Nina wasn’t convinced but had nothing else to offer as a substitute theory. “How about this? Philip said he called Eric to tell him about the grave being found, and about the tip. Eric could have gone straight there, if Philip passed on the GPS numbers, and taken the body right before the police arrived.”
“Good point,” Paul said. “It would take a couple of hours, but sure he could. Cyndi—maybe his girlfriend? He fits. He sure does. And Brenda saw him that day. He was worried she might identify him.”
“You have nothing on Eric, really, though I agree we may have the bones of a conspiracy worked out, and I think Hendricks has to be one of the coconspirators.”
“There’s something off about this guy. He’s dirty. I feel it. He’s got secrets.”
Nina zipped left toward Incline Village at Spooner Pass. The last of winter hung in the air in front of her headlights like tiny clouds, dissipating in the oncoming traffic, insubstantial.
“Actually, Hendricks doesn’t even need to be here for the escrow. This kind of transaction’s all done with smoke and mirrors. Maybe he’s packing up, leaving town as we speak. Your phone is smarter than mine. Why don’t you google Hendricks?”
“I’m truly amazed and agog and horrified I can google while driving late at night at sixty-two hundred feet above sea level through a deep forest split between California and Nevada,” Nina said. She pulled over and played with her iPhone, punching and pillaging the Net. A few minutes later, she drew back out into traffic and called Paul. “Nelson Hendricks is a member of the Elks. And the Chamber of Commerce. The Methodist Church. The NAACP Big Brothers. Not a complaint to Better Business in decades of business. Not a hint that he’s anything but straight.”
Paul was silent for several moments. “I’m calling Wish on this. I’ll call you back.”
Silence. Nina listened to the radio. Then her phone sang its jarringly inappropriate song. She answered. Paul came on the line. “Wish is such a dog! Sandy should be proud. He’s far more intelligent than he appears at first glance.”
“What did he find out?”
“Listen, Nelson Hendricks’s wife doesn’t have MS. She has a blood disease. Something to do with anemia. It’s not always fatal but usually is within a year or two. There’s a new treatment but Hendricks’s insurance company refuses to pay for it. They claim it’s experimental.”
“Wish got into an insurance company’s private files?”
“I won’t reveal his methods. When the insurance company denied Hendricks’s request, he appealed and lost. I’m sure he’s got a nest egg, but you know how expensive medical care is. Desperate times require desperate measures. Nelson and Rayanne Hendricks have been together for twenty-five years, since he was twenty-four and she was twenty. They have three kids getting started in the world, one in college, so no financial help there. They celebrated their anniversary and announced his upcoming retirement two months ago at a private party at the Edgewood Inn with fifty close friends. The Tahoe Mirror gave them a quarter page, they’re that well-known and loved.”
“And this pillar, this good man, Nelson Hendricks, made a deal with Eric Brinkman to steal the sales proceeds? For money for his wife?”
“Has to have. He’s not the type to embezzle for anything less than saving his wife’s life. Hendricks might get away with claiming he had nothing to do with it,” Paul went on. “Brinkman would never be identified as the recipient of the funds. Neither of them could ever do this more than once on their home grounds.”
“It all sounds sort of razor-sharp and extremely bold. Based on what you’ve said, though, I’d say the chances of Eric Brinkman succeeding in siphoning off the escrow funds are slim, Paul. I think he’d be caught.”
“Maybe he wants to be caught.”
“Maybe he thinks he’s invulnerable,” Nina countered.
“Yeah, that’s him. What time is it?”
“After six. Never have an honest man for an accomplice,” Nina said. “Nelson Hendricks is ripe to rat Eric out. He might be desperate, but he’s not a born criminal.”
“I’ve done things for you, honey. I can relate.”
“I said an honest man,” Nina teased, but her heart had gotten heavy. “Sorry. It’s nothing to joke about.”
“I’ll ignore that gallows humor as being all too appropriate at the moment.”
She turned up the hill toward Diamond Peak. Ahead of her a fast car came in the opposite direction. She pulled down the sunshade.
