up the days. People did it all the time. If that night hadn’t been unusual or remarkable for him—if, that is, he hadn’t witnessed Andrew Stadler’s murder that night, or been aware of it whether before or after the fact—then there was no reason for him to have any special, fixed memory of what he’d done. Or not done.
“And did Mr. Rinaldi come over?”
Conover nodded. “Maybe half an hour later. He walked around the yard, didn’t find anything. Checked the system. He thought maybe a large animal had set it off, like a deer or something.”
“Not an intruder.”
“Not that he could see. I mean, it’s possible someone was out there, walking around on my property, near the house. But I didn’t see anyone when I got up, and by the time Eddie got here, he didn’t see anything either.”
“You said you took Ambien to go to sleep that night?”
“Right.”
“So you must have been pretty groggy when the alarm went off.”
“I’ll say.”
“So there might have been someone, or something, that you just didn’t notice. Being groggy and all.”
“Definitely possible.”
“Did anyone else in the house wake up at the time?”
“No. The kids were asleep, and Marta—she’s the nanny and housekeeper—she didn’t get up either. Like I said, the alarm was set to sound in my bedroom, and not too loud. And the house is pretty soundproof.”
“Mr. Conover, you said your security director had ‘just’ put in the new alarm system. How long ago?”
“Two weeks ago. Not even.”
“After the incident with the dog?”
“You got it. If I could have had Eddie put in a moat and a drawbridge, I’d have done that too. I don’t ever want my kids to be endangered.”
“Certainly.” She’d noticed the cameras around the house when she’d arrived. “If you’d had a system like this earlier, you might have been able to prevent the break-ins.”
“Maybe,” Conover said.
“But you live in this gated community. There seems to be a lot of security when you come in—the guard, the access control, the cameras in front and all around the perimeter fence.”
“Which does a pretty good job of keeping out unauthorized vehicles. Problem is, there’s nothing that stops someone from just climbing the fence out of sight of the guardhouse and getting in that way. The cameras’ll pick them up, but there’s no motion sensor around the fence—no alarm goes off.”
“That’s a serious security flaw.”
“Tell me about it. That’s why Eddie wanted to beef up the system at the house.”
But now another thought appeared at the back of her thoughts, and she tugged at it like a stray thread.
The security system.
The cameras.
Nothing that stops someone from just climbing the fence.
If Stadler had climbed the fence that surrounded Fenwicke Estates and walked to Conover’s house in the middle of the night, walked across the lawn, setting off the brand-new motion sensors, wouldn’t that have been captured by Conover’s own video cameras?
And if so, wouldn’t there be a recording somewhere? Probably not videotape: no one used that anymore. Probably recorded onto a hard drive somewhere in the house, right? She wondered about that. She didn’t really know much about how these newfangled security systems worked.
She’d have to take a closer look.
“You know, I’ve changed my mind about that coffee,” Audrey said.
57
Audrey did not arrive home until a little after seven, feeling a knot in her stomach as she turned the key in the front door. She’d told him that she’d be home for dinner, though she hadn’t said what time that would be. It took so little to set Leon off.
But he wasn’t home.
Several nights in a row he hadn’t been home until late, almost ten o’clock. What was he doing? Did he go out drinking? Yet recently he didn’t seem to be drunk when he got home. She couldn’t smell liquor on his breath.
She had another suspicion, though it made her sick to think about it. It explained why Leon was no longer interested in having sex with her.
He was getting it somewhere else. He was, she feared, having an affair, and lately he was being brazen about it, not even attempting to cover it up.
Leon was at home all day while she was at work, which gave him plenty of opportunity to cheat without her ever finding out. But going out, coming home at nine, ten o’clock without so much as an excuse—that was a thumb in her eye. That was blatant.
Sure enough, at a few minutes after ten she heard the jingling of the keys in the lock, and Leon walked in, went right to the kitchen, ran water into a glass. He didn’t even say hello.
“Leon,” she called out.
But he didn’t answer.
And she knew. You didn’t have to be a detective. It was that obvious. She knew, and it was like a punch to her solar plexus.
Nick sat in his study, trying to go over some paperwork. He’d been calling Eddie, at home and on his cell, but no answer. On his fourth try, Eddie answered with an annoyed “What?”
“Eddie, she was just here,” Nick said.
“Fenwick’s own Cleopatra Jones? She don’t have no superpowers, Nick. She’s just sweating you. They tried the same shit on me today—the other one came by, Bugbee, asked me a shitload of questions, but I could see they got nothing.”
“She asked me about the call I made to you that night.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Well, I—see, I’d told her I slept through the night that night.”
