In Plain Sight (19 page)

Brad Ridenour’s reporting of the incident was done with proper solemnity, but the announcement was so brief that I had the odd feeling Leslie had been cheated. Her death deserved more than this.

For a moment I thought the news had passed right on by Sandy and Skye, but then it registered with Sandy and she gasped, “Somebody drowned right here in the lake today?”

“Leslie Marcone,” I said. I swallowed. “I—I was over at her place, and I found her body.”

They both looked at me. Even blasé teenagers’ mouths can drop open, I realized. I explained the day’s events.

“How awful,” Skye said. “Finding someone dead.” She shuddered delicately, an expression of distaste wrinkling her petite nose. “I saw this movie once, about a body being discovered after it had been in the water for days, and—”

“Skye, shut up,” Sandy said, the command so fierce and harsh, so totally unlike Sandy, that Skye and I both looked at her in astonishment.

“Well,
okay
,” Skye said, an offended note in her voice.

Sandy swallowed. “I’m sorry. It’s just that … I mean, she was always jogging on the trail … and now she’s dead …”

“You didn’t even like her.”

“That doesn’t make any difference.”

Sandy turned and walked over to the window. Skye and I followed. Skye, more understanding than I expected after Sandy’s sharp outburst, put her arm around Sandy and squeezed her shoulders. We all stared across the lake at the big white house. I wondered if the car was still down there by the boathouse.

“But how could she drown?” Sandy asked finally. “She could swim like a fish.”

I wasn’t about to offer the girls my dark speculations, so all I said was, “She could have slipped and hit her head before falling in. There’s a ladder at the end of the dock, and her sweatshirt was snagged on it. It kept her from sinking right away. I tried to get her body up on the dock before the police got there, but I … couldn’t.”

“I wonder how long she’d been dead,” Sandy said.

“I suppose they have tests or something to figure that out.”

Sandy suddenly turned and hugged me. “I’m glad Leslie fired you,” she said unexpectedly, her tone almost fierce again. “If you were still working for her, maybe you’d have been down there on the dock with her, and you’d have fallen in too.”

Or been attacked by the person who attacked Leslie.
But I didn’t say that. Although the thought occurred to me that the dock was a difficult place to sneak up on someone. Did that mean she’d known her attacker, and it had been a surprise assault?

Whoa! Remember, this was an accident.

I put the stir-fry dinner on the table and we ate, our conversation a bit subdued but on the normal subjects of school and gymnastics and Skye’s mother’s magazine and the Dumpling’s latest dietary kick, which was anything green. Green yuck du jour, as Skye put it. The girls studied together for a while, and then Skye went home about 9:30. Sandy and I watched the 11:00 local news together. Brad Ridenour had more information about the drowning to offer now, including that a former employee had found the body, but Leslie still wasn’t identified by name.

“They must be having trouble figuring out who her next of kin is,” Sandy said, and I agreed. I wondered if an ex-husband was considered next of kin. Would it be helpful to the authorities if someone told them about him? Although I didn’t even know his name, of course.

I did, however, know the name of that dot-com company about which he and Leslie had exchanged hostile words. Which gave me an idea.

19

Sandy had always been the one in the family who made most use of the computer, but it was in the den next to the living room, not in her bedroom. I waited until she went to bed right after the news, then turned it on.

I connected to the Internet and typed the company name plus the usual dot-com into the address line on the browser. If CyberPowerAds had a web page, that should bring it up. But all I got was one of those frustrating this-page-cannot-be-displayed notices. I’ve snagged on this before, but my computer expertise is too limited to know exactly what it signifies. That there is a page, but people like me can’t access it? That there had once been a website under that name, but it doesn’t exist now? That computers were purposely designed for maximum user frustration?

I tried a different tactic, a fishing expedition. I put the company name into a search engine and clicked “go.” Jackpot! All kinds of URLs popped up. What I wanted was a site that gave a simple, straightforward explanation of what this company was, who was involved, and what became of it.

It wasn’t that simple. What I got were sites where the company was briefly mentioned, often with something along the lines of “the surprising demise of dot-com powerhouse CyberPowerAds.” Also mentioned were “heretofore unrevealed capitalization problems” and “unrealized expectations.” A little later I found what appeared to be one of the earliest references to the company and finally identified what the company actually did. In terms glowing enough to herald a discovery that simultaneously cured baldness, cancer, and absentmindedness, an online business magazine article announced the launch of this new business, CyberPowerAds, dedicated to capturing the market in Internet ads.

Internet ads. Did that mean those annoying things that were always popping up on the computer, interrupting whatever I was doing? Or spam? Maybe both?

Another, less formal, reference called the company “hot,” the partners “hip,” and the results “dazzling.” Projected sales of 7.3 million dollars the first year, one item said, and destined to rise like a rocket taking off. No one site named all the partners in the company, but I scribbled names on a scratch pad as I found them here and there: Michael Flattery, apparently the head honcho. Also Shane Wagner, Leslie Wagner, Dirk Carson, and Lissa Rambough.

Leslie Wagner. Leslie’s married name, of course. Which meant the ex-husband was Shane Wagner. One site even showed a photo of him, his grin confident and cocky as he slouched in jeans and baseball cap in front of a computer. Part of the new generation that scorned suit and tie while they racked up their millions.

I found nothing publicly accusing Leslie of pulling a sneaky, unethical scam on her partners in selling out before the company collapsed, but another article was headed with the speculative question, “Did the Brains of CyberPowerAds Leave When Leslie Wagner Sold Out?” Finally, one article gave a brief but telling recapitulation: “CyberPowerAds: hype high, partners young and brash, profits nonexistent. Prognosis: painful corporate death.”

