Company Man

37

Nick took them into one of the conference rooms. Talking at his home base was out of the question, given the way anyone, including Marjorie, could listen in.

He took the lead. He sat at the head of the table. The moment the two homicide detectives sat, he began speaking. He adopted a calm, authoritative tone, brisk but cordial. He was the head of a major corporation with a million things going on, and these two cops were here without an appointment, without even giving him the courtesy of a heads-up call. Yet he didn’t want to diminish the importance of what they were doing. They were investigating the murder of a Stratton employee. He wanted them to feel that he took this seriously. It was a delicate balancing act.

He was scared shitless. He didn’t like the fact that they’d just shown up at his workplace. There was something aggressive, almost accusatory about that. He wanted to let them know, through his tone and his attitude, that he didn’t appreciate this, while at the same time communicating his respect for their mission.

“Detectives,” he said, “I can spare maybe five minutes. You’ve caught me on my busiest day.”

“Thanks for seeing us,” said the black woman. The blond man blinked a few times, like a Komodo dragon admiring a delicious-looking goat, but said nothing. Nick could tell that he was going to be trouble. The black woman was sweetly apologetic, an obvious pushover. The blond man-Busbee? Bugbee?-was the one to watch.

“I wish you’d called my office and made an appointment. I’d be happy to talk to you at greater length another time.”

“This shouldn’t take that long,” said the blond man.

“Tell me what I can do for you,” Nick said.

“Mr. Conover, as you know, an employee of the Stratton Company was found dead last week,” said the black woman. She was quite pretty, and there was something serene about her.

“Yes,” Nick said. “Andrew Stadler. A terrible tragedy.”

“Did you know Mr. Stadler?” she went on.

Nick shook his head. “No, unfortunately. We have five thousand employees-as many as ten thousand two years ago, before we had to let so many people go-and I can’t possibly get to know everyone. Though I wish I could.” He smiled wistfully.

“Yet you went to his funeral,” she pointed out.

“Of course.”

“You always go to the funerals of Stratton employees?” said the blond detective.

“Not always. When I can, though. I don’t always feel welcome, not anymore. But I feel it’s the least I can do.”

“You never met Mr. Stadler, is that right?” the black woman said.

“Right.”

“You were aware of his…situation, though, isn’t that right?” she continued.

“His situation?”

“His personal troubles.”

“I heard later that he’d been hospitalized, but plenty of people have mental illness and aren’t violent.”

“Oh?” the black detective said quickly. “How did you know he’d been hospitalized? Did you see his personnel file?”

“Didn’t I read it in the newspaper?”

“There wasn’t anything in the paper about that,” said the blond man.

“Must’ve been,” Nick said. There had been something in the paper, hadn’t there? “Said something about a ‘troubled emotional history’ or something, right?”

“Nothing about hospitalization,” the blond man said firmly.

“Someone must have mentioned it to me, then.”

“Your corporate security director, Edward Rinaldi?”

“Possibly. But I don’t recall.”

“I see,” the black woman said, jotting something down.

“Mr. Conover, did Edward Rinaldi tell you he thought Andrew Stadler was the guy who killed your dog?” the blond cop asked.

Nick squinted, as if trying to recall. He remembered asking Eddie about this.

Told her you didn’t even know who the guy was. Pretty much true.

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

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

“Eddie didn’t mention any names to me,” Nick said.

“Is that right?” the woman said, sounding surprised.

Nick nodded. “To be honest, it’s been a rough year. I’m the head of a company that’s had to let half its employees go. There’s a lot of anger out there, understandably.”

“You’re not the most popular man in town,” she suggested.

“That’s putting it mildly. I’ve gotten angry letters from downsized employees, really heartbreaking letters.”

“Threats?” she asked.

“Could be, but I wouldn’t know about them.”

“How could you not know about threats?” the male cop said.

“I’m not the first to open my mail here. If I get a threatening letter, it goes right to Security-I never see it.”

“You don’t want to know?” he said. “Me, I’d want to know.”

“Not me. Not unless I need to know for some reason. The less I know, the better.”

“Really?” said the blond man.

“Really. I don’t like to go around feeling paranoid. There’s no point in it.”

“Did Mr. Rinaldi tell you why he was looking into Mr. Stadler’s background?” the black woman persisted.

“No. I didn’t even know he was.”

“He didn’t tell you later he’d been looking into Stadler?” she persisted.

“Nope. He never told me anything about Stadler. I mean, I had no idea-have no idea-what Eddie was looking into. He does his job and I do mine.”

“Mr. Rinaldi never even mentioned Stadler’s name to you?” the woman said.

“Not that I recall, no.”

“I’m confused,” she said. “I thought you just said Mr. Rinaldi might have told you about Andrew Stadler’s hospitalization. Which would sort of require him to mention Stadler’s name, right?”

Nick felt the tiniest trickle of sweat run slowly down his earlobe. “After the news of Stadler’s death came out, Eddie may have mentioned his name to me in passing. But I really don’t recall.”

“Hmm,” the woman said. A few seconds of silence went by.

Nick ignored the sweat trickle, not wanting to call attention to it by brushing it away.

“Mr. Conover,” said the blond man, “your house has been broken into a bunch of times in the last year, right? Since the layoffs began?”

“Several times, yes.”

“By the same person?”

“It’s hard to say. But I’d guess, yeah, the same person.”

“There was graffiti and such?”

“Graffiti spray-painted inside my house, on the walls.”

“What kind of graffiti?” the black detective asked.

“‘No hiding place.’”

“That’s what they wrote?”

“Right.”

“Did you receive any death threats?”

“No. Ever since the layoffs started, two years ago, I’ve gotten occasional threatening phone calls, but nothing quite that specific.”

“Well, your family dog was killed,” said the blond detective. “That’s sort of a death threat, wouldn’t you say?”

Nick considered for a moment. “Possibly. Whatever it was, it was a sick, depraved thing to do.” He worried that he’d just gone too far: had be just betrayed his anger? Yet how else would he be expected to react? He noticed that the black woman wrote something down in her notebook.

“The Fenwick police have any idea who did this?” the guy said.

“No idea.”

“Does Mr. Rinaldi get involved in your personal security, outside the corporation?” the black detective asked.

“Informally, yeah,” Nick said. “Sometimes. After this last incident, I asked him to put in a new security system.”

“So you must have discussed the incident with him,” she said.

Nick hesitated, a beat too long. What did Eddie tell them, exactly? Did Eddie tell them he came over to the house after Barney was slaughtered? He wished he’d talked to Eddie longer, found out everything he’d said. Shit. “A bit. I asked his advice, sure.” He waited for the inevitable next question-inevitable to him, at least: did Eddie Rinaldi come to his house after Barney had been discovered in the pool? And what was the right answer?

Instead, the black detective said, “Mr. Conover, how long ago did you move into Fenwicke Estates?”

“About a year ago.”

“After all the layoffs were announced?” she went on.

“About a year after.”

“Why?”

Nick paused. “My wife insisted.”

“Why was that?”

“She was concerned.”

“About what?”

“That our family might be threatened.”

“What made her so concerned?”

“Instinct, mostly. She knew there were a few people who might want to do us harm.”

“So you did hear about threats,” the black woman said. “But you just said you didn’t know about any-you didn’t want to know about them.”

Nick folded his hands on the table. He was feeling increasingly frantic, trapped like some cornered animal, and he knew the only way to respond was to sound both reasonable and blunt. “Did I hear about specific threats? No. Did I hear that there were threats-that a few isolated fringe cases might have it in for me and my family? Sure. People talk. Rumors spread. I wasn’t going to wait to see if there was any basis in these rumors. And I can tell you my wife sure as hell wasn’t going to wait.”

The two detectives seemed to accept his answer. “Before you moved to your new house, Mr. Conover, did you have any break-ins?”

“Not till we moved to Fenwicke Estates.”

The blond detective smiled. “Guess the…gated community…didn’t give you much protection, huh?” He put a surly spin on the words “gated community,” made no attempt to conceal a note of smugness.

“Just takes longer to get in and out of,” Nick admitted.

The blond guy chuckled, shook his head. “Costs a lot more, though, I bet.”

“There you go.”

“But you can afford it.”

Nick shrugged. “Wasn’t my idea to move there. It was my wife’s.”

“Your wife,” said the black woman. “She-she passed away last year, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Nothing suspicious about her death, was there?”

A pause. “No, nothing suspicious,” Nick said slowly. “She was killed in a car accident.”

“You were driving?” she asked.

“She was driving.”

“Nothing-was alcohol involved?”

“The other driver, yeah,” Nick said. “A semi. He’d been drinking.”

“But not you.”

“No,” he said. “Not me.” He compressed his lips, then looked at his watch. “I’m afraid-”

The blond guy stood up. “Thanks for taking the time.”

But the black woman remained seated. “Just a couple more things, sir?”

“Can we continue this some other time?” Nick said.

“Just-just another minute, if you don’t mind. We don’t want to leave any stone unturned. Do you own any guns, Mr. Conover?”

“Guns?” Nick shook his head. He hoped his face hadn’t reddened.

“No handguns at all?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“Thank you. And last Tuesday night, where were you?”

“At home. I haven’t traveled anywhere in ten days or so.”

“What time did you go to sleep, do you remember?”

“Last Tuesday?”

“A week ago.”

Nick thought a moment. “I went out for dinner Wednesday night. Tuesday I was at home.”

“Do you remember what time you went to sleep?”

“I can’t-well, I’m normally asleep by eleven, eleven-thirty.”

“So you’d say by eleven-thirty you were in bed?”

“That sounds about right.” She was smart, Nick realized. Smarter, he saw now, than the blond guy, who was all posture and attitude.

“Sleep through the night?”

“Sure.” Jesus, he thought. What was she implying?

“Okay, great,” she said. She got up. “That’s all we need. We appreciate your taking the time to talk to us.”

Nick rose, shook their hands. “Anytime,” he said. “Just next time, give me some notice.”

“We will,” the black woman said. She stopped, appeared to hesitate. “I’m sorry to take up your time, Mr. Conover. But you know, our victims aren’t just victims-they’re human beings. Whatever their problems, whatever their difficulties, a man is dead. Someone who mattered to someone. We’re all beloved by someone, you know.”

“I’d like to think so,” Nick said.

38

As soon as Nick showed the two homicide cops to the elevator, he returned to the boardroom, hoping to catch Todd Muldaur, but the room was empty. Todd and the others had left. He returned to his office area-hell, his cubicle-taking an indirect route, past Scott’s area.

“Afternoon, Gloria,” he said to Scott’s admin, a small, hypercompetent woman with a broad face and blond hair cut in bangs. “Scott in?”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Conover. Scott’s right-”

“Hey, Nick,” Scott said, emerging from behind his panel. “Man, that was a rough ride today, huh?”

“Tell me about it,” Nick said blandly. He kept on going, toward Scott’s desk, to the round table where Scott held his conferences.

“That put root canals in a whole new perspective,” Scott said. He began lifting piles of papers off the round table, moving them to a credenza next to his desk. “So what’d you think of that new guy, Finegold?”

“Seems nice enough,” Nick said guardedly, standing at the table, waiting for Scott to finish clearing away the papers.

“That guy’s rolling in it, you know. I mean, totally loaded. You know he hired that boy band ’N Sync to play at his daughter’s bat mitzvah a couple of years back, when they were still hot?”

“He’s a hot spare,” Nick said.

“A what?”

“A hot spare. Disk drive fails, you swap it with a spare, all ready to go. Plug-’n’-play. Ready to go.”

“Dan? Oh-no, I’m sure they’re just trying to strengthen the bench. Is that the right sports term? He’s a great guy, actually-tell you a funny story, when he was at-”

“I had to learn about Atlas McKenzie from Todd?” Nick broke in. “What the hell’s up with that?”

Scott’s face colored; he examined the tabletop. “I told you, I got the call from Hardwick on my way over to dinner,” he said. “I tried you on your cell, but I guess it was off.”

“You didn’t leave a message.”

“Well, it’s-it wasn’t the sort of thing you want to leave in a voice mail, you know-”

“And you didn’t e-mail me? You didn’t call me this morning before the board meeting? You let me find out from Todd fucking Muldaur?”

Scott’s hands flew up, palms out. “I didn’t have a chance-”

“And you didn’t have a chance to tell me they wanted to put you on the board?” Nick said.

Scott stared at the white Formica tabletop as if he’d just seen something alarming there. “I didn’t,” he began, falteringly.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know that was going to happen. Why the hell didn’t you mention it to me? You couldn’t reach me on my cell, that it?”

“It-it wasn’t my place, Nick,” Scott said. He looked up at last, face gone burgundy, eyes watering. His voice was meek but his expression was fierce.

“Not your place? The fuck are you telling me? You knew they were going to put you on the board and it wasn’t your place to tell me that? You kept their little secret, embarrassed me in front of the board?”

“Hey, come on, Nick, calm down,” Scott said. “All right? It was complicated-I mean, maybe I should have said something, in retrospect, but Todd wanted me to keep it-Nick, you should take it up with Todd.”

Nick got up. “Yeah,” he said. “I just might do that.”

Don’t fuck with me, he thought. Almost said it, but at the last second something stopped him.

As he returned to his desk, Marge stopped him, holding up an envelope.

“This just came in from HR,” she said. “That check you requested.”

“Thanks,” he said, taking the envelope as he resumed walking.

“Nick,” she said.

He stopped, turned around.

“That check-for Cassie Stadler?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s a lot of money. It’s for her dad’s severance pay, isn’t it? Which he lost when he quit?”

Nick nodded.

“The company isn’t obligated to pay that, right?”

“No, it’s not.”

“But it’s the right thing to do. It’s-that’s nice, Nick.” There were tears in her eyes.

Nick nodded again, returned to his desk. He immediately picked up his handset and called Todd Muldaur’s cell phone. It rang three times, four, and just as Nick was about to hang up, Todd’s voice came on. “This is Todd.”

It sounded like a prerecorded voice-mail message, so Nick waited a second before saying, “Todd, it’s Nick Conover.”

“Oh, hey, Nick, there you are. You bolted before I had a chance to say goodbye, dude.”

“Todd, are you trying to squeeze me out?”

A beat. “What makes you say that?”

“Come on, man. What happened in there, in the board meeting. Bring in Finegold, your hot spare, putting Scott on the board without giving me a heads-up. The monthly board meetings, the weekly financials. Changing the rules of the game like that. Taking away my ability to change my team the way I see fit. What, you think I’m an idiot?”

“Nick, we don’t need to squeeze you out,” Todd said, his voice gone steely. “If we wanted you gone, you’d be gone.”

“Not without a pretty damned huge payday.”

“A rounding error at Fairfield Partners, buddy.”

“Five million bucks is a rounding error to you guys?”

“Nick, I meant what I said. We want to bring more to the table. Strengthen the team.”

“You don’t trust me to run the company, you should just come out with it.”

Todd said something, but the signal started to break up “…the way,” he was saying.

“Say again?” Nick said. “I lost you there.”

“I said, we trust you, Nick. We just don’t want you getting in the way.”

“In the way?”

“We need to make sure you’re responsive, Nick. That’s all. We want to make sure you’re on board.”

“Oh, I’m on board,” Nick said, deliberately ambiguous, insinuating. He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, exactly, except that he hoped it sounded vaguely threatening.

“Excellent,” Todd said. His voice got all crackly again as the signal weakened. A fragment: “…to hear.”

“Say again?” Nick said.

“Man, do you guys have, like, one cell tower out here in cow town? I swear, the reception sucks. All right, I better go. I’m losing you.” Then the line went dead.

For a long time, Nick stared at the long blue Stratton check he’d had the treasurer’s office cut for Cassie Stadler: a payoff, pure and simple. Andrew Stadler had quit before being laid off; legally, he wasn’t entitled to any severance. But what was legal, and what the courts might decide-if Cassie Stadler decided to press the issue-were two separate things. Better to pre-empt, he’d decided. Be generous. Show her that her father’s employer meant well, that Stratton was willing to go above and beyond what it was required to do.

That was all there was to it, he told himself.

Keep the woman happy. No one wanted a lawsuit.

And he remembered what that black woman detective had said as she left. “We’re all beloved by someone,” she’d said. She had a point. As crazy, as deranged as Andrew Stadler was, he’d been loved by his daughter.

He hit the intercom button. “Marge,” he said. “I need you to call Cassie Stadler for me.”

“I believe she’s living in her father’s house,” came Marge’s voice over the speakerphone.

“Right. Tell her I want to stop by. I have something for her.”

39

Sergeant Jack Noyce pulled Audrey into his glass-walled office, which was not much bigger than Audrey’s cubicle. He had it outfitted with an expensive-looking sound system, though, a top-of-the-line DVD player and speakers. Noyce loved his audio equipment, and he loved music. Sometimes Audrey would see him with his headphones on, enjoying music, or listening to the speakers with the office door closed.

As head of the Major Case Team, he had all sorts of administrative responsibilities and more than a dozen cops to supervise, and he spent much of his day in meetings. Music-Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Art Tatum, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, all the jazz piano greats-seemed to be his only escape.

A piece was playing quietly on Noyce’s stereo, a beautiful and soulful rendition of the ballad “You Go to My Head,” a pianist doing the melody.

“Tommy Flanagan?” Audrey said.

Noyce nodded. “You close your eyes, and you’re back in the Village Vanguard.”

“It’s lovely.”

“Audrey, you haven’t said anything about Bugbee.” His sad eyes, behind thick aviator-framed glasses, shone with concern.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“You’d tell me if it wasn’t, right?”

She laughed. “Only if I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“The practical jokes seem to have stopped.”

“Maybe he got tired of them.”

“Or maybe he’s learned to respect you.”

“You give him way too much credit,” she said with a laugh.

“And you’re the one who’s supposed to believe in the possibility of redemption. Listen, Audrey-you guys went over to Stratton?”

