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. Unfuckingbelievable.”
“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.”
58
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.
He wore his customary sport coat, a pale green with a windowpane plaid, a pale blue shirt, red tie. In repose, he was not a bad-looking man, even if he dressed like a used-car salesman. He saw her standing nearby, kept talking without acknowledging her presence. She held up a finger. After a little while he gave her a brusque nod.
She waited until he got off the phone, then wordlessly showed him the little clear-plastic eye-cream vial.
He looked at the pinch of dirt, said suspiciously, “What’s that?”
“I took it from Conover’s lawn yesterday.” She paused. “His lawn was recently hydroseeded.”
Bugbee stared, the realization dawning. “That’s not admissible,” he said. “Poison fruit.”
“I know. But worth taking a look at. To my eye it looks like the same stuff from under Stadler’s fingernails.”
“It’s been, what, like two weeks since the murder? It’s probably disintegrated a lot since then. The mulch pellets are supposed to break down.”
“It’s been a dry couple of weeks. The only water probably came from his irrigation system. More interesting, I managed to get a look at his security system while he was making coffee for me.” She handed him a While You Were Out message slip on which she’d written some notes. “Pretty fancy. Sixteen cameras. Here’s the name of the alarm monitoring company he uses. And the makes and models of the equipment, including the digital video recorder.”
“You want me to talk to one of the techs,” he said. She noticed that for the first time he didn’t argue with her.
“I think we should go over there and take a look at the recorder. And while we’re at it, check for blood and prints, inside and outside the house.”
Bugbee nodded. “You’re thinking the whole thing went down in or near Conover’s house, and the surveillance cameras recorded it.”
“We can’t ignore the possibility.”
“They’d be stupid to forget about that little detail.”
“We’ve both seen a lot of stupidity. People forget. Also, it’s not like the old days when you could just take out a videotape and get rid of it. It’s got to be a lot harder to erase a digital surveillance recording. You’ve got to know what you’re doing.”
“Eddie Rinaldi knows what he’s doing.”
“Maybe.”
“Of course he does,” Bugbee said. “Are you thinking Conover did it?”
“I’m thinking Eddie did it.” Now that he was a suspect, she noticed, he’d gone from Rinaldi to Eddie. “I think Conover saw or heard Stadler outside his house. Maybe the alarm went off, maybe not-”
“The alarm company would probably have a record of that.”
“Okay, but either way, Conover calls Eddie, tells him this guy’s trying to get into his house. Eddie comes over, confronts Stadler, then kills him.”
“And gets rid of the body.”
“He’s an ex-cop. He’s smart enough, or experienced enough, to make sure he doesn’t leave any trace evidence on the body-”