“Shit.”
“No, listen. That’s what I said at first, but then when she said she knew I’d made a call to you on your cell phone, I told her I must have mixed up the nights. I said the alarm went off that night, so I called you to ask you to check it out.” Nick waited for Eddie’s response with rising dread. “My God, Eddie, did you tell the other cop something different? I mean, I figured the alarm going off, that’s a matter of record—”
“No, you did the right thing. I said pretty much the same once I saw what he had. But man, I was shitting bricks you might try to wing it, say something else. Good job.”
> “We’ve got to coordinate a little more closely, Eddie. Make sure we don’t say different things.”
“Right.”
“And something else. She was admiring the alarm system.”
“She’s got good taste.” He lowered his voice. “And so does the superfreak who’s naked in my bed. Who was just admiring my dick. Which is why I gotta go.”
“Especially the cameras. Especially the cameras, Eddie.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you positive there’s no way to retrieve the part of the tape you erased?”
“It’s not tape, it’s digital,” Eddie snapped. “Anyway, I told you, you have nothing to worry about. What’s gone is gone. Why are we fucking having this conversation? I just spent ten minutes preheating the oven—now I got to stick in my French bread before it cools down, you get what I’m saying?”
“The hard drive is totally clean, right? They can’t bring it back?”
An exasperated sigh. “Stop being such a girl, okay?”
Nick felt a surge of anger he knew better than to vent. “I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing,” he said stonily.
“Nick, you’re doing it again. You’re peeing in my pool. Oh, by the way. That work you wanted me to do on Scott McNally?”
“Yeah?”
“Remember last month when he was away for a week?”
“I remember. Some sort of dude ranch in Arizona. Grapevine Canyon, was it? He said it was like City Slickers without the laughs.”
“City Slickers, he said? Crouching fucking Tiger’s more like it. He’s a sneak, but a cheapskate numbers guy like him can’t pass up the corporate travel rates, right? So this pencil dick puts in for a Stratton discount when he buys his ticket to Hong Kong. I got the receipts from the girls in the travel office. Unfuckingbelievable.”
“Hong Kong?”
Eddie nodded. “Hong Kong and then Shenzhen. Which is this huge industrial area near Hong Kong, shitload of factories, on the mainland.”
“I know about Shenzhen.”
“That mean anything to you?”
“It means he’s lying to me,” Nick replied. It also means that all these rumors are right. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, as the GSA guy said.
“Sounds to me like you got trouble everywhere you go,” Eddie said. “Big trouble.”
58
Audrey was surprised to find Bugbee in this early, sitting in his cubicle on the phone. She approached and heard him talking to a lawn company, asking about hydroseeding. Well, she thought, what do you know? He really is working this case.
He wore his customary sport coat, a pale green with a windowpane plaid, a pale blue shirt, red tie. In repose, he was not a bad-looking man, even if he dressed like a used-car salesman. He saw her standing nearby, kept talking without acknowledging her presence. She held up a finger. After a little while he gave her a brusque nod.
She waited until he got off the phone, then wordlessly showed him the little clear-plastic eye-cream vial.
He looked at the pinch of dirt, said suspiciously, “What’s that?”
“I took it from Conover’s lawn yesterday.” She paused. “His lawn was recently hydroseeded.”
Bugbee stared, the realization dawning. “That’s not admissible,” he said. “Poison fruit.”
“I know. But worth taking a look at. To my eye it looks like the same stuff from under Stadler’s fingernails.”
“It’s been, what, like two weeks since the murder? It’s probably disintegrated a lot since then. The mulch pellets are supposed to break down.”
“It’s been a dry couple of weeks. The only water probably came from his irrigation system. More interesting, I managed to get a look at his security system while he was making coffee for me.” She handed him a While You Were Out message slip on which she’d written some notes. “Pretty fancy. Sixteen cameras. Here’s the name of the alarm monitoring company he uses. And the makes and models of the equipment, including the digital video recorder.”
“You want me to talk to one of the techs,” he said. She noticed that for the first time he didn’t argue with her.
“I think we should go over there and take a look at the recorder. And while we’re at it, check for blood and prints, inside and outside the house.”
Bugbee nodded. “You’re thinking the whole thing went down in or near Conover’s house, and the surveillance cameras recorded it.”
“We can’t ignore the possibility.”
“They’d be stupid to forget about that little detail.”
“We’ve both seen a lot of stupidity. People forget. Also, it’s not like the old days when you could just take out a videotape and get rid of it. It’s got to be a lot harder to erase a digital surveillance recording. You’ve got to know what you’re doing.”
