Company Man

15

Audrey Rhimes’s pager shrilled in the semidarkness.

She jolted awake, out of a blissful dream of her childhood, a warm summer day, going down a Slip’N Slide that went on and on and on, in her family’s steeply canted backyard. Ordinarily 6:30 A.M. wasn’t early at all, but her shift had ended at midnight, and after that came the usual unpleasantness with Leon, so she’d gotten maybe four hours of sleep.

She felt raw, vulnerable like a freshly hatched chick.

Audrey was a woman who liked routine, schedule, regularity. This was a personality trait that didn’t go well with her job as a detective with the Fenwick Police Major Case Team. Calls could come at any time of day or night. Though she could no longer remember why, this was a job she’d wanted, a job she fought for. She was not just the only African-American member of the Major Case Unit but the only woman-the real difficulty, it turned out.

Leon groaned, rolled over, buried his head beneath a pillow.

She slipped out of bed and moved silently through the dim bedroom, narrowly avoiding a cluster of empty beer cans that Leon had left there. From the kitchen phone she called Dispatch.

A body discovered in a Dumpster on the five hundred block of Hastings. A section of town where all of the town’s vice seemed to be concentrated, all the prostitution and drugs and violence and shootings. A dead body there could mean any of a number of things, including drugs or gangs, but the odds were that it meant very little. Was this hard-hearted of her? She preferred not to think so. At first she’d been shocked at the reactions of the survivors, even the mothers, who seemed to be almost resigned to losing a son. They’d already lost their sons. Few of them pleaded their sons’ innocence. They knew better.

When Audrey learned who’d be picking her up this morning, who she’d been partnered with on this case-the loathsome Roy Bugbee-she felt her body go rigid with annoyance. More than annoyance, she had to admit to herself. Something stronger. This was not a worthy feeling, not a generous impulse.

Silently, as she dressed-she kept a clean outfit in the parlor closet-she recited one of her favorite verses of scripture, from Romans 15: “Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another, according to Christ Jesus.” She loved this line, even as she realized she didn’t yet fully understand it. But she knew it meant that the Lord first teaches us what is true consolation and true patience, and then He instills this in our hearts. Reciting this to herself got her through Leon’s recent sulking fits, his drinking problem, lent her a much-needed serenity. Her goal had been to re-read the entire Bible by year’s end, but the irregularity of her schedule made that impossible.

Roy Bugbee was a fellow detective in Major Cases who had an unaccountable loathing toward her. He didn’t know her. He knew only her outward appearance, her sex, and the color of her skin. His words cut her, though never as deeply as Leon’s.

She gathered her equipment, her Sig-Sauer and her handcuffs, rights cards and IBO request forms and her PT, her handheld radio. While she waited, she sat in Leon’s favorite chair, the worn rust BarcaLounger, and opened her old leather-bound King James Bible, her mother’s, but there was barely time to find her place before Detective Bugbee pulled up in his city car.

He was slovenly. The car, which he was lucky enough to have at his disposal-she hadn’t been given one-was littered with pop cans and Styrofoam Quarter Pounder boxes. It smelled of old French fries and cigarette smoke.

He didn’t say hello or good morning. Audrey said good morning to him, however, determined to rise above his pettiness. She sat in uncomfortable silence, amid the squalor, observing the scattering of ketchup packets on the floor around her feet and hoping that none of them was on the seat beneath her plum business suit. The stain would never come out.

After a few minutes he spoke as he flicked the turn signal at a red light. “You got lucky, huh?” Bugbee’s blond hair was slicked back in a pompadour. His eyebrows were so pale they were almost invisible.

“Pardon me?”

His laugh was raucous. “I don’t mean with your husband. If Owens wasn’t drunk on his ass when Dispatch called, you’da been assigned to him. But lucky you, you get me.”

“Mm hm,” she said, her tone pleasant. When she first arrived at Major Cases, only two of the men would talk to her, Owens being one of them. The others acted as if she wasn’t even there. She’d say, “Good morning,” and they wouldn’t answer. There was no women’s bathroom, of course-not for one woman-so she had to share the men’s. One of the guys kept urinating right on the toilet seat just to make it unpleasant for her. Her fellow detectives thought it was hilarious. She’d heard it was Bugbee, and she believed it. He’d done “practical jokes” on her she didn’t like to think about. Finally she’d had to resort to using the bathroom downstairs in the warrant unit.

“Body found in a Dumpster on Hastings,” Bugbee continued. “Wrapped up like a burrito in Hefty bags.”

“How long has it been there?”

“No idea. You better not go blow your cookies on me.”

“I’ll do my best. Who found it, one of the homeless looking for food?”

“Trash guy. You lose it like you did with that little black girl, you’ll get yanked off the case, I’ll see to it.”

Little Tiffany Akins, seven years old, had died in her arms a few months earlier. They’d got her father cuffed, but her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had already died of their gunshot wounds by the time Major Cases showed up. Audrey could not keep herself from weeping. The beautiful little girl, wearing SpongeBob pajamas, could have been her own child if she’d been able to have kids. She didn’t understand what kind of father would be so blinded by rage and jealousy that he’d kill not only his estranged wife and her lover but his own daughter too.

She recited to herself: Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another…

“I’ll do my best, Roy,” Audrey said.

16

The crime scene was a small blacktopped parking lot behind a ratty little diner called Lucky’s. A yellow streamer of evidence tape secured the area, barricaded off a small gathering of the usuals. It was remarkable, Audrey thought, and not a little sad, that this unknown vagrant was getting in death the kind of attention that he surely never got when it could have made a difference. A man wanders through the streets alone and unnoticed and despairing. Now, with the life gone out of his body, a crowd gathers to pay him the respect he’d never received in life.

No TV cameras here, though. No Newschannel Six truck. Maybe not even a reporter from the Fenwick Free Press. No one wanted to come down to the five hundred block of Hastings at six in the morning to report on the discovery of some vagrant’s body.

Roy Bugbee parked the city car on the street between two patrol cars. They got out without exchanging another word. She noticed the white van belonging to the Identification Bureau Office, meaning that the crime-scene techs were already there. Not the Medical Examiner yet. The uniformed first officer, who’d notified Dispatch, was swanning around self-importantly, warding off neighborhood gawkers, clearly enjoying the biggest thing that had happened to him all week. Maybe all month. He approached Audrey and Bugbee with a clipboard and demanded that they sign in.

Her eye was caught by a flash of light, then another. The IBO evidence tech on the scene was Bert Koopmans. She liked Koopmans. He was smart and thorough, obsessive-compulsive like the best crime-scene techs, but without being arrogant or difficult. Her kind of cop. Something of a gun nut, maintained his own personal Web site on firearms and forensics. He was a lean man in his fifties with a receding hairline and thick Polar Gray spectacles. He was snapping pictures, switching between Polaroid and digital and 35mm and video like some crazed paparazzi.

Her boss, Sergeant Jack Noyce, the head of the Major Case Team, was talking on his Nextel phone. He saw Audrey and Bugbee duck under the yellow tape, held up a finger to ask them to wait. Noyce was a round-faced, stout man with melancholy eyes, gentle and sweet natured. He’d been the one who’d talked her into putting in for Major Cases. He said he wanted a woman on the squad. Never had he admitted it might have been a mistake. He was her steadfast defender, and she did him the favor of never going to him with the petty insults of her colleagues. From time to time he’d hear about something and would take her aside, promise to talk to them. He never did, though. Noyce preferred to avoid confrontation, and who could blame him, really?

He ended the call and said, “Unknown older white male, sixties maybe, gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Waste Management guy spotted it after he loaded the Dumpster on his frontloader. First pickup too. What a way to start your day.”

“Before or after he tipped the trash into the hopper, boss?” asked Audrey.

“He noticed it before. Left the contents intact, stopped a patrol car.”

“Coulda been a lot worse,” Bugbee said. “Coulda put it through the compactor, huh?” He chortled, winked at his boss. “’Stead of a burrito we’d have a quesadilla. Ever see a body like that, Audrey? You’d really blow lunch.”

“You make a very good point there, Roy,” Noyce said, smiling thinly. Audrey had always suspected that her boss shared her dislike of Roy Bugbee but was too polite to let on.

Bugbee put a comradely hand on Noyce’s shoulder as he strutted past.

“I’m sorry about that,” Noyce said under his breath.

Audrey didn’t entirely understand what he was sorry about. “He’s got a unique sense of humor,” she said, taking a stab.

“Owens was intoxicated, according to Dispatch. Bugbee was next on the call list. I wouldn’t have partnered you two, but…” He shrugged, his voice trailing off.

Noyce waved at someone. Audrey turned to look. Curtis Decker, the body mover, was getting out of his old black Ford Econoline van. Decker, a small man of ghostly pallor, had a funeral home in Fenwick and was also the town’s conveyance specialist. He’d been transferring bodies from crime scenes to the morgue at Boswell Medical Center for twenty-seven years. Decker lighted a cigarette, leaned back against his van, chatting idly to his assistant, waiting his turn.

Noyce’s phone chirped. He picked it up, said, “Noyce,” and Audrey silently excused herself.

Bert Koopmans was painstakingly brushing powder on the rim of the battered dark-blue Dumpster. Without turning his head from his work, he said, “Morning, Aud.”

“Good morning, Bert.” As she drew closer to the Dumpster, she caught a whiff of a ripe stench, which mingled with the odor of bacon that wafted from the open service entrance door.

The asphalt was littered with cigarette butts. This was where the busboys and short-order cooks smoked. There were a few jagged shards from a brown beer bottle. She knew there wasn’t likely to be any evidence here, no shell casings or anything, since the body had been dumped.

“Partnered with Bugbee on this, I see.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“The Lord trieth the righteous.”

She smiled, her eyes straying to the body in the Dumpster, wrapped tightly in black trash bags. It did look a little like a take-out burrito. The bundle lay atop a foul mound of slimy lettuce heads and banana peels, a discarded submarine sandwich, next to a giant empty tin of Kaola Gold All-Vegetable Solid Griddle Shortening.

“Was it right on top like that?” she asked.

“No. Buried under a bunch of trash.”

“I assume you haven’t found anything, shell casings or whatever.”

“I didn’t really look that hard. There’s eight cubic yards of garbage in there. I figure that’s a job for the uniformed guys.”

“You already print the bags?”

“Huh,” Koopmans said. “Hadn’t thought of it.” Meaning: Of course, what do you think?

“So what’s your take, smart guy?”

“On what?”

“You unwrap that package up there, Bert?”

“First thing I did.”

“And? A mugging? Did you find a wallet or anything?”

Koopmans finished dusting a patch, carefully replaced his brush in the kit. “Just this.” He held up a plastic sandwich bag.

“Crack cocaine,” she said.

“Off-white chunky material in a Baggie, to be precise.”

“Which looks like crack. Like eighty dollars’ worth.”

He shrugged.

“A white guy in this part of town,” she said, “has to be a drug deal.”

“If the deal went bad, how come he got to keep the crack?”

“Good question.”

“Where’s your partner?”

She turned, saw Bugbee smoking, laughing raucously with one of the uniforms. “Hard at work interviewing witnesses, looks like. Bert, you’ll get this stuff tested, right?”

“Standard procedure.”

“How long does it take to get back results?”

“Few weeks, given the MSP’s work load.” The Michigan State Police lab did all the drug testing.

“You happen to have one of those field test kits with you?”

“Somewhere, sure.”

“Can I have a pair of gloves? I left mine in the car.”

Koopmans reached into a nylon rucksack beside him and pulled out a blue cardboard box, from which he yanked a pair of latex gloves. She snapped them on. “Could you hand me that Baggie?”

Koopmans gave her a questioning look but handed over the bag of crack. It was one of those Ziploc kinds. She pulled it open, removed one of the individually wrapped chunks-five or six in there, she noticed-and peeled off the plastic wrap.

“Don’t start doing my work,” Koopmans said. “Leads to worse things. Pretty soon you’ll be squinting into a microscope and bitching about detectives.”

With one gloved index finger she scraped at an edge of the off-white rock. Strange, she thought. A little too round-looking, too perfect a formation. Only one side was jagged. Then she touched her forefinger to her tongue.

“What the hell are you doing?” Koopmans said, alarmed.

“Thought so,” she said. “Didn’t numb my tongue like it’s supposed to. This isn’t crack. These are lemon drops.”

Koopmans gave a slow smile. “Still need me to get the test kit?”

“That’s okay. Could you help me up the side of this Dumpster, Bert? Of all the days I picked to wear my good shoes.”

17

Another ordinary morning at the office. Arrive at the Stratton parking lot at seven-thirty. Check e-mail, voice mail. Return a few calls, leave voice mails for people who won’t be in their offices for at least another hour.

You have killed a man.

Just another ordinary day. Business as usual.

The day before, Sunday, he’d even fantasized about going to church, to confession, which he hadn’t done since he was a kid. He’d never do it, he knew, but in his mind he rehearsed his confession, imagined the dark confessional booth, that musty cedar-vanilla smell, the scuffling footsteps outside. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says. “It has been thirty-three years since my last confession. I have committed these sins. I have taken the Lord’s name in vain. I have gazed lustfully upon other women. I have lost patience with my kids. And, oh yeah, I killed a man.” What would Father Garrison say about that? What would his own father have made of it?

He heard Marge’s voice, intercepting the early morning calls like the pro she was. “He is in the office, yes, but I’m afraid he’s in conference just now…”

How much had he slept in the past two days? He was in one of those weird, wobbly all-nighter states poised between calm and despair, and despite the coffee he’d had, he felt a sudden surge of weariness. He would have been tempted to close his office door and lay his head on his desk, except there was no door.

And it wasn’t an office, really, at all. Certainly not what he used to imagine a CEO’s office would look like. Which wasn’t to say he’d ever spent much time thinking about being CEO of Stratton, or CEO of anything for that matter. As a kid, sitting at supper at his parents’ Formica kitchen table, inhaling the acrid must of machine oil that emanated from his dad’s hair and skin even after his father had taken his post-shift shower, Nick used to imagine one day working alongside Dad on the Stratton shop floor, bending metal at the brake machine. His father’s gnarled stubby fingers, with the crescents of black grime still lodged under his fingernails, fascinated him. These were the fingers of a man who knew how to fix anything, could open a Mason jar that had been rusted shut, could build a fort out of spare lumber, nestled securely in the oak in their tiny backyard, that was the envy of all the neighbor kids. They were the hands of a worker, a guy who came home from the factory exhausted but then went right to work again, after his shower, around the house, tumbler of whiskey in one hand: fixing the dripping sink, a wobbly table leg, a lamp whose socket had a short. Dad liked fixing things that were broken, liked restoring order, getting things to work right. But more than anything, he liked being left alone. Working around the house was his way to get what he really wanted: a cone of silence around him, his thoughts kept to himself, not having to talk to his wife or son. Nick Conover only realized this about his dad much later when he saw it in himself.

He never thought one day he’d be running the company his father spoke of, the rare times he did speak, with such awe and disgruntlement. They barely knew anyone who didn’t work for Stratton. All the neighbor kids, all the grownups his parents ever saw or talked about, they all worked at Stratton. Dad always groused about fat old Arch Campbell, the nasty round-shouldered factory manager who tyrannized the day shift. Complaining about Stratton was like complaining about the weather: you were stuck with whatever you got. It was the big annoying extended family you could never escape from.

When he was around fourteen or fifteen, Nick’s junior-high class took the obligatory tour of Stratton-as if any of the kids needed a close look at the company that dominated their parents’ supper conversations, the company whose logo was sewn in red on their white baseball caps, on team uniforms, emblazoned in neon over the arched entrance to the high school stadium. Walking through the chair factory, cavernous and thundering, deafeningly loud, might have been fun if most of the kids hadn’t already been taken there at one time or another by their dads. Instead, it was the headquarters building that fascinated the rambunctious eighth-graders, finally intimidated them into a respectful awed silence.

At the climax of the tour they were crowded into the anteroom of the immense office suite of the president and chief executive officer, Milton Devries. This was the inner sanctum, the beating heart of the company that they realized, even as kids, ruled their lives. It was like being taken into King Tut’s tomb; it was that alien, that fascinating, that intimidating. There, Devries’s frightening mastiff-faced secretary, Mildred Birkerts, gave them a grudging little memorized talk, punctuated by the occasional dyspeptic scowl, about the vital function of the chief executive officer at Stratton. Craning his neck, Nick caught an illicit glimpse of Devries’s desk, an acre of burnished mahogany, bare except for a gold desk set and a perfectly neat pile of papers. Devries wasn’t there: that would have been too much. He saw huge windows, a leafy private balcony.