“Now don’t tell me he’s filling you in on every step we take.”

“No. I got a call from the security director at Stratton.”

“Rinaldi.”

“Right. You talked to him, and then you both went over to talk to Nicholas Conover.”

“What’d he call you for?”

“He says you just showed up and waited for Conover outside a board meeting? That true?”

She felt a prickle of defensiveness. “That was my decision. I wanted to avoid any prepared answers, any coordination.”

“I’m not following.” Noyce took off his glasses and began rubbing at them with a little cleaning cloth.

“I’d already talked to Rinaldi, and something didn’t sit right with me. I can’t explain it.”

“You don’t need to. Gut instinct.”

“Right.”

“Which ninety percent of the time doesn’t pan out. But hey.” He smiled. “You take what you get.”

“I didn’t want Rinaldi talking to his boss and getting his story straight.”

“So you just ambushed the CEO outside the boardroom?” Noyce laughed quietly.

“I just thought if we set up a meeting with him in advance, he’d call his security director and say, What’s this about?”

“Still not following. You telling me you think the CEO of Stratton’s got something to do with this case?”

She shook her head. “No, of course not. But there may be some connection. A couple of days before Stadler’s death, there was an incident at Nicholas Conover’s house. Someone slaughtered the family dog and dumped it in the swimming pool.”

Noyce winced. “My God. Was it Stadler?”

“We don’t know. But this was just the latest of a long series of incidents at the Conover house since they moved in, about a year ago. Up till now it’s been graffiti, nothing stolen, no violence. But each time, our uniformed division was notified-and we haven’t done a thing. They didn’t even print the knife that was used to kill the dog. From what I hear, there wasn’t a lot of motivation to do anything about it, given the way people feel about Conover.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s not right.”

“So just before Stadler’s death, Rinaldi got in touch with our uniformed division to ask about this guy Andrew Stadler and find out if he had any priors.”

“And were there any?”

“A long time ago Stadler was questioned in connection to the death of a neighbor family, but nothing ever came of it.”

“What got Rinaldi interested in Andrew Stadler?”

“Rinaldi said he went through the list of people they laid off-and it’s a long list, like five thousand people-to see who might have exhibited signs of violence.”

“Stadler did?”

“Rinaldi was evasive on that point. When I interviewed Stadler’s supervisor, at the model shop where he worked, the guy said Stadler wasn’t violent at all. Though he did quit in anger, which meant he lost the severance package. But Rinaldi said he found that Stadler had a history of mental illness.”

“So he suspected Stadler of being Conover’s stalker.”

“He denies it, but that’s the feeling I got.”

“So you think Conover or Rinaldi had something to do with Stadler’s murder?”

“I don’t know. But I do wonder about this Rinaldi fellow.”

“Oh, I know about Rinaldi.”

“He said you’re friends, you two.”

Noyce chuckled. “Did he, now.”

“He didn’t exactly play by the rules on the GRPD. He was squeezed out on suspicions of holding on to cash in a drug bust.”

“How do you know that?” Noyce was suddenly intrigued.

“I called Grand Rapids, asked around until I found someone who knew him.”

Noyce frowned, shook his head. “I’d rather you didn’t call GR.”

“Why not?”

“People talk. Rumors spread like wildfire. Things could get back to Rinaldi, and I don’t want him knowing that we’ve been asking around about him. That way we’re more likely to catch him in a lie.”

“Okay, makes sense.”

“You saying you like Rinaldi for the Stadler homicide?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. Edward Rinaldi’s an ex-cop, and a guy like that may know people, you know?”

“Who might have done a hit on some loony ex-employee?” Noyce replaced his glasses, raised one brow.

“Far-fetched, right?”

“Just a little.”

“But no more unlikely than a crack-related murder involving a guy who doesn’t fit the profile of a crackhead, had no crack in his bloodstream, and had fake crack in his pocket. A setup, in other words.”

“You make a good point.”

“Also, no fingerprints anywhere on the plastic wrapped over the body. Traces of talc indicating that surgical gloves were used to move the body. It’s all very strange. I’d like to get Rinaldi’s phone records.”

Noyce gave a long sigh. “Man, you’re opening a can of worms with Stratton.”

“What about Rinaldi’s personal phone records-home, cell, whatever?”

“Easier.”

“Could you sign off on that?”

Noyce bit his lip. “Sure. I’ll do it. You got an instinct, I like to go with it. But Audrey, listen. The Stratton Corporation has a lot of enemies in this town.”

“Tell me about it.”

“That’s why I want to be fair. I don’t want it to look like we’re going after them arbitrarily, trying to embarrass them. Bowing to public pressure, pandering. Nothing like that. I want us to play fair, but just as important, I want the appearance of fairness, okay?”

“Of course.”

“Just so long as we’re on the same page here.”

40

Cassie Stadler’s house was on West Sixteenth Street, in the part of Fenwick still known as Steepletown because of all the churches that used to be there. It was an area Nick knew well; he’d grown up here, in a tiny brown split-level with a little scrubby lawn, a chain-link fence keeping out the neighbors. When Nick was a kid, Steepletown was blue-collar, most of the men factory workers employed at Stratton. Mostly Polish Catholic, too, though the Conovers were neither Polish nor members of Sacred Heart. This was a place where people kept their money in mattresses.

He was overcome by a strange, wistful nostalgia driving through these streets. It all looked and smelled so familiar, the American Legion hall, the bowling alley, the pool hall. The triple-deckers, the aluminum siding, Corky’s Bottled Liquors. Even the cars were still big and American. Unlike the rest of Fenwick, which had gone upscale and fancy, vegan and latte, with all the galleries and the SUVs and the BMWs, something uncomfortable and ill fitting about it, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s high heels. Just before he parked the car at the curb in front of the house, a song came on the radio: Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman.” One of Laura’s favorites. She’d taught herself to play it on the piano, not badly at all. She’d sing it in the shower-“Oh, she takes care of herself…”-badly, offkey, in a thin, wobbly voice. Hearing it caused a lump to rise in Nick’s throat. He switched the radio off, couldn’t take it, and had to sit there in the car for a few minutes before he got out.

He rang the doorbell: six melodious tones sounding like a carillon. The door opened, a small figure emerging from the gloom behind the dusty screen door.

What the hell am I doing? he thought. Jesus, this is insane. The daughter of the man I killed.

Everyone is beloved by someone, the cop had said.

This is that someone.

“Mr. Conover,” she said. She wore a black T-shirt and worn jeans. She was slim, even tinier than he remembered from the funeral, and her expression was hard, wary.

“May I come in for a second?”

Her eyes were red-rimmed, raccoon smudges beneath. “Why?”

“I have something for you.”

She stared some more, then shrugged. “Okay.” The bare minimum of politeness, nothing more. She pushed open the screen door.

Nick entered a small, dark foyer that smelled of mildew and damp carpeting. Mail lay in heaps on a trestle table. There were a few homey touches-a painting in an ornate gold frame, a bad seascape, looked like a reproduction. A vase of dried flowers. A lamp with a fringed shade. A sampler in a severe black frame, done in needlepoint or whatever, that said LET ME LIVE IN THE HOUSE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND BE A FRIEND TO MAN, over a stitched image of a house that looked a good deal nicer than the one it hung in. It seemed as if nothing had been moved, or dusted, in a decade. He caught a glimpse of a small kitchen, a big old white round-shouldered refrigerator.

She backed up a few steps, standing in a cone of light from a torchere. “What’s this all about?”

Nick produced the envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She took it, gave a puzzled look, examined the envelope as if she’d never seen one before. Then she slid out the pale blue check. When she saw the amount, she betrayed no surprise, no reaction at all. “I don’t get it.”

“The least we can do,” Nick said.

“What’s it for?”

“The severance pay your father should have gotten.”

Realization dawned in her eyes. “My dad quit.”

“He was a troubled man.”

She flashed a smile, bright white teeth, that in another context would have been sexy. Now it seemed just unsettling. “This is so interesting,” she said. Her voice was velvety smooth, pleasingly deep. There was something about her mouth, the way it curled up at the ends even when she wasn’t smiling, giving her a kind of knowing look.

“Hmm?”

“This,” she said.

“The check? I don’t understand.”

“No. You. What you’re doing here.”

“Oh?”

“It’s like you’re making a payoff.”

“A payoff? No. Your father should have been counseled better at his outplacement interview. We shouldn’t have let him walk out without the same severance package everyone else got, whether he quit or not. He was angry, and rightly so. But he was a longtime employee who deserved better than that.”

“It’s a hell of a lot of money.”

“He worked for Stratton for thirty-six years. It’s what he was entitled to. Maybe not legally, but morally.”

“It’s guilt money. Schuldgeld, in German, right?” Those corners of her mouth turned all the way up in a canny smile. Closer to a smirk, maybe. “The word guilt has the same root as the German word for money, Geld.”

“I wouldn’t know.” He felt his insides clutch tight. “I just didn’t think you should be left high and dry.”

“God, I don’t know how you can stand doing what you do.”

She has the right to go after me, Nick thought. Let her. Let her rant, do her whole anti-corporate thing. Trash Stratton, and me. Make her feel better. Maybe that’s why you’re here: masochism.

“Ah, right,” he said. “‘Slasher Nick’ and all that.”

“I mean, it can’t be easy. Being hated by just about everyone in town.”

“Part of my job,” he said.

“Must be nice to have one.”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”

“Life must have been a lot easier a couple of years ago when everyone loved you, I bet. You must have felt you were really in the groove, hitting on all cylinders. Then all of a sudden you’re the bad guy.”

“It’s not a popularity contest.” The hell was this?

A mysterious smile. “A man like you wants to be liked. Needs to be liked.”

“I should be going.”

“I’m making you uncomfortable,” she said. “You’re not the introspective type.” A beat. “Why are you really here? Don’t trust the messenger service?”

Nick shook his head vaguely. “I’m not sure. Maybe I feel really bad for you. I lost my wife last year. I know how hard this can be.”

When she looked up at him, there seemed to be a kind of pain in the depths of her hazel eyes. “Kids?”

“Two. Girl and a boy.”

“How old?”

“Julia’s ten. Lucas is sixteen.”

“God, to lose your mother at that age. I guess there’s always enough pain to go around at the banquet of life. Plenty of seconds, right?” She sounded as if the wind had suddenly gone out of her.

“I’ve got to get back. I’m sorry if it bothered you, me coming by like this.”

Suddenly she sank to the floor, collapsing into a seated position on the wall-to-wall carpet, canting to one side. Her legs folded up under her. She supported herself with one arm. “Jesus,” she said.

“You okay?” Nick came up to her, leaned over.

Her other hand was against her forehead. Her eyes were closed. Her translucent skin was ashen.

“Jesus, I’m sorry. All the blood just left my head, and I…”

“What can I get you?”

She shook her head. “I just need to sit down. Lightheaded.”

“Glass of water or something?” He kneeled beside her. She looked like she was on the verge of toppling over, passing out. “Food, maybe?”

She shook her head again. “I’m fine.”

“I don’t think so. Stay there, I’ll get you something.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, her eyes unfocused. “Forget it, don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”

Nick got up, went into the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled up in the sink and on the counter next to it, a bunch of Chinese takeout cartons. He looked around, found the electric stove, a kettle sitting on one burner. He picked it up, felt it was empty. He filled it in the sink, shoving aside some of the stacked plates to make room for the kettle. It took him a couple of seconds to figure out which knob on the stove turned on which burner. The burner took a long time to go from black to orange.

“You like Szechuan Garden?” he called out.

Silence.

“You okay?” he said.

“It’s pretty gross, actually,” she said after another pause, voice weak. “There’s like two, maybe three Chinese restaurants in this whole town, one worse than the next.” Another pause. “There’s more than that on my block in Chicago.”

“Looks like you get a lot of takeout from there anyway.”

“I can walk to it. I haven’t felt much like cooking, since…”

She was standing at the threshold to the kitchen, entered slowly and unsteadily. She sank down in one of the kitchen chairs, chrome with a red vinyl seat back, the table red Formica with a cracked ice pattern and chrome banding around the edge.

The teakettle was making a hollow roaring sound. Nick opened the refrigerator-“Frigidaire” on the front in that great old squat script, raised metal lettering, reminding Nick of the refrigerator in his childhood home-and found it pretty much empty. A quart of skim milk, an opened bottle of Australian chardonnay with a cork in it; a carton of eggs, half gone.

He found a rind of Parmesan cheese, a salvageable bunch of scallions.

“You got a grater?”

“You serious?”

41

He set the omelet on the table before her, a fork and a paper napkin, a mug of tea. The mug, he noticed too late, had the old 1970s Stratton logo on one side.

She dug into it, eating ravenously.

“When’s the last time you ate today?” Nick asked.

“Right now,” she said. “I forgot to eat.”

“Forgot?”

“I’ve had other things on my mind. Hey, this isn’t bad.”

“Thank you.”

“I wouldn’t have figured you for a chef.”

“That’s about the extent of my cooking ability.”

“I feel way better already. Thank you. I thought I was going to pass out.”

“You’re welcome. I saw some salami in there, but I thought you might be a vegan or something.”

“Vegans don’t eat eggs,” she said. “Yum. God, you know, there’s some kinds of ribbon worms that actually eat themselves if they don’t find any food.”

“Glad I got here in time.”

“The head of Stratton makes a mean omelet. Wait till the newspapers get hold of that.”

“So how did you end up in Chicago?”

“Long story. I grew up here. But my mom grew tired of my dad’s craziness, when I was like nine or ten. That was before he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. She moved to the Windy City and left me here with Dad. A couple of years later, I went to live with her and her new husband. Hey, this is my house, and I’m not being much of a hostess.”

She got up, went over to one of the lower cabinets, opened the door. It held a collection of dusty bottles, vermouth and Baileys Irish Cream and such. “Let me guess-you’re a Scotch kinda guy.”

“I’ve got to get home to the kids.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Sure.” Something waiflike and needy in her face got to him. He’d told Marta an hour or so; another hour wouldn’t be a big deal.

“But maybe a little Scotch would be okay.”

She seemed to light up, leaned over and pulled out a bottle of Jameson. “Irish, not Scotch-okay?”

“Fine with me.”

She pulled out a cut-glass tumbler from the same cabinet. “Whoo boy,” she said, blowing a cloud of dust out of it. She held it under the running tap in the sink. “I’m going to say rocks.”

“Hmm?”

“Ice cubes. You drink your whiskey on the rocks.” She went to the antique Frigidaire, opened the freezer, took out the kind of ice tray Nick hadn’t seen in decades, aluminum with the lever you pull up to break the ice into cubes. She yanked back the handle, making a scrunching sound that sounded like his childhood. Reminded him of his dad, who liked his Scotch on the rocks, every night and too much of it.

She plopped a handful of jagged cubes into the glass, glugged in a few inches of whiskey, came over and handed it to him. She looked directly into his eyes, the first time she’d done that. Her eyes were big and gray-green and lucid, and Nick felt a tug in his groin. He immediately felt a flush of shame. Jesus, he thought.

“Thanks,” he said. The glass had FAMOUS GROUSE etched into it. It was the kind of thing you get at a liquor store packed with the bottle, a promotional deal.

“How about you?”

“I hate whiskey,” she said. The kettle began whistling shrilly. She pulled it off the burner, found a carton of teabags in a drawer, and poured herself a mug of herbal tea.

“How does it feel being home?” The whiskey had a pleasant bite to it, and he felt its effect immediately. He didn’t recall when he’d last eaten anything himself, actually.

“Strange,” she said, sitting down at the table. “Brings a lot of things back. Some good things, some not good things.” She looked at him. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Try me.”

“Do you know what it’s like to have a parent with severe mental illness? The whole point is, you’re a child, so you don’t grasp what’s going on.”

“Right. How could you?”

Cassie closed her eyes, and it was as if she were in some other place. “So you’re his beloved daughter, and he hugs you like nobody can hug you and he puts his forehead to yours and you feel so safe, and so loved, and everything’s right with the world. And then, one day, he’s different-except, as far as he’s concerned, you’re different.”

“Because of the disease.”

“He looks at you and you’re a stranger to him. You’re not his beloved daughter now. Maybe you resemble her, but he’s not fooled, he knows you’ve been replaced by someone or something else. He looks at you and he sees a Fembot, you know? And you say, ‘Daddy!’ You’re three or four or five and you throw your arms open, waiting for your super-special hug. And he says, ‘Who are you? Who are you really?’ and he says, ‘Get away! Get away! Get away!’” Her mimicry was uncanny; Nick was beginning to glimpse the nightmare she had endured. “You realize that he’s terrified of you. And it’s different from anything you’ve ever experienced. Because it isn’t what happens when, you know, you misbehave, and Mommy or Daddy turns red and you get yelled at. Every kid knows what that’s like. They’re mad. But you know they still love you, and they’re still aware of your existence. They don’t think you’re an alien. They’re not frightened of you. It’s different when a parent has schizophrenia. It steals over them, and suddenly you don’t exist to them any longer. You’re not a daughter anymore. Just some impostor. Just some intruder. Some…outsider. Someone who doesn’t belong.” She smiled sadly.

“He was ill.”

“He was ill,” Cassie repeated. “But a child doesn’t understand that. A child can’t understand it. Even if anybody had explained to me, I probably wouldn’t have understood.” She sniffed, her eyes flooded with tears. She frowned, turned away, wiped her eyes with her T-shirt, exposing her flat belly, a tiny pouting navel. Nick tried not to look.

“Nobody ever told you what was going on?”

“When I was maybe thirteen, I finally figured it out. My mother didn’t want to deal, and her way of not dealing meant you didn’t talk about it. Which is pretty crazy, too, when you think about it.”

“I can’t imagine what you had to go through.” And he couldn’t-not what she’d had to go through, nor what her father’s death was causing her to relive. He ached to do something for her.

“No, you can’t imagine. But it messes with your head. I mean, it messed with mine.”

