“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.
60
“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.
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.”