Eddie had taken them away, right?
When he took the gun?
Nick didn’t remember anymore. That night was such a blur.
Please God oh please God let them be gone the bullets make them gone.
He waited. Holding his breath, while the tech opened the big middle desk drawer, located the key at once, knelt down to unlock the bottom drawer.
The back of his shirt collar was seriously damp now. Downright wet.
My life is in this anonymous guy’s hands right now. He has the power to lock me away forever.
There’s no death penalty in Michigan, he found himself thinking. He’d never thought about it before, never had a reason to think about it. No death penalty.
Life in prison, though.
That was in the balance.
The drawer slid open, the tech bent over.
A second went by, two, then three.
The vacuum cleaner was turned off.
Nick felt like vomiting. He stood there on the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape like some casual sightseer, a tourist, and he waited.
The tech got to his feet. Nothing in his hands.
Maybe the drawer was empty.
If one stray bullet had rolled to the back of the drawer…
No, the tech would have taken out his camera and taken a picture if he’d found something.
The drawer had to be empty.
Nick felt relief. Temporary, maybe. Momentary.
He stood there watching the tech, the one who’d been vacuuming, take out a plastic bottle with a pistol grip and begin spraying a section of the hand-plastered walls around the light switch.
Decora rocker switch, Nick thought. Laura had replaced all the light switches in the house with Decora rocker switches, which she insisted were much more elegant. Nick had no opinion on Decora rockers. He’d never really thought much about light switches before.
The guy started spraying the bottom of the French doors, then the carpet.
He heard the two techs murmuring, heard the one with the plastic bottle say something like, “Miss my Luminol.”
The other one said something in a low voice, something about a daylight search, and then the first one said, “But Christ, this LCV shit is messy.”
Nick didn’t know what they were talking about. He felt stupid standing there on the threshold of his own study, gawking and eavesdropping.
The first one said, “stain’s gonna be degraded.”
The second one said something about “DNA match.”
Nick swallowed hard. “Stain” had to mean blood. They were looking for bloodstains on the door handles, on the door, on the carpet. Bloodstains that weren’t visible to the naked eye, which had maybe been wiped away but not well enough.
Well, at least I’m safe on that, Nick thought. Stadler never entered the house.
But his brain was not cooperating. It kicked up a thought that made the adrenaline surge, made him break out in sweat once again.
Stadler had bled, fairly profusely.
The black puddle of blood.
Nick had walked up to him, kicked at the body with his bare feet. Maybe even stood in the blood, who knows, he couldn’t remember.
Then walked back into the house.
Onto the carpet. To call Eddie.
He’d never noticed any bloodstains on the carpet, and neither did Eddie, but how much did it take? What scintilla of evidence, carried into the study on the soles of his bare feet from the puddle beside Stadler’s body? Mere droplets perhaps, invisible to the naked eye, smeared onto the wall-to-wall carpet unseen, soaking into the woolen fibers, waiting to announce their presence?
The tech who wasn’t spraying the carpet turned around to look at Nick’s desk, noticed Nick still standing there.
Quickly Nick said something, just so they wouldn’t think he was watching in terrified fascination, as he was. “Is that stuff gonna come off my carpet?”
The tech who was spraying shrugged.
“And what about all that powder?” Nick went on, fake-indignant. “How the hell am I going to get that out?”
The tech with the spray bottle turned around, blinked a few times, a lazy, malevolent grin on his face. “You got a housekeeper,” he said.
64
“Eddie.” Nick, calling from his study, scared out of his mind.
“What?” He sounded annoyed.
“They were here today.”
“I know. Here too. It’s bullshit. They’re trying to put a scare into you.”
“Yeah, well, it worked. They found something.”
A pause. “Huh?”
“They found a metal fragment. They think it might be a piece of a shell casing.”
“What? They recovered a shell casing?”
“No, a piece of one.”
“I don’t get it.” Eddie’s swaggering confidence had evaporated. “I recovered both shells, and I don’t remember any fragmentation. You said you fired two rounds, right?”
“I think so.”
“You think so? Now you think so?”
“I was freaked out, Eddie. Everything was a blur.”
“You told me you fired two rounds, so when I found two shells, I stopped looking. I coulda spent all night on that fucking lawn walking around with the flashlight.”
“You think they really might have a piece of ammunition?” Nick said, a quaver in his voice.
“The fuck do I know?” Eddie said. “Shit. Tell you this, I gotta start digging into this lady detective. See what skeletons she has in her closet.”
“I think she’s a good Christian, Eddie.”
“Great. Maybe I’ll find something real good.”
And he hung up the phone.
“We got shit, is what we got,” said Bugbee.
“The search warrant,” Audrey began.
“Was as broad as I could make it. Not just .380s, but any firearms of any description. On top of the usual. No blood or fibers in Rinaldi’s car anywhere.”
“We didn’t expect he took the body home with him.”
“Obviously not.”
“Any .380s?”
Bugbee shook his head. “But here’s the weird thing. Guy’s got a couple of those wall-mounted locking handgun racks, right? Found it in a closet behind some clothes, bolted onto the wall. Each one holds three guns, but two of them are missing.”
