Company Man (44 page)

“The kids can miss school, right? No big deal.”

“I already called the school, told them I'd be taking Julia and Lucas out of classes for a few days. Hell, I even picked up the tickets at the airport when I got in.” He pulled an envelope from his breast pocket, took out the tickets and held them up, fanning them like a winning hand of cards.

Cassie's smile vanished. “Three tickets.” She pulled her hand away.

“Just family. Me and the kids. I don't think we've ever done this. Just us three, heading off for a few days somewhere.”

“Just family,” Cassie repeated in a harsh whisper.

“I think it's important for me to try to reconnect with the
kids. I mean, you get along with them better than I do, which is great. But I've let my part in it slip—I've sort of delegated that to you, like I'm CEO of the family or something, and that's not right. I'm their dad, whether I'm any good at it or not, and it's my job to work on making us a family again.”

Cassie's face was transfigured, weirdly tight as if every muscle in her face were clenched.

“Oh God, Cassie, I'm sorry,” Nick said, flushing, embarrassed by his own obliviousness. “You know how much you mean to us.”

Cassie's eyelids fluttered oddly, and he could see the veins in her neck pulsing. It was as if she were struggling to contain herself—or maybe to contain something larger than herself.

He smiled ruefully. “Luke and Julia—they're my direct reports, you know. And I don't know when I'll have the chance again.”

“Just family.” The sound of one heavy stone scraping against another.

“I think it'll be really good for us, don't you?”

“You want to get away.”

“Exactly.”

“You want to escape.” Her voice was an incantation.

“Pretty much.”

“From me.”

“What? Jesus,
no
! You're taking this the wrong way. It isn't about—”

“No.” She shook her head slowly. “No. No hiding place. There's no hiding place down there.”

Adrenaline surged through Nick's veins. “
What
did you say?”

An odd smile appeared on her face. “Isn't that what the stalker spray-painted in the house? That's what Julia told me.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “Those very words.”

“I can read the writing on the wall, Nick.”

“Come on, Cassie, don't be silly.”

“It's like the book of Daniel, isn't it? The king of Babylon throws a big drunken party and all of a sudden he sees a
mysterious hand appear and start writing something strange and cryptic on the plaster wall, right? And the king's scared out of his mind and he calls in the prophet Daniel who tells him the message means the king's days are over, Babylon's history, he's going to be killed.” Her expression was glassy.

“Okay, you're starting to creep me out.”

Suddenly her eyes focused, and she met his gaze. “Maybe I should be grateful. I was wrong, wrong about so many things. It's
humbling
. Humbling to be put right. Just like with the Stroups. But so necessary. Listen, you do what you think is best. You do what's best for family. There's nothing more important than that.”

Nick held out his arms. “Cassie, come here.”

“I think I'd better go,” she said. “I think I've done enough, don't you think?”

“Cassie, please,” Nick protested. “I don't get it.”

“Because I can do a lot more.” Noiselessly, she walked out of the kitchen, her steps so fluid she could have been gliding. “I can do a lot more.”

“We'll talk, Cassie,” said Nick. “When we get back.”

A final glance over her shoulders. “A
lot
more.”

Early Sunday morning, before church. Audrey sat in the kitchen with her coffee and her buttered toast while Leon slept. She was poring over the bills, wondering how they'd be able to keep up, now that Leon's unemployment benefits were running out. Usually she paid off the entire credit-card balance each month, but she was going to have to start paying only the minimum balance due. She wondered too, whether they should drop to basic cable. She thought they should, though Leon would not be happy about losing the sports channels.

Her cell phone rang. A 616 number: Grand Rapids.

It was a Lieutenant Lawrence Pettigrew of the Grand Rapids police. The man who'd first talked to her about Edward Rinaldi. She'd placed several calls to him over the last few days and had all but given up on him. Noyce had made it clear that he didn't want her asking around in GR about Rinaldi, but she had no choice in the matter.

“How can I help you, Detective?” Pettigrew said. “The kids are waiting for me to take them out for pancakes, so can we make this quick?”

The guy was no fan of Edward Rinaldi, so she knew that asking about Rinaldi again would be like pushing a button and watching the vitriol spew out. But she had no reason to
expect that he'd know the specifics of a long-forgotten and, in fact, quite minor, drug case.

He didn't. “Far as I'm concerned, Rinaldi's gone and good riddance,” he said. “He wasn't exactly a credit to the uniform.”

“Was he fired?”

“Squeezed out might be more accurate. But I were you, I wouldn't be bad-mouthing Eddie Rinaldi over there in Fenwick.”

“He's the security director of Stratton, is that what you mean?”

“Yeah, yeah, but that's not what I'm talking about. Didn't you say you're in Major Cases?”

