Company Man

1

The office of the chief executive officer of the Stratton Corporation wasn’t really an office at all. At a quick glance you’d call it a cubicle, but at the Stratton Corporation-which made the elegant silver-mesh fabric panels that served as the walls around the CEO’s brushed-steel Stratton Ergon desk-“cubicle” was a dirty word. You didn’t work in a cubicle in the middle of a cube farm; you multitasked at your “home base” in an “open-plan system.”

Nicholas Conover, Stratton’s CEO, leaned back in his top-of-the-line leather Stratton Symbiosis chair, trying to concentrate on the stream of figures spewing from the mouth of his chief financial officer, Scott McNally, a small, nerdy, self-deprecating guy who had a spooky affinity for numbers. Scott was sardonic and quick-witted, in a dark, sharp-edged way. He was also one of the smartest men Nick had ever met. But there was nothing Nick hated more than budget meetings.

“Am I boring you, Nick?”

“You gotta ask?”

Scott was standing by the giant plasma screen, touching it with the stylus to advance the PowerPoint slides. He was not much more than five feet tall, over a foot shorter than Nick. He was prone to nervous twitches, anxious shrugs, and his fingernails were all bitten to the quick. He was also rapidly going bald, though he wasn’t even out of his thirties; his dome was fringed with wild curly hair. He had plenty of money, but he always seemed to wear the same blue button-down Oxford shirt, fraying at the collar, that he’d worn since Wharton. His brown eyes darted around as he spoke, sunken in deep lilac hollows.

As he rattled on about the layoffs and how much they were going to cost this year versus how much they’d save the next, he fidgeted, with his free hand, with what remained of his straggly hair.

Nick’s desk was kept fastidiously clear by his terrific assistant, Marjorie Dykstra. The only things on it were his computer (wireless keyboard and mouse, no pesky rat’s nest of wires, a flat-panel screen), a red model truck with the Stratton logo painted on the side, and framed pictures of his kids. He kept sneaking glances at the photos, hoping Scott would think he was just staring into space and concentrating on the interminable presentation.

What’s the bottom line, dude? he wanted to say. Are the guys in Boston going to be happy or not?

But Scott kept droning on and on about cost savings, about outplacement costs, about metrics, about employees as “units,” as bar graphs on a PowerPoint slide. “Current average employee age is 47.789 years, with a standard deviation of 6.92,” Scott said. He noticed Nick’s glazed expression as he touched the screen with the aluminum stylus, and a half smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “But hey, age is just a number, right?”

“Is there any good news here?”

“Ahh, it’s only money.” Scott paused. “That was a joke.”

Nick stared at the little display of silver frames. Since Laura’s death last year he cared about two things only: his job and his kids. Julia was ten, and she beamed with her thousand-watt smile in her school picture, her curly chestnut hair unruly, her enormous, liquid brown eyes sparkling, her big new teeth a little crooked, a smile so unself-conscious and dazzling she seemed to be bursting out of the photo. Lucas was sixteen, dark-haired like his little sister, and unnervingly handsome; he had his mother’s cornflower-blue eyes, an angular jawline. A high school heartthrob. Lucas smiled for the camera, a smile that Nick hadn’t actually seen in person since the accident.

There was just one photo of all four of them, sitting on the porch of the old house, Laura seated in the middle, everyone touching her, hands on her shoulder or her waist, the center of the family. The gaping hole, now. Her amused, twinkling blue eyes looked right at the camera, her expression frank and poised, seemingly tickled by some private joke. And of course Barney, their overweight, lumbering Golden/Lab mix, sat on his haunches in front of everyone, smiling his dog smile. Barney was in all the family pictures, even in last Christmas’s family photo, the one with Lucas glowering like Charles Manson.

“Todd Muldaur’s going to have a shit fit,” Nick said, lifting his eyes to meet Scott’s. Muldaur was a general partner in Fairfield Equity Partners in Boston, the private-equity firm that now owned the Stratton Corporation. Todd, not to put too fine a point on it, was Nick’s boss.

“That’s about the size of it,” Scott agreed. He turned his head suddenly, and a second later Nick heard the shouts too.

“What the hell-?” Scott said. A deep male voice, somewhere nearby, yelling. A woman’s voice, sounded like Marge’s.

“You don’t have an appointment, sir!” Marge was shouting, her voice high and frightened. An answering rumble, the words indistinct. “He isn’t here, anyway, and if you don’t leave right this instant, sir, I’m going to have to call Security.”

A hulking figure crashed into one of the silver panels that outlined Nick’s workstation, almost tipping it over. A bearded giant in his late thirties wearing a checked flannel shirt, unbuttoned, over a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt: barrel-chested, powerful-looking. The guy looked vaguely familiar. A factory worker? Someone who’d recently been laid off?

Immediately behind him followed Marge, her arms flailing. “You cannot come in here!” she shrilled. “Get out of here immediately, or I’ll call Security.”

The giant’s foghorn voice boomed: “Well, whaddaya know, there he is. Boss man himself. The Slasher is in.”

Nick felt a cold fear wash over him as he realized that the budget meeting might turn out to be the high point of his day.

The guy, probably a worker just laid off in the most recent round of cuts, was staring, wild-eyed.

Nick flashed on news stories he’d read about crazed employees-“disgruntled workers,” they were always called-who’d been let go, and then showed up at work and started picking people off.

“I just remembered a phone conference I’m late for,” Scott McNally muttered as he squeezed past the intruder. “If you’ll excuse me.”

Nick got up slowly, raised himself to his full six-two. The crazy bearded guy was considerably bigger.

“What can I do for you?” Nick asked politely, calmly, the way you might try to lull a rabid Doberman pinscher.

“What can you do for me? That’s fucking hilarious. There’s nothing more you can do for me, or to me, asshole.”

Marge, hovering directly behind him, her hands flailing, said: “Nick, I’ll call Security.”

Nick put up his hand to tell her to hold off. “I’m sure there’s no need,” he said.

Marge squinted at him to indicate her strong disagreement, but she nodded, backed away warily.

The bearded man took a step forward, puffing up his massive chest, but Nick didn’t budge. There was something primal going on here: the interloper was a baboon baring his canines, screaming and strutting to scare off a predator. He smelled of rancid sweat and cigar smoke.

Nick fought the strong temptation to deck the guy but reminded himself that, as CEO of Stratton, he couldn’t exactly do stuff like that. Plus, if this was one of the five thousand Stratton workers who’d been laid off within the last two years, he had a right to be angry. The thing to do was to talk the guy down, let him vent, let the air out of the balloon slowly.

Nick pointed to an empty chair, but the bearded man refused to sit. “What’s your name?” Nick said, softening his voice a bit.

“Old Man Devries woulda never had to ask,” the man retorted. “He knew everyone’s name.”

Nick shrugged. That was the myth, anyway. Folksy, paternal Milton Devries-Nick’s predecessor-had been CEO of Stratton for almost four decades. The old man had been beloved, but there was no way he knew ten thousand names.

“I’m not as good with names as the old man was,” Nick said. “So help me out here.”

“Louis Goss.”

Nick extended his hand to shake, but Goss didn’t take it. Instead, Goss pointed a stubby forefinger at him. “When you sat down at your fancy computer at your fancy desk and made the decision to fire half the guys in the chair factory, did you even fucking think about who these people are?”

“More than you know,” Nick said. “Listen, I’m sorry you lost your job-”

“I’m not here because I lost my job-see, I got seniority. I’m here to tell you that you deserve to lose yours. You think just because you waltz through this plant once a month that you know anything about these guys? These are human beings, buddy. Four hundred and fifty men and women who get up at four in the morning to do the early shift so they can feed their families and pay their rent or their mortgages and take care of their sick kids or their dying parents, okay? Do you realize that because of you some of these guys are going to lose their houses?”

Nick closed his eyes briefly. “Louis, are you just going to talk at me, or do you want to hear me out?”

“I’m here to give you a little free advice, Nick.”

“I find you get what you pay for.”

The man ignored him. “You better think seriously about whether you really want to go through with these layoffs. Because if you don’t call them off by tomorrow morning, this place is going to grind to a halt.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I got half, maybe three-quarters of the factory floor with me on this. More, once we start. We’re all sicking out tomorrow, Nick. And we’re staying sick until my buddies get their jobs back.” Goss was smiling with tobacco-darkened teeth, enjoying his moment. “You do the right thing, we do the right thing. Everyone’s happy.”

Nick stared at Goss. How much of this was bluster, how much on the level? A wildcat strike could paralyze the company, especially if it spread to the other plants.

“Why don’t you think this over when you’re driving home tonight in your Mercedes to your gated community?” Goss went on. “Ask yourself if you feel like taking your company down with you.”

It’s a Chevy Suburban, not a Mercedes, Nick wanted to say, but then he was struck by that phrase, “gated community.” How did Goss know where he lived? There’d been nothing in the newspaper about that, though of course people talked…Was this a veiled threat?

Goss smiled, a mirthless, leering grin, saw the reaction on Nick’s face. “Yeah, that’s right. I know where you live.”

Nick felt his rage flare up like a lit match tossed into a pool of gasoline. He sprang out of his seat, lunged forward, his face a few inches from Louis Goss’s face. “What the hell are you trying to say?” It took all his self-restraint to keep from grabbing the collar of the guy’s flannel shirt and twisting it tight around his fat neck. Up close he realized that Goss’s bulk was all flab, not muscle.

Goss flinched, seemed to shrink back a bit, intimidated.

“You think everyone doesn’t know you live in a fucking huge mansion in a gated community?” Goss said. “You think anyone else in this company can afford to live like that?”

Nick’s anger subsided as quickly as it had surged. He felt a damp sort of relief; he’d misunderstood. The threat that Louis had actually made seemed suddenly tame by comparison. He leaned even closer, poked a finger against Goss’s chest, jabbing the little white hyphen between “Harley” and “Davidson.”

“Let me ask you something, Louis. Do you remember the ‘town meeting’ at the chair plant two years ago? When I told you guys the company was in a shitload of trouble and layoffs seemed likely but I wanted to avoid them if possible? You weren’t sick that day, were you?”

“I was there,” Goss muttered.

“Remember I asked if you’d all be willing to cut your hours back so everyone could stay on the job? Remember what everyone said?”

Goss was silent, looking off to one side, avoiding Nick’s direct stare.

“You all said no, you couldn’t do that. A pay cut was out of the question.”

“Easy for you to-”

“And I asked whether you’d all be willing to cut back on your health plan, with your daycare and your health-club memberships. Now, how many people raised their hands to say yeah, okay, we’ll cut back? Any recollection?”

Goss shook his head slowly, resentfully.

“Zero. Not a single goddamned hand went up. Nobody wanted to lose a goddamned hour of work; nobody wanted to lose a single perk.” He could hear the blood rushing through his ears, felt a flush of indignation. “You think I slashed five thousand jobs, buddy? Well, the reality is, I saved five thousand jobs. Because the boys in Boston who own this company now don’t fuck around. They’re looking at our biggest competitor and seeing that the other guys aren’t bending metal, they’re not making their furniture in Michigan anymore. Everything’s made in China now, Louis. That’s why they can undercut us on price. You think the boys in Boston don’t remind me of that every single goddamned chance they get?”

“I got no idea,” Louis Goss muttered, shuffling his feet. It was all he could muster.

“So go right ahead, Louis. Have your strike. And they’ll bring in a new CEO who’ll make me look like Mister Rogers. Someone who’ll shut down all of our plants the second he walks in this building. Then you wanna keep your job, Louis? I suggest you learn fucking Mandarin.”

Louis was silent for a few seconds, and when he spoke, it was in a small, sullen voice. “You’re going to fire me, aren’t you?”

“You?” Nick snorted. “You’re not worth the severance package. Now, get the fuck back on the line and get the hell out of my…work space.”

A few seconds after Louis Goss had lumbered away, Marge appeared again. “You need to go home, Nick,” she said. “Now.”

“Home?”

“It’s the police. There’s a problem.”

2

Nick backed his Chevy Suburban out of his space too fast, not bothering to check whether anyone was behind him, and careened through the parking lot that encircled the headquarters building. Even at the height of the workday, it stood half-empty as it had for the last two years, since the layoffs began. Gallows humor abounded among the employees these days, Nick knew. The upside of losing half the workforce was, you could always find a parking space.

His nerves felt stretched taught. Acres of empty black asphalt, surrounded by a great black field of charred buffalo grass, the remains of a prescribed fire. Buffalo grass never needed mowing, but every few years it had to be burned to the ground. The air smelled like a Weber grill.

Black against black against the black of the road, a desolate landscape. He wondered whether driving by the vast swath of scorched earth every day, staring at the charred field through the office windows, left a dark carbon smudge on your psyche.

You need to go home. Now.

When you have kids, they’re the first thing you think of. Even a guy like Nick, hardly a worrywart, you get a call from the cops and your imagination takes flight in a bad direction.

But both kids were all right, the cops had assured Marjorie. Julia was on her way back from school, and Lucas-well, Lucas had been in classes today and was doing whatever the hell he did after school these days, which was another issue entirely.

That wasn’t it.