She tucked her chin in close to her chest, ran her fingers through her spiky hair, and when she looked up, her cheeks were wet. “You don’t need this,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “I think you should go.”

“Cassie,” he said. It came out in a whisper, sounded far more intimate than he’d intended.

For a while, her breaths came in short little puffs. When she spoke again, her voice was strained. “You need to be there for your kids,” she said. “There’s nothing more important than family, okay?”

“Not much of a family these days.”

“Don’t say that,” Cassie said. She looked up at him, eyes fierce. “You don’t fucking talk that way, ever.” Something had flared up inside her, like a whole book of matches, and then subsided almost as quickly. But who could blame the woman, having so recently put her father in the ground? And then he remembered why.

“Sorry,” he said. “It hasn’t been easy for the kids, and I’m not exactly doing my job.”

“How’d she die?” Her voice was soft. “Their mother.”

He took another sip. A quick scene played in his head, jittery, badly spliced film. The pebbles of glass strewn throughout Laura’s hair. The spiderwebbed windshield. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Natural question.”

“No, you’re-crying.”

He realized that he was, and as he turned his face, embarrassed, cursing the booze, she got up from her chair, came up to him. She put a small warm hand on his face, leaned close to him, and put her lips on his.

Startled, he backed away, but she moved in closer, pressed her lips against his, harder, her other hand pressed against his chest.

He turned his head away. “Cassie, I’ve got to get home.”

Cassie smiled uncomfortably. “Go,” she said. “Your kids are waiting.”

“It’s the babysitter, actually. She hates it when I come home later than I promised.”

“Your daughter-what’s her name, again?”

“Julia.”

“Julia. Sweet name. Go home to Julia and Luke. They need you. Go back to your gated community.”

“How’d you know?”

“People talk. It’s perfect.”

“What?”

“You living in a gated community.”

“I’m not really the gated-community type.”

“Oh, I think you are,” she said. “More than you know.”

42

LaTonya’s twelve-year-old daughter, Camille, was practicing piano in the next room, which made it hard for Audrey to concentrate on what her sister-in-law was saying. LaTonya was speaking in a low voice, uncharacteristically for her, while she removed a sweet-potato casserole from the oven.

“Let me tell you,” LaTonya said, “if Paul didn’t have a steady income, I don’t know how we’d get by with three kids still in the house.”

Audrey, who’d noticed the kitchen piled high with cartons of thermogenic fat-burning supplements, said, “But what about the vitamins?”

“Shit!” LaTonya shouted, dropping the casserole to the open oven door. “These damned oven mitts have a hole in them-what the hell good are they?”

Thomas, who was nine, ran in from the dining room where he and Matthew, eleven, were allegedly setting the table, though mostly just clattering the dishes and giggling. “You okay, Mom?”

“I’m fine,” LaTonya said, picking up the casserole again and putting it on the stovetop. “You get back out there and finish setting the table, and you tell Matthew to go tell your father and Uncle Leon to get off their lazy butts and come in to dinner.” She turned to Audrey, a disgusted look on her face. “Once again, I’m ahead of the curve.”

“How so?”

“These thermogenic supplements. Fenwick is a backward, fearful community,” she said gravely. “They do not want to try new things.”

“And now you’re stuck with all these bottles.”

“If they think I’m paying for them, they’ve got another think coming. I’m going to ask you to read the small print on my agreement, because I don’t think they can get away with it.”

“Sure,” Audrey said without enthusiasm. The last thing she wanted to do was get involved in extricating LaTonya from another mess she’d created. “You know, the money isn’t the worst part,” Audrey said. “I mean, it’s not easy, but we can get by.”

“Not having kids,” LaTonya pointed out.

“Right. It’s dealing with Leon.”

“What the hell does he do all day?” LaTonya demanded, one hand on her left hip, waggling the other hand to cool it off.

“He watches a lot of TV and he drinks,” Audrey said.

“You see, I knew this would happen. We spoiled him growing up. The baby of the family. Anything he wanted, he got. My momma and me, we waited on him hand and foot, and now you’re paying the price. You hear what I hear?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly.” She shouted, earsplittingly loud, “Camille, you’ve got twenty more minutes of practicing, so don’t stop now!”

An anguished, garbled protest came from the next room.

“And you don’t get any supper until you’re done, so move it!” She glowered at Audrey. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with her ownself. She pays me no mind at all.”

Dinner was meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, collards, and sweet-potato casserole, everything heavy and greasy but delicious. Leon sat next to his sister at one end of the table, LaTonya’s husband at the other, the two squirming boys on one side facing Audrey and Camille’s empty place.

The sound of the piano came from the living room, sporadic, sullen. Brahms, Audrey recognized. A pretty piece. A waltz, maybe? Her niece was struggling with it.

Thomas squawked with laughter over something, and Matthew said, “Fuck you!”

LaTonya exploded: “Don’t you ever use language like that in this house, you hear me?”

The two boys fell instantly silent. Matthew, looking like a whipped puppy, said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s right,” LaTonya said.

Audrey caught the younger boy’s eye and gave him a mildly disapproving look that was still, she hoped, filled with auntly love.

Leon was stuffing his face meanwhile. He said, “I wish I could eat supper here every night, LaTonya.”

She beamed, then caught herself. “Is there any reason you can’t get yourself a job?”

“Doing what?” Leon said, dropping his fork dramatically. “Operating an electrostatic spray gun at the Seven-Eleven, maybe?”

“Doing something,” LaTonya said.

“Doing something?” Leon said. “Like what? Like what do you think a guy with my skills can do here?”

“Your skills,” LaTonya scoffed.

“How do you think it feels getting laid off?” Leon said, his voice rising. “Do you have any idea? How do you think I feel about myself?”

“I’ll tell you how I feel about you sitting around doing absolutely nothing,” LaTonya said. She cocked her head. “Camille,” she shouted, “what are you doing?”

Another muffled cry.

“We’re all eating in here,” LaTonya yelled. “We’re likely to finish dinner without you, rate you’re practicing.”

Camille screamed back, “I can’t stand it!”

“You can yell all you want,” LaTonya bellowed. “Won’t make any difference. You’re not getting over on me.”

“Let me talk to her,” Audrey said. She excused herself from the table, went into the next room.

Camille was weeping at the piano, her head resting on her elbows atop the keys. Audrey sat down at the bench next to her. She stroked her niece’s hair, lingering on the kitchen, that kinky hair at the nape of her neck. “What is it, honey?”

“I can’t stand it,” Camille said. She sat up. Her face was streaked with tears. She looked genuinely upset; it was no act. “I don’t understand this. This is torture.”

Audrey looked at the sheet music. Brahms’s Waltz in A Minor. “What don’t you get, baby?”

Camille touched the music with a pudgy, tear-damp finger, making a tiny pucker.

“The trill, is that it?”

“I guess.”

Audrey nudged Camille over a bit and played a few measures. “Like that?”

“Yeah, but I can’t do that.”

“Try this.” Audrey played the trill slowly. “Down an octave.”

Camille placed her fingers on the keyboard and tried.

“Like this,” Audrey said, playing again.

Camille imitated her. Close enough. “That’s it, baby. You got it. Try it again.”

Camille played it, got it right.

“Now go back a couple of measures. To here. Let me hear it.”

Camille played the first two lines of the second page.

“Boy, are you a fast learner,” Audrey marveled. “You don’t even need me anymore.”

Camille smiled faintly.

“When’s your recital?”

“Next week.”

“What are you doing besides this?”

“Little Prelude.”

“Beethoven?”

Camille nodded.

“Can I come?”

Camille smiled again, this time a happy grin. “You think you have time?”

“I’ll make time, baby. I’d love to. Now, hurry up and finish. I’m getting lonely at the table without you.”

Paul looked up as Audrey entered the dining room. He was a pigeon-chested man with sunken cheeks, a recessive gene but a sweet-natured guy. Camille was back at the Brahms, strong and enthusiastic. “I don’t know what you threatened her with, but sounds like it worked,” he said.

“She probably pulled out her handcuffs,” said LaTonya.

“Probably her gun,” Leon mumbled. He seemed to have calmed down in the meantime, retreated back into his old, monosyllabic self.

“No,” Audrey said, sitting down. “She just needed a little help figuring something out.”

“I want an ice cream sundae for dessert,” the younger boy said.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” said LaTonya. “Right now it’s looking awful grim for you.”

“How come?”

“You got more than half your meat loaf left. Now Audrey, what are you working on these days?”

“It’s not dinner-table conversation,” Audrey said.

“I don’t mean the gory details.”

“I’m afraid it’s all gory details,” Audrey said.

“She’s working on that murder of the Stratton worker got murdered down on Hastings,” Leon said.

Audrey was amazed he even knew what she was working on. “People aren’t supposed to know what I’m doing,” she told him.

“We’re all family here,” said LaTonya.

“Right, but still,” said Audrey.

“No one’s going to say anything, my saditty sister,” LaTonya said. “You think we know anybody? This guy fell off the edge, that right? Get into crack and other poisons like that?” She cast an evil eye at her two sons.

“I met the guy,” Leon said.

“Who?” said Audrey. “Andrew Stadler?”

Leon nodded. “Sure. He kept to himself, but I talked to him in the break room once or twice.” Leon reached for the macaroni and cheese and shoveled a huge lump onto his plate, a third helping. “Couldn’t meet a nicer guy.”

“A troubled man,” Audrey said.

“Troubled?” said Leon. “I don’t know. Gentle as a lamb, I’ll tell you that.”

“Really?” said Audrey.

“Gentle as a lamb,” Leon said again.

“I’m done,” Camille announced, entering the room and sitting down next to Audrey. She found Audrey’s hand under the table and gave it a little secret squeeze. Audrey’s heart fluttered for a moment.

“Took you long enough,” said LaTonya. “I hope you learned your lesson.”

“You sounded great,” Audrey said.

43

Nick got in a little earlier than usual, got a cup of coffee from the executive lounge, and checked his e-mail. As usual, his inbox was cluttered with offers for Viagra and penis enlargement and low-interest mortgages, the subject headings inventively misspelled. The putative wives and sons of various deceased African heads of state urgently sought his assistance in transferring millions of dollars out of their country.

He thought about this woman, Cassie Stadler. She was not only seriously attractive, but she was unlike any woman he’d ever met before. And she-who, of course, had no idea what he’d done-was clearly as attracted to him as he was to her.

No message from the Atlas McKenzie guys-the mammoth deal that had unaccountably fallen through-but that didn’t surprise him. He was going to have to confront them on it, find out what the reason was, see if there was a way to sweet-talk them back on board.

Marjorie wasn’t in yet, so Nick placed the calls himself. It was 7:10 A.M. The Atlas McKenzie guys were usually in by then. Ten digits away. Not a lot of work to press those ten digits on the telephone keypad. How many calories did this take? Nick imagined a tiny scrap of the twiggy cereal Julia wouldn’t eat: that many calories. Why wouldn’t he place his own calls?

The woman on the other line was really sorry. Mr. Hardwick was still in conference. Nick imagined Hardwick making throat-cut, I’m-not-in gestures.

There it was. That was a reason not to place your own calls. To spare yourself the humiliation of dissembling secretaries. The smile in the voice that accompanied the sing-songy formula I’m sorry. The micro-power trip of putting one over on a CEO. Fun for the whole family. He wondered whether the waitress at Terra really had spit in his arugula salad. She’d brightened a little when she brought it out, hadn’t she?

Nick felt a little acid come up his gullet as he stared at the silver-mesh fabric panels in front of him. There were certain things that money and position protected you from. There were certain things that it didn’t. When his driver’s license needed renewing a couple of years ago, he didn’t stand in line at the DMV, the way he once had to. The CEO of a major corporation didn’t wait in line at the DMV. Some young staffer from the corporate counsel’s office did, and it got taken care of. Nick couldn’t remember the last time he’d waited in line for a taxi at an airport. Senior execs had cars; you looked for the guy holding a sign that said CONOVER. And senior execs of major corporations didn’t haul their own baggage. That got taken care of, too, even when Nick was flying commercial. But when the weather was bad, it was bad for you too. When your car was stuck in traffic, it didn’t matter what your company’s valuation was; traffic was traffic. Those things were the Levelers. The things that reminded you that you lived in the same world and were going to end up in the same place as everybody else. You thought you were a master of the universe, but you were just lording it over a little box of dirt, the tyrant of a terrarium. Having a kid who hated you-that had to be a Leveler too. And so was sickness.

And so was death.

Next he tried MacFarland-that was the name of the Nixon look-alike. But his assistant apologized: Mr. MacFarland was traveling. “I’ll be sure to let him know that you called,” MacFarland’s assistant told him, with the bright artificiality of someone from a casting director’s office. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Twenty minutes later came the faint settling-in noises, the heavy vanilla smell of Shalimar: Marjorie was in.

Nick got up, stretched, stepped around the partition. “How’s the novel coming?” He tried to remember the title. “Manchester Abbey, was it?”

She smiled. “We did Northanger Abbey a few weeks ago. This week is Mansfield Park.”

“Got it,” Nick said.

“I think Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey first, but it didn’t come out until after her death,” Marjorie said, turning on her computer. She said distantly, “Amazing what comes out after people die.”

Nick felt as if someone had touched his neck with an ice cube. His smile faded.

“Persuasion did too,” she went on. “And Billy Budd, which we read last year. I didn’t know you had such an interest, Nick. You ought to come to our book club.”

“Let me know when you decide to do the Chevrolet Suburban Owner’s Manual-that’s what I call a book,” he said. “Listen, I’m expecting a call from those Atlas McKenzie guys. Hardwick, MacFarland. Let me know when they’re on the line. Wherever I am, I’ll take the call.”

Nick spent the next couple of hours in conference rooms, two back-to-back, bun-numbing meetings. There was the supply-chain-management team, whose seven members had reached an important conclusion: Stratton needed to diversify its suppliers of metallic paint. They were bubbling with excitement as they reviewed the considerations they had taken into account, like they’d discovered penicillin. Then there was the industrial-safety team, which always had more lawyers than engineers, more concerned about lawsuits than limbs. Nobody came to spring him. No message from Marjorie.

He gave Marjorie a questioning look as he made his way back to his desk.

“The Atlas McKenzie people-they were supposed to get back this morning?” she asked.

Nick sighed. “I’m beginning to feel like I’m getting the bum’s rush. I phoned first thing today, you know, and they said Hardwick’s in conference, MacFarland’s on the road, they’ll get back to me.” Then again, they were supposed to return his call from yesterday too. Apparently they had other priorities.

“You think they’re trying to dodge you.”

“Could be.”

“Want to get them on line?” Marjorie looked sunny but sly. It was a good look.

“Yup.”

“Let me have a go.”

Nick took a few more steps toward his desk as Marjorie made a couple of phone calls. He couldn’t hear everything. “That’s right,” she was saying. “United Airlines. We’ve located the lost baggage, and he gave us a cell number to call him at. James MacFarland, yes. He seemed frantic. But the clerk must have written it down wrong…”

A minute later, an intercom tone told Nick to pick up his Line 1.

“Jim MacFarland?” Nick said as he answered the phone.

Cautiously: “Yes?”

“Nick Conover here.”

“Nick. Hey.” Friendly, but with a tremor of unease.

Nick wanted to say, Do you realize the amount of money and man-hours we’ve spent designing your goddamn prototypes? And you can’t be bothered to return my calls? Instead he tried to sound breezy. “Just wanted to touch base,” he said. “About where things stood.”

“Yeah,” MacFarland said. “Yeah. I meant to give you a call about that. About the current thinking.”

“Lay it on me.”

A deep breath. “Thing is, Nick-well, we hadn’t realized that Stratton’s on the block. Which kind of changes the picture for us.”

“On the block? Meaning what?” Nick struggled to keep his voice calm. At the start of his career, Nick figured that being the boss meant not having to kiss ass. A nice thought, anyway. Turned out there was always somebody whose ass you had to kiss. The commander in chief of the free world had to suck up to farmers in Iowa. It’s good to be the boss-wasn’t that what they said? But every boss had a boss. Turtles all the way down. Asses all the way up.

That was how it felt sometimes, anyway. That was how it felt just now.

“It’s just that Hardwick’s always real concerned about stability when it comes to sourcing and support,” MacFarland was saying. “We hadn’t realized things were in flux that way. It’s not like you had a big ‘For Sale’ sign over the front door, right?”

Nick was dumbfounded. “Stratton’s not for sale,” he said simply.

There was a moment of silence on the other end. “Huh.” Not the sound of agreement. “Look, Nick, you didn’t hear this from me. We use the same law firm in Hong Kong that Fairfield Partners does. And, you know, people talk.”

“That’s bullshit,” Nick said.

“What it is, is water under the bridge.”

“Come on. I’m the CEO of the company. If Stratton was being sold, you’d think I’d know, right?”

“You said it.” The chilling thing was that MacFarland sounded kindly, sympathetic, like an oncologist breaking the news of a bad diagnosis to a favorite patient.

44

Marjorie poked her head around at ten thirty.

“Remember, you’ve got a lunch at half past with Roderick Douglass, the Chamber of Commerce guy,” she said. “He’ll be wanting to hit you up again. Then there’s the meeting with the business development execs right after.”

Nick swiveled around and looked out the window. “Right, thanks,” he said, distracted.

It was a beautiful day. The sky was blue, deepened a little by the tint of the glass. There was enough of a breeze to flutter the leaves of the trees. A jet was making its way across the sky, its double contrails quickly turning into smudgy fluff.

It was also the seventh day in a row that Andrew Stadler hadn’t been alive to see.

Nick shivered, as if a gust of cool air had somehow made it through the building’s glass membrane. Cassie Stadler’s fragile, china-doll face now filled his mind. What did I do to you? He remembered the look of infinite hurt in her eyes, and he found himself dialing her number before he was even conscious of having decided to.

“Hello.” Cassie’s voice, deep and sleepy-sounding.