When, years later, Milton Devries died, Nick-who’d become the old man’s favorite vice president-was summoned by Milton’s widow, Dorothy, to her dark mansion on Michigan Avenue, where she told him he was the next CEO. Her family owned Stratton, so she could do that.

With great discomfort, Nick had moved into the old man’s Mussolini-size office, with the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Oriental rugs, the immense mahogany desk, the outer office where his executive assistant, Marjorie Dykstra, would guard his privacy. It was like living in a mausoleum. Of course, by then, Stratton had changed. Now everyone wanted to stuff as many employees as possible into a building, and Stratton had gone to the open-plan system, that fancy term for cubicles and all the furnishings that went with them. No one really liked the cube farm, but at least Stratton’s designs were elegant, cool, and friendly, 120-degree angles, the panels not too tall, all the computer cables and electrical wires and stuff hidden in the floors and panels.

One day a visitor looked around Nick’s office and made a crack. He was head of worldwide purchasing for IBM, a harried-looking guy with a sharp tongue, who’d surveyed Nick’s mahogany chamber and muttered dryly, “Oh, I see-you get the fancy digs while everyone else gets the ‘open plan.’”

The next day Nick had ordered the executive floor completely remodeled, switched to the open plan too, over the howls of protest from his entire executive management team. They’d busted their humps for years to finally land the big office with the private balcony and now they were all getting cubicles? This was a joke, right? You couldn’t do this.

But he did. Of course, everyone on the fifth floor got the best of the best, the elegant, high-end Ambience Office System with its silver mesh fabric panels on brushed aluminum frames, sound-absorbing panel walls, and the top-of-the-line leather Stratton Symbiosis chairs, the harp-back beauties that had pretty much taken the place of the Aeron chair in fancy offices around the world, much coveted, just added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Eventually people got used to the new arrangement. The complaints stopped. It got a little easier when Fortune did a big spread on the Stratton executive offices, on how they were walking the walk as well as talking the talk. It got easier still when delegations of design-school students started coming to gape at the executive offices, marvel at how edgy they were.

The new offices were pretty damned cool, it was true. If you had to work in cubicles, this was the best damned cube farm money could buy. So now, Nick had often reflected, you had guys sitting in cubicles thinking about…cubicles.

Of course, there really wasn’t any privacy anymore. Everyone knew where you were, when you went out to lunch or to work out, who you were meeting with. If you yelled at someone on the phone, everyone heard it.

The bottom line was, when Steve Jobs from Apple Computer came in for a meeting, or Warren Buffett flew in from Omaha, they could see that the top executives of Stratton weren’t hypocrites. They ate the same dog food they were selling. That was the best sales pitch of all.

So now Nick Conover’s office was a “workstation” or a “home base.” The new arrangement was less grandiose, suited him more. It wasn’t a big sacrifice. Most days he liked it a lot more anyway.

Only this wasn’t one of them.

“Nick, are you all right?”

Marjorie had come over to make sure he had the stapled agenda for Nick’s 8:30 meeting of his Executive Management Team. She was dressed elegantly, as always; she was wearing a lavender suit, the short string of pearls he’d bought as a gift for her a few years before. She wafted a faint cloud of Shalimar.

“Me? Oh, I’m fine, Marge, thanks.”

She wasn’t moving. She stood there, cocked her head. “You don’t look it. Have you been sleeping?”

Rough couple of nights, he almost said. Immediately he could hear her repeating back the words in a courtroom. He said he’d had a couple of rough nights, but he didn’t elaborate. “Ah, Lucas is driving me crazy,” he said.

A knowing smile. She’d raised two boys and a girl pretty much by herself and rightly considered herself an expert. “Poor kid’s in a tough place.”

“Yeah, called adolescence.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

“I’d love to, later on,” Nick said, knowing that would never happen; he’d make sure of it.

“Right, the EMT meeting. You all set for that, Nick?”

“I’m all set.”

Was it possible to look like a murderer? Was it visible on his face? It was stupid, it made no sense, but in his dazed, scrambled egg-brain state, he worried about it. In the EMT meeting, he barely spoke, because he could barely concentrate. He remembered the time when the family was camping in Taos, and a snake got into their cabin. Laura and the kids screamed, and she begged Nick to get a shovel and kill the vile thing. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. It wasn’t a venomous snake-it was a Western coach-whip-but Laura and the kids kept demanding that he get the shovel. Finally he reached down, picked it up, and threw it, twisting and wriggling, out into the desert.

Couldn’t kill a snake, he thought.

Some irony in that.

He strode out of the room as soon as the meeting was over, avoiding the usual post-meeting entanglements.

Back at his desk, he went on the Stratton intranet and checked Eddie Rinaldi’s online Meeting Maker to see what his schedule was. They hadn’t talked since Eddie had driven away with the body in the trunk of his car. Every time the phone rang, all Saturday and Sunday, he flinched a little, dreading that it might be Eddie. But Eddie never called, and he never called Eddie. He assumed everything had gone okay, but now he wanted the assurance of knowing. He thought about e-mailing Eddie to tell him he wanted to talk, but then decided against it. E-mails, instant messages, voice mails-they were all recorded somewhere. They were all evidence.

18

The only reason Audrey attended autopsies was that she had no choice. It was department policy. The Medical Examiner’s office required that at least one detective on a case be present. She told herself she didn’t see the need, since she knew she could ask the pathologist anything she wanted, anything that wasn’t in the path report.

In truth, of course, it made perfect sense to have a detective there. There were all sorts of things you found out at an autopsy that didn’t appear in the sterile lines of a report. Even so, they were the part of her job she most disliked. The dissection of bodies made her queasy. She was always afraid she might have to vomit, though she hadn’t done so since her first one, and that was a terribly burned female.

But that wasn’t what she hated most about autopsies. She found them deeply depressing. This was where you saw the human body devoid of its spirit, its soul, a carapace of flesh meted out in grams and liters. To her, on the other hand, homicide cases were about setting things right. Solving the crime didn’t always heal the wounds of the victim’s family-often it didn’t-but it was her way of restoring some kind of moral order to a deeply messed-up world. She’d taped a sign to her computer at work, a quote from one Vernon Geberth, whose name was well known to all homicide investigators, the author of a classic text, Practical Homicide Investigation. It said, “Remember: We work for God.” She believed this. She felt deeply that, as much as she was troubled by her work-and she was, most of the time-she really was doing God’s work here on earth. She was looking for the one lost sheep. But autopsies required a detachment she preferred not to have.

So she uneasily entered this white-tiled room that stank of bleach and formaldehyde and disinfectant, while her partner got to make phone calls and do interviews, though she wondered just how hard Roy Bugbee was working to solve this case of what he called “a shitbird crackhead.” Not too hard, she figured.

The morgue and autopsy room were located in the basement of Boswell Medical Center, concealed behind a door marked PATHOLOGY CONFERENCE ROOM. Everything about this place gave her the heebie-jeebies, from the stainless-steel gurney on which the victim’s nude body had been placed, head a few inches higher than the feet to facilitate drainage of bodily fluids, to the handheld Stryker bone saw on the steel shelf, the garbage disposals in the stainless-steel sink, the organ tray whose plastic drainage tube, once clear, was now discolored brown.

The assistant medical examiner, one of three attached to the department, was a young doctor named Jordan Metzler, strikingly handsome and he knew it well. He had a head of dark curly hair, great brown eyes, a strong nose, full lips, a dazzling smile. Everyone knew he wasn’t long for this job, or this town: he’d recently been offered a job in pathology at Mass General, in Boston. In a matter of months he’d be sitting at some fancy restaurant on Beacon Hill, regaling a beautiful nurse with tales of this backwater town in Michigan where he’d been stuck the last couple of years.

“Audrey’s in the house!” he crowed as she entered. “’S’up, Detective?”

What was it with white guys who felt compelled to use black slang when African-Americans were around? Did they think it made them seem cool, instead of ridiculous? Did they think that made black folks connect with them better? Did Metzler even notice that she didn’t talk that way?

She smiled sweetly. “Dr. Metzler,” she said.

He found her attractive; Audrey could tell by the way he grinned at her. Her antennae still worked, even after eight years of marriage to Leon. Like most women, she was adept at reading males; sometimes she was convinced she knew them better than they knew themselves. Eight years of marriage to Leon hadn’t knocked the self-esteem out of her, not even the terrible last couple of years. She knew that men had always been drawn to her, because of her looks. She didn’t consider herself beautiful, far from it, but she knew she was pretty. She took care of herself, she exercised, she never went without makeup and she was adept at choosing the right lipstick for her skin tone. She liked to think that it was her deep abiding faith that kept her looking good, but she had seen enough women of equally deep abiding faith at church, women whose looks only God could love, to know better.

“Have you found any bullets?” she asked.

“Well, we’ve got two in there, X-ray shows. No exit wounds. I’ll get ’em. You don’t have an ID on this one yet, do you?”

She found herself avoiding looking at the body, the wrinkled flesh and the yellow-brown toenails, which meant she had to keep looking at Metzler, and she didn’t want to send him the wrong signals. Not a horn-dog like him.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and score a hit on AFIS,” she said. The crime scene techs had just finished fingerprinting the victim, having collected whatever trace evidence they could find on the body, scraping and clipping the fingernails and all that. Since the body was unidentified, they’d run the prints right away through the Michigan Automated Fingerprint Identification System in Lansing.

She asked, “Evidence of habitual drug use?”

“You mean needle marks or something? No, nothing like that. We’ll see what tox finds on the blood.”

“Look like a homeless guy to you?”

He jutted his jaw, frowned. “Not based on his clothes, which didn’t smell unusually bad. Or grooming or dental care or hygiene. I’d guess no. In fact, the guy’s pretty clean. I mean, he could take better care of his cuticles, but he looks more like a house case than a police case.” That was what the pathologists called the autopsies they did on hospital patients, whose bodies were always clean and well scrubbed when they got here.

“Any signs of struggle?”

“None apparent.”

“The mouth looks sort of bashed in,” she said, forcing herself to look. “Broken teeth and all. Is it possible he got hit with, say, the butt of the gun?”

Metzler looked amused by her hypothesis. “Possible? Anything’s possible.” He probably sensed that he’d come off as too arrogant, so he softened his tone. “The teeth are chipped and cracked, not pushed in. That’s consistent with a bullet. And there’s no trauma to the lips-no swelling or bruising you’d find if there was a blunt-force injury. Also, there’s the little matter of the bullet hole in his palate.”

“I see.” She let him enjoy his moment of superiority. The fragile male ego needed to be flattered. She had no problem with that; she’d been doing that all of her adult life. “Doctor, what do you estimate as the time of death? We found the body at six-”

“Call me Jordan.” Another dazzling smile. He was working it. “We can’t tell. It’s in full rigor at this point.”

“At the crime scene you said there was no rigor mortis, and since rigor doesn’t really start setting in until three, four hours after death, I figured-”

“Nah, Audrey, there’s too many other factors-physique, environment, cause of death, whether the guy was running or not. Doesn’t really tell you anything.”

“What about the body temperature?” she pointed out, careful to sound tentative. She wanted answers from the pathologist; she had no interest in showing him up.

“What about it?”

“Well, at the scene, didn’t you take a body temperature reading of ninety-two? That means it dropped around six degrees, right? If the body temperature drops one point five to two degrees per hour after death, I estimate the victim had been killed three or four hours before the body was found. Does that sound about right to you?”

“In a perfect world, sure.” Dr. Metzler smiled, but this time it was the look a parent might give a five-year-old asking if the moon was made of green cheese. “It’s just not an accurate science. There are too many variables.”

“I see.”

“You seem more versed in forensics than a lot of the cops who come in here.”

“It’s an important part of my job, that’s all.”

“If you’re interested, I’d be willing to teach you a little, help you out. No sense me having all this information in my head if I can’t share it with someone who so clearly wants to learn.”

She nodded, smiled politely. The burdens of being so smart, she wanted to say.

“I wonder whether they really appreciate you on the Major Case Team.” He pretended to adjust the perforated stainless-steel tubing around the perimeter of the examination table, which washed the fluids off the body during the autopsy.

“I’ve never felt unappreciated,” she lied. For the first time she noticed the toe tag on the body’s left foot. It said “Unknown John Doe #6.” Wasn’t that, what was the word? A “John Doe” was unknown, wasn’t it?

“Somehow I doubt your beauty helps you in your line of work.”

“That’s very kind of you, Doctor,” she said, casting around desperately for a question in order to change the subject, but her mind had gone blank.

“Not kind at all. Accurate. You’re a fine-looking woman, Audrey. Beauty and brains-not a bad combination at all.”

“Why, you sound just like my husband,” she said lightly. He’d never actually said anything remotely like that, but she wanted the pathologist to get the message without hammering him over the head about it, and that was the first thing she thought of.

“I saw your ring, Audrey,” he said, giving her a smile that seemed more than playful.

The man was cutting up a dead body, for heaven’s sake. This wasn’t exactly a singles bar.

“You’re too kind,” she said. “Doctor, do the gunshot wounds give you any sense of the distance from the shooter?”

Metzler smiled to himself awkwardly as he studied the body on the table before him. He took a steel scalpel from the metal shelf attached to the table and, with maybe a little too much force, carved a large Y-shaped incision from the shoulders all the way down to the pubic bone. He was clearly trying his best to accept defeat gracefully. “There’s no stippling, no powder burns, no tattooing, no soot,” he said. His voice had changed; now he was all business.

“So they’re not contact wounds?”

“Neither contact nor intermediate range.” He began trimming back the skin and the muscle and tissue below.

“So what does that tell us distancewise?”

He was silent for a good thirty seconds as he worked. Then he said, “Actually, Detective, that tells us nothing except that the muzzle was more than three feet from the wound. Certainly not without determining the caliber of the bullet, the type of ammo, and then test-firing the gun. It could have been fired from three feet away, or a hundred feet. You can’t tell.”

The glistening rib cage exposed, he positioned the round jagged-toothed blade above the bone and flicked the switch to start it. Above the high-pitched mechanical whine, he said, “You might want to stand back, Detective. This can get a little messy.”

19

As badly as he wanted to, Nick couldn’t easily cancel the weekly number-crunching lunch with Scott McNally, not with the big quarterly board meeting coming up. He felt feverish, clammy, nauseated. He felt, unusually for him, antisocial. His normal ebullience had been tamped down. He felt the beginnings of a raging headache, and he hadn’t had a headache in years. He felt hung over, his stomach roiling. Coffee upset his stomach now, even though he needed it to stay awake and alert.

A chef from the corporate cafeteria had set out lunch for the two of them at the small round table adjacent to his home base. It was the usual-an eggplant Parmesan sub and a salad for Scott, a tuna sandwich and a cup of tomato soup for Nick. Folded linen napkins, glasses of ice water and a glass pitcher, Diet Cokes for both of them. Nick normally just ate a sandwich at his desk unless he had to do a working lunch. And until Laura’s death, she always packed his lunch-a tuna fish sandwich, a bag of Fritos, carrot sticks-and put it in his briefcase. It was a little tradition that went back to their earliest days, when they had no money, and he’d gotten used to it. It was one of those little things Laura liked to do for him, even when she was teaching college and barely had time in the morning before class to make his lunch. She always put a little mash note in the paper lunch bag, which always made him smile when he came upon it, like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. There’d been times when he’d been having an informal lunch with Scott or another of his executives and one of Laura’s notes had fluttered out, to Nick’s embarrassment and secret pride. He’d saved every single one of her notes, without telling her. After her death, he’d come very close to throwing them away or burning them or something, because it was just too excruciating to have them around. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that. So a neat pile of yellow Post-it notes in Laura’s beautiful handwriting lay in the bottom drawer of his desk at work, secured with a rubber band. Sometimes he’d been tempted to take them out and look through them, but in the end, he couldn’t. It was too painful.

“You look wiped out,” Scott said, tucking right in to his sub. “You getting sick?”

