Company Man (32 page)

“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?”

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 docu
ments. 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.

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:

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:

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

“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.