“You think she’s telling you the truth?”
“I got no reason to think otherwise. My instinct tells me, yeah, she’s on the level.”
Audrey nodded. “Me too.”
A few minutes later, Bugbee came up to Audrey’s cubicle with a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “Wouldn’t you just know Nicholas Conover would use a company called Elite Professional Lawn Care? Sixteen days ago they hydroseeded the property around a house belonging to the CEO of the Stratton Corporation. The guy remembered it well—the architect, guy named Claflin, specified Penn Mulch. Said they had to put in a new gas line or something, tore up the old grass, and his client decided to put in a whole new lawn, replace the crappy old one. Lawn guy, he said it’s a waste of money to put stuff like that in the slurry, but he’s not going to argue. Not with a customer who has the big bucks, you know?”
59
Scott McNally tended to get into work around the same time as Nick did, around seven thirty. Normally, they and the other early arrivers sat at their desks working and doing e-mail, tended not to socialize, took advantage of the quiet time to get work done uninterrupted.
But this morning, Nick took a stroll across the floor to the other side and approached Scott’s cubicle quietly. He felt a pulse of fury every time he thought about how Scott had lied to him about going to that dude ranch in Arizona, had instead made a secret trip to mainland China. That coupled with what he’d learned from the Atlas McKenzie and the Homeland Security guys—these goddamned rumors that Stratton was quietly negotiating to “move the company to China,” whatever that meant exactly.
It was time to rattle Scott’s cage, find out what he was doing.
“Got any interesting vacation ideas?” Nick asked abruptly.
Scott looked up, startled. “Me? Come on, my idea of a great vacation is a Trekkie convention.” He caught the look on Nick’s face and laughed nervously. “I mean, well, Eden loves Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos.”
“Actually, I was thinking some place further east. Like Shenzhen, maybe? Where do you like to stay when you visit Shenzhen, Scott?”
Scott reddened. He looked down at his desk—it was almost a reflex, Nick noticed—and said, “I’ll go anywhere for a good mu shu pork.”
“Why, Scott?”
Scott didn’t answer right away.
“We both know how hard Muldaur’s been pushing for us to move manufacturing to Asia,” Nick said. “That what you’re doing for him? Checking out Chinese factories behind my back?”
Scott looked up from his desk, looking pained. “Look, Nick, right now Stratton is like a puppy with diarrhea, okay? Cute to look at, but no one wants to get too close. I’m not doing any of us any good if I don’t scout out these possibilities.”
“Possibilities?”
“I realize you find it upsetting. I can’t blame you. But one day, when you look at the numbers and you finally say, ‘Scott, what are our options here?’ I’ve got to be able to tell you what they are.”
“Let me get this straight,” Nick said. “You made some sort of secret-agent trip to China to scout out factories, then lied about it to me?”
Scott closed his eyes and nodded, compressing his lips. “I’m sorry,” he said very quietly. “It wasn’t my idea. Todd insisted on it. He just felt it was too much of a sore point with you—that you’d do everything you could to block any kind of overtures to China.”
“What kind of ‘overtures’ are you talking about? I want specifics.”
“Nick, I really hate being caught in the middle like this.”
“I asked you a question.”
“I know. And it’s really not my place to say any more than I have already. So let’s just leave it right there, okay?”
Nick stared. Scott wasn’t even feigning deference anymore. Nick felt his anger growing greater by the second. It was all he could do not to reach over and grab Scott by the scrawny neck, lift him up, and hurl him against the silver-mesh fabric panel.
Nick turned to leave without saying another word.
“Oh, and Nick?”
Nick turned back, looked at him blankly.
“The Nan Hai is the place.”
“Huh?”
“The place to stay in Shenzhen. The Nan Hai Hotel. Great views, great restaurant—I think you’ll like it.”
A voice squawked out of Scott’s intercom. “Scott, it’s Marjorie?”
“Oh, hey, Marge. Looking for Nick? He’s right here.”
“Nick,” Marge said. “Call for you.”
Nick picked up Scott’s handset to speak to her privately. “There a problem?”
“It’s someone from the police.”
“My burglar alarm again.”
“No, it’s…it’s something else. Nothing urgent, and your kids are fine, but it sounds important.”
Scott gave him a curious look as Nick hurried away.
60
“This is Nick Conover.”
Audrey was astonished, actually, when Nicholas Conover picked up the phone so quickly. She was expecting the usual runaround, the game of telephone tag that powerful men so often liked to play.
“Mr. Conover, this is Detective Rhimes. I’m sorry to bother you again.”
The slightest beat of silence.
“No bother at all,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, now, I was wondering if we might be able to look around your house.”
“Look around…?”
“We were thinking it would help us a great deal in establishing Andrew Stadler’s whereabouts that night. That morning.” She hoped the shift to “we” was subtle enough. “If indeed it was Andrew Stadler who went to your house that night, he might have been scared off by all the new security measures. The cameras and the lights and what have you.”
“It’s possible.” Conover’s voice sounded a bit less friendly now.