“It’s Nick Conover,” he said. “Hope I’m not calling you too early.”

“Me? No-it’s-what time is it?”

“I woke you up. I’m sorry. It’s ten thirty. Go back to sleep.”

“No,” she said hastily. “I’m glad you called. Listen, about yesterday-”

“Cassie, I’m just calling to make sure you’re okay. When I left, you didn’t look so great.”

“Thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I-it helped, talking to you. Really helped.”

“I’m glad.”

“Would you like to come over for lunch?”

“You mean today?”

“Oh, God, that’s ridiculous, I can’t believe I just said that. You’re this big CEO, you’ve probably got lunch meetings scheduled every day until you’re sixty-five.”

“Not at all,” he said. “My lunch meeting just canceled, in fact. Which means a sandwich at my desk. So, yeah, I’d love to get out of the office, sure.”

“Really? Hey, great. Oh-just one little thing.”

“You don’t have any food in your refrigerator.”

“Sad but true. What kind of host am I?”

“I’ll pick something up. See you at noon.”

When he hung up, he stopped by his assistant’s desk. “Marge,” he said, “could you cancel my lunch meetings?”

“Both of them?”

“Right.”

Marjorie smiled. “Going to play hooky? It’s a beautiful day.”

“Hooky? Does that sound like me?”

“Hope springs eternal.”

“Nah,” he said. “I just need to run a couple of errands.”

45

The house on West Sixteenth, in Steepletown, was even smaller than he remembered it. A dollhouse, a miniature, almost.

Two stories. White sidings that could have been aluminum or vinyl, you’d have to tap to be sure. Black shutters that weren’t big enough to pretend to be shutters.

Nick, holding a couple of brown bags from the Family Fare supermarket he’d stopped at on the way over, rang the bell, heard the carillon tones.

It was almost half a minute before Cassie came to the door. She was in a black knitted top and black stretchy pants. Her face was pale, and sad, and perfect. She was wearing glossy orange lipstick, which was a little strange, but it looked right on her. She also looked better, more rested, than she had yesterday.

“Hey, you actually came.” Cassie opened the door, and walked him past the vase with the dried flowers and the framed embroidered sampler to the small living room. He could hear “One Is the Loneliest Number” come from the small speakers of a portable CD player. Not the old Three Dog Night version. A modern cover. A woman with a voice like clove cigarettes. Cassie switched it off.

Nick unloaded the stuff he’d bought-bread, eggs, juice, milk, bottled water, fruit, a couple of bottles of iced tea. “Toss whatever you don’t like,” he said. Then he unwrapped a couple of sandwiches, placing them ceremoniously on paper plates. “Turkey or roast beef?”

She looked doubtfully at the roast beef. “Too bloody,” she said. “I like my meat burned to a crisp, basically.”

“I’ll have it,” Nick said. “You have the turkey.”

They ate together in silence. He folded up the Boar’s Head delicatessen wrappers into neat squares, a form of fidgeting. She finished most of her iced tea and toyed with the cap. It was a little awkward, and Nick wondered why she’d invited him over. He tried to think of something to say, but before he could, she said, “Hey, you never know what you’re going to learn from a bottle cap. It says here, ‘Real Fact-the last letter added to the English-language alphabet was the “J.” ’”

Nick tried to think of something to say, but before he could, she went on: “Aren’t you supposed to be running a Fortune Five Hundred company or something?”

“We’re not a public company. Anyway, I had a boring lunch I canceled.”

“Now I feel guilty.”

“Not at all. I was happy to have an excuse to miss it.”

“You know, you really surprised me yesterday.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t very ‘Nick the Slasher.’ I guess people are never what you expect. Like they say, still waters-”

“Get clogged with algae?”

“Something like that. You know how it is-you see someone who seems so desperate, and you just have to reach out and help.”

“You don’t seem desperate.”

“I’m talking about you.”

Nick reddened. “Excuse me?”

She got up and put the kettle on. Standing at the stove, she said, “We’ve both suffered a loss. It’s like Rilke says-when we lose something, it circles around us. ‘It draws around us its unbroken curve.’”

“Huh. I used to have a Spirograph set when I was a kid.”

“I guess I figured you for the typical company man. Until I met you. But you know what I think now?” Her gaze was calm but intent. “I think you’re actually a real family man.”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, tell that to my son. Tell that to Lucas.”

“It’s a bad age for a boy to lose his mom,” Cassie said quietly. She took a teapot down from a cabinet, then some mugs.

“Like there’s a good one?”

“The kid probably needs you badly.”

“I don’t think that’s how he sees it,” Nick said, a little bitterly.

Cassie looked away. “You’re saying that because he’s isolated and he’s angry, and he turns on you. Am I right? Because you’re safe. But you’ll get through it. You love each other. You’re a family.”

“We were.”

“You know how lucky your kids are?”

“Yeah, well.”

She turned to face him. “I’ll bet being a CEO is sort of like being head of a family too.”

“Yeah,” Nick said acerbically. “Maybe one of those Eskimo families. The kind that puts Grandma on the ice floe when she’s not bringing in the whale blubber anymore.”

“I bet the layoffs were hard on you.”

“Harder on the people who got laid off.”

“My dad had a lot of problems, but I think having a job helped him keep it together. Then when he found out they didn’t want him anymore, he fell apart.”

Nick felt as if there was a metal strap around his chest and it was steadily tightening. He nodded.

“I was mad at Stratton,” Cassie said. “Mad at you, is the truth. Maybe because I’m a girl, I take these things too personally. But it might have had a bad effect on him. Someone with a thought disorder, it’s hard to know.”

“Cassie,” Nick started, but whatever he was going to say died in his throat.

“That was before I met you, though. You didn’t want to do this. The people in Boston made you. Because, end of the day, Stratton is a business.”

“Right.”

“But it’s never just a business to you, is it? See, I just realized something. Being a Stratton employee in the past couple of years must have been like being the daughter of a schizophrenic. One day you’re a beloved family member, the next you’re a unit, a cost center, something to be slashed.” She leaned against the counter, her arms folded.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Nick said. “More sorry than I can tell you.” With more to be sorry about than I can tell you.

“My daddy…” Cassie’s voice was hushed, halting. “He didn’t-he didn’t want to be the way he was. It would just take over him. He wanted to be a good father like you. He wanted…” Cassie’s breathing started to become ragged, and Nick realized that she was weeping. Her face was red, bowed, and she put a hand over her eyes. Tears rolled copiously down her cheeks.

Nick got up suddenly, his chair scraping against the linoleum floor, and put his arms around her.

“Oh, Cassie,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”

She was tiny, birdlike, and her shoulders were narrow and bony. She made a sound like she was hiccupping. She smelled like something spicy and New-Agey-patchouli, was that it? Nick was ashamed to realize he was getting aroused.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Stop saying that.” Cassie looked up at him and smiled wanly through her tears. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

Nick remembered a time when he was trying to fix a lamp socket he’d thought was switched off. An eerie, hair-erecting, tingling feeling had swept through his arm, and it had taken him a second to identify the sensation as house current that was leaking through the screwdriver. He felt something like that now, guilt washing through his body like an electrical flux. He didn’t know how to respond.

But Cassie said, “I think you’re a good man, Nicholas Conover.”

“You don’t know me,” he said.

“I know you better than you think,” she said, and he felt her arms squeezing against his back, pulling him toward her. Then she seemed to be standing on tiptoes, her face close to his, her lips pressing against his.

The moment for refusing, for backing out, came and went. Nick’s response was almost reflexive. This time he kissed her back, her tears sticky against his face, and his hands moved downward from her shoulders.

“Mmm,” she said.

The teakettle started whistling.

For a long time afterward, she lay on top of him in the slick of their perspiration, her mouth pressed against his chest. He could feel her heartbeat, fast as a bird’s, slowing gradually. He stroked her hair, nuzzled her porcelain neck, smelling her hair, a conditioner or whatever. He felt her breasts against his stomach.

“I don’t know what to say,” Nick began.

“Then keep silent.” She smiled, lifted herself up on her elbows until she was sitting upright on him. She lightly scratched her fingernails across his upper chest, tangling them in his chest hair.

Nick shifted his butt against the coarse-textured couch in the living room. He rocked upward, enfolded her in an embrace, leaned forward until he was sitting up too.

“Strong guy,” she said.

Her breasts were small and round, the nipples pink and still erect like little upturned thumbs. Her waist was tiny. She reached across him to the table next to the couch, and as she did, her breasts brushed against his face. He gave them a quick kiss. She retrieved a pack of Marlboros and a Bic lighter, took one out of the pack and waved it at him, offering.

“No, thanks,” Nick said.

She shrugged, lighted the cigarette, took in a lungful of air and spewed out a thin stream of smoke.

“‘Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man,’” Nick quoted.

“Yep.”

“Needlepoint by Grandma?”

“Mom got it in some junk store. She liked what it said.”

“So how long has it been since you left this place?”

“I just turned twenty-nine. Left when I was around twelve. So, a long time. But I came back to visit Dad a bunch of times.”

“School in Chicago, then.”

“You’re trying to piece together the Cassie Stadler saga? Good luck.”

“Just wondering.”

“My mom remarried when I was eleven. An orthodontist. Had a couple of kids of his own, my age, a little older. Let’s just say it wasn’t the Brady Bunch. Dr. Reese didn’t exactly take to me. Neither did the little Reese’s pieces, Bret and Justin. Finally shipped me off to Lake Forest Academy, basically to get me out of the way.”

“Must have been tough on you.”

She inhaled, held a lungful of smoke for several seconds. Then, as she let it out, she said, “Yes and no. In some ways, they did me a favor. I actually flourished at the academy. I was a precocious kid. Got a Headmaster scholarship, graduated top of the class. Should have seen me when I was seventeen. A real promising young citizen. Not the head case you see before you.”

“You don’t seem like a head case to me.”

“Because I don’t drool and wear bad glasses?” She crossed her eyes. “Fools them every time.”

“You talk about it like it’s a big joke.”

“Probably it is a joke. Some cosmic joke that’s just a little over our heads. God’s joke. Nothing to do but to smile and nod and try to pretend that we get it.”

“You can go pretty far in life doing that,” Nick said. He sneaked a glimpse at his wristwatch, saw it was after two already. With a jolt, he realized he had to get back to the office.

She noticed. “Time to go.”

“Cassie, I-”

“Just go, Nick. You’ve got a company to run.”

46

Dr. Aaron Landis, the clinical director of mental health services for County Medical, seemed to wear a permanent sneer. Audrey realized, though, that there was something not quite right about the man’s face, a crookedness to the mouth, a congenital deformity that made him look that way. His gray hair resembled a Brillo pad, and he had a receding chin that he tried to disguise, not very successfully, with a neatly trimmed gray beard. At first Audrey felt a bit sorry for the psychiatrist because of his homeliness, but her compassion quickly faded.

His office was small and messy, so heaped with books and papers that there was scarcely room for the two of them to sit. The only decoration was a photograph of a plain-looking wife and an even plainer son, and a series of colorful scans of a human brain, purple with yellow-orange highlights, on curling slick paper, thumbtacked along one wall.

“I don’t think I understand what you’re asking, Detective,” he said.

She had been as clear as day. “I’m asking whether Andrew Stadler exhibited violent tendencies.”

“You’re asking me to breach doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“Your patient is dead,” she said gently.

“And the confidentiality of his medical records survives his death, Detective. As does physician-patient confidentiality. You know that, or if you don’t, you should. The Supreme Court upheld that privilege a decade ago. More important, it’s part of the Hippocratic oath I took when I became a doctor.”

“Mr. Stadler was murdered, Doctor. I want to find his killer or killers.”

“An effort I certainly applaud. But I don’t see how it concerns me.”

“You see, there are a number of unanswered questions about his death that might help us determine what really happened. I’m sure you want to help us do our job.”

“I’m happy to help in any way I can. Just so long as you don’t ask me to violate Mr. Stadler’s rights.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Then let me restate my question. Speaking generally. Do most schizophrenics tend to be violent?”

The psychiatrist looked upward for a moment, as if consulting the heavens. He exhaled noisily. Then he fixed her with a sorrowful look. “That, Detective, is one of the most pernicious myths about schizophrenia.”

“Then maybe you can enlighten me, Doctor.”

“Schizophrenia is a chronic recurring psychotic illness that begins in early adulthood, as a rule, and lasts until death. We don’t even know if it’s a single disease or a syndrome. Myself, I prefer to call it SSD, or schizophrenia spectrum disorder, though I’m in the minority on this. Now, the defining symptoms of schizophrenia are thought disorder, a failure of logic, reality distortion, and hallucinations.”

“And paranoia?”

“Often, yes. And a psychosocial disability. So let me ask you something, Detective. You see a good deal of violence in your work, I’m sure.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Is most of it inflicted by schizophrenics?”

“No.”

“My point. Most violent crimes are not committed by persons with schizophrenia, and most persons with schizophrenia don’t commit violent crimes.”

“But there’s a-”

“Let me finish, please. The vast majority of patients with schizophrenia have never been violent. They’re a hundred times more likely to commit suicide than homicide.”

“So are you saying that Andrew Stadler was not a violent man?”

“Detective, I admire your persistence, but the backdoor approach won’t work either. I will not discuss the particulars of his case. But let me tell you what the real correlation is between schizophrenia and violence: schizophrenia increases the likelihood of being the victim of a crime.”

“Exactly. Mr. Stadler was the victim of a terrible crime. Which is why I need to know whether he might have provoked his own death by killing an animal, a family pet.”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“I’m asking whether he was capable of such an act.”

“I won’t tell you that either.”

“Are you saying that schizophrenics are never violent?”

After a long pause, he said: “Obviously there are the exceptions.”

“Was Andrew Stadler one of those exceptions, Doctor?”

“Please, Detective. I won’t discuss the particulars of Mr. Stadler’s medical records. I don’t know how much more clear I can be.”

Audrey sighed in exasperation. “Then let me ask you a purely hypothetical question, all right?”

“Purely hypothetical,” Dr. Landis repeated.

“Let’s take a…hypothetical case in which an individual repeatedly breaks into a family’s house in order to write threatening graffiti. Is able to do so, cleverly and without leaving any evidence, despite the security provided by the gated community in which this family lives. And has even slaughtered the family’s pet. What sort of person might do this, would you say?”

“What sort of hypothetical individual?” He attempted a smile, which twisted unpleasantly. “Someone, I would say, who’s extremely intelligent, high-functioning, capable of higher-order thinking and goal-governed behavior, and yet has pervasive impulse-control problems, marked mood swings, and is highly sensitive to rejection. There may be, say, a great fear of abandonment, derived from difficulties in childhood feeling connected to important persons in one’s life. He might have absolutely black-and-white views of others-might tend to idealize people and then suddenly despise them.”

“And then?”

“And then he might be subject to sudden and unpredictable rages, brief psychotic episodes, with suicidal impulses.”

“What might set him off?”

“A situation of great stress. The loss of someone or something important to him.”

“Or the loss of a job?”

“Certainly.”

“Can a schizophrenic exhibit this pattern of behavior you’re describing?”

Dr. Landis paused for a long moment. “Conceivably. It’s not impossible.” Then he gave a creepy sort of smile. “But what does all this have to do with Andrew Stadler?”

47

“Grover Herrick,” Marjorie said over the intercom the next morning.

Grover Herrick was a senior procurement manager at the U.S. General Services Administration, which did purchasing for federal agencies. He was also the point man for an enormous contract Stratton had negotiated for the Department of Homeland Security. DHS now encompassed the Coast Guard, Customs, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Transportation Security Administration-thousands of offices, a hundred and eighty thousand employees, and a major infusion of federal cash. The contract was second in value only to the Atlas McKenzie deal, and had been in the works almost as long.

You didn’t keep a GSA procurement manager on hold for long. That was one rule. Another was that anytime Grover Herrick wanted to talk to the CEO, Grover Herrick talked to the CEO. On half a dozen occasions in the past year, Nick fulfilled his duties as Stratton’s chief executive by feigning interest as Grover talked about the sailboat he was going to buy as soon as he retired, and pretending to care about the difference between a ketch and a yawl. If Herrick had wanted to talk about hemorrhoids, Nick would have boned up on that topic too.

This time, though, there were no preliminaries.

“Nick,” the GSA man said, “Gotta tell you, it looks like we’re going with Haworth.”

Nick felt gut-punched. It was all he could do not to double over. “You’re kidding.”

“I think you know by now when I’m kidding.” There was a pause. “Remember when I told you the story about dropping the Thanksgiving turkey in front of all the guests, and how my wife had the presence of mind to say, ‘Never mind, just bring out the other bird’? That I was kidding about.”

“Fucking Haworth?”

“Well, what the hell did you think would happen?” Herrick’s voice was a squawk of indignation. “You were going to have us ink the deal, move the company to Shenzhen, and then what? Have us outfit Homeland Security offices with desks from China?”

“What-?” Nick managed to choke out.

“When were you planning on telling us? I can think of some Senators who’d have a ball with that-but politics aside, it’s completely against GSA procurement guidelines. Can’t happen. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten about 41 USC 10. You guys oughta have the Buy American Act tattooed on your forehead.”

“Wait a minute-who told you Stratton’s going offshore?”

“What does it matter? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We liked Stratton. Great American company. I can see the temptation to cash in, put everything on a fast boat to China. Still think it’s a mistake, though. My personal opinion.”

“What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. We’re not going anywhere. I don’t care what you’ve heard.”

Herrick ignored him. “What was the game plan-inflate revenues with a hefty GSA prepayment, jack up the purchase price, figure the Heathen Chinese wouldn’t figure out the game? Strategic vision, huh? I guess that’s why you get the big bucks.”

“No, Grover. This is bullshit.”

“I told you before. We really liked you guys. We liked Haworth, too, but the Stratton price points looked better, all in. We just didn’t realize your price points came courtesy of cheap Chinese labor.”

