Company Man (24 page)

When he returned to the executive floor, Marjorie stopped him and handed him a slip of paper, a concerned look in her face. “I think you need to return this call right away,” she said.

Principal J. Sundquist,
she had written in her clear, elegant script, and then the telephone number.

Jerome Sundquist. Twenty-five years ago, he'd been Nick's high school math teacher. Nick remembered him as a rangy guy—a former tennis pro—who bounced around the classroom and was pretty good at keeping up the Math Is Fun act. To his students, he was Mr. Sundquist, not “Jerome” or “Jerry,” and though he was reasonably laid back, he didn't pretend to be pals with the kids in their chair desks. Nick half-smiled as he remembered those chair desks, with the little steel basket for books under the seat, and a “tablet arm” supported by a continuous piece of steel tube that ran from the back supports to the crossover legs. They were manufactured, back then as they were now, right in town, at Stratton's chair plant, a few miles down the road. Nick hadn't seen the numbers recently, but they listed for about a hundred and fifty, on a unit cost of maybe forty. Basically, it was the same design today.

Jerome Sundquist hadn't changed that much, either. Now he was the school principal, not a young teacher, and al
lowed himself a little more sententiousness than he used to, but if you were a high school principal, that was pretty much part of the job description.

“Nick, glad you called,” Jerome Sundquist said, in a tone that was both cordial and distant. “It's about your son.”

 

Fenwick Regional High was a big brick-and-glass complex with a long traffic oval and the kind of juniper-and-mulch landscaping you found at shopping centers and office parks—nothing fancy, but somebody had to keep it up. Nick remembered when he came home after his first semester at Michigan State, remembered how
small
everything seemed. That's how it should have felt when he visited his old high school, but it didn't. The place was
bigger
—lots of add-ons, new structures, new brick facings on the old ones—and somehow plusher than it was in the old days. Plenty of it had to do with how Stratton had grown over the past couple of decades, with a valuation that broke two billion dollars three years ago. Then again, the higher you got, the longer the fall to the bottom. If Stratton collapsed, it would bring a lot of things down with it.

He stepped through the glass double doors and inhaled. As much as the place had changed, it somehow
smelled
the same. That grapefruit-scented disinfectant they still used: maybe they'd ordered a vat in 1970 and were still working through it. Some sort of faint burnt-pea-soup odor wafting from the cafeteria, as ineradicable as cat piss. It was the kind of thing you only noticed when you were away from it. Like the first day of homeroom after summer vacation, when you realized that the air was heavy with hair-styling products and eggy breakfasts and cinnamon Dentyne and underarm deodorant and farts—the smell of Fenwick's future.

But the place had changed dramatically. In the old days everyone came to school on the bus; now the kids were either dropped off in vans or SUVs or drove to school themselves. The old Fenwick Regional had no blacks, or maybe one or two a year; now the social leaders of the school seemed to be black kids who looked like rappers and the
white kids who tried to. They'd added a sleek new wing that looked like something out of a private school. In the old days there used to be a smoking area, where longhaired kids in Black Sabbath T-shirts hung out and puffed and jeered at the jocks like Nick. Now smoking was outlawed and the Black Sabbath kids had become Goths with nose rings.

Nick hadn't spent much time in the principal's office when he was a student, but the oatmeal curtains and carpeting looked new, and the multicultural photographs of tennis champs on the court—the Williams sisters, Sania Mirza, Martina Hingis, Boris Becker—was very Jerome Sundquist.

Sundquist stepped around from his desk and shook Nick's hand somberly. They sat down together on two camel-colored chairs. Sundquist glanced at a manila file he had left on his desk, but he already knew what was in it.

“Love what you've done with the place,” Nick said.

“My office, or the school?”

“Both.”

Sundquist smiled. “You'd be surprised how many two-generation families the school has now, which is a nice thing. And obviously the district has been very lucky in a lot of ways. When the parents prosper, the schools prosper. We're all hoping the downturn isn't permanent. I appreciate you've got a lot on your shoulders right now.”

Nick shrugged.

“You were a pretty good student, as I recall,” Sundquist said.

“Not especially.”

Sundquist looked amused, tilted his head. “Okay, maybe ‘indifferent' would be closer to the mark. I don't think I ever persuaded you about the glories of polar coordinates. Your interest in trig was more practical. All about what angle you could use to slap a puck between the goalie's legs.”

“I remember your trying to sell me on that at the time. Nice try, though.”

“But you always did okay on the exams. And, Christ, you were a popular kid. The school's blue-eyed boy. Brought Fenwick Regional to the state semifinals, twice, isn't that right?”

“Semifinals one year. Finals the next.”

“That's one area where we haven't kept up. Caldicott has kicked our ass for the past four years.”

“Maybe you need a new coach.”

“Mallon is supposed to be good. Gets paid more than me, anyway. It's always hard to know when to blame the coach and when to blame the players.” Sundquist broke off. “I know how busy you are, so let me get right to the point.”