Nick shook his head, took a careful sip of ice water, its coldness making him shiver. “I’m fine.”

“Well, this ought to help,” Scott said. “I know how you feel about the numbers. You might want to grab a pillow.” He produced a couple of Velo-bound documents, slid one in front of Nick, next to his lunch plate.

Nick glanced at it. Income statement, cash-flow statement, and balance sheet.

“Check it out,” Scott said. “Man, I love the way they toast the bun. Grill it, maybe, I don’t know.” He took a slug of Diet Coke. “You’re not eating?”

“Not hungry.”

Nick skimmed through the statements without interest while Scott examined the Diet Coke can. “I hear the artificial sweetener in this stuff can cause mood disorders in rats,” he said.

Nick grunted, not listening.

“Ever seen a depressed rat?” Scott went on. “Curled up in a ball and everything? Some days they just don’t feel the maze is worth it, you know?” He took a large bite of his sub.

“What’s Stratton Asia Ventures?” Nick asked.

“You read footnotes. Very good. It’s a subsidiary corporation I’ve formed to invest in Stratton’s Asia Pacific ops. We needed a local subsidiary for permitting and to take advantage of certain tax treaties with the U.S.”

“Nice. Legal?”

“Picky, picky,” Scott said. “Of course legal. Clever doesn’t mean illegal, Nick.”

Nick looked up. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Our earnings are up?”

Scott nodded, chewing his huge mouthful, made some grunting noises indicating he wanted to speak but couldn’t. Then he said, mouth still half full of food, “So it appears.”

“I thought-Jesus, Scott, you told me we were in the toilet.”

Scott shrugged, gave an impish smile. “That’s why you’ve got me around. You know I always come to play. I’m bringing my A game, huh?”

“Your ‘A game’? Scott, did you ever play a competitive sport in your life?”

Scott tilted his head to one side. “What are you talking about? I was point guard on the Stuyvesant math team.”

“Wait a second.” Nick went back to the beginning of the booklet, began reading over the numbers more closely. “All right, hold on. You’re telling me our international business is up twelve percent? What gives?”

“Read the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. It’s all there in black and white.”

“I just talked with George Colesandro in London last week, and he was pissing and moaning all over the place. You telling me he was reading the numbers wrong? Guy’s got a fucking microprocessor for a brain.”

Scott shook his head. “Stratton UK reports in pounds, and the pound’s way up against the dollar,” he said with his Cheshire-cat smile. “Gotta use the latest exchange rate, right?”

“So this is all hocus-pocus. Foreign exchange crap.” Nick’s nerve endings were raw, and it felt good somehow to think about something besides Friday night. At the same time, though, what Scott seemed to be doing was unbelievable. It was smarmy. “We’re not up at all-we’re down. You’re-you’re juggling the numbers.”

“According to GAAP, we’re supposed to use the correct exchange rates.” GAAP stood for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, but bland and jargony as it sounded, it had the force of law.

“Look, Scott, it’s not apples to apples. I mean, you’re using a different exchange rate than the one you used last quarter. You’re just making it look like we did better.” Nick rubbed his eyes. “You did the same thing in Asia Pacific?”

“Everywhere, sure.” Scott’s eyes were narrowed, apprehensive.

“Scott, this is fucking illegal.” Nick slammed the booklet down on the table. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“To you? This isn’t about you.” Red-faced, Scott was looking down at the table as he spoke. “First of all, there’s nothing illegal about it. Call it pushing the envelope a little, maybe. But let me tell you something. If I don’t pretty these numbers up a little, our friends from Boston are going to come down on you like Nazi storm troopers. They are going to parachute in and tear this place up. I’m telling you this is a perfectly legitimate way to spin the numbers.”

“You’re-you’re putting lipstick on a pig, Scott.”

“Well, a little lip gloss, maybe. Look, when company comes over for dinner, you clean house, right? Before you sell your car, you take it to the car wash. None of the board members are going to look this close.”

“So you’re saying we can get away with it,” Nick said.

Scott shrugged again. “What I’m saying, Nick, is that everyone’s job is at risk here, okay? Including yours and mine. This way, at least, we buy ourselves a little time.”

“No. Uh-uh,” Nick said, drumming his fingertips on the clear plastic cover. “We give it to ’em straight. You got me?”

Scott’s face flushed, as if he were embarrassed or angry, or both. He was clearly straining hard to sound calm, like it was taking enormous effort to keep from raising his voice to his boss. “Gosh, and I was hoping to have a corporate tax loophole named after me,” he said after a pause.

Nick nodded, dispensed a grudging smile. He thought of Hutch, the old CFO. Henry Hutchens was a brilliant accountant, in his green-eyeshade, bean-counting way-no one knew the intricacies of the good old-fashioned balance sheet the way he did-but he knew little about structured finance and derivatives and all the shiny new financial instruments you had to use these days to stay afloat.

Hutch would never have done anything like this. Then again, he probably wouldn’t have known how.

“You told me we’re having dinner tonight with Todd Muldaur, remember?”

“Eight o’clock,” Nick said. He was dreading it. Todd had called just a few days ago to mention he was passing through Fenwick, as if anyone ever “passed through” Fenwick, and wanted to have dinner. It couldn’t be a good thing.

“Well, I told him I’d get him the updated financials before dinner.”

“Fine, but let’s make sure we’re on rock-solid foundations here, okay?”

“In accounting?” Scott shook his head. “No such thing. It’s like that story about the famous scientist who’s giving a lecture on astronomy, and afterward an old lady comes up to him and tells him he’s got it all wrong-the world is really a big flat plate resting on the back of a giant turtle. And the scientist says, ‘But what’s that turtle standing on?’ And the old lady says, ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever, but it’s no use-it’s turtles all the way down.’”

“Is that meant to be reassuring?”

Scott shrugged.

“I want you to give Todd the real, unvarnished numbers, no matter how shitty they look.”

“Okay,” Scott said, looking down at the table. “You’re the boss.”

20

Audrey’s desk phone was ringing as she approached her cubicle. She glanced at the caller ID and was glad she did, because it was a call she didn’t want to take.

She recognized the phone number. The woman called her every week, regular as clockwork, had done so for so many weeks Audrey had lost count. Once a week since the woman’s son was found murdered.

The woman, whose name was Ethel Dorsey, was a sweet Christian woman, an African-American lady who’d raised four sons on her own and was justifiably proud of that, convinced herself she’d done a good job, had no idea that three of her boys were deep into the life of gangs and drugs and cheap guns. When her son Tyrone was found shot to death on Hastings, Audrey recognized right away that it was drug-related. And like a lot of drug-related murders, it went unsolved. Sometimes people talked. Sometimes they didn’t. Audrey had an open file, one less clearance. Ethel Dorsey had one less son. But here was the thing: Audrey simply couldn’t bring herself to tell poor devout Ethel Dorsey the truth, that her Tyrone had been killed in some bad drug deal. Audrey remembered Ethel’s moist eyes, her warm direct gaze, during the interviews. The woman reminded Audrey of her grandmother. “He’s a good boy,” she kept saying. Audrey couldn’t break it to her that her son had not only been murdered, but he’d been a small-time dealer. For what? Why did the woman need to have her illusions shattered?

So Ethel Dorsey called once a week and asked, politely and apologetically, was there any progress on Tyrone? And Audrey had to tell her the truth: No, I’m sorry, nothing yet. But we haven’t given up. We’re still working, ma’am.

Audrey couldn’t bear it. Because she realized that they’d probably never find Tyrone Dorsey’s killer, and even if they did, it would bring no peace to Ethel Dorsey. Yet even a lowlife drug dealer was someone’s son. Everyone matters, or else no one matters. Jesus told of the shepherd who kept searching for the one lost lamb, leaving his flock behind. For this purpose, Christ said, I was born.

Today she couldn’t even bring herself to pick up the phone and talk to the woman. She looked at the photo of Tyrone she’d taped to the side wall of the cubicle, alongside the pictures of all the other victims whose cases she was working or had worked. As she waited for the phone to stop ringing, she noticed a folded square of paper that had been placed on top of the brown accordion file at the center of her desk. “UNKNOWN WHITE MALE #03486,” the file had been labeled in her neat capital letters.

The white square of paper, folded a little unevenly into a makeshift card. On the front a black-and-white image of some generic church, a cheesy graphic that looked like clip art downloaded off the Internet. Below it, in Gothic lettering done on someone’s computer, the words “Jesus Loves You.”

She opened it, knowing more or less what she’d find. Inside it said, “But Everyone Else Thinks Your an Asshole.”

She crumpled up Roy Bugbee’s inane little prank, misspelling and all, and tossed it into the metal wastebasket. She glanced, for the five-hundred-thousandth time, at the index card taped to her computer monitor, the card starting to go sepia at the edges, her lettering neat and fervent: “Remember: We work for God.” She wondered who Roy Bugbee thought he worked for.

Bugbee sauntered in an hour or so later, and they sat in an empty interview room.

“Strikeout on AFIS,” he announced, almost proudly. “Nada.”

So the old man’s prints didn’t match any of the fingerprint records in Lansing, neither the Tenprint Database nor the unsolved ones in the Latent Database. No real surprise there. The victim’s prints would only be in AFIS if he’d been arrested for something.

She said, “The rounds that were fired were.380s, according to Bert Koopmans. Brass-jacketed.”

“Oh, that’s helpful,” said Bugbee, deadpan. “Narrows it down to about a thousand possible weapons.”

“Well, not really.” Audrey ignored his sarcasm, proceeded on the assumption that Roy just didn’t know what he was talking about. “Once the MSP in Grand Rapids takes a look at it, they’ll winnow it down a whole lot more for us.” The Forensic Science Lab of the Michigan State Police, in Grand Rapids, handled the firearms investigations for the police in this part of the state. Their examiners were good, trained in identifying weapons and ammunition using all sorts of tools, including IBIS, the Integrated Ballistics Identification System database, which was managed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

“That shouldn’t take more than six months,” said Bugbee.

“Actually, I was hoping that when you drive it over there, you could press them to speed it up.”

“Me?” Bugbee laughed. “I think you ought to drive to Grand Rapids, Audrey. Pretty woman like you, bat your little eyes at them, ask ’em to put it on the top of the heap.”

She breathed in. “I’ll drive it over there,” she said. “Now, what about informants?”

“None of the snitches know a damned thing about some old guy trying to buy crack down the dog pound,” he said grudgingly, as if it annoyed him to part with the information. Why that section of town was called “the dog pound” Audrey didn’t remember if she ever knew. It just was.

“But the crack in the guy’s pocket was fake.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bugbee said with a wave of his hand. “Oldest trick in the book. White guy, easy mark, goes down to the dog pound to buy rock, and some zoomer sells him flex made outta candle wax and baking soda.”

“Horehound lemon drops broken up, actually.” So Bert Koopmans had told her.

“Whatever, don’t make no difference. White guy argues with the zoomer, who says, Who needs this shit? and wastes the guy. Takes his wallet while he’s at it and takes off. Open and shut.”

“And leaves the lemon drops.”

Bugbee gave a “lay off” shrug. He leaned back in the steel chair until his head was resting against the wall.

“And then instead of leaving the body in an alley somewhere, he goes to the trouble of wrapping it in garbage bags and then lifting it into a Dumpster, which isn’t easy.”

“Coulda been two guys.”

“Wearing surgical gloves.”

“Hmm?” He looked annoyed.

“The lab found traces of surgical-grade cornstarch on the trash bags consistent with the use of latex gloves.”

Bugbee probed a seam in the Sheetrock wall with a lazy forefinger. “Probably the lab’s.”

“I think they’re more careful than that,” she said, thinking: Come on, Roy, did you even think this one through? Are you working this case? She felt a pulse of annoyance, then willed herself back to serenity. “I kind of doubt many crackheads have surgical gloves lying around.”

Bugbee exhaled showily. “Is Noyce in this room?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, I don’t see Sergeant Noyce standing here, so if you’re trying to show off, no one’s watching, okay?”

Audrey swallowed, heard her inner voice begin, Now the God of patience and consolation grant you…and then she interrupted that inward sensible voice and spoke in a voice even softer than usual: “Roy, I’m not here to impress you. I’m here to do my job.”

Bugbee brought his chair forward, sat up straight, gave her a sleepy-eyed look.

She could hear her heart thudding. “Now, I know you don’t like me, for whatever reason, but I’m not going to apologize to you for being who I am and what I am. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to deal with it. I don’t judge you, and you shouldn’t judge me. You don’t sign my paycheck on Fridays. If you want off of this case, talk to Noyce. Otherwise, let’s both try to be professionals, okay?”

Bugbee looked as if he was debating shoving the table at her or getting up and slamming the door. A couple of seconds of silence passed. Then he said, “You don’t judge me, huh? Christers like you, that’s all you do. You’re always ticking off everyone’s little infractions like some hall monitor at school. It’s all about feeling superior, isn’t it, Audrey? Like you got the Big Guy on your side. All that praying you do, it’s about sucking up to the Big Boss in the Sky. Ass-kissing your way to heaven, right?”

“That’s enough, Roy,” she said.

A pounding on the door, and it swung open. Sergeant Noyce stood there, squaring his shoulders, looking from one to the other. “May I ask you two something?” he said. “Did either one of you check the missing persons database?”

“I called Family Services this morning,” Audrey said, “but they had nothing.”

“You’ve got to keep checking, you know,” Noyce said. “These things sometimes take a day or more to get posted.”

“You got a possibility?” Bugbee asked.

“It’s a lead, a pretty decent one,” Noyce replied. “I’d say it’s worth a look.”

21

Nick called Eddie, didn’t IM him, still feeling paranoid about what kind of records were stored on the corporate server.

They met at the southwest building entrance, outside of the Security offices, Eddie’s idea. Eddie didn’t want to talk inside the building. What did that mean, Nick wondered, if his own security chief didn’t feel safe talking in there?

They walked along the paved path that encircled one of the parking lots. The air had a faint manure smell, from all the surrounding farms, mixed with the charred scent of the burnt buffalo grass.

“What’s up?” Eddie said, lighting up a Marlboro. “Dude, you look worried.”

“Who, me?” Nick said, grimacing. “What’s to worry about?”

“Come on. Everything’s under control.”

Nick looked around, made sure no one was walking remotely near. “What’d you do with…him?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Nick was silent, listened to the scuff of Eddie’s shoes on the pavement. “No, I do. I want to know.”

“Nick, believe me, it’s better this way.”

“Did you get rid of the gun, or do you still have it, or what?”

Eddie shook his head. “The less you know, the better.”

“All right, listen. I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I think-I’ve got to go to the cops. There’s just no other way. What happened was legally defensible. It’ll be a goddamned mess, but with a smart enough attorney, I think I can tough it out.”

Eddie gave a low, dry chuckle. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “You can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube.”

“Meaning what?”

“Friday night you wanted it to go away. I made it go away.” He seemed to be straining to keep his tone civil. “At this point, we’ve got a serious cover-up, involving both of us.”

“A cover-up devised in a panic-”

“Look, Nick,” Eddie said. “I don’t swim in your toilet, you don’t pee in my pool, understand?”

“Huh?”

“I don’t tell you how to run Stratton. You don’t tell me about crime and cops and all that shit. This is my area of expertise.”

“I’m not telling you what to do,” Nick said. “I’m telling you what I’m going to do.”

“Any decision you make involves me too,” Eddie said. “And I vote no. Which means you don’t do a damned thing. What’s done can’t be undone. It’s just too fucking late.”

22

They pulled up in front of a modest house on West Sixteenth in Steepletown, Audrey feeling that jellyfish wriggling in her belly, the thing she always felt when she first met a survivor of a homicide. The spill of raw grief, disbelief, fathomless pain-she could hardly stand it. You had to distance yourself from all that, or you’d go crazy, Noyce had warned her early on. We all do. What looks to the outside world like cynicism, hardness, that’s what it is. Protective insulation. You’ll learn it.

She never did.

The investigative work, even the routine stuff that phone-it-in types like Roy Bugbee had no patience for, she enjoyed. Not this. Not feeling the hot spray of another human being’s agony up close and being unable, fundamentally, to do anything about it. I’ll find your dad’s murderer, I’ll track down the kids who killed your daughter, I’ll uncover the guy who popped your father in the 7-Eleven-that was the most she could promise, and it helped, but it didn’t heal.

