Company Man

61

Early that morning, the day after Detective Rhimes had come over to the house to talk, Nick had awakened damp with sweat.

The T-shirt he’d slept in was wet around the neck. His pillow, even, was soaked, the wet feathers and down giving off that barnyard smell. His pulse was racing the way it used to during a particularly fierce scrimmage.

He’d just been jolted out of a dream that was way too real. It was one of those movielike dreams that feel vivid and fully imagined, not like his normal fleeting fragments of scenes and images. This one had a plot to it, a terrible, inexorable story in which he felt trapped.

Everyone knew.

They knew what he’d done That Night. They knew about Stadler. It was common knowledge, everywhere he went, walking through the halls of Stratton, the factory floor, the supermarket, the kids’ schools. Everyone knew he’d killed a man, but he continued to insist, to pretend-it made no sense, he didn’t know why-that he was innocent. It was almost a ritual acted out between him and everyone else: they knew, and he knew they knew, and yet he continued to maintain his innocence.

Okay, but then the dream took a sharp left turn into the gothic, like one of those scary movies about teenagers and homicidal maniacs, but also like a story by Edgar Allan Poe he’d read in high school about a telltale heart.

He came home one day, found the house crawling with cops. Not the house he and the kids lived in now, not Laura’s mansion in Fenwicke Estates, but the dark, little brown-shingled, split-level ranch in Steepletown he’d grown up in. The house was a lot bigger though. Lots of hallways and empty rooms, room for the police to spread out and search, and he was powerless to stop them.

Hey, he tried to say but he couldn’t speak, you’re not playing by the rules. I pretend I’m innocent, and so do you. Remember? That’s how it works.

Detective Audrey Rhimes was there and a dozen other faceless police investigators, and they were fanning out across the eerily large house, searching for clues. Someone had tipped them off. He heard one of the cops say the tip came from Laura. Laura was there too, taking an afternoon nap, but he woke her up to yell at her and she looked wounded but then there was a shout and he went to find out what was up.

It was the basement. Not the basement of the Fenwicke Estates house, with its hardwood floors and all the systems, the Weil-McLain gas-fired boiler and water heater and all that, neatly enclosed behind slatted bifold doors. But the basement of his childhood house, dark and damp and musty, concrete-floored.

Someone had found a pool of bodily fluids.

Not blood, but something else. It reeked. A spill of decomposition that had somehow seeped out from the basement wall.

One of the cops summoned a bunch of the other guys, and they broke through the concrete walls, and they found it there, the curled-up, decomposed body of Andrew Stadler, and Nick saw it, an electric jolt running through his body. They’d found it, and the game of pretenses was over because they’d found the proof, a body walled up in his basement, decomposing, rotting, leaching telltale fluids. The body so carefully and artfully concealed had signaled its location by festering and decaying and putrefying, leaking the black gravy of death.

A good ten hours after he’d awakened in a puddle of his own flop sweat, Nick pulled into the driveway and saw a fleet of police vehicles, cruisers, and unmarked sedans and vans, and it was as if he’d never woken up. So much for low-key. They couldn’t have been much more obvious if they’d arrived with sirens screaming. Luckily the neighbors couldn’t see the cars from the road, but the police must have caused a commotion arriving at the gates.

It was just before five o’clock. He saw Detective Rhimes standing on the porch waiting for him, wearing a peach-colored business suit.

He switched off the Suburban’s engine and sat there for a moment in silence. Once he got out of the car, he was sure, nothing would be the same. Before and after. The engine block ticked as it cooled off, and the late afternoon sun was the color of burnt umber, the trees casting long shadows, clouds beginning to gather.

He noticed activity on the green carpet of lawn around the side of the house where his study was. A couple of people, a man and a woman-police techs?-were grazing slowly like sheep, heads down, looking closely for something. The woman was a squat fireplug with a wide ass, wearing a denim shirt and brand-new-looking dark blue jeans. The other one was a tall gawky guy with thick glasses, a camera around his neck.

This was real now. Not a nightmare. He wondered how they knew to look in the area nearest his study.

He tried to slow his heartbeat. Breathe in, breathe out, think placid thoughts.

Think of the first time he and Laura had gone to Maui, seventeen years ago, pre-kids, a Pleistocene era of his life. That perfect crescent of white sand beach in the sheltered cove, the absurdly blue crystal-clear water, the coconut palms rustling. A time when he felt more than just relaxed; he’d felt a deep inner serenity, Laura’s fingers interlaced with his, the Hawaiian sun beating down on him and warming him to his core.

Detective Rhimes cocked her head, saw him sitting in the car. Probably deciding whether to walk up to the Suburban or wait for him there.

They were looking for spent cartridges. He had a gut feeling.

But Eddie had retrieved them all, hadn’t he?

Nick had been such a wreck that night, so dazed and so out of it. Eddie had asked him how many shots he’d fired, and Nick had answered two. That was right, wasn’t it? The thing was such a blur that it was possible it was three. But Nick had said two, and Eddie had found two shell casings on the grass close to the French doors.

Had there been a third shot?

Had Eddie stopped when he found two, leaving one there that waited to be found by the gawky man and the fireplug woman, those experts in locating spent cartridge casings?

The lawn hadn’t been mowed, of course, because the grass was too new. The fast-talking guy from the lawn company had told him to wait a good three weeks before he let his gardener mow.

So a chunk of metal that might otherwise have been thrown up into the blades of Hugo’s wide walk-behind Gravely could well be lying there, glinting in the late-afternoon sun, just waiting for the wide-ass chick to bend over and snatch it up in her gloved hand.

He took another breath, did his best to compose himself, and got out of the Suburban.

“I’m terribly sorry to intrude on you this way,” Detective Rhimes said. She looked genuinely apologetic. “You’re very kind to let us look around. It’s such a big help to our investigation.”

“That’s all right,” Nick said. Strange, he thought, that she was keeping up the pretense. They both knew he was a suspect. He heard the rattling squawk of a crow circling overhead.

“I know you’re a very busy man.”

“You’re busy too. We’re all busy. I just want to do everything I can to help.” His mouth went dry, choking off his last couple of words, and he wondered if she’d picked up on that. He swallowed, wondered if she noticed that too.

“Thank you so much,” she said.

“Where’s your charming partner?”

“He’s busy on something else,” she said.

Nick noticed the gawky guy walking across the lawn to them, holding something aloft.

He went light headed.

The guy was holding a large pair of forceps, and as he drew closer Nick could see a small brown something gripped at the end of the forceps. When the tech showed it to Detective Rhimes, without saying a word, Nick saw that it was a cigarette butt.

Detective Rhimes nodded as the man dropped the cigarette butt into a paper evidence bag, then turned back to Nick. She went on speaking as if they hadn’t been interrupted.

Was Stadler smoking that night? Or had that been dropped there by one of the contractor’s guys, taking a cigarette break outside the house, knowing they weren’t allowed to smoke inside? He’d found some discarded Marlboro butts out there not so long ago, just before the loam was hydroseeded, picked them up with annoyance, made a mental note to say something to the contractor about the guys tossing their smokes around his lawn. Back when he had the luxury to be annoyed about such trivialities.

“I hope you don’t mind that we got started a little early,” Detective Rhimes said. “Your housekeeper refused to let my team in until you arrived, and I wanted to respect her wishes.”

Nick nodded. “That’s kind of you.” He noticed that the woman articulated her words too clearly, her enunciation almost exaggerated, hypercorrect. There was something formal and off-putting about her manner that contrasted jarringly with her shyness and reserve, a glimmering of uncertainty, a vein of sweetness. Nick prided himself on his ability to read people pretty well, but this woman he didn’t quite get. He didn’t know what to make of her. Yesterday he’d tried to charm her, but he knew that hadn’t worked.

“We’re going to need to get a set of your fingerprints,” she said.

“Sure. Of course.”

“Also, we’re going to need to take prints from everyone who lives in the house-the housekeeper, your children.”

“My children? Is that really necessary?”

“These are only what we call elimination prints.”

“My kids will freak out.”

“Oh, they might think it’s fun,” she said. A sweet smile. “Kids often find it a novelty.”

Nick shrugged. They entered the house, the high alert tone sounding quietly. The place different now: hushed, tense, like it was bracing itself for something. He heard the sound of running feet.

Julia.

“Daddy,” his daughter said, face creased with concern, “what’s going on?”

62

He sat down with the kids in the family room, the two of them on the couch that faced the enormous TV, Nick in the big side chair that Lucas normally staked out, which Nick thought of as his Archie Bunker chair. The Dad chair. He couldn’t remember when they’d all watched TV together last, but back when they did, Lucas always grabbed the Archie Bunker chair, to his silent annoyance.

On a trestle table next to the TV set Nick noticed the little shrine that Julia and Lucas had made to Barney: a collection of photographs of their beloved dog, his collar and tags. His favorite toys, including a bedraggled stuffed lamb-his own pet-that he slept with and carried everywhere in his slobbering mouth. There was a letter Julia had written to him in different colored markers, which began: “Barney-we miss you SO MUCH!!!” Julia had explained that the shrine was Cassie’s idea.

Lucas sat on the couch in huge baggy jeans, his legs splayed wide. The waistband of his boxer shorts was showing. He wore a black T-shirt with the word AMERIKAN in white letters on the front. Nick had no idea what that referred to. The laces on his Timberland boots were untied. He was wearing that rag on his head again. My own in-house, upper-middle-class, gated-community gangsta, Nick thought.

Lucas, staring off into the distance, said, “You gonna tell us what’s up with the five-oh?”

“The police, you mean.”

Lucas was looking out the bay window, watching the cops on the lawn.

“The police are here because of that guy who we think kept coming by and writing things inside our house,” Nick said.

“‘No Hiding Place,’” recited Julia.

“Right. All that. He was a man who had something wrong with his head.”

She said in a small voice, “Is he the man who killed Barney?”

“We’re not sure, but we think so.”

“Cassie’s dad,” Lucas said. “Andrew Stadler.”

“Right.” Cassie’s dad.

“He was fucked up,” Lucas said.

“Watch your mouth around your sister.”

“I’ve heard that word before, Dad,” said Julia.

“No doubt. I just don’t want either one of you using language like that.”

Lucas, smirking, shook his head with amused contempt.

“So this man, Andrew Stadler, he died a couple of weeks ago,” Nick went on, “and the police think he might have tried to come by our house the night he was killed, on his way to wherever he was going.”

“They think you did it,” Lucas said. A triumphant smile.

Nick’s insides seized. Maybe he had heard, that night when Eddie came over. Or did he just put two and two together?

“Hey!” said Julia, outraged.

“Actually, Luke, what they’re doing here is trying to trace his whereabouts.”

“Then how come they’re gathering evidence? I can see ’em out my window. They dug up some dirt from the lawn and put it in a little container thing, and they keep walking back and forth on the lawn like they’re scoping for something.”

Nick nodded, breathing in and out. They were gathering dirt? What did that mean? Had they found dirt on Stadler’s body? He remembered that Eddie had brushed Stadler’s shoes clean.

Could they have found dirt on Stadler’s body that connected him with the house? Could they even do something like that? This was the awful thing: Nick had no idea of what the police were actually capable of, how advanced their forensic science was, or how backward.

“Luke,” he said calmly, “they’re looking for anything that can tell them whether the guy came by here that night or not.” Nick knew he was treading water here. His kids were too bright. They’d watched too many TV shows and movies. They knew about cops and murders and suspects.

“Why do they care?” asked Julia.

“Simple,” he said. “They need to nail down what he did that night, see if he really was here instead of somewhere else, so they can figure out where he might have gone after that, when he was killed.”

“Wouldn’t that be on the cameras?” Lucas asked.

“Could be,” Nick said. “I don’t remember when the new security system was put in and when exactly the guy was killed.”

“I do,” Lucas said right back. “They put the cameras in the day before Stadler was killed.” How the hell did he know that, remember that?

“Well, if you’re right, then yes, they might find something on the cameras. I have no idea. Anyway, the police want to get your fingerprints while they’re here.”

“Cool,” said Lucas.

“How come? They don’t think we killed the man, right?” said Julia, looking worried.

Nick laughed convincingly. “Don’t worry about that. When they check for fingerprints inside and outside the house, they’re going to find our fingerprints-yours and mine and Marta’s-”

“And probably Emily’s too,” said Julia.

“Right.”

“And probably that guy Digga, right, Luke?”

Luke rolled his eyes, looked away.

“Who’s Digga?” Nick asked.

Lucas didn’t answer, still shaking his head.

“He’s this guy who wears a do-rag just like Luke and plays really loud music when you’re not here and always smells like smoke. He stinks.”

“When does he come over?” said Nick.

“Like once or twice,” Lucas said. “Jesus Christ. This is totally wack. He’s a friend of mine, all right? Am I allowed to have friends, or is this, like, a prison where you’re not allowed to have visitors? You happy, Julia? Fuckin’ tattletale.”

“Hey!” Nick said.

Julia, so unused to being yelled at by her older brother, ran out of the room crying.

“Uh, Mr. Conover?”

Detective Rhimes, standing tentatively at the door to the family room.

“Yes?”

“Could I see you for a minute?”

63

“We found something on your lawn,” she said.

“Oh?”

She’d taken him out into the hall, far enough away from the kids that they couldn’t hear.

“A mangled piece of metal.”

Nick shrugged, as if to say, So? Is that supposed to mean something to me?

“It may be a bullet fragment, maybe a piece of shell casing.”

“From a gun?” His breath stopped. Outwardly he tried to project an image of nonchalance, but interested, as someone in his position should be. Someone who was innocent, who wanted the cops to find the killer.

“It’s hard to say. I’m no expert.”

“Can I take a look?” he said, and he immediately regretted saying it. Mustn’t betray too much interest. Must get the balance right.

She shook her head. “The techs have it. I just wanted to ask you-it may seem a silly question-but you’ve said you don’t own a gun, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So obviously you’ve never fired a gun on your property, I’m sure. But has anyone you know fired a gun in your yard, to your knowledge?”

He attempted a dismissive laugh, though it sounded hollow. “No target practice allowed here,” he said.

“So, no one’s ever fired a gun outside your house, to your knowledge.”

“Nope. Not as far as I know.”

“Never.”

“Never.” A cool trickle of sweat traced a path along the back of one ear and down his neck, where it was absorbed by the collar of his shirt.

She nodded again, slowly. “Interesting.”

“The techs-are they sure it’s from a bullet or whatever?”

“Well, you know, I doubt I could tell the difference between a bottle cap and a-a Remington Golden Saber.380 cartridge,” she said. Nick couldn’t stop himself from flinching, and he hoped she hadn’t noticed. “But the crime scene techs, they’re awfully good at what they do, and I have to defer to them on that. They tell me it sure looks like a fragment from a projectile.”

“Strange,” Nick said. He tried to look puzzled in a sort of neutral, disinterested way, not letting the way he was really feeling leak out-terrified and trembling and nauseated.

Eddie had assured him he’d collected everything, all the shell casings, and checked for any other trace evidence that might be on the lawn. Then again, he could easily have missed a small piece of lead or brass or whatever it was, a flying piece of metal that had lodged itself into the earth, say. That would be easy to miss.

After all, Nick had noticed the smell of liquor on Eddie’s breath that night. He’d probably been sleeping it off when Nick called. Didn’t have all his faculties about him. Maybe he hadn’t been so thorough.

Detective Rhimes seemed about to say something more when Nick noticed someone walking by, carrying a black rectangular metal object sealed in a clear plastic bag. The fireplug woman, the evidence tech with the wide ass in the new jeans, was holding what Nick recognized at once as the digital video recorder that was hooked up to the security cameras. They must have taken it from the closet where the installer had put the alarm system.

“Hey, what’s that?” Nick called out. The woman, whose nametag on her denim shirt said Trento, stopped, looked at Detective Rhimes.

The detective said, “That’s the recording unit from your security system.”

“I need that,” Nick said.

“I understand. We’ll make sure this is turned around just as quickly as possible.”

Nick shook his head in apparent frustration. He hoped, prayed that the little shimmy of terror moving through his body wasn’t obvious. Eddie had wiped the disk clean, he’d said. Reformatted it. Nothing was there from that night.

Nick could only imagine what the camera image would look like. The lurching of a man in a too-big flapping overcoat suddenly illuminated by the outside lights. The flailing hands. The way the man had crumpled to the ground. Or did one of the cameras capture the act itself, Nick holding the pistol, his face contorted with fear and anger, pulling the trigger? The gun bucking up and back, the smoke cloud. The murder itself.

But that was all gone.

Eddie had assured him of that. Eddie, whose breath had stunk of booze. Who was always cocky but never thoughtful and thorough, certainly not in the rink. Who’d always acted hastily, impulsively.

Who might have missed something.

Done it wrong. Failed to reformat it properly.

Might have fucked up.

“Also, Mr. Conover, we’re going to need the keys to both of your cars, if you don’t mind.”

“My cars?”

“The Chevy Suburban that you drive, and the minivan. We’ll want to dust for prints and so on.”

“How come?”

“In case Stadler tried to get in, steal one of the cars, whatever.”

Nick nodded, logy and dazed, reached into his pants pocket for his key ring. As he did so, he noticed a swarm of activity in his study, straight down the hall. “I’m going to need to check my e-mail,” he said.

Detective Rhimes cocked her head. “I’m sorry?”

“My study. I need to get in there. I have work to do.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Conover, but this might take a while.”

“How long are we talking?”

“Hard to say. The evidence techs move in mysterious ways.” She smiled, her face lighting up, really lovely. “Oh, one quick question, if you don’t mind?”

“Sure.”

“About your security director-Mr. Rinaldi?”

“What about him?”

“Oh,” she said with a quiet laugh, “I suppose it’s like ‘Who will guard the guards?’ or something, but I’m sure you did a background check on him before you hired him to be your security director.”

“Of course,” Nick said. A background check was precisely what he hadn’t done. Eddie was an old friend. Well, a buddy, maybe. Whatever that meant.

“What do you know about his police career?” she asked.

There was a yellow tape across the entrance to his study. It said, “Crime Scene-Do Not Cross.”

Crime scene, he thought.

You don’t know.

Two evidence techs in there, wearing rubber gloves. One was dusting the doors, door frames, light switch plates, the desk, the wood frame and glass panes of the French doors, with fluorescent orange powder. The other was vacuuming the carpet with a strange-looking handheld vacuum cleaner, a black barrel, long straight nozzle.

Nick watched for a moment, cleared his throat to get their attention, and said, “You don’t need to do that. We’ve got a housekeeper.”

A lame joke, pathetic even. Offensive, probably. They didn’t have housekeepers.

The tech with the vacuum cleaner gave him a hard look.

Nick let it slide. They were dusting for fingerprints, but there was no way they were going to find anything incriminating. Stadler wasn’t inside the house on the night of his murder. He’d dropped to the ground, easily twenty feet from the French doors.

That wasn’t what bothered him.

What bothered him was why they seemed to be focusing on the study. There were lots of other rooms in the house where Stadler might plausibly have gotten in. Why the study?

Did they know something?

“Mr. Conover, do you have a key to this drawer?”

A confident baritone. One of the techs was pointing at the locked drawer where he’d kept the gun Eddie had given him.

He felt his entire body seize up.

“Key’s right in the top middle drawer,” Nick said mildly. “Real high security.”

He flashed on the box of cartridges in the drawer next to the gun. A green and gold cardboard box, the words REMINGTON and GOLDEN SABER in white lettering.

