Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

Scott McNally tended to get into work around the same time as Nick did, around seven thirty. Normally, they and the other early arrivers sat at their desks working and doing e-mail, tended not to socialize, took advantage of the quiet time to get work done uninterrupted.

But this morning, Nick took a stroll across the floor to the other side and approached Scott’s cubicle quietly. He felt a pulse of fury every time he thought about how Scott had lied to him about going to that dude ranch in Arizona, had instead made a secret trip to mainland China. That coupled with what he’d learned from the Atlas McKenzie and the Homeland Security guys — these goddamned rumors that Stratton was quietly negotiating to “move the company to China,” whatever that meant exactly.

It was time to rattle Scott’s cage, find out what he was doing.

“Got any interesting vacation ideas?” Nick asked abruptly.

Scott looked up, startled. “Me? Come on, my idea of a great vacation is a Trekkie convention.” He caught the look on Nick’s face and laughed nervously. “I mean, well, Eden loves Parrot Cay in the Turks and Caicos.”

“Actually, I was thinking some place further east. Like Shenzhen, maybe? Where do you like to stay when you visit Shenzhen, Scott?”

Scott reddened. He looked down at his desk — it was almost a reflex, Nick noticed — and said, “I’ll go anywhere for a good mu shu pork.”

“Why, Scott?”

Scott didn’t answer right away.

“We both know how hard Muldaur’s been pushing for us to move manufacturing to Asia,” Nick said. “That what you’re doing for him? Checking out Chinese factories behind my back?”

Scott looked up from his desk, looking pained. “Look, Nick, right now Stratton is like a puppy with diarrhea, okay? Cute to look at, but no one wants to get too close. I’m not doing any of us any good if I don’t scout out these possibilities.”

“Possibilities?”

“I realize you find it upsetting. I can’t blame you. But one day, when you look at the numbers and you finally say, ‘Scott, what are our options here?’ I’ve got to be able to tell you what they are.”

“Let me get this straight,” Nick said. “You made some sort of secret-agent trip to China to scout out factories, then lied about it to me?”

Scott closed his eyes and nodded, compressing his lips. “I’m sorry,” he said very quietly. “It wasn’t my idea. Todd insisted on it. He just felt it was too much of a sore point with you — that you’d do everything you could to block any kind of overtures to China.”

“What kind of ‘overtures’ are you talking about? I want specifics.”

“Nick, I really hate being caught in the middle like this.”

“I asked you a question.”

“I know. And it’s really not my place to say any more than I have already. So let’s just leave it right there, okay?”

Nick stared. Scott wasn’t even feigning deference anymore. Nick felt his anger growing greater by the second. It was all he could do not to reach over and grab Scott by the scrawny neck, lift him up, and hurl him against the silver-mesh fabric panel.

Nick turned to leave without saying another word.

“Oh, and Nick?”

Nick turned back, looked at him blankly.

“The Nan Hai is the place.”

“Huh?”

“The place to stay in Shenzhen. The Nan Hai Hotel. Great views, great restaurant — I think you’ll like it.”

A voice squawked out of Scott’s intercom. “Scott, it’s Marjorie?”

“Oh, hey, Marge. Looking for Nick? He’s right here.”

“Nick,” Marge said. “Call for you.”

Nick picked up Scott’s handset to speak to her privately. “There a problem?”

“It’s someone from the police.”

“My burglar alarm again.”

“No, it’s... it’s something else. Nothing urgent, and your kids are fine, but it sounds important.”

Scott gave him a curious look as Nick hurried away.

“This is Nick Conover.”

Audrey was astonished, actually, when Nicholas Conover picked up the phone so quickly. She was expecting the usual runaround, the game of telephone tag that powerful men so often liked to play.

“Mr. Conover, this is Detective Rhimes. I’m sorry to bother you again.”

The slightest beat of silence.

“No bother at all,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, now, I was wondering if we might be able to look around your house.”

“Look around...?”

“We were thinking it would help us a great deal in establishing Andrew Stadler’s whereabouts that night. That morning.” She hoped the shift to “we” was subtle enough. “If indeed it was Andrew Stadler who went to your house that night, he might have been scared off by all the new security measures. The cameras and the lights and what have you.”

“It’s possible.” Conover’s voice sounded a bit less friendly now.

“So if we’re able to nail down whether he did go to your house — whether it really was him who came by and not, say, a deer — that’ll be a big help in mapping his last hours. Really narrow things down for us.”

She could hear Conover inhale.

“When you’re talking ‘look around,’ what do you mean, exactly?”

“A search. You know, the usual.”

“Not sure I know what that means.” Was there the slightest strain in his voice? Certainly something had shifted, changed. He was no longer putting out friendly vibes. He’d gone neutral.

“We come over with our techs, collect evidence, take pictures, whatever.”

They both knew what she meant. No matter how she spun it, how she dressed it up, it was still a crime-scene search, and Conover surely understood that. It was a funny sort of dance now. A performance, almost.

“You talking about searching my yard?”

“Well, yes. That and your premises as well.”

“My house.”

“That’s right.”

“But... but no one entered my house.”

She was ready for that. “Well, see, if Andrew Stadler really is the stalker who’s repeatedly broken into your house over the last year, we might find evidence of that inside. Am I wrong in concluding that no one from the Fenwick police ever took fingerprints after the previous incidents?”

“That’s right.”

She shook her head, closed her eyes. “The less said about that, the better.”

“When are you talking about doing this? This week some time?”

“Actually, given how things are progressing in this investigation,” she said, “we’d like to do it today.”

Another pause, this one even longer.

“Tell you what,” Conover said at last. “Let me call you right back. What’s the best number to reach you at?”

She wondered what he was going to do now — consult an attorney? His security director? One way or the other, whether he gave permission or not, she was going to search his premises.

If he refused — if she needed to get a search warrant — she’d be able to get one in about an hour. She’d already talked to one of the prosecutors, woke him up at home this morning, in fact, which didn’t endear her to him. Once the prosecutor’s head cleared, he’d said that there were sufficient grounds to grant a warrant. A district court judge would sign it, no problem.

But Audrey didn’t want to get a search warrant. She didn’t want to play hardball. Not yet. That was escalation, and if and when she needed to step things up, she could always do it. Better to low-key things. Keep up the pretense — the shared pretense, she was quite sure — that Nicholas Conover was being cooperative just because he was a good citizen, wanted to see justice done, wanted to get to the bottom of this. Because the moment he shifted to opposition and antagonism, she’d be all over him.