Company Man (43 page)

The Information Technology Director at the Stratton Corporation didn't look like the computer type, Audrey thought. She was a tall, matronly woman named Carly Lindgren, who wore her beautiful and very long auburn hair knotted on top of her head. She wore a navy suit over an olive silk shell, a braided gold necklace and matching earrings.

Audrey had gotten an appointment with Mrs. Lindgren with a single phone call, telling her only it was “police business.” But once Audrey had presented the search warrant, she could see Mrs. Lindgren rear up like a cornered tigress. She examined it as if searching for flaws, though very few people knew what to look for, and in any case the warrant had been written carefully. It was as broad as Audrey could get the prosecutor to sign off on, even though all she really wanted was any archived video images on the Stratton network that came from Nicholas Conover's home security system.

Mrs. Lindgren kept Audrey and Kevin Lenehan waiting in an outer office while she placed a flurry of panicked calls all the way up her reporting chain—the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Technology Officer, and Audrey lost track of who all, but there really was nothing Mrs. Lindgren could do.

After twenty minutes or so, Kevin was given a chair and a
computer in an empty office. Audrey had nothing to do but watch. She looked around, saw a blue poster with white letters that said something about “The Stratton Family,” sort of a mission statement. The chairs they sat in were particularly comfortable; she noticed they were Stratton chairs. Nothing like this in Major Cases. Kevin put a CD in the computer and installed a program. He explained to her that it was viewer software he'd downloaded from the Web site of the company that made the digital video recorder in Conover's home. This would allow them to view, and capture, the video images.

“You know where to look?” Audrey asked, worried.

“It was in the settings in the DVR,” replied Kevin. “The folder it was written to, the date and time and everything. No
problema
.”

Audrey felt a little tremble of anticipation, which she tried to tamp down, tried to reason herself out of. She was sure that the murder of Andrew Stadler would be on this eleven minutes of camera footage. If indeed there was a backup here.

How often in any homicide detective's career could one hope to come across a piece of evidence like that? A digital image of a murder being committed? It was almost too much to hope for. She didn't want to allow herself to hope for it, because the disappointment would be crushing.

“Anything I can do to help, Detective?”

She looked up, saw Eddie Rinaldi standing in the doorway, felt her heart do a flip-flop. From where she sat, that angle, Rinaldi seemed tall and broad and powerful. He wore a dark blazer and a black collarless shirt. He was smiling, and his eyes glittered malevolently.

“Mr. Rinaldi,” she said. Even when talking to murder suspects, she tended to be polite, but she refused to be cordial with this man. Something about him she really couldn't stand. Maybe it was his air of knowingness, his cockiness, the feeling she got that he was enjoying the games he was playing with her.

“So you have a search warrant for the company's network, that it?”

“You're welcome to examine it.”

“No, no, no. I don't doubt you dotted every
i
and crossed every
t
. You're one thorough lady, I can tell.”

“Thank you.”

“Maybe thorough's a polite way to say it. Obsessed, maybe? Looks like you're still after my boss's home security tape.”

“Oh, we have the recorder in our custody.” She considered telling him they knew the tape had been erased, just to see his reaction, but that would be giving him information he shouldn't have.

Kevin muttered, “Almost there.”

Rinaldi glanced at Kevin curiously, as if he'd only just noticed him. Then he looked back at Audrey. He couldn't have been more blasé.

“I still don't get what you're hoping to find,” Rinaldi said.

“I have a feeling you know,” Audrey said.

“You're right. I do.”

“Oh?”

“Right. Couple of frames of some crazy old coot hobbling across my boss's lawn in the middle of the night. But what's that going to tell you, come right down to it?”

Audrey leaned over to the computer where Kevin was working. He tilted the monitor toward Audrey, who squinted, didn't see any picture, and then saw the words “
ERASED HERE TOO
” on a document on the screen.