Eddie had taken them away, right?

When he took the gun?

Nick didn’t remember anymore. That night was such a blur.

Please God oh please God let them be gone the bullets make them gone.

He waited. Holding his breath, while the tech opened the big middle desk drawer, located the key at once, knelt down to unlock the bottom drawer.

The back of his shirt collar was seriously damp now. Downright wet.

My life is in this anonymous guy’s hands right now. He has the power to lock me away forever.

There’s no death penalty in Michigan, he found himself thinking. He’d never thought about it before, never had a reason to think about it. No death penalty.

Life in prison, though.

That was in the balance.

The drawer slid open, the tech bent over.

A second went by, two, then three.

The vacuum cleaner was turned off.

Nick felt like vomiting. He stood there on the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape like some casual sightseer, a tourist, and he waited.

The tech got to his feet. Nothing in his hands.

Maybe the drawer was empty.

If one stray bullet had rolled to the back of the drawer…

No, the tech would have taken out his camera and taken a picture if he’d found something.

The drawer had to be empty.

Nick felt relief. Temporary, maybe. Momentary.

He stood there watching the tech, the one who’d been vacuuming, take out a plastic bottle with a pistol grip and begin spraying a section of the hand-plastered walls around the light switch.

Decora rocker switch, Nick thought. Laura had replaced all the light switches in the house with Decora rocker switches, which she insisted were much more elegant. Nick had no opinion on Decora rockers. He’d never really thought much about light switches before.

The guy started spraying the bottom of the French doors, then the carpet.

He heard the two techs murmuring, heard the one with the plastic bottle say something like, “Miss my Luminol.”

The other one said something in a low voice, something about a daylight search, and then the first one said, “But Christ, this LCV shit is messy.”

Nick didn’t know what they were talking about. He felt stupid standing there on the threshold of his own study, gawking and eavesdropping.

The first one said, “stain’s gonna be degraded.”

The second one said something about “DNA match.”

Nick swallowed hard. “Stain” had to mean blood. They were looking for bloodstains on the door handles, on the door, on the carpet. Bloodstains that weren’t visible to the naked eye, which had maybe been wiped away but not well enough.

Well, at least I’m safe on that, Nick thought. Stadler never entered the house.

But his brain was not cooperating. It kicked up a thought that made the adrenaline surge, made him break out in sweat once again.

Stadler had bled, fairly profusely.

The black puddle of blood.

Nick had walked up to him, kicked at the body with his bare feet. Maybe even stood in the blood, who knows, he couldn’t remember.

Then walked back into the house.

Onto the carpet. To call Eddie.

He’d never noticed any bloodstains on the carpet, and neither did Eddie, but how much did it take? What scintilla of evidence, carried into the study on the soles of his bare feet from the puddle beside Stadler’s body? Mere droplets perhaps, invisible to the naked eye, smeared onto the wall-to-wall carpet unseen, soaking into the woolen fibers, waiting to announce their presence?

The tech who wasn’t spraying the carpet turned around to look at Nick’s desk, noticed Nick still standing there.

Quickly Nick said something, just so they wouldn’t think he was watching in terrified fascination, as he was. “Is that stuff gonna come off my carpet?”

The tech who was spraying shrugged.

“And what about all that powder?” Nick went on, fake-indignant. “How the hell am I going to get that out?”

The tech with the spray bottle turned around, blinked a few times, a lazy, malevolent grin on his face. “You got a housekeeper,” he said.

64

“Eddie.” Nick, calling from his study, scared out of his mind.

“What?” He sounded annoyed.

“They were here today.”

“I know. Here too. It’s bullshit. They’re trying to put a scare into you.”

“Yeah, well, it worked. They found something.”

A pause. “Huh?”

“They found a metal fragment. They think it might be a piece of a shell casing.”

“What? They recovered a shell casing?”

“No, a piece of one.”

“I don’t get it.” Eddie’s swaggering confidence had evaporated. “I recovered both shells, and I don’t remember any fragmentation. You said you fired two rounds, right?”

“I think so.”

“You think so? Now you think so?”

“I was freaked out, Eddie. Everything was a blur.”

“You told me you fired two rounds, so when I found two shells, I stopped looking. I coulda spent all night on that fucking lawn walking around with the flashlight.”

“You think they really might have a piece of ammunition?” Nick said, a quaver in his voice.

“The fuck do I know?” Eddie said. “Shit. Tell you this, I gotta start digging into this lady detective. See what skeletons she has in her closet.”

“I think she’s a good Christian, Eddie.”

“Great. Maybe I’ll find something real good.”

And he hung up the phone.

“We got shit, is what we got,” said Bugbee.

“The search warrant,” Audrey began.

“Was as broad as I could make it. Not just.380s, but any firearms of any description. On top of the usual. No blood or fibers in Rinaldi’s car anywhere.”

“We didn’t expect he took the body home with him.”

“Obviously not.”

“Any.380s?”

Bugbee shook his head. “But here’s the weird thing. Guy’s got a couple of those wall-mounted locking handgun racks, right? Found it in a closet behind some clothes, bolted onto the wall. Each one holds three guns, but two of them are missing.”

“Missing, or not there? Maybe he only has four.”

Bugbee smiled, held up a finger. “Ah, that’s the thing. There’s two guns in one, two in the other, and you can see from the dust patterns that there used to be two more. They’ve been removed.”

Audrey nodded. “Two.”

“I’m saying one is the murder weapon.”

“And the other?”

“Just a guess. But maybe there’s a reason he didn’t want us to find that one too. Two unregistered handguns.”

Audrey turned to go back to her cubicle when a thought occurred to her. “You didn’t warn him you were doing the search?”

“Come on.”

“Then how’d he know you were coming? How’d he know to remove the guns?”

“Now you get it.”

“Conover knew we were coming to search his house,” Audrey said. “I’m sure he told Rinaldi, and Rinaldi knew it was only a matter of time before we searched his house too.”

Bugbee considered for a few seconds.

“Maybe that’s all it is,” he conceded.

An e-mail popped up on Audrey’s computer from Kevin Lenehan in Forensic Services, asking her to come by.

The techs in the Forensic Services Unit all went to crime scenes, but some of them had their specialties, too. If you wanted to get a fingerprint off the sticky side of a piece of duct tape, you went to Koopmans. If you wanted a serial number restoration, you took it to Brian. If you wanted a court exhibit, an aerial map, a scene diagram rendered in a hurry, you went to Koopmans or Julie or Brigid.

Kevin Lenehan was the tech most often entrusted with, or perhaps saddled with, retrieving information from computers or video capture work. That meant that while his co-workers got jammed with all the street calls, he had to waste vast amounts of time watching shadowy, indistinct video images of robberies taken by store surveillance cameras. Or poring over the video from the in-car cameras that went on automatically when an officer flipped on his overheads and sirens.

He was scrawny, late twenties, had a wispy goatee and long greasy hair that was either light brown or dark blond, though it was hard to tell, because Audrey had never seen him with his hair recently washed.

The rectangular black metal box that housed the digital video recorder from Conover’s security system was on his workbench, connected to a computer monitor.

“Hey, Audrey,” he said. “Heard about your little bluff.”

“Bluff?” Audrey said innocently.

“The bullet fragment thing. Brigid told me. Never knew you had it in you.”

She smiled modestly. “You do what it takes. How’s this coming?”

“I’m kinda not clear on what you wanted,” Kevin said. “You’re looking for a homicide, right? But nothing like that here.”

It was too easy, Audrey thought. “So what is on there?”

“Like three weeks of the moon moving behind the clouds. Lights going off and on. Coupla deer. Cars going in and out of the driveway. Dad, kids, whatever. Am I looking for something in particular?”

“A murder would be nice,” she said.

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“If the cameras recorded it, it’s going to be on there, right?” She pointed at the box.

“Right. This bad boy’s a Maxtor hundred-and-twenty gig drive connected to sixteen cameras, set to record at seven-point-five frames per second.”

“Could it be missing anything?”

“Missing how?”

“I don’t know, erased or something?”

“Not far’s I can tell.”

“Isn’t three weeks a long time to record on a hard drive that size?”

Lenehan looked at her differently, with more respect. “Yeah, in fact, it is. If this baby was in a twenty-four-hour store, it would recycle after three days. But it’s residential, and it’s got motion technology, so it doesn’t use up much disk space.”

“Meaning that the camera starts when there’s a movement that sets off the motion detector and gets the cameras rolling?”

“Sort of. It’s all done by software here. Not external motion sensors. The software is continually sampling the picture, and whenever a certain number of pixels change, it starts the recording process.”

“It recycles when the disk gets full?”

“Right. First in, first out.”

“Could it have recycled over the part I’m interested in?”

“You’re interested in the early morning hours of the sixteenth, you said, and that’s all there.”

“I’m interested in anything from the evening of the fifteenth to, say, five in the morning on the sixteenth. But the alarm went off at two in the morning, so I’m most interested in two in the morning. Well, 2:07, to be exact. An eleven-minute period.”

Kevin swiveled around on his metal stool to look at the monitor. “Sorry. Just misses it. The recording starts Wednesday the sixteenth. Three-eighteen A.M.”

“You mean Tuesday the fifteenth, right? That’s when it was put in. Some time on the afternoon of the fifteenth.”

“Hey, whatever, but the recording starts Wednesday the sixteenth. Three-eighteen in the morning. About an hour after the time you’re interested in.”

“Shoot. I don’t get it.”

He spun back around. “Can’t help you there.”

“You sure the eleven-minute segment couldn’t have just been erased?”

Kevin paused. “No sign of that. It just started at-”

“Could someone have recycled it?”

“Manually? Sure. Have to be someone who knows the system, knows what he’s doing, of course.”

Eddie Rinaldi, she thought. “Then it would have recorded over the part I’m interested in?”

“Right. Records over the oldest part first.”

“Do you have the ability to bring it back?”

“Like, unerase it? Maybe someone does. That’s kind of beyond what I know how to do. The State, maybe?”

“The State would mean six months at least.”

“At least. And who knows if they can do it? I don’t even know if it can be done.”

“Kevin, do you think it’s worth looking at again?”

“For what, though?”

“See if you can figure anything else about it. Such as whether you can find any traces. Anything that proves the recording was recycled over or deleted or whatever.”

Kevin waggled his head from one side to the other. “Take a fair amount of time.”

“But you’re good. And you’re fast.”

“And I’m also way behind on my other work. I’ve got a boatload of vid-caps to do for Sergeant Noyce and Detective Johnson.”

“That serial robber case.”

“Yeah. Plus Noyce wants me to watch like two days’ worth of tape from a store robbery, looking for a guy in a black Raiders jacket with white Nike Air shoes.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Eye-crossing fun. He wants it done-”

“Yesterday. Oh yes, I know Jack.”

“I mean, you want to talk to Noyce, get him to move you up in the queue, go ahead. But I gotta do what they tell me to do, you know?”

65

The next morning was jam-packed with complicated, if tedious, paperwork, which Nick was actually grateful for. It kept his mind off what was happening, kept him from obsessing over what the cops might have found in the house. And that fragment of a shell casing had ruined his sleep last night. He’d tossed and turned, alternating between blank terror and a steady, pulsing anxiety.

There was a bunch of stuff from the corporate counsel’s office outlining the patent lawsuit they wanted to file against one of Stratton’s chief competitors, Knoll. Stephanie Alstrom’s staff insisted that Knoll had basically ripped off a patented Stratton design for an ergonomic keyboard tray.

Stratton filed dozens of these complaints every year; Knoll probably did too. Kept the corporate attorneys employed. The legal department salivated at the prospect of litigation; Nick preferred arbitration, pretty much down the line. It kept the out-of-pocket costs down, and even if Stratton won the ruling, Knoll would have already figured out a workaround that would pass legal muster. Go after Knoll in a public courtroom, and you blow all confidentiality-your secrets are laid out there for every other competitor to rip off. Then there’d be subpoenas all over the place; Stratton would have to hand over all sorts of secret design documents. Forget it. Plus, in Nick’s experience, the awarded damages rarely added up to much once you subtracted your legal expenses. He scrawled ARB on the top sheet.

After an hour of sitting at his home base, going over this sort of crap, Nick’s shoulders were already starting to ache. The truth was, home base wasn’t feeling especially homey these days. His eyes settled on one of the family photographs. Laura, the kids, Barney. Two down, three to go, he thought. The curse of the House of Conover.

He remembered a line he’d seen quoted somewhere: Maybe this world is another planet’s hell. There had to be a bunch of corollaries to that. He had made someone else’s world a hell, and someone had made his world a hell. Supply-chain management for human suffering.

An instant-message from Marjorie popped up, even though she was sitting not ten feet away, on the other side of the panel. She didn’t want to break his concentration-she knew how fragile it tended to be.

The usual for lunch today, right?

Oh, right. Nick remembered: the regular weekly lunch with Scott. Which was just about the last thing he felt like doing.

He wanted to confront Scott, tell him to get the fuck out and go back home to McKinsey. But he couldn’t, not yet. Not until he got to the bottom of what exactly was going on. And the truth was, he no longer had the power to fire Scott if he wanted to. Which right now he very much did.

He typed:

OK, thanks.

He noticed that there was an e-mail in his in-box from Cassie; he could tell from the subject line.

He hadn’t given her his e-mail address, hadn’t gotten an e-mail from her before, and he hesitated before clicking on it:

From: ChakraGrrl@hotmail.com

To: Nconover@Strattoninc.com

Subject: From Cassie

Nick-Where’s my grocery delivery boy been? Free for lunch today? Come over between 12:30 and 1? I’ll supply the sandwiches.

C.

He felt his spirits lift at once, and he hit Reply:

I’m there.

“Marge,” he said into the intercom, “change in plans. Tell Scott I’m not going to be able to make lunch today, okay?”

“Okay. Want me to give a reason?”

Nick paused. “No.”

On the way to the elevator he passed Scott, who was coming out of the men’s room. “Got your message,” Scott said. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine. Just got really hectic all of a sudden.”

“You’ll do anything to avoid talking numbers,” Scott said with a grin.

“You got me figured out,” Nick said, grinning right back as he headed for the elevator bank. A couple of women from Payroll got in on the floor below, smiled shyly at him. One of them said, “Hey, Mr. Conover.”

He said, “Hey, Wanda. Hey, Barb.” They both seemed surprised, and pleased, that he knew their names. But Nick made it a point to know as many Stratton employees by name as possible; he knew how good it was for morale. And there’s fewer and fewer of them all the time, he thought mordantly. Makes it easier.

When the elevator stopped at the third floor, Eddie got in, said, “It’s the big dog.”

Something awfully disrespectful about that, especially in front of other employees. “Eddie,” Nick said.

“Had a feeling you were headed out to, uh, ‘lunch,’” Eddie said. The way he dropped little quotation marks around the word “lunch” was unnerving. Does he know where I’m going? How could he? And then Nick remembered that he’d asked Eddie to start looking closely at Scott’s e-mail. He wondered whether Eddie had taken that as an opportunity to look at Nick’s e-mail too. If true, that would be outrageous-but how the hell could he prevent Eddie from doing it? He was the goddamned security director.

Nick just gave him a stony look, which would be missed by Wanda and Barb from Payroll.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Eddie said. He was carrying an umbrella.

Nick nodded.

They walked together, silently, through the main lobby, past the waterfall that some feng shui expert had insisted they put there to repair a “blocked energy feeling” at the entrance. Nick had thought that was complete and utter bullshit, but he went along with it anyway, the way he’d always avoided stepping on cracks in the sidewalk so as not to break his mother’s back. Anyway, the waterfall looked good there, that was the main thing.

Nick could see through the big glass doors that it was raining. That explained the umbrella, but had Eddie planned to go out for lunch, or did he “happen” to run into Nick in the elevator-by design? Nick wondered but said nothing. He considered, too, asking Eddie about what Detective Rhimes had told him-that Eddie had left the Grand Rapids police force “under a cloud of suspicion.” But he didn’t know why she’d told him that. Was she trying to put a wedge between the two men? If so, that was a clever way to do it. If Eddie had lied to him about why he’d left police work, what else might he have lied about?

He’d ask Eddie. Not yet, though.

Outside, Eddie opened the big golf umbrella and held it up for Nick. When they’d walked a good distance away from the building, Eddie said, “Foxy Brown better watch her ass.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come on, man. Cleopatra Jones. Sheba baby.”

“I’m in a hurry, Eddie. It’s been fun free-associating with you.”

Eddie gripped Nick’s shoulder. “Your black lady detective, man. The one who’s trying to roast our nuts over the fire.” The rain thrummed loudly on the umbrella. “The Negro lady who’s got it in for you because you fucking laid off her husband,” he said ferociously, drawing out the words.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Think I’d joke about something like that? About something that should get her fucking thrown off the case?”

“Who’s her husband?”

“Some fucking nobody, man, worked on the shop floor spraying paint or whatever. Point is, Stratton laid him off, and now his wife’s coming to collect your scalp.” He shook his head. “And I say that ain’t right.”

“She shouldn’t be investigating us,” Nick said. “That’s outrageous.”

“That’s what I say. Bitch gets disqualified.”

“How do we do that?”

“Leave it to me.” His smile was almost a leer. “Meanwhile, I got some interesting stuff on your man Scott.”

Nick looked at him questioningly.

“You asked me to poke into his e-mail and shit.”

“What’d you get?”

“You know what Scott’s been doing just about every weekend for the last two months?”

“Burning hamburgers,” Nick said. “I was just over there last Saturday.”

“Not last Saturday, but almost every other weekend. He’s been flying to Boston. Think he’s visiting his sick Aunt Gertrude?”

“He’s getting the corporate discount through the travel office,” Nick said.

Eddie nodded. “I guess he figures you don’t look at travel expenses-not your job.”

“I do have a company to run. Run into the ground, some would say.”

“Plus a shitload of phone calls back and forth between him and that guy Todd Muldaur at Fairfield Equity Partners. Kinda doubt it’s all social chitchat, right?”

“Any idea what they’re talking about?”

“Nah, that’s just phone records. Voice mails I can hack into, but Scotty-boy’s a good camper. Deletes all voice mails when he’s done listening to them. Him and Todd-O e-mail each other, but it’s all kinda generic stuff like you’d expect-you know, here’s the monthly numbers, or shit like that. Scotty must know e-mails aren’t safe. Maybe that’s why, when he’s got something he wants to keep quiet, he uses encryption.”

“Encryption?”

“You got it. My techs intercepted a couple dozen encrypted documents coming and going between Scotty and Todd-O.”

Nick couldn’t think of any possible reason why Scott would be sending or receiving encrypted documents. Then again, he couldn’t think of a reason why Scott would make a secret trip to China either.

“What are they about?”

“Don’t know yet, seeing as how they’re encrypted. But my guys are crackerjacks. They’ll get ’em open for me. Let you know the second they do.”

“Okay.” They’d reached Nick’s Suburban, and he pressed the remote to unlock it.

“Cool. Enjoy your”-Eddie cleared his throat-“lunch.”

“You implying something, Eddie?”

“No umbrella or raincoat?” Eddie said. “Don’t you have a nice view out of your office? You musta seen it was raining.”

“I was too busy working.”

“Well, you don’t want to go out without protection,” Eddie said with a wink. “Not where you’re going.”

And he walked off.

66

When he arrived at Cassie’s, the rain had turned into a full-fledged downpour. He parked in her driveway and raced to the front door, rang the bell, stood there getting soaked. No answer; he rang again.

