Sleep of the Innocent (14 page)

“Don't bother. What did Lucas say to Patterson when he called in? Where in hell was he calling from?”

“The hospital at Deerton, sir. Or that's what I understood.”

“Bullshit. They've bloody well never heard of him at the hospital in Deerton,” said Baldwin. “He isn't there. I'll suspend him, that's what. I'm taking this up with—”

Kelleher looked up from the pile of material in front of him. “Not necessarily,” he said, calmly interrupting Baldwin. “Just because they haven't heard about him at the switchboard doesn't mean he isn't there. It takes a bit of time for information to filter through. Do you want me to try and find out? We could call the locals and get them to check it out.”

“Don't bother. I'll look after it myself,” said Baldwin.

Lucas had spent the rest of the afternoon trying not to be in the motel room. He had wandered into the snowy woods behind the complex, finding occasional isolated paths. Each one of them seemed to end in a filthy garbage dump or pile of rotting car metal and broken down refrigerators, and his irritation had intensified. On the other hand, Annie seemed to be recovering rapidly, he thought, with a certain amount of pride. She was even gratifyingly hungry. And that presented the problem of what in hell he was going to do with her when she was better. Not keep her here. His nerves couldn't take it. And as he walked into the restaurant for dinner, he realized his digestion wouldn't take much more of this particular location, either. Tomorrow he was going to have to decide. That night he took one of her pillows, settled himself more carefully into the horrible armchair, and fell into a sleep of total exhaustion.

Rob looked down at Annie Hunter in the cool light of early morning and felt a sense of satisfaction. She didn't look half bad today. Well enough to be moved to a classier motel, even. One with two beds in each room and a bit of space. Her breathing was a little fast, maybe, and her color a little gray, but surely that was the effect of expectations. Today, he was expecting her to be better; yesterday, he had expected her to be a lot worse.

She was still stirring restlessly in her sleep when he returned from the restaurant with breakfast. The sound of the door woke her, and she cried out nervously.

“Hey,” he said. “It's just me. Come on, let's get you into the bathroom.” She felt warm to his touch as he picked her up.

She looked a little better once she had washed, he thought. But after taking a few sips of orange juice and a bite of toast, she put the glass and the paper package down on the table beside her. “I'll finish it later,” she said. “I'm not very hungry right now.” His expostulations were interrupted by a knock on the door, and once again he chased away the manager's wife with her laundry cart, handing her some used towels and collecting clean linen in exchange.

Ed Dubinsky was leaning against the open door of elevator three, holding it immobile, waiting for John Sanders to finish reading the directory and figure out where they were going. He yawned.

“Fourth and fifth,” said Sanders.

“Which?”

Sanders shrugged. “Take your pick.” Dubinsky pushed both buttons.

It was a glittering, new, high-speed elevator, designed to reach the twenty-seventh floor at rocket speed, and it seemed to resent the briefness of its trip. It lurched to a reluctant halt on the fourth floor. Dubinsky held the door open again. “How does this grab you?” he said.

Sanders looked out. The door opened onto a wide hall with an understated black glossy reception desk manned by a pale, glossy receptionist. “It'll do,” he said. Dubinsky let go the door and slid rapidly out after his partner. Their feet sank into the carpet; their sleeves brushed against the pots of plants that filled up that awful blank space between elevators. “NorthSea/Baltic Enterprises are doing all right, I'd say,” Sanders remarked sourly.

“Or they owe a helluva lot of money to someone,” added Dubinsky.

The glossy receptionist was not pleased to receive another visit from the police. She would see if anyone could speak to them.

Out of their shortlist of possible interviewees, it seemed that the person with the most free time on his hands at the moment was the bookkeeper. They were willing to see him first, Sanders admitted, if that made the receptionist's life any easier, and they were ushered into a glass-and-fiberboard hamster cage badly disguised as a room. The bookkeeper was sitting at a desk, bare except for a new-looking IBM PS2—its screen blank for the moment at least—reading a battered paperback thriller that had sold three million copies several years ago. He was dark-eyed, thin-faced, and hungry-looking, and when he dropped his book down on the desk and stood up, the two police officers towered over him. He sat down again hastily, pointing at the two chairs on the other side of the desk as he went.

“You are Randolph West, assistant financial officer of NorthSea/Baltic Enterprises?” Sanders remained on his feet, and Dubinsky, with a sigh, followed suit.