“Luke's been having problems,” Nick said with a twinge of defensiveness. “I realize that. I want to do whatever I can.”

“Of course,” Sundquist said, sounding unconvinced. “Well, as I told you, Lucas is being suspended. A three-day suspension. He was caught smoking, and that's what happens.”

So Lucas would have even more time to light up. That was really going to make things better. “I remember when there used to be a smoking area.”

“Not anymore. Smoking is forbidden on the entire campus. We've got very tough rules on that. All the kids know it.”

Campus
was new. When Nick was at school, the school only had
grounds
. Campuses were for colleges.

“Obviously I don't want him smoking at all,” Nick put in. “I'm just saying.”

“Second offense, Lucas gets thrown out of school. Expelled.”

“He's a good kid. It's just been a rough time for him.”

Sundquist looked at him hard. “How well do you know your son?”

“What are you saying? He's my kid.”

“Nick, I don't want to overstate the situation, but I don't want to understate it, either. It's pretty serious. I spent some time this morning talking to our crisis counselor. We don't think this is just about smoking, okay? You need to appreciate that we have the right to search his locker, and we may do some surprise searches, with the police.”

“The police?”

“And if drugs are found, we will let the police prosecute.
That's the way we do it these days. I want to warn you about that. Lucas is a troubled kid. Our crisis counselor is very concerned about him. Lucas isn't like you, okay?”

“Not everybody has to be a jock.”

“That isn't what I meant,” Sundquist said, not elaborating. Another glance back at the manila folder on his desk. “Besides which, his grades are going to hell. He used to be an honor student. With the grades he's been getting, he's not going to stay in that track. You understand what that means?”

“I understand,” Nick said. “I do. He needs help.”

“He needs help,” Sundquist agreed, tight-lipped. “And he hasn't been receiving it.”

Nick felt as if he were being graded as a father, and getting an
F
. “Jerry, I just don't see how suspending him or—God forbid—expelling him is the right thing to do. How is that
helping
him?” he asked. Then he wondered how many times those words had been spoken in that office.

“We have these rules for a reason,” Sundquist said smoothly, leaning back a little in his chair. “There are almost fifteen hundred kids in this high school, and we have to do what's in the best interests of all of them.”

Nick took a deep breath. “It's been hard for him, what happened. I get that he's a troubled kid. Believe me, this is something that's very much on my mind. I just think that he's been hanging out with a bad crowd.”

“One way to look at it.” Sundquist's gaze was unwavering. “Of course, there's another way to look at it.”

“How do you mean?” Nick asked blankly.

“You could say that he
is
the bad crowd.”

 

“Luke.”

“What?” He'd picked up his cell phone on the first ring. The deal was that if he failed to answer a call from his father, he'd lose the phone.

“Where are you?”

“Home. Why?”

“What the hell happened at school?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I
mean
? Three guesses. Mr. Sundquist called me in.”

“What'd he tell you?”

“Don't play this game, Luke.” Nick tried to stay calm. Talking to Lucas was like dousing a fire with lighter fluid. “You were smoking, and you got caught. Forget about what
I
think about smoking—you know the rules on smoking at school. You just got a three-day suspension.”

“So? It's all bullshit anyway.”

“Suspension from school is bullshit?”

“Yeah.” His voice shook a bit. “Because school is bullshit.”

An instant message popped up on his monitor from Marge:

“Luke, I'm furious about this,” he said. “You and I are going to have a talk about this later.”

Yeah,
Nick thought.
That's telling him
.

“And, Luke—?”

But Lucas had hung up.

No sooner had Audrey returned to the squad room than Bugbee found her. He approached her desk holding a mug of coffee in one hand, a sheaf of papers in the other, looking pleased about something.

“Don't tell me,” he said. “The shrink spilled it all about his looney-tunes patient.”

Now she understood his self-satisfied look. He was gloating, yes, but it was something more. It was the told-you-so look she'd seen LaTonya give the boys when they got in trouble for doing something she'd told them not to.

“He gave me some useful background on schizophrenia and violence,” she said.

“Stuff you could have read in a textbook, I'm figuring. But he wouldn't talk about Stadler, would he? Doctor–patient confidentiality, right?”

“There has to be a way to get access to Stadler's medical records.” She couldn't bring herself to tell Bugbee he was right any more directly than that.

“What would Jesus do, Audrey? Get a search warrant.”

She ignored the crack. “That won't do it. The most we can get out of a search warrant is dates of admission to the hospital and such. The medical records are still protected. Maybe a Freedom of Information request.”

“How many years you got?”

“Right.”

“Speaking of search warrants,” Bugbee said, waving the sheaf of papers in his left hand, “when were you planning on telling me you requested the phone records of the Stratton security guy?”

“They came in already?”

“Not my point. What'd you want 'em for?”

Bugbee must have picked them up from the fax machine, or maybe he'd seen them in her in-box. “Let me see,” she said.

