Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

If he refused, four patrol units would be on their way over to his house in a matter of minutes to secure the premises and the curtilage, or the surrounding area, make sure no one took anything out. Then she’d be there an hour later with a search warrant and a crime-scene team.

She didn’t want to go down that road yet. But she always had to be aware of the legalities. The prosecutor had rendered his judgment that she could get a warrant if she wanted to, yes. Instead, Audrey wanted to conduct what they called a consent search. That meant that Conover would sign a standard Consent to Search form.

It was a little tricky, though. If Conover signed it and his signature was witnessed, that established that he’d given his knowing, intelligent, and voluntary consent to a search. But there’d been cases, she knew, where a suspect with a clever lawyer had managed to get the results of a search thrown out at trial, insisting that they’d been coerced, or they didn’t totally understand, or whatever. Audrey was determined not to commit that gaffe. So she was following the prosecutor’s advice: Get Conover to sign the waiver, date it, get two witnesses, and you’re fine. And if he refuses, we’ll get you a warrant.

Half an hour later he called back, sounding confident once again. “Sure, Detective, I have no problem with that.”

“Thank you, Mr. Conover. Now, I’m going to need you to sign a consent form allowing us to search your premises. You know, cross every T and so on.”

“No problem.”

“Would you like to be there for the search? It’s up to you, certainly, but I know how busy you are.”

“I think it’s a good idea, don’t you?”

“I think it’s a good idea, yes.”

“Listen, Detective. One thing. I don’t mind you guys searching my property, looking for whatever you want, but I really don’t want the neighborhood crawling with cops, you know? There going to be a bunch of patrol cars with lights and sirens and all that?”

Audrey chuckled. “It won’t be as bad as all that.”

“Can you do this using whatever you call them, unmarked vehicles?”

“For the most part, yes. There will be an evidence van and such, but we’ll try to be subtle about it.”

“As much as a police search can be subtle, right? Subtle as a brick to the head.”

They shared a polite, uneasy laugh.

“One more thing,” Conover said. “This is a small town, and we both know how people talk. I really hope this is all kept discreet.”

“Discreet?”

“Out of the public eye. I really can’t afford to have people hearing about how the police have been talking to me and searching my house in connection with this terrible murder. You know, I’m just saying I want to make sure my name stays out of it.”

“Your name stays out of it,” she repeated, thinking: What are you saying exactly?

“Look, you know, I’m the CEO of a major corporation in a town where not everybody loves me, right? Last thing I want is for rumors to start spreading — for people to be making stuff up about how Nick Conover’s being looked into. Right?”

“Sure.” She felt that prickle again, like an eruption of goose bumps.

“I mean, hey, we both know I’m not a suspect. But you get rumors and all that.”

“Right.”

“You know, it’s like they say. A lie’s halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, right?”

“I like that,” she said. Here was another thing that made her uneasy. When an innocent person is being investigated for a homicide, he almost always squawks about it to his friends, protests, gets indignant. An innocent person in the klieg lights wants the support of his friends, so he invariably tells everyone about the outrage of the police suspecting him.

Nick Conover didn’t want people to know that the police were interested in him.

This was not the reaction of an innocent man.

Early that morning, the day after Detective Rhimes had come over to the house to talk, Nick had awakened damp with sweat.

The T-shirt he’d slept in was wet around the neck. His pillow, even, was soaked, the wet feathers and down giving off that barnyard smell. His pulse was racing the way it used to during a particularly fierce scrimmage.

He’d just been jolted out of a dream that was way too real. It was one of those movielike dreams that feel vivid and fully imagined, not like his normal fleeting fragments of scenes and images. This one had a plot to it, a terrible, inexorable story in which he felt trapped.

Everyone knew .

They knew what he’d done That Night. They knew about Stadler. It was common knowledge, everywhere he went, walking through the halls of Stratton, the factory floor, the supermarket, the kids’ schools. Everyone knew he’d killed a man, but he continued to insist, to pretend — it made no sense, he didn’t know why — that he was innocent. It was almost a ritual acted out between him and everyone else: they knew, and he knew they knew, and yet he continued to maintain his innocence.

Okay, but then the dream took a sharp left turn into the gothic, like one of those scary movies about teenagers and homicidal maniacs, but also like a story by Edgar Allan Poe he’d read in high school about a telltale heart.

He came home one day, found the house crawling with cops. Not the house he and the kids lived in now, not Laura’s mansion in Fenwicke Estates, but the dark, little brown-shingled, split-level ranch in Steepletown he’d grown up in. The house was a lot bigger though. Lots of hallways and empty rooms, room for the police to spread out and search, and he was powerless to stop them.

Hey, he tried to say but he couldn’t speak, you’re not playing by the rules. I pretend I’m innocent, and so do you. Remember? That’s how it works.

Detective Audrey Rhimes was there and a dozen other faceless police investigators, and they were fanning out across the eerily large house, searching for clues. Someone had tipped them off. He heard one of the cops say the tip came from Laura. Laura was there too, taking an afternoon nap, but he woke her up to yell at her and she looked wounded but then there was a shout and he went to find out what was up.

It was the basement. Not the basement of the Fenwicke Estates house, with its hardwood floors and all the systems, the Weil-McLain gas-fired boiler and water heater and all that, neatly enclosed behind slatted bifold doors. But the basement of his childhood house, dark and damp and musty, concrete-floored.

Someone had found a pool of bodily fluids.

Not blood, but something else. It reeked. A spill of decomposition that had somehow seeped out from the basement wall.

One of the cops summoned a bunch of the other guys, and they broke through the concrete walls, and they found it there, the curled-up, decomposed body of Andrew Stadler, and Nick saw it, an electric jolt running through his body. They’d found it, and the game of pretenses was over because they’d found the proof, a body walled up in his basement, decomposing, rotting, leaching telltale fluids. The body so carefully and artfully concealed had signaled its location by festering and decaying and putrefying, leaking the black gravy of death.

A good ten hours after he’d awakened in a puddle of his own flop sweat, Nick pulled into the driveway and saw a fleet of police vehicles, cruisers, and unmarked sedans and vans, and it was as if he’d never woken up. So much for low-key. They couldn’t have been much more obvious if they’d arrived with sirens screaming. Luckily the neighbors couldn’t see the cars from the road, but the police must have caused a commotion arriving at the gates.