“Missing, or not there? Maybe he only has four.”
Bugbee smiled, held up a finger. “Ah, that’s the thing. There’s two guns in one, two in the other, and you can see from the dust patterns that there used to be two more. They’ve been removed.”
Audrey nodded. “Two.”
“I’m saying one is the murder weapon.”
“And the other?”
“Just a guess. But maybe there’s a reason he didn’t want us to find that one too. Two unregistered handguns.”
Audrey turned to go back to her cubicle when a thought occurred to her. “You didn’t warn him you were doing the search?”
“Come on.”
“Then how’d he know you were coming? How’d he know to remove the guns?”
“Now you get it.”
“Conover knew we were coming to search his house,” Audrey said. “I’m sure he told Rinaldi, and Rinaldi knew it was only a matter of time before we searched his house too.”
Bugbee considered for a few seconds.
“Maybe that’s all it is,” he conceded.
An e-mail popped up on Audrey’s computer from Kevin Lenehan in Forensic Services, asking her to come by.
The techs in the Forensic Services Unit all went to crime scenes, but some of them had their specialties, too. If you wanted to get a fingerprint off the sticky side of a piece of duct tape, you went to Koopmans. If you wanted a serial number restoration, you took it to Brian. If you wanted a court exhibit, an aerial map, a scene diagram rendered in a hurry, you went to Koopmans or Julie or Brigid.
Kevin Lenehan was the tech most often entrusted with, or perhaps saddl
ed with, retrieving information from computers or video capture work. That meant that while his co-workers got jammed with all the street calls, he had to waste vast amounts of time watching shadowy, indistinct video images of robberies taken by store surveillance cameras. Or poring over the video from the in-car cameras that went on automatically when an officer flipped on his overheads and sirens.
He was scrawny, late twenties, had a wispy goatee and long greasy hair that was either light brown or dark blond, though it was hard to tell, because Audrey had never seen him with his hair recently washed.
The rectangular black metal box that housed the digital video recorder from Conover’s security system was on his workbench, connected to a computer monitor.
“Hey, Audrey,” he said. “Heard about your little bluff.”
“Bluff?” Audrey said innocently.
“The bullet fragment thing. Brigid told me. Never knew you had it in you.”
She smiled modestly. “You do what it takes. How’s this coming?”
“I’m kinda not clear on what you wanted,” Kevin said. “You’re looking for a homicide, right? But nothing like that here.”
It was too easy, Audrey thought. “So what is on there?”
“Like three weeks of the moon moving behind the clouds. Lights going off and on. Coupla deer. Cars going in and out of the driveway. Dad, kids, whatever. Am I looking for something in particular?”
“A murder would be nice,” she said.
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“If the cameras recorded it, it’s going to be on there, right?” She pointed at the box.
“Right. This bad boy’s a Maxtor hundred-and-twenty gig drive connected to sixteen cameras, set to record at seven-point-five frames per second.”
“Could it be missing anything?”
“Missing how?”
“I don’t know, erased or something?”
“Not far’s I can tell.”
“Isn’t three weeks a long time to record on a hard drive that size?”
Lenehan looked at her differently, with more respect. “Yeah, in fact, it is. If this baby was in a twenty-four-hour store, it would recycle after three days. But it’s residential, and it’s got motion technology, so it doesn’t use up much disk space.”
“Meaning that the camera starts when there’s a movement that sets off the motion detector and gets the cameras rolling?”
“Sort of. It’s all done by software here. Not external motion sensors. The software is continually sampling the picture, and whenever a certain number of pixels change, it starts the recording process.”
“It recycles when the disk gets full?”
“Right. First in, first out.”
“Could it have recycled over the part I’m interested in?”
“You’re interested in the early morning hours of the sixteenth, you said, and that’s all there.”
“I’m interested in anything from the evening of the fifteenth to, say, five in the morning on the sixteenth. But the alarm went off at two in the morning, so I’m most interested in two in the morning. Well, 2:07, to be exact. An eleven-minute period.”
Kevin swiveled around on his metal stool to look at the monitor. “Sorry. Just misses it. The recording starts Wednesday the sixteenth. Three-eighteen A.M.”
“You mean Tuesday the fifteenth, right? That’s when it was put in. Some time on the afternoon of the fifteenth.”
“Hey, whatever, but the recording starts Wednesday the sixteenth. Three-eighteen in the morning. About an hour after the time you’re interested in.”
“Shoot. I don’t get it.”
He spun back around. “Can’t help you there.”
“You sure the eleven-minute segment couldn’t have just been erased?”
Kevin paused. “No sign of that. It just started at—”
“Could someone have recycled it?”
“Manually? Sure. Have to be someone who knows the system, knows what he’s doing, of course.”
Eddie Rinaldi, she thought. “Then it would have recorded over the part I’m interested in?”
“Right. Records over the oldest part first.”
“Do you have the ability to bring it back?”
“Like, unerase it? Maybe someone does. That’s kind of beyond what I know how to do. The State, maybe?”
“The State would mean six months at least.”
“At least. And who knows if they can do it? I don’t even know if it can be done.”