Yes, it was another break-in, they’d said, but this time he really needed to come by. What the hell could that mean?

Over the past year or so, Nick had gotten used to the periodic calls from the alarm company or the police. The burglar alarm would go off in the middle of the day. There’d been a break-in. The alarm company would verify that the alarm was genuine by calling home or Nick’s office and requesting a code. If no authorized user said it was a false alarm, the company would immediately dispatch the Fenwick police. A couple of cops would then drive by the house, check it out.

Inevitably it happened when no one was there-the crew working on the kitchen were taking one of their frequent days off; the kids were at school; the housekeeper, Marta, was out shopping or maybe picking up Julia.

Nothing was ever stolen. The intruder would force a window or one of the French doors, get inside, and leave a little message.

Literally, a message: words spray-painted in Day-Glo orange, all capital letters formed with the precision of an architect or mechanical engineer: NO HIDING PLACE.

Three words, one on top of another.

Was there any doubt it was a deranged laid-off employee? The graffiti defaced the walls of the living room, the dining room they never used, the freshly plastered walls of the kitchen. In the beginning it had scared the shit out of him.

The real message, of course, was that they weren’t safe. They could be gotten to.

The first graffiti had appeared on the heavy, ornate ashwood front door, which Laura had deliberated over for weeks with the architect, a door that had cost a ridiculous three thousand dollars, a fucking door, for God’s sake. Nick had made his feelings known but hadn’t objected, because it was obviously important to her, for some reason. He’d been perfectly content with the flimsy paneled front door that came with the house they’d just bought. He didn’t want to change anything about the house except maybe to shrink it to half its size. There was a saying that was popular at Stratton, which Old Man Devries was fond of repeating: the whale that spouts gets the harpoon. Sometimes he thought about having one of those bronze-looking estate wall plaques made for him by Frontgate, the kind you see on stone entrance pillars in front of McMansions, saying in raised copper letters, SPOUTING WHALE HOUSE.

But to Laura, the front door was symbolic: it was where you welcomed friends and family, and it was where you kept out those who weren’t welcome. So it had to be both beautiful and substantial. “It’s the front door, Nick,” she’d insisted. “The first thing people see. That’s the one place you don’t cheap out.”

Maybe, on some level, she thought a three-inch-thick front door would make them safer. Buying this insanely big house in the Fenwicke Estates: that was her idea too. She wanted the safety of the gated community. It took only a couple of anonymous threatening phone calls, as soon as the layoffs were announced.

“If you’re a target, we’re all targets,” she said. There was a lot of anger out there, directed at him. He wasn’t going to argue with her. He had a family to protect.

Now, with her gone, it felt as if he’d absorbed her neurosis, as if it had penetrated his bones. He felt, sometimes, that his family, what remained of it, was as fragile as an egg.

He also knew that the security of their gated community was little more than an illusion. It was a show, an elaborate charade, the fancy gatehouse and the guards, the private security, the high black iron fence with the spearhead finials.

The Suburban screeched to a stop before the ornately scrolled cast-iron gate beside the brick gatehouse built to resemble a miniature castle. A brass plaque on one of the piers said FENWICKE ESTATES.

That little “e” at the end of Fenwick-he’d always found it pretentious to the point of being irritating. Plus, he was so over the irony here, this posh enclosed neighborhood equipped with the priciest security you could get-the tall wrought-iron perimeter fence with the fiber-optic sensing cable concealed inside the top rail, the pan-tilt-zoom CCTV surveillance cameras, the motion-sensor intruder alarms-where you couldn’t stop the loonies from scrambling in through the dense surrounding woods and climbing over the fence.

“Another break-in, Mr. Conover,” said Jorge, the day guard. Nice guy, couldn’t be nicer. The security guards were all professional in demeanor, all wore sharp uniforms.

Nick nodded grimly, waited for the motor-driven gate to open, ridiculously slow. The high-pitched electronic warning beep was annoying. Everything beeped these days: trucks backing up, dishwashers and clothes dryers, microwaves. It really could drive you crazy.

“Police are there now, you know,” said Jorge. “Three cruisers, sir.”

“Any idea what it is?”

“No, sir, I don’t, I’m sorry.”

The damned gate took forever to open. It was ridiculous. In the evening sometimes there was a line of cars waiting to get in. Something had to be done about it. For Christ’s sake, what if his house caught fire-would the fire department trucks have to sit here while his house turned to toast?

He raced the engine in annoyance. Jorge shrugged a sheepish apology.

The second the gate was open far enough for the car to get through, he gunned it-the Suburban’s pickup never ceased to amaze him-and barreled over the tiger-teeth tire-shredders that enforced one-way traffic, across the wide circular court paved in antique brick in a geometric pattern by old-world Italian stonemasons shipped over from Sicily, past the SPEED LIMIT 20 sign at twice that at least.

The brick pavement turned into glass-smooth macadam road, no street sign. He raced past the old-growth elms and firs, the mailboxes the size of doghouses, none of the houses visible. You had to be invited over to see what your neighbor’s house looked like. And there sure as hell weren’t any block parties here in Fenwicke Estates.

When he saw police squad cars parked on the street and at the entrance to his driveway, he felt something small and cold and hard forming at the base of his stomach, a little icicle of fear.

A uniformed policeman halted him a few hundred feet from the house, halfway up the drive. Nick jumped out and slammed the car door in one smooth, swift motion.

The cop was short and squat, powerful-looking, seemed to be perspiring heavily despite the cool weather. His badge said MANZI. A walkie-talkie hitched to his belt squawked unceasingly.

“You Mr. Conover?” He stood directly in front of Nick’s path, blocking his way. Nick felt a flash of annoyance. My house, my driveway, my burglar alarm: get the fuck out of my way.

“Yeah, that’s me, what’s going on?” Nick tried to keep the irritation, and the anxiety, out of his voice.

“Ask you some questions?” Dappled sunlight filtered through the tall birches that lined the asphalt lane, played on the cop’s inscrutable face.

Nick shrugged. “Sure-what is it, the graffiti again?”

“What time did you leave the house this morning, sir?”

“Around seven-thirty, but the kids are normally out of there by eight, eight-fifteen at the latest.”

“What about your wife?”

Nick gazed at the cop steadily. Most of the cops had to know who he was at least. He wondered if this guy was just trying to yank his chain. “I’m a single parent.”

A pause. “Nice house.”

“Thank you.” Nick could sense the resentment, the envy rising off the man like swamp gas. “What happened?”

“House is okay, sir. It’s brand-new, looks like. Not even finished yet, huh?”

“We’re just having some work done,” Nick said impatiently.

“I see. The workers, they’re here every day?”

“I wish. Not yesterday or today.”

“Your alarm company lists a work number for you at the Stratton Corporation,” Officer Manzi said. He was looking down at an aluminum clipboard, his black eyes small and deeply inset like raisins in a butterscotch pudding. “You work there.”

“Right.”

“What do you do at Stratton?” There was a beat before the policeman looked up and let his eyes meet Nick’s: the guy knew damned well what he did there.

“I’m the CEO.”

Manzi nodded as if everything now made sense. “I see. You’ve had a number of break-ins over the last several months, is that correct, Mr. Conover?”

“Five or six times now.”

“What kind of security system you have here, sir?”

“Burglar alarm on the doors and some of the windows and French doors. Basic system. Nothing too elaborate.”

“Home like this, that’s not much of a system. No cameras, right?”

“Well, we live in this, you know, gated community.”

“Yes, sir, I can see that. Lot of good it does, keeping out the wing nuts.”

“Point taken.” Nick almost smiled.

“Sounds like the burglar alarm isn’t on very often, sir, that right?”

“Officer, why so many cars here today for a routine-”

“Mind if I ask the questions?” Officer Manzi said. The guy seemed to be enjoying his authority, pushing around the boss man from Stratton. Let him, Nick thought. Let him have his fun. But-

Nick heard a car approaching, turned and saw the blue Chrysler Town & Country, Marta behind the wheel. He felt that little chemical surge of pleasure he always got when he saw his daughter, the way he used to feel with Lucas too, until that got complicated. The minivan pulled up alongside Nick and the engine was switched off. A car door opened and slammed, and Julia shouted, “What are you doing home, Daddy?”

She ran toward him, wearing a light-blue hooded Stratton sweatshirt and jeans, black sneakers. She wore some slight variant of the outfit every day, a sweatshirt or an athletic jersey. When Nick went to the same elementary school, more than thirty years before, you weren’t allowed to wear jeans, and sweatshirts weren’t considered appropriate school attire. But he didn’t have time in the mornings to argue with her, and he was inclined to go easy on his little girl, given what she had to be going through since the death of her mother.

She hugged him tight around his abdomen. He no longer hoisted her up, since at almost five feet and ninety-something pounds, it wasn’t so easy. In the last year she’d gotten tall and leggy, almost gangly, though there was still a pocket of baby fat at her tummy. She was starting to develop physically, little breast buds emerging, which Nick couldn’t deal with. It was a constant reminder of his inadequacy as a parent: who the hell was going to talk to her, get her through adolescence?

The hug went on for several seconds until Nick released her, another thing that had changed since Laura was gone. His daughter’s hugs: she didn’t want to let him go.

Now she looked up at him, her meltingly beautiful brown eyes lively. “How come there’s all these police?”

“They want to talk to me, baby doll. No big deal. Where’s your backpack?”

“In the car. Did that crazy guy get in the house again and write bad stuff?”

Nick nodded, stroked her glossy brown hair. “What are you doing home now? Don’t you have piano?”

She gave him a look of amused contempt. “That’s not till four.”

“I thought it was three.”

“Mrs. Guarini changed it, like, months ago, don’t you remember?”

He shook his head. “Oh, right. I forgot. Well, listen, I have to talk to this policeman here. Marta, you guys stay here until the police say it’s okay to go in the house, okay?”

Marta Burrell was from Barbados, a mocha-skinned woman of thirty-eight, tall and slender as a fashion model with an air of sultry indifference, or maybe arrogance, her default mode. Her jeans were a little too tight, and she customarily wore high heels, and she was vocal about her disapproval of Julia’s daily uniform. She expressed disapproval of just about everything in the household. She was ferociously devoted to the kids, though, and was able to make both of them do things Nick couldn’t. Marta had been a superb nanny when the kids were little, was an excellent cook, and an indifferent housekeeper.

“Sure, Nick,” she said. She reached for Julia, but the girl scampered off.

“You were saying,” Nick said to the cop.

Manzi looked up, fixed Nick with a blank look, bordering on impertinence, but there was a gleam in his eyes; he seemed to be restraining a smile. “Do you have any enemies, Mr. Conover?”

“Only about five thousand people in town.”

The policeman’s eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me.”

“We laid off half our workforce recently, as I’m sure you know. More than five thousand employees.”

“Ah, yes,” the cop said. “You’re not a popular man around here, are you?”

“You could say that.”

It wasn’t that long ago, Nick reflected, that everyone loved him. People he didn’t know in high school started sucking up to him. Forbes magazine even did a profile. After all, Nick was the youthful blue-collar guy, the son of a guy who’d spent a life bending metal in the chair factory-business reporters ate that stuff up. Maybe Nick was never going to be beloved at the company like Old Man Devries, but for a while at least he’d been popular, admired, liked. A local hero in the small town of Fenwick, Michigan, sort of, a guy you’d point out at the Shop ’n Save and maybe, if you felt bold, walk up to and introduce yourself in the frozen-foods section.

But that was before-before the first layoffs were announced, two years ago, after Stratton’s new owners had laid down the law at the quarterly board meeting in Fenwick. There was no choice. The Stratton Corporation was going down the crapper if they didn’t cut costs, and fast. That meant losing half its workforce, five thousand people in a town of maybe forty thousand. It was the most painful thing he’d ever done, something he’d never imagined having to do. There’d been a series of smaller layoffs since the first ones were announced, two years ago. It was like Chinese water torture. The Fenwick Free Press, which used to publish puff pieces about Stratton, now ran banner headlines: THREE HUNDRED MORE STRATTON WORKERS FACE THE AXE. CANCER VICTIM SUFFERS LOSS OF STRATTON BENEFITS. The local columnists routinely referred to him as “the Slasher.”

Nick Conover, local boy made good, had become the most hated man in town.

“Guy like you ought to have better security than that. You get the security you pay for, you know.”

Nick was about to reply when he heard his daughter scream.

3

He ran toward the source of the screaming and found Julia beside the pool. Her cries came in great ragged gulps. She knelt on the bluestone coping, her hands thrashing in the water, her small back torquing back and forth. Marta stood nearby, helpless and aghast, a hand to her mouth.

Then Nick saw what had made Julia scream, and he felt sick.

A dark shape floated in cranberry red water, splayed and distended, surrounded by slick white entrails. The blood was concentrated in a dark cloud around the carcass; the water got lighter, pinkish as it got farther away from the furry brown mass.

The corpse wasn’t immediately recognizable as Barney, their old Lab/Golden Retriever. It took a second glance, a struggle with disbelief. On the bluestone not far from where Julia knelt, keening, was a blood-slick, carbon-steel Henckels knife from their kitchen set.