“That's right.”

“Hell, you want to know chapter and verse on Eddie Rinaldi, you could ask Jack Noyce. But then again, maybe you shouldn't.”

“I don't think Sergeant Noyce knows all that much about Rinaldi.”

Pettigrew's laugh was abrupt and percussive. “Noyce knows him like a book, sweetheart. Guarantee it. Jack was Eddie's partner.”

Audrey's scalp tightened.

“Sergeant Noyce?” she said, disbelieving.

“Partner in crime, I like to say. Don't take this the wrong way, Detective—what's your name again?”

“Rhimes.” Audrey shuddered.

“Like LeAnn Rimes, the singer?” He warbled, off-key, ‘How do I
live
…without you?'”

“Spelled differently, I believe.”

“Quite the babe, though, no matter how you spell it.”

“So I hear, yes. Noyce…Noyce was known to be dirty, is that what you're telling me?”

“Hell, there's a reason Jack got sent to Siberia, right?”

“Siberia?”

“No offense, sweetheart. But from where I sit, Fenwick is Siberia.”

“Noyce was…squeezed out too?”

“Peas in a pod, those guys. I got no idea who did more pilfering, but I'd say they both did pretty good. Works better in a team, so they're each willing to look away. Eddie was more into the guns, and Jack was more into the home electronics and the stereo components and what have you, but they both loved the cash.”

“They both…” she started to say, but she lost the heart to go on.

“Oh, and Detective LeAnn?”

“Audrey.” She wanted to vomit, wanted to end the call and throw up and then wrap herself in a blanket and go back to sleep.

“Sweetheart, I were you, I wouldn't use my name with Noyce. Guy's a survivor, and he'll wanna let bygones be bygones, know what I'm saying?”

She thanked him, pushed End, and then did exactly what she knew she would. She rushed to the bathroom and heaved the contents of her stomach, the acid from the coffee scalding her throat. Then she washed her face. All she wanted to do right now was to enrobe herself in the old blue blanket on the living room couch, but it was time for church.

The First Abyssinian Church of the New Covenant was a once-grand stone building that had slowly, over the years, gone to seed. The velvet pew cushions, badly in need of replacing, had been repaired in far too many places with duct tape. The place was always cold, summer or winter: something about the stone walls and floor, that plus the fact that the building fund was suffering, and it cost a fortune to heat the cavernous interior adequately.

Attendance was sparse this morning, as it was on most Sundays except Easter and Christmas. There were even a few white faces: a couple of regulars who seemed to find the sustenance here they didn't get in the white congregations. LaTonya's family wasn't here, which was no surprise, since they came only a few times a year. Early in their marriage, Leon used to accompany Audrey here, until he announced it wasn't for him. She didn't even know whether he was sleeping late this morning or doing something else, whatever else he'd been doing.

Leon was only one of the reasons why her heart was heavy today. There was also Noyce. That news had punctured her. She felt betrayed by this man who'd been her friend and supporter and who hid from her his true nature. It sickened her.

But this discovery, as much as it shook her to the core,
liberated her at the same time. She no longer had to agonize about betraying him, going behind his back, end-running him. She knew there was no choice, really. Whether Jack Noyce was in the Stratton Corporation's pocket, had been leaking to his old partner details of the investigation—or was simply compromised, trapped, by what Rinaldi knew about him—he had been working to defeat her investigation. She thought back to the many talks she'd had with him about this case, the advice he'd dispensed so freely. The way he'd cautioned her to proceed carefully, telling her she didn't have enough to arrest Conover and Rinaldi. And who would ever know what else he'd done to slow things up, block her progress? What resources had he quietly blocked? Whatever the truth was, she couldn't tell Noyce that she and Bugbee were about to get an arrest warrant for the CEO and the security director of Stratton. Noyce had to be kept in the dark, or he'd surely notify Rinaldi and do everything in his power to halt the arrest.

But here, at least, here she felt at peace and welcome and loved. Everyone said good morning, even people whose names she didn't know, courtly gentlemen and polite young men and lovely young women and hovering mothers and sweet old white-haired women. Maxine Blake was dressed all in white, wearing an ornate hat that looked a little like an upside-down bucket with white tendrils coming out of it and encircling it like rings around a planet. She threw her arms around Audrey, pressing Audrey to her enormous bosom, bringing her into a cloud of perfume and warmth and love. “God is good,” Maxine said.

“All the time,” Audrey responded.

The service started a good twenty minutes late. “Colored people's time,” the joke went. The choir, dressed in their magnificent red-and-white robes, marched down the aisle clapping and singing “It's a Highway to Heaven,” and then they were joined by the electric organ and then the trumpet and drum and then Audrey joined in along with most everybody else. She'd always wanted to sing in the choir, but her voice was nothing special—though, as she'd noticed, some
of the women in the choir had thin voices and tended to sing out of tune. Some had spectacular voices, it was true. The men mostly sang in a rumbling bass, but the tenor was more off-key than on.

