Company Man (33 page)

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 hy
pothalamus? 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.

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 ev
idence 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.”