Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

And I noticed something.

This was the end of Conrad’s Katonah property, this road here. This was the property line. And it wasn’t demarcated with a wooden fence or a chain-link one. The property was really too big to enclose with a running fence.

I pulled over when I saw an unmarked dirt road cutting through the trees on Conrad’s side of Girdle Ridge Drive. I saw tire tracks from trucks.

This was a service entrance to Kimball’s house.

I slowed and then turned onto the dirt road. It was narrow — the trees encroached close in — and the Toyota was scratched by branches.

The killer could have entered the property along this road. He, or she, wouldn’t have been spotted on video.

Or would he?

I braked, reversed, and saw a discreet CCTV camera on a telephone pole at the entrance to the dirt road from Girdle Ridge. It wasn’t exactly concealed, but it wasn’t obvious at all.

There was video back here. I wondered if Detective Goldman had seen it.

The Town of Bedford Police Department was on Bedford Road, in a redbrick building with white dormers that looked like a suburban bank office. Inside I could see it had been recently renovated.

Goldman was at his desk. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. But he didn’t want to talk in the building. He drove us to a Dunkin’ Donuts a mile or so down Bedford Road. As he drove I asked him about the dirt service entrance road and whether he’d seen the video from that camera from the night Maggie was killed.

He hadn’t, and he seemed angry at himself about it.

“I asked my partner to inventory all video cameras,” he said. “He must have missed it. Tunnel vision.”

I didn’t expect him to thank me, and he didn’t. It went unspoken. We parked, and entered the Dunkin’ Donuts. We both got coffee and sat at a table.

A guy in a black leather jacket entered, glanced over at us, and ordered something.

I went on. “Conrad must have an apartment in New York, right? A pied-à-terre?”

“Ten sixty Fifth Avenue,” Goldman said. “Eighty-eighth Street. View of the park.”

“Sounds about right. Are you any closer to finding out who killed Maggie?”

“The ME says the cause of death was blunt force trauma. She landed on her head and snapped her neck. And all the usual broken bones and contusions and lacerations.”

“What about the manner of death?”

“ME won’t conclude anything. She was probably shoved off the cliff. The ME is holding off pending further investigation.”

“Do you have footprints from the ground?” I remembered standing on the pre-impregnated pad to create elimination prints, when Goldman questioned me back in Kimball Hall.

“We took several plaster casts of impressions in the soil. Someone appears to have scuffled with her on the ledge above the ravine.”

“Male or female?”

“We can’t ascertain that.”

“You have casts of whatever shoes or boots Cameron had on.”

“All the kids. But we’re unable to establish a match.”

“Because of the rain?”

“No, we’ve got some decent shoeprints despite the rain. Just not a match.”

“Shit. If it was Fritz Heston, we know he’s going to be careful with the forensic traces anyway,” I said. “This is his business.”

“He’d also know how to turn off any video cameras he wanted off.”

“What about Maggie’s iCloud account? She’s got photos—”

“Way ahead of you there, chief. We got access to her iCloud account, but apparently she didn’t back up her photos to the cloud. So we got no pics, and her phone was stolen.”

“Have you been able to locate it?”

“Someone must have removed the battery or smashed it or something. So no, we haven’t found it.”

The guy in the black leather jacket was waiting for his order. He stood at the delivery counter and looked around but not at us this time. He had a medium-dark complexion, looked Middle Eastern. He had black hair shaved close to the scalp, a prominent jaw, and a thin scar cutting through his right eyebrow. He took his coffee and left the shop. So: nobody of concern. But I mentally clocked the face.

I turned back to Goldman.

“Right. So listen, uh, Bill, I need to ask you a favor. I want to take a look at Maggie’s office.”

“It’s a home office, and it’s sealed.”

“Right, but could you get me in? With an escort, if you want, someone from the Manhattan PD?”

“What are you looking for?”

“To be honest, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “I know — knew her well, and I just might see something your people missed.”

Goldman scratched his goatee. “I think that can be arranged.”

Maggie Benson’s apartment was on 126th Street in Harlem. This wasn’t the Harlem I knew from when I was a kid. Now there were yoga studios and hip restaurants and a Whole Foods. Her building was kind of ugly, and run-down inside, with an elevator that didn’t seem to be working. I walked up the six flights. The local NYPD guy was already there. He opened the door when I knocked. The crime scene tape around the door had been broken.

“You’re from Westchester?” he said. He looked like he was twenty-two, though he had to be older.

I didn’t correct him. Let him think I had something to do with the cops. I didn’t need to talk to him. I said, “Is Crime Scene done with their work?”

“I think so, yes. They’re done with the prints and the computers and all that. But you can wear these if you want.” He handed me a pair of nitrile gloves as I entered.

I immediately smelled Maggie’s delicate patchouli scent. Not the brash perfume she’d been wearing at Kimball’s, when she was playing a role.

The apartment was immaculate, looked like it had just been cleaned and straightened out, but I knew that was just the way Maggie lived. She was an army girl through and through. On the left was a fairly big room that was clearly outfitted as her office. Framed things on the wall. Her state license. Diplomas. Certificates of attendance at training seminars — forensic analysis, debt investigations, public records searches. A small, spare home office. She didn’t meet people here, I was pretty sure. On a simple metal desk was an open laptop next to a coffee mug. The laptop was a MacBook. It was plugged in, but it was dark. The police must have finished examining it.

I touched the trackpad with a gloved finger, and the screen came to life. A log-in screen with a blank for a password. The Bash Bunny wouldn’t work here. It didn’t work on Mac computers.

I looked at the screen and thought. Maggie was a pro. The password wasn’t going to be “1234.” Though I tried it, just to be sure, and I was right. It wasn’t “1234.” I had no idea what to try. It wasn’t going to be the date that we met, that much I knew. Or “I ♥ Nick.”

This was, I realized, a fool’s errand. Going into Maggie’s apartment and hoping to find some trace evidence she might have left behind — that was ridiculous. She was a pro and as careful as I am.

The laptop sat on a yellow legal pad. Maggie always had a legal pad. She always took notes on legal pads while she talked on the phone.

This one was blank. Which probably meant that she’d taken her notes with her, folded up into a small square — also something she used to do.

I switched on the desk lamp and looked at the yellow pad, then held it up to the light at an angle.

Yes. You could see the faint indentations of what she’d written on the top sheet, which she’d removed.

The cop who’d let me in had followed me into Maggie’s office, but I could see he was losing interest. His radio blasted an indecipherable message; he picked up his handheld from his belt and spoke into it. As he did so, he walked out of the room and into the hall, and I took advantage of his absence. I grabbed a pencil from a jar of pens and pencils and did something that would make another professional groan. I shaded the surface of the paper lightly with the lead of a pencil, bringing out all the indentations in white.