Reverend Jamison started his sermon as he always did, by calling out, “God is good,” to which everyone responded: “All the time.” He said it again, and everyone responded again. His sermons were always heartfelt, usually inspired, and never went on too long. They weren't particularly original, though. Audrey had heard he got them off the Internet from Baptist Web sites that posted sample sermons and notes. Once, confronted on his lack of originality, Reverend Jamison had said, “I milk a lot of cows, but I churn my own butter.” Audrey liked that.

Today he told the story of Joshua and the armies of Israel fighting the good fight, battling five of the kings of Canaan for the conquest of the promised land. About how the kings played right into Joshua's hands by joining the battle together. About how it wasn't the Lord who fought the battle, it was Israel. The five kings tried to hide in a cave, but Joshua ordered the cave sealed up. And after the battle had been won, Joshua brought the kings out of their cave, out of their hiding place, and humiliated them by ordering his princes to place their feet on the kings' necks. Reverend Jamison talked about how there's no hiding place. “We can't hide from God,” he declared. “The only hiding place from God is Hell.”

That made her think, as it had so many times, about Nicholas Conover and the graffiti that had been repeatedly spray-painted on the interior walls of his house. No hiding place.

That could be frightening, as no doubt Conover found it to be. No hiding place: from what? From a faceless adversary, from a stalker? From his guilt, his sins?

But here in church, “no hiding place” was meant to be a stern yet hopeful admonition.

In his most orotund voice the reverend recited from
Proverbs 28: “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.”

And she thought, because every single one of Reverend Jamison's sermons was devised to mean something to each and every one in the congregation, about Nicholas Conover. The king hiding in his cave.

But no hiding place. Andrew Stadler had been right, hadn't he?

Reverend Jamison cued the choir, which went right into a lively rendition of “No Hiding Place Down Here.” The soloist was Mabel Darnell, a large woman who sang and swayed like Aretha Franklin and Mahalia Jackson put together. The organist, Ike Robinson, was right up front, on display, not hidden the way the organist usually was in the other churches she'd seen. He was a white-haired, dark-skinned man of near eighty with expressive eyes and an endearing smile. He wore a white suit and looked like Count Basie, Audrey had always thought.

“I went to the rock to hide my face,” Mabel sang, clapping her hands, “but the rock cried out, ‘No hiding place!'”

Count Basie's pudgy fingers ran up and down the keys, syncopating, making swinging jazz out of it, and the rest of the choir joined in at
the rock
and
my face
and
cried out
and
no hiding place no hiding place no hiding place
.

Audrey felt a thrill coursing through her body, a shiver that moved along her spine like an electric current.

And the instant the choir had finished, while the organ chords still resounded, Reverend Jamison's voice boomed out, “My friends, none of us can hide from the Lord. ‘And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man'”—his voice rose steadily until the sound system squealed with feedback—“‘hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains.'” Now he dropped to a stage whisper: “‘And said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth
on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?'”

He paused to let the congregation know that his sermon had concluded. Then he invited anyone in the congregation who wished to come up to the altar for a moment of personal prayer. Ike Robinson, no longer Count Basie, played softly as a dozen or so people got up from their pews and knelt at the altar rail, and all of a sudden Audrey felt moved to do it too, something she hadn't done since her mother's death. She went up there and knelt between Maxine Blake and her enormous rings-of-Saturn hat and another woman, Sylvia-something, whose husband had just died of complications from liver transplant surgery, leaving her with four small children.

Sylvia-something was going through a terrible, terrible time, and what did Audrey have to complain about, really? Her problems were small ones, but they filled her up, as small problems will until the big ones move in and elbow them aside.

She knew she had allowed her anger at Leon to fester inside her, and she recalled the words from Ephesians 4:26–27: “Let not the sun go down upon your anger: Neither give place to the devil.” And she knew it was time to let go of that anger and confront him once and for all.

She knew that her hurt and disappointment over Jack Noyce might never heal, but it would not get in the way of her doing the right thing.

She thought of that poor little daughter of Nicholas Conover, fumbling at the piano, that beautiful needy face. That little girl who had just lost her mother and was about to lose her father too.

And that was the most wrenching thing of all, knowing that she was about to orphan that little girl.

She began weeping, her shoulders heaving, the hot tears running down her cheeks, and someone was rubbing her shoulder and consoling her, and she felt loved.

Outside the church, in the gloomy daylight, she took her cell phone out of her purse and called Roy Bugbee.