“Excellent,” Audrey said, nodding. “Good work.” She reached for the keyboard and typed out the words, “
PLAY ALONG WITH ME
.” Then she said, “Beautiful, Kevin. Can you improve the resolution just a bit?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Sure. I've got some great digital-imaging firmware that'll eliminate the motion artifacts and reduce the dot crawl. A comb filter oughta separate the chrominance from the luminance. A little line doubling and some deinterlacing, and we got a nice clean image. No problem at all on this guy.”

Kevin tapped some more, and the document disappeared before Rinaldi had a chance to look for himself.

But that was the peculiar thing. Eddie Rinaldi never moved from where he stood, never bothered to peer at the monitor. He seemed utterly uninterested.

No, that wasn't it, Audrey realized.

He was utterly confident. He knew what Kevin had just discovered, that the backup video had been deleted on the Stratton LAN, just as it had been deleted from Conover's home security recorder.

And his confidence had just given him away.

Nick felt a tiny tremble in his hands. He put them in his lap so Osgood wouldn't see. “Willard, don't get me wrong. I have no interest in taking you on. I'd much rather work together with you on this. You want to save the funds Todd's running, and I want to save the company. We both want to make money.”

Osgood slid his glasses back into place and gave Nick a steely stare as he stood behind his desk. He grunted.

“Now, I don't know you,” Nick said, “but I can tell you're not a gambler.” Nick noticed that the blond woman with the red glasses had slipped into the office to usher him out and was hovering in the background, waiting for her cue. He lowered his voice so that the woman couldn't hear. “So when Scott McNally and Todd Muldaur funnel a ten-million-dollar bribe to a Chinese government official to make sure this deal happens, that's where I think they're crossing a line you don't want to cross.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Osgood put his hands flat on the glass of his desk and leaned forward, intimidatingly.

“They're putting your company at risk, doing that. Word always leaks out. And then your entire firm will be jeopardized.” Nick opened his arms wide. “All of this. Everything you've worked your whole life building. And I wonder
whether you think it's really worth taking such an enormous risk, when there's another way to get what you want.”

“Rosemary,” Osgood barked. “Excuse us, please. We'll be another few minutes.” When his secretary had left, he sat down again. “What the hell are you talking about, bribe?”

“Stratton Asia Ventures,” Nick said.

“I don't know anything about that.”

Was he being straight? Or was he being careful? “It's all right there in front of you—the last couple of pages in that pile. How do you think Todd was able to get this deal done in a month instead of a year? Call it a deal-sweetener or a kick-back or a bribe—whatever you call it, it's a clear-cut violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. And it's the kind of legal exposure that you can't afford.”

The way Osgood yanked the folder back toward him, Nick realized that this really was news to the man. Osgood shoved his glasses back up on his forehead and hunched over the papers.

A few minutes later, he looked back up. His leathery face seemed to color. He looked thunderstruck. “Jesus,” he said. “Looks like you weren't the only one kept out of the loop.”

“I had a feeling Todd wasn't telling you everything,” Nick said.

“This is
stupid,
is what it is.”

“Desperate men sometimes do stupid things. Frankly, on some level I resent it. My company's worth a hell of a lot more than what Pacific Rim Investors is paying for it. There's no need to pay anyone off.”

“God
damn
it,” Osgood said.

“You may be great with tarpons, Willard, but I think what we're dealing with here is a snakehead.”

Osgood seemed to be doing a slow burn. “I think my Yale boy just got hisself in over his head.”

“I guess he figured no one was watching the shop…”

Osgood's pearly Chiclets looked more like a snarl than a smile. “From time to time, someone thinks they can pull one over on the old man. Maybe they've been reading too many
Parade
magazine profiles of me. But they always realize the error of their ways.”

Nick realized then how terrifying Willard Osgood could be once the cornpone mask fell away, a truly formidable opponent.

“A lot of people have been underestimating you too,” Osgood said. “I think I may be one of them. So tell me: What do you have in mind?”

“Daddy!” Julia ran up to Nick as he entered the house. “You're back!”