“Believe it or not, I believe I just passed Brinkman’s Porsche Cayenne,” Nina said with a calm she hadn’t known she could possess. “I don’t think he saw me.”
“Which means he’s not home. Excellent.”
“Which means our plans are foiled. We can’t confront him.”
Paul said, “Park down the street, not on his property.”
* * *
Nina pulled her RAV up a block from Eric’s house. In the distance, she spotted Paul’s Mustang.
Hidden behind a gate and a fence, a curved, short concrete-paver driveway led to Brinkman’s low-profile mansion.
Paul met her near the gate, which was not locked.
“Let’s explore the perimeter,” Paul said.
She hesitated. He removed various items from a small pack on his back.
“What if his alarm system goes off?”
“We run,” Paul said.
They walked up to the house like bold solicitors. No bells rang. No dogs barked. The surrounding forest was silent. A single light shone from the nearest neighbor’s house across a sea of soft mule-ears. They listened to the breeze.
Paul said, “I’m now going to make the garage door go up.” The door inside the gate rose, unresisting.
“How did you learn—amazing! How could Eric not be guarding against it?”
“Here’s the way things work now, honey. A controller controls things. Another controller actually bosses the first controller. Then there’s the übercontroller, the big man, the higher power, whatever. That’s what I’m using, the one that can override his security systems. It reads what he’s doing and then jams or starts allowing electronic emissions in those frequencies. It’s not going to work long. Pretty soon the private security firms will figure out how to block this fellow with an über-überfellow.”
“Then you’ll find an über-über-überfellow.”
“Yep.”
“Men exhaust me,” Nina said.
He pulled a flashlight from his pack. They went directly into the garage. Beside them Nina could see a shadowy automobile. Paul shone the flashlight on a white convertible, which was empty, and on a large motorcycle, then looked at his handheld screen. “The back door of this garage connects to the rest of the house. Okay?”
His hand grasped the knob, which opened easily.
“Not locked,” Nina marveled. “I lock every window.”
They slipped out of the garage and up wooden stairs to an interior landing with a small mat at the door. Paul tried the handle, and it opened. “This is a bad idea,” Nina said.
“Guy doesn’t lock his interior doors.”
“He didn’t expect you to be able to open the garage. Agh, I don’t like this.”
“Shh.” Paul yanked her into the house through the open door and turned on a light. “We’re in.”
A large, dim room lay ahead of them, curtains closed, blinds drawn.
“Motion detectors,” Paul muttered, holding her arm, nodding toward a blinking light. He went to work again. While he fiddled with technology, Nina looked around.
“All clear,” Paul announced.
“What if he’s an innocent man?”
“No such thing. However, if he’s not involved in the Strong scam, we leave and no harm done.” They walked into Brinkman’s living room.
A pebble-textured, black leather couch faced a large flat-screen TV next to the hearth. The room seemed impersonal to Nina. A few professional journals lay on the floor beside the couch. There were no rugs. A carved Balines
e daybed, piled high with cotton pillows, ran along the length of the window that faced toward Lake Tahoe.
She inspected the view. A long geologic decline swept all the way down the mountain to the lakeside, miles away. The distant view was unobscured. You could see the mountains ringing the southern side of the lake twenty-six miles away. Redwood decking, cantilevered from the house, behind double doors in the living room, seemed to drift toward the lake.
She examined the items on the coffee table carefully while Paul made his own quick exploration.
What she saw first, on a side table, was an oversize, kitschy, white porcelain dog sitting on an ornate stand. Nina picked it up carefully, turned it over. “Jeff Koons,” she said, recognizing the style now. “Brinkman spends money on art. He likes contemporary art.” She replaced it gingerly.
“Is that what this is?” Paul called, and Nina turned toward his finger, pointing at a large aquarium near the hall door.
They walked over together, and Nina’s disbelief grew: it was a fish, and that fish was not alive, but hanging from wires inside a solution she realized must be formaldehyde. “I know this kind of art,” she said.
“This is art?”
