"Not that I recall," Graeme said.
"She says you took her to the barn."
"The barn? No, certainly not. I picked her up and dropped her off at her car. That's all, Lieutenant."
"It didn't happen?" Stride asked. "You never went there with her?"
"It didn't happen," Graeme told him firmly.
"Then why would Sally say it did?"
Graeme sighed. "How the hell would I know, Lieutenant? Maybe Rachel put her up to it."
"Rachel?" Stride said. "Why would Rachel do that?"
"She's a complicated girl," Graeme said.
Maggie pointed at a three-drawer oak filing cabinet. "You start there. I'll take the desk."
The other officer, a gangly twenty-five-year-old rookie who hadn't outgrown his pimples, nodded and chewed his gum loudly. His name was Pete, and he had been in private security for several years before joining the force a few months ago. Maggie liked his cocky confidence, but he had a lot to learn. Pete had made the mistake of blowing a bubble with his gum and popping it with his gloved finger. Maggie nearly took his head off, reading him the riot act about contaminating the scene. Besides, the noise really bugged her.
Pete stopped blowing bubbles, but he kept chewing the gum, just to annoy her. That was exactly the kind of thing she would have done, and she liked that.
They were in Graeme Stoner's upstairs office. He kept it impeccably organized. There was a monitor and keyboard on the big, custom-built oak desk, a small array of books arranged by subject, and two stacks of compact discs. Maggie glanced at them. One set of discs reflected Graeme's taste in music, which ran to loud Mahler symphonies. The other set included discs labeled as confidential and bearing the stamp of Graeme's bank.
"We'll have to get Guppo to look at all the discs and the hard drive," she said. "Make sure we label them and take them all with us."
Pete grunted. He dug his gloved hands into the first drawer of the file cabinet.
Maggie glanced around the room, absorbing Graeme Stoner's tastes. The walls were papered in a dark blue pattern, with a gold fleck that matched the rich gold color of the carpeting. Several original watercolors hung on the walls, mostly nature scenes, and to Maggie's untrained eye, they looked professional and expensive. The desk and its elaborate leather chair were the main furnishings, supplemented by the filing cabinet, a wall of built-in bookshelves lined with hardcovers, and an overstuffed chair with matching ottoman. A slender brass lamp with a globe light sat on the corner of the desk.
It was a rich, sterile room, full of money and devoid of character. The same had been true of the master bedroom-the kind of elegant space in which it was hard to believe people actually lived. She and Pete had spent nearly two hours in the bedroom and bathroom, sifting through drawers and searching for secrets. They found little. The rooms were as interesting for what they didn't find as for what they did. No birth control. No sex toys. No adult videos. She wondered when Graeme and Emily had last had sex.
It didn't really matter. The question was whether Graeme and Rachel had ever had sex. They had turned up nothing yet in either room to prove Nancy Carver's allegation, and Maggie knew from their original search of Rachel's room after the disappearance that she had left nothing behind as physical evidence of an incestuous affair.
Maggie shuddered. She tried to imagine Rachel alone with Graeme in this house. Was it in the bedroom? In her room? On the bathroom floor? Did he take her on top, or did he make her straddle him? Did he take her from behind? Did he force her to her knees and make her suck him off?
Evidence. That was the troublesome part. Graeme was safe in denying the affair, as long as Rachel never showed up, because little proof ever remained that two people had been having sex. All they had was what Rachel told people-which was worthless in court.
"What's in the filing cabinet, Pete?" Maggie asked.
The cop shrugged. "Tax records. Warranties. The guy saved everything."
"Check every file, and box up the tax records. We'll want to copy those."
Maggie focused on the desk. She took each book from the desk, flipped through the pages, and returned it. She opened the drawers one by one, examined them from front to back, then got down on her knees and checked the bottom of each drawer to make sure nothing was taped underneath.
She booted up the computer. She didn't have time to examine the hard disk byte by byte-that was Guppo's job-but she at least wanted to do a search for e-mails and review the pages Graeme had been visiting on the Internet. To avoid accidentally altering the evidence, she first printed out a full directory listing on the laser printer, noting the details of every file on the hard drive. Then she hooked up a jump drive to the machine's USB port and copied Graeme's hard disk. When she was done, she swapped the drive to the laptop she had brought with her and called up a mirror of Graeme's computer on her own machine.
When she called up Internet Explorer, she was surprised to find that the history of sites visited had been deleted and there was no listing at all in the Favorites box.
"This is interesting," Maggie said aloud. "Looks like Graeme has been cleaning up after himself."
"Huh?" Pete said.
"No Web sites at all. And yet the man is head of e-commerce at his bank. Does that make any sense? He doesn't want anyone to see where he's been surfing."
Maggie loaded Outlook. The e-mail software was equally clean, nothing in his in-box, nothing sent, nothing saved. It was as if the man had never sent an e-mail on the computer, although Maggie knew that was absurd.
Something felt wrong. She wondered if Graeme had a drop box stored on one of the public Web sites like Yahoo or Hotmail, where he could send and receive personal e-mails without leaving a trail on his computer. That was going to be a lot harder to find.
Her walkie-talkie crackled, and Maggie picked it up. "Yeah?"
It was Guppo. "We've covered the basement."
"Anything?"
"Clean as a whistle. Even the garden implements shine like brand-new. I don't think he spends a lot of time down here."
"Damn," Maggie said. She was hoping they might find evidence of the murder itself, even if they couldn't prove that Rachel and Graeme were having sex. Based on the evidence at the barn, though, she realized it was unlikely that he had killed her in the house. It was more logical that they had gone to the barn and that something had happened between them there-something that ended in Rachel's death.
"Okay, Guppo, you and Terry go after the minivan outside, and work it over. Check out every inch, pull up the carpet, run the UV search for blood residue. Hair. Fiber. Semen. Fingerprints. Anything. I want to know if Rachel was in that van."
"Gotcha."
The next voice that crackled over the walkie-talkie belonged to Terry. "Son of a bitch, Maggie, you want me locked up in a van with Guppo? It was bad enough being in the basement with him."
Maggie laughed. "Hey, I put up with it at the barn, Terry. You don't get any sympathy from me. Over and out." She hooked the walkie-talkie onto her belt again.
"I'm going to start on the bookshelves," Maggie said, eyeing the wall of hardcovers with distaste.
"The computer's clean?" Pete asked.
"At least on the basic stuff, yeah. Looks like Graeme kept it tidy. We'll have to have Guppo do a more thorough search."
"How about pictures?" Pete said. "You know, GIFs, JPEGs, that kind of stuff. Maybe he kept some dirty photos or other X-rated stuff around."
Maggie nodded. She did a search of the jump drive. First she typed in "Rachel" and did a global search for any file that might include the girl's name. That would have been too easy, she figured, and she was right. The search came up empty. She tried again with files starting with R but was overwhelmed by the results. She searched for "sex," then "fuck," then "porn," but found nothing.
Then she had another idea. She narrowed the search list to identify any file that had been created or edited in a two-week span surrounding Rachel's disappearance.