Immoral (18 page)

On the porch, Stride felt the chill in the room, emanating from the two people he found there. Emily Stoner sat where she had been when he first met her, in a recliner by the fireplace. She looked frail, her skin drained of color. Her body had shrunk, and her skin seemed to hang loosely on her frame. Her hair fell limply across her face. She was years older than she had been just a few weeks ago.

Emily didn’t move and didn’t say anything, but her eyes followed Graeme as he sat down in the recliner opposite her. Stride had always sensed tension between them, but this was different. Emily had heard the news along with everyone else. Stride knew what she was thinking—that the man sitting calmly a few inches away, who had shared her bed for five years, might be a monster.

It was Graeme’s demeanor that surprised him.

Stride had dealt with criminals many times in the first moments after the truth came out. Most made angry protestations of innocence, denying the obvious. Others crumbled and confessed, releasing the burden of guilt that had been weighing on their souls. But he had never seen anyone look as calm and confident as Graeme Stoner. The man was furious but utterly controlled, and he still had a look of detached amusement, as if this whole process were nothing but a sideshow attraction.

Stride didn’t know how to read him. He usually believed he could tell a man’s guilt or innocence by watching for the truth written in his eyes and face. Graeme was a mask.

“You realize you’ve destroyed my reputation in this town,” Graeme told him with a determined stare. “I hope the city can afford to pay the damages when I sue you.”

Stride ignored him. He turned to Emily. “Please accept my apologies, Mrs. Stoner. If there had been any way of making this easier for you, I would have done it. I know what you’ve been through.”

Emily nodded but said nothing. She kept staring at her husband, doing what Stride was trying to do—see the truth. Graeme’s face revealed nothing.

“Mr. Stoner, I have to read you your rights,” Stride said.

Graeme raised an eyebrow. “Are you arresting me?”

“No, but you are a suspect in this investigation. I want to make sure you understand your rights before we go any further.” Stride rattled off the Miranda warnings, watching Graeme frown in disgust as he did so.

“Knowing that you don’t have to say anything, are you willing to answer some questions, even though Mr. Gale is not present?”

Another shrug. “I have nothing to hide,” Graeme said.

Stride was surprised—rich suspects
never
talked—but he wasn’t about to question his good fortune.

“The leak regarding this situation was regrettable, Mr. Stoner. I apologize for that. I don’t know how it happened.” Stride didn’t want to leap into the tough questions and have Graeme realize he was better off staying quiet. He wanted to worm his way slowly toward the ugly details.

“I suggest you find out how it happened, Lieutenant.” Something in the man’s eyes made Stride believe that Graeme was perfectly aware of the detective’s strategy.

Stride nodded. “You can understand, however, that some of the details we have uncovered raise a lot of questions for us. We’d like to get your side of the story. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m sure.”

“Were you sleeping with Rachel?” Stride asked.

There was a heavy silence in the room. Emily seemed to hold her breath, waiting for Graeme’s answer. Stride watched the man set his jaw and saw anger creep into his face. There was no hint of guilt in his expression, only contempt. His conviction made Stride wonder if they were making a mistake. Or was the man simply a consummate actor?

“What an offensive question. But the answer is no. Never. I would never have slept with my stepdaughter, Lieutenant. It did not happen.”

“Rachel said it did,” Stride said.

“I can’t believe that,” Graeme retorted. “The girl may not have had the best relations with either of us, but I cannot believe she would make up such an outrageous lie.”

“She told a school counselor, Nancy Carver, that you started having sex with her shortly after you married Emily.”

Stride heard Emily wince and suck in her breath. Graeme glanced at his wife, then back at Stride.

“Carver? No wonder. That interfering little bitch. Do you know she actually called and interrogated me? But she never came out and made any accusations like that. I think she’s the one you should be investigating, Stride. It’s obvious the woman is a lesbian. As I recall, I even called the school to complain.”

Stride jotted a reminder in his notes. He wanted to check if there had really been a complaint lodged against Nancy Carver.

“Why would Rachel make up such a story?”

“I can’t believe she did. Carver probably made up the whole thing.”

“Rachel told someone else, too,” Stride lied.