So a missing persons report had been called in to the police by a woman whose father had never come home Friday night. The physical description-age, height, weight, clothing-matched the murder victim found in the Dumpster on Hastings. Audrey knew this was it. The Family Services Division had called the daughter, which was the protocol, to say in their most diplomatic, tender way-they were good at this-that a body had been found, and there was a chance, just a chance, that it was her father, would she be so kind as to come down to the police morgue at Boswell Medical Center and help them identify a body, rule it out?

The aluminum screen door slammed, the woman coming toward them, even before Audrey was out of the Crown Vic. She was a small woman, even tiny, and from twenty feet she looked like a little girl. She wore a white T-shirt, faded and paint-splotched jeans, a ragged jeans jacket. Her brown hair was cut in a spiky sort of hairdo that Audrey associated with punk rockers and artists. Her hands flopped from side to side as she walked, making her look a little like some neglected rag doll.

“You must be from the police,” she said. Her brown eyes were large and moist. Up close she was actually quite beautiful and even more fragile. She looked to be in her mid-to late twenties. She had that glazed look of disbelief that Audrey had seen dozens of times in the faces of victims’ families. Her voice was deeper than Audrey had expected, its timbre oddly soothing.

“I’m Audrey Rhimes.” She extended a hand, beamed a look of compassion. “That’s my partner, Roy Bugbee.”

Roy, standing beside the open driver’s side door, did not come around to shake the daughter’s hand, probably figuring that it would be overkill. He gave a quick wave, a tight smile. Move your butt over here, Audrey thought. The man had no manners, no compassion. He didn’t even have the ability to fake it.

“Cassie Stadler.” Her palm was warm and damp, and her eye makeup was smudged. She got into the backseat of the cruiser. Bugbee drove.

The object here was to low-key it, to reduce the woman’s anxiety if at all possible. She’s being driven over to the city morgue to identify a body that might be her father’s, for God’s sake; probably nothing could diminish her anxiety. Cassie Stadler probably knew just as surely as Audrey knew. But Audrey kept speaking, turning around to face the passenger, who sat in the middle of the back seat, staring glassily ahead.

“Tell me about your father,” she said. “Does he tend to go out at night?” She hoped the present tense would just slip in there unobserved, silently reassuring.

“No, not really,” Cassie Stadler said, and fell silent.

“Does he get disoriented from time to time?”

She blinked. “What? I’m sorry. Disoriented? Yes, I guess he does, sometimes. His…his condition.”

Audrey waited for more. But Bugbee, heedless, broke in, his voice booming. “Did your father go down to the Hastings Street area often, to your knowledge?”

A series of expressions flashed in this lovely woman’s dark eyes, a slide show: puzzlement, hurt, annoyance, sorrow. Audrey, embarrassed, averted her gaze and turned back around in her seat, facing forward.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” was all the daughter finally said. “My daddy.”

They pulled into the hospital parking garage in silence. Audrey had never done one of these before. Identifying a body in the morgue-it was not at all common, thank God, no matter what you saw on TV. There were no sliding drawers at the morgue either, none of those hokey gothic touches. But death was gruesome, unavoidably so.

The body lay on a steel gurney covered with a green surgical sheet, the room sterile and air-conditioned to a chill and smelling of formalin. Jordan Metzler, polite if distant, pulled back the green cloth as matter-of-factly as if he were turning down a bed, exposing the head and neck.

Beneath that spiky mane, Cassie Stadler’s perfect little doll face crumpled, and no one had to say anything.

23

Audrey found an empty room in the hospital basement where the three of them could talk. It was an employees’ lounge: a collection of chairs upholstered in different institutional fabrics, a short couch, a coffee machine that looked as if no one ever used it, a TV. She and Bugbee moved chairs into a cluster. A couple of open soda cans were clustered on an end table. She found an almost-empty box of Kleenex. Cassie Stadler’s narrow shoulders bobbed; she sobbed silently, with all her body. Bugbee, who’d obviously learned how to distance, sat impatiently with a clipboard on his lap. Audrey couldn’t take it anymore, put her arms around the woman, murmuring, “Oh, it’s so hard, I know it.”

Cassie took in great gulps of air, her head bent. Eventually she looked up, saw the Kleenex box and pulled out a few tissues, blew her nose.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think…”

“Don’t apologize, sweetheart,” Audrey said. “What a terrible time for you.”

Cassie took out a pack of cigarettes and shook one out. “Okay if I smoke?”

Audrey nodded, gave Bugbee a sidelong glance. Smoking wasn’t allowed in here, but she wasn’t going to make a point of it, not with this poor woman at this time, and fortunately neither was Bugbee, who nodded as well.

Cassie took out a cheap plastic lighter and lit up, then exhaled a cloud of smoke. “He was shot in-in the mouth?”

A funeral home would have done some reconstruction, skillfully applied makeup. The face would have looked artificial in that way that all dead bodies look at funeral homes, but at least she’d have been spared the brutal sight.

“That’s right,” Bugbee said. He didn’t elaborate, didn’t say twice, didn’t say Stadler had also been shot in the chest. He was following standard procedure, which was to give out as little information as possible, in case a withheld detail could help them, down the line, confirm the killer.

“God!” she erupted. “Why? Who’d do that to my daddy?” She took another puff, took an empty Coke can off the end table and tapped out the ash into its small opening.

“That’s what we want to find out,” Audrey said. Daddy: it stabbed her, hearing that from a grown woman. She thought of her own daddy, remembered his smell of tobacco and sweat and Vitalis. “We need your help. I know this is a painful time, and you probably don’t want to talk at all, but anything you can think of will help.”

“Miss Stadler,” asked Bugbee, “was your father a drug user?”

“Drugs?” She looked puzzled. “What kind of drugs?”

“Such as crack?”

“Crack? My dad? Never.”

“You’d be surprised at who uses drugs like crack cocaine,” Audrey put in hastily. “People you’d never ever think of as users, people from all walks of life. Prominent citizens even.”

“My dad didn’t even know about that world. He was a simple guy.”

“But it’s possible he kept things from you,” Audrey persisted.

“Sure, possible, but I mean-crack? I’d have noticed,” Cassie said, expelling smoke through her nostrils like the twin plumes of a fire-breathing dragon. “I’ve been living with him for almost a year, I’d have seen something.”

“Maybe not,” Bugbee said.

“Look, I don’t do drugs myself, but I sure know people who do. I mean, I’m an artist, I live in Chicago, it’s not unheard of, you know? Dad had none of the signs. He-it’s absurd, really.”

“You’re originally from here?” Audrey asked.

“I was born here, but my parents divorced when I was a kid, and I went to live with my mom in Chicago. I come…came back here to visit Dad pretty often.”

“What made you come back to stay?”

“He called me and told me he’d just quit his job at Stratton, and I was worried about him. He’s not well, and my mom passed away four or five years ago, and I knew he needed someone to take care of him. I was afraid he couldn’t cope.”

“When Detective Bugbee asked you about drugs just now, you hesitated,” Audrey said. “Was he on any kind of medication?”

She nodded, passed a hand over her eyes. “A number of meds including Risperdal, an antipsychotic.”

“Psychotic?” Bugbee blurted out. “Was he psychotic?”

Audrey briefly closed her eyes. The guy never failed to do or say the wrong thing.

Cassie turned slowly to look at Bugbee as she snubbed out the cigarette on the top of the Coke can, then dropped it through the opening. “He suffered from schizophrenia,” she said absently. “He suffered from it for most of my life.” She turned to Audrey. “But it was more or less under control.”

“Did he ever disappear for stretches of time?” asked Audrey.

“No, not really. He’d go out for walks once in a while. I was glad when he got out of the house. This last year has been hard for him.”

“What did he do at Stratton?” Bugbee asked.

“He was a model builder.”

“What’s that mean?”

“He worked in their model shop making prototypes of products they were working on, the latest chairs or desks or whatever.”

“He quit, didn’t get laid off?” Bugbee said.

“They were about to lay him off, but he just sort of blew up and quit before they could do it.”

“When did you last see him?” Audrey asked.

“At supper Friday night. I-I’d just made supper for us, and he usually watches TV after supper. I went to the room I’ve been using as a studio and painted.”

“You’re an artist?”

“Sort of. Not as serious as I used to be, but I still paint. I never got a gallery or anything. I support myself by teaching Kripalu yoga.”

“Here?”

“In Chicago I did. I haven’t worked since I got to Fenwick.”

“Did you see him before you went to sleep?” Audrey asked.

“No,” she said sadly. “I fell asleep on the couch in there-I do that fairly often, when a painting’s not working and I want to think about it, sometimes I just fall asleep and wake up in the morning. That’s what happened Saturday morning-I got up and had breakfast, and when he wasn’t down by ten I started to worry about him, so I went to his room, but he was gone. I-will you excuse me? I’m thirsty-I need-”

“What can we get you, honey?” said Audrey.

“Anything, just-I’m so thirsty.”

“Water? Pop?”

“Something with sugar in it.” She smiled apologetically. “I need a hit of sugar. Sprite, Seven-Up, anything. Just no caffeine. It makes me crazy.”

“Roy,” Audrey said, “there’s a vending machine down the hall-could you…?”

Bugbee’s eyebrows went up, a nasty smile curling the corners of his mouth. He looked like he was about to say something unpleasant. But she wanted a little time alone with this woman. She had a feeling Cassie would open up more easily with her alone.

“Sure,” Roy said after a long pause. “Happy to.”

When the door closed, Audrey cleared her throat to speak, but Cassie spoke first.

“He has it in for you, doesn’t he?”

Good God, was it that obvious? “Detective Bugbee?” Audrey said, feigning surprise.

Cassie nodded. “It’s like he can barely contain his contempt for you.”

“Detective Bugbee and I have a very good working relationship.”

“I’m surprised you put up with him.”

Audrey smiled. “I’d prefer to talk about your father.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I just-noticed.” She was weeping again, wiping a hand across her eyes. “Detective, I-I have no idea in the world who might have killed my daddy. Or why. But I have a feeling that if anyone can find out, you can.”

Audrey felt tears come into her eyes. “I’ll do my best,” she said. “That’s all I can promise.”

24

Terra was the finest restaurant in Fenwick, the place you went to celebrate special occasions like birthdays, promotions, a visit of a special old friend. It had the slightly forbidding air of an expensive place where it was assumed you didn’t go often. Men were expected to wear ties. There was a maître d’ and a sommelier who wore a big silver taste-vin on a ribbon around his neck like an Olympic medal. The waiters ground pepper for you in a mill the size of a Louisville Slugger. The tablecloths were heavily starched white linen. The menu was immense, leather-bound, and required two hands. The wine list itself, a separate leather-bound folio, was twenty pages long. Nick had taken Laura here for her birthday, a few weeks before the accident; it was her favorite place. She loved their signature dessert, a molten chocolate cake that oozed chocolate like lava when you spooned into it. Nick found Terra stuffy and nervous-making, but the food was always great. From time to time he’d take important clients here.

Dinner tonight was with his most important client: his boss, the managing partner from Fairfield Equity Partners in Boston. Nick hadn’t particularly liked Todd Muldaur when he first met him, in the company of Fairfield’s founder, Willard Osgood. But Osgood always placed one of his deputies in charge of the companies his firm owned, and Todd was the man he picked.

Not long after Dorothy Devries had tapped Nick as her husband’s successor as CEO, she’d summoned Nick back to her old dark mansion to announce that the family was facing a huge tax bill and had to sell. It was up to Nick to find the ideal buyer. There was no shortage of interested bidders. The Stratton Corporation had no debt, steady profits, a major market share, and a famous name. But plenty of the buyout firms wanted to buy Stratton, gussy it up, then turn it around for a quick sale to someone else. Spin it off, maybe take it public-who the hell knew what those rape-and-pillage folks might do? Then the call came from the famous Willard Osgood, who had a reputation for buying companies and holding on to them forever, letting them run themselves. Willard Osgood: “the man with the Midas Touch,” as Fortune magazine called him. The perfect solution. Osgood even flew in to Fenwick-well, he flew in to Grand Rapids in his private jet and then was driven out to Fenwick in a plain old Chrysler sedan-and came a-courtin’ on the widow Devries and Nick. He charmed the pants off Dorothy Devries (she was partial to pantsuits, actually), and won over Nick as well. Willard Osgood was as plainspoken and unpretentious in person as he was in all his interviews. He was a lifelong Republican, an archconservative, just like Dorothy. He told her his favorite holding period was forever. Rule number one, he said, is never lose money; rule number two is never forget rule number one. He really won her over when he said it’s better to buy a great company at a fair price than a fair company at a great price.

The deputy he brought with him, Todd Muldaur, a straw-haired Yale football jock who’d done time at the big management-consulting firm McKinsey, didn’t say too much, but there was something about him Nick didn’t like. He didn’t like Todd’s swagger. But hey, it was Osgood who ran the show, Nick figured. Not Muldaur.

Of course, now it was Todd who presided over the quarterly board meetings, Todd who read the monthly financial reports and asked all the questions, Todd who had to sign off on the major decisions. After that first meeting with Willard Osgood, Nick never saw the old guy again.

Nick arrived a few minutes early. Scott McNally was already at the table, nursing a Diet Coke. He’d changed out of his frayed blue button-down shirt into a crisp blue-and-white broad-striped one, a red tie, a good dark suit. Nick was wearing his best suit too, which Laura had picked out for him at Brooks Brothers in Grand Rapids.

“Muldaur give you any sense of what he’s here for?” Nick asked as he sat down. This was just about the last place he wanted to be, eating at a fancy restaurant when he had no appetite, being social with some strutting asshole when he just wanted to be home in bed.

“No idea. He didn’t say.”

“He told me he wanted to ‘touch base’ in advance of the board meeting.”

“Gotta be the updated financials I just sent him. They can’t be happy about our numbers either.”

“Still, no need for a personal visit.”

Scott lowered his head, muttered, “He just walked in.” Nick looked up, saw the big blond man coming their way. Both he and Scott stood.

Scott stepped around the table, went up to Muldaur, gave him a hearty two-handed shake. “Hey, bud!”

“Scotty! My man!”

Muldaur extended his beefy hand to Nick and gave him one of those unnecessarily crushing handshakes, grabbing his fingers just below the knuckles in such a way that Nick couldn’t shake back. Nick hated that. “Nice to see you,” Todd said.

Todd Muldaur had a big square jaw, a button nose, and turquoise eyes that were bluer than they’d been last time Nick had seen him, in a glass-walled conference room at Fairfield’s offices on Federal Street in Boston. Had to be colored contacts. He had the lean, drawn face of a guy who ate a lot of protein, worked out regularly. He wore a dove-gray suit that looked expensive. “So, this must be the one good restaurant in town, huh?”

“Nothing but the best for our friends from Boston,” Nick said affably as they sat down.

Todd took the big white linen napkin, unfolded it, and put it in his lap. “Gotta be good,” he said sardonically. “The American Automobile Association gives this place its ‘prestigious Four Diamond Award,’ it says out front.”

Nick smiled and imagined punching Todd’s face out. He noticed a couple being seated a few tables over and recognized them. The man had been a senior manager at Stratton until last year, when his division had been shut down in the layoffs. The guy was in his fifties, with two kids in college, and despite the best efforts of the outplacement service Stratton had hired, hadn’t been able to find another job.

That familiar sinking feeling came over him. Nick excused himself, and went over to say hello.

It was the man’s wife who saw him first. Her eyes widened briefly. She turned away, said something quickly to her husband, then stood up, but not to greet him.

“Bill,” Nick said.

Now the man rose without saying anything, and he and his wife turned and walked out of the dining room. For a few seconds, Nick stood there, his face burning. He wondered why he subjected himself to this kind of snub. It happened often enough for him to know better. Maybe, on some level, he felt he deserved it.

By the time he returned to his table, Todd and Scott were deep in conversation about the good old days at McKinsey. Nick hoped that neither man had seen what had just happened.

It had been Todd who’d insisted that Stratton replace their old CFO, Henry “Hutch” Hutchens, with Scott McNally. Nick had gone along quite happily, but it annoyed him sometimes that Scott was so friendly with Muldaur.