Many things immediately made sense, now: the unusual police presence, the questioning, even the absence of Barney’s usual barked greeting when Nick arrived.

A couple of policemen were busy taking pictures, talking to one another, their low conversations punctuated by static blasts from their radios. They seemed to be chatting casually, as if nothing unusual had happened. Business as usual to them. No one was expressing sympathy or concern. Nick felt a flash of rage, but the main thing now was to comfort his daughter.

He rushed to her, sank to his knees, put a hand on her back. “Baby,” he said. “Baby.”

She turned, flung her arms around his neck, let out a wail. Her gasping breath was hot and moist. He held her tight as if he could squeeze the trauma out of her little body, make everything normal again, make her feel safe.

“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.” Her gasps were like spasms, hiccups. He held her even tighter. The copious flow of her tears pooled in the hollow of his neck. He could feel it soak his shirt.

Ten minutes later, when Marta had taken Julia inside, Nick spoke to Officer Manzi. He made no effort this time to contain his fury. “What the fuck are you guys going to do about this?” Nick thundered. “What the hell are you waiting for? These break-ins have been going on for months already, and you haven’t done a damned thing about it.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Manzi said blandly.

“You haven’t assigned a detective to the case, you haven’t done any investigation, you haven’t gone through the lists of laid-off Stratton employees. You’ve had months to stop this fucking madman. What are you waiting for? Does this lunatic have to murder one of my kids before you take it seriously?”

Manzi’s detachment-did Nick detect a smug sort of amusement, was that possible?-was infuriating. “Well, sir, as I said, you might want to think about upgrading your security-”

“My security? What about you guys? Isn’t this your goddamned job?”

“You said it yourself, sir-you laid off five thousand Stratton employees. That’s going to create more enemies than we can possibly protect you against. You should really upgrade your security system.”

“Yeah, and what are you going to do? How are you going to protect my family?”

“I’ll be honest with you, sir. Stalking cases are some of our hardest.”

“Meaning you pretty much can’t do shit, is that right?”

Manzi shrugged. “You said it. I didn’t.”

4

After the police left, Nick tried for a long while to console his daughter. He called to cancel her piano lesson, then sat with her, talking a bit, mostly hugging. When she seemed stable, Nick left her in Marta’s care and returned to the office for a largely unproductive afternoon.

By the time he returned home, Julia was asleep and Marta was in the family room, watching a movie about a baby who talks with Bruce Willis’s voice.

“Where’s Julia?” Nick asked.

“She’s asleep,” Marta said sadly. “She was okay by the time she went to bed. But she cried a lot, Nick.”

Nick shook his head. “That poor baby. This is going to be hardest on her, I think. Barney was Laura’s dog, really. To Julia, Barney…” He fell silent. “Is Lucas upstairs?”

“He called from a friend’s house, said they’re working on their history projects.”

“Yeah, right. Working on a nickel bag, more like it. Which friend?”

“I think Ziegler? Um, listen-Nick? I’m kind of nervous being alone in the house-after today, I mean.”

“I can’t blame you. You lock the doors and windows, right?”

“I did, but this crazy person…”

“I know. I’m going to have a new system put in right away so you can put on the alarm while you’re inside.” Stratton’s corporate security director had told Nick he’d drop by later, see what he could do. Anything for the boss. They’d gone too long with a rudimentary security system; it was time to put in something state-of-the-art, with cameras and motion detectors and all that. “You can go to sleep if you want.”

“I want to see the rest of this movie.”

“Sure.”

Nick went upstairs and down the hall to Julia’s bedroom, quietly opening the door and making his way through the darkness by memory. Enough moonlight filtered through the gaps in the curtains that, once his eyes adjusted, he could make out his daughter’s sleeping body. Julia slept under, and with, an assortment of favorite blankets, each of which she’d given names to, as well as a rotating selection of stuffed animals and Beanie Babies from her vast menagerie. Tonight she was clutching Winnie the Pooh, who’d been given to her when she was a few days old, now frayed and matted and stained.

Her choice of sleeping partner was a pretty reliable indicator of her mental state: Elmo when she was feeling sprightly; Curious George when she was feeling mischievous; her little Beanie Baby koala, Eucalyptus, when she wanted to nurture someone needier than herself. But Pooh always meant she was feeling especially fragile and in need of the ultimate comfort of her longest-serving pal. For several months after her mommy’s death, she slept with Pooh every night. Recently, she’d traded in Pooh for some of the other guys, which was a sign that she was starting to feel a little stronger.

Tonight, though, Pooh was back in her bed.

He touched her sweaty curls, breathed in the sweet baby-shampoo aroma mixed with the slightly sour smell of perspiration, and kissed her damp forehead. She murmured but did not stir.

A door opened and closed somewhere in the house, followed immediately by the thud of something being dropped to the floor. Nick was instantly alert. Heavy, bounding footsteps on the carpeted stairs told him it was Lucas.

Nick navigated a path through the minefield of books and toys and closed the door quietly behind him. The long hall was dark, but a stripe of yellow light glared through the crack under Lucas’s bedroom door.

Nick knocked, waited, then knocked again.

“Yeah?”

The depth and timbre of his son’s voice always startled him. That and the surly edge to it, in the last year. Nick opened the door and found Lucas lying back on his bed, boots still on, iPod earbuds in his ears.

“Where’ve you been?” Nick asked.

Lucas glanced at him, then found something in the middle distance that was more interesting. “Where’s Barney?”

Nick paused. “I asked you where you’ve been, Luke. It’s a school night.”

“Ziggy’s.”

“You didn’t ask me if you could go over there.”

“You weren’t around to ask.”

“If you want to go over to a friend’s house, you’ve got to clear it in advance with me or Marta.”

Lucas shrugged in tacit acknowledgment. His eyes were red and glassy, and now Nick was fairly certain he’d been getting high. This was an alarming new development, but he hadn’t yet confronted his son about it. He’d been putting it off simply because it was one more mountain to climb, a showdown that would require unwavering strength he didn’t have. There was so much going on at work, and there was Julia, who was frankly a hell of a lot easier to console, and then there was his own sadness, which sapped his ability to be a good and understanding dad.

He looked at Lucas, could hear the tinny, percussive hiss coming from the earphones. He wondered what kind of crappy music Lucas was listening to now. He caught a whiff of stale smoke in the room, which smelled like regular cigarettes, though he wasn’t sure.

There was a baffling disconnect between Lucas on the inside and Lucas on the outside. Externally, Lucas was a mature sixteen, a tall and handsome man. His almost feminine prettiness had taken on a sharp-featured masculinity. His eyebrows, above blue eyes with long lashes, were dark and thick. The Lucas inside, though, was five or six: petulant, easily wounded, expert at finding insult in the most unexpected places, capable of holding grudges to the end of time.

“You’re not smoking, are you?”

Lucas cast his father a look of withering contempt. “Ever hear of second-hand smoke? I was around people who were smoking.”

“Ziggy doesn’t smoke.” Kenny Ziegler was a big, strapping blond kid, a swimmer who was Lucas’s best friend from when he was still on the swim team. But ever since Lucas had quit swimming, six months or so ago, he hadn’t been hanging out with Ziggy nearly as much. Nick doubted that Lucas had actually spent the afternoon and evening at Ziggy’s house. Somewhere else: some other friend, probably.

Lucas’s stare was unwavering. His music squealed and hissed.

“You got homework?” Nick persisted.

“I don’t need you to monitor me, Nick.” Nick. That was something else new, calling his father by his first name. Some of Lucas’s friends had always called their own parents by their first names, but Nick and Laura had always insisted on the traditional “Mom” and “Dad.” Lucas was just trying to push his buttons. He’d been calling him Nick for the last month or so.

“Can you please take those earphones out when I’m talking to you?”

“I can hear you just fine,” Lucas said. “Where’s Barney?”

“Take off the earphones, Luke.”

Lucas yanked them out of his ears by the dangling wire, let them drop on his chest, the tinny sound now louder and more distinct.

“Something happened to Barney. Something pretty bad.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We found him…Someone killed him, Luke.”

Lucas whipped his legs around until he was perched on the edge of the bed, looking as if he were about to launch himself toward Nick.

“Killed him?”

“We found him in the pool today-some nut…” Nick couldn’t continue, couldn’t relive the gruesome scene.

“This is the same guy who keeps breaking in, isn’t it? The spray-paint graffiti guy.”

“Looks that way.”

“It’s because of you!” Lucas’s eyes widened, gleaming with tears. “All those people you fired, the way everyone in town hates you.”

Nick didn’t know how to answer.

“Like half the kids in school, their parents got laid off by you. It’s fucking embarrassing.”

“Lucas, listen to me-”

Lucas gave him a ferocious look, eyes bulging, teeth bared, as if Nick were the one who’d killed Barney. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of my room,” he said, his voice cracking.

Nick’s reaction surprised himself. If he’d talked that way to his father, he’d have had the shit beaten out of him. But instead of flying into a fury, he was instead overcome by calm, patient sorrow-his heart ached for the kid, for what he’d had to go through. “Lucas,” Nick said, so softly it was almost a whisper, “don’t you ever talk to me like that again.” He turned around and quietly closed the door behind him. His heart wasn’t in it.

Standing in the hallway just outside her adored older brother’s room was Julia, tears streaming down her face.

5

It wasn’t long after Nick had finally gotten Julia back to sleep-picking her up, hugging her, snuggling with her in her bed-that there was a quick rap on the front door.

Eddie Rinaldi, Stratton’s corporate security director, was wearing a tan fleece jacket and a pair of jeans, and smelled like beer and cigarettes. Nick wondered whether Eddie had just come over from his usual hangout, Victor’s, on Division.

“Shit, man,” Eddie said. “That sucks, about the dog.”

Eddie was a tall, lanky guy, edgy and intense. His frizzy brown hair was run through with gray. He had pitted cheeks and forehead, the legacy of a nasty case of acne in high school. He had gray eyes, flared nostrils, a weak mouth.

They’d been high school teammates-Eddie was the right wing on the same hockey team on which Nick, the captain, played center-though they’d never been especially close. Nick was the star, of the team and of the high school, the big man on campus, the good-looking guy all the girls wanted to go out with. Eddie, not a bad hockey player, was a natural cut-up, half-crazy, and with a face full of zits, he wasn’t exactly dating the prom queen. The joke about Eddie among some on the team was that he’d been left on the Tilt-A-Whirl a bit too long as a baby. That wasn’t quite fair; he was a goofball who just scraped by in school, but he had a native cunning. He also looked up to Nick, almost hero-worshiped him, though his idolatry always seemed tinged with a little jealousy. After high school, when Nick went to Michigan State, in East Lansing, Eddie went to the police academy in Fraser and lucked out, got a job with the Grand Rapids PD, where after almost two decades he hit a bad patch. As he’d explained to Nick, he’d been accused of brutalizing a suspect-a bullshit charge, but there it was-banished to a desk job, busted down the ranks until the publicity blew over, or so he was assured by the police chief. But he knew his career was as good as done for.

Nick, by then CEO of Stratton, stepped in and saved his ass, offering Eddie a job he was maybe underqualified for, assistant director of corporate security, in charge of background checks, pilferage investigations, that sort of thing. Just as Nick had assured the longtime security director, a white-haired sergeant who’d retired from the Fenwick force, Eddie had poured himself into the job, deeply grateful to Nick and eager to redeem himself.

Two years later, when the security director took early retirement, Eddie moved into the top job. Sometimes Nick thought it was like the old hockey days: Nick, the star, the power forward as they called him, with his hundred-mile-an-hour slap shot, taking the face-offs, making a pass through nine sticks as if he were threading a needle; and Eddie, grinning wildly as he did wild stunts like kicking an opponent’s skates out from under him, spearing guys in the gut, carving some other guy’s face with his stick, skating up and down the wing with a jittery juking craziness.

“Thanks for coming over,” Nick said.

“First I want to see the kitchen.”

Nick shrugged, led him down the hall. He switched on the light and peeled back one of the heavy plastic sheets, taped to the doorjamb, which served as a dust barrier between the kitchen and the rest of the house.

Nick stepped through, followed by Eddie, who gave a low whistle, taking in the glass-fronted cabinets, the Wolf commercial range. He set down the little nylon gym bag he’d been carrying. “Jeez Louise, this gotta cost a fortune.”

“It’s ridiculous.”

He switched one of the burners on. It tick-ticked and then ignited, a powerful roar of blue flame coming out. “Man, serious gas pressure. And you don’t even cook.”

“Had to bring in a new line for that. Tore up the lawn, had to reseed and everything.”

“Shit, how many sinks you got?”

“I think they call that one a prep sink, and that one’s for dishes.”

“The dishwasher’s gonna go in there?”

“Yeah.” Fisher & Paykel, was that it? Another result of Laura’s star-searches for the best appliances ever. It’s two drawers, she’d told him, so you can run smaller loads. Okay, whatever.

Eddie tugged at a handle, releasing a slab of rock maple. “This a knife drawer?”

“Built-in cutting board.”

“Sweet. Don’t tell me you picked all this shit out.”

