Osgood looked up for a moment. “I wish he hadn’t done things this way.”
“What way?”
“Keeping you out of the loop. It’s not the way I prefer. I like to be a straight shooter. Now I see why you’ve come to talk to me. I understand why you’re upset.”
“Oh, no,” Nick said quickly. “I totally understand why he didn’t want me to know. Hell, he knew how opposed I was—am—to a sale like this. Even though I don’t have the power to stop it, he was probably afraid I’d kick up a fuss, maybe even take it public. Better to just do the deal without me knowing, he figured, so that by the time I figured it out, it would be a fait accompli. It would be too late.”
“Something like that. But as I say, that’s not my way.”
“Todd needed a quick infusion of cash to help bail out the firm, after all his bad bets on semiconductors. And an IPO takes forever. I get it.”
“I told Todd you’re a reasonable man, Nick. He should have just leveled with you.”
“Maybe he should have leveled with you. Like telling you who the fairy godmother behind ‘Pacific Rim Investors’ really is. Though he probably figured that you, with your political beliefs, wouldn’t want to hear where the money comes from.” Nick paused. “The P.L.A.”
Osgood blinked owlishly.
“That’s the People’s Liberation Army,” Nick explained. “The Communist Chinese army.”
“I know who they are,” Osgood said curtly. “Wouldn’t have gotten to where I am without doing my homework.”
“You knew this?” Nick said.
“Good Lord, of course I knew it. There’s nothing illegal about it, my friend.”
“The Communist Chinese,” Nick persisted, hoping the incantation might jangle the old right-winger.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, this is office furniture. Not Patriot missiles or nuclear weapons or something. Desks and chairs and file cabinets. I hardly call that selling our enemy the rope they’re going to hang us with.”
“But have you actually looked at the numbers on Stratton that Todd provided Pacific Rim Investors?”
Osgood pushed the folder away from him. “I don’t micromanage. I don’t look over my partners’ shoulders. Nick, we’re both busy men—”
“You might want to. See, the balance sheet Todd gave them is a fraud. Prepared by my CFO, Scott McNally, who knows a thing or two about how to put lipstick on a pig.”
Another flash of the porcelain Chiclets. “Nick, maybe you’ve been in the Midwest a bit too long, but that Jimmy Stewart, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington bit’s not going to play here.”
“I’m not talking morality, Willard. I’m talking illegality.”
Osgood waved Nick away with an impatient hand. “There’s all kinds of ways of doing the books. Anyway, we’ve got a no-litigate clause, even if they do get buyer’s remorse.”
“You know about that too,” Nick said dully.
Osgood’s stare seemed to drill right through him. “Conover, you’re wasting your time and mine, trying to backtrack over everything. Horse is out of the barn. Gripe session’s over. Now, this it? We done here?” Osgood rose, pressing a button on his intercom. “Rosemary, could you show Mr. Conover out, please?”
But Nick remained in his seat. “I’m not done yet,” he said.
96
The Information Technology Director at the Stratton Corporation didn’t look like the computer type, Audrey thought. She was a tall, matronly woman named Carly Lindgren, who wore her beautiful and very long auburn hair knotted on top of her head. She wore a navy suit over an olive silk shell, a braided gold necklace and matching earrings.
Audrey had gotten an appointment with Mrs. Lindgren with a single phone call, telling her only it was “police business.” But once Audrey had presented the search warrant, she could see Mrs. Lindgren rear up like a cornered tigress. She examined it as if searching for flaws, though very few people knew what to look for, and in any case the warrant had been written carefully. It was as broad as Audrey could get the prosecutor to sign off on, even though all she really wanted was any archived video images on the Stratton network that came from Nicholas Conover’s home security system.
Mrs. Lindgren kept Audrey and Kevin Lenehan waiting in an outer office while she placed a flurry of panicked calls all the way up her reporting chain—the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Technology Officer, and Audrey lost track of who all, but there really was nothing Mrs. Lindgren could do.