“So if we’re able to nail down whether he did go to your house—whether it really was him who came by and not, say, a deer—that’ll be a big help in mapping his last hours. Really narrow things down for us.”
She could hear Conover inhale.
“When you’re talking ‘look around,’ what do you mean, exactly?”
“A search. You know, the usual.”
“Not sure I know what that means.” Was there the slightest strain in his voice? Certainly something had shifted, changed. He was no longer putting out friendly vibes. He’d gone neutral.
“We come over with our techs, collect evidence, take pictures, whatever.”
They both knew what she meant. No matter how she spun it, how she dressed it up, it was still a crime-scene search, and Conover surely understood that. It was a funny sort of dance now. A performance, almost.
“You talking about searching my yard?”
“Well, yes. That and your premises as well.”
“My house.”
“That’s right.”
“But—but no one entered my house.”
She was ready for that. “Well, see, if Andrew Stadler really is the stalker who’s repeatedly broken into your house over the last year, we might find evidence of that inside. Am I wrong in concluding that no one from the Fenwick police ever took fingerprints after the previous incidents?”
“That’s right.”
She shook her head, closed her eyes. “The less said about that, the better.”
“When are you talking about doing this? This week some time?”
“Actually, given how things are progressing in this investigation,” she said, “we’d like to do it today.”
Another pause, this one even longer.
“Tell you what,” Conover said at last. “Let me call you right back. What’s the best number to reach you at?”
She wondered what he was going to do now—consult an attorney? His security director? One way or the other, whether he gave permission or not, she was going to search his premises.
If he refused—if she needed to get a search warran
t—she’d be able to get one in about an hour. She’d already talked to one of the prosecutors, woke him up at home this morning, in fact, which didn’t endear her to him. Once the prosecutor’s head cleared, he’d said that there were sufficient grounds to grant a warrant. A district court judge would sign it, no problem.
But Audrey didn’t want to get a search warrant. She didn’t want to play hardball. Not yet. That was escalation, and if and when she needed to step things up, she could always do it. Better to low-key things. Keep up the pretense—the shared pretense, she was quite sure—that Nicholas Conover was being cooperative just because he was a good citizen, wanted to see justice done, wanted to get to the bottom of this. Because the moment he shifted to opposition and antagonism, she’d be all over him.
If he refused, four patrol units would be on their way over to his house in a matter of minutes to secure the premises and the curtilage, or the surrounding area, make sure no one took anything out. Then she’d be there an hour later with a search warrant and a crime-scene team.
She didn’t want to go down that road yet. But she always had to be aware of the legalities. The prosecutor had rendered his judgment that she could get a warrant if she wanted to, yes. Instead, Audrey wanted to conduct what they called a consent search. That meant that Conover would sign a standard Consent to Search form.
It was a little tricky, though. If Conover signed it and his signature was witnessed, that established that he’d given his knowing, intelligent, and voluntary consent to a search. But there’d been cases, she knew, where a suspect with a clever lawyer had managed to get the results of a search thrown out at trial, insisting that they’d been coerced, or they didn’t totally understand, or whatever. Audrey was determined not to commit that gaffe. So she was following the prosecutor’s advice: Get Conover to sign the waiver, date it, get two witnesses, and you’re fine. And if he refuses, we’ll get you a warrant.
Half an hour later he called back, sounding confident once again. “Sure, Detective, I have no problem with that.”
“Thank you, Mr. Conover. Now, I’m going to need you to sign a consent form allowing us to search your premises. You know, cross every T and so on.”
“No problem.”
“Would you like to be there for the search? It’s up to you, certainly, but I know how busy you are.”
“I think it’s a good idea, don’t you?”
“I think it’s a good idea, yes.”
“Listen, Detective. One thing. I don’t mind you guys searching my property, looking for whatever you want, but I really don’t want the neighborhood crawling with cops, you know? There going to be a bunch of patrol cars with lights and sirens and all that?”
Audrey chuckled. “It won’t be as bad as all that.”
“Can you do this using whatever you call them, unmarked vehicles?”
“For the most part, yes. There will be an evidence van and such, but we’ll try to be subtle about it.”
“As much as a police search can be subtle, right? Subtle as a brick to the head.”
They shared a polite, uneasy laugh.
“One more thing,” Conover said. “This is a small town, and we both know how people talk. I really hope this is all kept discreet.”
“Discreet?”
“Out of the public eye. I really can’t afford to have people hearing about how the police have been talking to me and searching my house in connection with this terrible murder. You know, I’m just saying I want to make sure my name stays out of it.”
“Your name stays out of it,” she repeated, thinking: What are you saying exactly?
“Look, you know, I’m the CEO of a major corporation in a town where not everybody loves me, right? Last thing I want is for rumors to start spreading—for people to be making stuff up about how Nick Conover’s being looked into. Right?”
“Sure.” She felt that prickle again, like an eruption of goose bumps.
“I mean, hey, we both know I’m not a suspect. But you get rumors and all that.”
“Right.”
“You know, it’s like they say. A lie’s halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, right?”