No answer. He rang a third time, looked at his watch. It was 12:40, so he was on time. She’d said between 12:30 and 1:00. Of course, that was ambiguous; maybe she’d wanted him to specify a time.

Drenched, shivering from the cold rain, he knocked on the door and then rang again. He’d have to change his clothes back at the office, where he kept a spare set. It wasn’t exactly cool for the CEO of Stratton to walk around headquarters looking like a drowned rat.

Finally he turned the knob and was surprised when it opened. He went in, called, “Cassie?”

No answer.

He walked into the kitchen. “Cassie, it’s Nick. You here?”

Nothing.

He went to the living room, but she wasn’t there either. In the back of his mind he worried. She seemed a little fragile, and her father had just died, and who the hell knew what she might do to herself?

“Cassie,” he shouted, louder still. She wasn’t downstairs. The blinds were drawn in the living room. He opened a slat and looked out, but she wasn’t out there either.

Nervous, he went upstairs, calling her name. The second floor was even darker and dingier than the downstairs. No wonder she didn’t want him going up here. Two doors on either side of a short hallway, and two at both ends. None of the doors was closed. He started at the room at the far end of the hall. It was a bedroom, furnished with not much more than a full-size bed and a dresser. The bed was made. The room had the look and smell of vacancy, as if no one had been in here for a long time. He assumed it was Andrew Stadler’s room. He left and went into the room at the other end of the hall, where a sloppily unmade bed, a discarded pair of jeans turned inside out on the floor, and the odor of patchouli and cigarettes told him it was Cassie’s.

“Cassie,” he called again as he tried another room. It smelled strongly of paint, and he knew even before he entered that this was the room Cassie was using as her studio. Sure enough, there was a half-finished canvas on an easel, a weird-looking picture, a woman surrounded by bright strokes of orange and yellow. Other canvases leaned against the walls, and all of them seemed to be variations on the same bizarre image of a black-haired young woman, naked, her mouth contorted in a scream. It looked a little like that famous painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream. In each one, the woman was surrounded by concentric strokes of yellow and orange, like a sunset, or maybe fire. They were disturbing paintings, actually, but she was pretty good, Nick thought, even if he didn’t know much about art.

Well, she wasn’t here either, which meant that something really was wrong, or they’d somehow gotten their signals crossed in the couple of hours since he’d sent his e-mail. Maybe she’d changed her mind, or had to go out, and had e-mailed back to tell him that, and the e-mail never arrived. That happened.

He tried the last door, but this was a bathroom. He took a much-needed piss, then took a bath towel and began blotting his shirt and pants. He put the towel back on the rod, and then, before he left, he took a peek in the mirror-fronted medicine cabinet, hating himself for snooping.

Apart from the usual cosmetics and women’s products, he found a couple of brown plastic pharmacy bottles labeled Zyprexa and lithium. He knew lithium was for manic-depressives, but he didn’t know what the other one was. He saw Andrew Stadler’s name printed on the labels.

Her dad’s meds, he thought. Still hasn’t thrown them out.

“They’re not all his, you know.”

Cassie’s voice made him jump. He reddened instantly.

“That lithium-that’s mine,” she said. “I hate it. Makes me fat and gives me acne. It’s like being a teenager all over again.” She waved an unopened pack of cigarettes at him, and he realized at once where she’d been.

“Cassie-Jesus, I’m sorry.” He didn’t even try to pretend he was looking for an Advil or something. “I feel like such a shit. I didn’t mean to snoop. I mean, I was snooping, but I shouldn’t have-”

“Would you snoop around to find out whether it’s raining? It’s pretty much staring you in the face. I mean, when you meet a person who was valedictorian of her high school, eight hundreds on her SATs, got into every college she applied to, and she’s basically doing fuck-all in the world, well, you’ve got to wonder. How come she isn’t pulling down six figures at Corning or working on signal-transduction pathways at Albert Einstein College of Medicine?”

“Listen, Cassie…”

Cassie made a circular gesture at her temple with her forefinger, the sign for crazy. “You just got to assume that this girl is a few clowns short of a circus.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Would you feel better if I put on a white coat and talked about catecholamine levels in the medial forebrain of the hypothalamus? Put my science education to work? Is that less offensive? It isn’t any more informative.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Crazy is as crazy does,” Cassie said in a cornpone Forrest Gump voice.

“Come on, Cassie.”

“Let’s go downstairs.”

Sitting together on the nubby brown couch in the living room, Cassie kept talking. “Full scholarship to Carnegie Mellon. I wanted to go to MIT, but my stepdad didn’t want to spend a red cent on me, and even with financial aid it was going to be a stretch. Freshman year was tough. Not the course work so much as the classmates. My sorority house burns down freshman year, and half the girls are killed. Blew me away. I mean, I came back here and didn’t want to leave my room. Never went back to college.”

“You were traumatized.”

“I also got addicted to cocaine and Valium, you name it. I was self-medicating, of course. Took me a few years before I figured out I had ‘bipolar tendencies.’ Was hospitalized for six months with depression. But the meds they put me on worked pretty well.”

“Better living through chemistry, I guess.”

“Yeah. By then, of course, I’d wandered off the Path.”

“The Path? That some religious thing?”

“The Path, Nick. The Path. You went to Michigan State, studied business, got a job at the Vatican of Office Furniture, and you were pretty much set so long as you kept working hard and kept your nose clean and didn’t piss too many people off.”

“I get it. And you…?”

“I got off the Path. Or I lost my way. Maybe I was in the woods and a big gust of wind came and blew leaves all over the Path and I just headed off in the wrong direction. Maybe birds ate the damn bread-crumb trail. I’m not saying my life lacks a purpose. It’s just that maybe the purpose is to provide a cautionary tale for everyone else.”

“I don’t think the world is that unforgiving,” Nick said.

“People like you never do,” Cassie said.

“It’s never too late.”

Cassie stepped over to him, pressed herself against his chest. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” she murmured.

67

Noyce called Audrey into his office and asked her to sit down.

“I got a call from the security director at Stratton,” he said.

“He can’t have been happy.”

“He was ripshit, Audrey. About both him and Conover.”

“I can’t speak for Roy, but I know my team was as careful as can be. We didn’t trash the place.”

“I don’t think Bugbee was as careful.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. Mine was a consent search. Roy had a warrant.”

“And Roy is Roy. Listen.” He leaned forward, rested his elbows on a bare patch of desk, rested his chin on his hands. “Rinaldi hit me with something we have to take seriously.”

“They’re threatening us with legal action,” Audrey said, half-kidding.

“He knows about Leon.”

“About Leon.”

“I’m surprised, frankly, it took him this long. But he obviously did some looking into you, and Leon’s name came up.”

“You knew Leon was laid off from Stratton. I didn’t keep that from you.”

“Of course not. But I didn’t really weigh that as carefully as I should have. It didn’t occur to me, frankly.”

“Everyone in this town’s got someone in their family who’s been laid off by Stratton.”

“Just about.”

“You start taking everyone off this case who has any connection to Stratton, and pretty soon there’d be no one left. I mean lab techs and crime scene-”

“This is always something we have to be hypersensitive about.”

“Jack, I was assigned to this case randomly. My name came up on the board. I didn’t request it.”

“I know.”

“And when I started it, there was no connection to the Stratton Corporation.”

“Granted, but-”

“Let me finish. Leon’s situation has nothing to do with this. I’m following the leads here. I’m not on any witch hunt. You know that.”

“I know it, Aud. Of course I know that. But if and when this comes to trial, I don’t want anything fucking it up. If I go to the prosecutor, he’s going to say he doesn’t want you involved-this has to be clean and pristine. And he’ll be right. Any DA is going to worry that this’ll look like payback on your part.”

She sat up straight in the uncomfortable chair, looked at her boss directly. “Are you taking me off the case?”

He sighed. “I’m not taking you off the case. That’s not it. I mean, maybe I should. The Stratton security guy is demanding it. But the fact is, you’re one of our best.”

“That’s not true, and you know it. My clearance rate is pretty darned mediocre.”

He laughed. “Your modesty is refreshing. I wish everyone around here had some of that. No, your clearance rate could be higher, but that’s because you’re still getting your chops. You tend to use a microscope when binoculars are what you want.”

“Pardon me?”

“You do waste time, sometimes, looking superclose at evidence that doesn’t lead anywhere. Going up blind alleys, barking up the wrong trees, all that. I think that gets better with experience. The more cases you do, the more developed your instinct gets. You learn what’s worth following up and what isn’t.”

She nodded.

“You know I’m your biggest fan.”

“I know it,” she said, feeling a surge of affection toward the man that was almost love. Maybe it was love.

“I pushed you to apply for the job, and I pushed you through. You know how many hoops you had to jump through.”

An abashed smile. She remembered how many interviews she’d had to do. Just when she thought she’d clinched it, someone else asked to interview her. Noyce had steered it all the way. “The race thing,” she said.

“The woman thing. That was really it. But look, a lot of people are waiting for you to fail.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“I do, and believe me, I know. A good number of people around here are waiting for you to trip and fall flat on your face. And I don’t want that to happen.”

“I don’t either.”

“Go back to the Leon issue for a second. Whether you say it’s an issue or not. We’re all susceptible to being driven by unconscious biases. Protective instincts. I know you, and you have a lot of love in your heart, and you hate seeing what your husband’s going through. You hate seeing him hurt in any way.” Audrey started to object, but Noyce said, “Hear me out. My turn, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’ve got a forest of facts, of evidence and clues. You’ve got to find a path through that forest. I mean, the stuff about the hydroseed-that’s damned good police work.”

“Thank you.”

“But we don’t know, do we, what that means? Did Stadler walk around Nicholas Conover’s premises? Sure. No one’s disputing that. Did he crawl around the property on his hands and knees, get dirt under his fingernails? Sure, why not? But does that mean Conover did it?”

“It’s a piece of the puzzle.”

“But is the puzzle one of those easy twenty-piece wooden jigsaws that little kids do? Or is it one of those impossible thousand-piece jobs my wife likes to do? That’s the thing. A hunch and some hydroseed isn’t enough.”

“The body was too clean,” she said. “Most of the trace evidence was removed by someone who knew what he was doing.”

“Maybe.”

“Rinaldi’s an ex-homicide detective.”

“Don’t have to be a cop to know about trace evidence.”

“We caught Conover in a lie,” she went on. “He said he slept through the night, the night Stadler was killed. But at two in the morning he called Rinaldi. That’s in the phone records.”

“They give different stories?”

“Well, when I asked Conover about it, he said maybe he got the day wrong, maybe that was the night his alarm went off and he called Rinaldi to check it out, since Rinaldi’s staff put it in.”

“Well, so maybe he did get the day wrong.”

“The bottom line,” Audrey said, exasperated, “is that they knew Stadler was stalking Conover. He butchered the family dog. Then he turns up dead. It just can’t be a coincidence.”

“You sound certain of it.”

“It’s my instinct.”

“Your instinct, Aud?-don’t take this the wrong way-but your instinct isn’t exactly developed yet.”

She nodded again, hoping her irritation didn’t show in her face.

“The bullet fragments,” he said. “At Conover’s house. What was that all about?”

She hesitated. “We didn’t find any bullet fragments.”

“That’s not what you told Conover. You said you found a piece of metal. You said it was a fragment from a projectile.” Rinaldi must have told him this. How else could he know?

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you let him think that, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she confessed.

“That was a little show you put on for Conover, wasn’t it?” he said sadly. “That was all a bluff, designed to get Conover to break down and admit it. Am I right?”

She nodded, hotly embarrassed. “I hardly think I’m the first homicide detective to try a bluff.”

“No, you’re not. Far from it. I’ve done my share, believe me. But we’re dealing with the CEO of the Stratton Corporation. That means we’re under the klieg lights here. Everything you do, everything we do, is going to be scrutinized.”

“I understand. But you know, if my little bluff pushes him closer to an admission, it’ll be worth it.”

Noyce sighed. “Audrey. Okay, so the crack on Stadler’s body was really lemon drops. Whether the guy got swindled or the thing was a setup, we just don’t know. But you got a schizo guy wandering around the dog pound in the middle of the night, it’s not so surprising he gets shot, right?”

“None of the informants knew anything about it.”

“Stuff goes on down there, our informants only know one little slice of it.”

“But boss-”

“I don’t want to be a backseat driver on this one, but before you go off trying to sweat the CEO and the security director of a major corporation for conspiracy to murder some crazy guy-two men who have an awful lot to lose-you want to make sure you’re not being seduced by a great story. I mean, your theory is sure a heck of a lot sexier than some drug killing. But this case mustn’t be about entertainment value. It’s got to be about hardnosed police work. Right?”

“Right.”

“For your own sake. And ours.”

“I understand.”

“I can’t help you if you don’t keep me fully informed, okay? From now on, I want you to keep me in the loop. Help me help you. I don’t want you getting burned on this.”

68

Eddie lived in a small condominium complex called Pebble Creek. It had been built about half a dozen years ago, and consisted of four five-story buildings-stained wood, red brick, big windows-set on a big square of grass and gravel. Each of the condos had its own white-trellised balcony, where residents had put out things like folding chairs and trees in pots. It was a look Nick had heard described as neo-Prairie. No creek anywhere, but plenty of pebbles around the parking lot. There were homey-looking office parks that looked like this-the Conovers’ pediatric dentist was located in one-and some people might have found Pebble Creek a little officey-looking for a home. Eddie wouldn’t have been one of them.

“Be it ever so humble,” Eddie said as he let Nick in. He was wearing black jeans and a gray knit shirt that was furred from one too many tumbles in the dryer. “Welcome to the Edward J. Rinaldi fuck pad.”

Nick had never visited Eddie at his home before, but he wasn’t surprised at what he saw. A lot of glass, a lot of chrome. Blue-gray carpeting. Black lacquered furniture and booze cabinet, big mirrors on the wall behind it. The biggest things in the room were two big flat Magnapan speakers, in silver, standing at either side of a black sofa like shoji screens. Everything more or less matched. In the bedroom, Eddie showed off an immense waterbed that he said got so much use he’d had to replace the liner three times already.

“So what do you know?” Eddie said, walking Nick into the area of his living room he no doubt called his “entertainment center,” though maybe he had a more colorful name for it.

“Well,” Nick said, “I know that ‘J’ was the last letter added to the alphabet.”

“No shit? How did they get by without it? Jacking off. Jheri Curl. Jism. Jesus. Jock straps. You got all the basics of civilization right there.” Eddie opened the drinks cabinet, twisted open a bottle of Scotch. “Not to mention J & B. And Jameson’s. What’ll you have?”

“I’m okay,” Nick said.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, settling into a chair covered in fake silver-gray suede, and putting his feet on the glass coffee table, next to a couple of books titled Beyer on Speed and Play Poker Like the Pros. “I think maybe you are.”

“What makes you say that?” Nick sat on the adjoining sofa, which was covered in the same fake suede.

“’Cause, Nicky, I got something for you. Figured you wouldn’t mind coming over to my place to look at a couple of e-mails our boy Scotty deleted a couple of weeks ago. I guess he figures if you delete something it’s gone, poof. Doesn’t realize all e-mail’s archived on the server. So who’s Martin Lai?”

“Martin Lai. He’s our manager for Asia Pacific, out of Hong Kong. In charge of accounting. Truly the deadliest, most stultifyingly dull guy you’re ever going to meet. Human ether.”

“Well, check it out.” He handed Nick a couple of pages.

To: SMcNally@Strattoninc.com

From: MLai@Strattoninc.com

Scott,

Can you please confirm for me that the USD $10 million that was wired out of Stratton Asia Ventures LLC this morning to a numbered account, no attached name, was done at your behest? The SWIFT code indicates that the funds went to the Seng Fung Bank-Macau. This entirely depletes the fund’s assets. Please reply soonest.

Thank you,

Martin Lai

Managing Director, Accounting

Stratton Inc., Hong Kong.

And then, Scott’s immediate reply:

To: MLai@Strattoninc.com

From: SMcNally@Strattoninc.com

This is fine-just part of the usual process of repatriation of funds in order to avoid tax payments. Thanks for keeping an eye out, but all is OK.

– Scott

When Nick looked up, he said, “Ten million bucks? What’s it for?”

“I don’t know, but it looks to me like Scotty-Boy’s being a little reckless. Playing fast and loose, huh?”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“Not like you.”

“Huh?”

“You’re not being reckless at all, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What you’re doing, man, is a fuck of a lot stupider than whatever Scott McNally’s up to. You better check yourself before you wreck yourself, bro, or we’re both going to the slammer. And don’t think I’m going to take the rap for you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Eddie’s gaze bore down on him relentlessly. “You want to explain what the fuck you’re doing layin’ pipe with Stadler’s daughter?”

Nick was speechless for a moment. “Are you spying on me, Eddie? That’s how you knew where I was going that day, in the rain, isn’t it? You have no business monitoring my e-mail or my phone lines-”

“It’s like we’re on a road trip together, Nick. We gotta be taking the same turns. You need to be watching the speed limit, observing all traffic signs. And right here, see, there’s no Merge sign. Sign says DO NOT ENTER. Are you hearing me? Because it’s real important that you do.” Eddie locked eyes with him. “Do you realize how unbelievably fucking reckless you’re being?”

“It’s totally none of your business, Eddie.”

Eddie stretched, raised his arms and put his hands behind his head. Under his arms, sweat stains blackened his gray shirt. “See, that’s where you’re wrong, buddy. It’s very much my business. Because if this keeps up, we could both be making license plates in the shithouse, and I promise you, that’s not going to happen.”

“This is out of bounds. You lay off her.”

“I wish you’d lay off her too. You tell me you’re getting rim jobs from the local Brownie troop, I could give a shit. You tell me you’re setting up a crystal-meth lab in your basement, I could give a flying fuck. But this thing involves the two of us. You let that piece of ass into your life-for whatever freaky, fucked-up reasons of your own-and you are jeopardizing both of us. What the fuck do you think she’s after?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“News flash,” Eddie said in a low voice. “You wasted her old man.”

The blood left Nick’s face. He was groping for words, but none came.

“You really don’t get it, do you? Cops think you might’ve had something to do with it. Let’s say the cops talk to her, maybe let on their suspicions, let it slip, see if she knows anything, right? So this little girl figures she gets close to you-I’m just spitballing here-and maybe she finds something out. Something that could help bring you down. Who the hell knows what? Maybe her thing isn’t really getting into your pants. Maybe it’s about getting into your head.”

“That’s bullshit. I don’t believe it,” Nick said. It felt as if his guts had furled into a small hard ball.

That time at Town Grounds.

God, someone who’d do something like that to your family.

I’d want to kill him.

“Believe it,” Eddie said. “Entertain the goddamn possibility.” He drained his glass, exhaled with a loud alcohol wheeze. “The ass you save could be your own.”

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to this,” Nick said, his face burning. He stood up, went to the door, but stopped halfway there and turned back around. “You know, Eddie, I’m not so sure you’re in any position to be giving lectures about recklessness.”

Eddie was staring at him defiantly, an ugly grin on his face.

Nick went on, “I don’t think you really leveled with me about why you left the Grand Rapids police.”

Eddie’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I already told you about that bullshit charge.”

“You didn’t tell me you were drummed out for pilfering.”

“Oh, Christ. Sounds like the kinda thing Cleopatra Jones might have told you. You going to believe her, or me?”