“Jesus, is that what they call me?” The thin face broke into a foxy smile, like a dachshund grinning. “I suppose it is. Randy West. I do the books. That's all—I'm not an accountant. I just try to keep everything straight until the professionals come in. And they do. Frequently.” He paused to catch the atmosphere of the meeting. “And if we're going to talk, why don't you sit down? Otherwise I'll get a crick in my neck.” His voice squeaked, as if he had a case of laryngitis he was trying to ignore; his accent reminded Sanders forcefully of the kids who stole and bullied and fought their way out of his old neighbourhood. Like him. Sanders pushed back one of the chairs and sat down.

“Doing the books here doesn't seem to involve a whole lot of work,” said Sanders in a noncommittal voice. “Is that all you do?”

Randy looked over at him in astonishment. “Where in hell have you guys been lately?” he asked. “On Mars?”

Sanders shook his head. “On leave.”

“Ah. That explains it. See this desk?” Neither one responded. “Empty. See those computers out there, with no one sitting in front of them? Locked.”

Sanders looked out the glass wall to his right. “Things do look quiet out there,” he observed. “Mostly.”

“Oh, you mean that guy. He's not one of ours. He's from the solicitor general's office. An accountant. And a computer whiz. He's going through our computer files. A week ago—the day after the boss died—these guys came in and sealed up everything. Walked out with all my books, all the financial records they could carry, and left shit-face, the ball-less wonder out there, to plow through the rest.”

Sanders turned to his partner. “Did we know about this?” he snapped.

Dubinsky paused for a moment. “Yeah, well, we knew that the company was being investigated as a result of—”

“The fire,” said Randy gloomily. “The fucking fire.”

“That's right, a fire,” said Dubinsky. “In a townhouse built by a construction company owned by NorthSea/Baltic. In which a woman and, I think, a couple of kids were killed.” Randy nodded in reluctant agreement. “The timing can't have had anything to do with Neilson's death, though. They'd been in front of a judge for days arguing over the court order.”

“That's right,” said Randy again. “And now there are all kinds of things that have to be done because Mr. Neilson died, and no one can do them. But they don't think of that, do they? I mean, it doesn't matter to them what happens to a whole company that employs hundreds of people just because some lazy bastard in some subsidiary that Mr. Neilson bought didn't check over the specs for wiring carefully enough.”

“Is that what happened?” asked Sanders. His face was expressionless.

“Sure. What else?”

“What happened where?” said a barely cordial voice from behind Sanders.

Sanders turned slowly to look at the man who had just entered the office. He was neat and compact, dressed in banker's gray and oozing prosperity. Sanders had run into him before; in court on rare occasions—his practice did not ordinarily extend to criminal law—but more frequently at headquarters, where he dropped in on his pal Matt Baldwin from time to time. His voice grated harshly on Sanders's ears, as it always did, and raised his hackles. “We were curious about the peace and calm around here, Mr. Fielding. I'd forgotten about the investigation.”

“Had you, indeed.” Marty Fielding's incredulity quivered in his voice. “But given the absence of documentation, I doubt that you'll be able to get much help from this department.” Randy shrugged his shoulders and opened his paperback again.

Carl Neilson's secretary had been reduced to a state of sulky ineffectualness by her employer's death. She was sitting at a word processor, staring at a voluminous pile of opened mail beside her, and buffing her nails. A small black-and-gold sign on her desk informed the world that her name was Miss S. Cavanaugh.

“I trust we're not interrupting you,” said Sanders.

Her ear was deaf to sarcasm. “Oh, no,” she said. “That's impossible. Because I really don't know what I should be doing. There's all this mail that Mr. Fielding told me to answer.” She flung a venomous look in his direction. “But I don't know what I'm supposed to say.”

“For chrissake, woman,” said Fielding, “you were his goddamn private secretary—or administrative assistant or whatever else in hell he called you. You answered all his mail, didn't you?”

“Not quite all.”

“Well, leave those letters for Mrs. Neilson—no, better leave them for me, and answer the rest.”

“When you two have settled all that,” said Sanders, flashing his identification in her face, “we would like to go over Mr. Neilson's office. Is it locked?” She nodded sulkily. “Including his desk. Is it locked?” The secretary reached into her top drawer, pulled out a set of keys on a chain and flung them down on the desk in front of the two police officers. “Is this the appointment diary you kept for him?” She shoved it in their direction and picked up the first letter on the pile.

Carl Neilson didn't seem to leave the clutter of his existence lying about in his office. Sanders looked around the large, tidy room and shook his head. “Have we already walked off with everything in here?”

Dubinsky shook his head. “Patterson sent a couple of constables down to do an inventory. Said there was nothing particularly notable in here for anyone to walk off with.”

“Well, there wouldn't be, would there? Not after every goddamn thing of interest was seized by court order before we arrived.”

