Or maybe he had wanted her to find the list, either to get her attention, to hurt her, or to push her into taking an action he didn’t have the guts to take.
Carey made a copy of the list and added it to her growing pile of evidence.
Slowly, she swiveled the desk chair around to face the built-in cabinets and pulled open a file drawer. David was organized to the point of being anal. There was a file for everything-bank statements, receipts, paid bills broken down into smaller categories: electricity, gas, etc.
The job of bill paying and record keeping had been assumed by David from the start of their marriage. He had taken on the responsibility willingly, and with an air of self-importance. He had a better head for business than she did. Lately, he had complained about being made to feel like a secretary, as if it was beneath him to write a check and stick a stamp on an envelope or click a few keys to pay bills electronically. And yet when Carey had suggested that Anka might like to do the job for some extra cash every week, David had accused her of belittling his role in the family.
Carey had refrained from snapping back that his role in the family had become largely ornamental.
She pulled the file with the paid phone bills and lifted out her husband’s last cell phone bill. There were a lot of calls to numbers she didn’t recognize, not that she had expected to recognize any of them. David had associates and acquaintances in his own world, and he rarely shared that world with her. A lot of repeat calls to one particular number. A lot. Maybe fifty or more on this one bill.
She picked up the phone and dialed the number. A machine answered with a woman’s breathy voice.
“I can’t take your call right now. I’m busy having fun. Leave a message. Bye.”
A girlfriend, Carey supposed, but she didn’t feel anything as the thought crossed her mind. No jealousy, no hurt. It was as if she were looking into the affairs of a stranger.
She ran the phone bill through the fax machine to make a copy, put the original back, and replaced the file.
With the same sense of detachment, she pulled the credit card statements and receipts for David’s business account, sat back in the chair, and started going through them.
Legitimate expenses, and plenty of the other kind. Restaurant tabs, bar tabs. Seventy-five dollars to a local florist. Fifty-three dollars to the same florist. Forty-five dollars, same florist. Sixteen hundred dollars charged as a gift certificate to a gym in Edina, ten minutes away. Some gift. Forty-three hundred dollars to Bloomingdale’s. Four hundred ninety-seven dollars to the Marquette Hotel. The receipt was dated the day before.
“… Where have you been this evening?” Kovac asked.
“I had a business dinner.”
“Where?”
“That new place in the IDS Tower next to the Marquette Hotel…”
A strange, hollow feeling opened up in Carey’s chest, as if her ribs were being spread apart. While she had been lying in a hospital bed, David had been lying in a hotel bed with another woman.
Setting that thought aside, she copied the credit card statements, then looked through the canceled checks. No twenty-five-thousand-dollar checks, but a monthly check to a property management company for thirty-five hundred dollars going back at least eight months.
Housing for the girlfriend? His own secret hideout for entertaining prostitutes? That son of a bitch. He hadn’t made a profit on his business in four years, but he was shelling out thousands of dollars a month of their-her-money to keep a roof over the head of his illicit activities.
Carey pulled a file of bank statements, looking for a deposit or withdrawal in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. Nothing listed for any of their accounts, but the latest statements were almost a month old.
It was Saturday. She couldn’t call the bank and ask them. She knew David did a lot of their banking via the computer, but she didn’t know how to access the account.
A car door slammed outside. Carey’s heart tried to jump out of her chest. Her hands were shaking as she shoved the credit card statements and receipts back into their file and put the file back into its place in the drawer.
She stood up too quickly and her head swam. She didn’t care if David found her at his desk. She cared that she might frighten her daughter, looking the way she did. But when she pulled back the drape and looked out the front window, Kovac was coming up the sidewalk to the door.
He looked like an unmade bed, thick hair standing up from a finger combing, rugged face drawn, mouth frowning. Like most street cops Carey knew, Sam Kovac had never been in any great danger of gracing the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly. He bought his suits cheap, cut his hair cheaper. He was a no-muss, no-fuss kind of a guy. It was a safe bet he had never spent forty-three hundred dollars at Bloomingdale’s on himself or anyone else. And she knew without asking that he held nothing but contempt for the politicians and police brass who ranked above him.
Carey imagined he hadn’t gotten any more sleep than she had. Maybe less. He had a case to run, and with a judge for a victim. The powers that ruled the city would be coming down hard on the police department. Not because any of them cared particularly about her personally but because of the media attention and because they had constituents to answer to.
He didn’t look surprised to see her as she cracked the front door open before he could ring the bell.
“Judge…”
“Detective. I’m guessing you haven’t come for the all-you-can-eat brunch.”
He blinked at her, taken aback that she still had the energy for sarcasm. “No appetite,” he said. “Do you have coffee?”
“Yes.”
“I need some. How about you?”
“Make yourself at home,” Carey said dryly as Kovac brushed past her and went in search of the kitchen.
“Where’s the husband?” he asked, snooping through the cupboards. He found the mugs on the second try. The coffee was already brewed. Half the pot was gone. Two mugs were resting upside down in the drainer rack at the sink. David and Anka. The morning paper had been left spread out on the breakfast table.
“Out.”
Kovac shot a look at her. Carey felt as if he could see past her clothes, past her external self, straight to the part of her that held her secrets. It wasn’t a good feeling.
“You don’t like David,” she said, easing down onto a chair.
Kovac poured the coffee. “No,” he said bluntly. “I don’t. Do you?”
“He’s my husband.”
Again the look, the flat cop eyes. Tigers probably had that same look in their eyes when they faced their prey. He sat down at the kitchen table with her and put one of the steaming mugs in front of her.
“You didn’t answer me.”
“I don’t have any reason to discuss my marriage with you.”
“You don’t want to have any reason to.”
Carey’s mouth pulled at one corner. “As you so graciously pointed out last night: There is no shortage of people who hate me right now. David only resents me. And he has an alibi.”
Kovac didn’t say anything, though Carey knew what he was thinking. The cheating husband gives himself an alibi and pays someone else to do the dirty work. She would have categorically denied the possibility except for one thing.
Twenty-five thousand dollars.
“You have better suspects to look at,” she said.
“I have other suspects.”
His choice of words was not lost on her, but she refused to take the bait.
The kitchen table sat in a nook with a bay window looking out onto the backyard, where the lawn was awash in fallen leaves, and Lucy’s swing set stood as a monument to childhood. Such a normal Saturday-morning kind of thing: sitting, chatting, having coffee.