After twenty minutes or so, Kevin was given a chair and a computer in an empty office. Audrey had nothing to do but watch. She looked around, saw a blue poster with white letters that said something about “The Stratton Family,” sort of a mission statement. The chairs they sat in were particularly comfortable; she noticed they were Stratton chairs. Nothing like this in Major Cases. Kevin put a CD in the computer and installed a program. He explained to her that it was viewer software he’d downloaded from the Web site of the company that made the digital video recorder in Conover’s home. This would allow them to view, and capture, the video images.
“You know where to look?” Audrey asked, worried.
“It was in the settings in the DVR,” replied Kevin. “The folder it was written to, the date and time and everything. No problema.”
Audrey felt a little tremble of anticipation, which she tried to tamp down, tried to reason herself out of. She was sure that the murder of Andrew Stadler would be on this eleven minutes of camera footage. If indeed there was a backup here.
How often in any homicide detective’s career could one hope to come across a piece of evidence like that? A digital image of a murder being committed? It was almost too much to hope for. She didn’t want to allow herself to hope for it, because the disappointment would be crushing.
“Anything I can do to help, Detective?”
She looked up, saw Eddie Rinaldi standing in the doorway, felt her heart do a flip-flop. From where she sat, that angle, Rinaldi seemed tall and broad and powerful. He wore a dark blazer and a black collarless shirt. He was smiling, and his eyes glittered malevolently.
“Mr. Rinaldi,” she said. Even when talking to murder suspects, she tended to be polite, but she refused to be cordial with this man. Something about him she really couldn’t stand. Maybe it was his air of knowingness, his cockiness, the feeling she got that he was enjoying the games he was playing with her.
“So you have a search warrant for the company’s network, that it?”
“You’re welcome to examine it.”
“No, no, no. I don’t doubt you dotted every i and crossed every t. You’re one thorough lady, I can tell.”
“Thank you.”
“Maybe thorough’s a polite way to say it. Obsessed, maybe? Looks like you’re still after my boss’s home security tape.”
“Oh, we have the recorder in our custody.” She considered telling him they knew the tape had been erased, just to see his reaction, but that would be giving him information he shouldn’t have.
Kevin muttered, “Almost there.”
Rinaldi glanced at Kevin curiously, as if he’d only just noticed him. Then he looked back at Audrey. He couldn’t have been more blasé.
“I still don’t get what you’re hoping to find,” Rinaldi said.
“I have a feeling you know,” Audrey said.
“You’re right. I do.”
“Oh?”
“Right. Couple of frames of some crazy old coot hobbling across my boss’s lawn in the middle of the night. But what’s that going to tell you, come right down to it?”
Audrey leaned over to the computer where Kevin was working. He tilted the monitor toward Audrey, who squinted, didn’t see any picture, and then saw the words “ERASED HERE TOO” on a document on the screen.
“Excellent,” Audrey said, nodding. “Good work.” She reached for the keyboard and typed out the words, “PLAY ALONG WITH ME.” Then she said, “Beautiful, Kevin. Can you improve the resolution just a bit?”
“Oh
yeah,” he said. “Sure. I’ve got some great digital-imaging firmware that’ll eliminate the motion artifacts and reduce the dot crawl. A comb filter oughta separate the chrominance from the luminance. A little line doubling and some deinterlacing, and we got a nice clean image. No problem at all on this guy.”
Kevin tapped some more, and the document disappeared before Rinaldi had a chance to look for himself.
But that was the peculiar thing. Eddie Rinaldi never moved from where he stood, never bothered to peer at the monitor. He seemed utterly uninterested.
No, that wasn’t it, Audrey realized.
He was utterly confident. He knew what Kevin had just discovered, that the backup video had been deleted on the Stratton LAN, just as it had been deleted from Conover’s home security recorder.
And his confidence had just given him away.
97
Nick felt a tiny tremble in his hands. He put them in his lap so Osgood wouldn’t see. “Willard, don’t get me wrong. I have no interest in taking you on. I’d much rather work together with you on this. You want to save the funds Todd’s running, and I want to save the company. We both want to make money.”