This time he caught a glimmer of hesitation in Graeme’s eyes, but the moment quickly vanished. “I find that hard to believe. But if Rachel did that, all I can think is that she was having problems. Maybe the girl was having fantasies about me. Or maybe she was trying to drive a wedge between me and Emily. Who knows?”

“But you never slept with her?”

“I told you, no.”

“You never touched her or had any kind of sexual contact with her?”

“Of course not,” Graeme snapped.

“And she never touched you.”

“I’m not Bill Clinton, Lieutenant. No sex means no sex.”

Stride nodded. A definitive denial would help them in prosecution, if they could find any evidence to back up a relationship between Rachel and Graeme, but he knew that was a big if.

He doubted Stoner would be so adamant in his denial if there were any way of proving the two had been involved.

Or he was telling the truth.

“Do you know a friend of Rachel’s named Sally Lindner?” Stride asked.

Graeme furrowed his brow. “I think so. She goes out with that boy Kevin, as I recall. Why?”

“Have you ever given her a ride in your van?”

“I really don’t remember,” Graeme said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

Graeme scratched his chin. “I may have given her a ride to her car one day. Her bike was broken. This was several months ago, and honestly, I can’t even remember if it was her.”

“Where did you pick her up?”

“Oh, somewhere north of town, as I recall. I had been visiting one of our branches.”

“And where did you take her?” Stride asked.

“Like I said, back to her car.”

“Did you stop anywhere?”

“Not that I recall,” Graeme said.

“She says you took her to the barn.”

“The barn? No, certainly not. I picked her up and dropped her off at her car. That’s all, Lieutenant.”

“It didn’t happen?” Stride asked. “You never went there with her?”

“It didn’t happen,” Graeme told him firmly.

“Then why would Sally say it did?”

Graeme sighed. “How the hell would I know, Lieutenant? Maybe Rachel put her up to it.”

“Rachel?” Stride said. “Why would Rachel do that?”

“She’s a complicated girl,” Graeme said.

Maggie pointed at a three-drawer oak filing cabinet. “You start there. I’ll take the desk.”

The other officer, a gangly twenty-five-year-old rookie who hadn’t outgrown his pimples, nodded and chewed his gum loudly. His name was Pete, and he had been in private security for several years before joining the force a few months ago. Maggie liked his cocky confidence, but he had a lot to learn. Pete had made the mistake of blowing a bubble with his gum and popping it with his gloved finger. Maggie nearly took his head off, reading him the riot act about contaminating the scene. Besides, the noise really bugged her.

Pete stopped blowing bubbles, but he kept chewing the gum, just to annoy her. That was exactly the kind of thing she would have done, and she liked that.

They were in Graeme Stoner’s upstairs office. He kept it impeccably organized. There was a monitor and keyboard on the big, custom-built oak desk, a small array of books arranged by subject, and two stacks of compact discs. Maggie glanced at them. One set of discs reflected Graeme’s taste in music, which ran to loud Mahler symphonies. The other set included discs labeled as confidential and bearing the stamp of Graeme’s bank.

“We’ll have to get Guppo to look at all the discs and the hard drive,” she said. “Make sure we label them and take them all with us.”

Pete grunted. He dug his gloved hands into the first drawer of the file cabinet.

Maggie glanced around the room, absorbing Graeme Stoner’s tastes. The walls were papered in a dark blue pattern, with a gold fleck that matched the rich gold color of the carpeting. Several original watercolors hung on the walls, mostly nature scenes, and to Maggie’s untrained eye, they looked professional and expensive. The desk and its elaborate leather chair were the main furnishings, supplemented by the filing cabinet, a wall of built-in bookshelves lined with hardcovers, and an overstuffed chair with matching ottoman. A slender brass lamp with a globe light sat on the corner of the desk.

It was a rich, sterile room, full of money and devoid of character. The same had been true of the master bedroom—the kind of elegant space in which it was hard to believe people actually lived. She and Pete had spent nearly two hours in the bedroom and bathroom, sifting through drawers and searching for secrets. They found little. The rooms were as interesting for what they didn’t find as for what they did. No birth control. No sex toys. No adult videos. She wondered when Graeme and Emily had last had sex.

It didn’t really matter. The question was whether Graeme and
Rachel
had ever had sex. They had turned up nothing yet in either room to prove Nancy Carver’s allegation, and Maggie knew from their original search of Rachel’s room after the disappearance that she had left nothing behind as physical evidence of an incestuous affair.

