“He can’t have been happy.”
“He was ripshit, Audrey. About both him and Conover.”
“I can’t speak for Roy, but I know my team was as careful as can be. We didn’t trash the place.”
“I don’t think Bugbee was as careful.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Mine was a consent search. Roy had a warrant.”
“And Roy is Roy. Listen.” He leaned forward, rested his elbows on a bare patch of desk, rested his chin on his hands. “Rinaldi hit me with something we have to take seriously.”
“They’re threatening us with legal action,” Audrey said, half-kidding.
“He knows about Leon.”
“About Leon.”
“I’m surprised, frankly, it took him this long. But he obviously did some looking into you, and Leon’s name came up.”
“You knew Leon was laid off from Stratton. I didn’t keep that from you.”
“Of course not. But I didn’t really weigh that as carefully as I should have. It didn’t occur to me, frankly.”
“Everyone in this town’s got someone in their family who’s been laid off by Stratton.”
“Just about.”
“You start taking everyone off this case who has any connection to Stratton, and pretty soon there’d be no one left. I mean lab techs and crime scene-”
“This is always something we have to be hypersensitive about.”
“Jack, I was assigned to this case randomly. My name came up on the board. I didn’t request it.”
“I know.”
“And when I started it, there was no connection to the Stratton Corporation.”
“Granted, but-”
“Let me finish. Leon’s situation has nothing to do with this. I’m following the leads here. I’m not on any witch hunt. You know that.”
“I know it, Aud. Of course I know that. But if and when this comes to trial, I don’t want anything fucking it up. If I go to the prosecutor, he’s going to say he doesn’t want you involved-this has to be clean and pristine. And he’ll be right. Any DA is going to worry that this’ll look like payback on your part.”
She sat up straight in the uncomfortable chair, looked at her boss directly. “Are you taking me off the case?”
He sighed. “I’m not taking you off the case. That’s not it. I mean, maybe I should. The Stratton security guy is demanding it. But the fact is, you’re one of our best.”
“That’s not true, and you know it. My clearance rate is pretty darned mediocre.”
He laughed. “Your modesty is refreshing. I wish everyone around here had some of that. No, your clearance rate could be higher, but that’s because you’re still getting your chops. You tend to use a microscope when binoculars are what you want.”
“Pardon me?”
“You do waste time, sometimes, looking superclose at evidence that doesn’t lead anywhere. Going up blind alleys, barking up the wrong trees, all that. I think that gets better with experience. The more cases you do, the more developed your instinct gets. You learn what’s worth following up and what isn’t.”
She nodded.
“You know I’m your biggest fan.”
“I know it,” she said, feeling a surge of affection toward the man that was almost love. Maybe it was love.
“I pushed you to apply for the job, and I pushed you through. You know how many hoops you had to jump through.”
An abashed smile. She remembered how many interviews she’d had to do. Just when she thought she’d clinched it, someone else asked to interview her. Noyce had steered it all the way. “The race thing,” she said.
“The woman thing. That was really it. But look, a lot of people are waiting for you to fail.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“I do, and believe me, I know. A good number of people around here are waiting for you to trip and fall flat on your face. And I don’t want that to happen.”
“I don’t either.”
“Go back to the Leon issue for a second. Whether you say it’s an issue or not. We’re all susceptible to being driven by unconscious biases. Protective instincts. I know you, and you have a lot of love in your heart, and you hate seeing what your husband’s going through. You hate seeing him hurt in any way.” Audrey started to object, but Noyce said, “Hear me out. My turn, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’ve got a forest of facts, of evidence and clues. You’ve got to find a path through that forest. I mean, the stuff about the hydroseed-that’s damned good police work.”
“Thank you.”
“But we don’t know, do we, what that means? Did Stadler walk around Nicholas Conover’s premises? Sure. No one’s disputing that. Did he crawl around the property on his hands and knees, get dirt under his fingernails? Sure, why not? But does that mean Conover did it?”
“It’s a piece of the puzzle.”
“But is the puzzle one of those easy twenty-piece wooden jigsaws that little kids do? Or is it one of those impossible thousand-piece jobs my wife likes to do? That’s the thing. A hunch and some hydroseed isn’t enough.”
“The body was too clean,” she said. “Most of the trace evidence was removed by someone who knew what he was doing.”
“Maybe.”
“Rinaldi’s an ex-homicide detective.”
“Don’t have to be a cop to know about trace evidence.”
“We caught Conover in a lie,” she went on. “He said he slept through the night, the night Stadler was killed. But at two in the morning he called Rinaldi. That’s in the phone records.”
“They give different stories?”
“Well, when I asked Conover about it, he said maybe he got the day wrong, maybe that was the night his alarm went off and he called Rinaldi to check it out, since Rinaldi’s staff put it in.”
“Well, so maybe he did get the day wrong.”
“The bottom line,” Audrey said, exasperated, “is that they knew Stadler was stalking Conover. He butchered the family dog. Then he turns up dead. It just can’t be a coincidence.”
“You sound certain of it.”
“It’s my instinct.”
“Your instinct, Aud?-don’t take this the wrong way-but your instinct isn’t exactly developed yet.”
She nodded again, hoping her irritation didn’t show in her face.
“The bullet fragments,” he said. “At Conover’s house. What was that all about?”
She hesitated. “We didn’t find any bullet fragments.”
“That’s not what you told Conover. You said you found a piece of metal. You said it was a fragment from a projectile.” Rinaldi must have told him this. How else could he know?
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but you let him think that, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she confessed.
“That was a little show you put on for Conover, wasn’t it?” he said sadly. “That was all a bluff, designed to get Conover to break down and admit it. Am I right?”
She nodded, hotly embarrassed. “I hardly think I’m the first homicide detective to try a bluff.”
“No, you’re not. Far from it. I’ve done my share, believe me. But we’re dealing with the CEO of the Stratton Corporation. That means we’re under the klieg lights here. Everything you do, everything we do, is going to be scrutinized.”
“I understand. But you know, if my little bluff pushes him closer to an admission, it’ll be worth it.”
Noyce sighed. “Audrey. Okay, so the crack on Stadler’s body was really lemon drops. Whether the guy got swindled or the thing was a setup, we just don’t know. But you got a schizo guy wandering around the dog pound in the middle of the night, it’s not so surprising he gets shot, right?”
“None of the informants knew anything about it.”
“Stuff goes on down there, our informants only know one little slice of it.”
“But boss-”
“I don’t want to be a backseat driver on this one, but before you go off trying to sweat the CEO and the security director of a major corporation for conspiracy to murder some crazy guy-two men who have an awful lot to lose-you want to make sure you’re not being seduced by a great story. I mean, your theory is sure a heck of a lot sexier than some drug killing. But this case mustn’t be about entertainment value. It’s got to be about hardnosed police work. Right?”