Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“What the hell happened at school?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Three guesses. Mr. Sundquist called me in.”

“What’d he tell you?”

“Don’t play this game, Luke.” Nick tried to stay calm. Talking to Lucas was like dousing a fire with lighter fluid. “You were smoking, and you got caught. Forget about what I think about smoking — you know the rules on smoking at school. You just got a three-day suspension.”

“So? It’s all bullshit anyway.”

“Suspension from school is bullshit?”

“Yeah.” His voice shook a bit. “Because school is bullshit.”

An instant message popped up on his monitor from Marge:

Compensation Committee meeting right now, remember?

“Luke, I’m furious about this,” he said. “You and I are going to have a talk about this later.”

Yeah, Nick thought. That’s telling him .

“And, Luke—?”

But Lucas had hung up.

No sooner had Audrey returned to the squad room than Bugbee found her. He approached her desk holding a mug of coffee in one hand, a sheaf of papers in the other, looking pleased about something.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “The shrink spilled it all about his looney-tunes patient.”

Now she understood his self-satisfied look. He was gloating, yes, but it was something more. It was the told-you-so look she’d seen LaTonya give the boys when they got in trouble for doing something she’d told them not to.

“He gave me some useful background on schizophrenia and violence,” she said.

“Stuff you could have read in a textbook, I’m figuring. But he wouldn’t talk about Stadler, would he? Doctor — patient confidentiality, right?”

“There has to be a way to get access to Stadler’s medical records.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell Bugbee he was right any more directly than that.

“What would Jesus do, Audrey? Get a search warrant.”

She ignored the crack. “That won’t do it. The most we can get out of a search warrant is dates of admission to the hospital and such. The medical records are still protected. Maybe a Freedom of Information request.”

“How many years you got?”

“Right.”

“Speaking of search warrants,” Bugbee said, waving the sheaf of papers in his left hand, “when were you planning on telling me you requested the phone records of the Stratton security guy?”

“They came in already?”

“Not my point. What’d you want ’em for?”

Bugbee must have picked them up from the fax machine, or maybe he’d seen them in her in-box. “Let me see,” she said.

“Why are you so interested in Edward Rinaldi’s phone records?”

Audrey gave him a long cold look, the sort of look LaTonya was so skilled at. “Are you holding them back from me, Roy?”

Bugbee handed the papers right over.

Boy, she thought, I’m going to have to take LaTonya Assertiveness Training. She felt a pulse of triumph and wondered whether this was a worthy feeling. She thought not, but she enjoyed it guiltily all the same. “Thank you, Roy. Now, in answer to your question, I wanted them because I’m curious as to whether Rinaldi ever made any phone calls to Andrew Stadler.”

“How come?”

“Well, now, think about it. He called our records division to find out if Stadler had any priors, right? Stadler’s the only former Stratton employee he called about. That tells me he was suspicious of Stadler — that he must have suspected Stadler of being the stalker who kept breaking into Nicholas Conover’s home.”

“Yeah, and maybe he was right. There haven’t been any more break-ins at Conover’s house since Stadler’s murder.”

“None that he’s reported,” she conceded. “But it’s only been a week or so.”

“So maybe Stadler was the guy. Maybe Rinaldi was on to something.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it wouldn’t surprise me if the security director called Stadler and warned him to stay away from Nicholas Conover’s house. You know, said, ‘We know it’s you, and if you do anything again you’ll regret it.’”

The computer-generated phone record faxed over by Rinaldi’s cell-phone provider was dense and thick, maybe ten or twenty pages long. She gave it a quick glance, saw that most of the information she’d requested was there, but not all. Dates and times of all telephone calls he’d placed and received — all those seemed to be there. But only some of the phone numbers also listed names. Some did not.

“I assume you already looked through this,” Audrey said.

“Quick scan, yeah. Guy has a pretty active social life, looks like. Lot of women’s names there.”

“Did you come across Andrew Stadler’s name?”

Bugbee shook his head.

“You looked closely at the day and night when the murder took place?”

Bugbee gave her his deadeye look. “Phone numbers don’t all have names.”

“I noticed that. There doesn’t seem to be a logic to it.”

“I figure if a number’s unlisted, the name doesn’t pop up automatically.”

“Makes sense,” she said. She hesitated, tempted to be as stingy with praise as Bugbee always was. But wasn’t it written in Proverbs somewhere that a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver? “I think you’re right. Very good point.”

Bugbee shrugged, a gesture not of modesty but of dismissiveness, his way of letting her know that clever thinking was second nature to him. “That means a hell of a lot of cross-referencing,” he said.

“Would you be able to take a crack at that?”

Bugbee snorted. “Yeah, like I got free time.”

“Well, someone’s got to.”

A beat of silence: a standoff. “Did you get any more on that hydroseed stuff?”

Bugbee gave a lazy smile, pulled from his pants pocket a crumpled pink lab request sheet. “It’s Penn Mulch.”

“Penn Mulch? What’s that?”

“Penn Mulch is a proprietary formula marketed by the Lebanon Seaboard Corporation in Pennsylvania, a fertilizer and lawn products company.” He was reading from notes prepared by someone else, probably a lab tech. “The distinctive characteristic is small, regular pellets half an inch long by an eighth of an inch wide. Looks kinda like hamster shit. Cellulose pellets made up of freeze-dried recycled newspaper, one-three-one starter fertilizer, and super-absorbent polymer crystals. And green dye.”

“And grass seed.”

“Not part of the Penn Mulch. The lawn company mixes in the grass seed with the mulch and a tackifier and makes a kind of slurry they can spray on the ground. Kind of like a pea soup, only thinner. The grass seed in this case is a mixture of Kentucky Bluegrass and Creeping Red Fescue, with a little Saturn Perennial Ryegrass and Buccaneer Perennial Ryegrass thrown in.”

“Nice work,” she said. “But that doesn’t really mean much to me — is this a pretty common formula for hydroseed?”

“The grass seed, that varies a lot. There’s like nine hundred different varieties to choose from. Some of it’s cheap shit.”

“The lawn companies don’t all use the same mix, then?”

“Nah. The shit they use along the highway, the contractor mix, you don’t want to use on your lawn. The better the mulch, the better results you get.”

“The Penn Mulch—”

“Expensive. Way better than the crap they normally use — ground-up wood mulch or newspaper, comes in fifty-pound bags. This is pricey stuff. Doubt it’s very common. It’s what you might use on some rich guy’s lawn — rich guy who knows the difference, I mean.”

“So we need to find out what lawn companies in the area use Penn Mulch.”