Nick laughed convincingly. “Don’t worry about that. When they check for fingerprints inside and outside the house, they’re going to find our fingerprints-yours and mine and Marta’s-”
“And probably Emily’s too,” said Julia.
“Right.”
“And probably that guy Digga, right, Luke?”
Luke rolled his eyes, looked away.
“Who’s Digga?” Nick asked.
Lucas didn’t answer, still shaking his head.
“He’s this guy who wears a do-rag just like Luke and plays really loud music when you’re not here and always smells like smoke. He stinks.”
“When does he come over?” said Nick.
“Like once or twice,” Lucas said. “Jesus Christ. This is totally wack. He’s a friend of mine, all right? Am I allowed to have friends, or is this, like, a prison where you’re not allowed to have visitors? You happy, Julia? Fuckin’ tattletale.”
“Hey!” Nick said.
Julia, so unused to being yelled at by her older brother, ran out of the room crying.
“Uh, Mr. Conover?”
Detective Rhimes, standing tentatively at the door to the family room.
“Yes?”
“Could I see you for a minute?”
63
“We found something on your lawn,” she said.
“Oh?”
She’d taken him out into the hall, far enough away from the kids that they couldn’t hear.
“A mangled piece of metal.”
Nick shrugged, as if to say, So? Is that supposed to mean something to me?
“It may be a bullet fragment, maybe a piece of shell casing.”
“From a gun?” His breath stopped. Outwardly he tried to project an image of nonchalance, but interested, as someone in his position should be. Someone who was innocent, who wanted the cops to find the killer.
“It’s hard to say. I’m no expert.”
“Can I take a look?” he said, and he immediately regretted saying it. Mustn’t betray too much interest. Must get the balance right.
She shook her head. “The techs have it. I just wanted to ask you-it may seem a silly question-but you’ve said you don’t own a gun, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So obviously you’ve never fired a gun on your property, I’m sure. But has anyone you know fired a gun in your yard, to your knowledge?”
He attempted a dismissive laugh, though it sounded hollow. “No target practice allowed here,” he said.
“So, no one’s ever fired a gun outside your house, to your knowledge.”
“Nope. Not as far as I know.”
“Never.”
“Never.” A cool trickle of sweat traced a path along the back of one ear and down his neck, where it was absorbed by the collar of his shirt.
She nodded again, slowly. “Interesting.”
“The techs-are they sure it’s from a bullet or whatever?”
“Well, you know, I doubt I could tell the difference between a bottle cap and a-a Remington Golden Saber.380 cartridge,” she said. Nick couldn’t stop himself from flinching, and he hoped she hadn’t noticed. “But the crime scene techs, they’re awfully good at what they do, and I have to defer to them on that. They tell me it sure looks like a fragment from a projectile.”
“Strange,” Nick said. He tried to look puzzled in a sort of neutral, disinterested way, not letting the way he was really feeling leak out-terrified and trembling and nauseated.
Eddie had assured him he’d collected everything, all the shell casings, and checked for any other trace evidence that might be on the lawn. Then again, he could easily have missed a small piece of lead or brass or whatever it was, a flying piece of metal that had lodged itself into the earth, say. That would be easy to miss.
After all, Nick had noticed the smell of liquor on Eddie’s breath that night. He’d probably been sleeping it off when Nick called. Didn’t have all his faculties about him. Maybe he hadn’t been so thorough.
Detective Rhimes seemed about to say something more when Nick noticed someone walking by, carrying a black rectangular metal object sealed in a clear plastic bag. The fireplug woman, the evidence tech with the wide ass in the new jeans, was holding what Nick recognized at once as the digital video recorder that was hooked up to the security cameras. They must have taken it from the closet where the installer had put the alarm system.
“Hey, what’s that?” Nick called out. The woman, whose nametag on her denim shirt said Trento, stopped, looked at Detective Rhimes.
The detective said, “That’s the recording unit from your security system.”
“I need that,” Nick said.
“I understand. We’ll make sure this is turned around just as quickly as possible.”
Nick shook his head in apparent frustration. He hoped, prayed that the little shimmy of terror moving through his body wasn’t obvious. Eddie had wiped the disk clean, he’d said. Reformatted it. Nothing was there from that night.
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.