But how could anyone prove it had been me who’d used the pay phone next to the cafeteria, and not someone else in the company?
Obviously I wanted the police to investigate the crash-but for me to accuse Kurt openly…Well, there was no putting that toothpaste back in the tube. Kurt would find out.
“I’ve wondered about it,” I said. “How it could have happened, you know? Was there something done to Trevor’s car?”
“That’s not my department. That’s Accident Recon. The CARS unit. Collision Analysis and Reconstruction. They’re the experts on all the mechanical stuff. I just do the background investigation. Help them out.”
“They must have found something,” I said. “If you’re here.”
“Well, now,” he said, and I thought he looked pretty darned evasive, “we work separately, understand. They look at the brake lines and such, and I look at the people.”
“So you’re talking to Trevor’s and Brett’s friends and acquaintances.”
“And coworkers. Which brings me back to my question. Which you didn’t answer. Whether there was any tension, any bad feeling, between you and them.”
I shook my head. “Not that I can recall.”
A ghost of a smile. “There was, or there wasn’t?”
“There wasn’t,” I said.
He nodded for what must have been half a minute, exhaling loudly through his nostrils. “Mr. Steadman, I don’t have any reason to dispute what you’re saying. I’m just trying to make all the pieces fit, you know? But what you’re saying, it doesn’t quite dovetail with this.”
He pulled out of his pocket a folded piece of white paper. He unfolded it, put it on the conference table in front of me. The paper looked like it had been folded and refolded dozens of time. It was a photocopy of an e-mail.
From me to Trevor. Dated about a week ago.
I won’t put up with your disrespect & your undermining of me anymore. There are ways to get rid of you that don’t involve HR.
“That’s not me,” I said. “It doesn’t even sound like me.”
“No?”
“I’d never make a threat like that. That’s ridiculous. And I’d sure never put it in an e-mail.”
“You wouldn’t want a record out there, that it?”
I closed my eyes in frustration. “I didn’t write it. Look I-”
“Mr. Steadman, have you ever been in Mr. Allard’s car?”
I shook my head.
“Did he have a regular parking spot here, at work?”
“Not an assigned spot.”
“You’ve never touched his car? I mean, placed your hands on it at any point?”
“Place my hands on it? I mean, theoretically, it’s possible, but I don’t recall ever even touching his car. It’s a Porsche, and he’s pretty fussy about it. Was, I mean.”
“What about his home? Have you been there?”
“No, never. He never invited me over. We weren’t really personal friends.”
“Yet you knew them ‘fairly well,’ you said.”
“Yes. But I also said we weren’t close friends.”
“You know where he lives?”
“I know he lives-lived-in Wellesley. But I’ve never been to his house.”
“I see. And his home garage-connected to his house. Were you ever there?”
“No. I just told you, I’ve never been to his house.”
He nodded. Kenyon appeared to be thinking. “So I’m just wondering, you know, why your fingerprints might have been found in his garage.”
“My fingerprints? That’s impossible.”
“Your right index finger, anyway. Doesn’t seem to be any doubt about that.”
“Come on,” I said. “You don’t even have my fingerprints to compare them against.”
He looked puzzled. “You didn’t give the print of your index finger to your Corporate Security department? For the new biometric reader?”
“Yes. Right. I forgot. I did-we all did. Our forefinger or our thumb. But I never went to Trevor Allard’s house or garage.”
His eyes watched me steadily. They were large and a little bloodshot, I noticed. “See, the problem with fingerprints,” he said quietly, “is that they don’t lie.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as maybe a little too convenient?”
“What’s too convenient, Mr. Steadman?”
“The one fingerprint you found in Trevor’s garage is my right index finger, right? Which is the one print that Corporate Security has in their biometric reader?”
“So?”
“So you tell me-aren’t there ways to copy and transfer a fingerprint? You guys believe in coincidence?”
“Coincidence?”
“What do you have? A print from one single finger that happens to be the same as the one print I gave Corporate Security. An e-mail I didn’t write-”
“There’s all kinds of headers and paths and directories on every e-mail, Mr. Steadman-”
“Which can be forged,” I said.
“Not so easily.”
“It’s easy if you work in Corporate Security.”
That shut him up for a second. “See,” I said, “we have an employee who’s done this sort of thing before.”
“In Corporate Security?”
I swallowed. Nodded. I leaned forward, my eyes on his. “I want to show you a document,” I said. “That should give you a sense of who we’re dealing with.”
I handed him the court-martial printout. He read through it. He took a lot of notes in his spiral-bound notebook.
And when he’d finished, he said, “Jesus Christ, your company hired this guy?”
I nodded.
“Don’t you do background checks?”
“It’s my fault,” I said.
“You didn’t hire the guy, did you? Corporate Security hired this wack job, right?”
“Because I vouched for him. I didn’t know him well at the time.”
He shook his head, looking disgusted. But I could tell that he was looking at me differently. Something in him had shifted. He seemed to be taking me seriously now.
“This guy Semko,” he said. “What kind of reason would he have to set you up?”
“It’s a long story. Complicated. He and I were friends. I brought him into the company. He has a military background, and he’s pretty smart.”
Kenyon’s expression had grown very still. He was watching me closely. “You’re friends,” he said.
“We were,” I said. “He did some things to help me out. Some things he shouldn’t have done.”
“Like?”
“Underhanded things. But…Look, Detective-”
“Sergeant Kenyon.”
“Sergeant. He’s already threatened me. He told me if I said anything to the cops, he’d kill my wife.”
Kenyon raised his eyebrows. “Did he?”
“If he finds out that I talked to you-I know him. He’ll carry out his threat. He’ll make it look like an accident. He knows lots of clever ways to kill people.”
“You’re talking to me now.”
“I have to trust you. Can I?”
“Trust me how?”
“Not to tell anyone else in the state police that I’ve spoken with you.”
“I can’t promise you that.”
“What?”
“I’m not a priest, Mr. Steadman. This isn’t a confessional. I’m a cop. If you committed a crime-”
“I didn’t commit a crime.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about. I’m also not a reporter for the Globe. I don’t plan to publish an exposé. Point is, I don’t want to give you assurances I can’t keep.”
“He knows people in the state police. A lot of people. He has contacts who tell him what’s going on.”
Kenyon smiled cryptically, nodded.
“What?” I said. “You look skeptical.”
“No. In fact, I’m not skeptical. I’m not going to lie to you. I’d like to tell you that kind of thing can’t happen, but the truth is-well, I can believe it. We leak like a sieve. Military guys like your friend here, sometimes they know a lot of people on the force.”
“Great,” I said darkly. “If he finds out I’ve even talked to you, he’ll do something to my wife. He works in Corporate Security-he knows the names of everyone who comes and goes here. You probably signed in at the front desk, right? You wrote Mass. State Police, and your name, right? To see Jason Steadman?”