“Listen to me, Grover.” Nick tried to cut him off, to no avail.

“Thing that chafes my ass is, you guys wasted a hell of a lot of my time. Got half a mind to bill you for it.”

“Grover, no.”

“Happy sailing, Nick,” the GSA man said, and he hung up.

Nick cursed loudly. He wanted to fling the phone across the room-across a room-but the Ambience system didn’t really lend itself to boss-man theatrics.

Marjorie came over. “Something going on that I should know about?”

“That’s pretty much my question, Marge,” Nick said, struggling to regain his composure.

He walked across the executive floor to Scott’s area, taking a back way in order to bypass Gloria, Scott’s admin. As he approached, he heard Scott talking on the phone.

“Well, sure,” Scott was saying. “We’ll give it a try, Todd man, why not?”

Nick advanced until he was in Scott’s line of sight.

Scott noticed him now, seemed to flinch just a bit, but instantly recovered: widening his eyes and smiling, raising his chin by way of greeting. “Right,” he said, more loudly. “Sounds like a great trip. Gotta go.” He hung up and said to Nick, “Hey, my liege, welcome to the low-rent district.”

“How’s Todd?” Nick said.

“Ah, he’s trying to set up a golf trip to Hilton Head.”

“I didn’t know you golf.”

“I don’t.” He laughed uncomfortably. “Well, badly. But that’s why they love having me around. Makes them look like Tiger Woods.”

“‘They’ being Todd and the other Fairfield boys?”

“Todd and his wife and Eden and another couple. Anyway.”

“I had an interesting talk with MacFarland at Atlas McKenzie.”

“Oh, yeah?” Scott’s expression seemed wary.

“Yeah. Learn something new every day. You know why they decided not to go with us?”

“Gotta be price, what else? Not quality, that’s for sure. But you get what you pay for.”

“MacFarland seems to think we’re on the block. Now, why would he think that?”

Scott spread out his palms.

“Atlas McKenzie uses the same Hong Kong law firm as Fairfield, which is how they heard.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Funny thing is, I heard something sort of similar from the guy at GSA just now.”

“GSA?” Scott said, swallowing.

“The Homeland Security deal? That just fell apart too.”

“Shit.”

“And you know why? They need Made-in-America, and they heard a rumor we’re going to be offshoring our manufacturing to China. Isn’t that the craziest thing?”

Scott, picking up on Nick’s bitter sarcasm, sat up straight in his chair and said solemnly, “If Todd and those guys were planning a move like that, don’t you think they’d at least mention it to me?”

“Yeah, I do, actually. Have they?”

“Obviously not-I would have told you right away.”

“Would you?”

“Of course-Jesus, Nick, I can’t believe people listen to stupid rumors like that. I mean, it’s no different from those idiotic rumors about the deep-fried chicken head in the box of Chicken McNuggets, or the bonsai kittens, or how the moon walk was a fraud-”

“Scott.”

“Look, I’ll make some calls, look into it for you, okay? But I’m sure there’s nothing to it.”

“I hope you’re right,” Nick said. “I really hope you’re right.”

48

Eddie didn’t stand up when Nick came to his office that afternoon. Just gave him a mock salute, as he leaned back in his Symbiosis chair with his feet on his desk. On the silver-mesh fabric wall behind him was a poster with the words “MEDIOCRITY. It Takes a Lot Less Time and Most People Won’t Notice the Difference Until It’s Too Late.” Above the slogan was a photograph of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was one of those wiseass spoofs of corporate workplace propaganda, but Nick sometimes wondered how much irony Eddie really meant.

“I get a promotion?” Eddie asked. “I mean, with you coming down here instead of making me come up.”

Nick pulled up a small, wheeled stool. “They call it Management by Walking Around. MBWA.”

“Lot to be said for MBSOYA. Management by Sitting on Your Ass.”

Nick forced a smile, and told him about what MacFarland and Grover Herrick had said, skipping the incidentals.

“Fuck me,” Eddie said. “Gotta be bullshit, right? You talk to Scott McNally about this?”

“He says there’s nothing to it. But he knows more than he’s telling me. I’m sure of it.”

Eddie nodded slowly. “If you’re out, I’m out, right?”

“Who said anything about my being out? I just want you to see what Scott’s up to, that’s all.”

Eddie grinned slowly. “You want an assist, I’ll fire you the puck and cross-check the assholes. I’ll even break the fucking stick over their heads.”

“A little e-mail surveillance should do it, Eddie.”

“I’ll get one of the techs to pull his e-mail records off the server, right? Just get me a few keywords.”

“That sounds like a start.”

“Oh, sure. Phone records, all that stuff. Easy peasy. But boy, you sure do have a knack for stepping in the shit.” Eddie’s skin formed webbing around his eyes as he smiled. “Good thing you got a friend who doesn’t mind cleaning your shoes.”

“You’ll let me know if you find anything.”

“That’s what friends are for.”

Nick didn’t meet his eyes. “And not a word to anyone.”

“Back at ya, buddy.”

Nick hesitated for a moment, then wheeled the stool close to Eddie’s desk. “Eddie, did you tell the cops you went over to my house after we found my dog?”

Eddie peered at him for a while. “They didn’t ask me. I don’t volunteer information. That’s cop interview lesson number one.”

Nick nodded. “They didn’t ask me either. Not yet. But in case it comes up, I want to make sure we have a consistent story, okay? I asked you to come over, and you did. Only natural that I’d give you a call. You’re my security director.”

“Only natural,” Eddie repeated. “Makes sense. But you got to calm down, buddy. You worry too much.”

49

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My office, or the school?”

“Both.”

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

Nick shrugged.

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

“Not especially.”

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

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

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

“Semifinals one year. Finals the next.”

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

“Maybe you need a new coach.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you saying? He’s my kid.”

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

“The police?”

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

“Not everybody has to be a jock.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you mean?” Nick asked blankly.

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

“Luke.”

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

“Where are you?”

“Home. Why?”

“What the hell happened at school?”

“What do you mean?”

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

“What’d he tell you?”

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

“So? It’s all bullshit anyway.”

“Suspension from school is bullshit?”

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

An instant message popped up on his monitor from Marge:

Compensation Committee meeting right now, remember?

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

Yeah, Nick thought. That’s telling him.

“And, Luke-?”

But Lucas had hung up.

50

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How many years you got?”

“Right.”

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

“They came in already?”

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

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

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

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

Bugbee handed the papers right over.

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

“How come?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bugbee shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, someone’s got to.”

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

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

“Penn Mulch? What’s that?”

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

“And grass seed.”

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

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

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

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

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

“The Penn Mulch-”

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

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

“That’s a lot of phone calls.”

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

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

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

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

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

51

During the drive from the high school back to Stratton, Nick found himself thinking about Cassie Stadler.

She was not only gorgeous-he’d had more than his share of gorgeous women over the years, especially during college, when Laura had wanted them to “take a break” and “see other people”-but she was so smart it was scary, eerily perceptive. She seemed to understand him fully, to see through him, almost. She knew him better than he knew himself.

And he couldn’t deny the physical attraction: for the first time in over a year he’d had sex, and he felt like a sexual being again. This was a sensation he’d almost forgotten about. The pump had been primed. He felt horny. He thought about yesterday afternoon and got hard.

Then he remembered who she was, how he’d come to know her, and his mood collapsed. The guilt came surging back, worse than ever.

A voice in his head: Are you kidding me? You’re screwing the daughter of the man you murdered?

What’s wrong with you?

He didn’t understand what he was doing. If he allowed himself to get close to her…Well, what if she found out, somehow? Could he keep up this crazy balancing act?

What the hell am I doing?

But he badly wanted to see her again. That was the craziest thing of all.

It was late afternoon by now, and he didn’t have to return to the office. He pulled over to the side of the road and fished a scrap of paper out of his jacket pocket. On it he’d scrawled Cassie Stadler’s phone number. Impulsively-without heeding that chiding voice in his head-he called her on his cell.

“Hello,” he said when she answered. His voice sounded small. “It’s Nick.”

A beat. “Nick,” she said, and stopped.

“I just wanted to…” His voice actually cracked. Just wanted to-what? Turn back the clock? Reverse what happened That Night? Make everything all better? And since that wasn’t possible, then what? He just wanted to talk to her. That was the truth. “I was just calling…”

“I know,” she said quickly.

“You okay?”

“Are you?”

“I’d like to see you,” he said.

“Nick,” she said. “You should stay away from me. I’m trouble. Really.”

Nick almost smiled. Cassie didn’t know what trouble was. You think you’re trouble? You should see me when I’ve got a Smith & Wesson in my hands. Acid splashed the back of his throat.

“I don’t think so,” Nick said.

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

He felt something like an electric jolt. Hadn’t he done enough? That was one way of looking at it. “Excuse me?”

“Not that I didn’t appreciate it. I did. All of it. But we need to leave it there. You’ve got a company to run. A family to hold together. I don’t fit into that.”

“I’m just leaving an appointment,” he said. “I can be there in about five minutes.”

“Hey,” Cassie said, opening the dusty screen door. Carpenter-style jeans, white T-shirt, flecks of paint. Then she smiled, a smile that crinkled her eyes. She looked better, sounded better. “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know, buyer’s remorse. Regret over what you’d done. The usual male stuff.”

“Maybe I’m not your usual male.”

“I’m getting that idea. Bring me anything today?”

Nick shrugged. “Sorry. There’s a bottle of windshield-wiper fluid in the trunk.”

“Forget it,” Cassie said. “That stuff always gives me a hangover.”

“Might have a can of WD-40 around, too.”

“Now that’s more promising. I’m really digging the idea of having the CEO of Stratton as my personal grocery boy.”

“Point of pride with me. Nick Conover buys a mean turkey sandwich.”

“But should I take it personally that you got me nonfat yogurt?” She brought him inside. “Let me make you some of the tea you bought.”

She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment. She had a CD on, a woman singing something about, “I’m brave but I’m chicken shit.”

When she came back, Nick said, “You look good.”

“I’m beginning to feel more like myself again,” she said. “You caught me at a low point the other day. I’m sure you know how it goes.”

“Well, you look a lot better.”

“And you look like shit,” she said, matter of fact.

“Well,” Nick said. “Long day.”

She stretched herself out on the nubby brown sofa, with the gold thread woven through the upholstery like something out of the 1950s.

“Long day, or long story?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to hear a grown man bitch and moan about troubles at the shop.”

“Trust me, I could use the distraction.”

Nick leaned back in the ancient green La-Z-Boy. After a few moments, he began to tell her about the Rumor, leaving out a few details. He didn’t mention Scott by name, didn’t go into Scott’s disloyalty. That was too painful a subject right now.

Cassie hugged her knees, gathering herself into some tight yoga-like ball, and listened intently as he explained.

“And if that weren’t enough, I get a call from Lucas’s school,” he went on. He stopped. He wasn’t accustomed to talking about his life that way. Not since Laura’s death. Somehow he’d gotten out of practice.

“Tell me,” she said.

He did, telling her, too, about how he’d called Lucas at home, confronted him, and how Luke had hung up. When he finally checked his watch, he realized he’d been talking for more than five minutes.

“I never understood that,” Cassie said.

“Understood what?”

“Kid gets suspended for three days, meaning what? They don’t have to go to school for three days? They stay home?”

“Right.”

“And get into more trouble? That’s supposed to be a punishment? I mean, a baseball player gets suspended for five games for fighting with the umpire, that’s a punishment. But telling a kid he can’t go to school, which he hates, for three days?”

“Maybe it’s like social humiliation.”

“For a teenager? Isn’t that more like a badge of honor?”

Nick shrugged. “Wouldn’t have been for me.”

“No, you were probably Mr. Perfect.”

“No way. I got into the usual trouble. I was just careful about it. I didn’t want to get kicked off the hockey team. Hey, where’s that tea?” he asked.

“That stove takes forever. Electric, and underpowered. Dad wouldn’t allow gas in the house. One of his many ‘things.’ But we won’t go there.” She craned her head, listening. “I’m sure it’s ready now.”

“Just that all this talking makes a man thirsty,” Nick said.

Cassie came back with two steaming mugs. “English Breakfast,” she said. “Though I saw that you also bought me a box of Blue Moon Kava Kava and Chamomile mix. I’m guessing that’s not Nick Conover’s usual cup.”

“Maybe not.”

“Why do I get the feeling you’ve got me figured for some sort of New Age nut?” She shrugged. “Possibly because I am one. How can I deny it? You make chairs, I teach asanas. Hey, when it comes down to it, we’re both in the sitting industry, right?”

“So you’re not going to tell me about my aura.”

“You can take the girl out of Carnegie Mellon-and believe me, they did.” A smile hovered around her lips. “But you can’t take the Carnegie Mellon out of the girl. Never really got into chakras and shit. There’s a lot of my dad in me. I’ve got an empirical streak a mile wide.”

“And I took you for a nineteen waist.”

“Thanks.” She took a careful sip of her tea. “So you’ve got problems. You’ll deal, because that’s the kind of person you are. When life gives you lemons, you make lemon Pledge.”

“I was expecting something more Zen, somehow.”

“I see you haven’t touched your English Breakfast. So what kind of tea do you like?”

“Any kind. So long as it’s coffee.”

She found a bottle of Four Roses bourbon on a low table beside the sofa, handed it to him. “Put a slug of this in it. It’ll cut the tannins.”

He sloshed a little into his cup. It definitely improved the taste.

Cassie was looking at him with cat eyes. “So are you here for me or for you?”

“Both.”

She nodded, amused. “You’re my caseworker?”

“Come on,” Nick said. “You’re not exactly a charity case.”

“I’m doing okay.”

“Well, I want you to know that if you’re ever not doing okay, you’ve got me here to help.”

“This is starting to sound like adios.”

“No. Not at all.”

“Good.” She got up, tugged at the cord on the venetian blinds, closing them and darkening the room. “That’s a relief.”

He came up to her from behind, slipped his hands under her knit top, and felt the silky warmth of her belly.

“Why don’t we go upstairs?” Nick said.

“We don’t go upstairs,” she said at once.

“We don’t, huh? Okay.” Slowly he began moving his hands upward until he found her breasts, teased her nipples as he kissed and licked the back of her neck.

“Yeah,” she said throatily.

Still with her back to his, she brought her hands around to his butt and squeezed each cheek, hard.

He entered her from behind this time.

“Jesus,” he said, and she looked up at him, her eyes gleaming.

It took him several minutes to catch his breath.

“Wow,” he said. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

“Well, mine, I think.”

She took a sip of tea, curled up next to him on the sofa. She began singing along with the CD, which must have been set on repeat mode, something about “best friend with benefits.”

“You’ve got a nice voice.”

“Sang in the church choir. Mom was a real holy roller, used to drag me there. It was the only thing that got me through. So, boss man, you can’t give up the fight, you know.” An odd sort of vehemence had entered Cassie’s voice. “You’ve got to play the game balls out, with all your heart. Everything matters.”

“That’s the way I always played hockey. Gave it my all-you have to.”

“Always kept your head up while you skated?”

He smiled. She obviously got hockey too. “Oh yeah. Put your head down for a second, and you’re signed, sealed, and delivered. The game’s fast.”

“You been keeping your head up at Stratton?”

“Not enough,” he admitted.

“I suspect people maybe underestimate you sometimes, because they sense you’re eager to be liked. My guess is that people who push you too far live to regret it.”

“Maybe.” Memories swirled in Nick’s head, dark ones that he didn’t want to reexamine.

“You’ve already surprised a lot of people, is my bet. Dorothy Devries-she’s cooled toward you in the past several years. Am I right?”

Nick blinked. It wasn’t a conscious realization he’d had, but it was true. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”

Cassie looked away. “Don’t take this the wrong way. But when Old Man Devries’s widow appoints a successor, there are a lot of things going on in her head. One thing she’s not looking to do is to bring in someone who’s going to show up her beloved Milton. A reliable hand on the tiller, sure. The kind of reliable guy about whom you could say, ‘He’s no Milton Devries, of course, but who is?’ They could have poached some hotshot from the competition-I bet that would have been the usual thing. But it wasn’t what she wanted. You were meant to be Milton’s mini-me. Then you came in, and you kicked ass. You weren’t Milton’s protégé anymore. And even if she benefited from that financially, the whole Nick Conover show had to bother her too.”

Nick just shook his head.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“The trouble is,” Nick said slowly, “I do believe you. What you say never really occurred to me before, and it’s sure not doing anything for my ego, but when I listen to you talk, I’m thinking, Yeah, that’s probably what went down. The old lady wasn’t expecting what she got. Truth is, I wasn’t either. I got in there, made three or four critical hires, let them do their thing. It could have played differently. I’m not that smart, but I know what I don’t know. What I’m good at, maybe, is bringing in smarts.”

“And so long as they’re loyal to you, you’re going to be okay. But if they aren’t family-first people, you could have problems.”

“Family-first?”

“The Stratton family.”

“You really are the woman with X-ray eyes,” Nick said. “You see right through people.” Suddenly he shivered. How much did she see? Did she see the blood on his hands? He swallowed hard. It wasn’t a good time to start losing it.

“You know what they say.”

“Who?”

“They. Anaïs Nin, maybe, I forget. ‘We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.’”

“Not sure I get that.”

“And the hardest people to see, sometimes, are the people we love. Like your son.”

“A complete mystery to me these days.”

“What time did you say your kids would be home?”

“Less than an hour.”

“I’d like to meet them,” she said.

“Uh, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Nick said.

Cassie got to her feet, ran her fingers through her hair. “Jesus, what am I saying, it’s a terrible idea,” she said. The change in her was abrupt, startling. “What was I thinking? I’m not part of your life. I don’t make sense in your life. Listen, I’d probably be ashamed of me too.” She tugged at her paint-flecked jeans. “So let’s leave things here. After all, we’ll always have Steepletown. Goodbye, Nick. Have a good life.”