“Laura designed the whole thing, picked out every appliance, the color scheme, the cabinets, everything.”

“Tough to cook without a kitchen counter, you know.”

“That’s coming.”

“Where do you keep the booze?”

Nick touched the front of a cabinet. It popped open, revealing an array of liquor bottles.

“Neat trick.”

“Magnetic touch-latch. Also Laura’s idea. Scotch?”

“Sure.”

“Rocks, right?” Nick held a tumbler against the automatic icemaker on the door of the Sub-Zero and watched as the cubes chink-chink-chinked against the glass. Then he poured a healthy slug of Johnnie Walker, handed it to Eddie, and led the way out of the kitchen.

Eddie took a long sip, then gave a contented sigh. “Hey, Johnnie, Daddy’s home. What are you drinking, buddy?”

“Better not. I’ve been taking a pill to sleep, not supposed to mix it with alcohol.”

They left the kitchen, entered the dark back corridor, illuminated only by the orange glow from the switch plates. Nick switched on the lamp on the hall table, another of the millions of little details about this house that reminded him of Laura every single day. She’d spent months looking for the perfect alabaster lamp until she found it one day in an antiques store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when she’d accompanied him on a business trip. The shop dealt only with the trade, decorators and interior designers, but she’d sweet-talked her way in, then spotted the lamp. The base was carved of alabaster quarried in Volterra, Italy, she’d explained, when Nick asked why it had cost so freaking much. To Nick it just looked like white rock.

“Aw, don’t take pills, man. You know what you need to help you sleep?”

“Let me guess.” The lights in his study came on automatically as they entered, pinpoints in the ceiling and little floods that washed the hand-plastered walls, the huge Sony flat-panel TV mounted on the facing wall, the French doors that opened onto the freshly seeded lawn.

“That’s right, Nicky. Pussy. Look at this place. Incredible.”

“Laura.”

Eddie sank into one of the butter-soft leather Symbiosis chairs, took a swig of his Scotch, and placed it noisily down on the slate-topped side table. Nick sat in the one next to him.

“So I picked up this chick Saturday night at Victor’s, right? I mean, I must’ve had my beer goggles on, because when I woke the next morning she-well, she had a great personality, know what I’m saying? I mean, the bitch must have fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.” He gave a dry, wheezing cackle.

“But you got a good night’s sleep.”

“Actually no, I was shit-faced, man. Point is, Nick, you gotta get out there and start dating. Get back on the trail of tail. But man, watch out, there’s a lot of skanks out there.”

“I don’t feel like it yet.”

Eddie tried to soften his voice, though it came out more as an insinuating rasp. “She died a year ago, Nicky. That’s a long time.”

“Not if you’re married seventeen years.”

“Hey, I’m not talking about getting married again. I’m the last one to tell you to get married. Look at me-I don’t buy, I lease. Trade ’em in regularly for the latest model.”

“Can we talk about my security system? It’s late, and I’ve had a long day.”

“All right, all right. My systems guy’s a total fucking wizard. He put in my home system.”

Nick’s brows shot up.

“I mean, I paid for it out of my own pocket, come on. If he can get the equipment, I’ll have him put one in tomorrow.”

“Cameras and everything?”

“Shit. We’re talking IP-based cameras at the perimeter and at all points of entry and egress, cameras inside, overt and covert.”

“What’s IP?”

“Internet-something. Means you can get the signal over the Internet. You can monitor your house from your computer at work-it’s amazing shit.”

“Back up to tape?”

“No tape. All the cameras record to a hard drive. Maybe put in motion sensors to save on disk space. We can do remote pan-and-tilt, real-time full-color streaming video at seven and a half frames per second or something. The technology’s totally different these days.”

“This going to keep my stalker out?”

“Put it this way, once he sees these robot cameras swiveling at him as he approaches the house, he’ll turn and run, unless he’s a total whack job. And at the very least, we get a bunch of high-quality images of him next time he tries to break in. Speaking of which, I saw some serious cameras around the guard booth down the road. Looks like you got cameras all around the perimeter fence, not just at the entrance. We mighta got lucky, got a picture of him. I’ll talk to the security guys down there first thing in the morning.”

“You don’t think the cops already did that?”

Eddie made a pfft sound. “Those guys aren’t going to do shit for you. They’ll do the bare minimum, or less.”

Nick nodded. “I think you’re right.”

“I know I’m right. They all hate your fucking guts. You’re Nick the Slasher. You laid off their dads and their brothers and sisters and wives. I bet they love seeing you get some serious payback.”

Nick exhaled noisily. “What do you mean, ‘unless he’s a total whack job’?”

“That’s the thing about stalkers, man. They don’t necessarily obey the rules of sanity. Only one thing can give you total peace of mind if he comes around again.” He unzipped the black nylon gym bag and took out a small oilcloth bundle. He unwrapped it, revealing a blunt matte-black semiautomatic pistol, squarish and compact, ugly. Its plastic frame was scratched, the slide nicked. “Smith and Wesson Sigma.380,” he announced.

“I don’t want that,” Nick said.

“I wouldn’t rule anything out, I were you. Anyone who’d do that to your dog might well go after your kids, and you gonna tell me you’re not going to protect your family? That’s not the Nick I know.”

6

Nick slipped into the dark theater-the FutureLab, they called it-and took a seat at the back. The Film was still playing on the giant curved movie screen, a high-gain, rear-projection video screen that took up an entire curved front wall. The darkness of the theater was soothing to his bleary morning eyes.

Jangly techno music emanated in surround sound from dozens of speakers built into the walls, ceiling, and floor. Watching this beauty reel, you were careening through the Kalahari Desert, down a narrow street in Prague, flying over the Grand Canyon, close enough to the walls to be scraped by the jagged rocks. You were whizzing through molecules of DNA and emerging in a City of the Future, the images kaleidoscopic, futuristic. “In an interlinked world,” a mellifluous baritone confided, “knowledge reigns supreme.” The Film was about the future of work and life and technology; it was totally abstract and cerebral and very trippy. Not a stick of furniture was anywhere to be seen.

Only some customers were shown The Film. Some visitors, particularly Silicon Valley types, were blown away by it and, when the lights came up, wanted to chatter on and on about the “seamless integration” between office furniture and technology, about the Workplace of the Future, ready to sign on the dotted line right then and there.

Others found it pretentious and annoying, didn’t get it at all. Like this morning’s audience, a delegation of nine high-level executives from the Atlas McKenzie Group. It was one of the world’s largest financial services companies, had its spindly tendrils in everything from banking to credit cards to insurance, in more than a hundred countries and territories. Nick watched them squirm in their seats, whispering to each other. They included the Senior VP of Real Estate and the VP for Facilities Management and assorted minions. They’d been flown up from Chicago the day before on the Stratton corporate jet, been given the full-out tour by Stratton’s Guest Experience Team. Nick had had lunch with them, shown them around the executive offices himself, given them his standard pitch about the flattening of the corporate pyramidal hierarchy and how the work environment was moving from individual to the collaborative community, all that stuff.

Atlas McKenzie was building an immense office tower in Toronto. A million square feet, a third of which would be their new corporate headquarters, which they wanted outfitted from scratch. That meant at least ten thousand workstations, at least fifty million bucks up front, and then there was the ten-year maintenance contract. If Stratton got the deal, it would be a huge win. Beyond huge. Unbelievable. Then there were all the Atlas McKenzie offices around the world, which could well be standardized on Stratton-Nick couldn’t even calculate how much that could mean.

All right, so The Film was flopping. They might as well have been watching some subtitled art house film set in a small Bulgarian village.

At least yesterday afternoon they’d been totally jazzed by the Workplace of the Future exhibit. Visitors always were, without exception. You couldn’t help but be. It was a fully functional mock-up of a workstation, eight by ten, that looked a lot more like a network news anchor set than some cubicle out of Dilbertland. The visitors were given ID tags to wear that contained an embedded chip, which communicated with an electronic sensor so that when you entered the space, the overhead lights changed from blue to green. That way, co-workers could tell from way across the floor that you were at your desk. As soon as you sat down, an electronic message was flashed to your team members-in this case, the laptops provided to the visitors-telling them you were in. Amazing what Stratton’s engineers came up with, he’d often marveled. In front of the worker’s desk in the Workplace of the Future was a six-foot-long wraparound computer monitor, superhigh resolution, on which appeared a page of text, a videoconference window, and a PowerPoint slide. Clients saw this and coveted it, the way some guys drool over Lamborghinis.

They were running about ten minutes behind, so Nick had to sit through The Talk. The screen faded to black, and slowly, slowly, the lights in the Lab came up. Standing at the brushed-aluminum podium was Stratton’s Senior Vice President for Workplace Research, a very tall, slender woman in her late thirties with long, straight blond hair cut into severe bangs and giant horn-rim glasses. She was Victoria Zander-never Vicky or Tori, only Victoria. She was dressed dramatically, in all black. She could have been a beatnik from the fifties, a pal of Jack Kerouac’s on the road.

Victoria spoke in a mellifluous soprano. She said, “Your corporate headquarters is one of the most powerful branding tools you have. It’s your opportunity to tell your employees and your visitors a story about you-who you are, what you stand for. It’s your brandscape. We call this the narrative office.” As she talked, she jotted down key phrases-“smart workplace” and “heartbeat space” and “Knowledge Age”-on a digital whiteboard set into the wall in front of her, and her notes, zapped instantly into computer text, appeared on the laptops in front of the folks from Atlas McKenzie. She said, “Our model is wagons around the campfire. We live our private lives in our own wagon but come together at suppertime.”

Even after hearing it a dozen times, Nick didn’t understand all of her patter, but that was okay; he figured that no one else did either. Certainly not these guys from Chicago, who were probably rolling their eyes inwardly but didn’t want to admit their lack of sophistication. Victoria’s loopy little graduate seminar was intimidating and probably soared over their heads too.

What these guys understood was modular wiring infrastructure and pre-assembled components and data cables built into access floors. That was where they lived. They didn’t want to hear about brandscapes.

He waited patiently for her to finish, increasingly aware of the visitors’ restlessness. All he had to do was a quick meet-and-greet, make sure everyone was happy, chat them up a bit.

Nick didn’t actually get involved in selling since he became CEO, not in any real hands-on way. That was handled on the national accounts level. He just helped close the deal, nudged things along, assured the really big customers that the guy at the top cared. It was remarkable how far a little face time with the CEO went with customers.

He was normally good at this, the firm handshake and the clap on the back, the no-bullshit straight answer that everyone always found so refreshing. This morning, though, he felt a steady pulse of anxiety, a dull stomachache. Maybe it was a rebound reaction to the Ambien he’d taken last night, that tiny sliver of a pill that lulled him to sleep. Maybe it was the three cups of coffee instead of his usual two. Or maybe it was the fact that Stratton really, really needed this deal.

After Victoria finished her presentation, the lights came up, and the two lead guys from Atlas McKenzie went right up to him. One, the Senior VP of Real Estate, was a slight, whey-faced man of around fifty with full, almost female lips, long lashes, a permanently bland expression. He didn’t speak much. His colleague, the VP for Facilities Management, was a stubby man, all torso, with a heavy five-o’clock shadow, a beetle brow, obviously dyed jet-black hair. He reminded Nick of Richard Nixon.

“And I thought you guys just did chairs and filing cabinets,” said Nixon, flashing bright white teeth with a prominent center gap.

“Far from it,” Nick chuckled. They knew better; Stratton had been courting them for months, making their business case, running a long series of offsite meetings that Nick had thankfully been spared. “Listen, if you need to check your e-mail or your voice mail or whatever, we’ve got a wireless campsite down the hall.”

The whey-faced man, whose name was Hardwick, sidled up to Nick and said silkily, “I hope you don’t mind a rather direct question.”

“Of course not.” The delicate-featured, blank-faced Hardwick was a killer, a genuine corporate assassin; he could have been an apparatchik out of the old Soviet Politburo.

Hardwick unzipped a Gucci leather portfolio and pulled out a clipping. Nick recognized it; it was an article from Business Week headlined, “Has Midas Lost His Touch?” There was a picture of the legendary Willard Osgood, the crusty old founder of Fairfield Equity Partners-the man who’d bought Stratton-with his Coke-bottle glasses and leathery face. The article focused mostly on “the millions in pretax losses incurred by Stratton, once the fastest growing office-furniture company in the U.S.” It talked about Osgood’s “vaunted Midas touch for picking quality companies and growing them steadily over the long term” and asked, “What happened? Will Osgood stand idly by while one of his investments falls off a cliff? Not likely, say insiders.”

Hardwick held the clipping up for a few seconds. “Is Stratton in trouble?” he asked, fixing Nick with a watery stare.

“Absolutely not,” Nick replied. “Have we had a couple of lousy quarters? Hell, yeah-but so have Steelcase and Herman Miller and all the other players. We’ve been through two years of layoffs, as you know, and the severance costs are a bear. But we’re doing what we’ve got to do to stay healthy in the long term.”

Hardwick’s voice was almost inaudible. “I understand that. But you’re not a family-run company like you used to be. You’re not running the whole show. I’m sure Willard Osgood’s breathing down your neck.”