“Whatever happened to that guy Nolan Bennis?” Scott was saying. “Remember him?” He smiled at Nick. “Another McKinseyite. You wouldn’t believe this dweeb.” He turned back to Todd. “Remember that Shedd Island retreat?” He explained to Nick: “McKinsey always used to rent out this really posh hotel on this superexclusive island off the coast of South Carolina, for a retreat with top clients. So this guy Nolan Bennis is out there on the tennis court with some Carbide guys, and I swear to God, he’s wearing black socks and penny loafers. Couldn’t play for shit. Really stank up the place. We heard about that for months-what an embarrassment. I mean, the guy was a total loser. You couldn’t take him out in public. He still at McKinsey?”

“You obviously didn’t see the latest Forbes Four Hundred,” Todd said.

“What are you talking about?” Scott said, a quizzical look on his face.

“Nolan Bennis is the CEO of ValueMetrics. Worth four billion dollars now. He bought the Shedd Island hotel a couple of years ago, along with about five hundred acres on the island.”

“I always thought that guy would go places,” Scott said.

“Gotta love this menu,” Todd said. “Duck breast with raspberry coulis. I mean, how 1995 can you get? I’m getting nostalgic here.”

The waitress approached their table. “May I tell you about our specials tonight?” she said. The woman looked familiar to Nick, though he couldn’t quite place her. She glanced at Nick, looked away quickly. She knew him too. Not another one.

“We have a Chilean sea bass with roasted cauliflower, pancetta, and tangerine juice for twenty-nine dollars. There’s a pistachio-crusted rack of lamb with celery root puree and wild mushrooms. And the catch of the day is a seared tuna-”

“Let me guess,” Todd broke in. “It’s ‘sushi quality,’ and it’s served rare in the center.”

“That’s right!” she said.

“Where have I heard that before?”

“You look familiar,” Nick said, feeling bad for the woman.

Her eyes flitted to him and then away. “Yes, Mr. Conover. I used to work for Stratton, in Travel.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. You doing okay?”

She hesitated. “Waitressing pays less than half what I was making at Stratton, sir,” she answered tightly.

“It’s been tough all around,” Nick said.

“I’ll give you gentlemen a few more minutes to decide,” she said, and moved quickly away.

“Is she going to spit in our salads?” Todd said.

“You guys don’t need me to tell you we got a real problem here,” Todd said.

“No question,” Scott agreed quickly.

Nick nodded, waited.

“A bad quarter or two, blame it on a lousy economy,” Todd said. “But it keeps happening, it begins to look like a death spiral. And we can’t afford that.”

“I understand your concern,” Nick said, “and believe me, I share it. I want to assure you that we’ve got things under control. We’ve got a major customer coming in tomorrow-I mean major-and it looks good for signing them up. That contract alone will turn things around.”

“Hey, we can always hope lightning strikes,” Todd said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky. But let me tell you something. Corporations may be based on continuity, but capital markets are all about creative destruction. If you’re unwilling to change, you’ll be drawn into that big slide toward mediocrity. As CEO, you’ve got to overcome the organizational inertia. Unclog those corporate arteries. Free the flow of fresh ideas. Even the best boats need rocking, man. That’s the magic of capitalism. That’s what Joseph Schumpeter said years ago.”

“Didn’t he used to play for the Bruins?” Nick said, deadpan.

“There’s the quick, and there’s the dead, Nick,” Todd said.

“Well, I don’t know about ‘creative destruction,’” Nick said, “but I know we’re all basically in sync. That’s why we sold the company to Fairfield. You guys are value investors with the long view-that’s the only reason I was able to convince Dorothy Devries to sell to you. I always remember what Willard said to Dorothy and me, in the parlor of her house on Michigan Avenue-‘We want to be your partner, your sounding board. We don’t want to run the business-we want you to run the business. We may have to go through some pain together, but we’re all in this for the long haul.’”

Todd smiled slyly. He got what Nick was doing, invoking the words of the ultimate boss like Holy Scripture. “That sounds just like Willard. But you gotta understand something-the old man’s been spending an awful lot of time fly-fishing in the Florida Keys these days. Guy loves fly-fishing-last year or so, he seems to think a lot more about tarpon and bonefish than P and Ls.”

“He’s retiring?”

“Not yet, but soon. All but. Which means he leaves the heavy lifting to us, the poor suckers who have to go to work every day and do the dirty work while he’s standing in the bow of his Hell’s Bay, casting his line. The world has changed, Nick. Used to be all the big institutional investors would write us a twenty-million-dollar check, maybe a hundred-million-dollar check, and let us do our job. At the end of six years, ten years, they cash out, everyone’s happy. Not anymore. Now they’re all looking over our shoulders, calling all the time. They don’t want to see one of our major investments turn sour. They want to see results yesterday.”

“They ought to go to your Web site,” Nick said. Fairfield Equity Partners actually had an animated Flash movie on its Web site, the Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare, made to look like a storybook. It was beyond cornball. “Tell ’em to check out the tortoise-and-the-hare story. Remind ’em about the long view.”

“These days, the tortoise gets made into turtle soup, buddy,” Todd said.

Scott laughed a bit too loud.

“Don’t worry,” Nick said, “that’s not on the menu.”

Todd didn’t smile. “The kind of companies we like are healthy companies that are growing. We don’t believe in catching a falling knife.”

“We’re not a falling knife, Todd,” Nick said calmly. “We’re going through some adjustments, but we’re on the right path.”

“Nick, the quarterly board meeting is in a couple of days, and I want to make sure the board sees a comprehensive plan to turn things around. I’m talking plant consolidation, selling off real estate, whatever. Creative destruction. I don’t want the board losing confidence in you.”

“Are you implying what I think you’re implying?”

Todd cracked a victorious smile. “Hell no, Nick! Don’t take me the wrong way! When we bought Stratton, we weren’t just buying some outdated factories in East Bumfuck, Michigan, with equipment out of 1954. We were buying a team. That means you. We want you to hang in there. We just need you to start thinking different. A balls-out, warp-speed effort to come up with a way to change the trend line.”

Scott nodded sagely, chewing his lower lip, twirling a few strands of his hair behind his right ear. “I get what you’re saying, and I think I’ve got some interesting ideas.”

“What I like to hear. I mean, hell, there’s no reason for you to have all your components made in the U.S. when you can get ’em at half the price from China, you know?”

“Actually,” Nick said, “we’ve considered and rejected that, Todd, because-”

Scott broke in, “I think it’s worth taking up again.”

Nick gave him a black look.

“I knew I could count on you guys. Well, who’s up for dessert? Let me guess-the dessert trend that swept Manhattan in 1998 has finally made it to Fenwick: molten chocolate cake?”

After they said goodbye to Todd and watched him drive away in his rented Lincoln Town Car, Nick turned to Scott. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“What are you talking about? You’ve got to keep the boss happy.”

“I’m your boss, Scott. Not Todd Muldaur. Remember that.”

Scott hesitated, seemingly debating whether to argue. “Anyway, who says there’s sides? We’re all in this together, Nick.”

“There’s always sides,” Nick said quietly. “Inside or outside. Are you with me?”

“Of course, Nick. Jesus. Of course I’m on your side, what do you think?”

25

Leon was watching TV and drinking a beer. That was pretty much all he did these days, when he wasn’t sleeping. Audrey looked at her husband, slouched in the middle of the couch, wearing pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt that was too tight over his ever-expanding beer gut. The thirty or forty pounds he’d put on in the past year or so made him look ten years older. Once she would have said he was the hardest-working man she’d ever met, never missed a day of work on the line, never complaining. Now, with his work life taken away from him, he was lost. Without work, he retreated into a life of sloth; there was no in-between for him.

She went over to the couch and kissed him. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t bathed either. He didn’t turn his head to kiss her; he received her kiss, his eyes not even moving from the screen. After a while, Audrey standing there, hands on her hips, smiling, he said, “Hey, Shorty,” in his whiskey-and-cigarettes voice. “Home late.”

Shorty: his term of endearment almost since they’d started going out. He was well over six feet, she was barely five, and they did look funny walking together.

“I called and left you a message,” she said. “You must have been in conference.” He knew she meant asleep. That was how she dealt with Leon’s newfound lifestyle. The idea of his sitting around watching TV and sleeping during the day, when they had a mortgage to pay-it was infuriating to her. She knew she wasn’t being entirely reasonable about it. The poor guy had been laid off from his job, and there wasn’t a company for hundreds of miles around that was looking to hire an electrostatic powder-coating technician. Still, half the town had been laid off, and plenty of people had managed to get jobs working for Home Depot or bagging groceries at the Foodtown. The pay was lousy, but it was better than nothing, and certainly better than sleeping on the couch all day.

He didn’t answer. Leon had deep-set eyes, a large head, a powerful build, and once, not that long ago, he would have been considered a fine-looking man. Now he looked beaten down, defeated.

“You…get my message about dinner?” Meaning, of course, that she wanted him to make dinner. Nothing complicated. There was frozen hamburger he could defrost in the microwave. A package of romaine hearts he could wash for salad. Whatever. But she smelled nothing, no food cooking, and she knew the answer before he spoke.

“I ate already.”

“Oh. Okay.” She’d left him a message around four, as soon as she knew she’d be staying late, way before he ever ate supper. She suppressed her annoyance, went into the kitchen. The small counter was stacked so high-dirty plates, glasses, coffee mugs, beer bottles-that you couldn’t even see the swirly rose Formica surface. How, she marveled, could one person create such a mess in a day? Why did he refuse to clean up after himself? Did he expect her to be breadwinner and wife and housekeeper all at the same time? In the plastic trash bucket was a discarded Hungry-Man box and plastic compartmented tray, crusted with tomato sauce goo. She reached down, felt it. It was still warm. He’d just eaten. Not hours ago. He’d been hungry and just made himself dinner, didn’t make anything for her even though she’d asked him to. Well, exactly because she’d asked him to, probably.

Returning to the living room, she stood there, waiting to get his attention, but he kept watching the baseball game. She cleared her throat. Nothing.

She said, “Leon, honey, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure.”

“Could you look at me?”

He muted the TV, finally, and turned.

“Baby, I thought you were going to make us both supper.”

“I didn’t know when you were getting back.”

“But I said…” She bit her lip. She was not going to yell at him. She was not going to be the one to start the quarreling, not this time. She softened her voice a bit. “I asked you to make dinner for us, right?”

“I figured you’d eat whenever you got home, Shorty. Don’t want to make something’s gonna get cold.”

She nodded. Paused. By now she knew the script by heart. But our deal, our agreement, was that you make dinner, clean up, you know I can’t do everything. And he says, How come you can’t do what you did before? You had time to do that stuff before. And she says, I need help, Leon, that’s the point. I get home exhausted. And he says, How do you think I feel, sitting here like a good-for-nothing piece of shit? At least you got a job.

That worked for a long time, that guilt thing. But then he began to take it to another level, talking about how cooking and cleaning, that was woman’s work, and how come all of a sudden he’s expected to do woman’s work, was this all because he wasn’t bringing home a paycheck? And by now she wants to scream, woman’s work? Woman’s work? What makes this woman’s work? And can’t you at least pick up after yourself? And so it would go, tedious and mind-numbing and pointless.

“Okay,” she said.

She was working six cases, three of them active, one a homicide. You couldn’t really focus on more than one at a time; tonight was Andrew Stadler. She placed the accordion file on the couch next to her, and while Leon watched the Tigers and drank himself into a stupor, she read over the files. She liked to read case files just before she went to sleep. She believed that her unconscious kept working on things, poking and prodding, turning things over with its gimlet eye, saw things more clearly than she did awake.

How Andrew Stadler’s body ended up in a Dumpster on the five hundred block of Hastings baffled her. So did the fake crack. His diagnosed schizophrenia-did that fit in anywhere? Obviously she’d have to talk to his boss at Stratton, and the Employee Relations director too. See if there’d been any indication of drug use.

She was tempted to ask Leon about Stratton, about the model shop, if he knew anything about it. Maybe he’d even run across Stadler in the factory some time, or knew someone who knew him. She was, in fact, just about to say something when she turned to look at him, saw his glazed eyes, his defeated face, and decided not to. Any little thing she mentioned about the job these days was like probing a bad tooth for him. It reminded him of how she had a job she was involved in, and how he didn’t.

Not worth the pain, she decided.

When the game was over, he went to bed, and she followed. As she brushed her teeth and washed her face, she debated whether to put on her usual long T-shirt or a teddy. They hadn’t had sex in more than six months, and not because she didn’t want it. He’d lost all interest. But she needed it, needed to regain that physical closeness. Otherwise…

By the time she got into bed, Leon was snoring.

She slipped in beside him, clicked off her bedside lamp, and was soon asleep.

She dreamed of Tiffany Akins, dying in her arms. The little girl in the SpongeBob pajamas. The girl who could have been her own. Who could have been herself. She dreamed of her father, of that moment when Cassie Stadler called her father Daddy.

And then her gimlet-eyed subconscious kicked something upstairs, and her eyes came open. She sat up slowly.

It was all too clean. An absence of evidence.

Not just the daubs of pharmaceutical-grade starch on the plastic bags wrapped around the body. This indicated that the body had been moved by someone wearing surgical gloves, someone who was careful about not leaving fingerprints. That in itself revealed a degree of caution not often found in drug murder cases. But neither was there any particulate matter on the body, no fibers, none of the normal trace evidence you always found on the body of a victim. Even the treads on the victim’s shoes, where you always found dirt, had been brushed clean.

She remembered, too, how clean the body was at the autopsy. She remembered the pathologist saying, “He looks more like a house case than a police case.”

That was it; that was the anomaly. The body had been fastidiously cleaned, gone over by an expert. By someone who knew what the police looked for.

Andrew Stadler’s body hadn’t been disposed of by some crack dealer in a panic. It had been carefully, methodically placed in a Dumpster by someone who knew what he was doing.

It took her a long time to fall back asleep.

26

“This stuff tastes like twigs,” Julia said.

Nick couldn’t stop himself from laughing out loud. The front of the box had a photograph of two smiling people, a little Asian girl and a blond Nordic-looking boy. They weren’t smiling about the cereal, that was for sure.

“It’s good for you,” he said.

“How come I always have to have healthy cereal? Everyone else in my class gets to have whatever they want for breakfast.”

“I doubt that.”

“Paige gets to have Froot Loops or Cap’n Crunch or Apple Jacks every morning.”

“Paige…” Normally the parental responses came quickly to him, autopilot, but this morning he wasn’t thinking very clearly. He worried about taking the sleeping pill so many days in a row. It was probably addictive. He wondered whether Julia or Lucas or Marta had heard anything two nights before. “Paige doesn’t do well in school because she doesn’t start off her day with a healthy breakfast.” Sometimes he couldn’t believe the crap he said aloud, the shameless propaganda. When he was a kid, he ate whatever the hell he wanted for breakfast, sugary shit like Quisp and Quake and Cocoa Puffs, and he did just fine in school. He didn’t know, actually, if all kids were forced to eat healthy breakfasts by their parents these days, or if it was just Laura who’d insisted on it. Whatever, he observed the Law of Healthy Breakfast as if it were the Constitution.

“Paige is in my math group,” Julia countered.

“Good for her. I don’t care if she eats chocolate cake for breakfast.” The TV had been set up on a table in this temporary corner of the kitchen. The Today show was on, but right now there was a local commercial for Pajot Ford, always an annoying ad. John Pajot, the owner, was also the pitchman-hell, he paid for the ads, he could star in them if he wanted to-and he always did them wearing a hunting outfit. He made puns about saving “bucks” and “racking up” savings.

“Where’s your brother?” he asked.

She shrugged, staring balefully at the cereal. It actually did look like stuff gathered from the ground in a forest. “Asleep, probably.”

“All right, just have some yogurt, then.”

“But I don’t like the kind we have. It doesn’t taste good.”

“It’s what we have. That’s your choice. Yogurt or…twigs.”

“But I like strawberry.”

“I’ll ask Marta to get more strawberry. In the meantime we have vanilla. It’s good.” Marta was doing laundry. He’d have to remember to ask her to add strawberry yogurt to her shopping list. Also some healthy cereal that didn’t taste like twigs.

“No, it’s not. It’s the organic kind. Their vanilla tastes funny.”

“It’s that or string cheese, take your choice.”