“Cassie,” Nick said. “That’s not what I meant.”

Cassie was silent. When Nick turned to look at her, her eyes were wells of sorrow. He felt a wave of guilt, and longing.

“Would you like to come by for dinner?” he asked.

52

Cassie was subdued as the Chevy Suburban waited in a queue in front of the Fenwicke Estates gatehouse. Nick suppressed the urge to drum his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Evening, Jorge,” Nick said, as they slowly passed the gatehouse.

Cassie leaned over so she could see him. “Hi, Jorge, I’m Cassie.” She smiled and gave him a little wave.

“Evening,” Jorge said, more animatedly than usual.

Okay, Nick thought. Chalk one up for the girl’s humanity. She noticed the guys in uniform. So long as it wasn’t the start of some big worker’s solidarity trip, that was probably a good sign.

He wondered how the kids would react to his bringing a woman home. More than wondered: he was, he had to admit, nervous about it. She was the first woman he’d been involved with in any way since Laura’s death, and he had no idea how they’d react. Lucas, he could safely predict, would be hostile. Hostility was his default mode. Julia? Now, that was a question. There was the Freudian thing where the girl wants Daddy all to herself, and there was that powerful strain of unthinking loyalty to her mom: how dare Daddy date someone other than Mommy?

It could be ugly. But the one who’d really suffer the brunt of it was Cassie. He felt bad for her, for what she was about to experience. As he drove to the house, he began to regret his impulsive invitation. He should have introduced her to the kids more gradually.

As they approached the driveway to the house, Cassie gave a low whistle.

“Sweet,” she said. “Wouldn’t have guessed it was your style, I have to admit.”

“Maybe it isn’t,” Nick admitted, but he felt self-conscious about saying it. Like he was putting the blame on Laura.

She squinted at the yellow Dumpster that was stationed underneath a basketball hoop. “Construction?”

“Always.”

“Portoncini dei morti,” she said.

“You’re in America now,” Nick said lightly. “About time you learned to speak English.”

“I take it you’ve never been to Gubbio.”

“If they don’t manufacture casters there, I’ve probably never been.”

“It’s in Umbria. Amazing place. I spent a whole year there-painting, busking, you name it. Great place, but spooky too. You go through the old part of town, and you start to notice that a lot of the houses have these areas that look oddly bricked up. Turns out that they had this old custom, like a sacrament. They bricked up the doorway where a dead person was taken out of a house. They’re called portoncini dei morti. Doors of the dead. Ghost doors.”

“Must have kept a lot of masons busy,” Nick said. It’s the front door, Nick. That’s the one place you don’t cheap out. Doors of the dead.

“This was Laura’s house, wasn’t it?” Cassie asked.

That wasn’t how Nick would have put it, but it was more or less true. It was Laura’s house.

“Sort of,” he said.

Marta was at the door when they came in. “I told you we’d be having company,” Nick said. “Well, she’s the company.”

Marta didn’t shake Cassie’s hand, he noticed, just said, “Nice to meet you,” and none too cordially. Same expression she reserved for telephone solicitors.

“Where’s Julia?” Nick asked Marta.

“Watching TV in the family room. Emily just left a little while ago.”

“And Luke?”

“In his room. On the computer, maybe. He said he can’t stay for dinner.”

“Oh, that right? Well, he’s going to stay for dinner,” Nick said, icily. Christ. The whole suspension thing-they would have to have a Very Serious Talk. Which probably meant a Perfect Storm of an argument.

Just not tonight.

Nick took Cassie over to the family room, where Julia was engrossed in Slime Time Live on Nickelodeon.

“Hey, baby,” Nick said. “I want you to meet my friend Cassie.”

“Hi,” Julia said, and turned back to the show. Not rude, but not exactly friendly. A little cool, maybe.

“Cassie is going to be joining us for dinner.”

Julia turned around again. “Okay,” she said, warily. To Cassie, she said, “We usually don’t have company for dinner.”

Then she turned back to the flickering screen. Someone was getting doused with green slime.

“Don’t worry,” Cassie said. “I eat like a bird.”

Julia nodded.

“Two and half times my body weight in earthworms,” Cassie said.

Julia giggled.

“Are you a baseball fan?” Cassie asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” Julia said. “You mean my jersey?”

“I love the Tigers,” Cassie said.

Julia shrugged dismissively. “The girls in school keep calling me ‘tomboy’ because I wear it all the time.”

“They’re just jealous of your jersey,” Nick put in, but Julia wasn’t listening.

“You ever been to Comerica Park?” Cassie asked her.

Julia shook her head.

“Oh, it’s amazing. You’d love it. We’ve got to go there some time.”

“Really?” Julia said.

“Definitely. And listen-I got called ‘tomboy’ when I was a kid too,” said Cassie. “Just ’cause I wasn’t into Barbie.”

“Really? I hate Barbie,” Julia said.

“Barbie’s kind of creepy,” Cassie agreed. “I was never into dolls.”

“Me neither.”

“But I’ll bet you have stuffed animals to keep you company, right?”

“Beanie Babies, mostly.”

“Do you collect them?”

“Sort of.” Julia was now looking at Cassie with interest. “They’re very valuable, you know. But only if you don’t use them and stuff.”

“You mean like, never take the label off, and put them on the shelf?”

Julia nodded, this time more animatedly.

“I don’t get that,” Cassie said. “The whole point of Beanie Babies is to play with them, right? Do you have a lot, or just a couple of them?”

“I don’t know. I guess a lot. You want to see my collection?”

“Really? I’d love to.”

“Not now,” said Nick. “Later. Right now it’s suppertime, and we’re having company.”

“Okay,” Julia said. Then she yelled, “Luke, supper! We have company.”

As Nick took Cassie back to the front hall, she said, “She’s a sweetie, isn’t she?”

“A regular Ma Barker is what she is,” Nick said. “For sweetness and light, we’ve got Lucas Conover.” He took her upstairs, gestured toward the hallway. There was no need to specify which was Lucas’s room. From beneath the closed door, thrash music pulsed, an avalanche of noise with someone shouting at the top of his lungs over a thudding bass beat. Something about outta my mind, something about ashes to ashes, something about all pain, no gain. A lot of incomprehensible screaming in between.

“As you can tell, he’s a huge Lawrence Welk fan,” Nick said. He decided against knocking on the door. Let Marta get him downstairs. Lucas responded better to her anyway.

“How do you know so much about Beanie Babies?” Nick asked.

“My knowledge of Beanie Babies is limited to what I read in Newsweek. Am I busted?”

“You sure got Julia believing you’re a Beanie Babies expert.”

“Hey, whatever works, right? Though I get a feeling your son isn’t into Beanie Babies.”

“He’s a hard case, my son,” Nick said, not wanting to dwell on it. “I’m going to change, meet you downstairs in a few.”

When he came back down, Cassie and Julia were deep in conversation in the family room. “And there was blood everywhere,” Julia was saying in a hushed, serious voice.

“Oh no,” Cassie breathed.

“And it was Barney.” Julia’s eyes were moist.

“My God.”

“And Daddy said he would protect us. He said he’d do whatever he had to do.”

Nick cleared his throat; it wasn’t a conversation he wanted to encourage. “Hey, girls,” he called. “Suppertime.”

“I’ve just been hearing about what happened to Barney,” Cassie said, looking up. “Sounds horrible.”

“It was rough,” Nick said. “For all of us.” He tried to sound a little brusque, to let Cassie know he didn’t want the conversation to continue.

Luckily, Marta emerged from the kitchen just then and announced that dinner was ready.

“All right,” Nick said. “Let’s go, girls. Marta, would you go upstairs and ask Sid Vicious to join us?”

As Marta went upstairs, Julia asked, “Who’s Sid Vicious?”

“You know the Sex Pistols?” Cassie said to Nick, smiling.

“I think I saw part of some movie about them before I walked out,” Nick said. “I’m not a total geek, you know, no matter what my son thinks.”

“But who’s Sid Vicious?” Julia asked again.

Lucas’s heavy footsteps thundered as if a crate of bowling balls had been upended at the top of the stairs. At the landing he looked around, taking in Cassie’s presence with an unblinking stare.

“Luke, I’d like you to meet my friend Cassie Stadler,” Nick said.

“Cassie Stadler?”

The way he said it made Nick’s blood run cold.

“That’s right,” he said quietly. “She’ll be joining us for dinner.”

“I have to go out,” Lucas said.

“You have to stay here.”

“I have a homework project I need to do with some kids in class.”

Nick refrained from rolling his eyes. A science experiment, no doubt, designed to study the effect of Cannabis sativa on the psychophysiology of the American sixteen-year-old. “It isn’t up for discussion,” he said. “Sit.”

“I like your music,” Cassie said to him.

Lucas looked at her with something just shy of hostility. “Yeah?” His tone of voice made it short for: Yeah, what of it?

“If you call that music,” Nick said, feeling protective of Cassie. He gave her an apologetic shrug. “And when he isn’t listening to this kind of noise, it’s that gangsta rap stuff.”

“Gangsta rap stuff.” Cassie’s mimicry was perfect, and devastating.

Lucas half snorted, half chortled.

“You’d prefer it if he listened to the Mamas and the Papas?” she asked. “Like some kind of Stepford son?”

Hey, no fair, Nick wanted to say. “I didn’t even listen to the Mamas and the Papas,” he said.

Cassie wasn’t paying attention. She was focused on Lucas. “I’m curious. How long have you been into Slasher?”

“A few months,” Lucas said, surprised.

“Not a lot of people your age even know about Slasher. I bet you have all their albums.”

“Got downloads of some stuff they haven’t released yet, and some bootleg demos, too.”

“Slasher would be a rock band,” Nick said, feeling obscurely excluded. “Tell me if I’m warm.”

“‘Slasher’ is what they call Dad, you know,” Lucas said, pleased.

“I’ve heard. Anyway, Slasher’s cool, but John Horrigan’s kind of a jerk, I gotta tell you,” Cassie said, taking a step toward Lucas.

Lucas’s eyes widened. “You know him? No fucking way.” An entirely different Lucas was making an appearance.

She nodded. “You heard about how he fell off the stage in Saratoga, during the Sudden Death tour? Well, he had some problems with his neck and back after that. Nothing helped. So I used to teach this yoga class in Chicago, where he’s based. One day he shows up, and it’s the first thing that really helps. Then he’s asking me for extra sessions. And then…” She walked closer to Lucas and put her hand on his arm as she murmured the rest.

Lucas giggled, blushing.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Horrigan rocks. So…” He glanced at Nick, at Julia, and lowered his voice. “What was he like?”

“Selfish,” Cassie said. “First I thought, bad technique. But then I realized it was just selfishness. Finally I just stopped returning his phone calls. Great guitar player, though.”

“Horrigan rocks.”

“What do you mean ‘selfish’?” Julia demanded, with a ten-year-old’s unerring instinct for inappropriate subjects.

“We’re just talking about who gets their guitar licks in,” Cassie said.

Lucas began to quake with silent laughter.

Julia started to laugh, too, for no particular reason. Then Nick, too, began to laugh, and for the life of him he couldn’t say why. Except that he couldn’t remember when Lucas had last laughed.

Marta brought a platter of pork chops to the table, some sort of chili and cilantro thing on top. “More in the kitchen if anyone wants,” she said, sounding slightly peevish, or maybe just a little out of sorts.

“Everything smells delicious, Marta,” Nick said.

“And there’s salad.” She pointed to two covered ceramic bowls. “And there’s rice and there’s ratatouille.”

“That’s great, Marta,” said Cassie. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

“I didn’t make a dessert, but there’s ice cream,” Marta added darkly. “And some fruit. Some bananas.”

“I make one hell of a banana flambé,” said Cassie. “Any takers?”

“Knock yourself out,” Lucas said, and grinned.

Perfect white teeth, clear blue eyes, almost perfect complexion. A beautiful kid. Nick felt a surge of paternal pride. Three-day suspension. They’d have to have The Talk. Just not now. It hung over him like a sword.

“All you need are bananas, some butter, brown sugar, and rum.”

“We’ve got all that,” Nick said.

“Oh, and a light. For a blaze of glory.” Cassie turned to Lucas. “Got a lighter, kiddo?”

53

After driving Cassie home, Nick returned to find Lucas in his room, lying back on his bed, earbuds in. Nick signaled to him to take them off. To his surprise, Lucas did without complaint, and he spoke first: “So, she’s cool.”

“Good. I’m glad you like her.” Nick sat in the only chair in the room that wasn’t piled with books and papers and discarded clothes. He took a breath, plunged in. The normal force field of hostility seemed to be down, or maybe just diminished. That was good; that would make it easier.

“Luke, buddy, you and I have to talk.”

Lucas watched him, blinking, said nothing.

“I told you Mr. Sundquist called me in for a conference today.”

“So?”

“You understand how serious this is, this suspension.”

“It’s a three-day vacation.”

“That’s what I was afraid I’d hear. No, Luke. It goes on your record. When you apply to colleges, they see that.”

“Like you care?”

“Oh, now, come on. Of course I care.”

“You don’t even know what I’m studying in school, do you?”

“I didn’t know you were studying anything,” Nick cracked without thinking.

“That’s a big help, Dad. You basically spend all your time at work, and now you’re trying to pretend like you’re interested in how I do in school?” It was amazing how Lucas could take those pure, innocent eyes and focus them like a laser beam into one cold, hard blue ray of hatred.

“Yeah, well, I’m worried about what’s happening to you.”

“What’s happening to me,” Lucas repeated mockingly.

“This is all about Mom, isn’t it?” He regretted saying it as soon as it came out. That was way too blunt. But how else to say it?

“Excuse me?” Lucas said, incredulous.

“Look, ever since Mom’s death, you’ve totally changed. I know it, and you know it.”

“That’s deep, Nick. Really deep. Coming from you, that’s really great.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, look at you. You went right back to work, no problem.”

“I have a job, Luke.”

“Moving right on, huh, Nick?”

“Don’t ever talk to me that way,” Nick said.

“Get the hell out of my room. I don’t need this shit from you.”

“I’m not leaving until you hear me out,” Nick said.

“Fine,” Lucas said, getting up from the bed and walking out of his room. “Sit there and blab all you want.”

Nick followed his son into the hall. “You come back here,” he said.

“I don’t need this shit.”

“I said, get back here. We’re not done talking.”

“Hey, you’ve made your point, okay? I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you.” Lucas raced down the stairs, taking them two steps at a time.

Nick ran after him. “You don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you,” he shouted. He caught up with him just as Lucas reached the front door, put his hand on his son’s shoulder.

Luke swiveled, swatted Nick’s hand off. “Get your fucking hands off me!” he screamed, turning the big brass knob and shoving the door open.

“You get back here,” Nick shouted after him, standing in the doorway. “This cannot go on!”

But Lucas was running down the stone path into the darkness. “I’m sick of this fucking house, and I’m sick of you!” came his son’s voice, echoing.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Nick yelled back. “You get back here right now!”

He thought about taking off after his son, but what would be the point, really? He was overcome with a sense of futility and desperation. He stood there on the threshold until the sound of Lucas’s footsteps faded to silence.

Julia was there at the bottom of the stairs when he turned around. She was weeping.

He went up to her, gave her a tight squeeze, and said, “He’ll be okay, baby. We’ll be okay. Now you go to bed.”

In the shower a little later, Nick cursed himself for how badly he’d handled the whole thing, how ham-handed he’d been, how emotionally obtuse. There had to be ways of reaching Lucas, even if he didn’t know them. It was like a foreign country where the language sounds nothing like your own, the street signs are unreadable, you’re alone and lost. As the needles of water stung his neck and back, he looked at the row of shampoos and conditioners in the tiled inset: Laura’s stuff, all of it. He hadn’t bothered to remove it. Couldn’t bring himself to remove it, really.

He soaped himself up, got soap in his eyes, which made them smart so that when they started stinging and watering, he couldn’t tell if it was the soap or the tears.

He put on a T-shirt, pajama bottoms, and got into bed just as he heard the front door open, the alert tone go off. Luke had returned.

He switched off the bedside lamp. As always, he slept on the side of the bed that had always been his, wondered when, if ever, he’d start sleeping in the middle of the bed.

His bedroom door opened, and he thought for a split second that it might be Lucas, here to apologize. But it wasn’t, of course.

Julia stood there, her lanky shape and curly hair silhouetted by the nightlight in the hall.

“I can’t sleep,” she said.

“Come here.”

She ran to Nick, scrambled into the bed. “Daddy,” she said very softly. “Can I sleep in your bed? Just for tonight.”

He brushed back the curls, saw the tear-streaked face. “Sure, baby. But just for tonight.”

54

Leon slept late, of course, so it was no problem for Audrey to be up long before him Saturday morning. She enjoyed the quiet of the morning, the solitude, being in her own head. She made herself a pot of hazelnut coffee-the kind Leon hated, but she’d make regular coffee when he got up-and read the morning papers.

The weekends used to be their little island of intimacy, before-before he lost his job, before she started working overtime hours in order to be gone as much as possible. They’d sleep late on Saturday, snuggle, make love. They’d make brunch together, read the papers together, sometimes even make love again. Take a nap together. Then go out and enjoy the weekend, shopping or going for walks. Sundays he’d sleep until she returned from church, and then they’d maybe go out for brunch or make something at home, and they’d make love too.

Those days were like ancient Mesopotamia. She’d almost forgotten what they felt like, they’d receded so into the distant shrouded past.

This Saturday morning, after she’d had her coffee, she considered getting out her case files and working. But a glimmering of ancient Mesopotamia arose in her mind.

Someone had to break the gridlock, she told herself. They were both frozen. Neither wanted to make the first move to try to change things.

She debated internally, the way she debated most things large or small. How many times are you going to keep trying? she asked herself. How often are you going to butt your head against a brick wall before you realize it feels better to stop? The other voice-the wiser, more generous voice-said: But he’s the damaged one. He’s the hurt one. You need to take the lead.