“Osgood and his people pretty much leave us alone,” Nick said. “They figure we know what we’re doing-that’s why they acquired us.” His mouth was dry. “You know, they always like to give their companies enough rope.”

Hardwick blinked, lizardlike. “We’re not just buying a hell of a lot of workstations from you folks, Nick. We’re buying a ten-year service contract. Are you going to be around a year or two from now?”

Nick placed a hand on Hardwick’s bony shoulder. “Stratton’s been around for almost seventy-five years,” he said, “and I can assure you, it’s going to be here long after you and I are gone.”

Hardwick gave a wan smile. “I wasn’t asking about Stratton. I’m asking if you’re going to be around.”

“Count on it,” Nick said. He gave Hardwick’s shoulder a squeeze as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eddie Rinaldi leaning against the wall by the entrance to the Lab, arms folded.

“Excuse me for a second,” Nick said. Eddie rarely dropped by, and when he did it was always something important. Plus, Nick didn’t mind taking a break in this awkward exchange.

He went up to Eddie. “What’s up?”

“I got something for you. Something you better take a look at.”

“Can it wait?”

“It’s about your stalker. You tell me if you want to wait.”

7

Eddie sat down in front of Nick’s computer as if it were his own and pecked at the keyboard with two fingers. He was surprisingly adept for someone who’d never learned how to type. As he navigated through the corporate intranet to the Corporate Security area, he said, “The boys in the guard booth at your little concentration camp were more than happy to help out, of course.”

“You’re talking about Fenwicke Estates.” Eddie smelled of cigarettes and Brut, the cologne he’d worn back in high school. Nick didn’t even know they still made Brut.

“Now, they’ve got a nice setup there-high-definition, high-res Sony digital video cams positioned at the entrance and exit. Backlight compensation. Thirty frames a second. The cops didn’t even ask to look at their hard-disk recorder, know that?”

“Like you said.”

“Shit, they didn’t even do the bare minimum, for appearances’ sake. Okay.” A color photo appeared on the monitor of a lanky, bespectacled figure. Eddie clicked the mouse a few times, zooming in on the figure. He was a man of around sixty with a deeply creased face, a small, tight mouth, close-cropped gray hair, eyes grotesquely magnified by the lenses of heavy-framed black glasses. Nick’s heart began to thud. A few more mouse clicks, and the man’s grim face took up most of the screen. The resolution wasn’t bad. The man’s face was clearly visible.

“Recognize him?” Eddie said.

“No.”

“Well, he knows who you are.”

“No doubt. What, did he just walk through? Some security.”

“Climbed the fence in the wooded section, actually. Cameras there get triggered by motion sensors. No alarms there-they’d get way too many false alarms with all the animals and shit-but cameras up the wazoo.”

“Great. Who is he?”

“His name is Andrew Stadler.”

Nick shrugged. He’d never heard the name.

“I narrowed it down by laid-off male employees in their fifties or older, especially with outplacement irregularities. Man, I spent most of the morning looking at mug shots. My eyes are crossing. But hey, that’s why I get the big bucks, right?”

Eddie double-clicked the mouse, and another photo appeared on a split screen beside the surveillance image. It was the same man, a little younger: the same heavy black glasses with the ogling eyes, the same slit of a mouth. Under this photograph was the name ANDREW M. STADLER and a Social Security number, a date of birth, a Stratton employee number, a date of hire.

Nick asked, “Laid off?”

“Yes and no. They sat him down for the layoff meeting and he quit. You know, said, ‘After all I’ve done for this company?’ and ‘Fuck you,’ and like that.”

Nick shook his head. “Never even seen the guy before.”

“Spend a lot of time at the model shop?”

The model shop was where a small crew of workers-metal-benders, solderers, woodworkers-built prototypes of new Stratton products, in editions of one or two or three, from specs drawn up by the designers. The model-shop employees tended to be odd sorts, Nick had always thought. They’d all done time on the factory floor, bending metal, and they were good with their hands. They also tended to be loners and perfectionists.

“Andrew Stadler,” Nick said, listening to the sound of the name, scanning the data on the man’s file. “He was with the company thirty-five, thirty-six years.”

“Yep. Started as an assembler on the old vertical-file-cabinet line, became a welder. Then he became a specialist level two-worked by himself in the chair plant repairing the returns. Refused to work on any of the progressive build lines because, he said, he hated listening to other people’s music. Kept getting into fights with his floor supervisor. They learned to leave him alone and let him do his work. When there was an opening in the model shop five years ago, he put in for it, and they were glad to get rid of him.” With another couple of clicks, Eddie brought up Stadler’s employee reviews. Nick leaned closer to read the small type. “What’s this about hospitalization?”

Eddie swiveled around in Nick’s chair and looked up, his half-wild eyes staring. “He’s a fucking nutcase, buddy. A brainiac and a maniac. The guy’s been in and out of the locked ward at County Medical.”

“Jesus. For what?”

“Schizophrenia. Every couple of years he stops taking his meds.”

Nick let his breath out slowly.

“Okay, Nick, now here’s the scary part. I put in a call to the Fenwick PD. Something like fifteen years ago, Stadler was questioned in the possible murder of an entire family that lived across the street.”

Nick felt a sudden chill. “What does that mean?”

“Family called Stroup, neighbors, used to hire this guy to do repairs, odd jobs. Mister Fix-It-guy’s a mechanical genius, could fix anything. Maybe they got into some kinda fight, maybe they looked at him wrong, who knows, but one night there’s a gas leak in their basement, something sets it off, whole house blows.”

“Jesus.”

“Never proven if the whole thing was an accident or this wacko did it, but the cops suspected he did. Never could prove it, though. Had to let him go-no evidence. Just strong suspicion. Nick, this guy Stadler is one dangerous motherfucker. And I’ll tell you something else you’re not going to want to hear. This fruitcake’s got a gun.”

“What?”

“There’s an old safety inspection certificate in his name-found it in the county records. Like twenty years old. And no record of sale, which means he’s still got it.”

“Jesus. Get a restraining order.”

Eddie made a soft, dismissive pfft sound. “Come on, man, TROs are bullshit. Piece of paper.”

“But if he tries to go on my property again-”

“You can get him arrested for trespassing, man. Not for stalking. Big fucking deal. You think that’s going to stop a goddamned psychopath? Guy who eviscerated your goddamned dog? Guy who hears voices, wears a tinfoil hat?”

“Jesus Christ, Eddie. We got a time-stamped image of this nut climbing the fence right around the time my dog got killed. The cops got a knife that might have prints on it. They got enough to charge the guy with my dog’s death.”

“Yeah, and what have they done, right? They haven’t done shit.”

“So how do we make them take action?”

“I don’t know, man. Got to apply some serious pressure. But they’re going to be busy covering their big fat asses, so they’re not exactly going to snap to. I say we scare the shit out of this loon first. Once the police get involved in any real way, we gotta keep hands off Stadler. But in the meantime, we got to make sure you and your family are safe.”

Nick considered for a moment. “All right. But don’t do anything that’ll compromise me in any way. So no getting rough with him. I just want the fucker locked up somewhere.”

“Fine with me. I’ll track the guy down. Meantime, my man Freddie’s going over to your house this afternoon to get started on the new system. I’m having him put a rush on it.”

Nick glanced at his watch. He had to head over to the monthly meeting of the Compensation Committee. “Great.”

“And hey, if all else fails, remember my little loaner.”

Nick lowered his voice, aware that Marjorie was at her desk on the other side of the partition and might be able to hear their voices. “I don’t have a permit, Eddie.”

Eddie gave a slow shake of his head. “Permit? Come on, man. You know how long it takes to go through the hoops, do all the paperwork? You can’t wait that long. Look, carrying an unlicensed weapon is a misdemeanor, okay? A hundred-buck fine. And that’s if you get caught. Which you won’t, because you won’t have to use it. Isn’t that worth it to protect your family from that sick fuck? A hundred bucks?”

“All right. Get out of here-I need to check my e-mail, and then I’ve got three meetings stacked up.”

Eddie rose. “Man, you got some fancy computer equipment up here. I could use some monitors like this for my department.”

“Not up to me,” Nick said. “I’m just a figurehead.”

8

Scott McNally lived in a decent-sized, but perfectly ordinary, house in the Forest Hills section of Fenwick where many of the Stratton execs lived. A successful accountant could have lived here. It was a generic white colonial with green shutters, a two-car garage, a rec room, a finished basement. It was decorated generically too. Everything-the dining room set, the couches and chairs and rugs-seemed to have been bought all at once, at the same mid-priced home-furnishings store. Obviously Eden, Scott’s trophy wife, didn’t share Laura’s interest in design.

Nick and Laura had talked about Scott’s house once. He admired the fact that Scott, who was loaded from his McKinsey days, didn’t try to show it off like so many financial types. Money to Scott wasn’t something you spent. It was like frequent-flyer miles you never use. Still, Nick couldn’t put his finger on what felt funny about Scott’s house until Laura pointed out that it looked somehow temporary, like those short-term furnished corporate apartments.

As soon as they arrived, the kids dispersed, Julia to the bedroom of one of Scott’s twin twelve-year-old daughters, and Lucas to the rec room to sit by himself and watch TV. Scott was manning the immense, stainless-steel charcoal grill, the only remotely expensive thing he seemed to own. He was wearing a black barbecue apron with a yellow hazard sign on the front of it that said DANGER MEN COOKING, and a matching DANGER MEN COOKING baseball cap.

“How’s it going?” Nick said as they stood in the smoke.

“Can’t complain,” Scott said. “Who’d listen?”

“Think that grill’s big enough?”

“A cooking surface of eight hundred and eighty square inches, big enough to burn sixty-four burgers at once. Because you just never know.” He shook his head. “That’s the last time I let Eden go shopping at Home Depot.”

“How is Eden these days?”

“The same, only more so. She’s become a real fitness nut. If it were up to her, we’d be feasting on texturized tofu, spirulina, and barley green juice. Her latest obsession is this Advanced Pilates course she’s taking. I don’t quite get how that works. Does it keep getting more advanced? Can you do graduate work in Pilates, end up with a doctorate?”

“Well, she looks great.”

“Just don’t call her arm candy. She’d rather be thought of as arm tempeh.” Scott checked that all the knobs were set to high. “You know, I’m always kind of embarrassed when you come over. It’s like the feudal lord leaving his castle to go visit the peasants in their hovels. We should be roasting a boar, really. Maybe a stag.” He looked at Nick. “What would you like to drink? A flagon of mead, my liege?”

“A beer would do it.”

Scott turned and began shouting to his portly nine-year-old son, who was sitting by himself on the back porch making immense bubbles using a strange gadget, a long pole with a cloth strap dangling off it. “Spencer! Spencer, will you get over here, please?”

“Aww!” Spencer whined.

“Right now!” Scott shouted. Lowering his voice a bit, he said, “Eden can’t wait until he’s old enough to send to Andover.”

“Not you, though.”

“I barely notice the kid,” he said with a shrug. If Nick didn’t know Scott better, he wouldn’t realize Scott was kidding, doing his usual shtick. When his son was within speaking range, he said, “Spencer, could you please get Mr. Conover one of those brown bottles of beer?” To Nick he said, “You’ll love this beer. It’s a Belgian Abbey ale that’s brewed in upstate New York.”

“Got any Miller?”

“Ah, the Champagne of Beers. What I’d like to find is the beer of champagnes. I think Eden bought some Grolsch, if that’ll work.”

“Sure.”

“Spencer, look for the green bottles that have the funny metal tops with the rubber stoppers on them, got it?”

“Dad, it’s not supposed to be good for you to eat barbecued meats.” Spencer folded his arms across his chest. “Do you know that barbecuing at high heat can create polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are known to be mutagens?”

Nick stared at the kid. How the hell do you learn to pronounce that stuff?

“Now, that’s where you’re wrong, son,” said Scott. “They used to think that aromatic hydrocarbons were bad. Now they know that they’re the best thing for you. What do they teach you in school, anyway?”

Spencer looked stymied, but only momentarily. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you if you get cancer later in life.”

“I’ll be dead by then, son.”

“But Dad-”

“Okay, kid, so here’s your burger,” Scott said blithely, holding up one of the raw patties. “Go fetch yourself a bun and some ketchup, okay? So instead of cancer, you’ll get salmonella and E. coli bacteria. Mad cow too, if you’re really lucky.”

Spencer seemed to get his father’s sense of humor but wouldn’t let on. “But I thought E. coli naturally colonizes the human intestine,” he said.

“You don’t stop, do you? Go play in traffic. But first get Mr. Conover his beer.”

The boy trudged reluctantly away.

Scott chuckled. “Kids these days.”

“Impressive,” was all Nick could think to say.

“I’m sorry you don’t want to try this Belgian ale,” Scott said. “I discovered it at that dude ranch in Arizona I went to last month with my old college buddies, remember?”

“You didn’t exactly rave about the place.”

“Ever smell a horse up close? Anyway, I liked the beer.”

“So, Spencer’s a little scary, huh?”

“I guess. We first had an inkling of that when he was three and he started composing haiku using the letters from his alphabet soup.”