Julia sighed with bottomless frustration. “String cheese,” she said sullenly.

The local news segment came on, and the anchorman, a lean-faced, slick-looking guy with shoe-polish black hair, said something about “found brutally murdered.”

“Where’s the remote?” asked Nick. When Julia was in hearing range, he normally muted any TV stories about murders or gruesome crimes or child molestation. She reached for it between the carton of organic one-percent milk and the sugar bowl, handed it to her father. He grabbed it, searched for the tiny mute button-why didn’t they make the damned mute button bigger, and a different color?-but as he was about to press it, he saw the graphic on the screen. A photograph of a horribly familiar face, the words “Andrew Stadler.” He froze, stared, his heart pounding.

He heard: “Dumpster behind Lucky’s Restaurant on Hastings Street.”

He heard: “Thirty-six years at the Stratton Company until he was laid off last March.”

“What’s the matter, Daddy?” Julia asked.

He heard something about funeral arrangements. “Hmm? Oh, nothing. One of our Stratton employees died, baby. Come on, get yourself some string cheese.”

“Was he old?” she asked, getting up.

“Yeah,” Nick said. “He was old.”

Marge was already at her desk when he arrived, sipping coffee from a Stratton mug and reading a novel by Jane Austen. She flipped the paperback closed apologetically. “Oh, good morning,” she said. “Sorry, I was hoping to finish this before my book group meets tonight.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

A copy of the Fenwick Free Press had been placed on his desk next to his keyboard. A front-page headline read: “Longtime Stratton Employee a Probable Homicide.” Marjorie must have placed it there, folded so that the Stadler article faced up.

He hadn’t bothered to look at the paper this morning before leaving the house; it had been too hectic. Luke hadn’t gotten up, so Nick had gone to his room to awaken him. From under his mound of blankets and sheet, Luke had said he had study hour first period and was going to sleep in. Instead of arguing, Nick simply closed Luke’s bedroom door.

Now he picked up the article and read it closely. Once again his heart was drumming. Not much here in the way of details. “…body discovered in a Dumpster behind a restaurant on Hastings Street.” Nothing about it being wrapped in plastic; Nick wondered whether Eddie had, for some reason, removed the trash bags. “Apparently shot several times,” though it didn’t say where the man had been shot. Surely the police hadn’t released to the paper everything they knew about the case. As nerve-wracking as it was to read, Nick found it oddly reassuring. The details formed a convincing picture of an unemployed man who’d been murdered in a rough part of town, probably having been involved in some street crime. There was a photo of Stadler taken at least twenty years ago: the same glasses, the same tight mouth. You’d read the article, shake your head sadly over how the loss of a job had caused an already troubled man to spiral into drugs or crime or something, and you’d move on to the sports.

Nick’s eyes filled with tears. This is the man I killed. A man who left behind one child-“a daughter, Cassie, twenty-nine, of Chicago”-and an ex-wife who’d died four years earlier. A modest, quiet-living man, worked in a Stratton factory for his entire adult life.

He was suddenly aware of Marge standing there, looking worriedly at him. She’d said something.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, it’s sad, isn’t it?”

“Terribly sad,” Nick said.

“The funeral’s this afternoon. You have a telcon with Sales, but that can be rescheduled.”

He nodded, realizing what she was saying. Nick usually attended the funerals of all Stratton employees, just as old man Devries had done. It was a tradition, a ceremonial obligation of the CEO in this company town.

He’d have to go to Andrew Stadler’s funeral. He didn’t really have a choice.

27

“You’re not helping me any,” Audrey said.

Bert Koopmans, the evidence tech, turned at the sink where he was washing his hands. There was something birdlike about the way he inclined his head, gawked at her. He was tall, almost spindly, with small close-set eyes that always looked startled.

“Not my job,” he said, dry but not unfriendly. “What’s the problem?”

She hesitated. “Well, you really didn’t find anything on the body, when it comes right down to it.”

“What body are we talking about?”

“Stadler.”

“Who?”

“The guy in the Dumpster. Down on Hastings.”

“The tortilla.”

“Burrito, really.”

He allowed a hint of a smile. “You got everything I got.”

“Did the body strike you as too…clean?”

“Clean? You talking hygiene? I mean, the guy’s fingernails were filthy.”

“That’s not what I mean, Bert.” She thought a minute. “The dirt under his fingernails-that got tagged, right?”

“No, I lost it,” Bert said, flashing her a look. “You forget who you’re talking to? Like this was one of Wayne’s cases?” Not all the techs were as meticulous, as obsessive-compulsive as Koopmans. He walked over to a black file cabinet, pulled it open, selected a folder. He scanned a sheet of paper. “Pubic hairs, head hairs, fingernails left hand, fingernails right hand. Fibers from shoe left, fibers from shoe right. Unidentified substance under fingernails right hand, unidentified substance under fingernails left hand. Want me to keep going?”

“No, thanks. What’s the unidentified substance?”

Another look. “If I knew what it was, think I’d call it unidentified?”

“Are we talking skin or blood or dirt?”

“You try my patience, Detective. Skin and blood, these are substances I’ve seen before, believe it or not.”

“Dirt you’ve seen before too.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “But dirt isn’t dirt. It’s…stuff. It’s anything. I made a note that it had a kind of greenish hue to it.”

“Green paint? If Stadler scraped his fingernails against the side of a house, say…?”

“Paint I would have recognized.” He handed her the chain-of-custody sheet. “Here. Why don’t you take a walk down to Property and get the shit? We can both take a look.”

The guy who ran the Property room was a clock-puncher named Arthur something, a flabby white man with a toothbrush mustache who wore coveralls. She pushed the buzzer, and he took his time coming around to the window. She handed him the pink copy of the Property Receipt, explaining that she only wanted item number fifteen. All the evidence-the pulled head hair, pulled pubic hair, the two vials of blood-was kept in a big refrigerator. Arthur returned a few minutes later and could not have looked more bored. As he went through the ritual of scanning the bar code label on the five-by-seven evidence envelope marked “Nail Clippings From Autopsy,” then the bar code on the wall chart to capture her name and number, Audrey heard Roy Bugbee’s voice.

“That looks like the Stadler case,” Bugbee said.

She nodded. “You working Jamal Wilson?”

Bugbee ignored her question. As the property guy slid the envelope under the window, Bugbee snatched it before Audrey could get to it. “Nail clippings, eh?”

“Just some more trace evidence I’m running past IBO again.”

“Why do I get the crazy feeling we’re not partnering on this, Audrey?”

“There’s no end of things I’d appreciate your help on,” she said uneasily.

“Right,” Bugbee said. “You going over to IBO right now?”

Koopmans, who seemed surprised to see Roy Bugbee, placed two sheets of copy paper on the counter in the long narrow lab room where they fumed for fingerprints. He slit the bottom of each little envelope with a disposable scalpel and tapped out the contents onto the paper.

“Like I said, green dirt,” Koopmans said. He and Audrey both wore surgical masks so that their breath wouldn’t blow away the dirt. Bugbee did not.

Audrey peered closely. “Would it help to put it under a binocular microscope?”

“Happy to. But I’ve already done it, and there’s nothing more to see.” He sifted the tiny pile with a wooden applicator. “Sand, some kind of fine green powder, some fragments of what looks like pellets, maybe. Take it over to the state lab, if you want, but they’re just going to tell you what I’ve just said. And it’ll take ’em six weeks to tell you.”

“Christ,” said Bugbee, “you don’t need a microscope for this shit.”

“Oh, is that right,” said Koopmans, giving Audrey a quick look.

“You don’t have a lawn, obviously,” Bugbee said. “That’s hydroseed.”

“Hydroseed,” said Koopmans.

“Which is what, exactly?” Audrey asked.

“It’s grass seed and, I don’t know, ground-up newspaper and shit they spray. To start a new lawn. Hate the shit, myself-full of weed seed. I call it ‘hydroweed.’”

“But it’s green,” Audrey said.

“That’s the dye powder,” Koopmans said. “And the pellets-that’s the mulch.” He pulled at his chin with his thumb and forefinger.

“Well, you saw the Stadler home,” Audrey said. “I didn’t see any hydroseed, did you?”

“Naw,” said Bugbee, cocky. “A shitty lawn. All crabgrass and broadleaf weeds. Guys notice stuff like that.”

“If you’re lawn-obsessed,” Koopmans said. “Is it possible your guy had some part-time job doing landscaping work or something?”

“No,” Audrey said. “He could barely hold on to his job at Stratton. No, I suspect he got that stuff under his fingernails from wherever he went. Maybe-probably-the night he was killed.”

28

The Mount Pleasant Cemetery was not the biggest burial ground in Fenwick Township, nor especially well tended. It sat on a high bluff above a busy highway and seemed forlorn, even for a cemetery. Nick had never been here before. Then again, he hated cemeteries and avoided them whenever possible. When he had to attend a funeral, he went to the church or funeral home and missed this part. Laura’s death had made burials harder, not easier.

But he was late. He’d missed the service at the funeral home, having been unable to reschedule a major teleconference with the CEOs of Steelcase and Herman Miller to discuss a lobbying effort against an idiotic bill before Congress.

He parked his Suburban along a curb near where a ceremony was going on. There was a small clutch of people in dark clothing, maybe ten or twelve people in all. There was a pastor, a black woman, an elderly couple, five or six guys who might have worked with Stadler, a pretty young woman who had to be the man’s daughter. She was petite, with big eyes and short, sort of chopped-looking punk hair. The paper had said she was twenty-nine and lived in Chicago.

Nick approached tentatively, heard the pastor, standing beside the casket, say: “Bless this grave that the body of our brother Andrew may sleep here in peace until You awaken him to glory, when he will see You face to face and know the splendor of the eternal God, who lives and reigns, now and forever.” The roaring traffic obliterated some of his words.

A couple of the mourners turned to look at him. The Stratton guys recognized him, their eyes lingering a moment longer. Nick thought he saw surprise, maybe a flash or two of indignation, though he wasn’t sure. The beautiful daughter looked dazed, like a deer caught in the headlights. Near her stood the black woman, who was quite attractive as well. She looked at Nick, her glance piercing, tears running down her cheeks. Nick wondered who she was. There weren’t that many blacks in town.

He wasn’t prepared for the sight of the burnished mahogany casket, sitting atop the lowering device, Nick remembered from Laura’s burial, which was hidden behind drapes of green crushed velvet. It jolted him. Somehow it was even more brutal, that tall, rounded mahogany coffin, than seeing Andrew Stadler’s dead body crumpled on his lawn. It was more final, more real. This was a man with a family-a daughter, at least-and friends. He might have been a dangerous, unmedicated schizophrenic-but he was somebody’s daddy too. This lovely young woman with the spiky hair and porcelain skin. Tears sprang to Nick’s eyes. He was embarrassed.

The black woman glanced at him again. Who was she?

The Stratton guys looked at him again, no doubt noticing his tears and inwardly rolling their eyes at the hypocrisy. Slasher Nick weeping at the grave of a guy he laid off, they had to be thinking.

When it was over, and the coffin was lowered smoothly and silently into the grave, the mourners began tossing clods of earth and flowers onto the coffin. Some of them embraced the daughter, clutching her hand, murmuring condolences. When the moment seemed right, he approached her.

“Ms. Stadler, I’m Nick Conover. I’m the-”

“I know who you are,” she replied coolly. She had the tiniest stud on the right side of her nose, a glint of light.

“I didn’t know your father personally, but I wanted to tell you how sorry I am. He was a valued employee.”

“So valued that you fired him.” She spoke in a quiet tone, but her bitterness was obvious.

“The layoffs have been difficult for all of us. So many deserving people lost their jobs.”

She sighed as if the subject wasn’t worth discussing any further. “Yeah, well, everything started to fall apart for my dad when he got forced out.”

He’d steeled himself against anger, given how often he met former Stratton employees, but this he wasn’t quite prepared for, not here in a cemetery, from a woman who was burying her father. “It’s a terrible thing he had to go through.” He noticed the black woman watching the exchange with interest, though she was far enough away that she might not have been able to hear what they were saying.

Stadler’s daughter smiled ruefully. “Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Conover. As far as I’m concerned, you killed my dad.”

29

Leon’s oldest sister, LaTonya, was a very large woman with an imperious way about her, adamant in all her opinions, though maybe you had to be to raise six kids. Audrey liked being around her-she was everything Audrey wasn’t, bawdy where Audrey was respectful, profane where Audrey was polite, stubborn where Audrey was compliant. Things might not have been so good with Leon, but that didn’t affect their friendship. Sisterhood was stronger. LaTonya didn’t have much respect for her younger brother anyway, it seemed.

Fairly often Audrey babysat the three younger Saunders kids. Most of the time she enjoyed it. They were good kids, a twelve-year-old girl and two boys, nine and eleven. No doubt they ran roughshod over her, took advantage of her good nature, got away with stuff their drill-sergeant mother would never let them. But that, she figured, was what aunts were for. It didn’t escape her, either, that LaTonya herself took advantage of Audrey, asking her to sit way more than she should, because LaTonya understood what was never said aloud, that her kids were the only kids Audrey would ever have.

LaTonya arrived home an hour later this evening than she’d said she would. She was taking a motivational training seminar at the Days Inn on Winsted Avenue, learning to start a home business. Her husband, Paul, managed the service department of a GMC dealership and usually worked late, didn’t get home until eight. Audrey didn’t mind, really. She’d just come off a long shift, which included attending the Andrew Stadler funeral, and would rather spend a few hours with her niece and nephews than at home with Leon, to be honest. Or thinking about poor Cassie Stadler. You had to take a break sometimes.

LaTonya was lugging a huge cardboard box heaped with white plastic bottles. Her moon-shaped face was beaded with sweat. “This here,” she announced as the screen door slammed behind her, “is going to liberate us from debt.”

“What is it?” Audrey asked. Camille was practicing her piano in the den by now and the two boys were watching TV.

“Hey, what’s this? What the hell is this?” LaTonya hollered at her sons as she dropped the box on the kitchen table. “I don’t care how much of a pushover your Auntie Audrey is, we have a rule about the TV. Turn that goddamned set off, and get to your homework, right now!”

“But Audrey said we could!” protested Thomas, the younger son. Matthew, experienced enough to know never to argue with their mother, scampered upstairs.

“I don’t give a shit what Audrey said, you know the rules!” she thundered. She turned to Audrey, her voice softening. “It’s weight-loss supplements. In a year or two, I’m not going to need Paul’s salary. Not that there’s much of that.”

“Weight-loss supplements?”

“Thermogenic,” LaTonya said. It was clear she had just learned the word. “Burns the fat off. Stokes up your metabolism. Blocks carbs too. And it’s all natural.”

“Sistah, you got to be careful with those make-money-at-home schemes,” Audrey said. It was funny, when she was around LaTonya she found herself talking black, the rhythms of her speech changing. She was acutely aware that LaTonya considered Audrey saditty, or conceited.

“Careful?” LaTonya gasped. “This is the wellness industry we’re talking about. In five years it’s going to be a trillion-dollar industry, and I’m getting on the elevator at the ground floor.” She opened a new box of Ritz Crackers, offered it to Audrey, who shook her head. LaTonya tore open the wax paper on one of the cracker rolls and grabbed a handful.

“LaTonya, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Mmmph?” LaTonya replied through a mouthful of cracker.

“It’s the way you talk to your kids. The language. I don’t think children should hear that kind of language, particularly from a parent.”

LaTonya’s eyes widened in indignation. She put her hands on her hips. She chewed, swallowed, then said, “Audrey, baby, I love you, but they’re my kids, you understand? Not yours. Mine.”

“But still,” Audrey said, regretting she’d said anything, wanting to take it back.

“Honey, these little buggers respect strong words. If you had kids, you’d understand.” LaTonya saw the wounded look in Audrey’s face. “I’m-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it the way it came out.”

“That’s okay,” Audrey said with a dismissive shake of the head. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

LaTonya was holding up one of the big white plastic bottles. “This you need,” she said.

“I need?”

“For your no-good, lazy-ass husband. My brother. Least he can do while he’s sitting on his butt is take some of these thermogenic supplements. Twenty-four ninety-five. You can afford it. Tell you what: I’ll give you my discount. Sixteen fifty. Can’t do better than that.”

30

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

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

“How come?”