“I'm back.” He set down his garment bag, lifted her up, felt a slight twinge in his lower back around the lumbar. Yikes. Can't be picking her up anymore like she's an infant. “How's my baby?”

“Good.” Julia never said anything else. She was always good. School was always good. Everything was good.

“Where's your brother?”

She shrugged. “Probably in his room? Do you know Marta just left a couple of hours ago for Barbados? She said she's going to visit her family.”

“I know. I thought she needed some time off. Her trip to Barbados is a present from all of us. Where's Cassie?” Cassie had happily agreed to come over to watch the kids.

“She's here. She was just teaching me yoga.”

“Where is she?”

“In your study, maybe?”

Nick hesitated a moment. That again. But there was nothing to find there. He had to stop being so suspicious.

“She has a surprise for you,” Julia said with a mischievous smile, her big brown eyes wide. “But I can't tell you what it is.”

“Can I guess?”

“No.”

“Not even one guess?”

“No!” she scolded. “It's a
surprise
!”

“Okay. Don't tell me. But I have a surprise for
you
.”

“What is it?”

“How would you like to go to Hawaii?”

“
What?
No
way
!”

“Way. We're leaving tomorrow night.”

“But what about school?”

“I'm taking you and Luke out of school for a few days, that's all.”

“Hawaii! I don't believe it! Maui?”

“Maui.”

“The same place as last time?”

“Same place. I even got us the exact same villa on the beach.”

Julia threw her arms around him, squeezing hard. “I want to do snorkeling again,” she said, “and take those hula lessons, and I want to make a lei, and this time I want to learn how to windsurf. Aren't I old enough?”

“You're old enough, sure.” Laura had been afraid to let her try, last time.

“Luke said he'd show me how. Are you going to scuba dive again?”

“I think I might have forgotten how.”

“What about surfing? Can I learn how to surf too?”

Nick laughed. “Are you going to have time for all these lessons?”

“Remember when I found that gecko in our room, and its tail broke off? Oh, wow, this is so
awesome
.”

 

Nick went to the kitchen to take the shortcut to his study, but he stopped at the threshold.

In place of the usual plastic draft sheets hanging down was some kind of paper barrier. He looked closer. Wrapping paper had been taped across the entrance, floor to ceiling and jamb to jamb. A wide blue ribbon crisscrossed it like a
gift. The paper, he noticed, had little pictures of Superman all over it, cape flying.

“Even though you look more like Clark Kent right now.” Cassie's voice. Her arms slid around his waist; she kissed the back of his neck.

“What's this?”

He turned, gave her a hug and planted a big kiss on her mouth.

“You'll see. How was Boston?”

“Let's just say your instincts were right.”

Cassie nodded. The dark smudges were visible beneath her eyes again. She looked drawn, exhausted. “Well, you'll get things back on track. You'll see. It's not too late.”

“We'll see. Can I open my gift?”

She bowed her head, turned up an “After you” palm.

Nick punched a fist through the gift wrap. The kitchen was all lit up, every light on, dazzling. The granite-topped kitchen island was perfect, just as Laura had once sketched it for him.

“Jesus,” Nick said. He went in slowly, taking it all in, awed. He ran a hand over the island top. There was an overhang, enabling the whole family to sit around it. Exactly what Laura had wanted.

He felt its edge. “Bullnose?”

“Half bullnose.”

He turned to look at Cassie, saw the little pleased smile. “How the hell did you do this?”

“I didn't do it myself, Nick. I mean, I may have inherited my dad's mechanical ability, but I'm not
that
good. What I'm good at is getting what I want.” She shrugged modestly. “It really only took them one full day of work. But it took me a lot of begging and pleading to get them here to do it and finish it by the end of the day.”

“My God, you're a miracle worker,” Nick said.

“Just like to finish what I start, that's all. Or what your wife started.” She paused and then said in a small voice, “Nick, are you ever going to be able to talk about her death?”