Nick pursed his lips. “I don’t know, Eddie. I’m beginning to think I believe her.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said acidly. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

“You didn’t say it wasn’t true.”

“Did I cut corners? Sure. But that’s it. You can’t believe everything you hear. People talk some crazy shit.”

69

Audrey’s desk phone rang, and she checked the caller ID to make sure it wasn’t poor Mrs. Dorsey again. But it was a 616 area code, which meant Grand Rapids, and so she picked it up.

A woman was calling from the Michigan State Police crime lab who identified herself as an IBIS technician named Susan Calloway. She was soft-spoken but authoritative-sounding, her voice arid, devoid of any warmth or personality. She gave the case number she was calling about-it was the Stadler homicide-and said, “The reason I’m calling, Detective, is that I believe you asked us to see if we could match the bullet in your case with any others, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, it seems we got a warm hit on IBIS.”

Audrey knew a fair amount about the Integrated Ballistics Identification System. She knew it was a computerized database of archived digital images of fired bullets and cartridges that linked police and FBI crime labs across the country. It was sort of like AFIS, the fingerprint-matching network, only the fingerprints here were photographs of bullets and casings.

“A warm hit?” Audrey said. That term she hadn’t heard before, though.

“I mean a possible hit,” the woman said, her bland voice betraying the tiniest hint of annoyance. “To me, it looks quite similar to a bullet recovered in a no-gun case in Grand Rapids about five, six years ago. Six years ago, to be precise.”

“What kind of case?”

“The file class is 0900-01.”

That was the Michigan state police offense code for a homicide. So the gun used to kill Stadler had been used six years earlier in another homicide, in Grand Rapids. That could be significant-or it could mean almost nothing. Guns were bought and sold on the black market all the time.

“Really? What do we know about the case?”

“Not much, Detective, I’m sorry to say. I have only the submitting agency’s case number, which won’t do you much good. But I’ve already called over there and asked them to bring over the bullet in question so I can do the comparison.”

“Thank you.”

“And as to the question you’re probably about to ask-how long will this take?-the answer is, as soon as I get the bullet from the GR PD.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to ask that,” Audrey said. She thought: Only because it would rankle if I did ask. If you had no juice with these firearms examiners, you’d better be as sweet as pie. “But I appreciate the information.”

Interesting, she thought. Very interesting.

She took a stroll across the squad room and over to Forensic Services, where she found Kevin Lenehan slumped over his desk, arms folded, a dim shadowy tape playing on a TV monitor, numbers racing across the top of the screen.

She put a hand on his shoulder, and he jolted awake.

“Hey,” she said, “you don’t want to miss the guy in the Nike Air sneakers and the Raiders jacket.”

“I hate my life,” he said.

“You’re too good for this kind of work,” she said.

“Tell that to my manager.”

“Where is she?”

“Maternity leave. Noyce’s my manager these days. Aren’t you tight with him?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Kevin, listen. Could you take another look at my recorder? I mean, unofficially and off the books and all that?”

“When? In my voluminous spare time?”

“I’ll owe you one.”

“No offense, but that doesn’t really work on me.”

“Then how about out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Not much there,” he said.

“Kevin.”

He blinked. “Let’s say, hypothetically now, that I had ten minutes for a coffee break that I decided to spend chasing the great white whale out of a personal obsession. What would I be looking for anyway?”

70

“I just tried Fairfield,” Marge said over the intercom, “but Todd’s assistant said he’s out of the office for the day, so I left a message.”

“Can you try his cell? You have the number, right?”

“Of course.”

Of course she did. She never lost a phone number, never misplaced an address, could pull up a name from her file in a matter of seconds without fail. God, she was the best.

There was a certain etiquette to making phone calls, which she appreciated. If she called Todd’s office and he was there, she’d put Nick on before Todd picked up. That was how it worked. Nick had always hated the telephone brinksmanship, where someone’s assistant would call Marge, be put through to Nick, and then the assistant would say, “I have Mr. Smith,” and Nick would say, “Okay, thanks,” and then Mr. Smith would get on, as if he were too busy even to suffer a few seconds of being on hold. It was demeaning. Nick had devised his own way around that. He’d instructed Marge to tell the assistant, “Put Mr. Smith on, please, and I’ll get Mr. Conover.” That usually worked. So when Marge placed calls for him, he didn’t like to play Mr. Smith’s game. Todd picked up his own cell phone, of course-who didn’t?-so Nick dialed the call himself.

Todd answered right away.

“Todd, it’s Nick Conover.”

“Oh, hey, man.” No background noise. Nick wondered whether Todd actually was in his office anyway.

“Todd, we’ve got some funny things going on around here, and we need to talk.”

“Hey, that’s what I’m here for.” Like he was a shrink or something.

“Two massive deals just fell through because they each, separately, heard that we’re planning to shift all manufacturing to China.”

“Yeah?”

“Any truth to it?”

“I can’t be responsible for gossip, Nick.”

“Of course. But I’m asking you now, flat out-man to man-if it’s true.” Man to toad, he thought. Man to weasel. “If you guys are even exploring the idea.”

“Well, you know how I feel about this, and I’ve let you know. I think we’re eroding our profit margins by continuing to operate these old factories in Michigan like it’s nineteen fifty-nine or something. The world’s changed. It’s a global economy.”

“Right,” Nick said. “We’ve been through all that, and I’ve made it clear that the day Stratton stops making its own stuff is the day we’re no longer Stratton. I’m not going to be the guy who shuts down our factories.”

“I hear you,” Todd said testily.

“I’ve already laid off half the company as you guys asked me to. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever done. But turning Stratton into some kind of virtual company, a little sales office with all the manufacturing done eight thousand miles away-that’s not going to happen on my watch.”

“I hear you,” Todd said again. “What are you calling for?”

“Let me repeat the question, because I don’t think I heard your answer. Is there any truth to these reports that you guys are negotiating to move our manufacturing offshore, Todd?”

“No,” he said quickly.

“Not even preliminary talks?”

“No.”

Nick didn’t know what else to say. Either he was telling the truth, or he was lying, and if he was willing to lie so baldly, well, what the hell could Nick do about it anyway? He thought about mentioning all the back-and-forth e-mail between Todd and Scott, the encrypted documents-but he didn’t want Todd to know he was having his security director keep a close watch. He didn’t want to shut one of the few windows he had into what was really going on.

“Then maybe you can explain to me why you’ve got Scott going to China on some secret mission, like Henry fucking Kissinger, without even telling me.”

A few seconds of silence. “News to me,” Todd finally said. “Ask him.”

“Scott said he went to China to explore the options. He didn’t do that for you? Because if he did, I want you to understand something. That’s not the way it works around here, Todd.”

“He doesn’t report to me, Nick.”

“Exactly. I don’t want to be undermined.”

“I don’t want that either.”

“The job’s tough enough without having to worry about whether my chief financial officer’s taking secret flights to the Orient on Cathay Pacific.”

Todd chuckled politely. “It’s a tough job, and it takes a lot out of you.” The timbre of his voice suddenly changed, as if he’d just thought of something. “You know, I understand your family’s been through some rough times, death of your wife, all that. If you need to spend more time with them, we’re here to help. You want to take a little sabbatical, a little break, might be a good thing. You could probably use a vacation. Be good for you.”

“I’m fine, Todd,” Nick said. Not so easy, Todd. “Going to work every day-that’s what keeps me going.”

“Good to hear it,” Todd said. “Good to hear it.”

71

Bugbee was gobbling Cheetos out of a small vending machine bag. His fingers-which Audrey had noticed were usually immaculate, the nails neatly clipped-were stained orange.

“Makes sense,” he said through a mouthful of Cheetos. “Rinaldi picked up a piece in Grand Rapids when he was working there.”

“Or here. Those guns travel.”

“Maybe. So where’d he toss it?”

“Any of a million possibilities.” She was hungry, and he wasn’t offering her any, the jerk.

“I forget who the poor slobs were searched the Dumpster, but nothing there.”

“There’s probably hundreds of Dumpsters in town,” Audrey pointed out. “And the dump. And sewer grates, and the lake and the ponds and the rivers. We’re never going to find the gun.”

“Sad but true,” Bugbee said. He crumpled up the empty bag, tossed the wad at the metal trash can against the wall, but the bag unballed in the air and landed on the floor. “Shit.”

“Did you have a chance to talk to the alarm company?”

He nodded. “Fenwick Alarm’s just an office downtown. I don’t know what the hell they do-they install, but not in this case. They don’t even do the monitoring themselves. That’s done by a joint called Central Michigan Monitoring, out of Lansing. They keep all the electronic records.”

“And?”

“Nada. Just confirms what we already know. That Wednesday morning one of the perimeter alarms at Conover’s house got triggered. Alert lasted eleven minutes. Big fucking deal. You got the hard drive-that ought to give up what the cameras recorded, right?”

She explained what she knew about Conover’s digital video recording system. “I’ve asked Lenehan to look again. But Noyce has him doing all kinds of other things ahead of us.”

“Why does that not surprise me?”

“Speaking of cameras, one of us should check out whatever they have at Fenwicke Estates security for that night.”

Bugbee shook his head. “Did already. They use a central station downtown. Nothing special-Stadler climbs a perimeter fence, that’s it.”

“Too bad.”

“I say we poly the guy. Both of those assholes.”

“That’s a tough one. It may be early. We may want to wait until we have more. I know that’s what Noyce would say.”

“Screw Noyce. This is our case, not his. You notice the way he’s been breathing down our necks?”

“Some.”

“He must smell something big about to pop.”

She didn’t know how much to say. “I think it’s more that he wants to make sure we don’t slip up.”

“Slip up? Like we’re rookies?”

Audrey shrugged. “It’s a big case.”

Bugbee said, with a crooked grin, “No shit.”

Audrey responded with a rueful smile as she turned to go back to her cubicle.

“That thing about the shell casing or bullet fragment or whatever,” Bugbee said.

She turned. “What shell casing?”

“That bluff?”

“Yes?”

“Not bad,” Bugbee said.

72

Nick was beyond weary. All the shit that was going on with Todd and Scott, all the crap he didn’t understand: it was draining. And that on top of Eddie and his warnings about Cassie: check yourself before you wreck yourself. And: What do you think she’s after? Could there be something to what Eddie was saying?

Was it possible, he’d begun to wonder, that, on some subconscious level, he wanted to be found out?

And worst of all, so awful he couldn’t stand to think about it, was this fragment of a shell casing the police had discovered on his lawn.

He’d always prided himself on his ability to endure pressure that would crush most other guys. Maybe it was the hockey training, the way you learned to find the serene place inside you and go there when things got tough. He never used to panic. Laura, always on the high-strung side, never got that. She thought he didn’t care, didn’t get it. And he’d just shrug and reply blandly, “What’s the use in panicking? Not going to help.”

But since the murder, everything had changed. His hard shell had cracked or turned porous. Or maybe all the stress of the last few weeks was additive, the worries heaped onto his back until his muscles trembled and spasmed. Any second now he’d collapse to the ground.

But he couldn’t, not yet.

Because whatever Todd and Scott were up to-all this maneuvering, the secret trips and the phone calls and the encrypted document-it had ignited a fuse in him that crackled and sparked.

You want to take a little sabbatical, a little break, might be a good thing.

Like Todd gave a shit about his emotional well-being.

Todd wanted him to take time off. Not resign: that was interesting. If Todd and the boys at Fairfield wanted to get rid of him, they’d have fired him long ago. So why hadn’t they? Was it really the huge payday, the five million bucks they’d have to pay to fire him without cause, that was stopping them? Given how many billions Fairfield had under management?

He tapped at his keyboard and pulled up the corporate directory, clicked on MARTIN LAI. A photo popped up-a fat-faced, phlegmatic-looking guy-along with his direct reports, his e-mail, his phone number.

He glanced at his watch. Thirteen-hour time difference in Hong Kong. Nine-thirty in the morning here meant ten-thirty at night there. He picked up the phone and dialed Martin Lai’s home number. It rang and rang, and then a recorded message came on in Chinese, followed by a few perfunctory words in heavily accented English. “Martin,” he said, “this is Nick Conover. I need to speak to you right away.” He left the usual array of phone numbers.

Then he spoke into the intercom and asked Marge to locate Martin Lai’s cell phone number, which wasn’t on the Stratton intranet. A minute later, a long number popped up on his screen.

He called it and got a recorded voice again, and he left the same message. He checked Lai’s Meeting Maker, his online corporate schedule, and the man appeared not to be away from Stratton’s Hong Kong office.

Todd’s words kept coming back to him: You want to take a little sabbatical, a little break, might be a good thing.

What the hell were Todd Muldaur and Fairfield Equity Partners up to, really? Who, he wondered, might know?

The answer came to him so swiftly that he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. A “cousin” in the extended Fairfield family, that was who.

He opened his middle desk drawer and found a dog-eared business card that said KENDALL RESTAURANT GROUP, and underneath it, RONNIE KENDALL, CEO.

Ronnie Kendall was a sharp entrepreneur, a quick-witted bantam with an impenetrable Texan accent. He’d started the Kendall Restaurant Group with a little Tex-Mex place in Dallas and turned it into a thriving chain and eventually a prosperous restaurant holding company. It was mostly a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants popular in the Southwest, but his company also owned a cheesecake chain, a barbecued-chicken chain that wasn’t doing so well, a lousy Japanese-food chain where chefs dressed like samurai sliced and flipped your food right at your table, and a “good times” bar-and-grill chain known for its baby back ribs and gargantuan frozen margaritas. Ten years ago he’d sold to Willard Osgood.

Nick had met him at some business conference in Tokyo, and they’d hit it off. Ronnie Kendall turned out to be a big hockey fan and had followed Nick’s college career at Michigan State, amazingly. Nick had confessed he’d eaten at the Japanese restaurant chain that Kendall’s group owned and didn’t much like it, and Kendall had shot right back, “You kidding? Every time I set foot in there I get diarrhea. Never eat there, but people love it. Go figure.”

Nick was put on hold several times before Ronnie Kendall picked up, sounding exuberant as always, speaking a mile a minute. Nick made the mistake of asking how business was, and Ronnie launched into a manic monologue about how the barbecued-chicken chain was expanding in Georgia and South Carolina, and then he somehow shifted into a rant on the low-carb craze. “Man, am I glad that fad is over, huh? That was killing us! The low-carb cheesecake never went over, and the low-carb diet Margaritas-forget it! And then just when we signed up our new celebrity endorser”-he mentioned the name of a famous football player-“and we’d even taped a bunch of fifteen-and thirty-second spots, then out of the blue he gets hit with a rape charge!”

“Ronnie,” Nick finally broke in, “how well do you know Todd Muldaur?”

Ronnie cackled. “I hate the slick bastard and he loves me just the same. But I stay out of his way, and he stays out of mine. He and his MBA buddies were trying to muck around in my business, got so bad I called Willard himself and said, you put a choke collar on your little poodles or I’m gone. I quit. I’m too old and too rich, I don’t need it. Willard must have taken Todd to the woodshed, because he started backing off. ’Course, he had his hands full, what with the chip meltdown.”

“Chip meltdown?”

“Isn’t that what you call them things? Microchips or whatever? Semiconductors, right?”

“Yeah?”

“You read the Journal, right? The semiconductor industry bubble, the way all those private-equity guys overinvested in chips, then the bubble burst?” He cackled again. “Gotta love it, the way all those guys took a bath.”

“Hold on, Ronnie. Fairfield Equity Partners overinvested in microchips?”

“Not the whole of Fairfield, just the funds our boy Todd runs. He made a massive bet on the chip business. Put all his chips on chips, right?”

Nick didn’t join Ronnie’s laughter. “I thought there’s some kind of limit to how much they can invest in one particular sector.”

“Todd’s an arrogant guy, you know that, right? You can smell it on him. He figured when the semiconductor stocks started sinking, he’d pick up a bunch of companies cheap, turn a big fat profit. Well, he’s sure gettin’ his. His funds are sucking wind. Willard Osgood has got to be madder ’n a wet hen. If Todd’s funds collapse, the whole mother ship goes down.”

“Really?”

“I imagine Todd Muldaur should be makin’ nice to you these days. I know Stratton’s going through some hard times, but at least you’re solvent. Compared to some of his other investments, you’re a cash cow. He could take you guys public, make some real money. Of course, given how long that takes, it might be too late for him.”

“That would take a year at least.”

“At least. Why, they talking about spinning you guys off?”

“No. Nothing about that.”

“Well, Fairfield needs what they call a liquidity event, and real soon.”

“Meaning they need cash.”

“You got it.”

“Yeah, well, they’re up to something,” Nick said. “Really pushing hard to cut costs.”

“Forget that. You know what I always say, when your house is on fire, you don’t hold a garage sale.”

“Come again?”

“I mean, Todd’s so deep in the shit that he’s probably desperate to make a quick buck, sell Stratton quick-and-dirty just to save his ass. I were you, I’d watch Todd’s moves real close.”

The instant he hung up, another call came in, this one from Eddie.

“The small conference room on your floor,” Eddie said without preface. “Right now.”

73

Ever since they’d had it out at Eddie’s condo, there had been an acute chill in their already frosty relationship. Eddie no longer joked around as much. He avoided Nick’s eyes. He often seemed to be seething.

But when he entered the conference room, he looked as though he had a secret he couldn’t wait to share. It was a look Nick hadn’t seen in a while.

Eddie closed the conference room door and said, “The piece of shell casing?”

Nick’s voice caught in his throat. He was unable to speak.

“It’s bullshit,” Eddie said.

“What?”

“The cops never found any fragment of a shell casing on your lawn.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“What was it, then?”

“It was bullshit. A pressure tactic. There never was any metal scrap.”

“They lied about it?”

“I wouldn’t get on my high horse if I were you, Nick.”

“You’re certain? How do you know this for sure?”

“I told you. I got sources. It’s a fake-out, dude. Don’t you recognize a fake-out when you see one?”

Nick shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Come on, man. Remember when we were playing Hillsdale in the finals, our senior year, and you made that great deke to your backhand at the blue line before you fired a rocket behind Mallory, sent the game into overtime?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Nick said. “I also remember that we lost.”

74

Nick put his briefcase down in the front hall. Its antique, reclaimed pumpkin-pine flooring-the strip oak that had been there didn’t make the cut, as far as Laura was concerned-glowed in the amber light that spilled from soffits overhead. Without thinking about it, he expected to hear the click click click of Barney’s dog toenails on the wood, the jangle of his collar, and the absence of that happy sound saddened him.

It was almost eight o’clock. The marketing strategy committee meeting had run almost two hours late; he’d called home during a break and told Marta to make dinner for the kids. She’d said that Julia was over at her friend Jessica’s, so it would just be Lucas.

He heard voices from upstairs. Did Lucas have a friend over? Nick walked upstairs, and the murmur resolved into conversation.

It was Cassie’s voice, he realized with surprise. Cassie and Lucas. What was she doing here? The staircase was solidly mortised, no squeaks and creaks like the old house, or like the house he’d grown up in. They hadn’t heard him come up. He felt a prickling sensation as he paused at the top landing and listened. Lucas’s door was open for a change.

“They should have assigned this in physics class,” Lucas was complaining. “Why would a poet know how the world’s going to end anyway?”

“You think the poem is really about how the world is going to end?” Cassie’s husky voice.

He was relieved. Cassie was helping Lucas with his homework, that was all.

“Fire or ice. That’s how the world will end. It’s what he’s saying.”

