Clare had mastered the trick of talking on the phone while breastfeeding—she switched on the speaker and balanced the phone on her shoulder. She could carry on a conversation, and any distinctive smacking or gulping noises were muted by the distance. Ethan was a dedicated nurser, latching on with a single-minded focus and not releasing until he was full. After almost five months, they were both pros at it.
“I thought I would stop by and lend my support, if it wouldn’t be too much. I’ve been worried about your parents.” That was certainly true.
“I am, too,” Joni said. “Dad’s just been wrecked over this. We finally got him to leave the hospital this morning. Mom forced him into bed and he was out like a light. I think it’s the first real sleep he’s had since the night before the party.”
“What’s the latest on Bors?”
“Not good news. He’s got some sort of pneumal infection now. They’re hitting him with wide-spectrum antibiotics, but it’s looking increasingly grim.”
Which may explain why Kent was willing to come home. If Bors’s death was assured, he didn’t have anything to worry about on that front.
“Would this be an okay time?”
“Please. I would love to talk with someone who’s not falling apart at the seams. I may throw you at my mother so I can get outside and take a walk. She doesn’t want to leave Dad alone, and I don’t want to leave her alone, so the two of us are stuck here overeating.”
Clare smiled a little. “At least you’re not overdrinking.”
“That’s next.”
Clare promised to get there as soon as possible, and finished the call just as Ethan finally fell asleep, his mouth sagging open to spill the last of the milk onto her stomach. He stayed asleep through burping and handing him over to Margy. Clare kissed his fat cheek. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Take care of yourself.” Margy cupped the back of Ethan’s head. “You’ve got a lot more to lose nowadays.”
“Don’t I know it.”
There were only two cars in the Langevoorts’ parking area when Clare arrived. Joni greeted her at the door. “We had everyone from B and E here yesterday. Most of them have gone back to the city by now.”
“How did the meeting go?”
Joni smiled wanly. “I was able to give my counseling training a real workout. We spent the first two hours just processing everybody’s feelings.”
The temperature inside was pleasantly cool. One of the upgrades Audrey Langevoort had mentioned Friday night, no doubt. The kitchen and dining area seemed even larger without the party crowd.
“How much of a problem is the company going to have with Bors’s…” Clare didn’t want to say “death.”
“Incapacitation?” Joni walked to the gleaming stainless steel refrigerator. “He’s the CFO. That’s a key position that has to be filled, preferably from within the company, which creates another vacancy in upper management, and so on.”
She retrieved a jug of lemonade and waggled it toward Clare.
“Yes, please. What about your father?”
Joni pulled out two glasses. “Obviously, it slams the brakes on his retirement plans. Which isn’t a disaster—he’s only sixty-seven. When he took over the company back in the day, the previous owner had cancer, which, of course, no one knew because in the early seventies, no one mentioned that sort of thing.” She poured and slid Clare’s glass across the smooth soapstone island. “He died within a year.”
“Are you talking about Mr. Harrington?”
Clare and Jodi both turned toward where Audrey Langevoort was closing the master bedroom door behind her. “Your father was very good to him.” She crossed to Clare and embraced her. “It’s so nice to see you again, Clare. Thank you for coming.”
Clare winced inside. If Russ was right, her presence here might keep Kent Langevoort from destroying whatever evidence there was of his crimes. That was the important thing, the most important thing, but it didn’t stop the unpleasant poking of her conscience, accusing her of manipulating her position as a priest and as a friend.
“Darling, can you pour me some?”
“With or without vodka?” Joni reached for another glass.
“Without. I’m afraid if I touch any booze I’ll just keel over like your father.”
“Is he still asleep?” Clare gestured toward the bedroom door.
“Yes, thank heavens.” She accepted her lemonade and climbed onto one of the woven leather stools nestled beneath the island’s lip.
Clare took another one. “You said Kent was very good to his predecessor.”
Audrey nodded. “Took care of all his medical expenses. Private nurses at his home, experimental treatment at Sloane-Kettering—everything insurance didn’t cover.”
“At any rate, Dad’s perfectly healthy.” Joni leaned across the island from the other side. “So it’s not a huge problem if he has to take another year to find a new CEO.”
Audrey shot her a look. “Easy for you to say, kiddo. You’re thirty-two. I’ve been looking forward to your father’s retirement since before you were born.”
