“How’d Kennett know about the disk? What’s his connection to the case?”
She didn’t answer. Something on the floor alongside her desk had caught her eye. She bent to scoop it up, looked at it and then held it out to me. Key. Shiny new, as if it had been recently cut. She compared it to her own office key. Exact duplicate.
“Now I’m sure Kennett’s responsible,” she said. “I run a pretty open shop here; you know that. The same key operates all the doors so staff members will have access to the other offices if they need something. We trust each other, so we tend to trust the other pier tenants too. Made it simple for Kennett to snag a key while he was hanging around Julia and have a copy made. This isn’t the first time he’s used it, either, I’ll bet.”
“No?”
“Yesterday morning our creaky old office safe was open when I came in. I thought one of the staff must’ve left it that way, even though none of them owned up to it.”
“Anything taken?”
“Nothing. There’s not much in it except petty cash and my .357 Magnum, but they weren’t disturbed.”
“Kennett looking for the disk.”
“Yes. And I should’ve been more careful.”
I asked again, “What’s his connection to the case?”
“All I can do right now is guess,” McCone said. “He must know Patterson or one of the others involved. Architects and city planners all know one another. Somebody found out we were conducting an investigation — a leak somewhere, or a trail we didn’t sweep clean — and paid or coerced Kennett into finding out what we knew. As often as he was in and out of the offices the past week, he could have overheard one of us mention the disk.”
I said, “He was only out of my sight for a few seconds. It’s either still on him or somewhere close by.”
“Wherever it is, we’d damn well better find it. If we don’t, there goes weeks of work, a fat fee, and my hard-earned professional reputation.”
17
From the catwalk we located Kennett, drink in hand, wandering casually through the crowd. By the time we got to the pier floor he’d stopped by the Santa’s Village display, was standing there by himself looking at it. When he saw us, the grim look on McCone’s face, it was like watching somebody put on a mask. Blank, smiling innocence, the kind Nixon used to project in front of TV cameras.
Sharon said, “Where’s the disk?”
“What disk?”
“The one you stole from my private office.”
“Stole? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you deny you were in my office a few minutes ago?”
“I certainly do. I haven’t been anywhere near your office.”
I said, “We both know that’s a lie, Kennett.”
“Who’re you? I don’t know you.”
“You’re not leaving here with that disk,” McCone said.
“I don’t have any damn disk.” Bluster now, but with an undercurrent of fear. He gulped what was left in his plastic cup, set the cup on the floor, and then extended his arms dramatically. In a loud voice he said, “Search me if you want to. Go ahead, search me!”
People in the vicinity stopped talking, turned to stare — just what he wanted. Neither Sharon nor I moved. There was no point in searching him, we both knew that. His leather pants were skin tight; the outline of a disk would have shown clearly. Same thing with the ribbed pullover. A computer disk might fit inside one of the loafers he was wearing, but he hadn’t had time to stuff it in there; and even if he had, it would probably have changed the way he walked. He didn’t have it on him. He’d gotten rid of it somewhere, and not very long after he left McCone’s office.
“All right, Kennett. You win this round.” She jabbed him on the chest with a sharp-nailed forefinger, as hard as I would have. “But we’ll find it if it takes all night. You’ll be under watch until we do.”
“If you try to hold me against my will, I’ll sue you. You and this man and anybody else involved. Don’t think I won’t.”
More bluster. Neither of us bothered to respond.
Sharon McCone is as efficient an investigator as I’ve known in thirty-some years in the business. Doubly so in a crisis. She gathered and quickly briefed the members of her staff, individually and in pairs, telling Craig Morland to stay close to Kennett everywhere he went, assigning her nephew, Mick, and her newest operative, Julia Rafael, to watch the exits. The rest of us went upstairs to her office, Neal Osborn and Kerry included. Neal because we might need an extra hand, Kerry because she’d noticed Kennett hurrying downstairs with me in his wake.
Once we were all settled, Sharon behind her desk, the rest of us sitting or standing, she said, “We need to brainstorm this, try to get some idea of what Kennett did with the disk. Wolf and I will do most of the talking, but if anybody has anything to contribute, jump in any time.” That was another thing about McCone: She ran a fairly loose ship, delegating a good deal of authority to her people, but when she took command she did it forcefully and got complete cooperation in return. In my idealized view of the future, Tamara would turn out just like her. You couldn’t ask for a better role model.
She asked me to go over again, in detail, what had happened earlier. When I was done, she said, “So Kennett didn’t go around to the opposite catwalk before he went downstairs, and Craig said he hasn’t gone up there since. That eliminates the Chandler & Santos offices as a hiding place.”
“We can eliminate one other possibility,” I said. “The unlikely one that Kennett hid the disk somewhere in here before I walked in. The old purloined letter trick. He didn’t expect to get caught and he’d be a fool to risk sneaking in another time, or trying to retrieve it while you were here.”
She nodded. “You had him in sight the whole time after he left, except for those few seconds on your way downstairs?”
“Right.”
“How many seconds, would you say?”
“No more than fifteen. That little window must be when he got rid of the disk.”
“Unless he managed to hide it on the way. Up here among the railing decorations, for instance.”
“I doubt it, but I can’t be a hundred percent certain. He did walk close to the railing all the way to the stairs. It’s remotely possible he slipped the disk in among the decorations.”
“The main argument against it is the same as hiding it in here — he couldn’t’ve been sure of getting his hands on it later. All the decorations between here and the stairs are ours. Still... Ted, go check and make sure.”
As Ted went out, I said, “Kennett had one hand in his pocket on the catwalk, on the stairs, and when I lost sight of him. But when I spotted him again, the hand was out — he made a gesture with it when he joined the group by the trophy. It’s possible that he passed the disk to somebody in the crowd.”
“Not likely. He’d’ve had no reason to arrange for an accomplice. It feels like a one-man operation to me.”
“Which leaves a hiding place someplace on the pier floor.”
“Did he turn straight into the crowd from the stairs?”
“Yes. Hard left turn.”
“So he passed right by the Model T Ford display.”
“Right, because that was what cat off my view of him.”
Charlotte Keim, Mick’s girlfriend and fellow computer whiz, said, “Another possibility is the nonprofit’s ecological display. It’s right next to the car.”
McCone said, “Among the branches of one of the fir trees? Could be.”
“The only problem with that is, he’d’ve had to go right in among them. That’d be inviting attention.”