Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

Nick could only imagine what the camera image would look like. The lurching of a man in a too-big flapping overcoat suddenly illuminated by the outside lights. The flailing hands. The way the man had crumpled to the ground. Or did one of the cameras capture the act itself, Nick holding the pistol, his face contorted with fear and anger, pulling the trigger? The gun bucking up and back, the smoke cloud. The murder itself.

But that was all gone.

Eddie had assured him of that. Eddie, whose breath had stunk of booze. Who was always cocky but never thoughtful and thorough, certainly not in the rink. Who’d always acted hastily, impulsively.

Who might have missed something.

Done it wrong. Failed to reformat it properly.

Might have fucked up.

“Also, Mr. Conover, we’re going to need the keys to both of your cars, if you don’t mind.”

“My cars?”

“The Chevy Suburban that you drive, and the minivan. We’ll want to dust for prints and so on.”

“How come?”

“In case Stadler tried to get in, steal one of the cars, whatever.”

Nick nodded, logy and dazed, reached into his pants pocket for his key ring. As he did so, he noticed a swarm of activity in his study, straight down the hall. “I’m going to need to check my e-mail,” he said.

Detective Rhimes cocked her head. “I’m sorry?”

“My study. I need to get in there. I have work to do.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Conover, but this might take a while.”

“How long are we talking?”

“Hard to say. The evidence techs move in mysterious ways.” She smiled, her face lighting up, really lovely. “Oh, one quick question, if you don’t mind?”

“Sure.”

“About your security director — Mr. Rinaldi?”

“What about him?”

“Oh,” she said with a quiet laugh, “I suppose it’s like ‘Who will guard the guards?’ or something, but I’m sure you did a background check on him before you hired him to be your security director.”

“Of course,” Nick said. A background check was precisely what he hadn’t done. Eddie was an old friend. Well, a buddy, maybe. Whatever that meant.

“What do you know about his police career?” she asked.

There was a yellow tape across the entrance to his study. It said, “Crime Scene — Do Not Cross.”

Crime scene, he thought.

You don’t know.

Two evidence techs in there, wearing rubber gloves. One was dusting the doors, door frames, light switch plates, the desk, the wood frame and glass panes of the French doors, with fluorescent orange powder. The other was vacuuming the carpet with a strange-looking handheld vacuum cleaner, a black barrel, long straight nozzle.

Nick watched for a moment, cleared his throat to get their attention, and said, “You don’t need to do that. We’ve got a housekeeper.”

A lame joke, pathetic even. Offensive, probably. They didn’t have housekeepers.

The tech with the vacuum cleaner gave him a hard look.

Nick let it slide. They were dusting for fingerprints, but there was no way they were going to find anything incriminating. Stadler wasn’t inside the house on the night of his murder. He’d dropped to the ground, easily twenty feet from the French doors.

That wasn’t what bothered him.

What bothered him was why they seemed to be focusing on the study. There were lots of other rooms in the house where Stadler might plausibly have gotten in. Why the study?

Did they know something?

“Mr. Conover, do you have a key to this drawer?”

A confident baritone. One of the techs was pointing at the locked drawer where he’d kept the gun Eddie had given him.

He felt his entire body seize up.

“Key’s right in the top middle drawer,” Nick said mildly. “Real high security.”

He flashed on the box of cartridges in the drawer next to the gun. A green and gold cardboard box, the words REMINGTON and GOLDEN SABER in white lettering.

Eddie had taken them away, right?

When he took the gun?

Nick didn’t remember anymore. That night was such a blur.

Please God oh please God let them be gone the bullets make them gone .

He waited. Holding his breath, while the tech opened the big middle desk drawer, located the key at once, knelt down to unlock the bottom drawer.

The back of his shirt collar was seriously damp now. Downright wet.

My life is in this anonymous guy’s hands right now. He has the power to lock me away forever.

There’s no death penalty in Michigan, he found himself thinking. He’d never thought about it before, never had a reason to think about it. No death penalty.

Life in prison, though.

That was in the balance.

The drawer slid open, the tech bent over.

A second went by, two, then three.

The vacuum cleaner was turned off.

Nick felt like vomiting. He stood there on the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape like some casual sightseer, a tourist, and he waited.

The tech got to his feet. Nothing in his hands.

Maybe the drawer was empty.

If one stray bullet had rolled to the back of the drawer...

No, the tech would have taken out his camera and taken a picture if he’d found something.

The drawer had to be empty.

Nick felt relief. Temporary, maybe. Momentary.

He stood there watching the tech, the one who’d been vacuuming, take out a plastic bottle with a pistol grip and begin spraying a section of the hand-plastered walls around the light switch.

Decora rocker switch, Nick thought. Laura had replaced all the light switches in the house with Decora rocker switches, which she insisted were much more elegant. Nick had no opinion on Decora rockers. He’d never really thought much about light switches before.

The guy started spraying the bottom of the French doors, then the carpet.

He heard the two techs murmuring, heard the one with the plastic bottle say something like, “Miss my Luminol.”

The other one said something in a low voice, something about a daylight search, and then the first one said, “But Christ, this LCV shit is messy.”

Nick didn’t know what they were talking about. He felt stupid standing there on the threshold of his own study, gawking and eavesdropping.

The first one said, “stain’s gonna be degraded.”

The second one said something about “DNA match.”

Nick swallowed hard. “Stain” had to mean blood. They were looking for bloodstains on the door handles, on the door, on the carpet. Bloodstains that weren’t visible to the naked eye, which had maybe been wiped away but not well enough.

Well, at least I’m safe on that, Nick thought. Stadler never entered the house.

But his brain was not cooperating. It kicked up a thought that made the adrenaline surge, made him break out in sweat once again.

Stadler had bled, fairly profusely.

The black puddle of blood.

Nick had walked up to him, kicked at the body with his bare feet. Maybe even stood in the blood, who knows, he couldn’t remember.

Then walked back into the house.

Onto the carpet. To call Eddie.

He’d never noticed any bloodstains on the carpet, and neither did Eddie, but how much did it take? What scintilla of evidence, carried into the study on the soles of his bare feet from the puddle beside Stadler’s body? Mere droplets perhaps, invisible to the naked eye, smeared onto the wall-to-wall carpet unseen, soaking into the woolen fibers, waiting to announce their presence?

The tech who wasn’t spraying the carpet turned around to look at Nick’s desk, noticed Nick still standing there.

Quickly Nick said something, just so they wouldn’t think he was watching in terrified fascination, as he was. “Is that stuff gonna come off my carpet?”