This morning-maybe it was the still beauty of the morning, maybe it was the deliciousness of the coffee, maybe it was the time alone-she decided to take the lead.

She walked quietly through the dark bedroom, careful not to wake him. She slid open her bottom dresser drawer and pulled out the pale apricot silk teddy she’d bought from the Victoria’s Secret catalog, never worn.

She closed the bedroom door and went down the hall to the bathroom, where she took a nice hot shower, using the loofah. She applied lotion all over-her skin tended to get ashy if she didn’t-and then put on makeup, something she never did unless she was going out. She daubed perfume on in all the right secret places-Opium, the only perfume that Leon had ever complimented her on.

Wearing just her teddy, and feeling a bit silly at first, she went into the kitchen and made brunch. French toast, bacon, even some cantaloupe balls. His favorite breakfast: he liked French toast even more than eggs Benedict. A fresh pot of coffee, the kind he liked. A white porcelain creamer, in the shape of a cow, filled with half-and-half.

Then she arranged everything carefully on a bed tray-it took her a while to find it in the overhead storage in the little pantry, and then she’d had to wash off the accumulated dust-and went in to wake up Leon.

Since he’d been in a sour mood for most of the last year, she was pleasantly surprised at his sweet smile upon seeing her and the breakfast she’d placed on the bed.

“Hey, Shorty,” he rasped. “What’s all this?”

“Brunch, baby.”

“French toast. It’s not my birthday, is it?”

She climbed into the bed and kissed him. “I just felt like it, that’s all.”

He took a sip of coffee, made a contented noise. “I got to go take a whiz.” The breakfast tray tottered dangerously as he tried to extricate himself from the bed.

She could hear the sound of his urine splashing noisily in the toilet bowl, the toilet flushing, then she could hear him brushing his teeth, something he didn’t normally do before breakfast. A good sign. Even though he was getting as big as his sister, he remained a very sexy man.

He came back into the bed; she moved the tray to allow him to get in without upsetting it. He kissed her again, to her surprise. She shifted her body, angled it toward him, a hand on his upper arm, ready-but then he pulled away and took another sip of coffee.

“You forgot the syrup,” he said.

She touched the white porcelain gravy boat.

He tipped it over the stack of French toast, dousing it liberally, then took the knife and fork and cut a tall wedge. She’d even dusted it with powdered sugar, which he liked.

“Mmm-mmm. You warmed it.”

Audrey smiled, pleased. Didn’t they always say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach? Maybe this was all it took to break through the ice floes that had accumulated in their marriage.

After he’d wolfed down half the stack of French toast and all but two of the bacon strips, he turned to her. “How come you’re not eating?”

“I ate some in the kitchen.”

He nodded, devoured another piece of bacon, took another swig of coffee. “I thought you were working today.”

“I’m taking the day off.”

“How come?”

“Well, I thought we could spend some time together.”

He turned his attention back to the French toast. “Hmph.”

“You feel like going for a walk later, maybe?” she asked.

After a moment, he said, “I thought we needed the money.”

“One day’s not going to send us to the poorhouse. We could go for a drive out in the country.”

Another silence, and then he spoke through a mouthful of cantaloupe. “Just don’t be telling me about getting a job as a night watchman.”

She was annoyed but didn’t let on. “We don’t have to talk about that stuff now, honey.”

“All right.”

Her cell phone rang. She hesitated. Not just that it was a flow-breaker, but it was an unwelcome reminder of the job she had and he didn’t. She knew it couldn’t be a personal call. It rang again.

“I’ll make it quick,” she said, reaching for the cell phone on her nightstand.

Leon cast her a warning look.

It was Roy Bugbee. This was unusual, a call from Bugbee on a Saturday morning. He wasn’t friendly, but neither was he as rude as usual. “The phone records,” he said.

“One second.” She walked out of the bedroom so as not to subject Leon to her conversation. “Rinaldi’s cell phone records?”

“One of the numbers kept coming up a lot, no ID, so I looked it up in Bresser’s.” He was referring to one of the reverse phone directories. She was impressed at Bugbee’s initiative, relieved that he’d finally agreed to take this job on. Maybe he wasn’t completely beyond redemption.

Bugbee had paused, waiting for her to say something, or maybe for dramatic effect, so she said, “Great idea.”

“Right. And three guesses who called Rinaldi at 2:07 in the morning, the day Stadler got plugged.”

“Stadler,” she ventured.

“No,” Bugbee said. “Nicholas Conover.”

“Two in the morning? The same morning when Stadler’s body was found, you mean.”

“Uh huh.”

“But…but Conover told me he slept through the night.”

“Hmph. Guess not, huh?”

“No,” Audrey said, feeling a little tingle of excitement. “I guess not.” Another awkward pause. “Is that it?”

“Is that it?” Bugbee scoffed. “You got something better on a Saturday morning?”

“No, I mean-nice job,” she said. “Well done.”

She ended the call and returned to the bedroom, but Leon was no longer in bed. He was sitting in the chair, dressed, tying his sneakers.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Leon stood up, and as he walked out of the bedroom, he passed the bed and flung out a hand at the breakfast tray, flipping it onto the floor. The cantaloupe balls went skittering across the carpet, the French toast flopping down in a neat pile, the maple syrup puddle sitting atop the gray wool. The coffee spill soaked right in, as did the half-and-half. Audrey couldn’t keep from letting out a squawk of surprise.

She followed him out, crying, “Leon, baby, I’m sorry-I didn’t…” But didn’t what? The call was important, wasn’t it?

“You’ll make it quick, huh?” Leon said bitterly as he clomped down the hall. “Sure you will. You got business to do, you’re gonna do it no matter what we’re doing. You got your priorities straight, don’t you?”

She felt sad and almost despondent. “No, Leon, that’s not fair,” she said. “I couldn’t have been on the phone for more than a minute. I’m sorry-”

But the screen door slammed, and he was gone.

Audrey was alone in the house now, feeling lonely and a tad anxious. She had no idea where Leon had stormed off to, just that he’d taken his car.

She called Bugbee back, reaching him on his cell.

He didn’t sound happy to hear from her, but then, he never did. “You said Conover called Rinaldi at 2:07 on Wednesday morning. Was that the only call that night?”

“That morning,” Bugbee corrected her. She could hear traffic noise in the background. He was probably in his car now.

“Were there any other calls that night or that morning between Conover and Rinaldi?”

“No.”

“That means Rinaldi didn’t call Conover first, wake him up or something. Conover wasn’t calling Rinaldi back, in other words.”

“Right. Put it this way: Rinaldi didn’t call Conover from either his home phone or his cell phone. It’s conceivable he called Conover from a payphone, but you’d have to get Conover’s phone records for that.”

“Yes. I think we should talk to both of these gentlemen again.”

“I’d say so. Hold on, I’m losing you.” A few seconds went by, a half a minute, and he was back on. “Yeah, put the squeeze on ’em both. I’d say we got ’em there with an inconsistency.”

“I’d like to talk to them tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday-don’t you have church or something?”

“Sunday afternoon.”

“I’m golfing.”

“Well, I’m going to see if I can’t talk to Nicholas Conover tomorrow afternoon.”

“On Sunday?”

“I figure he can’t be too busy at work if it’s a Sunday.”

“But that’s family time.”

“Stadler had a family too. Now the thing is, Roy, I think we should talk to these gentlemen simultaneously. And we ought to call them at the last minute before we go over. I really don’t want one calling the other to get their stories straight.”

“Right, but like I said, I’m golfing tomorrow.”

“I’m flexible as to the time tomorrow,” she said. “You tell me what works best for you. I’m usually out of church by eleven.”

“Christ. Well, I’d rather do Conover. I want to take down the fucker. You can talk to Rinaldi.”

“My sense, talking to Rinaldi, is that he might respond better to a male detective.”

“I don’t really give a shit what makes him comfortable.”

“It’s not a matter of comfort,” Audrey said. “It’s a matter of what’s going to work best, what will help us extract the information we want most effectively.”

Bugbee raised his voice a few decibels. “You want to get information out of Nicholas Conover, you gotta play him hard. And that calls for me. My style. Not yours. You’re a pushover, and he can tell.”

“Oh, I’m less of a pushover than you might think, Roy,” she said.

55

Cassie was already seated at a booth when Nick arrived at the Town Grounds, Fenwick’s upscale coffee house. The national craze for good coffee had even come to Fenwick, a Maxwell-House-in-the-can kind of place if ever there was one, but Starbucks had stayed clear so far. The result was this small, sort of neo-hippy joint that roasted their own coffee, did a healthy take-out business in beans, and served coffee in little glass French presses.

She was drinking a cup of herbal tea-a Celestial Seasonings Cranberry Apple Zinger packet was crumpled next to the teapot-and looked tired, gloomy. The smudges under her eyes were back.

“Am I late?” Nick asked.

A quick shake of the head. “No, why?”

“You look pissed off.”

“You obviously don’t know me well enough yet,” she said. “You’ll learn to recognize pissed off. This isn’t pissed off. This is tired.”

“Well, that dinner wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“Your kids are great.”

“You really hit it off with them. I think Julia loved having another woman around.”

“It’s a pretty male household, with you two Conover men exuding all that testosterone.”

“The thing is, you know, Julia’s at this age where-well, I don’t know who’s going to talk to her about periods and tampons, all that girl stuff. She doesn’t want to hear it from me. Like I know anything about it anyway.”

“Her nanny, maybe? Marta, right?”

“I guess. But it’s not the same thing as a mom. There’s Laura’s sister, Aunt Abby, but we barely see her anymore since Laura’s death. And Luke spends most of his time hating me. One big happy family.” He told her about the big fight, Lucas storming out of the house.

“You talk about him like he’s the bad seed.”

“Sometimes I think he is.”

“Since Laura’s death.”

Nick nodded.

“How’d that happen?”

Nick shook his head. “I don’t want to get into that, you mind?”

“Hey, fine. What do I care?”

Nick looked at her. “Come on, don’t get offended. It’s just a sort of heavy topic for a Sunday morning, okay?” He took a breath. “We were driving to a swim meet and we hit an icy path and skidded.” He studied the tabletop. “And blah blah blah.”

“You were driving,” she said softly.

“Laura was, actually.”

“So you don’t blame yourself for it?”

“Oh, I do. I totally do.”

“But you know it’s not rational.”

“Who’s talking rational?”

“Whose swim meet?”

“Luke’s. Can we talk about something else, please?”

“So he gets to blame you and also share in the guilt, right?”

“You got it. It’s a mess.”

“He’s a good kid, deep down. Lot of attitude, like most sixteen-year-old boys. Hard shell, but soft nougat center.”

“How come I never get to see the nougat center?”

“Because you’re his dad, and you’re safe.”

“Well, maybe you can talk to him about the evils of smoking.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, chuckling. She took a pack of Marlboros from her jeans jacket and tapped one out. “I think I’m not the best person to do that. Kinda like your Sid Vicious giving ‘Just Say No’ lectures on heroin.” She took out her orange plastic Bic lighter and lit the cigarette, pulling the saucer toward her to use as an ashtray.

“I thought people who do yoga don’t smoke,” Nick said.

She flicked him a glare.

“Isn’t yoga all about breath?”

“Come on,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Can I ask you something?” she said offhandedly.

“Sure.”

“Julia told me about your dog.” Nick felt his guts constrict, but he said nothing. “God,” she went on. “That’s so incredible. I mean, how did you feel when that happened?”

“How did I feel?” He didn’t know how to respond. How would anyone feel? He shook his head, faltered for a bit. “I was frightened for my kids, I guess, most of all. I was terrified they might be next.”

“But you must have been furious too. I mean, God, someone who’d do something like that to your family!” She tilted her head as she peered at him, her eyes keen. “I’d want to kill him.”

Why was she asking this?

He felt a wave of cold wash over him. “No,” he said, “it wasn’t anger so much as-as this protective instinct. That’s what I felt most of all.”

She nodded. “Sure. That’s right. The normal dad reaction. Gotta protect the kids.”

“Right. Got a new alarm system, told all the kids to be extra careful. But there’s only so much you can do.” His cell phone rang.

He apologized, and picked it up. “Nick Conover,” he said.

“Mr. Conover, this is Detective Rhimes?”

He paused for a few seconds. “Oh, yes. Hi-”

He wondered whether Cassie could hear the police detective’s voice.

Cassie smoked, idly studying a hand-lettered “THIS IS A SMOKE-FREE ZONE!” sign on a little chalkboard, pink Day-Glo chalk.

“I’m terribly sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but if there’s any way you could spare a little time, I’d like to come by and talk for a little bit.”

“Well, sure, I suppose. What’s up?”

“There’s a couple of little details I’m confused about, I thought you might be able to clear up for me. I know Sunday is family time, but if you wouldn’t mind…”

“Sure,” Nick said. “What time do you have in mind?”

“Is half an hour from now convenient for you?”

Nick hesitated. “I think that would be okay,” he said.

When he ended the call, he said, “Cassie, listen-I’m sorry, but-”

“Family calls,” she said.

He nodded. “Afraid so. I’ll make it up to you.”

She put a hand on his forearm. “Hey, don’t worry about it. Family’s always number one.”

As soon as he’d dropped her off, he dialed Eddie’s cell.

56

Driving up to the fancy iron gate with the brass plaque that said FENWICKE ESTATES, Audrey was distinctly aware that she was entering another world. She had changed out of her church clothes into something more casual, and now she felt underdressed. Her Honda Accord was definitely underdressed. The guard at the gatehouse looked her over with disapproval as he took her name and picked up his phone to call Conover. She doubted it was the color of her skin. More likely the color of the rust on her front left quarter panel.

She noticed all the security cameras. One, mounted to the gatehouse, took her picture. Another was positioned to capture her license plate at the rear of her car. There was a proximity-card reader by the guard’s window too: people who lived in Fenwicke Estates probably had to wave a card at the sensor to be admitted. The security was impressive. But what must it be like to live like this? she wondered. In a place like Fenwick, where the crimes were mostly localized in the bad part of town, why would you want to live this way? Then she remembered what Conover had said about his wife’s concern that the family might be threatened by employees laid off from Stratton.

When she drove up to the house, she drew breath.

This was a mansion, there was no other word for it. The place was immense, made of stone and brick, beautiful. She’d never seen a house like this in real life. It sat in the middle of a huge green field of a lawn, with specimen trees and flowers everywhere. As she walked up the stone path to the house, she glanced again at the lawn and noticed that the blades of grass were small and slender and sparse. Up close she could see that the lawn had recently been seeded.

The lawn.

She pretended to trip on one of the paving stones, fell to her knees, breaking her fall with one hand. When she got back on her feet, she slipped a good healthy pinch of soil into her purse just as the front door opened and Nicholas Conover came out.

“You okay?” he said, walking down the front steps toward her.

“Just clumsy. My husband’s always saying to me, ‘Walk much?’”

“Well, you’re not the first to trip on those stones. Gotta do something about that path.”

He was wearing faded jeans, a navy blue polo shirt, white running shoes. She hadn’t noticed before how tall he was and trim and powerful looking. He looked like an athlete, or a former athlete. She remembered reading that he’d been a hockey star at the high school.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you at home on a Sunday.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Conover said. “It’s probably just as well. My schedule during the week’s pretty jammed. Plus, anything I can do to help you out, I want to do. You’re doing important work.”

“I appreciate it. This is such a beautiful home.”

“Thanks. Come on in. Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Lemonade? My daughter makes the best lemonade.”

“That right?”

“Right from frozen concentrate. Yep.”

“That sounds tempting, but I’ll pass.” Before they got to the front steps, she turned around and said, “That really has to be the most beautiful lawn I’ve ever seen.”

“Now, that’s what a guy likes to hear.”

“Oh, right. Men and their lawns. But seriously, it looks like a putting green.”

“And I don’t even golf. My greatest failing as a CEO.”

“Is it-do you mind if I ask, because my husband, Leon, is always complaining about the state of our lawn-did you put down sod?”

“No, just seed.”

“Regular grass seed, or, what’s that stuff called-where you spray it?”

“Hydroseed. Yep, that’s what we did.”

“Well, I’ve got to tell Leon. He’s always calling it hydroweeding because he says you get way too many weeds in the grass, but this looks just perfect to me.”

“That Leon sounds like a real card.”

“Oh, he is,” Audrey said, feeling a prickle. “That he is.”

The front door looked like something out of Versailles, ornately carved wood in a honey color. A quiet high-pitched tone sounded when Conover opened the door: an alarm system. He led her through an enormous foyer, high vaulted ceilings, really breathtaking. So this is how rich people live, she thought. Imagine being able to afford a house like this. She tried not to gawk, but it was hard.

She heard the sound of someone playing a piano and thought of Camille. “Is that one of yours?” she asked.

“My daughter,” he said. “Believe me, it doesn’t happen often, her practicing. It’s like a total eclipse of the sun.”

They walked by the room where a young girl was practicing, a lanky dark-haired girl around Camille’s age wearing a baseball shirt. The girl was playing the first prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, one of Audrey’s favorite pieces. She played it haltingly, mechanically, clearly not yet grasping how fluid it had to be. Audrey caught a quick flash of a baby grand piano, a Steinway. She remembered how long LaTonya and Paul had scrimped to buy the battered old upright, which never stayed in tune. Imagine owning a Steinway, she thought.

She was briefly tempted to stop and listen, but Conover kept going down the hall, and she kept up. As they entered an elegant sitting room with Persian rugs and big comfortable-looking easy chairs, she said, “Oh, they never like practicing.”

“Tell me about it,” Conover said, sinking into one of the chairs. “You pretty much have to put a-” he began, then started again. “They fight you on everything at this age. You have kids, Detective?”

She sat in the chair alongside his, not the one directly opposite, preferring to avoid the body language of confrontation. “No, I’m afraid we haven’t been blessed with children,” she said. What was he about to say-You have to put a gun to their heads? What was interesting was not the figure of speech but that he’d caught himself.