“Desire and hate,” Cassie said. “The human heart can be a molten thing, and it can be sheathed in ice. Don’t think outer space. Think inner space. Don’t think the world. Think your world. Frost can be an incredibly dark poet, but he’s also a poet of intimacy. So what’s he saying here?”

“Thin line between love and hate, basically.”

“But love and desire aren’t the same, are they? There’s the love of family, but we don’t call that desire. Because desire is about an absence, right? To desire something is to want it, and you always want the thing you don’t have.”

“I guess.”

“Think about Silas, in the last poem they gave you. He’s about to die, and he comes home.”

“Except it’s not his home.”

“In that one, Warren says, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ One of the most famous lines Frost ever wrote. Is that love or desire? How does his world end?”

Nick, feeling self-conscious, took a few steps down the hall toward his bedroom. Cassie’s voice receded to a singsong murmur, asking something, and Lucas’s adolescent baritone rose in impatience. “Some say this, some say that. You feel, like, Make up your friggin’ mind already.”

Nick stopped again to listen.

Cassie laughed. “What’s the rhythm telling you? The poem’s lines mainly have four beats, right? But not the last lines, about hate: ‘Is also great.’ Two stressed syllables. ‘And would suffice.’ Clear and simple. Like it’s funneling to a point. About the ice of hatred, how potent that is, right?”

“Mad props to my dawg Bobby Frost,” Lucas said. “He could flow, no doubt. But he starts with fire.”

“A lot of things start with fire, Luke. The crucial question is how they end.”

Nick debated whether he should join them. He wouldn’t have hesitated in the old days, but Lucas was different now. What was going on was a good thing, yet probably a fragile thing too. Lucas wouldn’t let him help with his homework anymore, and now that he was in the eleventh grade, Nick wasn’t much use anyway. But Cassie had somehow figured out a way to talk to him, and she knew that stuff-she was a natural. A goddamn valedictorian.

Finally, Nick walked past Lucas’s bedroom, which let them know he was home, and made his way to his own room. Removed his clothes, brushed his teeth, took a quick shower. When he came out again, Lucas was alone in his room, sitting at his computer, working.

“Hey, Luke,” he said.

Lucas glanced up with his usual look of annoyance.

Nick wanted to say something like, Did Cassie help? I’m glad you’re focusing on work. But he held back. Any such comment might be resented, taken as intrusive. “Where’s Cassie?” he said.

Lucas shrugged. “Downstairs, I guess.”

He went downstairs to look for Cassie, but she wasn’t in the family room or the kitchen, none of the usual places. He called her name, but there was no answer.

Well, she has the right to snoop around my house, he thought. After she caught me going through her medicine cabinet.

But she wouldn’t do that, would she?

He passed through the kitchen to the back hallway, switched on the alabaster lamp, kept going to his study.

Unlikely she’d be in there.

The door to his study was open, as it almost always was, and the lights were on. Cassie was seated behind his desk.

His heart thumped. He walked faster, the carpet muffling his footsteps so his approach was silent. Not that he was intending to sneak up on her, though.

Several of the desk drawers were ajar, he saw.

All but the bottom one, which he kept locked. They were open just a bit, as if they’d been open and then shut hastily.

And he knew he hadn’t done it. He rarely used the desk drawers, and when he did, he was meticulous about closing them all the way, otherwise the desk looked sloppy.

She was sitting back in his black leather Symbiosis chair, writing on a yellow legal pad.

“Cassie.”

She jumped, let out a shriek. “Oh, my God! Don’t ever do that!” She put a hand across her breasts.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Oh-God. I was in my own world. No, I should apologize-I shouldn’t be in here. I guess I’m just a low-boundaries gal.”

“That’s okay,” he said, trying to sound as if he meant it.

She seemed instantly aware of the drawers that had been left slightly ajar and began pushing them all the way closed. “I was looking for a pad and a pen,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“I had this idea, and I had to write it down right away-that happens to me.”

“Idea?”

“Just-just something I want to write. Someday, if I ever get my shit together.”

“Fiction?”

“Oh, no. Nonfiction. Too much fiction in my life. I hope you don’t mind my coming over tonight. I did call, you know, but Marta said you were at work, and Lucas and I got to talking, and he said he was busting his head over some poem. Which turns out to be one of the poems I actually know something about. So I…”

“Hey,” Nick said. “You’re doing God’s work. I’m afraid my arrival broke things up.”

“He’s going to write the first few paragraphs of his poetry term paper. See where it’s heading.”

“You’re good with him,” Nick said. You’re amazing, is what he thought.

Maybe that’s all it was. She came over to help him figure out some Robert Frost poem.

“You ever teach?”

“I told you,” Cassie said. “I’ve pretty much done everything.” The pinpoint ceiling lights caught her hair, made it sparkle. She looked waiflike, still, but her skin wasn’t so transparent. She looked healthier. The dark smudges beneath her eyes were gone. “‘He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be / Some good perhaps to some one in the world.’”

“Come again?”

Cassie shook her head. “It’s just a line from Death of the Hired Man. It’s a poem about home. About family, really.”

“And the true meaning of Christmas?”

“You Conovers,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”

“I have a few ideas,” Nick said, attempting a leer. “God, you’re good at everything, aren’t you?”

“Coming from you? The alpha male? Jock of all trades?”

“I wish. I may be the most math-challenged CEO in the country.”

“Is there a sport you can’t do?”

He thought a moment. “Never learned to ride a horse.”

“Horseshoes?”

“That’s not a sport.”

“Archery, I bet.”

“I’m okay.”

“Shooting?”

He went dead inside. After a split second, he gave a small shake of his head, looking perplexed. For a second his eyes went out of focus.

“You know,” she said. “Target shooting, whatever it’s called. On the range.”

“Nope,” he said, hearing the studied casualness in his voice as if from a distance. He lowered himself onto a rush-seated Windsor chair that invariably threatened to leave splinters in his backside. Laura had banished his favorite old leather club chair when they moved. Frat house furniture, she called it. He rubbed his eyes, trying to conceal the flush of terror. “Sorry, I’m just wiped out. Long day.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not now. Sorry. I mean, thanks, but another time. I’d rather talk about anything else than work.”

“Can I make you dinner?”

“You cook?”

“No,” she admitted with a quick laugh. “You’ve had one of my three specialties. But I’m sure Marta left something for you in that haunted kitchen of yours.”

“Haunted?”

“Oh yeah. I met your contractor right when I got here, and I got the lowdown from him.”

“Like why it’s taking his guys forever to put in a kitchen counter?”

“Don’t blame them. You’re driving them crazy, is what I hear. He can’t get signoffs when they need them. Things like that.”

“Too many goddamn decisions. I don’t really have the time for it. And I don’t want to get it wrong.”

“‘Wrong’ defined as what?”

Nick was quiet for a moment. “Laura had very definite ideas of what she wanted.”

“And you want everything to be just the way she’d planned. Like it’s your memorial to her.”

“Please don’t do the shrink thing.”

“But maybe you’re afraid to finish it too, because when it’s over, something else is over too.”

“Cassie, can we change the subject?”

“So it’s like Penelope, in the Odyssey. She weaves a shroud during the day, and unravels it at night. That way it’s never finished. She staves off the suitors, and honors the departed Odysseus.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Nick took a deep breath.

“I think you do.”

“Except, you know, it’s reached a point where I really do want the damn thing finished already. It was her big project, and, okay, maybe as long as it was under way, it was like she was still at work. Which doesn’t make any sense, but still. Thing is, now I just want the plastic draft sheets out of here, and I want the Dumpster gone, and the trucks, and all that. I want this to be a goddamn home. Not a project. Not a thing in process. Just a place where the Conovers live.” A beat. “Whatever’s left of them.”

“I get it,” she said. “So why don’t you take me out to dinner somewhere?” A smile hovered around her lips. “A date.”

75

They walked through the Grand Fenwick Hotel parking lot holding hands. It was a cool, cloudless night, and the stars twinkled. Cassie stopped for a moment before they reached the porte cochere and looked up.

“You know, when I was six or seven, my best friend, Marcy Stroup, told me that every star was really the soul of someone who’d died.”

Nick grunted.

“I didn’t believe it either. Then in school we learned that each star is actually a ball of fire, and some of them probably have solar systems of their own. I remember when they taught us in school about how stars die, how in just a few thousandths of a second a star’s core would collapse and the whole star would blow up-a great supernova followed by nothingness. And I started to cry. Right there at my desk in sixth grade. Crazy, huh? That night I was talking to my daddy about it, and he said that was just the way of the universe. That people die, and stars die too-they have to, to make room for new ones.”

“Huh.”

“Daddy said if no one ever died, there’d be no room on the planet for the babies being born. He said if nothing ever came to an end, nothing could ever begin. He said it was the same way in the heavens-that sometimes a world has to come to an end so that new ones can be born.” She squeezed his hand. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

The lobby of the Grand Fenwick was carpeted in what was meant to suggest an old-fashioned English broadloom, with lots of oversized leather furniture arranged in clubby “conversation pits,” like a dozen living rooms stitched together. Velvet ropes on stanchions partitioned the restaurant from the lobby. The menu offered fifties favorites like duck à l’orange and salmon hollandaise, but mainly what it offered were steaks, for old-school types who knew the names for the different cuts: Delmonico, porterhouse, Kansas City strip. The place smelled like cigars, and not especially expensive ones; the smoke had seeped into everything like dressing on a salad.

“They have fish,” Nick said, apologetically, as they were led to a corner table.

“Now why would you say that? You think girls don’t eat red meat?”

“That’s right, I forgot-you do. So long as it isn’t actually red.”

“Exactly.”

Cassie ordered a rib steak well done, Nick a medium-rare sirloin. Both of them ordered salads.

After Nick ate his salad, he looked at Cassie. “Brainstorm. I always order a salad. But I just realized something: I don’t particularly like salad.”

“Not exactly the solution to Fermat’s last theorem,” Cassie said, “but we can work with this. You don’t like salad. Same deal as with tea.”

“Right. I drink tea. Laura would make it and I’d drink it. Same deal. I order salads. But you know, I never liked tea, and I never liked salad.”

“You just realized this.”

“Yeah. It was always true. I just wasn’t conscious of it, somehow. Like…Chinese food. I don’t really like it. I don’t hate it. I just don’t have any liking for it.”

“You’re on a roll, now. What else.”

“What else? Okay. Eggplants. Who the hell decided that eggplants were edible? Nontoxic, I get. But is everything that’s nontoxic a food? If I were some cave man, and I weren’t starving, and I bit into an eggplant, cooked or not, I wouldn’t say, wow, a new taste sensation-I’ve discovered a foodstuff. I’d say, well, this definitely won’t kill you. Don’t bother to dip your arrowhead in it. It’s like-I don’t know-maple leaves. You could probably eat them, but why would you?”

Cassie looked at him.

“You’re the one who was complaining I was a stranger to myself,” Nick said, tugging on the table linen absently.

“That wasn’t really what I meant.”

“Gotta start somewhere.”

She laughed. He felt her hand stroking his thigh under the tablecloth. Affectionately, not sexually. “Forget eggplant. Give yourself credit-you know what’s most precious to you. Not everyone does. Your kids. Your family. They’re everything to you, aren’t they?”

Nick nodded. There was a lump of sadness in his throat. “When I was playing hockey, I could convince myself that the harder I worked, the harder I trained, the harder I played, the better I’d do. It was true, or true enough. True of a lot of things. You work harder, and you do better. In hockey, they talk about playing with a lot of ‘heart’-giving it your all. Not true of family, though. Not true of being a father. The harder I try to get through to Lucas, the harder he fights me. You got through the force field. I can’t.”

“That’s because you always argue with him, Nick. You’re always trying to make a case, and he doesn’t want to hear it.”

“The way he looks at me, I think he couldn’t care less whether I lived or died.”

“That’s not what’s going on here. Has Lucas ever talked to you about Laura’s death?”

“Never. The Conover men don’t really do feelings, okay?” Nick looked around the darkened room, and was surprised to see Scott McNally being seated a few tables away. Their eyes met, and Scott waved a hand. He was with a tall, gangly man with a narrow face and a prominent chin. Nick saw Scott talking to his dinner companion hurriedly, gesturing toward him. It looked like Scott was deciding whether to do the dessert visit, or to get it over with, and had decided that it would be better to get it over with. The two men stood up and came over to Nick’s table.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Scott said, patting Nick’s shoulder. “I had no idea this was one of your hangouts.”

“It’s not,” Nick said. “Scott, I’d like you to meet my friend Cassie.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Cassie,” Scott said. “And this is Randall Enright.” He paused. “Randall’s just helping me understand some of the legal aspects of financial restructuring. Boring technical stuff. Unless you’re me, of course, in which case it’s like Conan the Barbarian with spreadsheets.”

“Nice to meet you, Randall,” said Nick.

“Pleased to meet you,” the tall man said pleasantly. His suit jacket was unbuttoned, and he put his glasses in his breast pocket before shaking hands.

“We get that contract with the Fisher Group analyzed?” Nick said.

“Not sure that’s something we want to rush into, actually,” said Scott.

“Sooner the better, I’d say.”

“Well,” said Scott, fidgeting with a lock of hair above his left ear, glancing away. “You’re the boss.”

“Enjoy Fenwick,” Cassie said to the lawyer. “When are you heading back to Chicago?”

The tall man exchanged a glance with Scott. “Not until tomorrow,” he said.

“Enjoy your dinner,” Nick said, with a hint of dismissal.

Soon, heavy white plates arrived with their steaks, each accompanied by a scoop of pureed spinach and a potato. Nick looked at Cassie. “How did you know he was heading back to Chicago?”

“The Hart Schaffner and Marx label inside his jacket. The obvious fact that he’s got to be some sort of hot-shot lawyer if he’s having a working dinner with your CFO.” She saw the question in his eyes and said, “He put his glasses away because they were reading glasses. And they hadn’t been given their menus yet. We’re definitely looking at a working dinner.”

“I see.”

“And Scott wasn’t happy about introducing him. He did it strategically, but the fact is, he chose to have dinner here for the same reason you did. Because it’s a perfectly okay place where you don’t expect to see anyone you know.”

Nick grinned, unable to deny it.

“And then there’s the ‘You’re the boss’ stuff. Resent-o-rama. A line like that always comes with an asterisk. ‘You’re the boss.’ Asterisk says, ‘For now.’”

“You’re being a little melodramatic. Don’t you think you might be over-interpreting?”

“Don’t you think you might not be seeing what’s right in front of your face?”

“You may have a point,” Nick admitted. He told her about Scott’s secret trip to China, the way he tried to cover it up with a lie about going to a dude ranch in Arizona.

“There you go,” she said with a shrug. “He’s fucking with you.”

“Sure seems that way.”

“But you like him, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, I did. He’s funny, he’s a whiz with numbers. We’re friends.”

“That’s your problem-it’s blinding you. Your alleged ‘friendship’ with Scott didn’t exactly keep him from stabbing you in the back, did it?”

“True.”

“He’s not scared of you.”

“Should he be?”

“Most definitely. Scared of you, not of what’s-his-name, the Yale guy from Boston.”

“Todd Muldaur. Todd’s really calling the shots, and Scott knows it. Truth is, I’m surprised by him. I brought him in here, I would have expected a modicum of loyalty.”

“You’re a problem for Scott. A speed bump. An impediment. He’s decided you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. His deal is all about Scott Incorporated.”

“I’m not sure you’re right, there-there’s actually nothing greedy or materialistic about him.”

“People like Scott McNally-it’s not about making a life, or attaining a certain level of comfort. You told me he wears the same shirts he’s probably worn since he was a student, right?”

“So whatever he’s about, it’s not exactly money. I get it.”

“Wrong. You don’t get it. He’s a type. People like him don’t care about enjoying the things money can buy. They’re not into rare Bordeaux or Lamborghini muscle cars. At the same time, they’re incredibly competitive. And here’s the thing. Money is how they keep score.”

Nick thought about Michael Milken, Sam Walton, those other billionaire-next-door types. They lived in little split-level ranch houses and were completely fixated on adding to their Scrooge McDuck vaults, day after day. He remembered hearing about how Warren Buffett lived like a miser in the same little suburban house in Omaha he bought for thirty thousand bucks in 1958. He thought about Scott’s nothing-special house and how much money he had. Maybe she was right.

“Scott McNally has his mind on winning this round, so he can play in the big-stakes games,” Cassie went on.

“They teach this after the lotus position or before?”

“Okay, then let me just ask you this. What do you think Scott McNally wants to be when he grows up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Does he want to be selling chairs and filing cabinets, or does he want to be a financial engineer at Fairfield Partners? Which is more his style?”

“Point taken.”

“In which case, it’s fair to ask yourself, who’s he really working for?”

Nick gave a crooked smile.

She stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

Nick watched as she made her way to the ladies’ room, admiring the curve of her butt. She wasn’t there long. On her way back, she walked past Scott’s table, and stopped there briefly. She said something to the lawyer, then sat down next to him for a moment. She was laughing, as if he’d said something witty. A few moments later, he saw the lawyer hand her something. Cassie was laughing again as she stood up and returned to her seat.

“What was that about?” Nick asked.

Cassie handed him the lawyer’s business card. “Just check him out, okay?”

“That was quick work.” Nick glanced at the card and read, “Abbotsford Gruendig.”

“Just being neighborly,” Cassie said.

“By the way, I can see what’s in front of my face,” Nick said. “You’re in front of my face. I see you quite well, and I like what I see.”

“But as I said, we don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

“Does the same go for you?”

“Goes for all of us. We lie to ourselves because it’s the only way we can get through the day. Time comes, though, when the lies get tired and quit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Cassie looked at him steadily, searchingly. “Tell me the truth, Nick. What’s the real reason the police were at your house?”

76

For a moment, he was at a loss for words.

He hadn’t told her about the police searching the house and yard, which was a pretty damn huge thing not to have told her about. Especially given the connection to her father. Both Lucas and Julia knew the police had been searching for traces of Andrew Stadler. They just didn’t know the real reason.

“Lucas told you,” Nick said neutrally. He tried to keep his pulse steady, his breathing regular. He took a forkful of steak for which he had no appetite.

“It freaked him out.”

“Yeah, well, he seemed to think it was a hoot. Cassie, I should have said something to you about it, but I knew how it would upset you. I didn’t want to bring up your dad-”

“I understand,” she said. “I understand. And I appreciate it.” She was toying with a spoon. “They actually think my father was the stalker?”

“It’s just one possibility,” Nick said. “I think they’re really groping.” He swallowed hard. “Hell, they probably even wonder if I had something to do with it.” The last words came out in a rush, not the way he had heard himself say it in his mind.

“With his death,” Cassie said carefully.

Nick grunted.

“And is it possible that you did?”

Nick couldn’t speak right away. He didn’t look at her, couldn’t. “What do you mean?”

She set down the spoon, placed it carefully alongside the knife. “If you thought he might have been the one doing all that crazy stuff, maybe you could have intervened, somehow. Helped him to get help.” She broke off. “But then, these are the questions I ask myself. Why didn’t I make him get help? Why didn’t I intervene? I keep asking myself whether there was something I could have done that would have changed things. Stratton’s supposed to have all these great mental health programs, but suddenly he wasn’t eligible for them anymore-that’s a real Catch-22, isn’t it? Because of a mental illness, you quit and lose your right to treatment for your mental illness. That isn’t right.”

Warily: “It’s not right.”

