Her entire house could fit into a couple of these rooms.
She would never have children.
She was sitting next to the man who was responsible for laying Leon off.
She took out her notebook and said, “Well, I just wanted to clear up a few things from our last conversation.”
“Sure.” Conover leaned back in his chair, arms folded back, stretching. “How can I help you?”
“If we can go back to last Tuesday evening, ten days ago.”
Conover looked puzzled.
“The night that Andrew Stadler was murdered.”
He nodded his head. “Okay. Right.”
She consulted her pad, as if she had the notes from their last interview right in front of her. She’d already transcribed them and put them into a folder in one of the Stadler file boxes. “We talked about where you were that night,” she prompted, “when your memory was maybe a little fresher. You said you were at home, asleep by eleven or eleven thirty. You said you slept through the night.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t remember getting up that night?”
He furrowed his brow. “I suppose it’s possible I got up to pee.”
“But you didn’t make a phone call?”
“When?”
“In the middle of the night. After you went to sleep.”
“Not that I recall,” he said, smiling, leaning forward. “If I’m making calls in my sleep, I’ve got even bigger problems than I’m aware of.”
She smiled too. “Mr. Conover, at 2:07 A.M. that night you placed a call to your security director, Edward Rinaldi. Do you remember that?”
Conover didn’t seem to react. He seemed to be examining the pattern on the Oriental rug. “We’re talking after midnight, early on Wednesday?”
“That’s right.”
“Then I must have my days wrong.”
“I’m sorry?”
“One of those nights I remember the alarm went off. I’ve got it set to make a sound in my bedroom so it doesn’t wake up the whole house.”
“The alarm went off,” Audrey said. That was checkable, of course.
“Something set it off, and I went downstairs to check it out. It was nothing, as far as I could see, but I was a little anxious. You can understand, I’m sure, with what had just happened.”
She nodded, compressed her lips, jotted a note. Didn’t meet his eyes.
“Eddie, Stratton’s security director, had just had one of his guys put in this fancy new alarm system, and I wasn’t sure if this was a false alarm or something I should be concerned about.”
“You didn’t call the alarm company?”
“My first thought was to call Eddie-I asked him to come out to the house and check it out.”
She looked up. “You couldn’t check it out yourself?”
“Oh, I did. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t something faulty in the system. I didn’t want to call the cops for what was sure to be a false alarm. I wanted Eddie to check it out.”
“At two in the morning?”
“He wasn’t happy about it.” Conover grinned again. “But given what I’ve been through, we both agreed it was better safe than sorry.”
“Yet you told me you slept through the night.”
“Obviously I got the days mixed up. My apologies.” He didn’t sound at all defensive. He sounded quite casual. Matter-of-fact. “Tell you something else, I’ve been taking this pill to help me sleep, and it kind of makes the nights sort of blurry for me.”
“Amnesia?”
“No, nothing like that. I don’t think Ambien causes amnesia like some of those other sleeping pills, Halcion or whatever. It’s just that when I pass out, I’m zonked.”
“I see.”
He’d just altered his story significantly, but in a completely believable way. Or was she being too suspicious? Maybe he really had mixed up the days. People did it all the time. If that night hadn’t been unusual or remarkable for him-if, that is, he hadn’t witnessed Andrew Stadler’s murder that night, or been aware of it whether before or after the fact-then there was no reason for him to have any special, fixed memory of what he’d done. Or not done.
“And did Mr. Rinaldi come over?”
Conover nodded. “Maybe half an hour later. He walked around the yard, didn’t find anything. Checked the system. He thought maybe a large animal had set it off, like a deer or something.”
“Not an intruder.”
“Not that he could see. I mean, it’s possible someone was out there, walking around on my property, near the house. But I didn’t see anyone when I got up, and by the time Eddie got here, he didn’t see anything either.”
“You said you took Ambien to go to sleep that night?”
“Right.”
“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.
57
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.