Company Man (16 page)

Audrey didn't much like the security director of the Stratton Corporation, an ex-cop named Edward Rinaldi. For one thing, there was his initial unwillingness to meet her, which she found peculiar. She was investigating the death of a Stratton employee, after all. How packed could his schedule really be? On the phone, after she'd told him what she wanted, he'd said he was “raked.”

Then there was his reputation, which was a little hinky. She always did her homework, of course, and before coming to Stratton headquarters, she called around, figuring that the security director of the biggest company in town had to be known to at least the uniform division of the police. She learned that he was a local boy, went to high school with Nicholas Conover, Stratton's CEO. That he'd joined the force in Grand Rapids. His dealings with the Fenwick police were limited to pilferage cases and vandalism at Stratton. “That guy?” a veteran patrol cop named Vogel told her. “He never woulda made it here. We'd have kicked him out on his ass.”

“How come?”

“Smartass. Got his own rule book, know what I'm saying?”

“I don't think I do, no.”

“I don't want to spread rumors. Ask around in GR.”

“I will, but you've dealt with him yourself, haven't you?”

“Ah, he was all over us on some vandalism deal at the CEO's house like it was our fault, instead of some whacked laid-off employee.”

“All over you how?”

“He wanted the priors on this employee.”

“Who?”

Vogel seemed surprised. “What're you talking, your guy, of course, right? That Stadler guy, isn't that why you called me?”

Suddenly Edward Rinaldi was becoming more interesting.

When she called Grand Rapids, she had a harder time finding someone who'd talk to her about Edward Rinaldi, until a lieutenant there named Pettigrew confided that Rinaldi was not missed. “Put it this way,” the lieutenant said cagily, “he lived pretty good.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning his income wasn't necessarily limited to his salary.”

“We talking bribes, Lieutenant?”

“Could be, but that's not what I mean. I'm just saying that not all the evidence from drug busts made it to the property room.”

“He was a user?”

The lieutenant chuckled. “Not so far as I know. He seemed a lot more interested in the shoeboxes full of cash. But he was booted out without a formal IA investigation, so that's just rumor.”

It was enough to make her wary of the man.

But most of all she didn't like Rinaldi's manner—the evasiveness, the shiftiness in his eyes, the quick and inappropriate grins, the intensity of his stare. There was something vulgar, something scammy about the man.

“Where's your partner?” he asked after they'd chatted a few minutes. “Don't you guys always work in teams?”

“Often.” He and Bugbee would have hit it off just fine, she thought. Cut from the same bolt of polyester fabric.

“You're Detective Rhimes? As in LeAnn Rimes?”

“Spelled differently,” she said. “Did Andrew Stadler van
dalize your CEO's house, Mr. Rinaldi?” she asked, coming straight to the point.

Rinaldi looked away too quickly, searched the ceiling as if wracking his brain, furrowed his brow. “I have no idea, Detective.”

“You wanted to know his priors, Mr. Rinaldi. You must have had some suspicion.”

Now he looked straight at her. “I like to do a thorough job. I investigate all possibilities. Same as I'm sure you do.”

“I'm sorry, I don't quite understand. You did suspect Mr. Stadler, or you didn't?”

“Look, Detective. My boss's house gets vandalized in a particularly sick and twisted way, first thing I'm gonna do is go through the rolls of people who got the ax here, right? Anyone who made any threats during their outplacement interviews, all that. I find out that one guy who got laid off has a mental history, I'm gonna look a little more closely. Make sense?”

“Absolutely. So what did you find when you looked closely?”

“What'd I find?”

“Right. Did he make any threats during his outplacement?”

“Wouldn't surprise me. People do, you know. People lose it, time like that.”

“Not according to his boss at the model shop, the fellow who conducted the outplacement interview along with someone from HR. He said Stadler quit, but he wasn't violent.”

Rinaldi guffawed. “You trying to trap me or something, Detective? Forget it. I'm telling you this guy was in and out of the loony bin.”

“He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, is that right?”

