Killer Move

“What time was that?”

“Not sure. But she was back at the office around lunchtime. So I don’t know, maybe one thirty? I mean that’s when she got back.”

“And she’d come straight from seeing him?”

“Far as I know. Then evidently Mr. Warner was out meeting someone Tuesday evening—he missed my appointment because a dinner engagement ran late.”

“Time?”

“It was a little before half past eight, I think, when we rearranged. I waited fifteen minutes before I called his assistant. Though . . . his message to her had come in a little earlier, so I don’t know when exactly.”

The deputy noted all this down and asked if I had any idea who Warner’s dinner had been with. I said I did not. He asked for any information I had on Warner’s assistant, and so I got my phone off the counter and—without really knowing why—made it appear as though Melania’s number wasn’t already sitting there on the screen, ready for me to call. I spent a few seconds looking as if I was going through different screens before I read out her number. He noted this down, too, then flicked back a couple of pages in his little pad.

“That’s different from the one I have.”

“I believe there’s more than one line of communication,” I said. “When I was on the phone to her she talked about having a BlackBerry, too.”

“Oh, okay.” He stowed the pad, then handed me a card of his own. “If this guy gets in touch with you again, will you do me a favor and let me know right away?”

“No problem,” I said, leading him back out through the house toward the front door. “But probably he’s just not picking up his phone, right?”

“Or he doesn’t want to talk to his sister,” the policeman muttered. “You have a good day, sir.”

I watched him stride pugnaciously down the path to his vehicle, thinking that were I Deputy Hallam’s boss— Sheriff Barclay, presumably—I might want to have a conversation with him about not wearing his heart so evidently on his sleeve.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When I got to The Breakers I was relieved to see I was the first to arrive. The mere act of speaking Karren’s name to Deputy Hallam had made me feel odd. I didn’t want to have to deal with her in person right away. As soon as I got to my desk I called Melania’s number. There was no reply. It was early, but I got the sense David Warner’s assistant was used to being at his beck and call.

I left a voice mail asking her to call me back. Then I e-mailed Kevin the Geek, thanking him for sending the instructions the night before and saying I’d like to take him up on his offer to give my laptop a sweep. I offered to buy him lunch at his choice of venue. Finally, I sent an SMS message to Steph, saying I hoped her meeting was going/had gone/would go well.

I felt extremely jumpy, and lack of sleep wasn’t helping my mental clarity. The arrival of the police officer that morning had complicated matters in ways I hadn’t yet been able to quantify. One of the doors I’d seen while floating in the pool still hung open in my mind, however. Finally, I walked through it.

Someone, somewhere, was fucking with me—seriously, with malice and forethought.

The photographs on the USB drive were not tied to me, in the sense that it couldn’t be proved that I’d taken them. They couldn’t be, as I hadn’t taken them. Therefore, whoever was responsible for the images had linked them to me by association. First, by causing them to be discovered on my laptop; second, by causing the camera to date-stamp each picture. It was this second link—pinning the event to an evening when I hadn’t been at home, and so could feasibly have done what I was purported to have done—that seemed far more important, and had kept me awake half the night. It proved it was a deliberate setup, one that had been planned. It might not to Steph, but it proved it to me. If enough odd things happen—inexplicable little events, one after another—after a while you start to question yourself. The date stamp on the pictures got me out of self-doubt jail. On any normal evening I’d have been at home, or out with a friend (or Steph), who could have been a witness to my whereabouts. On Tuesday night I’d been out on what had proved to be a wild-goose chase . . . and perhaps deliberately so. Whoever took the photos knew I wouldn’t be at home, either because they’d observed me being out or—probably far more likely—because they’d engineered me to be where I was in the first place. And who could have done that?

I only had one answer.

David Warner.

He’d called the office midday, got hold of Karren instead, and so played along—but then insisted it be me who turned up for part two of the negotiations. He’d had his assistant call and set up the meeting . . . to which he didn’t show. Having committed me to being out, he then kept me out by rearranging the time and place via his assistant (even though, as she’d mentioned at the time, it would have been easier for him to call me direct). Using Kevin the Geek’s technique of Occam’s Razor, you only need one guy to make all this so.

But why the hell would Warner do this?

I didn’t even know the guy. I’d met him just once, that chance encounter in Krank’s—and it wasn’t like I’d latched on to him and got feral Realtor upside his face, hustling him to the point where I deserved some kind of comeuppance. I was in the bar with Steph and a couple of her colleagues from the magazine. They were all over some minor work crisis, and so I’d wound up chatting with a stranger about the Reds’ chances in the state league, as two men leaning on the same bar will sometimes do. It was Warner who’d brought up his house, not me. So why on earth would he meet Karren on Tuesday, think, “Hey, here’s a pretty girl, here’s some leverage, let’s stir things up for the asshole Realtor . . .”

Why?

I heard footsteps approaching the office, and froze. The door opened and Karren walked in. There was nothing different about her, but she looked different.

“Hell happened to you?” she asked, as she dumped her purse on her desk.

“What do you mean?”

“You look like a bad passport photo. Late night?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said.

She winked. “Doesn’t surprise me.”

“What do you mean?” My tone was a lot sharper than I’d intended.

“Whoa,” she said. “Just a pro forma dig, okay? The ‘How do you sleep at night, dude?’ routine. Not that I’m implying you have anything to . . . Look, whatever, you know? Call off the dogs. Relax.”

“Sure,” I said, forcing a smile. “Sorry.”

I was finding it hard to look away from her. Once you’ve seen a picture, you can’t forget it, and I had seen pictures I should not have seen. Being in her presence wasn’t turning me on, however. I felt . . . protective, perhaps, which was not something I’d ever have expected to feel about Karren White, a woman I believed had chosen to spell her Christian name in a nonstandard fashion purely to give her an excuse to spell it out to clients, the better to lodge it in their minds.

I felt that I should warn her about the photographs. But you can’t just pipe up with “Hey! I’ve got a dozen seminude pictures of you on a USB drive in my pocket . . .” unless you have a very innocent and convincing second half to the sentence, ready and waiting. I did not. Maybe I could do it when I had an explanation for how the pictures had ended up on my machine, but not yet.

“When you met with this David Warner guy on Tuesday,” I said instead, making it sound casual. “Anything strike you?”

“Apart from him being a sexist asshole? Not really. Why?”

“I didn’t tell you. He arranged to meet me that evening, to see the house.”

“Good for you.”

“Uh, not so much. He blew me off. Twice.”

“Huh,” she said, a little less tart. “Seems like he’s prepared to piss off Realtors regardless of their race, creed, or gender.”

“An equal opportunity asshole, for sure. You get a number for him?”