Maggie shuddered. She tried to imagine Rachel alone with Graeme in this house. Was it in the bedroom? In her room? On the bathroom floor? Did he take her on top, or did he make her straddle him? Did he take her from behind? Did he force her to her knees and make her suck him off?

Evidence. That was the troublesome part. Graeme was safe in denying the affair, as long as Rachel never showed up, because little proof ever remained that two people had been having sex. All they had was what Rachel told people—which was worthless in court.

“What’s in the filing cabinet, Pete?” Maggie asked.

The cop shrugged. “Tax records. Warranties. The guy saved everything.”

“Check every file, and box up the tax records. We’ll want to copy those.”

Maggie focused on the desk. She took each book from the desk, flipped through the pages, and returned it. She opened the drawers one by one, examined them from front to back, then got down on her knees and checked the bottom of each drawer to make sure nothing was taped underneath.

She booted up the computer. She didn’t have time to examine the hard disk byte by byte—that was Guppo’s job—but she at least wanted to do a search for e-mails and review the pages Graeme had been visiting on the Internet. To avoid accidentally altering the evidence, she first printed out a full directory listing on the laser printer, noting the details of every file on the hard drive. Then she hooked up a jump drive to the machine’s USB port and copied Graeme’s hard disk. When she was done, she swapped the drive to the laptop she had brought with her and called up a mirror of Graeme’s computer on her own machine.

When she called up Internet Explorer, she was surprised to find that the history of sites visited had been deleted and there was no listing at all in the Favorites box.

“This is interesting,” Maggie said aloud. “Looks like Graeme has been cleaning up after himself.”

“Huh?” Pete said.

“No Web sites at all. And yet the man is head of e-commerce at his bank. Does that make any sense? He doesn’t want anyone to see where he’s been surfing.”

Maggie loaded Outlook. The e-mail software was equally clean, nothing in his in-box, nothing sent, nothing saved. It was as if the man had never sent an e-mail on the computer, although Maggie knew that was absurd.

Something felt wrong. She wondered if Graeme had a drop box stored on one of the public Web sites like Yahoo or Hotmail, where he could send and receive personal e-mails without leaving a trail on his computer. That was going to be a lot harder to find.

Her walkie-talkie crackled, and Maggie picked it up. “Yeah?”

It was Guppo. “We’ve covered the basement.”

“Anything?”

“Clean as a whistle. Even the garden implements shine like brand-new. I don’t think he spends a lot of time down here.”

“Damn,” Maggie said. She was hoping they might find evidence of the murder itself, even if they couldn’t prove that Rachel and Graeme were having sex. Based on the evidence at the barn, though, she realized it was unlikely that he had killed her in the house. It was more logical that they had gone to the barn and that something had happened between them there—something that ended in Rachel’s death.

“Okay, Guppo, you and Terry go after the minivan outside, and work it over. Check out every inch, pull up the carpet, run the UV search for blood residue. Hair. Fiber. Semen. Fingerprints. Anything. I want to know if Rachel was in that van.”

“Gotcha.”

The next voice that crackled over the walkie-talkie belonged to Terry. “Son of a bitch, Maggie, you want me locked up in a van with Guppo? It was bad enough being in the basement with him.”

Maggie laughed. “Hey, I put up with it at the barn, Terry. You don’t get any sympathy from me. Over and out.” She hooked the walkie-talkie onto her belt again.

“I’m going to start on the bookshelves,” Maggie said, eyeing the wall of hardcovers with distaste.

“The computer’s clean?” Pete asked.

“At least on the basic stuff, yeah. Looks like Graeme kept it tidy. We’ll have to have Guppo do a more thorough search.”

“How about pictures?” Pete said. “You know, GIFs, JPEGs, that kind of stuff. Maybe he kept some dirty photos or other X-rated stuff around.”

Maggie nodded. She did a search of the jump drive. First she typed in “Rachel” and did a global search for any file that might include the girl’s name. That would have been too easy, she figured, and she was right. The search came up empty. She tried again with files starting with
R
but was overwhelmed by the results. She searched for “sex,” then “fuck,” then “porn,” but found nothing.