“I like that,” she said. Here was another thing that made her uneasy. When an innocent person is being investigated for a homicide, he almost always squawks about it to his friends, protests, gets indignant. An innocent person in the klieg lights wants the support of his friends, so he invariably tells everyone about the outrage of the police suspecting him.
Nick Conover didn’t want people to know that the police were interested in him.
This was not the reaction of an innocent man.
Part Four
Crime Scene
61
Early that morning, the day after Detective Rhimes had come over to the house to talk, Nick had awakened damp with sweat.
The T-shirt he’d slept in was wet around the neck. His pillow, even, was soaked, the wet feathers and down giving off that barnyard smell. His pulse was racing the way it used to during a particularly fierce scrimmage.
He’d just been jolted out of a dream that was way too real. It was one of those movielike dreams that feel vivid and fully imagined, not like his normal fleeting fragments of scenes and images. This one had a plot to it, a terrible, inexorable story in which he felt trapped.
Everyone knew.
They knew what he’d done That Night. They knew about Stadler. It was common knowledge, everywhere he went, walking through the halls of Stratton, the factory floor, the supermarket, the kids’ schools. Everyone knew he’d killed a man, but he continued to insist, to pretend—it made no sense, he didn’t know why—that he was innocent. It was almost a ritual acted out between him and everyone else: they knew, and he knew they knew, and yet he continued to maintain his innocence.
Okay, but then the dream took a sharp left turn into the gothic, like one of those scary movies about teenagers and homicidal maniacs, but also like a story by Edgar Allan Poe he’d read in high school about a telltale heart.
He came home one day, found the house crawling with cops. Not the house he and the kids lived in now, not Laura’s mansion in Fenwicke Estates, but the dark, little brown-shingled, split-level ranch in Steepletown he’d grown up in. The house was a lot bigger though. Lots of hallways and empty rooms, room for the police to spread out and search, and he was powerless to stop them.
Hey, he tried to say but he couldn’t speak, you’re not playing by the rules. I pretend I’m innocent, and so do you. Remember? That’s how it works.
Detective Audrey Rhimes was there and a dozen other faceless police investigators, and they were fanning out across the eerily large house, searching for clues. Someone had tipped them off. He heard one of the cops say the tip came from Laura. Laura was there too, taking an afternoon nap, but he woke her up to yell at her and she looked wounded but then there was a shout and he went to find out what was up.
It was the basement. Not the basement of the Fenwicke Estates house, with its hardwood floors and all the systems, the Weil-McLain gas-fired boiler and water heater and all that, neatly enclosed behind slatted bifold doors. But the basement of his childhood house, dark and damp and musty, concrete-floored.
Someone had found a pool of bodily fluids.
Not blood, but something else. It reeked. A spill of decomposition that had somehow seeped out from the basement wall.
One of the cops summoned a bunch of the other guys, and they broke through the concrete walls, and they found it there, the curled-up, decomposed body of Andrew Stadler, and Nick saw it, an electric jolt running through his body. They’d found it, and the game of pretenses was over because they’d found the proof, a body walled up in his basement, decomposing, rotting, leaching telltale fluids. The body so carefully and artfully concealed had signaled its location by festering and decaying and putrefying, leaking the black gravy of death.
A good ten hours after he’d awakened in a puddle of his own flop sweat, Nick
pulled into the driveway and saw a fleet of police vehicles, cruisers, and unmarked sedans and vans, and it was as if he’d never woken up. So much for low-key. They couldn’t have been much more obvious if they’d arrived with sirens screaming. Luckily the neighbors couldn’t see the cars from the road, but the police must have caused a commotion arriving at the gates.
It was just before five o’clock. He saw Detective Rhimes standing on the porch waiting for him, wearing a peach-colored business suit.
He switched off the Suburban’s engine and sat there for a moment in silence. Once he got out of the car, he was sure, nothing would be the same. Before and after. The engine block ticked as it cooled off, and the late afternoon sun was the color of burnt umber, the trees casting long shadows, clouds beginning to gather.
He noticed activity on the green carpet of lawn around the side of the house where his study was. A couple of people, a man and a woman—police techs?—were grazing slowly like sheep, heads down, looking closely for something. The woman was a squat fireplug with a wide ass, wearing a denim shirt and brand-new-looking dark blue jeans. The other one was a tall gawky guy with thick glasses, a camera around his neck.
This was real now. Not a nightmare. He wondered how they knew to look in the area nearest his study.
He tried to slow his heartbeat. Breathe in, breathe out, think placid thoughts.
Think of the first time he and Laura had gone to Maui, seventeen years ago, pre-kids, a Pleistocene era of his life. That perfect crescent of white sand beach in the sheltered cove, the absurdly blue crystal-clear water, the coconut palms rustling. A time when he felt more than just relaxed; he’d felt a deep inner serenity, Laura’s fingers interlaced with his, the Hawaiian sun beating down on him and warming him to his core.
Detective Rhimes cocked her head, saw him sitting in the car. Probably deciding whether to walk up to the Suburban or wait for him there.
They were looking for spent cartridges. He had a gut feeling.
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