“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.
Part Four: Crime Scene
61
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.
It was just before five o’clock. He saw Detective Rhimes standing on the porch waiting for him, wearing a peach-colored business suit.
He switched off the Suburban’s engine and sat there for a moment in silence. Once he got out of the car, he was sure, nothing would be the same. Before and after. The engine block ticked as it cooled off, and the late afternoon sun was the color of burnt umber, the trees casting long shadows, clouds beginning to gather.
He noticed activity on the green carpet of lawn around the side of the house where his study was. A couple of people, a man and a woman-police techs?-were grazing slowly like sheep, heads down, looking closely for something. The woman was a squat fireplug with a wide ass, wearing a denim shirt and brand-new-looking dark blue jeans. The other one was a tall gawky guy with thick glasses, a camera around his neck.
This was real now. Not a nightmare. He wondered how they knew to look in the area nearest his study.
He tried to slow his heartbeat. Breathe in, breathe out, think placid thoughts.
Think of the first time he and Laura had gone to Maui, seventeen years ago, pre-kids, a Pleistocene era of his life. That perfect crescent of white sand beach in the sheltered cove, the absurdly blue crystal-clear water, the coconut palms rustling. A time when he felt more than just relaxed; he’d felt a deep inner serenity, Laura’s fingers interlaced with his, the Hawaiian sun beating down on him and warming him to his core.
Detective Rhimes cocked her head, saw him sitting in the car. Probably deciding whether to walk up to the Suburban or wait for him there.
They were looking for spent cartridges. He had a gut feeling.
But Eddie had retrieved them all, hadn’t he?
Nick had been such a wreck that night, so dazed and so out of it. Eddie had asked him how many shots he’d fired, and Nick had answered two. That was right, wasn’t it? The thing was such a blur that it was possible it was three. But Nick had said two, and Eddie had found two shell casings on the grass close to the French doors.
Had there been a third shot?
Had Eddie stopped when he found two, leaving one there that waited to be found by the gawky man and the fireplug woman, those experts in locating spent cartridge casings?
The lawn hadn’t been mowed, of course, because the grass was too new. The fast-talking guy from the lawn company had told him to wait a good three weeks before he let his gardener mow.
So a chunk of metal that might otherwise have been thrown up into the blades of Hugo’s wide walk-behind Gravely could well be lying there, glinting in the late-afternoon sun, just waiting for the wide-ass chick to bend over and snatch it up in her gloved hand.
He took another breath, did his best to compose himself, and got out of the Suburban.