Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“So you must have been pretty groggy when the alarm went off.”

“I’ll say.”

“So there might have been someone, or something, that you just didn’t notice. Being groggy and all.”

“Definitely possible.”

“Did anyone else in the house wake up at the time?”

“No. The kids were asleep, and Marta — she’s the nanny and housekeeper — she didn’t get up either. Like I said, the alarm was set to sound in my bedroom, and not too loud. And the house is pretty soundproof.”

“Mr. Conover, you said your security director had ‘just’ put in the new alarm system. How long ago?”

“Two weeks ago. Not even.”

“After the incident with the dog?”

“You got it. If I could have had Eddie put in a moat and a drawbridge, I’d have done that too. I don’t ever want my kids to be endangered.”

“Certainly.” She’d noticed the cameras around the house when she’d arrived. “If you’d had a system like this earlier, you might have been able to prevent the break-ins.”

“Maybe,” Conover said.

“But you live in this gated community. There seems to be a lot of security when you come in — the guard, the access control, the cameras in front and all around the perimeter fence.”

“Which does a pretty good job of keeping out unauthorized vehicles. Problem is, there’s nothing that stops someone from just climbing the fence out of sight of the guardhouse and getting in that way. The cameras’ll pick them up, but there’s no motion sensor around the fence — no alarm goes off.”

“That’s a serious security flaw.”

“Tell me about it. That’s why Eddie wanted to beef up the system at the house.”

But now another thought appeared at the back of her thoughts, and she tugged at it like a stray thread.

The security system.

The cameras.

Nothing that stops someone from just climbing the fence .

If Stadler had climbed the fence that surrounded Fenwicke Estates and walked to Conover’s house in the middle of the night, walked across the lawn, setting off the brand-new motion sensors, wouldn’t that have been captured by Conover’s own video cameras?

And if so, wouldn’t there be a recording somewhere? Probably not videotape: no one used that anymore. Probably recorded onto a hard drive somewhere in the house, right? She wondered about that. She didn’t really know much about how these newfangled security systems worked.

She’d have to take a closer look.

“You know, I’ve changed my mind about that coffee,” Audrey said.

Audrey did not arrive home until a little after seven, feeling a knot in her stomach as she turned the key in the front door. She’d told him that she’d be home for dinner, though she hadn’t said what time that would be. It took so little to set Leon off.

But he wasn’t home.

Several nights in a row he hadn’t been home until late, almost ten o’clock. What was he doing? Did he go out drinking? Yet recently he didn’t seem to be drunk when he got home. She couldn’t smell liquor on his breath.

She had another suspicion, though it made her sick to think about it. It explained why Leon was no longer interested in having sex with her.

He was getting it somewhere else. He was, she feared, having an affair, and lately he was being brazen about it, not even attempting to cover it up.

Leon was at home all day while she was at work, which gave him plenty of opportunity to cheat without her ever finding out. But going out, coming home at nine, ten o’clock without so much as an excuse — that was a thumb in her eye. That was blatant.

Sure enough, at a few minutes after ten she heard the jingling of the keys in the lock, and Leon walked in, went right to the kitchen, ran water into a glass. He didn’t even say hello.

“Leon,” she called out.

But he didn’t answer.

And she knew. You didn’t have to be a detective. It was that obvious. She knew, and it was like a punch to her solar plexus.

Nick sat in his study, trying to go over some paperwork. He’d been calling Eddie, at home and on his cell, but no answer. On his fourth try, Eddie answered with an annoyed “What?”

“Eddie, she was just here,” Nick said.

“Fenwick’s own Cleopatra Jones? She don’t have no superpowers, Nick. She’s just sweating you. They tried the same shit on me today — the other one came by, Bugbee, asked me a shitload of questions, but I could see they got nothing.”

“She asked me about the call I made to you that night.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“Well, I... see, I’d told her I slept through the night that night.”

“Shit.”

“No, listen. That’s what I said at first, but then when she said she knew I’d made a call to you on your cell phone, I told her I must have mixed up the nights. I said the alarm went off that night, so I called you to ask you to check it out.” Nick waited for Eddie’s response with rising dread. “My God, Eddie, did you tell the other cop something different? I mean, I figured the alarm going off, that’s a matter of record—”

“No, you did the right thing. I said pretty much the same once I saw what he had. But man, I was shitting bricks you might try to wing it, say something else. Good job.”

“We’ve got to coordinate a little more closely, Eddie. Make sure we don’t say different things.”

“Right.”

“And something else. She was admiring the alarm system.”

“She’s got good taste.” He lowered his voice. “And so does the superfreak who’s naked in my bed. Who was just admiring my dick. Which is why I gotta go.”

“Especially the cameras. Especially the cameras, Eddie.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you positive there’s no way to retrieve the part of the tape you erased?”

“It’s not tape, it’s digital,” Eddie snapped. “Anyway, I told you, you have nothing to worry about. What’s gone is gone. Why are we fucking having this conversation? I just spent ten minutes preheating the oven — now I got to stick in my French bread before it cools down, you get what I’m saying?”

“The hard drive is totally clean, right? They can’t bring it back?”

An exasperated sigh. “Stop being such a girl, okay?”

Nick felt a surge of anger he knew better than to vent. “I sure as hell hope you know what you’re doing,” he said stonily.

“Nick, you’re doing it again. You’re peeing in my pool. Oh, by the way. That work you wanted me to do on Scott McNally?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember last month when he was away for a week?”

“I remember. Some sort of dude ranch in Arizona. Grapevine Canyon, was it? He said it was like City Slickers without the laughs.”

“ City Slickers, he said? Crouching fucking Tiger ’s more like it. He’s a sneak, but a cheapskate numbers guy like him can’t pass up the corporate travel rates, right? So this pencil dick puts in for a Stratton discount when he buys his ticket to Hong Kong. I got the receipts from the girls in the travel office. Unfucking believable .”

“Hong Kong?”

Eddie nodded. “Hong Kong and then Shenzhen. Which is this huge industrial area near Hong Kong, shitload of factories, on the mainland.”

“I know about Shenzhen.”

“That mean anything to you?”

“It means he’s lying to me,” Nick replied. It also means that all these rumors are right. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, as the GSA guy said .

“Sounds to me like you got trouble everywhere you go,” Eddie said. “Big trouble.”

Audrey was surprised to find Bugbee in this early, sitting in his cubicle on the phone. She approached and heard him talking to a lawn company, asking about hydroseeding. Well, she thought, what do you know? He really is working this case.