“What do you want from me? You want to know if this guy Stadler was the sick fuck who went to my boss's home and killed his dog, I have no idea.”

“Did you talk to him?”

Rinaldi waved his hand. “Nah.”

“Did you ask the police to investigate him?”

“For what? Get the poor guy in trouble, for what?”

“You just said it wouldn't surprise you if he made threats during his outplacement interview.”

Rinaldi spun his fancy chair around and looked at his computer screen, squinted his eyes. “Who's the head of Major Cases now? Is it Noyce?”

“Sergeant Noyce, that's right.”

“Say hi for me. Nice guy. Good cop.”

“I will.” Was he threatening to pull strings? Wouldn't work if he did, she thought. Sergeant Noyce barely knew him. She'd asked her boss about Rinaldi. “But as to my question, Mr. Rinaldi—you never talked to Stadler, never pointed him out as a potential suspect in the incident at Mr. Conover's home?”

Rinaldi shook his head again, gave a thoughtful frown. “I had no reason to think he was the one,” he said reasonably.

“So that situation is unresolved, what happened at Mr. Conover's home?”

“You tell me. Fenwick PD doesn't seem optimistic about solving it.”

“Did you ever meet Andrew Stadler or talk with him?”

“Nope.”

“Or Mr. Conover? Did he ever meet with Stadler or talk with him?”

“I doubt it. The CEO of a company this size doesn't usually meet most of his employees, except maybe in group settings.”

“Then it was very kind of him to attend Mr. Stadler's funeral.”

“Did he? Well, that sounds like Nick.”

“How so?”

“He's very considerate about his employees. Probably goes to all funerals of Stratton workers. Town like this, he's a public figure, you know. Part of his job.”

“I see.” She thought for a moment. “But you must have run names by Mr. Conover, names of laid-off employees, to see if any of them rang a bell.”

“I usually don't bother him at that level, Detective. Not
unless I have a firm lead. I let him do his job, and I do mine. No, I wish I could help you. The guy worked for Stratton for, what, like thirty-five years. I just hate to see a loyal employee come to an end like that.”

“Yo,” Scott said, appearing from behind Marge's side of the divider panel next to Nick's desk. “Looking for some exciting reading? The board books are ready.”

Nick looked up from his screen, a testy e-mail exchange with his general counsel, Stephanie Alstrom, about some tedious and endless battle with the Environmental Protection Agency over the emissions of certain volatile organic compounds in an adhesive used in the manufacture of one of the Stratton chairs that they'd discontinued anyway.

“Fiction or nonfiction?” he said.

“Nonfiction, unfortunately. Sorry it's so last minute, but I had to redo all the numbers the way you wanted.”

“Sorry to be so unreasonable,” Nick said sardonically. “But I'm the guy on the hot seat.”

“Muldaur and Eilers are arriving at the Grand Fenwick this afternoon,” Scott said, “and I told them I'd get the board books over there before dinner tonight so they could look 'em over. You know those guys—there's going to be questions, the second they see you. Just so long as you're ready to face them.”

The board of directors always had dinner in town the night before the quarterly board meeting. Dorothy Devries, the founder's daughter and the only member of the Devries family on the board, usually hosted them at the Fenwick Country
Club, which she more or less owned. It was always a stiff and awkward occasion, with no overt business transacted.

“Ah, Scott, I'm going to have to miss it tonight.” He stood up, feeling rubbed raw, his headache full blown now.

“You're—you're kidding me.”

“It's the fourth-grade school play tonight—they're doing
The Wizard of Oz,
and Julia's got a big part. I really can't miss it.”

“Please tell me you're joking, Nick. The
fourth-grade play
?”

“I missed her school play last year, and I've missed the art exhibit and just about every school assembly. I can't miss this too.”

“You can't get someone to videotape it?”

“Videotape it? What kind of dad are you?”

“Absentee and proud of it. My kids respect me more for being distant and unavailable.”