“And because of these decisions-decisions you and I and God knows how many other people made-my daddy’s dead.” Cassie was weeping now, tears spilling down both cheeks.

“Cassie,” Nick said. He took her hand in his, and fell silent. Her hand looked pale and small in his. Then a thought came to him, and he felt as if he had swallowed ice. His hand, the hand with which he tried to comfort her, was the hand that had held the gun.

“But you want to know something?” Cassie said haltingly. “When I got the news about-you know-”

“I know.”

“I felt like I’d run into a brick wall. But, Nick, I felt something else too. I felt relieved. Do you understand?”

“Relieved.” He repeated the word numbly.

“All the hospitalizations, all the relapses, all the agony he’d endured. Pain that’s not physical but every bit as real. He didn’t like the place he was in-the world that, more and more, he had to live in. It wasn’t your world or my world, it was his world, Nick, and it was a cold and scary place.”

“It had to have been hell, for both of you.”

“And then one day he disappears. Then he’s dead. Killed-shot dead, God knows why. But it was almost like an act of mercy. Do you ever think that things happen for a reason?”

“I think some things happen for a reason,” Nick said slowly. “But not everything. I don’t think Laura died for any particular reason. It just happened. To her. To us. Like a piano that just falls out of the sky and flattens you.”

“Shit happens, you’re saying.” Cassie palmed away the tears on her face. “But that’s never the whole story. Shit happens, and it changes your life, and then what do you do? Do you just go on as if nothing happened? Or do you face it?”

“I choose option A.”

“Yeah. I see that.” Cassie rumpled her spiky hair with a hand. “There’s a parable of Schopenhauer’s, it’s called ‘Die Stachelschweine’-the porcupines. You’ve got these porcupines, and it’s winter, and so they huddle together for warmth-but when they get too close, of course, they hurt each other.”

“Allegory alert,” Nick said.

“You got it. Too far, and they freeze to death. Too near, and they bleed. We’re all like that. Same with you and Lucas.”

“Yeah, well, he’s a porcupine, all right.”

“Got to hand it to you Conover men,” Cassie said. “You’re as well defended as a medieval castle. Got your moat, got your boiling oil over the gate, got your castle keep. ‘Bring it on,’ right? Hope you got plenty of provisions in the larder.”

“All right, babe. Since you see so much more clearly than I do, let me ask you something. How much do you think I have to worry about my son?”

“Well, some. He’s a stoner, as you know. Probably gets high a couple of times a day. Which can do a number on your ability to concentrate.”

“A couple of times a day? You sure?”

“Oh please. He’s got two bottles of Visine on his dresser. He’s got Febreze fabric spray in his closet.”

Nick looked blank.

“Fabric freshener. You spritz it on your clothing to remove the smell of the herb. Then he’s got these Dutch Master leavings in his wastebasket. For making a blunt, okay? This is all Pothead 101 stuff.”

“Christ,” said Nick. “He’s sixteen years old.”

“And he’s going to be seventeen. And then eighteen. And that’s going to be rough too.”

“A year ago you wouldn’t have recognized him. He was this totally straight, popular athlete.”

“Just like his dad.”

“Yeah, well. My mom didn’t die when I was fifteen.”

“What makes it worse is if you can’t talk about it.”

“He’s a kid. It’s hard for him to talk about stuff like that.”

Cassie looked at him.

“What?”

“I wasn’t just talking about Lucas,” she said quietly. “I was talking about you.”

A deep breath. “You like metaphors? Here’s one. You know the cartoon coyote that’s always racing off the edge of the cliff?”

“Yes, Nick. Wile E. Coyote. An odd role model for the CEO of Acme Industries, I’d have thought.”

“And he’s in midair, but his legs are still pumping and he’s moving along fine. But then-he looks down, and he sinks like a stone. Moral of the story? Never fucking look down.”

“Beautiful,” Cassie said, her voice as astringent as witch hazel. “Just beautiful.” Her eyes flashed. “Have you noticed that Lucas can’t even look at you? And you can barely look at him. Now why is that?”

“If you bring up those Black Forest porcupines again, I’m out of here.”

“He’s lost his mom, and he desperately needs to bond with his father. But you’re not around, and when you are, you’re not there. You’re not exactly verbally expressive, right? He needs you to be the healer, but you can’t do it-you don’t know how. And the more isolated he feels, the more he turns on you, and the angrier you get.”

“The armchair psychologist,” Nick said. “Another one of your imaginative ‘readings.’ Nice guess, though.”

“No,” she said. “Not a guess. He pretty much told me.”

“He told you? I can’t even imagine that.”

“He was stoned, Nick. He was stoned, and he started to cry, and it came out.”

“He was stoned? In your presence?”

“Lit up a nice fat doobie,” Cassie said, with a half-smile. “We shared it. And we had a long talk. I wish you could have heard him. He has a lot on his mind. A lot he hasn’t been able to say to you. A lot you need to hear.”

“You smoked marijuana with my son?”

“Yes.”

“That is incredibly irresponsible. How could you do that?”

“Whoa, Daddy, you’re missing the big picture here.”

“Lucas has a problem with this shit. You were supposed to help him. Not encourage him, goddammit. He looks up to you!”

“I told him to lay off the weed, at least on school nights. I think he’s going to.”

“Goddammit! You haven’t got a clue, have you? I don’t care what kind of a fucked-up childhood you had. This is my son you’re dealing with. A sixteen-year-old boy with a drug problem. What part of this isn’t registering?”

“Nick, be careful,” she said, in a low, husky voice. Her face was turning a deep red, but her expression remained oddly fixed, a stone mask. “We had a very open and honest conversation, Luke and I. He told me all kinds of things.” Now she turned to look at him with hooded eyes.

Nick was torn between fury and fear, wanting to lay into her for what she’d done, getting high with Lucas-and yet frightened of what she might have found out from Lucas.

Lucas, who might-or might not-have heard shots one night.

Who might-or might not-have overheard his father and Eddie discussing what had really happened that night.

“Like what?” he managed to say.

“All kinds of things,” she whispered darkly.

Nick closed his eyes, waited for his heart to stop hammering. When he opened them again, she was gone.

77

Audrey’s e-mail icon was bouncing, and she saw it was Kevin Lenehan, the electronics tech.

She walked right over there, almost ran.

“What’s the best restaurant in town, would you say?” Kevin said.

“I don’t know. Terra, maybe? I’ve never been there.”

“How about Taco Gordito?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you owe me dinner. I told you the recording on this baby started at three-eighteen in the morning on Wednesday the sixteenth, right? After the sequence you’re so interested in?”

“What’d you find?”

“The hard drive’s partitioned into two sections, right? One for the digital images, the other for the software that drives the thing.” He turned to his computer monitor, moved the mouse around and clicked on something. “Very cool system, by the way. Internet-based.”

“Meaning?”

“Your guy had the ability to monitor his cameras from his office.”

“What does that tell you?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying. Anyway, look at this.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s a long list of numbers.”

“Not a techie, huh? Your husband has to program the VCR for you?”

“He can’t either.”

“Same with me. No one can. So, look. This is the log of all recorded content.”

“Is that the fifteenth?”

“You got it. This log says that the recording actually started on Tuesday the fifteenth at four minutes after noon, right? Not like fifteen hours later.”

“So you found more video?”

“I wish. No, you’re not following me. Someone must have gone in and reformatted the section of the hard drive where the recordings are made, then started the whole machine over, recycled it, so it just looked like it started from scratch at three-whatever in the morning on Wednesday. But the log here tells us that the system was initiated fifteen hours earlier. I mean, it’s saying there’s recorded content going back to like noon that day. Only, when you click on the files, it says ‘File not found.’”

“Deleted?”

“You got it.”

Audrey stared at the screen. “You’re sure of this.”

“Am I sure the box started recording at noon the day before? Yeah, sure as shit.”

“No. Sure you can’t retrieve the recording.”

“It’s, like, so gone.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Hey, you look, like, disappointed. I thought you’d be thrilled. You want proof part of the video was erased, you got it right here.”

“You ever read the book Fortunately when you were a kid?”

“My mom plopped me down in front of One Life to Live and General Hospital. Everything I learned about life I learned from soap operas. That’s why I’m single.”

“I must have read it a thousand times. There’s a boy named Ned, and he’s invited to a surprise party, but unfortunately the party’s a thousand miles away. Fortunately a friend lends him an airplane, but unfortunately the motor explodes.”

“Ouch. I hate when that happens.”

“Fortunately there’s a parachute in the airplane.”

“But unfortunately he’s horribly burned over ninety percent of his body and he’s unable to open the chute? See how my mind works.”

“This case is like that. Fortunately, unfortunately.”

“That pretty much describes my sex life,” Kevin said. “Fortunately the girl goes home with Kevin. Unfortunately she turns out to be a radical feminist lesbian who only wants him to teach her how to use Photoshop.”

“Thanks, Kevin,” Audrey got up from the stool. “Lunch at Taco Gordito’s on me.”

“Dinner,” Kevin said firmly. “That’s the deal.”

78

Nick’s cell phone rang just as he was pulling into the parking lot, almost half an hour later than usual this morning.

It was Victoria Zander, the Senior Vice President for Workplace Research, calling from Milan. “Nick,” she said, “I’m at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, and I’m so upset I can barely speak.”

“Okay, Victoria, take a deep breath and tell me what’s up.”

“Will you please explain to me what’s going on with Dashboard?”

Dashboard was one of the big new projects Victoria was developing, a portfolio of flexible, modular glass walls and partitions-very cool, beautifully designed, and something Victoria was really high on. Nick was high on it for business reasons: there was nothing else like it out there, and it was sure to hit a sweet spot.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s going on’?”

“After all the time and money we’ve put in on this, and-it just makes no sense! ‘All major capital expenditures on hold’-what do you mean by that? And not even giving me the courtesy of advance notice?”

“Victoria-”

“I don’t see how I can continue working for Stratton. I really don’t. You know, Herman Miller has been after me for two years, and frankly I think that’s a far better home for-”

“Victoria, hold on. Cool your jets, will you? Now, who told you we’re shelving Dashboard?”

“You guys did! I just got the e-mail from Scott.”

What e-mail? Nick almost asked, but instead he said, “Victoria, there’s some kind of glitch. I’ll call you right back.”

He clicked off, slammed the car door, and went to look for Scott.

“He’s not here, Nick,” Gloria said. “He had an appointment.”

“An appointment where?” Nick demanded.

She hesitated. “He didn’t say.”

“Get him on his cell, please. Right now.”

Gloria hesitated again. “I’m sorry, Nick, but his cell phone doesn’t work inside the plant. That’s where he is.”

“The plant? Which one?”

“The chair factory. He’s-well, he’s giving someone a tour.”

As far as Nick knew, Scott had been inside the factories maybe twice before. “Who?”

“Nick, I-please.”

“He asked you not to say anything.”

Gloria closed her eyes, nodded. “I’m really sorry. It’s a difficult position.”

Difficult position? I’m the goddamned CEO, he thought.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said kindly.

Nick hadn’t visited the chair plant in almost three months. There was a time when he’d visit monthly, sometimes more, just to check out how things were running, ask questions, listen to complaints, see how much inventory backlog was on hand. He’d check the quality boards at each station too, mostly to set an example, figuring that if he paid attention to the quality charts, the plant manager would too, and so would everyone below him.

He made visits to the plant just like Old Man Devries used to do, only when the old man did it, they weren’t called Gemba walks, as they were now. That term had been introduced by Scott, along with Kaizen and a bunch of other Japanese words that Nick didn’t remember, and that sounded to him like types of sushi.

It was the layoffs that made walking the plants an unpleasant chore. He could sense the hostility when he came through. It wasn’t lost on him, or anybody else, that Old Man Devries’s job had been to build plants, and Nick’s was to tear them down.

But he knew it was something he should probably start doing again, both here and in the other manufacturing complex about ten miles down the road. He’d go back to the monthly walks, he vowed.

If he had the chance.

If the factories were still here.

He noticed the big white sign on the front of the red brick building that said DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT, and next to it a black LED panel with the red digital numerals 322. Someone had crossed out ACCIDENT and scrawled over it, with a heavy black marker, LAYOFFS.

He went in the visitors’ entrance and caught the old familiar smell of welding and soldering, of hot metal. It took him back to visits to his father at work, of dog-day summers in high school and college spent working on the line.

The plump girl who sat at the battered old desk and handed out safety glasses, greeted visitors, and answered the phone, did a double take. “Good morning, Mr. Conover.”

“Morning, Beth.” Beth-something-Italian. He signed the log, noticed Scott had signed in about twenty minutes earlier along with someone else whose signature was illegible.

“Boy, both you and Mr. McNally in the space of an hour. Something going on I should know about?”

“No, in fact, I’m looking for Mr. McNally-any idea where he is?”

“No, sir. He had a visitor with him, though.”

“Catch the other guy’s name?”

“No, sir.” She looked ashamed, as if she hadn’t been doing her job. But Nick couldn’t blame her for not checking the ID of the CFO’s guest too carefully.

“Did Scott say where they were going?”

“No, sir. Sounded like Mr. McNally was giving a tour.”

“Brad take them around?” Brad Kennedy was the plant manager, who gave tours only to the VIPs.

“No, sir. Want me to call Brad for you?”

“That’s okay, Beth.” He put on a pair of dorky-looking safety glasses.

He’d forgotten how deafening the place was. A million square feet of clattering, pounding, thudding metal. As he entered the main floor, keeping to the “green mile,” as it was called-the green-painted border where you’d be safe from the Hi-Lo electric lift trucks that barreled down the aisles at heedless speeds-he could feel the floor shake. That meant the thousand-ton press, which stamped out the bases of the Symbiosis chair control panel, was operating. The amazing thing was that the thousand-ton press was all the way across the factory floor, clear on the other end, and you could still feel it go.

The place filled him with pride. This was the real heart of Stratton-not the glitzy headquarters building with its silver-fabric cubicles and flat-panel monitors and all the backstabbing. The company’s heartbeat was the regular thud of the thousand-ton behemoth, which sent vibrations up your spine as you passed through. It was here, where you still found some of those antique, dangerous, hydraulic-powered machines that could bend steel three-quarters of an inch thick, the exact same one on which his father had worked, bending steel, a seething monster that could take your hand off if you weren’t careful. His dad had in fact lost the tip of his ring finger to the old green workhorse once, which caused him more embarrassment than anger, because he knew it was his fault. He must have felt that the brake machine, after all those years of a close working relationship, had been disappointed in him.

As he walked, he looked for Scott, and the more he looked, the angrier he got. The idea that Scott, who worked for him, a guy he’d hired, would dare shelve projects, block funding, change vendors without consulting him-that was insubordination of the most egregious sort.

Four hundred hourly workers in this plant, and another hundred or so salaried employees, all turning out chairs for the Armani-clad butts of investment bankers and hedge-fund managers, the Prada-clad rumps of art directors.

He was always impressed by how clean the factory floor was kept, free of oil spills, each area clearly marked with hanging signs. Each section had its own safety board, marked green for a safe day, yellow for a day with a minor injury, red for an injury requiring hospitalization. Good thing, he thought grimly, he didn’t have one of those hanging in his house. What was the color for death?

He was looking for two men in business suits. They shouldn’t be hard to find here, among the guys (and a few women) in jeans and T-shirts and hard hats.

Periodic messages flashed on the TV monitors, a steady stream of propaganda and morale-building. THE STRATTON FAMILY CARES ABOUT YOUR FAMILY-TALK TO YOUR BENEFITS ADVISER. And: THE NEXT INSPECTOR IS OUR CUSTOMER. And then: STRATTON SALUTES JIM VEENSTRA-FENWICK PLANT-25 YEARS OF SERVICE.

A radio was blasting out Fleetwood Mac’s “Shadows” from the progressive-build station where the Symbiosis chairs were assembled. Nick had borrowed the process from Ford and pretty much forced it on the workers, who resisted any further dumbing-down of their jobs. They liked building the whole chair themselves, and who could blame them? They liked the old piecework incentives. Now, one chair was assembled every fifty-four seconds as a light cycled from green to amber to red, signaling the workers to finish up. This plant turned out ten thousand Symbiosis chairs a week.

He jogged past the in-line washer that cleaned the oil off the chair-control covers and then sent them clattering down into an orange supply tub. He couldn’t help slowing a bit to admire the robotic machine, a recent acquisition, that took sized and straightened wire stock, made five perfect bends, and then cut it, all in twelve seconds. In front of a press that made tubes out of eight-foot steel coils for the stacking chairs, a guy wearing green earplugs was asleep, obviously on break.

The floor supervisor, Tommy Pratt, saw him, threw him a wave, came hurrying up. Nick couldn’t politely avoid the guy.

“Hey! Mr. Conover!” Tommy Pratt was a small man who looked like he’d been compacted from a larger man: everything about him seemed dense. Even his hair was dense, a helmet of tight brown curls. “Haven’t seen you down here in a while.”

“Couldn’t stay away,” Nick said, raising his voice to be heard above the din. “You seen Scott McNally?”

Pratt nodded, pointed toward the far end of the floor.

“Thanks,” Nick shouted back. He gestured with his chin at an orange tub stacked high with black chair casters. An unusual sight-Scott’s new inventory-control system made sure there was never a backlog. Keeping too much inventory on hand was a cardinal sin against the religion of Lean Manufacturing. “What’s this?” he said.

“Yeah, Mr. Conover-we’ve been having a problem with, like, every other lot of those casters. You know, they’re vended parts-”

“Seriously? That’s a first. I’ll have someone call Lenny at Peerless-no, in fact, I’ll call Lenny myself.” Peerless, in St. Joseph, Michigan, had been manufacturing chair casters for Stratton since forever. Nick vaguely remembered getting a couple of phone messages from Lenny Bloch, the CEO of Peerless. “Uh, no, sir,” Pratt said. “We switched to another vendor last month. Chinese company, I think.”

“Huh?”

“The bitch of it is, sir, with Peerless, if we ever got a bad batch, which hardly ever happened by the way, he’d just truck us a new lot overnight. Now we gotta deal with container ships, you know, takes forever.”

“Who switched vendors?”

“Well, I think Brad said it was Ted Hollander who insisted on it. Brad put up a fight, but you know, the word came down, we’re cutting costs and all that.”

Ted Hollander was vice president for control and procurement, and one of Scott McNally’s direct reports. Nick clenched his jaw.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” he said in a voice of corporate cordiality. “When I tell the guys to look at cost containment, some of them go a little overboard.” Nick turned to go, but Pratt touched his elbow. “Uh, Mr. Conover, one more thing. I hope I’m not driving you away here-I don’t want you to think all we’re ever gonna do is bitch at you, you know?”

“What is it?”

“The damned Slear Line. We had to shut it down twice since the shift started this morning. It’s really bottlenecking things.”

“It’s older than I am.”

“That’s just it. The service guy keeps telling us we gotta replace it. I know that’s a load of dough, but I don’t think we have a choice.”

“I trust your judgment,” Nick said blandly.

Pratt gave him a quizzical look; he’d been expecting an argument. “I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, we can’t put it off that much longer.”

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”

“Because we couldn’t get the requisition approved,” Pratt said. “Your people said it wasn’t a good time right now. Something about putting major capital expenditures on hold.”

“What do you mean, ‘my people’?”

“We put the request through last month. Word came down from Hollander a couple of weeks ago.”

“There’s no freeze on major expenditures, okay? We’re in this for the long haul.” Nick shook his head. “Some people do tend to get a little overzealous. Excuse me.”