Osgood slid his glasses back into place and gave Nick a steely stare as he stood behind his desk. He grunted.
“Now, I don’t know you,” Nick said, “but I can tell you’re not a gambler.” Nick noticed that the blond woman with the red glasses had slipped into the office to usher him out and was hovering in the background, waiting for her cue. He lowered his voice so that the woman couldn’t hear. “So when Scott McNally and Todd Muldaur funnel a ten-million-dollar bribe to a Chinese government official to make sure this deal happens, that’s where I think they’re crossing a line you don’t want to cross.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Osgood put his hands flat on the glass of his desk and leaned forward, intimidatingly.
“They’re putting your company at risk, doing that. Word always leaks out. And then your entire firm will be jeopardized.” Nick opened his arms wide. “All of this. Everything you’ve worked your whole life building. And I wonder whether you think it’s really worth taking such an enormous risk, when there’s another way to get what you want.”
“Rosemary,” Osgood barked. “Excuse us, please. We’ll be another few minutes.” When his secretary had left, he sat down again. “What the hell are you talking about, bribe?”
“Stratton Asia Ventures,” Nick said.
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Was he being straight? Or was he being careful? “It’s all right there in front of you—the last couple of pages in that pile. How do you think Todd was able to get this deal done in a month instead of a year? Call it a deal-sweetener or a kick-back or a bribe—whatever you call it, it’s a clear-cut violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And it’s the kind of legal exposure that you can’t afford.”
The way Osgood yanked the folder back toward him, Nick realized that this really was news to the man. Osgood shoved his glasses back up on his forehead and hunched over the papers.
A few minutes later, he looked back up. His leathery face seemed to color. He looked thunderstruck. “Jesus,” he said. “Looks like you weren’t the only one kept out of the loop.”
“I had a feeling Todd wasn’t telling you everything,” Nick said.
“This is stupid, is what it is.”
“Desperate men sometimes do stupid things. Frankly, on some level I resent it. My company’s worth a hell of a lot more than what Pacific Rim Investors is paying for it. There’s no need to pay anyone off.”
“Goddamn it,” Osgood said.
“You may be great with tarpons, Willard, but I think what we’re dealing with here is a snakehead.”
Osgood seemed to be doing a slow burn. “I think my Yale boy just got hisself in over his head.”
“I guess he figured no one was watching the shop…”
Osgood’s pearly Chiclets looked more like a snarl than a smile. “From time to time, someone thinks they can pull one over on the old man. Maybe they’ve been reading too many Parade magazine profiles of me. But they always realize the error of their ways.”
Nick realized then how terrifying Willard Osgood could be once the cornpone mask fell away, a truly formidable opponent.
“A lot of people have been underestimating you too,” Osgood said. “I think I may be one of them. So tell me: What do you have in mind?”
98
“Daddy!” Julia ran up to Nick as he entered the house. “You’re back!”
“I’m back.” He set down his garment bag, lifted her up, felt a slight twinge in his lower back around the lumbar. Yikes. Can’t be picking her up anymore like she’s an infant. “How’s my baby?”
“Good.” Julia never said anything else. She was always good. School was always good. Everything was good.
“Where’s your brother?”
She shrugged. “Probably in his room? Do you know Marta just left a couple of hours ago for Barbados? She said she’s going to visit her family.”
“I know. I thought she needed some time off. Her trip to Barbados is a present from all of us. Where’s Cassie?” Cassie had happily agreed to come over to watch the kids.
“She’s here. She was just teaching me yoga.”
“Where is she?”
“In your study, maybe?”
Nick hesitated a moment. That again. But there was nothing to find there. He had to stop being so suspicious.
“She has a surprise for you,” Julia said with a mischievous smile, her big brown eyes wide. “But I can’t tell you what it is.”
“Can I guess?”
“No.”
“Not even one guess?”
