Company Man (29 page)

Audrey did not arrive home until a little after seven, feeling a knot in her stomach as she turned the key in the front door. She'd told him that she'd be home for dinner, though she hadn't said what time that would be. It took so little to set Leon off.

But he wasn't home.

Several nights in a row he hadn't been home until late, almost ten o'clock. What was he doing? Did he go out drinking? Yet recently he didn't seem to be drunk when he got home. She couldn't smell liquor on his breath.

She had another suspicion, though it made her sick to think about it. It explained why Leon was no longer interested in having sex with her.

He was getting it somewhere else. He was, she feared, having an affair, and lately he was being brazen about it, not even attempting to cover it up.

Leon was at home all day while she was at work, which gave him plenty of opportunity to cheat without her ever finding out. But going out, coming home at nine, ten o'clock without so much as an excuse—that was a thumb in her eye. That was blatant.

Sure enough, at a few minutes after ten she heard the jingling of the keys in the lock, and Leon walked in, went right
to the kitchen, ran water into a glass. He didn't even say hello.

“Leon,” she called out.

But he didn't answer.

And she knew. You didn't have to be a detective. It was that obvious. She knew, and it was like a punch to her solar plexus.

 

Nick sat in his study, trying to go over some paperwork. He'd been calling Eddie, at home and on his cell, but no answer. On his fourth try, Eddie answered with an annoyed “What?”

“Eddie, she was just here,” Nick said.

“Fenwick's own Cleopatra Jones? She don't have no superpowers, Nick. She's just sweating you. They tried the same shit on me today—the other one came by, Bugbee, asked me a shitload of questions, but I could see they got nothing.”

“She asked me about the call I made to you that night.”

“What'd you tell her?”

“Well, I—see, I'd told her I slept through the night that night.”

“
Shit
.”

“No, listen. That's what I said at first, but then when she said she knew I'd made a call to you on your cell phone, I told her I must have mixed up the nights. I said the alarm went off that night, so I called you to ask you to check it out.” Nick waited for Eddie's response with rising dread. “My God, Eddie, did you tell the other cop something different? I mean, I figured the alarm going off, that's a matter of record—”

“No, you did the right thing. I said pretty much the same once I saw what he had. But man, I was shitting bricks you might try to wing it, say something else. Good job.”

“We've got to coordinate a little more closely, Eddie. Make sure we don't say different things.”

“Right.”

“And something else. She was admiring the alarm system.”

“She's got good taste.” He lowered his voice. “And so does the superfreak who's naked in my bed. Who was just admiring my dick. Which is why I gotta go.”

“Especially the cameras. Especially the
cameras,
Eddie.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you
positive
there's no way to retrieve the part of the tape you erased?”

“It's not tape, it's digital,” Eddie snapped. “Anyway, I told you, you have nothing to worry about. What's gone is gone. Why are we fucking
having
this conversation? I just spent ten minutes preheating the oven—now I got to stick in my French bread before it cools down, you get what I'm saying?”

“The hard drive is totally clean, right? They can't bring it back?”

An exasperated sigh. “Stop being such a
girl,
okay?”

Nick felt a surge of anger he knew better than to vent. “I sure as hell hope you know what you're doing,” he said stonily.

“Nick, you're doing it again. You're peeing in my pool. Oh, by the way. That work you wanted me to do on Scott McNally?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember last month when he was away for a week?”

“I remember. Some sort of dude ranch in Arizona. Grapevine Canyon, was it? He said it was like
City Slickers
without the laughs.”

“
City Slickers,
he said?
Crouching
fucking
Tiger
's more like it. He's a sneak, but a cheapskate numbers guy like him can't pass up the corporate travel rates, right? So this pencil dick puts in for a Stratton discount when he buys his ticket to Hong Kong. I got the receipts from the girls in the travel office. Unfucking
believable
.”

“Hong Kong?”

Eddie nodded. “Hong Kong and then Shenzhen. Which is
this huge industrial area near Hong Kong, shitload of factories, on the mainland.”

“I know about Shenzhen.”

“That mean anything to you?”

“It means he's lying to me,” Nick replied.
It also means that all these rumors are right. Where there's smoke there's fire, as the GSA guy said
.

“Sounds to me like you got trouble everywhere you go,” Eddie said. “Big trouble.”

Audrey was surprised to find Bugbee in this early, sitting in his cubicle on the phone. She approached and heard him talking to a lawn company, asking about hydroseeding. Well, she thought, what do you know? He really is working this case.

He wore his customary sport coat, a pale green with a windowpane plaid, a pale blue shirt, red tie. In repose, he was not a bad-looking man, even if he dressed like a used-car salesman. He saw her standing nearby, kept talking without acknowledging her presence. She held up a finger. After a little while he gave her a brusque nod.

She waited until he got off the phone, then wordlessly showed him the little clear-plastic eye-cream vial.

He looked at the pinch of dirt, said suspiciously, “What's that?”

“I took it from Conover's lawn yesterday.” She paused. “His lawn was recently hydroseeded.”

Bugbee stared, the realization dawning. “That's not admissible,” he said. “Poison fruit.”

“I know. But worth taking a look at. To my eye it looks like the same stuff from under Stadler's fingernails.”

“It's been, what, like two weeks since the murder? It's probably disintegrated a lot since then. The mulch pellets are supposed to break down.”