Clare would rather smash her glass and slice her wrists with the shards than listen to Audrey talk about her hopes for a future with her husband. How do you feel about disgrace and despair and once-a-week visits to Clinton, Mrs. Langevoort? That was the truly evil part of crime. No one escaped. Victims stretched out in all directions. “I have a question.” Anything to derail the conversation. “Do you know what Bors’s personal bank was?”
Audrey frowned. “No. Why?”
“On Friday, Russ mentioned checking his accounts. In case there were financial reasons behind his suicide attempt.” True. Russ’s theory had changed, but he did say that on Friday.
Joni groaned. “Oh, God. Embezzlement. We didn’t even think of that.” She rubbed her forehead with the butt of her hand. “Now that really could be a disaster.”
Clare held up her hands. “Just a thought. What’s Mr. Langevoort’s personal bank?”
“HSBC.” Audrey frowned at her daughter. “But there’s no reason to think Bors would have the same one. We’re at HSBC because they’re right on the corner by our condo.”
HSBC was no good. There wasn’t a branch within three counties of Millers Kill. She folded her hands around her glass. Okay. Russ was going to get a warrant, based on information from the medical examiner and the brother of the previous victim. Hopefully. He and his officers would then be able to search this camp. It wasn’t her responsibility to figure out where Kent Langevoort might be hiding away evidence of his and Bors’s crime.
Unless … if Russ’s questions really had made Kent suspicious, the first thing he’d do would be to start hiding his tracks. If he had a receipt from a bank or a key to a safe-deposit box here, those things could disappear as soon as he woke up.
“Clare?”
Her head jerked up. “Sorry. I was woolgathering. What?”
Joni smiled at her. “I was wondering if you’d do us a big favor and stay here while Mom and I took a walk.”
“I don’t want Kent to wake up to an empty house,” Audrey said.
Clare didn’t believe in divine intervention in human affairs, but if she did, this would be a giant billboard sign from the Almighty. “Sure. Yes. I’m sure you could both stand some fresh air and exercise.”
She waved them farewell from the front porch and stood there a long moment as the two women turned left out of the parking area and took the long narrow road through the woods. She thought about Gabrielle Yates and Natalie, who apparently still had family waiting to find out what had happened to her. She thought of the third woman, nameless and forgotten. The last thing we can give the dead is justice, Russ had said once. There was nothing she could do to stop the pain heading for the Langevoort women. But there was something she could do for the dead. She turned and went into the house.
She went upstairs first, to the guest bedrooms. Russ had searched Saunderson’s room the night of the party, with Audrey’s permission, and hadn’t found anything. But if Kent had already started covering his tracks, stashing anything incriminating with Bors’s things was a quick and easy way to begin.
There was nothing obvious to her eye. The small writing desk was empty, Bors’s laptop already in police custody. She quickly and methodically riffled through the pockets of his clothing hanging in the closet and slid her hands along the dresser drawers. She heaved the mattress up—nothing—and then spent too much time smoothing the bedding to make it look untouched.
The other three rooms upstairs were guest bedrooms, empty and unused. She twisted her hair against the back of her head while she considered. Langevoort was a workaholic. They came up here frequently. He must have a workspace. She had already seen the main floor, so that left the walk-out basement.
She went down one flight of stairs and paused in front of the master bedroom door. She didn’t hear any sounds. She continued down the next flight of stairs, which opened up onto a long family room. A pool table sat near the stairs, bracketed by a narrow bar, and beyond it, a massive sectional sofa would give loungers the chance to watch either a wall-hung wide-screen TV or the mountains, framed by the wall of French doors facing the outdoors.
There was a narrow hall, barely six feet long, across from the bar. It had an open door on each side, one to a bathroom, the other leading to what was obviously Joni’s room. Clare hissed in frustration. Maybe there was an outbuilding she had missed? She turned back to the stairs, which was when she saw the small room behind the pool table. Its door was invisible to anyone descending the stairs.
She tried it. Unlocked. The room inside was utterly dark. She swept her hand along the wall and was rewarded with the lights snapping on. It was a windowless office almost filled by a desk and chair and a set of bookcases. Someone had made an attempt to brighten the space up with a pair of skiing posters and a fake fiddle-leaf fig tree, but they couldn’t change the vibe of Getting Things Done.
She ignored the closed laptop squared on a wide leather blotter. She had neither the time nor the expertise to tackle it. Instead, she slid into the chair and began going through the drawers.