He closed his eyes for a while before he spoke. He opened his eyes, took a breath. “I can try. Lucas had a swim meet. It was half past seven, but dark, you know? First week of December. It gets dark early. We were driving to Stratford, because the meet was in the high school there. We're on Stratford-Hillsdale Road, which is what truckers sometimes use to connect to the interstate.”

Nick closed his eyes again. He was back in the car on that dark night, a nightmare he had relived only in dreams, and then in shards and fragments of time. He spoke in a low, expressionless monotone. “So there's a tractor trailer heading the opposite way, and the guy driving it had had a couple of beers, and the road surface was icy. Laura was driving—she hated to drive at night, but I asked her to, because I had some calls to make on the cell phone. That was me—company man, always working. We were bickering over something, and Laura was upset, and she wasn't paying attention to the road, see. She didn't see the truck drifting into our lane, across those double yellow lines, until it was too late. She—she tried to turn the wheel, but she didn't do it in time. The truck rammed into us.”

He opened his eyes. “Funny thing is, it didn't seem like we were hit all that hard,” Nick went on. “It wasn't like some horrible collision in the movies where everything goes black. It was a hard bump, like you might feel if you were playing bumper cars. Kind of a hollow crunch. I didn't get whiplash. Never blacked out. Nothing like that. I turn to Laura and I'm yelling, ‘Can you believe that guy?' And she doesn't say anything. And I notice how the windshield is all spiderwebbed on her side. And there's some pebbles of glass on her forehead. Something glistening in her hair. But there's no blood, or hardly any. A fleck or two, maybe. She looked fine. Like she'd nodded off.”

“There was nothing you could have done,” Cassie breathed.

Nick only knew that his eyes were wet because his vision was blurred. “Except there were
hundreds
of things I could have done. Any one of them, and Laura would still be alive.
You know, when we were leaving the house that night, Laura was about to make a phone call, and I made her hang up. I told her she was making us late. I told her it was ridiculous that she'd spent fifteen minutes putting on makeup and perfume for a goddamn
swim meet
. I told her that, for once, we weren't going to be late. I told her I wanted to get a good seat in the stands so I could see what the hell was going on. Now, thing is, if she had made that phone call, we wouldn't have been in an accident. If I hadn't been in such a hurry, we would actually have arrived. And I didn't have to make those goddamned phone calls in the car that night, for Christ's sake. Like they couldn't wait till the morning. I could have driven the car—I mean, look, I was the better driver, we both knew that, she
hated
driving. I shouldn't have been arguing with her while she was behind the wheel. Oh, and here's a sweet one. She wanted to take the Suburban. I said it would just be a pain to park. I insisted that we take the sedan. If we'd taken the Suburban, she might have survived the impact. And I'm just starting a long, long list. All kinds of things I could have done differently. The weeks after she died, I became the world's leading expert on this subject. Had 'em all cross-tabulated in my mind. Should have been on
Jeopardy!
Thanks, Alex, I'll take Vehicular Fatalities for a hundred.”

Cassie looked wan, ran her fingers through her hair. Nick wondered whether she was even listening to him. “Intracerebral hemorrhage,” he went on. “She died in the hospital the next day.”

“You're a good person.”

“No,” Nick said. “But I wish I were.”

“You give so much.”

“You don't know, Cassie. All right? You don't know what I've
taken,
what I've done. You don't know…”

“You've given me a family.”

And I've taken yours away
. He looked at her for a long time. He felt foolish about how he'd suspected her secret intentions and worried that she'd been trying to dig up the truth about what had happened to her father.

Then again, he obviously wasn't so good at sizing people up, he realized. He'd gotten Osgood wrong in all sorts of ways, and he'd gotten Scott wrong. Todd Muldaur—well, he had Todd's number from the start, so no surprise there. Eddie? He wasn't really surprised, when it came right down to it, that Eddie wouldn't hesitate to kick the skates out from under him.