“Kevin, do you think it’s worth looking at again?”
“For what, though?”
“See if you can figure anything else about it. Such as whether you can find any traces. Anything that proves the recording was recycled over or deleted or whatever.”
Kevin waggled his head from one side to the other. “Take a fair amount of time.”
“But you’re good. And you’re fast.”
“And I’m also way behind on my other work. I’ve got a boatload of vid-caps to do for Sergeant Noyce and Detective Johnson.”
“That serial robber case.”
“Yeah. Plus Noyce wants me to watch like two days’ worth of tape from a store robbery, looking for a guy in a black Raiders jacket with white Nike Air shoes.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Eye-crossing fun. He wants it done—”
“Yesterday. Oh yes, I know Jack.”
“I mean, you want to talk to Noyce, get him to move you up in the queue, go ahead. But I gotta do what they tell me to do, you know?”
65
The next morning was jam-packed with complicated, if tedious, paperwork, which Nick was actually grateful for. It kept his mind off what was happening, kept him from obsessing over what the cops might have found in the house. And that fragment of a shell casing had ruined his sleep last night. He’d tossed and turned, alternating between blank terror and a steady, pulsing anxiety.
There was a bunch of stuff from the corporate counsel’s office outlining the patent lawsuit they wanted to file against one of Stratton’s chief competitors, Knoll. Stephanie Alstrom’s staff insisted that Knoll had basically ripped off a patented Stratton design for an ergonomic keyboard tray.
Stratton filed dozens of these complaints every year; Knoll probably did too. Kept the corporate attorneys employed. The legal department salivated at the prospect of litigation; Nick preferred arbitration, pretty much down the line. It kept the out-of-pocket costs down, and even if Stratton won the ruling, Knoll would have already figured out a workaround that would pass legal muster. Go after Knoll in a public courtroom, and you blow all confidentiality—your secrets are laid out there for every other competitor to rip off. Then there’d be subpoenas all over the place; Stratton would have to hand over all sorts of secret design documents. Forget it. Plus, in Nick’s experience, the awarded damages rarely added up to much once you subtracted your legal expenses. He scrawled ARB on the top sheet.
After an hour of sitting at his home base, going over this sort of crap, Nick’s shoulders were already starting to ache. The truth was, home base wasn’t feeling especially homey these days. His eyes settled on one of the family photographs. Laura, the kids, Barney. Two down, three to go, he thought. The curse of the House of Conover.
He remembered a line he’d seen quoted somewhere: Maybe this world is another planet’s hell. There had to be a bunch of corollaries to that. He had made someone else’s world a hell, and someone had made his world a hell. Supply-chain management for human suffering.
An instant-message from Marjorie popped up, even though she was sitting not ten feet away, on the other side of the panel. She didn’t want to break his concentration—she knew how fragile it tended to be.
The usual for lunch today, right?
Oh, right. Nick remembered: the regular weekly lunch with Scott. Which was just about the last thing he felt like doing.
He wanted to confront Scott, tell him to get the fuck out and go back home to McKinsey. But he couldn’t, not yet.
Not until he got to the bottom of what exactly was going on. And the truth was, he no longer had the power to fire Scott if he wanted to. Which right now he very much did.
He typed:
OK, thanks.
He noticed that there was an e-mail in his in-box from Cassie; he could tell from the subject line.
He hadn’t given her his e-mail address, hadn’t gotten an e-mail from her before, and he hesitated before clicking on it:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: From Cassie
Nick—Where’s my grocery delivery boy been? Free for lunch today? Come over between 12:30 and 1? I’ll supply the sandwiches.
C.
He felt his spirits lift at once, and he hit Reply:
I’m there.
“Marge,” he said into the intercom, “change in plans. Tell Scott I’m not going to be able to make lunch today, okay?”
“Okay. Want me to give a reason?”
Nick paused. “No.”
On the way to the elevator he passed Scott, who was coming out of the men’s room. “Got your message,” Scott said. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. Just got really hectic all of a sudden.”
“You’ll do anything to avoid talking numbers,” Scott said with a grin.
“You got me figured out,” Nick said, grinning right back as he headed for the elevator bank. A couple of women from Payroll got in on the floor below, smiled shyly at him. One of them said, “Hey, Mr. Conover.”
He said, “Hey, Wanda. Hey, Barb.” They both seemed surprised, and pleased, that he knew their names. But Nick made it a point to know as many Stratton employees by name as possible; he knew how good it was for morale. And there’s fewer and fewer of them all the time, he thought mordantly. Makes it easier.
When the elevator stopped at the third floor, Eddie got in, said, “It’s the big dog.”
Something awfully disrespectful about that, especially in front of other employees. “Eddie,” Nick said.
“Had a feeling you were headed out to, uh, ‘lunch,’” Eddie said. The way he dropped little quotation marks around the word “lunch” was unnerving. Does he know where I’m going? How could he? And then Nick remembered that he’d asked Eddie to start looking closely at Scott’s e-mail. He wondered whether Eddie had taken that as an opportunity to look at Nick’s e-mail too. If true, that would be outrageous—but how the hell could he prevent Eddie from doing it? He was the goddamned security director.
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