“Eddie Rinaldi knows what he’s doing.”
“Maybe.”
“Of course he does,” Bugbee said. “Are you thinking Conover did it?”
“I’m thinking Eddie did it.” Now that he was a suspect, she noticed, he’d gone from Rinaldi to Eddie. “I think Conover saw or heard Stadler outside his house. Maybe the alarm went off, maybe not—”
“The alarm company would probably have a record of that.”
“Okay, but either way, Conover calls Eddie, tells him this guy’s trying to get into his house. Eddie comes over, confronts Stadler, then kills him.”
“And gets rid of the body.”
“He’s an ex-cop. He’s smart enough, or experienced enough, to make sure he doesn’t leave any trace evidence on the body—”
“Except the fingernails.”
“It’s the middle of the night, two in the morning, it’s late and it’s dark and they’re both panicking. They overlook some things. Subtleties like that.”
“One of them moves the body down to Hastings.”
“Eddie, I’m guessing.”
Bugbee thought a moment. “The gatehouse at Fenwicke Estates probably has records of who left when. We can see if Conover drove out of there some time after Eddie drove in. Or if it was just Eddie.”
“Which would tell you what?”
“If the shooting happened inside or outside Conover’s house, they had to move the body down to the Dumpster on Hastings. Which they’re going to do in a car. If both Conover and Rinaldi left Fenwicke Estates some time after two, then it could have been either one of them. But if only Eddie left, then it’s Eddie who moved it.”
“Exactly.” A moment of silence passed. “There are cameras everywhere around the community.”
Bugbee smiled. “If so, we got ’em.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. If we can get the surveillance tapes, we can confirm when Eddie entered and exited, sure.”
“Or Eddie and Conover.”
“Okay. But more important, we can see if Stadler came over. If Andrew Stadler entered. Then we’ve got Stadler’s whereabouts pinned down.”
Bugbee nodded. “Yeah.” Another pause. “Which means that Eddie has an unlicensed .380.”
“Why unlicensed?”
“Because I went through the safety inspection certificate files at the county sheriff’s department. He’s got paperwork for a Ruger, a Glock, a hunting rifle, couple of shotguns. But no .380. So if he’s got one, he doesn’t have any paper on it.”
“I’ve been pushing the state crime lab,” Audrey said. “I want to see if they can use their database to match the rounds we found in Stadler’s body with any other no-gun case anywhere.”
Bugbee looked impressed, but he just nodded.
“In any case, we’re going to need a search warrant to see what weapons Rinaldi has.”
“Not going to be a problem getting one.”
“Fine. If we find a .380 and we get a match…” She was starting to enjoy the genuine back-and-forth, even if Bugbee was still prickly and defensive.
“You’re dreaming. He can’t be that stupid.”
“We can always hope. What did he say about the phone
call?”
“He was pretty slick. Said, yeah, he got a call from Conover that night, the alarm went off at Conover’s house and could he check it out. Said he was a little pissed off, but he went over there to check it out. You know, the shit you do to keep your boss happy. It was like no big deal. Did Conover put his foot in it?”
“No. He—well, it felt like he sort of evolved his story.”
“Evolved?”
“He didn’t revise his story right away. I reminded him that he’d said he slept through the night, and then I asked him about the phone call he made at two in the morning, and he owned right up to it. He said he must have got the days mixed up.”
“Happens. You believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
“He sound rehearsed?”
“It was hard to tell. Either he was telling the truth, or he’d done his homework.”
“Usually you can tell.”
“Usually. But I couldn’t.”
“So maybe he’s a good liar.”
“Or he’s telling the truth. The way I see it, he’s telling part of the truth. He called Eddie, Eddie came over—and that’s where the true part ends. Did Eddie say if he found anything when he looked around Conover’s yard?”
“Yeah. He said he found nothing.”
“That much they got straight,” Audrey said.
“Maybe too straight.”
“I don’t know what that means. Straight is straight. You know what? I say we ought to move quickly on this. The gun, the tape recorder—this is all stuff that they could do something about if they haven’t already. Toss the gun, delete the tape, whatever. Now that we’ve talked to them both separately, at the same time, they’re both going to be suspicious. If they’re going to destroy evidence, now is the time they’re going to do it.”
Bugbee nodded. “Talk to Noyce, put in for the warrants anyway in case we need them. I’ll make a couple of calls. Can you clear your schedule today?”
“Happy to.”
“Oh, I called that Stadler chick for a follow-up.”
“And?”
“She doesn’t know shit about what her father did on the night he was killed. Says he never said anything about Conover.”
Company Man Page 27