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

“I don’t think I do, no.”

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

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

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

“All over you how?”

“He wanted the priors on this employee.”

“Who?”

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

Suddenly Edward Rinaldi was becoming more interesting.

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

“Meaning what?”

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

“We talking bribes, Lieutenant?”

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

“He was a user?”

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

It was enough to make her wary of the man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’d I find?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you talk to him?”

Rinaldi waved his hand. “Nah.”

“Did you ask the police to investigate him?”

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

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

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

“Sergeant Noyce, that’s right.”

“Say hi for me. Nice guy. Good cop.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Nope.”

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

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

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

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

“How so?”

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

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

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

31

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

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

“Fiction or nonfiction?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re-you’re kidding me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

32

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay.”

“And also-well, I probably shouldn’t say this.”

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

She wrote down “S &W Sigma.380.”

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

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

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

“Well, after our IBIS technician enters it.”

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

33

The brand-new Fenwick Elementary School auditorium was fancier than a lot of college theaters: plush stadium seating, great acoustics, professional sound system and lighting. It was called the Devries Theater, a gift from Dorothy Stratton Devries, in honor of her late husband.

When Nick had gone to Fenwick Elementary, there hadn’t even been an auditorium. School assemblies had been held in the gym, all the kids sitting on the splintery wooden bleachers. Now it seemed like the fourth-grade class was doing its annual play in a Broadway theater.

Looking around, Nick was glad he’d come. All the parents were here, grandparents too. Even parents who rarely came to any of their kids’ school events, like Emily Renfro’s plastic-surgeon dad, Jim. Jacqueline Renfro was a class mom or something, but her husband was usually too busy doing face-lifts or screwing his receptionist to show up. A number of the parents had mini videocams, ready to film the production on compact digital tape that no one would ever bother to watch.

He was late as usual. Everywhere he went, he seemed to arrive late these days. Marta had dropped Julia off an hour ago so she and the rest of the fourth-graders could get into their handmade costumes, which they’d been working on in art class for months. Julia was excited about tonight because she got to play the Wicked Witch of the West-her choice, a role she’d auditioned for and then pleaded for. Not for her Dorothy, which all the other girls wanted. Nick’s little tomboy had no interest in playing a wimpy character wearing a braided wig and a gingham dress. She knew that the witch part was the scene-stealer. He liked that about her.

She didn’t expect him to be here. He’d already told her a couple of times that he had a work dinner he had to go to and couldn’t get out of. She was disappointed, but resigned. So she’d be all the more excited when she saw her daddy here. In truth, of course, Nick considered sitting through the school play one of those unpleasant parental obligations like changing a poopy diaper, or going to “The Lion King On Ice” (or anything on ice, for that matter), or watching the Teletubbies or The Wiggles and not letting on how creepy they were.

The back sections of the theater had been cordoned off, and there didn’t seem to be any available seats in the front. He peered around, saw a few spaces here and there, a sea of averted glances, a few unfriendly faces. Maybe he was being a little paranoid. Guilt burned on his face as visibly as a scarlet letter. He was convinced people knew what he’d done just by looking at him.

But that wasn’t it, of course. They hated him for other reasons, for being Slasher Nick, for being the local hero who’d turned on them. He saw the Renfros, caught their icy glares before they looked away. Finally he saw one friendly face, a buddy of his from high school days whose son was in Julia’s class.

“Hey, Bobby,” he said, sitting down in the seat Bob Casey had freed up by moving his jacket. Casey, a bald, red-faced guy with an enormous beer gut, was a stockbroker who’d tried to hit Nick up for business several times. He was a wisenheimer whose chief claim to fame since high school was his ability to memorize long stretches of dialogue from Monty Python or any of the National Lampoon or Airplane movies.

“There he is,” Casey said heartily. “Big night, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. How’s Gracie?”

“Doin’ good. Doin’ good.”

A long, uncomfortable silence followed. Then Bob Casey said, “Ever see anything like this theater? We never had anything like this.”

“We were lucky to use the gym.”

“Luxury!” Casey said in his Monty Python voice. “Luxury! We had to walk thirty miles to school every morning in a blizzard-uphill, both ways. And we loved it!”

Nick smiled, amused but unable to laugh.

Casey noticed Nick’s subdued response and said, “So, you’ve had a hard year, huh?”

“Not as hard as a lot of people here.”

“Hey, come on, Nick. You lost your wife.”

“Yeah, well.”

“How’s the house?”

“Almost done.”

“It’s been almost done for a year, right?” he gibed. “Kids okay? Julia seems to be doing good.”

“She’s great.”

“I hear Luke’s having a hard time of it.”

Nick wondered how much Bob Casey knew about Luke’s troubles-probably more than Nick did himself. “Well, you know. Sixteen, right?”

“Tough age. Plus, only one parent and all that.”

The production was about what you’d expect for a fourth-grade play-an Emerald City set they’d all painted themselves, the talking apple tree made out of painted corrugated cardboard. The music teacher playing sloppily on the Yamaha digital piano. Julia, as the Witch, froze up, kept forgetting her lines. You could almost hear the parents in the audience thinking them out loud for her-“Poppies!” and “I’ll get you, my pretty!”

When it was over, Jacqueline Renfro seemed to go out of her way to find Nick and say, “Poor Julia.” She shook her head. “It can’t be easy for her.”

Nick furrowed his brow.

“Well, only one parent, and you hardly ever there.”

“I’m there as much as I can,” he replied.

Jacqueline shrugged, having made her point, and moved on. But her husband, Jim, lagged behind. He wore a brown tweed jacket and a blue button-down shirt, looking like he was still a Princeton undergrad. He pointed a finger at Nick and winked. “Can’t imagine how I’d get by without Jackie,” he said in a confiding tone. “I don’t know how you get by. Still, Julia’s a great kid-you’re very lucky.”

“Thanks.”

Jim Renfro was smiling too hard. “Of course, the thing about family is, when they get to be too much, you can’t exactly downsize them.” A cheery, self-satisfied wink. “Am I right?”

Any number of responses occurred to Nick-too many. None of them nonviolent. He had this strange feeling of a lid coming off, the bleed valves blowing.

At that point, Julia came running up, still wearing her pointed black construction-paper hat and her green face makeup. “You came!” she said.

He threw his arms around her. “I couldn’t miss this.”

“How was I?” she asked. There wasn’t a drop of concern in her voice, no awareness that she’d messed up. She was bursting with pride. He loved this little girl.

“You were great,” he said.

34

In the car on the way home, Nick’s cell phone went off, a weird synthesized, symphonic fanfare that he’d never bothered to reprogram.

He glanced at the caller ID, saw that it was Eddie Rinaldi. He picked it up from the cradle, not wanting Julia to hear whatever Eddie had to say over the speakers. She was sitting in the backseat of the Suburban, poring over the Wizard of Oz program in the darkness. She still had the green zinc-oxide face makeup on, and Nick could see a bedtime struggle ahead when he made her clean it off.

“Hey, Eddie,” he said.

“There you are. You had the phone off?”

“I was watching Julia’s school play.”

“Okay,” he said. Eddie, who had no kids, no plans to have any, and no interest in them, never asked about his kids beyond the bare minimum required. “I was thinking of dropping by.”

“Can’t it wait?”

A pause. “I think not. We should talk. Only take five minutes, maybe.”

“There a problem?” Nick was suddenly on edge.

“No, no. No problem. Just, we should talk.”

Eddie sprawled in the easy chair in Nick’s study, legs splayed wide as if he owned the place.

“A homicide detective came to talk to me,” he said casually.

Nick felt his insides go cold. He leaned forward in his desk chair. Here they sat, just a few feet from where it had happened. “What the fuck?” he said.

Eddie shrugged, no big deal. “Standard operating procedure. Routine shit.”

“Routine?”

“She’s just covering all the bases. Got to, sloppy if she didn’t.”

“It’s a woman.” Nick focused on the anomaly, avoiding the main issue: a homicide detective was on the case, already?

“Negro lady.” Eddie could have put it much more crudely. His racism was no secret to anyone, but maybe he’d learned over the years that it wasn’t socially acceptable, not even around his old buddies. Or maybe he didn’t want to antagonize Nick at the moment.

“I didn’t know the Fenwick police had any.”

“I didn’t either.”

A long silence in which Nick could hear the ticking of the clock. A silver clock, engraved FENWICK CITIZEN OF THE YEAR, awarded to him three years ago. When everything was going great. “What’d she want?”

“What do you think? She wanted to ask about Stadler.”

“What about Stadler?”

“You know, what you’d expect. Did he make any threats, whatever.”

Eddie was being evasive, and Nick didn’t like it. Something didn’t sit right. “Why was she talking to you?”

“Hey, man, I’m the security director, remember?”

“No. There has to be some more specific reason she went to talk to you. What are you leaving out, Eddie?”

“Leaving out? I’m leaving nothing out, buddy. I mean, look, she knew I asked some guys on the job about Stadler.”

So that was it. By doing his background check on Stadler, he’d in effect tipped his hand to the police. “Shit.”

“Come on. I never talked to the guy.”

“No,” Nick said, one hand cupping his chin. “You call the cops, asking about some downsized employee who slaughtered your boss’s dog, then the guy turns up dead a couple days later. This doesn’t look good.”

Eddie shook his head, rolling his eyes in contempt. “Like this is, what, the Mafia or something? Get real. The guy goes off the deep end, doing sick shit, matter of time before he pisses off the wrong guy.”

“Yeah.”

“In the dog pound, I mean, come on. Look, they got nothing tying Stadler to me-or to you.”

“Then what was she asking about?”

“Ah, she wanted to know if you’d ever talked to Stadler, had any contact with the guy. Told her you probably didn’t even know who the guy was. Pretty much true.”

Nick inhaled slowly, tried to calm himself, held his breath. “And if I did? What’s the assumption here, that I went after the guy, killed him?” Nick heard the aggrieved tone in his own voice, as if he were actually starting to believe himself innocent.

“Nah, she’s just looking for scraps. Anyway, don’t worry, I handled her fine. Believe me, she left knowing she’s barking up the wrong tree.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell, come on. Get serious here, Nick. The CEO of Stratton murdered one of his employees? I don’t think so. No one’s going to believe that for a second.”

Nick was silent for a long while. “I hope so.”

“I just wanted to keep you in the loop. In case she comes to talk to you.”

Nick, his chest tightening, said, “She said she was going to?”

“No, but she might. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“I’d never even heard the name,” Nick said. “Right? You tell her otherwise?”

“Exactly. Told her you’re a busy guy, I do my job, you don’t get involved.”

“Right.”

“So you figured maybe some downsized employee went wacko, killed your dog, but you called the cops, figured they’d handle it, you had no idea who it mighta been.”

“Right.”

“Guy turns up dead, mighta been the same guy, mighta been different, you have no idea. Like that.”

Nick nodded, rehearsing the answer in his mind, turning it over and over, poking at the soft spots. “There’s nothing tying me to this thing?” he said after a few moments.

A long silence. Eddie replied with a kind of smoldering indignation. “I did my job, Nick, you clear?”

“I don’t doubt it. I’m asking you to think like a cop. Like a homicide cop.”

“That’s how I think, man. Like a cop.”

“No prints, nothing like that, on the…body? Fibers, DNA, whatever?”

“Nick, I told you, we’re not going to talk about this.”

“We are now. I want to know.”

“The body was clean, Nick,” Eddie said. “Okay? Clean as a whistle. Clean as I could get it in the time we had.”

“What about the gun?”

“What about it?”

“What’d you do with it? You don’t still have it, do you?”

“Like I’m a stupid fuck? Come on, man.”

“Then where is it?”

Eddie let out a puff of air, made a sound like pah. “Bottom of the river, you really want to know.” Fenwick, like so many towns in Michigan, was built on the shores of one of the many waterways leading into Lake Michigan.

“Shell casings too?”

“Yup.”

“And if it turns up?”

“You realize how unlikely that is?”

“I’m saying.”

“Even if they do find it, they got no way to connect it to me.”

“Why not? It’s your gun.”

“It’s a goddamned drop gun, Nick.”

“A what?”

“A throw-down. A piece I picked up at a scene in GR. Some crack dealer, who the hell knows where he got it? Point is, there’s no record anywhere. No paperwork, no purchase permit, nothing. Clean.”

Nick had heard of cops picking up guns they found at crime scenes, keeping them, but he knew you weren’t supposed to do that, and it made him nervous to hear Eddie admit to it. If he did that, what else did he do?

“You sure?” Nick said.

“Sure as shit.”

“What about the security cameras?”

Eddie nodded. “Hey, I’m a pro, right? Took care of that too.”

“How?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“I need to know. My own fucking security cameras recorded me killing the guy.”

Eddie closed his eyes, shook his head in irritation. “I reformatted the hard drive on the digital video recorder. That night’s gone. Never happened. System started recording next day-makes sense, right? Since we just put it in the day before.”

“Not a trace?”

“Nada. Hey, don’t worry about it. The lady comes to talk to you, you cooperate, tell her everything you know, which is a big fat zero, right?” Eddie gave his dry cackle.

“Right. I know she talked to you?”

Eddie shrugged. “Play it either way. Let’s say, no, I didn’t get around to it. Got nothing to do with you, right?”

“Right.”

Eddie got up. “Nothing to worry about, man. Get some sleep. You look like shit.”

“Thanks.” Nick got up, to walk Eddie out, then thought of something. “Eddie,” he said. “That night. You said it was your gun, tied everything to you, right? That’s why I didn’t have a choice.”

Eddie’s eyes were dead. “Yeah?”

“Now you tell me the gun was clean. No connection to you at all. I don’t get it.”

A long silence.

“Can’t take chances, Nicky,” Eddie finally said. “Never take chances.”

Nick walked Eddie out of his study, heard footfalls on the carpeting. Saw a jeans-clad leg, a sneaker, disappear up the stairs.

Lucas.

Just getting home? Was it possible that he’d overheard their conversation? Nah, he’d have had to have stood outside the study door, listening. Lucas didn’t do that, the main reason being that he had no interest in what his dad was up to.

Still.

Nick wondered, a tiny wriggle of worry.

35

Driving to work the next morning, Nick was in a foul mood. The news that a homicide detective was poking around the corporation had sent him spiraling into a tense, sleepless night. He thrashed around in the big bed, got up repeatedly, obsessed about that night.

What Happened That Night-that was how he thought of it now. The memory had receded to attenuated, kaleidoscopic images: Stadler’s leering face, the gunfire, the body sprawled on the ground, Eddie’s face, carrying the body wrapped in black trash bags.

He was out of pills, which was just as well; any more of them, he figured, and he was headed for the Betty Ford clinic. He tried to think about work stuff, anything but that night. But that just meant the board meeting in the morning. Board meetings always made him tense, but this time he knew that the shit was about to rain down.

On the way into work he stopped at a light next to a gleaming silver S Class Mercedes. He turned to admire it and saw that the driver was Stratton’s VP of sales, Ken Coleman. Nick rolled down his passenger’s side window, tapped on his horn until he got Coleman’s attention. When Coleman-forty-one, a good seventy pounds overweight, a bad hairpiece-rolled down his window, his face lit up.

“Hey, Nick! Looking pretty slick.”

“Board meeting. New car, Kenny?”

Coleman’s grin got even wider. “Got it yesterday. You like?”

“Must list for a hundred grand, right?”

Coleman, always hyper, nodded fast, up and down and up and down like some bobble-head doll. “Over. Fully loaded. Like, AMG sports package and, I mean, heated steering wheel, you know?” The top sales guys at Stratton made more than Nick did. He didn’t resent it; someone had to do the soul-destroying shit they did.

The light turned green, but Nick didn’t move. “Buy or lease?” he asked.

“Well, lease. I always lease, you know?”

“Good. Because it’s going back to the dealer.”

Coleman cocked his bobble head, a movement like a terrier, almost comic. “What?”

Behind him, someone honked a horn. Nick ignored it. “We laid off five thousand workers, Ken. Half the company. To cut costs, save Stratton. Pretty much wiped out the town. So I don’t want a member of my executive management team driving around town in a fucking hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, understand?”

Coleman stared in disbelief.

Nick went on, “You take that back to the dealership by close of business today and tell ’em you want a fucking Subaru or something. But I don’t want to see you behind that heated steering wheel again, you understand?”