Two men in suits and safety glasses were walking through the “supermarket,” the area where parts were stored in aisles. They were walking quickly, and one of them-Scott-was waving a hand at something as they left the floor. Nick wondered what he was saying to the other man, whom he recognized from last night.

The attorney from Chicago who was supposedly advising Scott on structuring deals. The man whom Scott, who hadn’t been on the shop floor in more than a year, was showing around in such a low-profile, almost secretive way.

There was, of course, no reason in the world for a financial engineer to tour one of Stratton’s factories. Nick thought about trying to catch up with them, but he decided not to bother.

No need to be lied to again.

79

There wasn’t any e-mail from Cassie. Not that he expected any, but he was sort of hoping there’d be something. He realized he owed her an apology, so he typed:

Where’d my little porcupine go?

– N

Then he adjusted the angle on the flat-panel monitor, opened his browser and went to Google. He typed in Randall Enright’s name, and the name of his law firm, from the card Cassie had gotten from him last night.

Abbotsford Gruendig had offices in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, among other places. “With over two thousand lawyers in 25 offices around the world, Abbotsford Gruendig provides worldwide service to national and multinational corporations, institutions and governments,” the firm’s home page boasted.

He typed in Randall Enright’s name. It appeared, as part of a list of names, on a page headed with the rubric MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS and then more boilerplate:

Our corporate lawyers are leaders in M &A, focusing on multi-jurisdictional transactions. They can advise on licence requirements and regulatory compliance and provide local legal services in over twenty jurisdictions. Our clients include many larger corporations in the telecommunications, defence and manufacturing sectors.

Blah blah blah. More legal gobbledygook.

But it told him that Scott sure as hell wasn’t getting up to speed on new accounting regulations.

He was up to something completely different.

Stephanie Alstrom, Stratton’s corporate counsel, wore a navy blue suit with a white blouse and a big heavy gold chain necklace that was probably intended to make her look more authoritative. Instead, the necklace and matching earrings diminished her, made her look tiny. Her gray hair was close-cropped, her mouth heavily lined, the bags under her eyes pronounced. She was in her fifties but looked twenty years older. Maybe that was what decades of practicing corporate law could do to you.

“Sit down,” Nick said. “Thanks for dropping by.”

“Sure.” She looked worried, but then again, she always looked worried. “You wanted to know about Abbotsford Gruendig?”

Nick nodded.

“I’m not sure what you wanted to know, exactly, but it’s a big international law firm, offices all over the world. A merger of an old-line British firm and a German one.”

“And that guy Randall Enright?”

“M and A lawyer, speaks fluent Mandarin. A real hotshot. China law specialist, spent years in their Hong Kong office until his wife forced them to move back to the States. Mind if I ask why the sudden interest?”

“The name came up, that’s all. Now, what do you know about Stratton Asia Ventures?”

She wrinkled her brow. “Not much. A subsidiary corporation Scott set up. He never ran it by my office.”

“Is that unusual?”

“We review all sorts of contracts, but we don’t go after people and insist on it. I assumed he was using local counsel in Hong Kong.”

“Check this out, would you?” Nick handed her the e-mail from Scott to Martin Lai in Hong Kong, which Scott had tried to delete.

“Ten million dollars wired to an account in Macau,” Nick said as she looked it over. “What does that tell you?”

She looked at Nick, looked down quickly. “I don’t know what you’re asking me.”

“Can you think of a circumstance in which ten million dollars would be wired to a numbered account in Macau?”

She flushed. “I don’t want to be casting aspersions. I really don’t want to guess.”

“I’m asking you to, Steph.”

“Between you and me?”

“Please. Not to be repeated to anyone.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “One of two things. Macau is one of those money-laundering havens. The banks there are used for hidden accounts by the Chinese leaders, same way deposed third-world dictators use the Caymans.”

“Interesting. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

She was clearly uncomfortable. “Embezzlement-or a bribe. But this is only speculation on my part, Nick.”

“I understand.”

“And not to be repeated.”

“You’re afraid of Scott, aren’t you?”

Stephanie looked down at the table, her eyes darting back and forth, and she said nothing.

“He works for me,” Nick said.

“On paper, I guess,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Her remark felt to Nick like a blow to his solar plexus. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of him.

“The org chart says he’s under you, Nick,” she said hastily. “That’s all I mean.”

80

“Got something for you,” Eddie said over the phone.

“I’ll meet you in the small conference room on my floor in ten minutes,” Nick said.

Eddie hesitated. “Actually, why don’t you come down to my office?”

“How come?”

“Maybe I’m tired of taking the elevator up there.”

The only thing worse than this kind of idiotic, petty game, Nick thought, was responding to it. “Fine,” he said curtly, and hung up.

“You know how much e-mail Scotty blasts out?” Eddie said, leaning back in his chair. It was a new chair, Nick noticed, one of a premium, super-limited run of Symbiosis chairs upholstered in butter-soft Gucci leather. “He’s like a one-man spam generator or something.”

“Sorry to put you out,” Nick said. He also noticed that Eddie had a new computer with the largest flat-panel monitor he’d ever seen.

“Guy’s a Levitra addict, first off. Gets it over the Internet. I guess he doesn’t want his doc to know-small town and all that.”

“I really don’t care.”

“He also buys sex tapes. Like How to Be a Better Lover. Enhance Your Performance. Sex for Life.”

“Goddammit,” Nick said, “that’s his business, and I don’t want to hear about it. I’m only interested in our business.”

“Our business,” Eddie said. He sat upright, reached over for a thick manila folder, and set it down in front of Nick with a thud. “Here’s something that’s very much our business. Do you even know the first fucking thing about Cassie Stadler?”

“We’re back to that?” Nick snapped. “You stay out of my goddamned e-mails, or-”

Eddie looked up suddenly, his eyes locked with Nick’s. “Or what?”

Nick shook his head, didn’t reply.

“That’s right. We’re joined at the hip now, big guy. I got job security, you understand?”

Nick’s heart thrummed, and he bit his lower lip.

“Now,” Eddie said, a lilt to his voice. “I’m not reading your fucking e-mails. I don’t need to. You forget I can watch your house on my computer.”

“Watch my house?” Nick shook his head. “Huh?”

Eddie shrugged. “Your security cameras transmit over the Internet to the company server, you know that. I can see who’s coming and going. And I can see this babe coming and going a lot.”

“You do not have permission to spy on me, you hear me?”

“Couple of weeks ago you were begging for my help. Someday soon you’ll thank me. You know this chick spent eight months in a psycho ward?”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “Only it was six months, and it wasn’t a ‘psycho ward.’ She was hospitalized for depression after a bunch of college friends of hers were killed in an accident. So what?”

“You know that for the last six years, there’s no record of any FICA payments on this broad? Meaning that she didn’t have a job? Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“I’m not hiring her to be vice president of human resources. In fact, I’m not hiring her at all. She’s been a yoga teacher. How many yoga teachers make regular Social Security payments, anyway?”

“I’m not done yet. Get this: ‘Cassie’ isn’t even her real name.”

Nick furrowed his brow.

Eddie smiled. “Helen. Her name is Helen Stadler. Cassie-that’s not on her birth certificate. Not a legal name change. Totally made up.”

“So what? What’s your point?”

“I got a feeling about her,” Eddie said. “Something about her ain’t correct. We talked about this already, but let me say it again: I don’t care how sweet the snatch. It ain’t worth the risk.”

“All I asked you to do was to find out what Scott McNally was up to.”

After a few seconds of sullen silence, Eddie handed Nick another folder.

“So, those encrypted documents my guys found?”

“Yeah?”

“My guys cracked ’em all. It’s really just one document, bunch of different drafts, went back and forth between Scotty and some lawyer in Chicago.”

“Randall Enright.”

Eddie cocked his head. “That’s right.”

“What is it?”

“Fuck if I know. Legal bullshit.”

Nick started to page through the documents. Many of them were labeled DRAFT ONLY and REDLINE. The sheets were dense with legal jargon and stippled with numbers, the demon spawn of a lawyer and an accountant.

“Maybe he’s selling company secrets,” Eddie said.

Nick shook his head. “Not our Scott. Huh-uh. He’s not selling company secrets.”

“No?”

“No,” Nick said, once again short of breath. “He’s selling the company.”

81

“Why do you trust me?” said Stephanie Alstrom. They met in one of the smaller conference rooms on her floor. There was just no damned privacy in this company, Nick realized. Everyone knew who was meeting with whom; everyone could listen in.

“What do you mean?”

“Scott’s stabbing you in the back, and you hired him too.”

“Instinct, I guess. Why, are you working against me too?”

“No,” she smiled. Nick had never seen her smile before, and it wrinkled her face strangely. “I just guess I should feel flattered.”

“Well,” Nick said, “my instinct has failed me before. But you can’t be distrustful of everyone.”

“Good point,” she said, putting on a pair of half-glasses. “So, you know what you’ve got here, right?”

“A Definitive Purchase Agreement,” Nick said. He’d looked over hundreds of contracts like this in his career, and even though the legalese froze his brain, he’d learned to hack his way through the dense underbrush to uncover the key points. “Fairfield Equity Partners is selling us to some Hong Kong-based firm called Pacific Rim Investors.”

Stephanie shook her head slowly. “That’s not what I pick up from this. It’s strange. For one thing, there’s not a single mention in the list of assets of any factories or plants or employees. Which, if they were planning to keep any of it, they’d have to list. And then, in the Representations and Warranties section, it says the buyer’s on the hook for any costs, liabilities, et cetera, associated with shutting down U.S. facilities or firing all employees. So, it’s pretty clear. Pacific Rim is buying only Stratton’s name. And getting rid of everything else.”

Nick stared. “They don’t need our factories. They’ve got plenty in Shenzhen. But all this money for a name?”

“Stratton means class. An old reliable American name that’s synonymous with elegance and solidity. Plus, they get our distribution channels. Think about it-they can make everything over there at a fraction of the price, slap a Stratton nameplate on it, sell it for a premium. No American firm would have made a deal like this.”

“Who are they, this Pacific Rim Investors?”

“No idea, but I’ll find out for you. Looks like Randall Enright wasn’t working for Fairfield after all-he represents the buyer. Pacific Rim.”

Nick nodded. Now he understood why Scott had given Enright the factory tour. Enright was in Fenwick to do due diligence on behalf of a Hong Kong-based firm that couldn’t come to visit because they wanted to keep everything very quiet.

She said, “The least they could do is tell you.”

“They knew I’d go ballistic.”

“That must be why they put Scott on the board. Asians always demand to meet with the top brass. If Todd Muldaur thought firing you would help, he’d have done it already.”

“Exactly.”

“It freaks potential buyers out if a CEO gets fired right before a sale. Everyone’s antennae go up. Plus, a lot of the key relationships are yours. The smarter move was to hermetically seal you off. As they did.”

“I used to think Todd Muldaur was an idiot, but now I know better. He’s just a prick. Can you explain this side agreement to me?”

Her pruned mouth turned down in a scowl. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It looks like some kind of deal-sweetener. From what I can tell, it’s a way to speed up the deal, make it happen fast. But that’s just a guess. You might want to talk to someone who knows.”

“Like who? Scott’s the only one I know who understands the really devious stuff.”

“He’s good, but he’s not the only one,” Stephanie said. “Does Hutch still speak to you?”

82

Nick had begun to dread going out in public.

Not “public” as in going to work, though that still took a fair amount of effort, putting on his Nick Conover, CEO act, confident and friendly and outgoing, when a toxic spill of anxiety threatened to ooze out through his pores. But whether it was school functions or shopping or taking clients out to restaurants, it was getting harder and harder to keep the mask fastened securely.

What was once just uncomfortable, even painful-seeing people the company had laid off, exchanging polite if tense words with them, or just generally feeling like a pariah in this town-was now close to intolerable. Everywhere he went, everyone he ran into, he felt as if a neon sign was hanging around his neck, its gaudy orange tubes flashing the word MURDERER.

Even tonight, when he was just another spectator at Julia’s piano recital. Her long-dreaded, long-awaited piano recital. It was being held in one of the old town performance theaters, Aftermath Hall, a mildew-smelling old place that had been built in the nineteen thirties, a Steinway grand on a yellow wooden stage, red velvet curtain, matching red velvet upholstered seats with uncomfortable wooden backs.

The kids in their little coats and ties or their dresses streaked across the lobby, propelled by nervous energy. A couple of little African-American boys in jackets and ties with their older sister, in a white dress with a bow: unusual in Fenwick, given how few blacks there were.

He was startled to find Laura’s sister there. Abby was a couple of years older than Laura, had two kids as well, married a guy with a trust fund and no personality. He claimed to be a novelist, but mostly he played tennis and golf. Abby had the same clear blue eyes as Laura, had the same swan neck. Instead of Laura’s corkscrew brown curls, though, her brown hair was straight and glossy and fell to her shoulders. She was more reserved, had a more regal bearing, was less approachable. Nick didn’t especially like her. The feeling was probably mutual.

“Hey,” he said, touching her elbow. “Nice of you to come. Julia’s going to be thrilled.”

“It was sweet of Julia to call me.”

“She did?”

“You seem surprised. You didn’t tell her to?”

“I can’t tell her to do anything, you know that. How’s the family?”

“We’re fine. Kids doing okay?”

He shrugged. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. They miss you a lot.”

“Do they? Not you, though.” Then she softened it a bit with a smile that didn’t look very sincere.

“Come on. We all do. How come we haven’t seen you?”

“Oh,” she breathed, “it’s been crazy.”

“Crazy how?”

She blinked, looked uncomfortable. Finally she said, “Look, Nick, it’s hard for me. Since…”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Nick put in hastily. “I’m just saying, don’t be a stranger.”

“No, Nick,” Abby said, inclining her head, lowering her voice, her eyes gleaming with something bad. “It’s just that-every time I look at you.” She looked down, then back up at him. “Every time I look at you it makes me sick.”

Nick felt as if he’d just been kicked in the throat.

Little kids, big kids running past, dressed up, taut with the preperformance jitters. Someone playing a swatch of complicated music on the Steinway, sounding like a professional you might hear at Carnegie Hall.

Laura’s nude body on the folding wheeled table after the embalming, Nick weeping and slobbering as he dressed her, his request, honored by the funeral director with some reluctance. Nick unable to look at her waxen face, a plausible imitation of her once glowing skin, the neck and cheek he’d nuzzled against so many times.

“You think the accident was my fault, that it?”

“I really see no sense in talking about it,” she said, looking at the floor. “Where’s Julia?”

“Probably waiting her turn at the piano.” Nick felt a hand on his shoulder, turned, and was stunned to see Cassie. His heart lifted.

She stood on her tiptoes, gave him a quick peck on the lips.

“Cass-Jesus, I had no idea-”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Did Julia order you to show up too?”

“She told me about it, which is a different thing. I’d say a daughter’s piano recital falls in the category of a family obligation, don’t you think?”

“I’m-wow.”

“Come on, I’m practically family. Plus, I’m a big classical piano fan, don’t you know that about me?”

“Why do I doubt that?”

She put her lips to his ear and whispered, her hot breath getting him excited: “I owe you an apology.”

Then she was gone, before Nick had a chance to introduce her.

“Who’s the new girlfriend?” Abby’s voice, abrupt and harsh and brittle, an undertone of ridicule.

Nick froze. “Her name’s…Cassie. I mean, she’s-”

I mean, she’s what? Not a girlfriend? Just a fuck? Oh, she’s the daughter of the guy I murdered, ain’t that a funny coincidence? Tell that to Craig, your alleged-writer husband. Give him something to write about.

“She’s beautiful.” Abby’s arched brows, lowered lids, glimmering with contempt.

He nodded, supremely uncomfortable.

“She doesn’t exactly seem like the Nick Conover type, though. Is she an…artist or something?”

“She does some painting. Teaches yoga.”

“Glad you’re dating again.” Abby could not have sounded more inauthentic.

“Yeah, well…”

“Hey, it’s been a year, right?” she said brightly, something cold and hard and lilting in her voice. “You’re allowed to date.” She smiled, victorious, not even bothering to hide it.

Nick couldn’t think of anything to say.

LaTonya was lecturing some poor soul as Audrey approached, wagging her forefinger, her long coral-colored nails-a self-adhesive French manicure kit she’d been hounding Audrey to try-looking like dangerous instruments. She was dressed in an avocado muumuu with big jangly earrings. “That’s right,” she was saying. “I can make a hundred and fifty dollars an hour easy, taking these online surveys. Sitting at home in my pajamas. I get paid for expressing my opinions!”

When she saw Audrey, she lit up. “And I figured you’d be working,” she said, enfolding Audrey in an immense bosomy hug.

“Don’t tell me Leon’s here too.” LaTonya seemed to have forgotten about her sales pitch, freeing the victim to drift off.

“I don’t know where Leon is,” Audrey confessed. “He wasn’t at home when I stopped in.”

“Mmm hmm,” LaTonya hummed significantly. “The one thing I know he’s not doing is working.”

“Do you know something you’re not telling me?” Audrey said, embarrassed by the desperation she’d let show.

“About Leon? You think he tells me anything?”

“LaTonya, sister,” Audrey said, moving in close, “I’m worried about him.”

“You do too much worrying about that man. He don’t deserve it.”

“That’s not what I mean. He’s-well, he’s gone too much.”

“Thank your lucky stars for that.”

“We-we haven’t had much of a private life in a very long time,” Audrey forced herself to say.

LaTonya waggled her head. “I don’t think I want to know the gory details about my brother, you know?”

“No, I’m…Something’s going on, LaTonya, you understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

“His drinking getting even worse?”

“It isn’t that, I don’t think. He’s just been disappearing a lot.”

“Think that bastard is cheating on you, that it?”

Tears sprang to Audrey’s eyes. She compressed her lips, nodded.

“You want me to have a talk with him? I’ll slice his fucking balls off.”

“I’ll handle it, LaTonya.”

“You don’t hesitate to call me in, hear? Lazy bastard don’t know what a good thing he has in you.”

83

Audrey’s heart broke when Nicholas Conover’s daughter played the first prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier. It wasn’t just that the girl hadn’t played all that well-a number of note fumbles, her technique not very polished, her performance mechanical. Camille had all but stolen the show with the Brahms waltz, had played perfectly and with heart, making Audrey burst with pride. It was what was about to happen to Julia Conover. This little girl, awkward in her dress, had lost her mother, something that should never happen to a child. And now she was about to lose her father.

In just a couple of days her father would be arrested, charged with murder. The only time she’d ever see her remaining parent would be during supervised jail visits, her daddy wearing an orange jumpsuit, behind a bulletproof window. Her life would be upended by a public murder trial; she’d never stop hearing the vicious gossip, she’d cry herself to sleep, and who would tuck her in at night? A paid babysitter? It was too awful to think about.

And then her daddy would be sent away to prison. This beautiful little girl, who wasn’t much of a pianist but radiated sweetness and naïveté: her life was about to change forever. Andrew Stadler may have been the murder victim, but this little girl was a victim too, and it filled Audrey with sorrow and foreboding.

As the teacher, Mrs. Guarini, thanked the audience for coming and invited everyone to stay for refreshments, Audrey turned around and saw Nicholas Conover.

He was holding up a video camera. Next to him sat a beautiful young woman, and next to her Conover’s handsome son, Lucas. Audrey did a double take, recognizing the woman, who just then put her hand on Conover’s neck, stroking it familiarly.