“Well, it could be a biological specimen. Maybe he collects them. But I think this is an installation by Damien Hirst. His works bring the highest prices of any artist in the world. He’s one of the most famous, too.”
“It’s got to be four feet long.”
“The original was a fourteen-foot shark. It sold for millions.”
“So, he has expensive taste.” Paul continued to stare at the fish. “I wonder if he caught it and pickled it himself. Where’d he get the money for this house and art?”
A large, bare room on the right, tableless and carpetless, had been turned into a gym. A ROM exercise machine had been set up in the center of the room.
“I’ve been wanting one of those for years. Keeps you hard working out just four minutes a day, if you believe the ads. He’s dirty,” Paul muttered. “I know it like I know my name. Come on. Here’s the kitchen, and then let’s find the office and his bedroom.”
All the small appliances were European stainless steel. Every surface sparkled. “He had a decorator put the interiors together, I think,” Nina said. “There’s not much personal aside from the art. He’s a clean freak. A little compulsive.” She opened a drawer. Rows of utensils, sorted and matching. “Bet he’s a Virgo.”
“We haven’t seen everything yet.”
Since there was no dining table, the bar stools at the counter constituted the dining room. Nina went around the tall marble counter and on impulse opened the refrigerator door. She saw cans of Red Dog, a vitamin-caffeine drink, bottles of vitamin water, a box of Rice Krispies, a carton of soy milk, fish oil, and some dark juice in a pitcher. She saw prescription pills in their container and took a look—Provigil. What was that? She had been reading about it.
Right, a recreational drug. A neuro-enhancer, that was the word. College kids took it without being prescribed it because it was supposed to make you feel more alert, more able to concentrate, maybe a little smarter.
She put the pills back and checked out the freezer, saying, “One sec,” to Paul. A Dutch gin called Damrak, frosty on the top rack; frozen steaks below. A container of coffee ice cream. On the way out she glanced into the pantry; endless supplies of paper products and Duraflame fire logs and cases of water and juice, probably from Costco, the bulk-buy store in Carson City.
She had come to two conclusions: these cold cabinets did not hold Jim Strong’s body, or any sign of it.
Also, she was finally getting to know Brinkman. He was self-disciplined; that was evident. He had an orderly mind and had sophisticated tastes. He needed to be in control.
Maybe it was nothing but a gut feeling, but she felt it strongly: Cyndi Amore was not his type. The whole situation would be too messy for him.
She didn’t really want to go any further. If she and Paul turned back now, maybe she could talk their way out of a criminal trespass charge. The house was just the home of a wealthy, austere bachelor, exactly what Eric Brinkman seemed to be in spite of Paul’s suspicions.
Paul beckoned at her from the door of the next room down the carpeted hall.
They went into Eric’s office, another large room with a long table facing the door serving as a desk. One wall of shelves made a library. There was a wood filing cabinet and another fireplace.
The bookshelves held paper and other supplies. Nina cast her eye upon the carefully shelved and sorted books—heavy art and medical books on the bottom shelves, books on languages, science fiction, manga, a collection of modern classics. Nina’s eyes returned to the medical books, big professional texts. Paul worked the laptop, an ultrathin computer, trying to access the local airport. He looked up. “Can’t get in. If Wish were here, he’d kick this shield to shit.” Paul cursed again, picking up a file lying on the table. “Whoo. My name,” he said briefly, and flipped through the paperwork.
As he read, Nina watched his face tighten. The cheekbones stood out and his lips wrinkled as his whole face seemed to become a bastion.
“He investigated me,” Paul said, reading along, “looked for dirt. Has bank records and a credit report. Copy of my app for a PI license renewal last year. Notes on my connection to the Strong case. Notes on my connection to you.”
“And this bulletin board.”
“Obsessed with the Strong case,” Paul said. They took in the board covered with newspaper articles, photographs, and notebook speculations.
“Why would he—is it possible he’s intending to blackmail you regarding Jim? Did he know something?”
Paul examined the articles on the wall and began reading some posted notebook pages, obviously printouts from a computer, and only selections of longer ruminations. “He suspected me, for sure. It feels odd to be the prey, not the hunter.” Paul looked genuinely shaken.