“Why are you so interested in Edward Rinaldi's phone records?”

Audrey gave him a long cold look, the sort of look LaTonya was so skilled at. “Are you holding them back from me, Roy?”

Bugbee handed the papers right over.

Boy, she thought, I'm going to have to take LaTonya Assertiveness Training. She felt a pulse of triumph and wondered whether this was a worthy feeling. She thought not, but she enjoyed it guiltily all the same. “Thank you, Roy. Now, in answer to your question, I wanted them because I'm curious as to whether Rinaldi ever made any phone calls to Andrew Stadler.”

“How come?”

“Well, now, think about it. He called our records division to find out if Stadler had any priors, right? Stadler's the
only
former Stratton employee he called about. That tells me he was suspicious of Stadler—that he must have suspected Stadler of being the stalker who kept breaking into Nicholas Conover's home.”

“Yeah, and maybe he was right. There haven't been any more break-ins at Conover's house since Stadler's murder.”

“None that he's reported,” she conceded. “But it's only been a week or so.”

“So maybe Stadler was the guy. Maybe Rinaldi was on to something.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it wouldn't surprise me if the security director called Stadler and warned him to stay
away from Nicholas Conover's house. You know, said, ‘We know it's you, and if you do anything again you'll regret it.'”

The computer-generated phone record faxed over by Rinaldi's cell-phone provider was dense and thick, maybe ten or twenty pages long. She gave it a quick glance, saw that most of the information she'd requested was there, but not all. Dates and times of all telephone calls he'd placed and received—all those seemed to be there. But only some of the phone numbers also listed names. Some did not.

“I assume you already looked through this,” Audrey said.

“Quick scan, yeah. Guy has a pretty active social life, looks like. Lot of women's names there.”

“Did you come across Andrew Stadler's name?”

Bugbee shook his head.

“You looked closely at the day and night when the murder took place?”

Bugbee gave her his deadeye look. “Phone numbers don't all have names.”

“I noticed that. There doesn't seem to be a logic to it.”

“I figure if a number's unlisted, the name doesn't pop up automatically.”

“Makes sense,” she said. She hesitated, tempted to be as stingy with praise as Bugbee always was. But wasn't it written in Proverbs somewhere that a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver? “I think you're right. Very good point.”

Bugbee shrugged, a gesture not of modesty but of dismissiveness, his way of letting her know that clever thinking was second nature to him. “That means a hell of a lot of cross-referencing,” he said.

“Would you be able to take a crack at that?”

Bugbee snorted. “Yeah, like I got free time.”

“Well, someone's got to.”

A beat of silence: a standoff. “Did you get any more on that hydroseed stuff?”

Bugbee gave a lazy smile, pulled from his pants pocket a crumpled pink lab request sheet. “It's Penn Mulch.”

“Penn Mulch? What's that?”

“Penn Mulch is a proprietary formula marketed by the Lebanon Seaboard Corporation in Pennsylvania, a fertilizer and lawn products company.” He was reading from notes prepared by someone else, probably a lab tech. “The distinctive characteristic is small, regular pellets half an inch long by an eighth of an inch wide. Looks kinda like hamster shit. Cellulose pellets made up of freeze-dried recycled newspaper, one-three-one starter fertilizer, and super-absorbent polymer crystals. And green dye.”

“And grass seed.”

“Not part of the Penn Mulch. The lawn company mixes in the grass seed with the mulch and a tackifier and makes a kind of slurry they can spray on the ground. Kind of like a pea soup, only thinner. The grass seed in this case is a mixture of Kentucky Bluegrass and Creeping Red Fescue, with a little Saturn Perennial Ryegrass and Buccaneer Perennial Ryegrass thrown in.”

“Nice work,” she said. “But that doesn't really mean much to me—is this a pretty common formula for hydroseed?”

“The grass seed, that varies a lot. There's like nine hundred different varieties to choose from. Some of it's cheap shit.”

“The lawn companies don't all use the same mix, then?”

“Nah. The shit they use along the highway, the contractor mix, you don't want to use on your lawn. The better the mulch, the better results you get.”

“The Penn Mulch—”

“Expensive. Way better than the crap they normally use—ground-up wood mulch or newspaper, comes in fifty-pound bags. This is pricey stuff. Doubt it's very common. It's what you might use on some rich guy's lawn—rich guy who knows the difference, I mean.”

“So we need to find out what lawn companies in the area use Penn Mulch.”

“That's a lot of phone calls.”

“How many lawn companies in Fenwick? Two or three, maybe?”

“Not my point,” Bugbee said. “So you find the one com
pany that sometimes uses Penn Mulch in its hydroseed mix. Then what?”

“Then you find out whose lawns they used Penn Mulch on. If you're saying it's so expensive, there can't be all that many.”

“So what do you get? Our dead guy walked over someone's lawn that had Penn Mulch on it. So?”

“I don't imagine there are too many fancy lawns down in the dog pound, Roy,” she said. “Do you?”