The wide center drawer was filled with loose papers, pens, pencils, the detritus every office collected. The right top drawer was more of the same, with a small graveyard of old calculators and decrepit phones thrown in. Beneath that was a slide-out file drawer. Clare bent over, her fingers flicking through the file tabs, the physical manifestation of time tick-tick-ticking past. Spreadsheets, market reports, sales brochure designs, research. She stopped at one labeled BANKING and pulled it out, but it was filled with complicated forms from commercial banks she didn’t even pretend to understand. She slid it back into place and continued.
FUNDING, PROSPECTS, UNLABELED, PRESS AND PUBLICITY—she stopped. Reached for UNLABELED. Inside were eight full-page receipts. The logos changed, and the name went from McKenzie Full Service to McKenzie Self-Store, but they all seemed to be from the same storage unit company. The oldest was dated 1970, the newest just last year. The listed renter on the newest receipt was the same as that on the oldest—Lloyd Harrington. Who had been dead for thirty years.
There was a key at the bottom of the folder.
She took a breath. Pulled her phone from her back pocket and laid the key on the desktop. Took a photo of it. Put it back in the file. She smoothed the most recent receipt over the laptop’s cover and photographed it. Put it back in the file. She was about to pull out the oldest receipt when she heard thumping overhead.
Heart racing, she slid the file back into place. Shut the drawer. Stood up and shoved the chair back into place.
“Clare?”
She opened the door and turned out the lights simultaneously.
“Clare?”
On tiptoe, she bounded toward the center of the room, as awkward as a gazelle in toe shoes. “Down here!” She shoved her phone back into her pocket and pressed her hands against her flaming cheeks. She headed up the stairs.
Audrey and Joni were bracing themselves against the front door, taking their sneakers off. “We got into some mud,” Joni explained.
“Were you checking out the downstairs?” Audrey walked past Clare toward the kitchen sink.
Clare nodded. “I missed the tour Friday night,” she managed.
“I’m not going to miss that pool table, I’ll tell you.” Audrey ran herself a glass of water. “We’ve scrubbed, we’ve sprayed, we’ve cleaned the carpet, but the smell of cigars will not come out.”
Joni joined her mother. “God, I remember the first time Dad included me with the ‘big guys.’ One scotch and a cigar and I spent the rest of the evening barfing out back.” She shook her head. “The crap I put myself through trying to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.”
Her mother put an arm around her. “Hey. No more of that.” She rose up on tiptoe and kissed Joni’s cheek. “You are who you are and we love you.”
Joni smiled down at the older woman. “Thanks, Mom.”
Clare thought they must be able to hear the sound of her heart breaking for them. She took a breath. “I need to make a phone call. Can you excuse me?”
Outside, she walked away from the house, decided that wasn’t enough, and got into her car. She was tempted to turn on the ignition and start driving and not stop until she reached Virginia. She sat for a moment, her hands on the wheel. They were shaking, she noticed. She thought about the bottle of pain pills. She had tucked them in the glove compartment, behind the papers and small flashlight and bag of almonds and extra hairbrush. Her plan had been to sneak them back into Audrey’s bathroom. She realized that wasn’t going to happen. She reached for the small door, then curled her hand into a fist.
No. No. Quiet mind. Calm mind. She focused on breathing, in, out, in. She needed to call Russ. She picked up her phone and pressed his number.
“Hey, darlin’. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She closed her eyes. “I mean, I feel like I’m abusing their trust the whole time I’m chatting with Audrey and Joni like there’s nothing wrong, but … yeah, other than that, I’m fine.”
“If you want to pull out, just let me know. I’ll get Eric McCrea up there. It’ll tip my hand, but I’m not so concerned about that anymore. Jack and I are making real progress here. We’re figuring out which bank officers to notify as soon as we’ve gotten the warrant.”
“It’s not a safe-deposit box. It’s a storage unit.”
“What?”
“I found receipts dating back to 1970, all in the name of Lloyd Harrington. There was a key in the file, too.”
Russ paused. She could picture him, staring into the middle distance. “Could it be something personal? Old stuff that belonged to Harrington?”
“He died in the early seventies. The latest receipt is from last year. I took a picture of it, and of the key. I’m going to send them to you.”
“Send it to my e-mail. It’ll be easier to print off as part of our warrant request.”
“I will.”
“Are you sure you’re okay? You sound … Seriously, darlin’, you don’t have to do this. I can have Eric out there in twenty minutes.”
“No. Thank you, but no. I feel like I ought to be there for them. Even though they don’t know what’s coming.”
“All right. If anything gets hairy, leave.”
“I will.” She sighed.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Hey,” he said. “I’m holding on over here.”
She smiled. “Good. Because I’m not letting go.”