That wasn’t what bothered him.
What bothered him was why they seemed to be focusing on the study. There were lots of other rooms in the house where Stadler might plausibly have gotten in. Why the study?
Did they know something?
“Mr. Conover, do you have a key to this drawer?”
A confident baritone. One of the techs was pointing at the locked drawer where he’d kept the gun Eddie had given him.
He felt his entire body seize up.
“Key’s right in the top middle drawer,” Nick said mildly. “Real high security.”
He flashed on the box of cartridges in the drawer next to the gun. A green and gold cardboard box, the words REMINGTON and GOLDEN SABER in white lettering.
Eddie had taken them away, right?
When he took the gun?
Nick didn’t remember anymore. That night was such a blur.
Please God oh please God let them be gone the bullets make them gone.
He waited. Holding his breath, while the tech opened the big middle desk drawer, located the key at once, knelt down to unlock the bottom drawer.
The back of his shirt collar was seriously damp now. Downright wet.
My life is in this anonymous guy’s hands right now. He has the power to lock me away forever.
There’s no death penalty in Michigan, he found himself thinking. He’d never thought about it before, never had a reason to think about it. No death penalty.
Life in prison, though.
That was in the balance.
The drawer slid open, the tech bent over.
A second went by, two, then three.
The vacuum cleaner was turned off.
Nick felt like vomiting. He stood there on the other side of the yellow crime-scene tape like some casual sightseer, a tourist, and he waited.
The tech got to his feet. Nothing in his hands.
Maybe the drawer was empty.
If one stray bullet had rolled to the back of the drawer…
No, the tech would have taken out his camera and taken a picture if he’d found something.
The drawer had to be empty.
Nick felt relief. Temporary, maybe. Momentary.
He stood there watching the tech, the one who’d been vacuuming, take out a plastic bottle with a pistol grip and begin spraying a section of the hand-plastered walls around the light switch.
Decora rocker switch, Nick thought. Laura had replaced all the light switches in the house with Decora rocker switches, which she insisted were much more elegant. Nick had no opinion on Decora rockers. He’d never really thought much about light switches before.
The guy started spraying the bottom of the French doors, then the carpet.
He heard the two techs murmuring, heard the one with the plastic bottle say something like, “Miss my Luminol.”
The other one said something in a low voice, something about a daylight search, and then the first one said, “But Christ, this LCV shit is messy.”
Nick didn’t know what they were talking about. He felt stupid standing there on the threshold of his own study, gawking and eavesdropping.
The first one said, “stain’s gonna be degraded.”
The second one said something about “DNA match.”
Nick swallowed hard. “Stain” had to mean blood. They were looking for bloodstains on the door handles, on the door, on the carpet. Bloodstains that weren’t visible to the naked eye, which had maybe been wiped away but not well enough.
Well, at least I’m safe on that, Nick thought. Stadler never entered the house.
But his brain was not cooperating. It kicked up a thought that made the adrenaline surge, made him break out in sweat once again.
Stadler had bled, fairly profusely.
The black puddle of blood.
Nick had walked up to him, kicked at the body with his bare feet. Maybe even stood in the blood, who knows, he couldn’t remember.
Then walked back into the house.
Onto the carpet. To call Eddie.
He’d never noticed any bloodstains on the carpet, and neither did Eddie, but how much did it take? What scintilla of evidence, carried into the study on the soles of his bare feet from the puddle beside Stadler’s body? Mere droplets perhaps, invisible to the naked eye, smeared onto the wall-to-wall carpet unseen, soaking into the woolen fibers, waiting to announce their presence?
The tech who wasn’t spraying the carpet turned around to look at Nick’s desk, noticed Nick still standing there.
Quickly Nick said something, just so they wouldn’t think he was watching in terrified fascination, as he was. “Is that stuff gonna come off my carpet?”
The tech who was spraying shrugged.
“And what about all that powder?” Nick went on, fake-indignant. “How the hell am I going to get that out?”
The tech with the spray bottle turned around, blinked a few times, a lazy, malevolent grin on his face. “You got a housekeeper,” he said.
64
“Eddie.” Nick, calling from his study, scared out of his mind.
“What?” He sounded annoyed.
“They were here today.”
“I know. Here too. It’s bullshit. They’re trying to put a scare into you.”
“Yeah, well, it worked. They found something.”
A pause. “Huh?”
“They found a metal fragment. They think it might be a piece of a shell casing.”
“What? They recovered a shell casing?”
“No, a piece of one.”
“I don’t get it.” Eddie’s swaggering confidence had evaporated. “I recovered both shells, and I don’t remember any fragmentation. You said you fired two rounds, right?”
“I think so.”
“You think so? Now you think so?”
“I was freaked out, Eddie. Everything was a blur.”
“You told me you fired two rounds, so when I found two shells, I stopped looking. I coulda spent all night on that fucking lawn walking around with the flashlight.”
“You think they really might have a piece of ammunition?” Nick said, a quaver in his voice.
“The fuck do I know?” Eddie said. “Shit. Tell you this, I gotta start digging into this lady detective. See what skeletons she has in her closet.”
“I think she’s a good Christian, Eddie.”
“Great. Maybe I’ll find something real good.”
And he hung up the phone.
“We got shit, is what we got,” said Bugbee.
“The search warrant,” Audrey began.
“Was as broad as I could make it. Not just.380s, but any firearms of any description. On top of the usual. No blood or fibers in Rinaldi’s car anywhere.”
“We didn’t expect he took the body home with him.”
“Obviously not.”
“Any.380s?”
Bugbee shook his head. “But here’s the weird thing. Guy’s got a couple of those wall-mounted locking handgun racks, right? Found it in a closet behind some clothes, bolted onto the wall. Each one holds three guns, but two of them are missing.”
“Missing, or not there? Maybe he only has four.”
Bugbee smiled, held up a finger. “Ah, that’s the thing. There’s two guns in one, two in the other, and you can see from the dust patterns that there used to be two more. They’ve been removed.”
Audrey nodded. “Two.”
“I’m saying one is the murder weapon.”
“And the other?”
“Just a guess. But maybe there’s a reason he didn’t want us to find that one too. Two unregistered handguns.”
Audrey turned to go back to her cubicle when a thought occurred to her. “You didn’t warn him you were doing the search?”
“Come on.”
“Then how’d he know you were coming? How’d he know to remove the guns?”
“Now you get it.”