“No!” she scolded. “It’s a surprise!”
“Okay. Don’t tell me. But I have a surprise for you.”
“What is it?”
“How would you like to go to Hawaii?”
“What? No way!”
“Way. We’re leaving tomorrow night.”
“But what about school?”
“I’m taking you and Luke out of school for a few days, that’s all.”
“Hawaii! I don’t believe it! Maui?”
“Maui.”
“The same place as last time?”
“Same place. I even got us the exact same villa on the beach.”
Julia threw her arms around him, squeezing hard. “I want to do snorkeling again,” she said, “and take those hula lessons, and I want to make a lei, and this time I want to learn how to windsurf. Aren’t I old enough?”
“You’re old enough, sure.” Laura had been afraid to let her try, last time.
“Luke said he’d show me how. Are you going to scuba dive again?”
“I think I might have forgotten how.”
“What about surfing? Can I learn how to surf too?”
Nick laughed. “Are you going to have time for all these lessons?”
“Remember when I found that gecko in our room, and its tail broke off? Oh, wow, this is so awesome.”
Nick went to the kitchen to take the shortcut to his study, but he stopped at the threshold.
In place of the usual plastic draft sheets hanging down was some kind of paper barrier. He looked closer. Wrapping paper had been taped across the entrance, floor to ceiling and jamb to jamb. A wide blue ribbon crisscrossed it like a gift. The paper, he noticed, had little pictures of Superman all over it, cape flying.
“Even though you look more like Clark Kent right now.” Cassie’s voice. Her arms slid around his waist; she kissed the back of his neck.
“What’s this?”
He turned, gave her a hug and planted a big kiss on her mouth.
“You’ll see. How was Boston?”
“Let’s just say your instincts were right.”
Cassie nodded. The dark smudges were visible beneath her eyes again. She looked drawn, exhausted. “Well, you’ll get things back on track. You’ll see. It’s not too
late.”
“We’ll see. Can I open my gift?”
She bowed her head, turned up an “After you” palm.
Nick punched a fist through the gift wrap. The kitchen was all lit up, every light on, dazzling. The granite-topped kitchen island was perfect, just as Laura had once sketched it for him.
“Jesus,” Nick said. He went in slowly, taking it all in, awed. He ran a hand over the island top. There was an overhang, enabling the whole family to sit around it. Exactly what Laura had wanted.
He felt its edge. “Bullnose?”
“Half bullnose.”
He turned to look at Cassie, saw the little pleased smile. “How the hell did you do this?”
“I didn’t do it myself, Nick. I mean, I may have inherited my dad’s mechanical ability, but I’m not that good. What I’m good at is getting what I want.” She shrugged modestly. “It really only took them one full day of work. But it took me a lot of begging and pleading to get them here to do it and finish it by the end of the day.”
“My God, you’re a miracle worker,” Nick said.
“Just like to finish what I start, that’s all. Or what your wife started.” She paused and then said in a small voice, “Nick, are you ever going to be able to talk about her death?”
He closed his eyes for a while before he spoke. He opened his eyes, took a breath. “I can try. Lucas had a swim meet. It was half past seven, but dark, you know? First week of December. It gets dark early. We were driving to Stratford, because the meet was in the high school there. We’re on Stratford-Hillsdale Road, which is what truckers sometimes use to connect to the interstate.”
Nick closed his eyes again. He was back in the car on that dark night, a nightmare he had relived only in dreams, and then in shards and fragments of time. He spoke in a low, expressionless monotone. “So there’s a tractor trailer heading the opposite way, and the guy driving it had had a couple of beers, and the road surface was icy. Laura was driving—she hated to drive at night, but I asked her to, because I had some calls to make on the cell phone. That was me—company man, always working. We were bickering over something, and Laura was upset, and she wasn’t paying attention to the road, see. She didn’t see the truck drifting into our lane, across those double yellow lines, until it was too late. She—she tried to turn the wheel, but she didn’t do it in time. The truck rammed into us.”
Company Man Page 42