“I don’t think you appreciate how cooperative he is. If I’d asked Luke to go fetch me a beer he would have ripped my face off.”

“Tough age. By the time Spencer turns sixteen we’ll probably see him just once a year, at Christmas. But yeah, he’s usually well behaved, and he’s into math just like his dad. Of course, later, when he turns into Jeff Dahmer, we’ll discover the dissected remains of dogs and cats in the backyard.” He started to chuckle, and then his face fell. “Oh, shit, Nick, I forgot about your dog. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t believe I said that.”

“You might want to turn the burgers. They’re burning.”

“Oh, right.” He wrestled with a big metal spatula. “Nick, the cops have any idea who did it?”

Nick hesitated, then shook his head. “They’re guessing it’s a downsized employee. But I could’ve told ’em that.”

“That narrows it down to five thousand and sixty-seven. You don’t have a security system?”

“Not good enough, obviously. I mean, we’re in a gated community.”

“Jesus, that could happen to us too.”

“Thanks for being so sensitive.”

“No, I mean-sorry, but as the CFO I’m just as responsible as you are for the layoffs, and-God, you must be spooked as shit.”

“Of course I am. But most of all I’m fucking pissed off.”

“The cops aren’t going to do anything, are they?”

“They all know someone we laid off. Alarm goes off at my house, they’re not going to get off their stools at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

Spencer ran across the lawn with a bottle of beer in one hand and a glass in the other. “Here you go, Mr. Conover,” he said, handing the beer and glass to Nick.

“Thanks, Spencer.” Nick set down the glass and struggled with the complicated top of the Grolsch. He’d actually never had a bottle of the stuff outside of a bar, where they poured it for you.

Spencer circled his pudgy little arms around his dad’s waist. Scott reached out his free hand and grabbed his son back, made a grunting sound. “Hey, sweetie,” he said. His face was red from the heat, and he blinked the smoke out of his eyes.

“Hey, Dad.”

Nick smiled. So Spencer was a little kid, too, not just a Jeopardy champ.

“Shit,” Scott said, as one of his burgers slipped through the grate and into the fire.

“Do this often?”

“It’s my only hobby. Understand, my idea of a good time is filling out my tax return using Roman numerals.” He fiddled some more with the metal spatula. “Shit,” he said again, as another burger dropped into the flames. “You like well done?”

9

The architect who was doing the renovations to the Conovers’ kitchen was a stodgy but affable man named Jeremiah Claflin. He wore round black glasses of the sort that some of the famous architects affected-that Japanese guy, that Swiss guy, Nick forgot their names if he ever knew them-and his white hair contrasted pleasantly with his ruddy face and curled over his shirt collar. Laura had interviewed him and several other architects from Fenwick and the surrounding towns as intensively as she’d interviewed nanny candidates years ago. It was important to her that the architect she hired not only had a portfolio of projects she admired, but also wasn’t too stubborn, too much of an artiste that he wouldn’t do exactly what she wanted.

Nick got along with Claflin, as he got along with just about everyone, but he realized early on that the architect found Nick frustrating. Sure, he was pleased to be working on the house that belonged to Stratton’s CEO-that gave him certain bragging rights-and since Laura had chosen nothing but the most high-end, most ridiculously expensive appliances and cabinets and all that, Claflin was making a boatload of money for not that much design work. But Nick wasn’t all that interested in the fussy little details that Laura had had such patience for, and there sure as hell were a million fussy little details. The decisions never seemed to end. Did he want the kitchen counters to have a full bullnose or half bullnose or an ogee edge? How much of an overhang? How tall did he want the backsplash to be? A self-rimming sink or an undermount? What about the height of the countertop? Jesus, Nick had a company to run.

Claflin was forever faxing him drawings and lists of questions. Nick would inevitably tell the architect to just do whatever Laura had told him to do. He really didn’t give a damn about what the kitchen looked like. What he cared about-was obsessed about, really-was that it be done precisely the way Laura wanted. The renovations had been Laura’s last big project, pretty much all she thought about, talked about, in the months before the accident. Nick suspected that part of the reason she’d poured so much of herself into it was that the kids were getting older, and being a mom was no longer a full-time job. After Lucas was born, she’d quit her job teaching art history at St. Thomas More College. She tried to get her teaching position back when the kids were older, but she couldn’t. She’d been mommy-tracked. She missed teaching, missed the intellectual engagement.

Laura was by far the smarter one in the marriage. Nick had gone to Michigan State on a full-boat hockey scholarship, busted his hump to get C’s and B’s, while Laura had breezed through Swarthmore summa cum laude. It was like she had a deep well of creative energy inside her that needed to be tapped or she’d go crazy, and the renovations filled a need for her.

But there was more to it: Laura had wanted to knock down the sterile old kitchen, which looked like no one ever used it, and turn it into a hearth, a great room where the whole family could gather. Laura, who was an excellent cook, could make dinner while the kids did their homework or hung out around the kitchen island. The whole family could be together comfortably.

The least Nick could do to honor her was to make sure the damned kitchen was done the way she wanted.

Their marriage had been far from perfect-hell, they’d been arguing the night she was killed, as he’d never forget-but Nick had learned you choose your battles. You made unspoken deals sometimes, ceded turf. Laura, who’d grown up in a shambling Victorian on the Hill, a pediatrician’s kid, wanted to live a certain way, namely better than the way in which she’d been brought up. She wanted the elegance and style she never had growing up in a house that was always in some state of chaos and disrepair. She subscribed to Architectural Digest and Elle Decor and half a dozen other magazines that all looked the same, and she was always tearing out photos and two-page spreads and adding them to a steadily thickening file folder that she might as well have labeled DREAM HOUSE. To Nick, having a house with more than two bedrooms and a backyard and a kitchen you didn’t eat in already bordered on unimaginable luxury.

Claflin was waiting for him in the kitchen when he arrived, twenty minutes late. From the family room Nick could hear Julia and her best friend, Emily, playing a computer game called The Sims in which they created their own creepily real-looking human beings and bent them to their will. Julia and Emily were shrieking with laughter over something.

“Busy day?” Claflin asked. His tone was jovial, but his eyes betrayed annoyance at being kept waiting.

Nick apologized as he shook the architect’s hand, and then his eye was immediately caught by something. The countertops were in. He went up to the island and realized that, even to his untrained eye, something looked wrong.

“I see they’ve put a new alarm system in,” Claflin said. “Fast work.”

Nick nodded. He’d noticed the white touch pads on the wall as he entered. “The island,” he said. “That’s not what Laura wanted.”

She’d designed a big island in the center of the kitchen around which the whole family could gather, sitting on stools, while she made dinner. But you sure as hell couldn’t sit at this thing. It had walls of black granite that came up about two feet, no overhang, no place for stools.

Claflin beamed. “None of your guests will have to see the cooking mess from the dining table,” he said. “Yet it works perfectly as a food-prep station. Clever, don’t you think?”

Nick hesitated. “You can’t sit at it,” he said.

“True,” Claflin conceded, his smile fading, “but there’s no unsightly mess. That open-kitchen thing, that’s the big problem with this great-room design that no one talks about. You have this stunning kitchen with all the best appliances, and this big farmhouse table where your guests eat their dinner, and what do they end up looking at? A mess of dirty pots and pans on the counters and island. This solves that problem.”

“But the kids can’t sit around it.”

“Believe me, that’s trivial compared to-”

“Laura wanted everyone to be able to sit around the kitchen island. She wanted to be able to see the kids hanging out here, doing their homework or reading or talking or whatever while she was making dinner.”

“Nick,” Claflin said slowly, “you don’t cook, right? And Laura’s-well, she’s…”

“Laura wanted this big, open, hang-out kitchen,” Nick said. “That’s what she wanted, and that’s what we’re going to have.”

Claflin looked at him for a few seconds. “Nick, I faxed you the specs, and you signed off on them.”

“I probably didn’t even look at them. I told you we’re doing everything exactly according to Laura’s wishes.”

“This has already been cut. We can’t…send it back. You own it.”

“I really don’t give a shit,” Nick said. “You get the stone guy back here and have him recut it the way Laura wanted.”

“Nick, there’s a logic to this design that-”

“Just do it.” Nick’s voice was arctic. “Are we clear?”

10

As soon as Claflin left, Julia entered the kitchen. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt emblazoned with the arch-shaped logo of the Michigan Wolverines. Her friend was still sitting at the computer in the family room, busily tyrannizing the lives of her Sims family like some high-tech Hitler.

“Daddy, are you the president of Stratton?”

“President and CEO, baby, don’t you know that? Give me a hug.”

She ran to him as if she’d been waiting for permission, threw her arms around him. Nick leaned over and gave her a kiss on her forehead, thought: She’s just figuring this out?

“Emily says you fired half the people in Fenwick.”

Emily looked up from the computer screen, stole a furtive glance at Nick.

“We had to lay a lot of really good people off,” Nick said. “To save the company.”

“She says you fired her uncle.”

Ah, so that was it. Nick shook his head. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear it, Emily.”

Emily gave him an imperious, condescending look, almost withering, quite remarkable for a ten-year-old girl. “Uncle John’s been unemployed for almost two years. He says he gave everything to Stratton and you ruined his life.”

Nick wanted to respond-It wasn’t me, and anyway we provided extensive outplacement counseling, you know-but once you start debating with ten-year-olds you might as well hang it up. He was saved by the honk of a car horn. “Okay, Em, you’d better get going. You don’t want to keep your mom waiting.”

Emily’s mom drove a brand-new gold Lexus LX 470 roughly half as long as a city block. She wore a white Fred Perry tennis shirt, white shorts, a Fenwick Country Club windbreaker, expensive-looking white tennis shoes. She had great, tanned legs, short auburn hair coiffed in a high-fashion cut, a giant glittering diamond engagement ring. Her husband was a plastic surgeon who was rumored to be having an affair with his receptionist, and if even Nick, who was completely out of the gossip stream, had heard it, it was probably true.

“Hello, Nick.” Her cigarette-husky voice was chilly and bone-dry.

“Hi, Jacqueline. Emily should be out in a second. I had to tear her away from the computer.”

Jacqueline smiled in an artful semblance of sociability. Nick knew her only enough to say hi: maintaining friendships among the school parents had been Laura’s job. Not that long ago, Jacqueline Renfro would light up when she saw him at school plays and parents’ nights, as if he were a long-lost friend. But people didn’t suck up to him so much anymore.

“How’s Jim?” he said.

“Oh, you know,” she said airily. “When people lose their jobs they don’t get Botox quite as often.”

“Emily mentioned that her uncle got laid off from Stratton. Is he your brother or Jim’s?”

She paused, then said sternly, “Mine, but Emily shouldn’t have said that. Honestly, she has no manners. I’ll talk to her.”

“No, no-she was saying what was on her mind. Where’d your brother work?”

“I don’t-” she faltered, then she called out, “Emily, what is taking you so long?”

They stood in awkward silence for a moment until her daughter emerged from the house, struggling under the weight of a backpack the size of a Sherpa’s.

Julia didn’t look up from the computer monitor as Nick approached and asked, “Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“You finish your homework?”

Julia didn’t answer.

“You heard me, right?”

“What?” What was it with the selective hearing? He could whisper “Krispy Kreme” in the kitchen and she’d come bounding.

“Your homework. We’re eating dinner in half an hour-it’s Marta’s night off. Turn off the computer.”

“But I’m in the middle-”

“Save it and shut down. Come on, sweetie.”

He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up for Lucas. No reply. The house was so unnecessarily big, though, that sound didn’t carry far. Nick went upstairs, past Laura’s study, its door unopened since her death, to Lucas’s room.

He knocked. The door, slightly ajar, opened inward a few inches. He pushed it open the rest of the way, called, “Luke?” No answer; no Lucas here. His desk lamp was on, a textbook open. He walked over to see which textbook it was, inadvertently bumping against the desk. The iMac’s flat panel screen came out of sleep mode, displaying a profusion of colorful flesh-tone photographs. Nick looked again and saw naked bodies in various sexual contortions. He came closer to get a closer look.

The entire screen was taken up with pop-up windows of slutty-looking women with huge boobs in garish shades of pink and orange. “Real Amateur Pussy,” one window read, the word “real” flashing red like a neon sign.

Nick’s first reaction was a very male one: he looked even closer, intrigued, felt a stirring he hadn’t felt in months. Immediately after, though, he felt disgusted at the tawdriness of the images-who were these girls who were willing to do this stuff for all the heavy-breathing Internet world to see? And then the realization washed over him that this was Lucas’s computer, that his son was looking at all this stuff. If Laura had discovered this, she would have freaked out, called him at work, demanded that he come home at once and have a Talk with his son.

Whereas Nick didn’t know what to think, how to react. He was at a loss. The kid was sixteen, and developmentally a fairly advanced sixteen at that. Of course he was interested in sex. Nick remembered when he and a buddy, around the same age, had found a matted, waterlogged Playboy in the woods. They’d dried it out carefully, pored over it as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls, hid it in Nick’s garage. Looking back on it now, it was amazing how different smut was in those days, how innocent, though it sure didn’t seem it at the time. The photos in Playboy were so heavily airbrushed that it was something of a shock when Nick first got an up-close glimpse of his first real-life tits not long afterward, in the finished basement of his first real girlfriend, Jody Catalfano. Jody, the cutest girl in the class, had been after him for months, was ready long before he was. Her breasts were far smaller than the voluptuous babes’ in Playboy, her nipples larger and darker with a few stray hairs around the edges of the areolas.