“Now. Wait 'til they get into therapy. Anyway, you know as well as I do that nothing ever gets done at those dinners.”

“It's called schmoozing. A Yiddish word that means saving your job.”

“They're going to fire me because I didn't have dinner with them? If they do, Scott, they're just looking for an excuse anyway.”

Scott shook his head. “Okay,” he said, looking down at the floor. “You're the boss. But if you ask me—”

“Thanks, Scott. But I didn't ask you.”

Audrey sat at her desk, staring at her little gallery of photographs, and then phoned the Michigan State Police crime lab in Grand Rapids.

Yesterday she'd driven almost two hours to Grand Rapids and handed the bullets, in their little brown paper evidence envelopes, to a crime lab tech who looked barely old enough to be shaving. Trooper Halverson had been polite but all business. He asked her if there were any shell casings, as if she'd maybe forgotten. She told him they hadn't recovered any, found herself actually apologizing to the boy. She asked how long it would take, and he said their caseload was huge, they were badly understaffed, their backlog was running a good three or four months. Luckily, Sergeant Noyce knew one of the Ramp Rangers, as they called the Michigan Highway Patrolmen, and when she reminded him of that—subtly, delicately—Trooper Halverson had said he'd try to get right to it.

On the phone, Trooper Halverson sounded even younger. He didn't remember her name, but when she read off the lab file number, he pulled it up on the computer.

“Yes, Detective,” he said, tentative. “Um, well, let's see here. Okay. They're .380, brass-jacketed, like you said. The rifling looks to be six left. Gosh, you guys didn't turn up any casings?”

“The body was dumped. So, as I said, unfortunately, no.”

“It's just that if you had a casing we could really learn a whole lot more,” he said. He spoke as if she were holding the cartridge casings back and maybe just needed a little persuasion to hand them over. “The casings tend to take imprints so much better than the bullets.”

“No such luck,” she said. She waited patiently while he went through the measurements and specs from his microscope exam. “So, um, based on the land and groove widths, the GRC database spits out like twenty different possible models that might've been the weapon in question.” The GRC, she recalled, was the General Rifling Characteristics database, put out by the FBI every year or so on a CD.

“Twenty,” she said, disappointed. “That doesn't narrow it down too much.”

“Mostly Colts and Davis Industries. A lot of street guns look like this. So I'd say you're looking for a Colt .380, a Davis .380, or a Smith and Wesson.”

“There's no way to narrow it down any more? What about the ammunition?”

“Yes, ma'am, these are hollow-point brass-jacketed bullets. There are some indications that they're Remington Golden Sabers, but don't hold me to it. That's problematic.”

“Okay.”

“And also—well, I probably shouldn't say this.”

“Yes?”

“No, I'm just saying. Personal observation here. The land width is between .0252 and .054. The groove measurement is between .124 and .128. So it's pretty tight. That tells me the weapon that fired it is a pretty decent one, not just some Saturday night special. So I'm thinking maybe it's the Smith and Wesson, because they're a good manufacturer.”

“How many possible Smith and Wesson models are we talking about?”

“Well, Smith and Wesson doesn't make any .380s anymore. The only one they ever made was the baby Sigma.”

“Baby Sigma? That's the name of the gun?”

“No, ma'am. I mean, you know, they have a product line
called the Sigma, and for a couple of years—like the mid-to late nineties—the bottom end of the Sigma line was a .380 pocket pistol that people sometimes called the ‘baby' Sigma.”

She wrote down “S&W Sigma .380.”

“Okay, good,” she said, “so we're looking for a Smith and Wesson Sigma .380.”

“No, ma'am. I didn't say that. No suspect weapons should be overlooked.”

“Of course, Trooper Halverson.” The troops were super-careful about what they told you, because they knew that everything had to stand up in a court of law, everything had to be carefully documented, and there couldn't be any guesswork. “When do you think you might know more?”

“Well, after our IBIS technician enters it.”

She didn't want to ask how long that would take. “Well, anything you can do to put wings on this, Trooper, would be much appreciated.”