About that time Sandy appeared in the doorway, yawning. “Aunt Ivy, what are you doing? You’re going to run into weirdos if you surf the Net at this time of night.”

“I was just checking some business articles. No weirdos,” I assured her. I quickly broke the Internet connection and put the computer into shut-off mode. I couldn’t say exactly why I didn’t want her to know what I was doing. Maybe because I was afraid she’d ask questions, and I was reluctant to voice my concerns. If Leslie had to be dead, I wanted it to be an accident, not some vicious murder.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the hostilities and angers in that company. A man named Michael who had furtively watched Leslie’s home through binoculars. An ex-husband whom I’d personally heard make a veiled threat. An unseen skulker crashing around in the brush.

And now, Leslie Wagner Marcone was dead.

“Is something wrong, hon?” I asked as Sandy just stood there in her shorty pajamas and bare feet.

“No, I just couldn’t sleep.” She yawned, but she wiggled her toes restlessly in the carpet. “Things feel, you know, creepy with Leslie Marcone dying right out there in the lake. I think I had a bad dream.”

“C’mon.” I put an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll go have a cup of warm milk and I’ll take you back up to bed.”

The hope that Sgt. Yates and I would not cross orbits fizzled when his police car showed up in the driveway the following afternoon. I was on the computer again, reading an online article about a dozen dot-com companies that had started, like CyberPowerAds, in a blaze of glory and then flamed out during the general dot-com bust, leaving onetime paper millionaires with nothing but scraps useful only for starting bonfires.

But not Leslie. She’d known when to get out, and had done so. With cash. To the original glee but later anger and resentment of her partners.

I opened the door when Sgt. Yates rang the bell. He was in uniform. This looked official.

“Got a minute?” he asked with what I thought was deceptive casualness. “I’m just checking on a few details from yesterday.”

“‘Yesterday’ meaning Leslie Marcone’s drowning, I assume?” I stood back to let him in and motioned toward a seat on the sofa.

“Right.” He sat on the edge of the cushion and pulled out a small green notebook.

We went through the whole situation, from when I’d last seen Leslie to why I was at her house and why I went down to the dock. From description of the position of the body when I found it to what I knew about the remote control for the gate. He went into one subject that hadn’t occurred to me, although, under the circumstances, I supposed it could be relevant.

“Do you have any personal knowledge of whether Ms. Marcone used alcohol or drugs?”

Either might have been a logical explanation for her tumble into the lake. Except for the fact that I’d never seen Leslie take so much as a glass of wine with a meal. Neither had I ever seen any sign of alcohol or drugs anywhere in the house. I told Sgt. Yates all that. “And I cleaned thoroughly,” I emphasized. “I was into every nook and cranny.”

“Drug users can be very adept at hiding their caches.”

“Well, I didn’t pull up floorboards or look behind electrical outlets or check the undersides of every drawer,” I said. I didn’t bother to
not
sound facetious. Actually, I felt a bit indignant on Leslie’s behalf. Contaminate that buff body with drugs? No way
.
“And I never checked to see if all her perfume and talcum containers were real or phonies holding something else.”

“You’re very imaginative, Mrs. Malone,” Sgt. Yates observed, as he had on another occasion. “How about sleeping pills? Did she ever take those?”

“You’re thinking she took a sleeping pill, wandered outside, and was so drowsy she walked right off the end of the dock?”

“You think that might be possible?” He managed to sound interested in my opinion, even though I knew he was really just dodging my question by asking another of his own.

“I left about 2:00 every day, so I don’t know what she may have taken at bedtime. But I never saw any sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet or anywhere else. But you’ll have a toxicology report, I’m sure, to tell you for certain what was in her body.”

An uncommunicative “Hmmm” was all I got in response.

“I didn’t expect you to be involved in this, Sgt. Yates. I thought major crimes were your area of police work, not accidents.”

I was fishing, of course, wondering if someone besides me was speculating that this might not be an accident. I was suddenly almost certain Sgt. Yates was suspicious. Not taking anything at face value was, in my own suspicions, as much a part of Sgt. Yates as that scar across his eyebrow.

I just couldn’t see him as “sweet,” no matter what Tammi Ridenour said. This was the kind of man who might risk his life to save you but who would also look for ulterior meaning in a morning hello.

Though all he said at the moment was a mild, “Our manpower is limited.”

That apparently closed the subject. However, my curiosity knows few bounds, so I jumped to a different subject. “Has Leslie’s next of kin been located yet?”

“Yes, an uncle in Toledo. However, he has Alzheimer’s, so it’s his wife who will be coming here. Arriving tomorrow, I believe. And, since the next of kin has now been contacted, Ms. Marcone’s name has been released to the news media.”

I didn’t expect Sgt. Yates to let me in on how they’d acquired this information about an uncle, but I asked anyway, and, to my surprise, he told me.

“We lucked out. His name turned up on an admissions form Ms. Marcone filled out at the local hospital when she went to the emergency room for a minor accident a few weeks ago. Their forms always require the name of a next of kin.”

“How in the world did you discover she’d filled out such a form?”

“We have very few cases that require autopsies here in Woodston, so the few we do have are conducted at the hospital. The form, with the information about the uncle, turned up when we made arrangements for an autopsy.”

“Autopsy?” I repeated with a little shiver. It’s a word that invariably brings up ugly images.

“Standard procedure in a death of this kind.”

Of this kind. What did that mean? That they discovered a lot of stray bodies in the lake?

I squelched that mental remark. Sgt. Yates would undoubtedly identify it as an “attitude.”

“Will you be attending the autopsy?”

“Why do you ask?”

Okay, I asked because in detective books the detective on the case always has to attend the autopsy of the victim. But nothing, I decided, required me to tell Sgt. Yates that. He’d already politely implied on another occasion that I read too many mysteries.