“Yeah, well, he pointed that out.”

Sanders pulled open the desk drawers one after another. They were almost empty. The deep bottom drawer was bereft of files. The middle drawer contained a small assortment of different sizes of notepaper. In the top drawer he found drawing instruments, rulers, pencils, drafting pens, and colored felt-tipped pens. The wide, flat drawer in the middle of the desk contained a large pad of squared drafting paper, a diary, a passport, and a folder wrapped around two plane tickets for Tampa, Florida.

Sanders picked up the tickets and the passport and carried them to the door. “Hey, you,” he snapped. “Miss Cavanaugh. What are these for?”

“They're plane tickets,” she said crossly. “What do you think they're for? I picked them up for Mr. Neilson the day before he died.”

Sanders ignored the turn of the worm. “No one mentioned that Mr. Neilson was planning on taking a trip.”

“Well, really,” said Miss Cavanaugh in tones of exasperation. “Why would we? He traveled all the time. Especially down to Florida. Some months he was hardly ever here. Anyway, this wasn't a business trip or anything like that. He was taking his son for the March break.”

“And he needed a passport? To travel to the States? Since when?”

“Mr. Neilson had an accent,” said the secretary, picking up the next piece of mail on her desk. As if that answered the question.

“What?”

“He had an accent. And so the customs and immigration people were always stopping him. It's easier to carry a passport than to spend all your time explaining who you are.”

“And when was Mr. Neilson planning on leaving for Florida with his son and his passport?” asked Sanders.

Miss Cavanaugh shrugged her silk-clad shoulders. “Around six, I think. The day he, uh, died. It's on the ticket.”

“Was he planning to go home first? Get his stuff?”

She looked at him with scorn. “Certainly not. Mr. Neilson never carried luggage.” Clearly, in Miss Cavanaugh's world, only peasants like Sanders carried luggage. “He kept everything he needed in his condo in Florida. He used to take a briefcase with him, that's all. And I'd put everything in it that needed attention.”

“And that's what you did on March the seventh. The day he died.”

The secretary paused a moment. “Yeah. Sure. That's what I did.”

Sanders stared hard at her, considering that pause. Her face remained sulkily impassive. “Could you open the safe, Miss Cavanaugh?”

“It's open,” she said. “The auditors opened it. There's nothing in it.”

“Dubinsky!” yelled Sanders over his shoulder. “Look in the safe.” There was a momentary pause, filled with the soft rustle of feet over broadloom.

“It's empty,” said his partner.

“What did he usually keep in there?”

“Not much. Cash sometimes, if he was closing a deal, or negotiable securities if we had them lying around. Or important papers. He never used it to store valuable stuff. That all went to the bank.”

“He wouldn't have kept his will in there?”

“That would be in Mr. Fielding's office,” she replied stiffly.

“Damn,” said Sanders. “Has Fielding left?” She nodded. “You got his address there?”

Instead of pulling her Rolodex over and looking up his address, she gave him another astonished look. There was apparently no limit to the ignorance of the police. “It's on the sixth floor,” she said. “Suite six-oh-five.”

Fielding was containing his joy at the sight of Sanders pretty effectively. “Yes?” he said, drawling out the word insultingly.

“Simple matter, Mr. Fielding. I would like to know the provisions of Mr. Neilson's will. In outline, for the moment.”

Fielding looked bored. “I doubt if it'll give you much to go on. Basically he split his estate between his wife and his son. The wife holds the son's share in trust until he reaches twenty-one. If she dies at the same time, or close to the same time as her husband, her sister becomes the child's guardian, with a compensatory sum for her troubles.”

“Like?”

“Five hundred thousand, I think. Not much when you consider the size of the estate. She would manage things for him with the assistance of two other trustees until he reached twenty-one. It's a very safe, conservative will. I don't encourage my clients to have wills that are guaranteed to be contested.”

“Did Mr. Neilson have any enemies?”

“I've been through all this, you know. You can look it up. Rivals, yes. Enemies, no. Good day, Inspector.”

“Now where?” said Dubinsky. “It's almost lunchtime.”

“For chrissake, Ed, it's nowhere near lunchtime. You trying to give me a heart attack? We've got a lot to do this morning.”

“Just trying to keep you moving. Where to?”

“Thornhill. I want to meet the grieving widow.”

Lydia Neilson had been sitting in her comfortable, cluttered study, dressed in tweed slacks and a cashmere sweater, in front of a pleasant fire, when the two men came in. She fussed gently, ordering coffee, removing magazines from chair seats, and in general settling them in as though they were refugees who needed reassurance and comforting.