It was Cassie Stadler.

Andrew Stadler’s daughter.

Her mind spun crazily. She didn’t know what to think, what to make of it.

Nicholas Conover, having an affair with the daughter of the man he’d murdered.

She felt as if a whole row of doors had just been flung open.

84

It had to happen, since the two of them got into work at about the same time.

Nick and Scott had been avoiding each other studiously. Even at meetings where both of them were present, they were publicly cordial yet no longer exchanged small talk, before or after.

But they could hardly avoid each other right now. Nick stood at the elevator bank, waiting, just as Scott approached.

Nick was the first to speak: “’Morning, Scott.”

“’Morning, Nick.”

A long stretch of silence.

Fortunately, someone else came up to them, a woman who worked in Accounts Receivable. She greeted Scott, who was her boss, then shyly said, “Hi” in Nick’s general direction.

The three of them rode up in silence, everyone watching the numbers change. The woman got off on three.

Nick turned to Scott. “So you’ve been busy,” he said. It came out more fiercely than he intended.

Scott shrugged. “Just the usual.”

“The usual include killing new projects like Dashboard?”

A beat, and then: “I tabled it, actually.”

“I didn’t know new product development was in your job description.”

Scott looked momentarily uncertain, as if he were considering ducking the question, but then he said, “Any expenditures of that magnitude concern me.”

The elevator dinged as it reached the executive floor.

“Well,” Scott said with visible relief, “to be continued, I’m sure.”

Nick reached over to the elevator control panel and pressed the emergency stop button, which immediately stopped the doors from opening and also set off an alarm bell that sounded distantly in the elevator shaft.

“What the hell are you-”

“Whose side are you on, Scott?” Nick asked with ferocious calm, crowding Scott into the corner of the elevator. “You think I don’t know what’s going on?”

Nick braced himself for the usual wisecracking evasions. Scott’s face went a deep plum color, his eyes growing, but Nick saw anger in his face, not fear.

He’s not scared of you, Cassie had observed.

“There aren’t any sides here, Nick. It’s not like shirts versus skins.”

“I want you to listen to me closely. You are not to kill or ‘table’ projects, change vendors, or in fact make any changes whatsoever without consulting me, are we clear?”

“Not that simple,” Scott replied levelly, a tic starting in his left eye. “I make decisions all day long-”

The elevator emergency alarm kept ringing.

Nick dropped his voice to a near-whisper. “Who do you think you’re working for? Any decision you make, any order you give, that’s not in your designated area of responsibility will be countermanded-by me. Publicly, if need be. You see, Scott, like it or not, you work for me,” Nick said. “Not for Todd Muldaur, not for Willard Osgood, but for me. Understand?”

Scott stared, his left eye wincing madly. Finally he said, “The real question is, who do you think you’re working for? We both work for our stakeholders. It’s pretty simple. Your problem is that you’ve never really understood that. You talk about managing this company as if you own the place. But I’ve got news for you. You don’t own the place, and neither do I. You think you’re a better man than me because you got all teary-eyed when the layoffs came? You talk about the ‘Stratton Family,’ but guess what, Nick. It’s not a family. It’s a business. You’re a great face to parade in front of the Wall Street analysts. But just because you look good in tights doesn’t make you a superhero.”

“That’s enough, Scott.”

“Fairfield gave you the car keys, Nick. They didn’t give you the car.”

Nick took a deep breath. “There’s only one driver.”

The tic in Scott’s eye was coming more rapidly now. Nick could see a vein pulsing at his temple. “In case you haven’t figured it out,” Scott said, “things have changed around here. You can’t fire me.” He tried to reach around for the emergency stop button to get the elevator doors open. But Nick swiveled his body in one quick motion to block Scott’s hand.

“You’re right,” he said. “I can’t fire you. But let me be really clear: so long as I’m here, you are not to conduct any discussions regarding the sale of this company.”

A thin smile crept across Scott’s face as he kept staring. Several seconds ticked by. The only sound was the ring of the elevator alarm. “Fine,” he said freezingly. “You’re the boss.” But his tone called to mind Cassie’s interpretation of Scott’s refrain: those unspoken words for now.

85

He returned to his desk shaken and began to go through his e-mail. More Nigerians who sought to share their plundered millions. More offers to add inches, or borrow money, or acquire painkillers.

He called Henry Hutchens and made an appointment for coffee or an early lunch tomorrow. Then he tried Martin Lai in Hong Kong, at home, where it was around nine in the evening.

This time, Martin Lai answered. “Oh-Mr. Conover, yes, thank you, thank you,” he said, a cataract of nerves. “I’m very sorry I didn’t call you back-I was on a trip, sir.”

Nick knew that wasn’t true. Had Lai, surprised to get a call from the CEO, checked in with Scott, who told him not to reply? “Martin, I need your help with something important.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“What can you tell me about a ten-million-dollar transfer of funds out of Stratton Asia Ventures to a numbered account in Macau?”

“Sir, I don’t know anything about that,” Lai answered, too quickly.

“Meaning you don’t know why the transfer was made?”

“No, sir, this is the first I hear of it.”

He was covering up. Scott must have gotten to him.

“Martin, this financial irregularity has been called to my attention, and it’s something I’m quite concerned about. I thought I’d see if you know anything before the formal investigation is launched by Compliance.”

“No, sir,” Lai said. “I never heard of it before.”

As he stared at the computer screen, Marjorie’s voice came over the intercom, and at the same time an instant message popped up.

“Nick,” she said, “it’s the high school again.”

Nick groaned.

The message was from Stephanie Alstrom:

Nick-info for you-talk soon?

“Is it Sundquist again?” he said to Marjorie, as he typed:

come by my office now.

“I’m afraid it is,” Marjorie said. “And this time-well, it sounds awfully serious.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “Can you put me through?”

Stephanie Alstrom was getting out of the elevator just as Nick was about to get in. He gestured for her to stay in the cabin, and once the doors closed, he said, “I’m in a rush. Personal business. What do you have, Steph?”

“Pacific Rim Investors,” she said. “Apparently it’s a consortium whose silent partner-their anonymous sugar daddy-is an arm of the P.L.A.-the People’s Liberation Army of China.”

“Why the hell would the Chinese army want to buy Stratton?”

“Capitalism, pure and simple. They’ve bought up thousands of foreign corporations, usually through shell companies to avoid the political backlash. I wonder if Willard Osgood knows it. He’s somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.”

“I wonder,” Nick said. “But no one’s a bigger archconservative than Dorothy Devries. And you can bet she has no idea.”

86

“Nick, I know you’re an extremely busy man,” Jerome Sundquist said, leading him past the framed photos of multicultural tennis champs, “but if anyone owes you an apology, it’s your son.” He spoke loudly so Lucas could hear.

Lucas sat in one of the camel-upholstered side chairs, looking small, shoulders hunched, furled into himself. He was wearing a gray T-shirt under a plaid shirt and track pants that were zippered above the knee so you could turn them into shorts, not that Lucas ever did.

He didn’t look up when Nick entered.

Nick stood there in his raincoat-this time he was prepared for the lousy weather, even brought an umbrella-and said, “You did it again, didn’t you?”

Lucas didn’t reply.

“Tell your father, Lucas,” Sundquist said as he took a seat behind his overly large desk. Nick wondered, fleetingly, why it was that people with the biggest desks and the biggest offices were often not all that powerful, in the scheme of things.

Then he reminded himself that Jerry Sundquist might only run a high school in a small town in Michigan, but right now he was as powerful in the lives of the Conovers as Willard Osgood.

Lucas cast the principal a bloodshot glare and looked back down at his feet. Had he been crying?

“Well, if he doesn’t have the courage to tell you, I will,” Sundquist said, leaning back in his chair. He actually seemed to be enjoying this moment, Nick thought. “I told you that the second time he was caught smoking he’d be expelled.”

“Understood,” Nick said.

“And I think I also told you that if we found drugs, we’d let the police prosecute.”

“Drugs?”

“The school board voted unanimously a few years ago that any student using, distributing, or even possessing marijuana on school property will be suspended, arrested, and face an expulsion hearing.”

“Arrested,” Nick said, suddenly feeling a chill, as if he’d just stepped into a meat locker. Lucas wasn’t crying. He was high.

“We notify the police and let them prosecute. And I have to tell you, Michigan tends to be tough on minors in possession of marijuana. The two-thousand-dollar fine is probably insignificant to you, Nick, but I’ve seen judges give minors anything from probation to forty-five days in prison, as much as a year.”

“Jerry-”

“Under Michigan law, we’re required to notify the local police, do you know that? MCL three-eighty, thirteen oh eight. We don’t have a choice about it.”

Nick nodded, put a hand on his forehead and began massaging away the headache. My God, he thought. Expulsion? There wasn’t another high school for forty miles. And what private school would take Lucas, given his record? How would Laura have handled this? She was so much better at difficult situations than he was. “Jerry, I’d like us to talk. You and me. Without Luke.”

Sundquist didn’t have to do anything more than raise his chin at Lucas, who quickly got up, as if shot from a cannon. “Wait in the faculty lounge,” he said to Lucas’s back.

“I’m sorry, Nick. I hate to do this to you.”

“Jerry,” Nick said, leaning forward in his chair. For a moment, he lost his train of thought. Suddenly he wasn’t a prominent parent, the president and chief executive officer of the biggest company in town. He was a high school kid pleading with the principal. “I’m as angry about this as you are. More so, probably. And we’ve got to let him know it’s totally unacceptable. But it’s his first time.”

“Somehow I doubt it’s his first time using marijuana,” Sundquist said with a sidelong glance. “But in any case, we have a zero-tolerance policy. Our options are severely limited here.”

“It’s not a gun, and he’s not exactly a dealer. We’re talking about one marijuana cigarette, right?”

Sundquist nodded. “That’s all it takes these days.”

“Jerry, you’ve got to consider what the kid has been going through in the last year, with Laura’s death.” There was a note of pleading in his voice that embarrassed Nick.

The principal looked unmoved. In fact, he looked almost pleased. Nick felt the anger in him rise, but he knew anger would be the worst response in this situation.

Nick took a deep breath. “Jerry, I’m asking for your mercy. If there’s anything I can do for the high school, the school system. Anything Stratton can do.”

“Are you offering a payoff?” Sundquist said, biting off the words.

“Of course not,” Nick said, although both men knew that was exactly what he was talking about. An extra deep discount on furniture could save the high school hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Sundquist closed his eyes, shook his head sadly. “That’s beneath you, Nick. What kind of lesson do you think it’s going to teach your son if he gets special treatment because of who his dad is?”

“What we talk about stays between us,” Nick said. He couldn’t believe that he’d just offered the high school principal a bribe. Was anything lower? Bribes-that was the coin of Scott McNally’s realm, Todd Muldaur’s realm. Not his.

Jerome Sundquist was looking at him with a new expression now, one of disappointment and maybe even contempt. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear it, Nick. But I’m willing to show some leniency on the grounds of his mother’s death. I do have to notify the police that we’re willing to handle the incident ourselves, and generally they leave it to our discretion. I’m giving Lucas a five-day suspension and assigning him to crisis counseling during that time and for the rest of the school year. But the next time, I go right to the police.”

Nick stood up, walked up to Sundquist’s desk and put out his hand to shake. “Thanks, Jerry,” he said. “I think it’s the right decision, and I appreciate it.”

But Sundquist wouldn’t shake his hand.

Ten minutes later Nick and Lucas walked out together through the glass doors of the high school. The rain was really coming down now-it was monsoon season, had to be-and Nick held up his umbrella for Lucas, who shunned it, striding ahead through the rain, head up as if he wanted to get soaked.

Lucas seemed to hesitate before getting into the front seat, as if contemplating making a run for it. As the car nosed through the parking lot and onto Grandview Avenue, the silence was electric with tension.

Lucas wasn’t high anymore. He was low, and he was silent, but it wasn’t a neutral silence. It was a defiant silence, like that of a prisoner of war determined to reveal nothing more than his name, rank, and serial number.

Nick’s own silence was the silence of someone who had plenty to say but was afraid of what would happen if he began to speak.

Lucas’s hand snaked around to the radio dial and turned on some alternative rock station, blasting it.

Nick immediately switched it off. “You proud of yourself?”

Lucas said nothing, just stared fixedly ahead as the windshield wipers flipped back and forth in a lulling rhythm.

“You know something? This would have broken your mother’s heart. You should be relieved she isn’t around to see this.”

More silence. This time Nick waited for a reply. He was about to go on when Lucas said, in a hollow voice, “I guess you made sure of that.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Lucas didn’t respond.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Nick realized he was shouting. He could see a spray of his own spittle on the windshield. He pulled the car over, braked to an abrupt stop, and turned to face Lucas.

“What do you think?” Lucas said in a low, wobbly voice, not meeting his eyes.

Nick stared, disbelieving. “What are you trying to say?” he whispered, summoning all the calm he could muster.

“Forget it,” Lucas said, making a little buzz-off gesture with his left hand.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I wouldn’t know, Dad. I wasn’t there.”

“What’s gotten into you, Lucas?” The windshield wipers ticked back and forth, back and forth, and he could hear the regular clicking of the turn signal that hadn’t gone off. He reached over, switched off the signal. The rain sheeted the car’s windows, making it feel like the two of them were inside a cabin in a terrible storm, but it wasn’t a safe place. “Look, Luke, you don’t have Mom anymore. You just have me. You wish it were otherwise. So do I. But we’ve got to make the best of a bad situation.”

“It wasn’t me who made that situation.”

“No one ‘made’ that situation,” Nick said.

“You killed Mom,” he said, so quietly that for a moment Nick wasn’t sure Lucas had actually spoken the words.

Nick felt like someone had grabbed his heart and squeezed. “I can’t deal with this right now. I can’t deal with you.”

You Conover men. Better defended than a medieval castle.

“Fine with me.”

“No,” Nick said. “No. Scratch that.” He was breathing hard, as if he had just done an eight-hundred-meter sprint. “Okay, listen to me. What happened to your mother that night-God knows we’ve talked about it…”

“No, Dad.” Lucas’s voice was shaky but resolute. “We’ve never talked about it. You refer to it. You don’t talk about it. That’s the house rule. We don’t talk about it. You don’t. You talk about what a fuck-up I am. That’s what you talk about.”

The windows had begun to fog up. Nick closed his eyes. “About your mother. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t wonder whether there was anything I could have done-anything at all-that might have made a difference.”

“You never said…” Lucas’s eyes were wet and his voice was thick, muffled.

“The truck came out of nowhere,” Nick began, but then he stopped. It was too painful. “Luke, what happened happened. And it wasn’t about me and it wasn’t about you.”

Lucas was quiet for a moment. “Fucking swim meet.”

“Lucas, don’t try to make sense of it. Don’t try to connect the dots, as if there was some kind of logic to it all. It just happened.”

“I didn’t visit her.” Lucas’s words were slurred, whether from the pot or from emotion, Nick couldn’t tell, and didn’t care. “In the hospital. Afterward.”

“She was in a coma. She was already gone, Luke.”

“Maybe she could have heard me.” His voice had gotten thin and reedy.

“She knew you loved her, Luke. She didn’t need reminding. I don’t think she wanted you to remember her like that, anyway. She wouldn’t have been sore that you weren’t there. She would have been glad. I really believe that. You were always attuned to her feelings. Like there was some radio frequency only the two of you could hear. You know something, Luke? I think maybe you were the only one of us who did what she would have wanted.”

Lucas buried his face in his hands. When he spoke again, his voice sounded as if it were coming from a long way off. “Why do you hate me so much? Is it ’cause I look like her, and you can’t deal with that?”

“Lucas,” Nick said. He was determined to hold it together. “I want you to listen to me. I need you to hear this.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “There is nothing in my life more precious to me than you are.” His voice was hoarse, and he got the words out with difficulty, but he got them out. “I love you more than my life.”

He put his arms around his son, who at first stiffened and squirmed, and then, suddenly, put his own arms around Nick and clasped him tightly, the way he did when Lucas was a little boy.

Nick felt the rhythmic convulsions of grief, the staccato expulsions of breath, and it took him a moment before he realized that Lucas wasn’t the only one who was weeping.

87

The phone rang, and Audrey picked it up without thinking.

“Is this Detective Rhimes?” A sweet, female voice, the words slow and careful.

Her heart sank. “Yes it is,” Audrey said, although she was sorely tempted to say, No, I’m afraid Detective Rhimes is on vacation.

“Detective, this is Ethel Dorsey.”

“Yes, Mrs. Dorsey,” she said, softening her voice. “How are you doing?”

“I’m doing as well as could be expected with my Tyrone gone and all. But I thank the good Lord I still have my three wonderful sons.”

“There’s so much we can’t understand, Mrs. Dorsey,” Audrey said. “But the Scriptures tell us that those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”

“I know he records our tears and collects them all in his bottle.”

“He does. That he does.”

“God is good.”

“All the time,” Audrey said, her response a reflex.

“Detective, I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering if you’ve made any progress on my Tyrone’s case.”

“No, I’m sorry. Nothing yet. We keep plugging away, though.” The lie made her ashamed.

“Please don’t give up, Detective.”

“Of course not, Mrs. Dorsey.” She hadn’t given the case more than a fleeting thought in the last several weeks. She was thankful that Mrs. Dorsey worshipped in another church, the next town over.

“I know you’re doing your best.”

“Yes, I am.”

“May the Lord keep you strong, Detective.”

“You too, Mrs. Dorsey. You too.”

She hung up filled with sorrow, ashamed beyond ashamed, and the phone rang again immediately.

It was Susan Calloway, the bland-voiced woman from the state police lab in Grand Rapids. The firearms examiner in charge of the IBIS database. She sounded a little different, and Audrey realized that what she was hearing was excitement, in the woman’s tamped-down, squelched way.

“Well, I do think we have something for you,” the woman said.

“You have a match.”

“I’m sorry this has taken so long-”

“Oh, not at all-”

“But the Grand Rapids PD certainly took their time. I mean, all I was asking them to do was to check the bullets out of Property and drive them all of seventeen blocks over to Fuller. You’d think I’d asked for a human sacrifice or something.”

Audrey chuckled politely. “But you got a match,” she prompted. The technician sounded positively giddy.

“Of course, the real problem was that it wasn’t anyone’s case anymore. I mean, it was from six years ago, and both detectives are gone, they tell me. There’s always an excuse.”

“Tell me about it,” Audrey laughed.

“In any case, the bullets they brought over matched the ones in your case. They’re copper-jacketed Rainiers, so the ammunition is different. But the striation markings are identical.”

“So it’s a positive match.”

“It’s a positive match, yes.”

“The weapon-?”

“I can’t tell you that for absolute certain. But I’d say it’s a safe guess it’s a Smith and Wesson.380. That’s not legally admissible, though.” The woman read off the Grand Rapids PD report number for the bullet.

“So Grand Rapids should have all the information I need,” Audrey said.

“Well, I don’t know how much more they’ll have than I already told you. Both detectives on the case are off the force, as I say.”

“Even so, those names would be a help.”

“Oh, well, if that’s all you want, I have that. The submitting detective, anyway. Right here in the comments box.” The technician went silent, and Audrey was about to prompt her for the name, when the woman spoke again, and Audrey went cold.

“Says here it was submitted by a Detective Edward J. Rinaldi,” the technician said. “But they say he’s retired from the force, so that’s probably not going to be much use to you. Sorry about that.”