latches and black iron hinges, and a shiny new hasp set into the doorframe. There was a shiny new lock hanging from it. I opened my waist pack and took out the pry bar.
This doorframe was not for shit and neither was the hardware, and I put a lot of back into it and wasn’t subtle. There was a tearing sound and the hasp came away from the frame, along with some long galvanized screws. I pushed the door open and stepped in.
It was black inside, and quiet, and it smelled of damp timber, damp earth, wet hay, and compost. There was a garage smell, too, of metal and rubber and gasoline and exhaust. And faintly, below these odors, was the scent of something else. I found a switch along the wall.
Lights hung from the big central beam, but they were few and dim, and heavy shadows were everywhere. Still, the high points were plain: the black timber bones of the place and the packed earth floor; the ladder to the hayloft at the front of the barn, near the sliding door that was chained and locked; the row of open stalls on the long wall opposite me; the large open space in the middle, and the big black Beemer parked there. My heart was pounding.
I walked to the car and the smell was stronger. I walked around the car. It had New York plates, of course, and of course they were Danes’s. The window glass was fogged inside, but not so clouded that I couldn’t make out the body in the back seat.
33
He was long gone, and stewed in his own juices- bloated, loose, and coming apart. And he’d been rolled, like an obscene sausage, in heavy plastic sheeting that was sealed at the ends with duct tape. The wrapping was stiff and translucent, and it clouded any features that might have been left on the body, but through it I could see a black irregular patch where the chest used to be.
The car and the plastic had kept the animals out, but it couldn’t keep the smell in. It was suffocating and thick, and it boiled out of the open rear door and filled the barn in an instant. I closed the door and staggered back a few paces and ground my teeth to fight the heaving in my stomach. I blotted my eyes with my sleeve and pulled the collar of my sweatshirt up over my nose and stood for a while, taking shallow breaths. I thought about Nina and I thought about Billy.
“Goddammit,” I whispered.
I looked at the car. It was a crime scene- this whole place wasand I knew I should leave it in peace. But I’d left should behind a while ago- when I’d creeped the house and broken the lock off the barn door, or maybe much earlier than that. I shook my head. My vinyl gloves were wet and tearing, and I pulled them off and jammed them in my pocket. I reached into my waist pack and pulled out a fresh pair.
“In for a penny,” I said to myself.
I opened the driver’s door, and a fresh wave of dead smell rolled out. I ground my teeth against it and looked into the front seat. It was a mess. It was as if a cyclone had passed through the compartment and dropped the jumbled contents of a linen closet and a wardrobe and a medicine chest in there. Bedsheets and blankets and towels were tangled with trousers and underwear and shoes; shirts were knotted with pillowcases and socks, and the whole chaotic pile was shot through with toiletries: toothbrush, vitamin bottle, razor blades, dental floss, shaving cream. It was debris from the storm whose tracks I’d seen in the master bedroom of the farmhouse.
There was a suitcase jammed into the foot well on the passenger side. It was brown leather and expensive- looking, just like the luggage I’d seen in Danes’s apartment. There was a brown plastic medicine bottle with a white cap near the brake pedal. I knelt down and shined the flashlight beam on it. It was for a prescription antibiotic, and it was made out to Gregory Danes. The trunk release was near the driver’s seat and I pressed it and the trunk lid went up an inch.
I closed the car door and went around back. There was a flash of blue light through the high barn windows, and a sizzling sound, and an almost simultaneous crack of thunder. The building shook and I felt the pressure wave in my shoulders and I was sure that the windows had shattered. The weak lights failed and found themselves again. I looked up at the windows and saw they were intact. I lifted the trunk lid.
The first thing I saw was the missing curtain rod from the farmhouse dining room, and the missing green curtain. The rod was bent and the curtain was stiff with dried blood. Beneath it was another insane pile. Rather than linen closets and wardrobes, it looked as if someone had whirled a refrigerator together with a desktop. The food was on top- a carton of milk, eggs, butter, a foil bag of coffee, bread, a box of Swiss breakfast cereal, a bottle of red wine- all curdled and rotten and gone to mold. The smell wafted up at me, competing with- and momentarily defeating- the dead smell. It was a small reprieve. Below the food was hardware.
I saw the cell phone that was never answered, an electronic organizer the size of a deck of cards, and the laptop that was missing from the docking station in Danes’s apartment. I saw a wineglass, cracked and dark with dregs and mold, and a snarled skein of black power cables wrapped around it all. The papers were underneath.
Some of them were newspapers-New York Times, Journal, FT- and some were magazines, and some of them were glossy pamphlets and catalogs. But the milk carton and wine bottle had drained on the pile, and left the electronics sticky and spotted with odd pink scabs and the papers mostly illegible. I picked carefully through the mess and stopped when I got to the briefcase. It was a black leather satchel, and it was empty except for an accordion file. The file was red, with a long flap and an elastic band, and it was mostly unscathed. I slid it out and opened it up.
There was a thick sheaf of papers inside. I thumbed through them and my heart started to pound. There was a bench behind me, near the Dutch door, and I sat on it and read.
Mostly, they were stock research reports, with titles like “Fly Me to the Moon: A Survey of Online Travel Agents,” and “Going, Going, Gone: Valuation of Internet Auction Houses,” and I recognized the names of the authors- Irene Pratt, Anthony Frye, others- as members of the Pace-Loyette equity research department. The reports were in chronological order on the pile- oldest to latest- and every page of every report was marked CONFIDENTIAL in dark capitals in the upper left-hand corner and DRAFT in the upper right.
The report at the top of the pile had been written by Irene Pratt, and it was fifteen months old. It was eight pages long and surveyed stocks of video-game software companies, and it ended with a recommendation to buy the shares of three different firms. Stapled to the bottom of its last page was a rectangular strip of paper. It was from a fax machine, and it confirmed the transmission, some fifteen months back, of an eight-page fax from a number with a 212 area codea New York City number- to a number with a 203 area code- a number in Connecticut.
The last report on the stack was barely three months old. It had been written by Anthony Frye and another man from Pace, and it concluded with sell recommendations on the shares of four companies. It was six pages long, and it too had a fax confirmation stapled to its last page- six pages sent to a number in Connecticut. In fact, each of the twelve reports in the stack had a fax confirmation fastened to it. The sending phone numbers were different in each case, but the receiving numbers were all the same. They suggested that someone had been faxing drafts of Pace-Loyette’s confidential research reports to someone else in Connecticut, and that whoever it was had been doing it for well over a year.
It was the pages I found tucked between the research reports that told me why. There were twelve of them, one following each of the research reports, and they were typed- not printed- on the simple yet elegant letterhead of the Kubera Group. They were investor statements.
The dates corresponded roughly to the dates on the research papers, lagging them in each case by a week or so, and they reported the performance of only one investment: a 15 percent share in a fund that had the innocent- sounding name of Kubera Venture Twelve. It was an investment, apparently, that had done quite well. On the first statement, dated fifteen months back, the investor’s stake in Kubera Venture Twelve was worth just under five million dollars; on the last, its value had more than doubled. I guessed that the investor must have been quite pleased with that performance, but as he was currently wrapped in plastic and dissolving in the back seat of a car, I’d never know for sure. But maybe Marcus Hauck could tell me- it was, after all, his signature on each of the statements.
I let out a long, slow breath. The way I read it, they were in business together, Danes and Hauck. In violation of about a zillion securities laws and NASD rules, and who knew how many of Pace-Loyette’s company policies, they