“It's been a dry couple of weeks. The only water probably came from his irrigation system. More interesting, I managed to get a look at his security system while he was making coffee for me.” She handed him a While You Were Out message slip on which she'd written some notes. “Pretty fancy. Sixteen cameras. Here's the name of the alarm monitoring company he uses. And the makes and models of the equipment, including the digital video recorder.”

“You want me to talk to one of the techs,” he said. She noticed that for the first time he didn't argue with her.

“I think we should go over there and take a look at the recorder. And while we're at it, check for blood and prints, inside and outside the house.”

Bugbee nodded. “You're thinking the whole thing went down in or near Conover's house, and the surveillance cameras recorded it.”

“We can't ignore the possibility.”

“They'd be stupid to forget about that little detail.”

“We've both seen a lot of stupidity. People forget. Also, it's not like the old days when you could just take out a videotape and get rid of it. It's got to be a lot harder to erase a digital surveillance recording. You've got to know what you're doing.”

“Eddie Rinaldi knows what he's doing.”

“Maybe.”

“Of course he does,” Bugbee said. “Are you thinking Conover did it?”

“I'm thinking Eddie did it.” Now that he was a suspect, she noticed, he'd gone from Rinaldi to Eddie. “I think Conover saw or heard Stadler outside his house. Maybe the alarm went off, maybe not—”

“The alarm company would probably have a record of that.”

“Okay, but either way, Conover calls Eddie, tells him this guy's trying to get into his house. Eddie comes over, confronts Stadler, then kills him.”

“And gets rid of the body.”

“He's an ex-cop. He's smart enough, or experienced
enough, to make sure he doesn't leave any trace evidence on the body—”

“Except the fingernails.”

“It's the middle of the night, two in the morning, it's late and it's dark and they're both panicking. They overlook some things. Subtleties like that.”

“One of them moves the body down to Hastings.”

“Eddie, I'm guessing.”

Bugbee thought a moment. “The gatehouse at Fenwicke Estates probably has records of who left when. We can see if Conover drove out of there some time after Eddie drove in. Or if it was just Eddie.”

“Which would tell you what?”

“If the shooting happened inside or outside Conover's house, they had to move the body down to the Dumpster on Hastings. Which they're going to do in a car. If both Conover and Rinaldi left Fenwicke Estates some time after two, then it could have been either one of them. But if only Eddie left, then it's Eddie who moved it.”

“Exactly.” A moment of silence passed. “There are cameras everywhere around the community.”

Bugbee smiled. “If so, we got 'em.”

“That's not what I'm saying. If we can get the surveillance tapes, we can confirm when Eddie entered and exited, sure.”

“Or Eddie and Conover.”

“Okay. But more important, we can see if
Stadler
came over. If Andrew Stadler entered. Then we've got Stadler's whereabouts pinned down.”

Bugbee nodded. “Yeah.” Another pause. “Which means that Eddie has an unlicensed .380.”

“Why unlicensed?”

“Because I went through the safety inspection certificate files at the county sheriff's department. He's got paperwork for a Ruger, a Glock, a hunting rifle, couple of shotguns. But no .380. So if he's got one, he doesn't have any paper on it.”

“I've been pushing the state crime lab,” Audrey said. “I want to see if they can use their database to match the
rounds we found in Stadler's body with any other no-gun case anywhere.”

Bugbee looked impressed, but he just nodded.

“In any case, we're going to need a search warrant to see what weapons Rinaldi has.”

“Not going to be a problem getting one.”

“Fine. If we find a .380 and we get a match…” She was starting to enjoy the genuine back-and-forth, even if Bugbee was still prickly and defensive.

“You're dreaming. He can't be that stupid.”

“We can always hope. What did he say about the phone call?”

“He was pretty slick. Said, yeah, he got a call from Conover that night, the alarm went off at Conover's house and could he check it out. Said he was a little pissed off, but he went over there to check it out. You know, the shit you do to keep your boss happy. It was like no big deal. Did Conover put his foot in it?”

“No. He—well, it felt like he sort of evolved his story.”

“Evolved?”

“He didn't revise his story right away. I reminded him that he'd said he slept through the night, and then I asked him about the phone call he made at two in the morning, and he owned right up to it. He said he must have got the days mixed up.”

“Happens. You believe him?”

“I don't know.”

“He sound rehearsed?”

“It was hard to tell. Either he was telling the truth, or he'd done his homework.”

“Usually you can tell.”

“Usually. But I couldn't.”

“So maybe he's a good liar.”

“Or he's telling the truth. The way I see it, he's telling
part
of the truth. He called Eddie, Eddie came over—and that's where the true part ends. Did Eddie say if he found anything when he looked around Conover's yard?”

“Yeah. He said he found nothing.”

“That much they got straight,” Audrey said.

“Maybe too straight.”

“I don't know what that means. Straight is straight. You know what? I say we ought to move quickly on this. The gun, the tape recorder—this is all stuff that they could do something about if they haven't already. Toss the gun, delete the tape, whatever. Now that we've talked to them both separately, at the same time, they're both going to be suspicious. If they're going to destroy evidence, now is the time they're going to do it.”

Bugbee nodded. “Talk to Noyce, put in for the warrants anyway in case we need them. I'll make a couple of calls. Can you clear your schedule today?”

“Happy to.”

“Oh, I called that Stadler chick for a follow-up.”

“And?”

“She doesn't know shit about what her father did on the night he was killed. Says he never said anything about Conover.”

“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?”