Nick gunned the engine and took off.

The five members of the board of directors of the Stratton Corporation, and their guests, were gathered in the anteroom to the boardroom. Coffee was being served from vacuum carafes, and not the institutional food-service blend that was served in the Stratton employee cafeteria, either. It was brewed from Sulawesi Peaberry beans fresh-roasted by Town Grounds, Fenwick’s best coffee place. Todd Muldaur had complained about the coffee at the first board meeting after the buyout, poked fun at the Bunn-O-Matic. Nick thought Todd was being ridiculous, but he ordered the change. That, and little cold bottles of Evian water, melon slices, raspberries and strawberries, fancy pastries trucked in from a famous bakery in Ann Arbor.

Todd Muldaur, in another of his expensive suits, was at the tail end of a joke when Nick arrived, holding forth to Scott, the other guy from Fairfield Partners, Davis Eilers, and someone Nick had never seen before. “I told him the best way to see Fenwick is in your rearview mirror,” Todd was saying. Eilers and the other guy laughed raucously. Scott, who’d noticed Nick’s approach, just smiled politely.

Davis Eilers was the other deal partner, a guy who had a lot of operational experience. He’d done his time at McKinsey like Todd and Scott, only he’d played football at Dartmouth, not Yale. He later ran a number of companies, sort of a CEO-for-hire.

Todd turned, saw Nick. “There he is.” He tipped his cup at Nick. “Great coffee!” he said expansively and gave a wink. “Sorry to miss you last night. Busy being a dad, huh?”

Nick shook Todd’s hand, then Scott’s, then Eilers’s. “Yeah, couldn’t get out of it. My daughter’s school play, you know, and given-”

“Hey, you got your priorities straight,” Todd said with an excess of sincerity. “I respect that.”

Nick wanted to toss the cup of hot Sulawesi Peaberry in the guy’s face, but he just looked straight in Todd’s too-blue eyes and smiled appreciatively.

“Nick, I want you to meet our new board member, Dan Finegold.” A tall, handsome guy, athletic-looking. A thatch of dark brown hair starting to silver over. What was it with Fairfield Equity Partners? It was a fucking frat.

Dan Finegold’s handshake was a crusher.

“Don’t tell me Yale football too,” Nick said cordially. Thinking: Our new board member? Like, were they going to tell me? Just spring it on me?

“Yale baseball, actually,” said Todd, clapping both men on their shoulders, bringing them together. “Dan was a legendary pitcher.”

“Legendary, my ass,” said Finegold.

“Hey, man, you were,” Todd said. He looked at Nick. “Dan’s got twenty years’ experience in the office-supply space, with all the scar tissue. I’m sure you know Office-Source-that was his baby. When Willard bought it, he grabbed Dan for Fairfield.”

“You like Boston?” Nick asked. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He couldn’t say what he was really thinking, which was: Why are you here, and who invited you onto the board, and what’s really going on here? Fairfield had the right to put whomever they wanted on the board, but it wasn’t exactly cool for them to just show up with a new board member in tow. They hadn’t done it before. It wasn’t a good precedent, or maybe that was the point.

“It’s great. Especially for a foodie like me. Lot of happening restaurants in Boston these days.”

“Dan’s part owner of an artisanal brewery in upstate New York,” said Todd. “They make the best Belgian beer outside of Belgium. Abbey ale, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Welcome to the board,” Nick said. “I’m sure your expertise in Belgian beer’s going to come in handy.” Something about Belgian beer and Abbey ale sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

Todd took Nick by the elbow as they walked to the boardroom. He spoke in a low voice. “Bummer about Atlas McKenzie.”

“Huh?”

“Scott told me last night.”

“What are you talking about?”

Todd gave him a quick, curious glance. “The deal,” he said under his breath. “How it fell through.”

“What?” What the hell was he talking about? The Atlas McKenzie deal was all but inked. This made no sense!

“Don’t worry, it’s not going to come up this morning. But still, a major bummer, huh?” In a louder voice, he called out, “Mrs. Devries!”

Todd turned away and strode up to Dorothy Devries, who had just entered the boardroom. Todd clasped her small hand in both of his large ones and waited until she turned her cheek toward him before he kissed it.

Dorothy was wearing a Nancy Reagan burgundy pants suit with white piping around the lapels. Her white hair was a perfect cumulus cloud with just a hint of blue rinse in it, which brought out the steely blue of her eyes. Fairfield Partners had left Dorothy Stratton Devries a small piece of the company and a seat on the board, which was a condition of hers that Willard Osgood had no quibble with. It looked good to have the founder’s family still connected to Stratton. It told the world that Fairfield still respected the old ways. Of course, Dorothy had no power. She was there for window dressing, mostly. Fairfield owned ninety percent of Stratton, controlled the board, ran the show. Dorothy, a sharp cookie, understood that, but she also understood that, outside the boardroom at least, she still possessed some moral authority.

Her dad, Harold Stratton, had been a machinist for the Wabash Railroad, a tinsmith’s apprentice, a steeplejack. He worked as a machinist at Steelcase, in Grand Rapids, before he started his own company with money provided by his rich father-in-law. His big innovation had been to develop a better roller suspension for metal file cabinets-progressive roller bearings in a suspension-file drawer. His only son had died in childhood, leaving Dorothy, but women didn’t run companies in those days, so eventually he turned it over to Dorothy’s husband, Milton Devries. She’d spent her later years in her big, dark mansion in East Fenwick as the town matriarch, a social arbiter as fearsome as only a small-town society queen can be. She was on every board in town, chairwoman of most of them. Even though she liked Nick, and made him the CEO, she still looked down on him as being from a lower social class. Nick’s dad, after all, had worked on the shop floor. Never mind that Dorothy was but one generation away from having machinist’s grease on her own fingers.

Nick, reeling from Todd’s casual revelation, saw Scott sitting down at his customary place at the oval mahogany board table. As Nick approached him, put a hand on his shoulder, he heard Todd saying, “Dorothy, I’d like you to meet Dan Finegold.”

“Hey,” Nick whispered, standing immediately behind Scott, “what’s this about Atlas McKenzie?”

Scott craned his neck around, eyes wide. “Yeah, I just got the call on my cell at dinner last night-Todd happened to be there, you know…” His voice trailed off. Nick remained silent. Scott went on: “They went with Steelcase-you know, that joint venture Steelcase has with Gale and Wentworth-”

“They called you?”

“I guess I was on Hardwick’s speed-dial, all those negotiations at the end-”

“You get bad news, you tell me first, understand?”

Nick could see Scott’s pale face flush instantly. “I-of course, Nick, it was just that Todd was right there, you know, and-”

“We’ll talk later,” Nick said, giving Scott a shoulder squeeze too hard to be merely companionable.

He heard Dorothy Devries’s brittle laugh from across the room, and he took his place at the head of the table.

The Stratton boardroom was the most conservative place in the headquarters-the immense mahogany table with places for fifteen, even though there hadn’t been fifteen board members since the takeover; the top-of-the-line black leather Stratton Symbiosis chairs, the slim monitors at each place that could be raised and lowered with the touch of a button. It looked like a boardroom in any big corporation in the world.

Nick cleared his throat, looked around at the board, and knew he was not among friends anymore. “Well, why don’t we get started with the CFO’s report?” he said.

36

Something about the way Scott went through his depressing presentation-his dry, monotone, doom-and-gloom voice-over to the PowerPoint slides projected on the little plasma screens in front of everyone-was almost defiant, Nick thought. As if he knew full well he was hurling carrion to the hyenas.

Of course, they didn’t need his little dog-and-pony show, since they’d all gotten the charts in their black loose-leaf board books, FedExed to everyone yesterday, or couriered over to their hotel. But it was a board ritual, it had to go into the minutes, and besides, you couldn’t assume that any of them had actually read through the materials.

Nick knew, however, that Todd Muldaur had read the financials closely, the instant he got them in Boston, the way some guys grab the sports section and devour the baseball box scores. Todd probably didn’t wait even for the printouts; he’d surely gone through the Adobe PDF files and Excel spreadsheets as soon as Scott had e-mailed them.

Because his questions sounded awfully rehearsed. They weren’t even questions, really. They were frontal assaults.

“I don’t believe what I’m seeing here,” he said. He looked around at the other board members-Dorothy, Davis Eilers, Dan Finegold-and the two “invited guests” who always attended the first half of the board meeting: Scott, and the Stratton general counsel who was here in her capacity as board secretary. Stephanie Alstrom was a small, serious woman with prematurely gray hair and a small, pruned mouth that seldom smiled. There was something juiceless, almost desiccated about Stephanie. Scott had once described her as a “raisin of anxiety,” and the description had stuck in Nick’s mind.

“This is a train wreck,” Todd went on.

“Todd, there’s no question these numbers look bad,” Nick tried to put in.

“Look bad?” Todd shot back. “They are bad.”

“My point is, this has been a challenging quarter-hell, a challenging year-for the entire sector,” Nick said. “Office furniture is economically sensitive, we all know that. Companies stop buying stuff practically overnight when the economy slows.”

Todd was staring at him, rattling Nick momentarily. “I mean, look, new office installations have plummeted, business startups and expansions have slowed to almost nothing,” Nick went on. “Last couple of years, there’s been serious overcapacity in the office furniture sector, and that, combined with weaker demand across the board, has put serious downward pressure on prices and profit margins.”

“Nick,” Todd said. “When I hear the word ‘sector,’ I reach for my barf bag.”

Nick smiled involuntarily. “It’s the reality,” he said. He folded his arms, felt something crinkle in one of the breast pockets of his suit.

“If I may quote Willard Osgood,” Todd went on, “‘Explanations aren’t excuses.’ There’s an explanation for everything.”

“Uh, in all fairness to Nick,” Scott put in, “he’s just seeing these numbers for the first time.”

“What?” said Todd. “Today? You mean, I saw these numbers before the CEO?” He turned to Nick. “You got something more important on your mind? Like, your daughter’s ballet recital or something?”

Nick gave Scott a furious look. Yeah, it’s the first time seeing the real numbers, he thought. Not the fudged ones you wanted to fob off on them. Nick was sorely tempted to let loose, but who knew where that might lead? Nervously, he fished inside the breast pocket of his suit and found a scrap of paper, pulled it out. It was a yellow Post-it note. Laura’s handwriting: “Love you, babe. You’re the best.” A little heart and three X’s. Tears immediately sprang to his eyes. He so rarely wore this suit that he must not have had it dry-cleaned last time he wore it, before Laura’s death. He slipped the note carefully back where he’d found it.

“Come on, now, Todd,” said Davis Eilers. “We’re all dads here.” Noticing Dorothy, he said, “Or moms.” He ignored Stephanie Alstrom, who had no kids and wasn’t married and seemed to shrink into herself as she tapped away at her laptop.

Calm, Nick told himself, blinking away the tears. Stay calm. The room revolved slowly around him. “Scott means the final figures, Todd, but believe me, there’s no surprise here. I take heart from the fact that our profit margins are still positive.”

“No surprise?” Todd said. “No surprise? Let me tell you something, I don’t really care how the rest of the sector’s doing. We didn’t buy Stratton because you’re like everyone else, because you’re average. We bought you because you were marquee. Same reason we use Stratton chairs and work panels and all that in our own offices in Boston, when we could have bought anything. Because you were the best in your space. Not just good enough. As Willard’s so fond of saying, ‘ “Good enough” is not good enough.’”

“We’re still the best,” Nick said. “Bear in mind that we did our layoffs early-at your insistence, let me remind you. Everyone else waited. We got ahead of the curve.”

“Fine, but you’re still not delivering on your plan.”

“To be fair,” Scott pointed out, “Nick’s plan didn’t assume the economy was going to get worse.”

“Scott,” Todd said in a deadly quiet voice, “Nick’s the CEO. He should have anticipated turns in the economy. Look, Nick, we always like to give our CEOs a lot of rope.” He gave Nick a steady blue stare. What did that mean, anyway? Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself-was that it? “We don’t want to run your business-we want you to run your business,” Todd went on. “But not if you’re going to run it into the ground. At the end of the day, you work for us. That means that your job is to protect our investors’ capital.”

“And the way to protect your capital,” Nick said, straining to remain civil, “is to invest in the business now, during the downturn. Now’s the time to invest in new technology. That way, when the economy comes back, we kick butt.” He looked at Dorothy. “Sorry.” She didn’t respond, her icy blue eyes focused on the middle distance.

Todd, leafing through his board book, looked up. “Like spending thirty million dollars in the last three years in development costs for a new chair?”

“A bargain,” Nick said. “Design and retooling costs, twenty-six patents, two separate design teams. And that’s actually less than Steelcase spent on their Leap chair, which turned out to be a great investment. Or Herman Miller spent on developing the Aeron chair. I mean, don’t forget, product design and development is a core value at Stratton.” Todd was silent for a moment. Score one for the defense. Before he could reply, Nick went on: “Now, if you want to continue this discussion, I’d like to move that we go into executive session.” The motion was seconded and approved by voice vote. This was the point when Scott, as an invited guest but not a board member, normally got up to leave. Nick caught his eye, but Scott’s expression was opaque, unreadable. He wasn’t gathering his things, wasn’t getting up.

“Listen, Nick, we’re going to ask Scott to stay,” Todd said.

“Really?” was all Nick could think to say. “That’s-that’s not the protocol.”

Now Davis Eilers, who’d barely said a word, spoke up. “Nick, we’ve decided that it’s time that Scott join the board formally. We really feel that Scott’s become an important enough part of the management team that we’d like his official participation on the board. We think he can add a lot of value.”

Nick, stunned, swallowed hard as he racked his brain for something to say. He tried to catch Scott’s eye again, but Scott was avoiding his glance. He nodded, thought. The Dan Finegold thing was outrageous. But now, adding Scott as a board member without even telling him in advance, let alone pretending to seek his opinion? He wanted to call them on it, bring it all out into the open, but all he said was, “Well, he can certainly add value.”

“Thanks for understanding,” Eilers said.

“Uh, Nick, we’re going to be making a few changes going forward,” Todd said.

As opposed to what? Nick thought. Going backward? He said, “Oh?”

“We think this board should be meeting every month instead of quarterly.”

Nick nodded. “That’s a lot of travel to Fenwick,” he said.

“Well, we can alternate between Boston and Fenwick,” Todd said. “And we’ll be looking to see the financials weekly instead of monthly.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged,” Nick said slowly. “As long as Scott doesn’t mind.” Scott was examining his board book closely and didn’t look up.

“Nick,” said Davis Eilers, “we’ve also been thinking that, if and when you decide to fire any of your direct reports-any of the executive managers-that’s going to require board approval.”

“Well, that’s not what my contract says.” He could feel his face start to prickle.

“No, but it’s an amendment we’d be in favor of. Sort of making sure we’re all on the same page, personnelwise. Like they say, the only constant is change.”

“You guys are hiring me to do the best job I can,” Nick said. “Enough rope, like you always say. And you just said you want me to run the company-you don’t want to run it yourself.”

“Of course,” Eilers said.

Todd said, “We just don’t want any surprises. You know, keep things running smoothly.” He’d adopted a reasonable tone, no longer combative. He knew he’d won. “We’ve got an almost-two-billion-dollar company to run. That’s a big job for anyone, even someone who’s paying full attention. Hey, it’s like football, you know? You may be the quarterback, but you’re not going to have a winning team without linesmen and receivers and running backs-and coaches. Think of us as your coaches, right?”

Nick gave a slow, faint smile. “Coaches,” he said. “Right.”

When the board meeting came to an end an hour and a half later, Nick was the first to leave the room. He needed to get the hell out of there before he lost it. That wouldn’t be good. I’m not going to quit, he told himself. Make them fire me. Quit and you get nothing. Get fired without cause, and the payoff was considerable. Five million bucks. That was in the contract he’d negotiated when he sold to Fairfield, when the idea of getting fired seemed like science fiction. He was a rock star then; they’d never dump him.

As he left, he noticed two people seated just outside the boardroom, a thuggy-looking blond man in a bad suit and a well-dressed, attractive black woman.

The woman Rinaldi had told him about.

The homicide detective.

The woman he’d seen at Stadler’s funeral.

“Mr. Conover,” she called out. “Could we talk to you for a few minutes?”