But this stuff, garish and flashing, was way too real, somehow. It was more blatant, more perverted than anything from Nick’s fevered adolescence. And here it was, a couple of mouse clicks away. It wasn’t half-buried under dead leaves in the woods, didn’t require conservation efforts or concealment in an empty Pennzoil box in a garage. On some level it was almost sickening. And what if Julia had wandered in here and seen it?

He picked up Lucas’s desk phone and called his son’s cell.

Lucas answered after five rings, fumbling with the phone a long time. “Yeah?” In the background was loud music, raucous voices.

“Luke, where the hell are you?”

A pause. “What’s up?”

“What’s up? It’s suppertime.”

“I ate already.”

“We have dinner together, remember?” This “dinner together” thing had become one of Nick’s recent obsessions, particularly since Laura was gone. He sometimes felt that if he didn’t insist on it, the remains of his family could all fly away by centrifugal force.

Another pause. “Where are you, Luke?”

“All right,” Lucas said and hung up.

An hour later, Lucas still wasn’t home. Julia was hungry, so the two of them sat down to dinner at the small round table that had been temporarily placed in one corner of the kitchen, away from most of the construction. Marta had set the table for the three of them before going out for the evening. In the warm oven was a roast chicken, tented with foil. Nick brought the chicken and rice and broccoli to the table, remembering to put trivets under the chicken pan so he didn’t scorch the table. He expected a fight over the broccoli, and he got it. Julia would accept only rice and a chicken drumstick, and Nick was too wiped out to argue.

“I like Mommy’s better,” Julia said. “This is too dry.”

“It’s been in the oven for a couple of hours.”

“Mommy made the best fried chicken.”

“She sure did, baby,” Nick said. “Eat.”

“Where’s Luke?”

“He’s on his way back.” Taking his damned time of it too, Nick thought.

Julia stared at the chicken leg on her plate as if it were a giant cockroach. Finally, she said, “I don’t like it here.”

Nick thought for a moment, unsure how to respond. “Like it where?”

“Here,” she said unhelpfully.

“This house?”

“We don’t have any neighbors.”

“We do, but…”

“We don’t know any of them. It’s not a neighborhood. It’s just…houses and trees.”

“People do keep to themselves here,” he conceded. “But your mommy wanted us to move here because she thought it would be safer than our last house.”

“Well, it’s not. Barney…” She stopped, her eyes welling up with tears, resting her chin in her hands.

“But we will be now, with this new security system in.”

“Nothing like that ever happened in our old house,” she pointed out.

The front door opened, setting off a high alert tone, and a few seconds later Lucas trundled noisily into the kitchen, threw his backpack down on the floor. He seemed to get taller and broader by the day. He wore a dark blue Old Navy sweatshirt, baggy cargo pants with the waistband of his boxer shorts showing, and some white scarflike thing under his backwards baseball cap.

“What’s that on your head?” Nick asked anyway.

“Do-rag, why?”

“That like a hip-hop thing?”

Lucas shook his head, rolled his eyes. “I’m not hungry,” he said. “I’m going upstairs.”

“Sit with us anyway, Luke,” Julia pleaded. “Come on.”

“I’ve got a lot of homework,” Lucas said as he left the kitchen without turning back.

11

Nick followed his son upstairs. “We have to have a talk,” he said.

Lucas groaned. “What now?” When he reached the open door to his room, he said, “You been in here?”

“Sit down, Luke.”

Lucas noticed the computer monitor facing the door, and he leaped toward it, spun it away. “I don’t want you going in my room.”

“Sit down.”

Lucas sat on the edge of his bed, hunched over with his elbows propped on his knees, his chin resting on his hands, a gesture that Julia had recently started imitating. He stared malevolently.

“You’re not allowed to go to porn sites,” Nick said.

Lucas blinked. His angry blue eyes were crystal clear, innocent and pure. He was trying to grow something under his chin, Nick noticed. For a moment Lucas seemed to be debating whether to own up to the evidence so prominently on display. Then he said: “There’s nothing there I don’t know about, Nick. I’m sixteen.”

“Cut out the ‘Nick’ stuff.”

“Okay, Dad,” he said with a surly twist. “Hey, at least I’m not going to snuff or torture sites. You should see the shit that’s out there.”

“You do that again and your Internet access gets cut off, understand?”

“You can’t do that. I need e-mail for school. It’s required.”

“Then I’ll leave you with just AOL with whatever those controls are.”

“You can’t do that! I got to do research on the Internet.”

“I’ll bet. Where were you this afternoon?”

“Friend’s.”

“Sounded like a bar or something.”

Lucas stared as if he weren’t going to dignify this with a response.

“What happened to Ziggy?”

“Ziggy’s an asshole.”

“He’s your best friend.”

“Look, you don’t know him, all right?”

“Then who are these new kids you’re hanging out with?”

“Just friends.”

“What are their names?”

“Why do you care?”

Nick bit his lip, thought for a moment. “I want you to go back to Underberg.” Lucas had seen a counselor for four months after Laura’s death, until he quit, complaining that Underberg was “full of shit.”

“I’m not going back there. No way.”

“You’ve got to talk to someone. You won’t talk to me.”

“About what?”

“For God’s sake, Lucas, you’ve just been through one of the most traumatic things a kid can go through. Of course you’re having a hard time. You think it’s any easier on your sister, or on me?”

“Forget it,” Lucas said, raising his voice sharply. “Don’t even go there.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lucas shot him a pitying look. “I got homework,” he said, getting up from the bed and walking over to his desk.

Nick poured himself a Scotch on the rocks, sat in the family room and watched TV for a while, but nothing held his interest. He started feeling a mild, pleasant buzz. Around midnight he went up to his room. Both Julia’s and Lucas’s lights were off. The newly installed alarm touch pad in his bedroom glowed green, announced READY in black letters. Ready for what? he thought. The installer had called him and given him the ten-minute lowdown that afternoon. If a door was open somewhere, it would say something like FAULT-LIVING ROOM DOOR. If someone moved downstairs it would say, FAULT-MOTION SENSOR, FAMILY ROOM or whatever.

He brushed his teeth, stripped down to his shorts, and climbed into the king-size bed. Next to Laura’s side of the bed was the same stack of books that had been there since the night of the accident. Marta dusted them off but knew enough not to put them away. The effect was as if she were away on a business trip and might come back in, keys jingling, at any moment. One of the books, Nick always noticed with a pang, was an old course catalog from St. Thomas More College that had a listing for her art history class. She used to look at it sometimes at night, regretful.

The sheets were cool and smooth. He rolled over something lumpy: one of Julia’s Beanie Babies. He smiled, tossed it out of the way. Lately she’d taken to leaving a different Beanie Baby in his bed each night, a little game of hers. He guessed it was her way of sleeping with Daddy, by proxy, since she hadn’t been allowed to sleep in the parental bed for some time.

He closed his eyes, but his mind raced. The Scotch hadn’t helped at all. A jerky, low-quality movie kept playing in his mind: The cop saying, Do you have any enemies, Mr. Conover? Julia’s hot, wet tears soaking his shirt by the side of the pool.

Fifteen, twenty minutes later he gave up, switched on the bathroom light, and fished out an Ambien from the brown plastic pharmacy bottle and dry-swallowed it.

He turned on the bedside lamp and read for a while. Nick wasn’t a reader, never read fiction, only enjoyed biographies but didn’t have time to read anything anymore. He hated reading those books on business management that so many of his Leadership Team kept on their shelves.

After a while he began feeling drowsy, finally, and turned off the light.

He had no idea how much later it was when he was awakened by a rapid beeping tone. Eddie’s installers had set the system to go off only in his bedroom or his study, and not too loud, when he was in the house.

He sat up, his heart pounding, his head filled with sludge. For a moment he didn’t know where he was or what that strange insistent beeping was. When he realized where it was coming from, he leaped out of bed and squinted at the green touch pad’s LED.

It was flashing: ALARM***PERIMETER***ALARM.

Keeping his footsteps light, in order not to wake the kids, he went downstairs to investigate.

12

Nick padded barefoot downstairs, the house dark and silent. He glanced at one of the new touch pads at the foot of the stairs. It too was flashing: ***ALARM***PERIMETER***.

His brain felt viscous and slow. It was an effort to think clearly. Only the rapid beating of his heart, the adrenaline-fueled anxiety, kept him moving forward.

He paused for a moment, considering which way to go.

Then a light came on inside the house, flooding him with panic. He walked quickly toward the light-his study?-until he remembered that the software that ran the cameras had been programmed to detect pixel changes, shifts in light or movement. Not only did the cameras start recording when there was a change in light, but the software was connected to a relay that automatically switched on a couple of inside lights, to scare off potential intruders by making them think someone in the house had been awakened, even if no one was home.

He slowed his pace but kept going, trying to think. The motion-sensor software worked by zones. That meant that whoever or whatever was there was on the side of the lawn nearest his study. Eddie’s guy had set up the system so that the alarm company wasn’t alerted unless the house itself was broken into, since a large animal moving across the lawn was enough to set off the perimeter alarm. Otherwise there’d be too many false alarms. But if something did cross the lawn, the cameras started and the lights went on.

A deer. Probably that was all it was.

Still, he had to be sure.

He kept going through the family room, down the hall to his study. The lights were on.

He slowed as he entered the study, the sludge in his head starting to clear. No one was here, of course. The only sound was the faint hum from his computer. He looked at the French doors and the darkness beyond. Nothing there; nothing outside. A false alarm.

The room went dark, startling him momentarily, until he remembered that the lights were also programmed to go off after two minutes. He walked through the study, approaching the glass panes of the French doors, staring out.

He could see nothing.

Nothing out there but watery moonlight glinting on the trees and shrubbery.

He glanced back at the illuminated face of his desk clock. Ten minutes after two. The kids were asleep upstairs, Marta presumably back from her night out and asleep in her bedroom in the wing off the kitchen. He glanced back out through the windowpanes, checking again.

After a few seconds he turned to leave the study.

The lawn outside lit up. The floodlights came on, jolting Nick. He spun back around, looked outside, saw a figure approaching from a stand of trees.

He moved closer to the glass, squinted. A man in some kind of trench coat that flapped as he walked. He was crossing the lawn slowly, headed directly toward Nick.

Nick went to the touch pad and deactivated the alarm system. Then he reached for the French doors’ lever handle, thought for a moment, and went to his desk. He took the key from the middle drawer and unlocked the bottom one, slid it open, took out the pistol.

He removed it from its oilcloth.

Blood rushed through his head; he could hear it in his ears.

Despite assuring him he’d never have to use the thing, Eddie had left it loaded. Now Nick gripped the weapon, pulled back the slide to chamber the first round, as Eddie had instructed, let the slide go.

He turned slowly, the weapon at his side, careful to keep his finger away from the trigger. With his left hand he turned the handle and opened the French doors. He stepped outside, the soil of the newly seeded lawn cold against his bare feet.

“Stop right there,” he called.

The man kept advancing. Now Nick could make out his heavy black eyeglasses, his ogling eyes, his brush-cut gray hair, his bent figure. The man, his name was Andrew Stadler, walked straight ahead, heedlessly.

Nick raised the gun, barked: “Freeze!”

Under the flapping trench coat, Stadler wore white pants, a white shirt. He was muttering to himself, all the while staring at Nick as he came closer and closer.

He’s a fucking nutcase, buddy…

The guy kept coming, goggling eyes staring as if he didn’t even see the gun, or if he did, he didn’t give a shit.

Eddie’s words. A maniac. The guy’s been in and out of the locked ward at County Medical.

“Don’t you fucking take another step!” Nick shouted.

Now the man’s mutterings were starting to become distinct. The man raised his hand, pointed a finger at Nick, his expression malevolent, enraged. “Never safe,” the man croaked. He smiled, his hands fluttering to his sides, to his coat pockets. The smile was like a twitch: it came and disappeared several times in succession, no logic to it.

Stadler was questioned in the possible murder of an entire family that lived across the street.

“One more step, and I shoot!” Nick shouted, raising the weapon with both hands, aiming at the center of the lunatic’s body.

“You’re never going to be safe,” the man in white said, one hand fumbling in his pocket, now rushing toward Nick, toward the open door.

Nick squeezed the trigger, and everything seemed to happen all at once. There was a popping sound, loud but not nearly as loud as he’d expected. The pistol bucked in his hands, flew backward at him. An empty shell casing flew off to one side. Nick could smell gunpowder, sulfuric and acrid.

The maniac stumbled, sank to his knees. A dark blotch appeared on his white shirt, a corona of blood. The bullet had entered his upper chest. Nick watched, his pulse racing, still gripping the pistol in both hands, leveling it at the man until he could be sure the man was down.

