“I wish. Not yesterday or today.”
“Your alarm company lists a work number for you at the Stratton Corporation,” Officer Manzi said. He was looking down at an aluminum clipboard, his black eyes small and deeply inset like raisins in a butterscotch pudding. “You work there.”
“Right.”
“What do you do at Stratton?” There was a beat before the policeman looked up and let his eyes meet Nick’s: the guy knew damned well what he did there.
“I’m the CEO.”
Manzi nodded as if everything now made sense. “I see. You’ve had a number of break-ins over the last several months, is that correct, Mr. Conover?”
“Five or six times now.”
“What kind of security system you have here, sir?”
“Burglar alarm on the doors and some of the windows and French doors. Basic system. Nothing too elaborate.”
“Home like this, that’s not much of a system. No cameras, right?”
“Well, we live in this, you know, gated community.”
“Yes, sir, I can see that. Lot of good it does, keeping out the wing nuts.”
“Point taken.” Nick almost smiled.
“Sounds like the burglar alarm isn’t on very often, sir, that right?”
“Officer, why so many cars here today for a routine-”
“Mind if I ask the questions?” Officer Manzi said. The guy seemed to be enjoying his authority, pushing around the boss man from Stratton. Let him, Nick thought. Let him have his fun. But-
Nick heard a car approaching, turned and saw the blue Chrysler Town & Country, Marta behind the wheel. He felt that little chemical surge of pleasure he always got when he saw his daughter, the way he used to feel with Lucas too, until that got complicated. The minivan pulled up alongside Nick and the engine was switched off. A car door opened and slammed, and Julia shouted, “What are you doing home, Daddy?”
She ran toward him, wearing a light-blue hooded Stratton sweatshirt and jeans, black sneakers. She wore some slight variant of the outfit every day, a sweatshirt or an athletic jersey. When Nick went to the same elementary school, more than thirty years before, you weren’t allowed to wear jeans, and sweatshirts weren’t considered appropriate school attire. But he didn’t have time in the mornings to argue with her, and he was inclined to go easy on his little girl, given what she had to be going through since the death of her mother.
She hugged him tight around his abdomen. He no longer hoisted her up, since at almost five feet and ninety-something pounds, it wasn’t so easy. In the last year she’d gotten tall and leggy, almost gangly, though there was still a pocket of baby fat at her tummy. She was starting to develop physically, little breast buds emerging, which Nick couldn’t deal with. It was a constant reminder of his inadequacy as a parent: who the hell was going to talk to her, get her through adolescence?
The hug went on for several seconds until Nick released her, another thing that had changed since Laura was gone. His daughter’s hugs: she didn’t want to let him go.
Now she looked up at him, her meltingly beautiful brown eyes lively. “How come there’s all these police?”
“They want to talk to me, baby doll. No big deal. Where’s your backpack?”
“In the car. Did that crazy guy get in the house again and write bad stuff?”
Nick nodded, stroked her glossy brown hair. “What are you doing home now? Don’t you have piano?”
She gave him a look of amused contempt. “That’s not till four.”
“I thought it was three.”
“Mrs. Guarini changed it, like, months ago, don’t you remember?”
He shook his head. “Oh, right. I forgot. Well, listen, I have to talk to this policeman here. Marta, you guys stay here until the police say it’s okay to go in the house, okay?”
Marta Burrell was from Barbados, a mocha-skinned woman of thirty-eight, tall and slender as a fashion model with an air of sultry indifference, or maybe arrogance, her default mode. Her jeans were a little too tight, and she customarily wore high heels, and she was vocal about her disapproval of Julia’s daily uniform. She expressed disapproval of just about everything in the household. She was ferociously devoted to the kids, though, and was able to make both of them do things Nick couldn’t. Marta had been a superb nanny when the kids were little, was an excellent cook, and an indifferent housekeeper.
“Sure, Nick,” she said. She reached for Julia, but the girl scampered off.
“You were saying,” Nick said to the cop.
Manzi looked up, fixed Nick with a blank look, bordering on impertinence, but there was a gleam in his eyes; he seemed to be restraining a smile. “Do you have any enemies, Mr. Conover?”
“Only about five thousand people in town.”
The policeman’s eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me.”
“We laid off half our workforce recently, as I’m sure you know. More than five thousand employees.”
“Ah, yes,” the cop said. “You’re not a popular man around here, are you?”
“You could say that.”
It wasn’t that long ago, Nick reflected, that everyone loved him. People he didn’t know in high school started sucking up to him. Forbes magazine even did a profile. After all, Nick was the youthful blue-collar guy, the son of a guy who’d spent a life bending metal in the chair factory-business reporters ate that stuff up. Maybe Nick was never going to be beloved at the company like Old Man Devries, but for a while at least he’d been popular, admired, liked. A local hero in the small town of Fenwick, Michigan, sort of, a guy you’d point out at the Shop ’n Save and maybe, if you felt bold, walk up to and introduce yourself in the frozen-foods section.
But that was before-before the first layoffs were announced, two years ago, after Stratton’s new owners had laid down the law at the quarterly board meeting in Fenwick. There was no choice. The Stratton Corporation was going down the crapper if they didn’t cut costs, and fast. That meant losing half its workforce, five thousand people in a town of maybe forty thousand. It was the most painful thing he’d ever done, something he’d never imagined having to do. There’d been a series of smaller layoffs since the first ones were announced, two years ago. It was like Chinese water torture. The Fenwick Free Press, which used to publish puff pieces about Stratton, now ran banner headlines: THREE HUNDRED MORE STRATTON WORKERS FACE THE AXE. CANCER VICTIM SUFFERS LOSS OF STRATTON BENEFITS. The local columnists routinely referred to him as “the Slasher.”
Nick Conover, local boy made good, had become the most hated man in town.
“Guy like you ought to have better security than that. You get the security you pay for, you know.”
Nick was about to reply when he heard his daughter scream.
3
He ran toward the source of the screaming and found Julia beside the pool. Her cries came in great ragged gulps. She knelt on the bluestone coping, her hands thrashing in the water, her small back torquing back and forth. Marta stood nearby, helpless and aghast, a hand to her mouth.
Then Nick saw what had made Julia scream, and he felt sick.
A dark shape floated in cranberry red water, splayed and distended, surrounded by slick white entrails. The blood was concentrated in a dark cloud around the carcass; the water got lighter, pinkish as it got farther away from the furry brown mass.
The corpse wasn’t immediately recognizable as Barney, their old Lab/Golden Retriever. It took a second glance, a struggle with disbelief. On the bluestone not far from where Julia knelt, keening, was a blood-slick, carbon-steel Henckels knife from their kitchen set.
Many things immediately made sense, now: the unusual police presence, the questioning, even the absence of Barney’s usual barked greeting when Nick arrived.
A couple of policemen were busy taking pictures, talking to one another, their low conversations punctuated by static blasts from their radios. They seemed to be chatting casually, as if nothing unusual had happened. Business as usual to them. No one was expressing sympathy or concern. Nick felt a flash of rage, but the main thing now was to comfort his daughter.