Interesting.

She casually glanced at an arrangement of family photographs in silver frames on a low table between them, and she felt a pang of jealousy. She saw Conover and his late wife, a son, and a daughter, Conover with his two children and the family dog. An extremely handsome family.

This house, these children-she was overcome by envy, which shamed her.

Envy and wrath shorten the life, it said in Ecclesiastes. Somewhere else it said that envy is the rottenness of the bones-was it Proverbs? Who is able to stand before envy? Who indeed? Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches. That was in Psalms, she was quite sure. Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst them down into destruction.

Her entire house could fit into a couple of these rooms.

She would never have children.

She was sitting next to the man who was responsible for laying Leon off.

She took out her notebook and said, “Well, I just wanted to clear up a few things from our last conversation.”

“Sure.” Conover leaned back in his chair, arms folded back, stretching. “How can I help you?”

“If we can go back to last Tuesday evening, ten days ago.”

Conover looked puzzled.

“The night that Andrew Stadler was murdered.”

He nodded his head. “Okay. Right.”

She consulted her pad, as if she had the notes from their last interview right in front of her. She’d already transcribed them and put them into a folder in one of the Stadler file boxes. “We talked about where you were that night,” she prompted, “when your memory was maybe a little fresher. You said you were at home, asleep by eleven or eleven thirty. You said you slept through the night.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t remember getting up that night?”

He furrowed his brow. “I suppose it’s possible I got up to pee.”

“But you didn’t make a phone call?”

“When?”

“In the middle of the night. After you went to sleep.”

“Not that I recall,” he said, smiling, leaning forward. “If I’m making calls in my sleep, I’ve got even bigger problems than I’m aware of.”

She smiled too. “Mr. Conover, at 2:07 A.M. that night you placed a call to your security director, Edward Rinaldi. Do you remember that?”

Conover didn’t seem to react. He seemed to be examining the pattern on the Oriental rug. “We’re talking after midnight, early on Wednesday?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I must have my days wrong.”

“I’m sorry?”

“One of those nights I remember the alarm went off. I’ve got it set to make a sound in my bedroom so it doesn’t wake up the whole house.”

“The alarm went off,” Audrey said. That was checkable, of course.

“Something set it off, and I went downstairs to check it out. It was nothing, as far as I could see, but I was a little anxious. You can understand, I’m sure, with what had just happened.”

She nodded, compressed her lips, jotted a note. Didn’t meet his eyes.

“Eddie, Stratton’s security director, had just had one of his guys put in this fancy new alarm system, and I wasn’t sure if this was a false alarm or something I should be concerned about.”

“You didn’t call the alarm company?”

“My first thought was to call Eddie-I asked him to come out to the house and check it out.”

She looked up. “You couldn’t check it out yourself?”

“Oh, I did. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t something faulty in the system. I didn’t want to call the cops for what was sure to be a false alarm. I wanted Eddie to check it out.”

“At two in the morning?”

“He wasn’t happy about it.” Conover grinned again. “But given what I’ve been through, we both agreed it was better safe than sorry.”

“Yet you told me you slept through the night.”

“Obviously I got the days mixed up. My apologies.” He didn’t sound at all defensive. He sounded quite casual. Matter-of-fact. “Tell you something else, I’ve been taking this pill to help me sleep, and it kind of makes the nights sort of blurry for me.”

“Amnesia?”

“No, nothing like that. I don’t think Ambien causes amnesia like some of those other sleeping pills, Halcion or whatever. It’s just that when I pass out, I’m zonked.”

“I see.”

He’d just altered his story significantly, but in a completely believable way. Or was she being too suspicious? Maybe he really had mixed up the days. People did it all the time. If that night hadn’t been unusual or remarkable for him-if, that is, he hadn’t witnessed Andrew Stadler’s murder that night, or been aware of it whether before or after the fact-then there was no reason for him to have any special, fixed memory of what he’d done. Or not done.

“And did Mr. Rinaldi come over?”

Conover nodded. “Maybe half an hour later. He walked around the yard, didn’t find anything. Checked the system. He thought maybe a large animal had set it off, like a deer or something.”

“Not an intruder.”

“Not that he could see. I mean, it’s possible someone was out there, walking around on my property, near the house. But I didn’t see anyone when I got up, and by the time Eddie got here, he didn’t see anything either.”

“You said you took Ambien to go to sleep that night?”

“Right.”

“So you must have been pretty groggy when the alarm went off.”

“I’ll say.”

“So there might have been someone, or something, that you just didn’t notice. Being groggy and all.”

“Definitely possible.”

“Did anyone else in the house wake up at the time?”

“No. The kids were asleep, and Marta-she’s the nanny and housekeeper-she didn’t get up either. Like I said, the alarm was set to sound in my bedroom, and not too loud. And the house is pretty soundproof.”

“Mr. Conover, you said your security director had ‘just’ put in the new alarm system. How long ago?”

“Two weeks ago. Not even.”

“After the incident with the dog?”

“You got it. If I could have had Eddie put in a moat and a drawbridge, I’d have done that too. I don’t ever want my kids to be endangered.”

“Certainly.” She’d noticed the cameras around the house when she’d arrived. “If you’d had a system like this earlier, you might have been able to prevent the break-ins.”

“Maybe,” Conover said.

“But you live in this gated community. There seems to be a lot of security when you come in-the guard, the access control, the cameras in front and all around the perimeter fence.”

“Which does a pretty good job of keeping out unauthorized vehicles. Problem is, there’s nothing that stops someone from just climbing the fence out of sight of the guardhouse and getting in that way. The cameras’ll pick them up, but there’s no motion sensor around the fence-no alarm goes off.”

“That’s a serious security flaw.”

“Tell me about it. That’s why Eddie wanted to beef up the system at the house.”

But now another thought appeared at the back of her thoughts, and she tugged at it like a stray thread.

The security system.

The cameras.

Nothing that stops someone from just climbing the fence.

If Stadler had climbed the fence that surrounded Fenwicke Estates and walked to Conover’s house in the middle of the night, walked across the lawn, setting off the brand-new motion sensors, wouldn’t that have been captured by Conover’s own video cameras?

And if so, wouldn’t there be a recording somewhere? Probably not videotape: no one used that anymore. Probably recorded onto a hard drive somewhere in the house, right? She wondered about that. She didn’t really know much about how these newfangled security systems worked.

She’d have to take a closer look.

“You know, I’ve changed my mind about that coffee,” Audrey said.

57

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

But he wasn’t home.

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

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

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

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

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

“Leon,” she called out.

But he didn’t answer.

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

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

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

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

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

“What’d you tell her?”

“Well, I-see, I’d told her I slept through the night that night.”

“Shit.”

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

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

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

“Yeah?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah?”

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

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

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

“Hong Kong?”

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

“I know about Shenzhen.”

“That mean anything to you?”

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

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

58

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We can’t ignore the possibility.”

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

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

“Eddie Rinaldi knows what he’s doing.”

“Maybe.”

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

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

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

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

“And gets rid of the body.”

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

“Except the fingernails.”

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

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

“Eddie, I’m guessing.”

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

“Which would tell you what?”

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

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

Bugbee smiled. “If so, we got ’em.”

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

“Or Eddie and Conover.”

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

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

“Why unlicensed?”

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

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

Bugbee looked impressed, but he just nodded.

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

“Not going to be a problem getting one.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Evolved?”

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

“Happens. You believe him?”

“I don’t know.”

“He sound rehearsed?”

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

“Usually you can tell.”

“Usually. But I couldn’t.”

“So maybe he’s a good liar.”

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

“Yeah. He said he found nothing.”

“That much they got straight,” Audrey said.

“Maybe too straight.”

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

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

“Happy to.”

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

“And?”

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

“You think she’s telling you the truth?”

“I got no reason to think otherwise. My instinct tells me, yeah, she’s on the level.”

Audrey nodded. “Me too.”

A few minutes later, Bugbee came up to Audrey’s cubicle with a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “Wouldn’t you just know Nicholas Conover would use a company called Elite Professional Lawn Care? Sixteen days ago they hydroseeded the property around a house belonging to the CEO of the Stratton Corporation. The guy remembered it well-the architect, guy named Claflin, specified Penn Mulch. Said they had to put in a new gas line or something, tore up the old grass, and his client decided to put in a whole new lawn, replace the crappy old one. Lawn guy, he said it’s a waste of money to put stuff like that in the slurry, but he’s not going to argue. Not with a customer who has the big bucks, you know?”

59

Scott McNally tended to get into work around the same time as Nick did, around seven thirty. Normally, they and the other early arrivers sat at their desks working and doing e-mail, tended not to socialize, took advantage of the quiet time to get work done uninterrupted.

But this morning, Nick took a stroll across the floor to the other side and approached Scott’s cubicle quietly. He felt a pulse of fury every time he thought about how Scott had lied to him about going to that dude ranch in Arizona, had instead made a secret trip to mainland China. That coupled with what he’d learned from the Atlas McKenzie and the Homeland Security guys-these goddamned rumors that Stratton was quietly negotiating to “move the company to China,” whatever that meant exactly.

It was time to rattle Scott’s cage, find out what he was doing.

“Got any interesting vacation ideas?” Nick asked abruptly.

Scott looked up, startled. “Me? Come on, my idea of a great vacation is a Trekkie convention.” He caught the look on Nick’s face and laughed nervously. “I mean, well, Eden loves Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos.”

“Actually, I was thinking some place further east. Like Shenzhen, maybe? Where do you like to stay when you visit Shenzhen, Scott?”

Scott reddened. He looked down at his desk-it was almost a reflex, Nick noticed-and said, “I’ll go anywhere for a good mu shu pork.”

“Why, Scott?”

Scott didn’t answer right away.

“We both know how hard Muldaur’s been pushing for us to move manufacturing to Asia,” Nick said. “That what you’re doing for him? Checking out Chinese factories behind my back?”

Scott looked up from his desk, looking pained. “Look, Nick, right now Stratton is like a puppy with diarrhea, okay? Cute to look at, but no one wants to get too close. I’m not doing any of us any good if I don’t scout out these possibilities.”

“Possibilities?”

“I realize you find it upsetting. I can’t blame you. But one day, when you look at the numbers and you finally say, ‘Scott, what are our options here?’ I’ve got to be able to tell you what they are.”

“Let me get this straight,” Nick said. “You made some sort of secret-agent trip to China to scout out factories, then lied about it to me?”

Scott closed his eyes and nodded, compressing his lips. “I’m sorry,” he said very quietly. “It wasn’t my idea. Todd insisted on it. He just felt it was too much of a sore point with you-that you’d do everything you could to block any kind of overtures to China.”

“What kind of ‘overtures’ are you talking about? I want specifics.”

“Nick, I really hate being caught in the middle like this.”

“I asked you a question.”

“I know. And it’s really not my place to say any more than I have already. So let’s just leave it right there, okay?”

Nick stared. Scott wasn’t even feigning deference anymore. Nick felt his anger growing greater by the second. It was all he could do not to reach over and grab Scott by the scrawny neck, lift him up, and hurl him against the silver-mesh fabric panel.

Nick turned to leave without saying another word.

“Oh, and Nick?”

Nick turned back, looked at him blankly.

“The Nan Hai is the place.”

“Huh?”

“The place to stay in Shenzhen. The Nan Hai Hotel. Great views, great restaurant-I think you’ll like it.”

A voice squawked out of Scott’s intercom. “Scott, it’s Marjorie?”

“Oh, hey, Marge. Looking for Nick? He’s right here.”

“Nick,” Marge said. “Call for you.”

Nick picked up Scott’s handset to speak to her privately. “There a problem?”

“It’s someone from the police.”

“My burglar alarm again.”

“No, it’s…it’s something else. Nothing urgent, and your kids are fine, but it sounds important.”

Scott gave him a curious look as Nick hurried away.

60

“This is Nick Conover.”

Audrey was astonished, actually, when Nicholas Conover picked up the phone so quickly. She was expecting the usual runaround, the game of telephone tag that powerful men so often liked to play.

“Mr. Conover, this is Detective Rhimes. I’m sorry to bother you again.”

The slightest beat of silence.

“No bother at all,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, now, I was wondering if we might be able to look around your house.”

“Look around…?”

“We were thinking it would help us a great deal in establishing Andrew Stadler’s whereabouts that night. That morning.” She hoped the shift to “we” was subtle enough. “If indeed it was Andrew Stadler who went to your house that night, he might have been scared off by all the new security measures. The cameras and the lights and what have you.”

“It’s possible.” Conover’s voice sounded a bit less friendly now.

“So if we’re able to nail down whether he did go to your house-whether it really was him who came by and not, say, a deer-that’ll be a big help in mapping his last hours. Really narrow things down for us.”

She could hear Conover inhale.

“When you’re talking ‘look around,’ what do you mean, exactly?”

“A search. You know, the usual.”

“Not sure I know what that means.” Was there the slightest strain in his voice? Certainly something had shifted, changed. He was no longer putting out friendly vibes. He’d gone neutral.

“We come over with our techs, collect evidence, take pictures, whatever.”

They both knew what she meant. No matter how she spun it, how she dressed it up, it was still a crime-scene search, and Conover surely understood that. It was a funny sort of dance now. A performance, almost.

“You talking about searching my yard?”

“Well, yes. That and your premises as well.”

“My house.”

“That’s right.”

“But-but no one entered my house.”

She was ready for that. “Well, see, if Andrew Stadler really is the stalker who’s repeatedly broken into your house over the last year, we might find evidence of that inside. Am I wrong in concluding that no one from the Fenwick police ever took fingerprints after the previous incidents?”

“That’s right.”

She shook her head, closed her eyes. “The less said about that, the better.”

“When are you talking about doing this? This week some time?”

“Actually, given how things are progressing in this investigation,” she said, “we’d like to do it today.”

Another pause, this one even longer.

“Tell you what,” Conover said at last. “Let me call you right back. What’s the best number to reach you at?”

She wondered what he was going to do now-consult an attorney? His security director? One way or the other, whether he gave permission or not, she was going to search his premises.

If he refused-if she needed to get a search warrant-she’d be able to get one in about an hour. She’d already talked to one of the prosecutors, woke him up at home this morning, in fact, which didn’t endear her to him. Once the prosecutor’s head cleared, he’d said that there were sufficient grounds to grant a warrant. A district court judge would sign it, no problem.

But Audrey didn’t want to get a search warrant. She didn’t want to play hardball. Not yet. That was escalation, and if and when she needed to step things up, she could always do it. Better to low-key things. Keep up the pretense-the shared pretense, she was quite sure-that Nicholas Conover was being cooperative just because he was a good citizen, wanted to see justice done, wanted to get to the bottom of this. Because the moment he shifted to opposition and antagonism, she’d be all over him.

If he refused, four patrol units would be on their way over to his house in a matter of minutes to secure the premises and the curtilage, or the surrounding area, make sure no one took anything out. Then she’d be there an hour later with a search warrant and a crime-scene team.

She didn’t want to go down that road yet. But she always had to be aware of the legalities. The prosecutor had rendered his judgment that she could get a warrant if she wanted to, yes. Instead, Audrey wanted to conduct what they called a consent search. That meant that Conover would sign a standard Consent to Search form.

It was a little tricky, though. If Conover signed it and his signature was witnessed, that established that he’d given his knowing, intelligent, and voluntary consent to a search. But there’d been cases, she knew, where a suspect with a clever lawyer had managed to get the results of a search thrown out at trial, insisting that they’d been coerced, or they didn’t totally understand, or whatever. Audrey was determined not to commit that gaffe. So she was following the prosecutor’s advice: Get Conover to sign the waiver, date it, get two witnesses, and you’re fine. And if he refuses, we’ll get you a warrant.

Half an hour later he called back, sounding confident once again. “Sure, Detective, I have no problem with that.”

“Thank you, Mr. Conover. Now, I’m going to need you to sign a consent form allowing us to search your premises. You know, cross every T and so on.”

“No problem.”

“Would you like to be there for the search? It’s up to you, certainly, but I know how busy you are.”

“I think it’s a good idea, don’t you?”

“I think it’s a good idea, yes.”

“Listen, Detective. One thing. I don’t mind you guys searching my property, looking for whatever you want, but I really don’t want the neighborhood crawling with cops, you know? There going to be a bunch of patrol cars with lights and sirens and all that?”

Audrey chuckled. “It won’t be as bad as all that.”

“Can you do this using whatever you call them, unmarked vehicles?”

“For the most part, yes. There will be an evidence van and such, but we’ll try to be subtle about it.”

“As much as a police search can be subtle, right? Subtle as a brick to the head.”

They shared a polite, uneasy laugh.

“One more thing,” Conover said. “This is a small town, and we both know how people talk. I really hope this is all kept discreet.”

“Discreet?”

“Out of the public eye. I really can’t afford to have people hearing about how the police have been talking to me and searching my house in connection with this terrible murder. You know, I’m just saying I want to make sure my name stays out of it.”

“Your name stays out of it,” she repeated, thinking: What are you saying exactly?

“Look, you know, I’m the CEO of a major corporation in a town where not everybody loves me, right? Last thing I want is for rumors to start spreading-for people to be making stuff up about how Nick Conover’s being looked into. Right?”

“Sure.” She felt that prickle again, like an eruption of goose bumps.

“I mean, hey, we both know I’m not a suspect. But you get rumors and all that.”

“Right.”

“You know, it’s like they say. A lie’s halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, right?”

“I like that,” she said. Here was another thing that made her uneasy. When an innocent person is being investigated for a homicide, he almost always squawks about it to his friends, protests, gets indignant. An innocent person in the klieg lights wants the support of his friends, so he invariably tells everyone about the outrage of the police suspecting him.

Nick Conover didn’t want people to know that the police were interested in him.

This was not the reaction of an innocent man.