Suddenly, with surprising agility, the madman sprang to his feet with a throaty growl, shouting, “No!” in an aggrieved, almost offended voice. He propelled himself toward Nick, said, “Never-safe!”

The man was less than six feet away now, and Nick fired, aiming higher this time, wild with fear and resolve. He was able to stabilize the weapon better now, felt a spray of powder sting his face, and he saw the man tumble backward and to one side, mouth open, but this time he did not break his fall. He landed on his side, legs splayed at a funny angle, expelling a guttural, animallike sound.

Nick froze, watched in silence for a few seconds.

His ears rang. Gripping the weapon in both hands, he stepped to one side to see the man’s face. The lunatic’s mouth was gaping, blood seeping over his lips, his chin. The black glasses had fallen off somewhere; now the eyes, much smaller without the magnification of the lenses, stared straight ahead.

The man exhaled with a rattling noise and was silent.

Nick stood, dazed, flooded with adrenaline, even more terrified at this moment than he had been a minute earlier. He pointed the pistol, almost accusingly, at the man and walked slowly up to him. Nick thrust out his right foot, nudged the man’s chest, testing.

The man rolled backward, his mouth open, a mouthful of silver fillings glinting, the eyes now staring into the night sky, blood seeping. The high metallic ringing in Nick’s ears had begun to subside, and everything was strangely, eerily silent. From very far away, Nick thought he could hear a faint rustling of leaves. A dog now barked, far in the distance, then stopped.

The man’s chest was not moving; he was not breathing. Nick leaned over him, the pistol now dangling in his left hand by his side. He placed his right forefinger on the man’s throat and felt no pulse. This was no surprise; the staring eyes had already announced that the maniac lay dead.

He’s dead, Nick thought. I’ve killed him.

I’ve killed a man.

He was suffused with terror. I killed this guy. Another voice in his head began to plead, defensive and frightened as a little boy.

I had to. I had no choice. I had no fucking choice.

I had to stop him.

Maybe he’s just unconscious, Nick thought desperately. He felt the man’s throat again, couldn’t find the pulse. He grabbed one of the man’s rough, dry hands, pressed against the inside of his wrist, felt nothing.

He let go of the hand. It dropped to the ground.

He poked again at the man’s chest with his toes, but he knew the truth.

The man was dead.

The crazy man, this stalker, this man who would have dismembered my children the way he butchered my dog, lay dead on the freshly seeded lawn, surrounded by tiny sprouts of grass that poked out sparsely from the moist black earth.

Oh, Jesus God, Nick thought. I’ve just killed a man.

He stood up but felt his knees give way. He sank to the ground, felt tears running down his cheeks. Tears of relief? Of terror? Not, certainly not, of despair or of sadness.

Oh, please, Jesus, he thought. What do I do now?

What do I do now?

For a minute, maybe two, he remained on his knees, sunken in the soft ground. It was as if he were in a church, a place he hadn’t been in decades, praying. That was what it felt like. He was praying on the soft, hydroseeded lawn, his back turned to the crumpled body. For a few seconds he wondered if he was going to lose consciousness, pass out on the soil. He waited for a sound, the sound of someone in the house, awakened by the gunshots, running out to see what had happened. The kids couldn’t see this, mustn’t be allowed to see it.

But not a sound. No one had awakened, not even Marta. Gathering his strength, he rose, dropping the weapon to the ground, moving back toward the study as if in a trance. The lights came on: the motion sensor software again.

He could barely stand. He sank into his desk chair, folding his arms on the desk, resting his head on his arms. His mind was racing, but to no purpose; he was not thinking clear thoughts. His brains felt scrambled.

He was terrified.

What do I do now?

Who can help me? Who do I call?

He lifted the handset on his desk phone, pressed the number nine.

Nine-one-one. The police.

No, I can’t. Not yet. He hung up.

Must think. What do I tell them? Everything depends on this. Was it self-defense pure and simple?

The police, who despised him so much, would be looking to hang him. Once they showed up, they’d be asking all sorts of questions, and one wrong answer might put him in prison for years. Nick knew that, given how groggy and out of it he was, he might well be railroaded by the cops.

He needed help.

He picked up the handset again, punched the cell number of the one person who would know what to do now.

Dear God, he thought as the phone rang.

Help me.

Eddie’s voice was sleep-thickened, clipped. “Yeah?”

“Eddie, it’s Nick.”

“Nick-Jesus, it’s fucking-”

“Eddie, I need you to come over to my house. Right now.” He swallowed. A cool breeze swept through the room from the open doors, making him shiver.

“Now? Nick, are you out of your-”

“Now, Eddie. Oh, God. Right now.”

“What the hell is it?”

“The stalker,” Nick said. His mouth was dry, and the words stuck in his throat.

“He’s there?” For a few seconds, Nick couldn’t answer. Eddie went on, “Christ, Nick, what is it? My God, don’t tell me he got to your kids!”

“I-I gotta call nine-one-one, but-I need to know what to tell them, and-”

“What the fuck happened, Nick?” Eddie barked.

“I killed him,” Nick heard himself say softly. He paused to think of how to explain it, blinked a few times, then fell silent. What was there to say, really? Eddie had to have figured it out.

“Shit, Nick-”

“When I call the cops, they’re going to-”

“Nick, you listen to me,” Eddie interrupted. “Do not pick up the phone again. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The phone slipped from Nick’s hand as if his fingers were greased. He felt a sob welling up.

Please, dear God, Nick thought. Make this go away.

13

Standing in the shadowed recesses of the front porch, Nick sipped from a mug of instant coffee and waited. Apart from physical sensations-the chill of the night air, the warmth of the mug against his palms, the gusts of wind-he felt nothing. He was beyond numb. He was a husk, an empty body standing on a porch at night while above him hovered Nick Conover, watching in disbelief. This hadn’t happened. This was a nightmare that, even as he experienced it in real time, he told himself was merely a bad dream that he’d awaken from, soon enough, but not before he moved through the twisting, steadily more awful script. At the same time, he understood that it wasn’t a dream. Any minute now, Eddie’s car would pull into the driveway, and Nick, by telling another person, seeking his advice, would make it real.

As if on cue, Eddie’s Pontiac GTO coasted quietly up the driveway, headlights extinguished. Eddie got out, shut the door quietly, jogged up to Nick. He was wearing sweatpants and a tan Carhartt jacket.

“Nicky, tell me exactly what happened?” Eddie’s face was creased, unfamiliarly, with concern. His shoulders were hunched. His breath stank of stale booze; he looked like he’d been asleep.

Nick chewed the inside of his cheek, looking away.

Eddie twisted his head to one side. “All right. Where is he?”

“Okay,” Eddie said. “Okay.”

His hands made strange, resolute chopping motions in the air. “Okay.” He stood over the crumpled body. The floodlights at his back cast a long, spindly shadow.

“Do you think anyone heard?” His first question. A strange one, it seemed to Nick. Not “What happened?”

Nick shook his head. He spoke in a low voice, hoping Eddie would do the same. “Marta or the kids would have gotten up if they did.”

“Neighbors?”

“Hard to say. The security guys down at the booth normally drive up if they think there’s a problem.”

“No lights went on at any of the neighbors’ houses?”

“Look for yourself. Our nearest neighbor is hundreds of feet away. Trees and everything between us. I can’t see them, they can’t see me.”

Eddie nodded. “The Smith and Wesson’s a.380. Makes kind of a loud popping noise.” He leaned over to peer more closely at Stadler. “Did he enter the house?”

“No.”

Eddie nodded again. Nick couldn’t tell from his expression whether that was good or not.

“He see you?”

“Sure. I was standing right here.”

“You told him to stop.”

“Of course. Eddie, what the hell am I-”

“You did the right thing.” His voice was low, soothing. “You had no fucking choice.”

“He kept on going. He wouldn’t stop.”

“He would have attacked your kids if you didn’t stop him.”

“I know.”

Eddie let out a long, slow breath, a little quaver in it. “Shit, man.”

“What?”

“Shit.”

“It was self-defense,” Nick said.

Eddie drew closer to Stadler’s corpse. “How many shots?”

“I think two.”

“Chest and the head. The mouth.”

Nick noticed that the bleeding had stopped. It looked black in the artificial light. The man’s skin was white and waxen, his eyes staring.

“You must have a tarp here, all the construction.”

“A tarp?”

“Canvas. Or plastic, better.”

“A tarp?”

“A tarpaulin, Nick. You know. A big heavy plastic sheet. Or contractor bags if you have them. You must have those around.”

“What for?”

“The hell do you think? Any idea how hard it is to carry a dead body?”

Nick felt a spasm of fear in his abdomen. “We got to call the cops, Eddie.”

Eddie looked at Nick incredulously. “You are fucking kidding me. You think you even have a choice here?”

“What the hell else are we going to do?”

“Then what’d you call me for, Nick?”

“I-” He had a point, of course. “This is bad, Eddie. Really bad.”

“You just used my fucking gun. To kill a guy, okay? Are you hearing me? My gun. We really don’t have a choice.”

14

Nick stared, didn’t know what to say, went back into the study, Eddie right behind him. Nick sat in one of the side chairs, rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“It was self-defense,” he repeated.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? What are you talking about, maybe? This guy was dangerous.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“No. But how the hell could I have known that?”

“You couldn’t,” Eddie conceded. “Maybe you saw something glint, a knife or a gun or something, you couldn’t be sure.”

“I saw him reach in his pocket. You told me the guy has a gun-I figured he was reaching for a weapon.”

Eddie nodded, turned grimly toward the doors, and stepped back into the inky blackness. He returned a minute or so later, some objects in his cupped hands. He dumped them onto the coffee table. “Wallet, key ring. No knife, no gun, no nothing on the guy.”

“I didn’t fucking know that,” Nick said. “He kept saying, ‘You’re not safe.’”

“Nick, of course you didn’t know. Jesus, I mean, you were dealing with a fucking psycho, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. That’s not it.”

“The truth is, you lent me your gun as protection,” Nick said. “Temporarily. You said it’s a misdemeanor.”

Eddie slammed his fist into his palm. “You still don’t fucking get it, do you? You killed the dude outside the house, not inside.”

“He was trying to get in, believe me.”

“I know that. You’re allowed to use physical force to terminate attempted commission of criminal trespass.” The words sounded unnatural, halting, coming out of his mouth, as if he’d memorized them during his cop days. “But not deadly physical force. That’s the premises law. See, Nick, the law says deadly physical force can only be used in the face of deadly physical force.”

“But given the guy’s record-”

“I’m not saying you wouldn’t have a chance of beating this. But what the hell you think’s going to happen to you, huh?”

Nick finished his mug of coffee. The caffeine only went so far in counteracting the sleeping pill; it was adrenaline and fear that were keeping him functioning. “I’m the CEO of a major corporation, Eddie. I’m a respected member of the community.”

“You’re fucking Nick the Slasher!” Eddie hissed. “What the fuck do you think’s going to happen to you? And to your family? Think about it. You think the cops are going to cut you any slack?”

“The law’s the law.”

“Shit! Don’t talk to me about the law, Nick. I know the law. I know how it gets twisted and bent if the cops want it to. I’ve done it, okay?”

“Not all cops,” Nick said.

Eddie flashed him a look of barely concealed hostility. “Put it to you this way. The locals’ll have no choice but to charge you, right?”

“Maybe.”

“For absolute fucking sure. And when it comes to trial-and it will, you can be sure of that-yeah, you might beat it. Maybe. After ten months of a nightmare. Yeah, you could get lucky, get a reasonable prosecutor, but even they’re going to face all sorts of pressure to string up Nick the Slasher. You’re going to be facing a jury of twelve people who all hate your guts-man, the thought of locking you up…I mean, in a town this size, there isn’t going to be a juror in the pool who doesn’t know someone, a friend or a relative, that you fired, right? You saw what that jury did to Martha Stewart for a little insider trading. You fucking murdered an old man, are you with me yet? A sick old man.”

“The bottom line is, I’m innocent.” Nick was feeling ill again, thought he might throw up, looked around for his metal wastebasket in case he did.

“You don’t get to say what the bottom line is, okay?”

“But it was fucking self-defense!”

“Hey, don’t argue with me! I’m on your side. But it’s homicide, Nick. Manslaughter at a minimum. You say it’s self-defense, but you got no witnesses, you got no injuries, and you got a dead guy who was unarmed. I don’t care how much money you spend on a lawyer-you get tried here, in Fenwick. And what the hell you think’s going to happen to your kids during this goddamned media circus, huh? You have any fucking idea what this is going to do to them? You think it’s hard for them, dealing with Laura and the layoffs and everything? Imagine you on trial for murder. A fucking lynch mob, Nick. You want to put your kids through that?”

Nick didn’t reply. He felt frozen in the chair, completely at a loss.

“They’re probably going to send you away, Nick. Five, ten years if you’re lucky. Sentence like that, you’re going to miss your kids’ childhood. And they grow up with a jailbird father. They don’t have a mom, Nick. All they got is you. You gonna play Russian roulette with your kids, Nick?”

Eddie’s stare was unrelenting, furious.

Finally, Nick spoke. “What are you suggesting?”