Nina indicated the electronic lock on the file cabinet. Paul disabled that quickly and they looked at each other.
“Ladies first,” Paul said.
She saw her own name right away, toward the back in alphabetical order. She pulled out the file and saw herself as others saw her: medical records, credit scores, bank statements, what she had bought on her last trip to Reno at the Macy’s store. As Paul had said, she felt endangered, as if a snake were coiling around her.
What had Eric intended to do with this information?
“Here’s a file on Damien Hirst.”
Paul said, “Give me Michelangelo. Nobody’s been as good since.” He continued to rummage.
“Paul? Maybe you don’t realize this, but I don’t want to get caught. Hurry.”
Paul read through a longer notebook entry posted on the bulletin board.
“I can’t. I have a child,” Nina continued. “A son. Bob. Good kid. Needs his mother. Let’s go. Right now.”
“Nothing here to implicate Brinkman. But he’s as crooked as my grandma’s nose.” Paul scanned through every note on the board, flipped through every accessible paper. “Nothing. Nothing Damn!”
“We need to go! Now!”
Paul straightened up. “He’ll have a vault or safe or something. We need to check the bedroom, turn anything over that turns over.” Nina, stuttering and unhappy, followed him into the hall and moved into Eric’s bedroom. A fur throw lay neatly over a big bed, perfectly centered. No old socks littered the floor. Eric was preternaturally tidy. Nina checked behind the mirror. Paul ran his hand under the mattress. They moved stealthily like the couple of trespassing fools they were.
Nina opened Brinkman’s underwear drawer where all the real secrets usually hid, but all she found were neat stacks of socks and folded white silk boxers.
In the master bath, which contained a separate shower that would fit two and a jetted tub, she leaned against the towel rack. “Ow.” The rack was hot, a chrome rack beside the tub with no towels on it. For some reason, Nina turned the knob controlling the he
at. As she did so, the long mirror above the marble counter that ran along one wall noiselessly slipped away, practically giving her a heart attack, revealing a small storage area about four feet high and the same in width.
“Paul, you need to see this! You aren’t completely nuts. He is—” As she spoke these words, she stepped forward one step closer to the storage area, staring, and reached into it to take something. “Oh! Oh! Oh!”
An alarm must have cast its invisible light right across her path because the light flickered, and in the distance, somewhere in the house, she heard a magnified donkey blare, the amplified song of a humpback, an alarm that would definitely notify the police.
“We’re out of here,” Paul said.
Nina had the presence of mind to turn the knob on the towel warmer. The display case shut behind her. Running, Nina said, “I thought you disabled all the alarms!”
“Two systems. Oops.”
They made it as far as the front of the house, then Paul put out a hand to stop her. “We’re caught, honey. Nowhere to go from here.” He touched her forehead. “Settle down, okay?” She struggled to contain her panting breaths. The alarm cried and cried in hysterical bursts.
Eric’s Porsche Cayenne swooped up the driveway, catching them in its headlights.
CHAPTER 30
The Cayenne idled for a while, as if studying them. Finally, the lights dimmed and went out. Eric got out. “Hey, Paul, Nina.” He tipped his head and spoke in a loud voice over the screaming beast. “Any reason we need the police here?”
Paul spoke before Nina could think of anything to say. “We tried the front door. Guess your alarm system responds to jiggles. Sorry. Nina warned me not to do it.”
Eric took his phone out of his pocket and spoke into it, then went around to his trunk, punched a button, and watched the lid rise. Before he could reach into the trunk, Paul moved forward to see what Eric might be bringing out, but the only thing inside was a Raley’s brown paper bag.
Eric carried his groceries up to the front door. He set them down on a bench by the door and used his keys to unlock it. The alarm inside continued to racket, and now the phone was ringing, too. “Why don’t you two come on in?” Eric said, picking up a phone by the kitchen. He pushed buttons on a keypad and the alarm stopped.
Dreams of the Dead Page 27
