Killer Instinct (37 page)

“Don’t see many of those critters around here,” he said.

“It’s a rattlesnake, isn’t it?” I said.

“Eastern Diamondback. Big mother, too. You see these guys in Florida and North Carolina. Sometimes Louisiana. Not in Massachusetts, though.”

“How’d it get here then?” I asked.

“Who the heck knows? I know people buy exotic snakes over the Internet nowadays. VenomousReptiles.com, places like that.”

The snake had gone back to slithering along the bedroom carpet and was approaching the TV.

“Looking for a place to hide,” the animal control guy said. He watched for a minute longer, and then put on the long red gloves and got about ten feet away from the snake before he put down the cardboard box, right up against the wall, and pushed it closer to the snake with the long blue aluminum tongs.

“They like the close spaces. Looking for shelter. Coupla drops of snake lure inside, but I doubt we need it. Belt and suspenders, I figure. Critter gets stuck on the glue inside.”

I watched as the rattlesnake, sure enough, began undulating slowly toward the box, stopped curiously just before it, then poked its head inside one end.

“Man,” the animal guy said, “I saw one of these back in Florida when I was a kid. But never up here. Never. Watch him.”

It was slithering into the box.

“Good thing you didn’t get too close. This fella bites you, you’re gonna die. Most dangerous snake in North America. Largest rattlesnake in the world, matter of fact.”

Then Kate’s voice: “What are you going to do with it?” She was standing at the threshold to the bedroom, a blanket wrapped around her like a cape.

The white box began to move. Shake back and forth. More than half the snake’s body was still outside the trap, and it began whipping back and forth, trying to free itself. It wriggled farther into the trap, and now most of the thing seemed to be stuck.

“What are we going to do with it?” the animal guy said. “Legally, I’m supposed to tell you we dispose of it humanely.”

“And in reality?” Kate said.

“Depends on whose definition of humane. Ours, or the snake’s. We got the critter, that’s the main thing.” He walked right up to the white box and picked it up. “Boy, you just never see Eastern Diamondbacks around here. Fact, I can’t remember the last time I even saw a venomous snake in this town. Gotta wonder how the heck it got in here.”

“Yeah,” Kate said, heavy on the sarcasm. “Gotta wonder.”

She got back into bed, but only after I’d checked the bedroom and the bathroom, even lifted the lid to the toilet tank.

Then she read over the court-martial record that I’d printed out.

“Is this enough to get Kurt arrested?”

“I doubt it. But it’ll help. It’s obviously enough to get him fired, but that’s only the first step. A half measure. And what do I do until then? Until I can convince the police to arrest him?”

She nodded. “He’s totally charming and seductive. He likes to feel superior. Narcissists like that, they need to be adored. They crave it. They’re like drug addicts. He needs your adulation.”

“The way he got yours, let me remind you.”

“We were both taken in.”

“Well, that’s over, and he knows it. It’s all out in the open between us now. He knows how I feel.”

“Well, turn the tap back on. The adulation. This is what you’re good at. Sell him. Let him think there’s more hero worship in the tank, that you’ve got an endless supply.”

“Why?”

“To neutralize him. Until you get the cops in to arrest him.”

“You make it sound easy,” I said. “It’s not going to be easy at all.”

“Do you have a choice?” she said.

I headed right to Corporate Security to look for Scanlon.

I was mad, and in a hurry, and I didn’t have my badge out, so I used the biometric fingerprint reader to get in.

I remembered Kurt’s threat:
“…Everything you do, I’m watching. Everywhere you go. Every call you make. It’s like that Police song, right?”

As the fingerprint reader beeped to admit me, I suddenly realized how Kurt always knew where I went in the building, and it was so obvious I felt like a moron. My access badge, the fingerprint reader—every time I accessed another part of the building, he probably knew right away.

I found the door with the plaque that said
DIRECTOR OF CORPORATE SECURITY
. It was closed. I walked up, grabbed the knob, but I was stopped by Scanlon’s secretary, who was sitting at a desk perpendicular to the door.

“He’s on the phone,” the secretary said.

“Good,” I said, and I turned the knob and barged right into Scanlon’s office. Against the sun streaming in from the glass, the security director was only a silhouette. He was on the phone, looking out the window.

“Hey,” I said. In one hand I held a printout of Kurt’s court-martial record.

He swiveled around slowly. “You’re looking for the director?” Kurt said, putting the phone down.

I stared in shock.

“Scanlon opted for early retirement,” Kurt said. “I’m the new Director of Corporate Security. Can I help you?”

When I got to my office, I saw a man sitting at the empty cubicle near Franny’s cube that I used as a waiting room for my visitors. He was a black man, maybe fifty, with small ears and a large bullet head. He wore khaki dress slacks and a blue blazer, a blue shirt and solid navy blue tie.

“Jason,” Franny said, turning around in her chair.

“Mr. Steadman,” said the man, rising quickly. I noticed a pair of handcuffs on his belt, and a gun. “Sergeant Ray Kenyon, Massachusetts State Police. You’re a hard one to reach.”

52

He wanted to talk in my office, but I led him instead to an empty conference room.

“I’m investigating a collision involving two of your employees, Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason.”

I nodded. “A terrible tragedy. They were both friends of mine. Anything I can do to help.”

He smiled. His skin was very dark, and his teeth were incredibly white. Up close he might have been in his midforties. Hard to tell. His head was a cue ball, so shiny it looked waxed. He spoke slowly, like he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I could see that his eyes missed nothing.

“How well did you know these two men, Mr. Allard and Mr. Gleason?”

“Fairly well. They worked for me. I can’t say they were close friends, but I saw them every day.”

“You all got along?”

“Sure.”

“There was no animosity between and among you all?”

“Animosity?” I wondered who he’d talked to, what he knew about how I’d come to really dislike those two. Had I sent Trevor or Gleason any hostile e-mails? Not my kind of thing, usually—if I wanted to chew either one of them out, I did it in person. Fortunately. “Sergeant Kenyon, I don’t get why you’re asking all these questions. I thought Trevor and Brett died in a car crash.”

“They did. We want to find out why that happened.”

“Are you saying it wasn’t just an accident?”

He peered at me for a few seconds. “What do you think?”

I stared right back, but squinted as if I didn’t quite understand.

I knew that whatever I said next would change everything.

If I said I had no suspicions about the crash—well, what if he somehow knew I’d made that damned “anonymous” call? If so, then he knew I was lying.

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?”