But Cassie. He hadn't known just what to make of her, and maybe he still didn't know her all that well. Maybe his overpowering guilt and her overpowering seductiveness made it hard for him to see her clearly. She was a little emotionally unstable, that was obvious. Bipolar and having your dad murdered—that was a fairly lethal combination.

And he wondered how she'd react when he came clean.

It made no difference to him whether Eddie would strike some kind of deal with the police or not. He'd leave Eddie to his own smarmy fate.

When he and the kids came back from Hawaii, he was going to tell her the truth. And then he'd tell Detective Rhimes the truth.

And there would be an arrest, he knew that. Because whether a DA decided it was self-defense or not, he had killed a man.

Back in Boston, after his meeting with Willard Osgood, he'd taken a cab over to Ropes & Gray, a big law firm where a friend of his worked as a criminal defense attorney. A really smart guy he knew from Michigan State. Nick had told him what had happened, the whole story.

The lawyer had blanched, of course. He told Nick he was in deep shit, there was no way around it. He said the best Nick could hope for was criminally negligent homicide, that if he were very lucky he might get only a couple of years in prison. But it might well be more—five, seven, even ten years, because there was also the matter of having moved the body—tampering with physical evidence. The lawyer said that if Nick wanted to go through with it, he'd get a local counsel and petition to try the case in Michigan
pro hoc vice,
whatever that meant. He'd arrange for Nick to surren
der, and he'd try to negotiate a plea agreement with the DA in Fenwick. And he said he'd ask for a lot of money up front.

Whatever would happen to him, though, was the least of it. What was going to happen to his kids? Would Aunt Abby be willing to take care of them?

This was the worst thing of all, the thing that truly terrified him.

But he knew it was the right thing to do, at long last, however long it had taken him to come to his senses. It was like that dream he'd had recently, the one about the body in the basement wall that gave away its hiding place by oozing the fluids of decay. He couldn't hold the horrible secret inside anymore.

So in a week or so, after his last vacation with the kids, he was going to tell Cassie the truth. He'd already begun to rehearse, in his head, how he'd tell her.

“What is it?” she said.

“I've been doing a lot of thinking, and I've made some decisions.”

“Decisions about the company?”

“Not that, no. My life is about other things.”

An anxious look came over her. “Is this bad?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“Is it bad for us?”

“No. It's not about us, exactly.”

“‘Not about us, exactly'—what's that supposed to mean?”

“We'll talk when the time is right. Just not yet.”

She placed her hand on his. He took it in his hand, holding it gently. Hers was small and trembling; his was big and steady.

The hand that killed her father.

“Cass, we're off tomorrow,” he said. “We're going to Hawaii for a few days. I already got the tickets.”

“Hawaii?”

“Maui. Laura loved that place most of all. There's this great resort Laura and I discovered before we had kids. We had our own villa, right on the beach, with its own pool—not
that you needed it—and all you could see from it was the Pacific Ocean.”

“Sounds amazing.”

“Until Laura died, we used to take the family there every year. Our big splurge. Same villa every time, Laura made sure of it. I think of it as a time when we were completely happy, all of us. I remember last time we were there, Laura and I were in bed and she turned to me and she said she wanted to spray a fixative on the whole day and keep it forever.”

“God, it sounds beautiful, Nick.” A light seemed to flicker in her eyes. She looked almost serene.

“I called the travel agency we'd used, and—it felt like a miracle—they said that exact same villa's available.”

“Are you sure you want to return to a place they associate so closely with Laura? It might be better to go somewhere new—you know, create new memories.”

“You may be right. I know it won't be the same. It'll be sad in some ways. But it'll be a new start. A good thing—just going there as a family, being together again. And there isn't going to be any pressure to talk, or work through ‘issues,' or anything else. We're just going to play on the beach and do stuff and eat pineapple and just
be
. It won't be the same, but it'll be
something
. And it'll be something we can all remember when things change, because they're going to change.”