Nine

“Okay.”

She went to one of the other desks and picked up a phone.

While she made the call, he looked the desk over without opening it, then stooped to look beneath the chair. No wads of gum stuck to the underside. He put on a pair of disposable gloves and carefully opened the top desk drawer without touching any of the surfaces a person would usually handle when opening it. He looked into it and smiled.

“He wants to talk to you,” Nola said, holding the receiver toward him.

He took it from her, and she strolled closer to the open desk but didn’t touch it.

“Detective Brandon?” Serault was saying. “I can’t tell you how shocked I am.”

“Who does the background checks on your employees?”

“My HR person calls the references.”

“And all of Eric Grady’s checked out fine. Except it wasn’t Eric Grady who came to work for you.”

“I can’t believe this. I can’t, really.”

“I’ll want to see any payroll checks this employee endorsed. We’ll also want to talk to the people he worked with.”

“Anything. Anything.”

He paused, then said, “Mr. Serault, given the subject matter you cover on the program-”

“I know, I know, I should have been more alert than most. I can’t tell you how embarrassing this is.”

“I was about to say that you might want to increase security all the way around. If not for your own sake, for the sake of your employees.”

“Yes. Yes. I see that now. Whatever you say. You let me know what I should do.”

Alex nearly told him that at just this moment he was a little too busy to be doing private security analysis for free, but a thought struck him. “I know someone who’d probably enjoy coming out here and giving you advice. Retired sheriff’s deputy. I’ll ask him to give you a call. His name’s O’Brien.”

Serault readily agreed to this, and after offering more avowals of his chagrin, finally allowed Alex to get back to the task at hand.

He called for a crime scene technician, then moved back over to the desk.

As Nola watched, he opened other drawers, but he found little of interest.

“What made you smile when you looked in the first drawer?” she asked.

It was still open and he pointed to the pencils in the pencil tray.

“Mr. Phony is a pencil chewer.”

“That’s right!” she said. “He gnawed on the end of pencils all the time.”

“With any luck, we’ll get his fingerprints off the drawer pulls and his DNA off the pencils. By the way-can you warn the security guard that a crime scene technician is on his way over here?”

She made the call, then said, “Let’s go into my office. I printed out some photos for you.”

He followed her across the hall. His cell phone rang. It was Captain Nelson.

“I was just about to call you, sir.”

“I should hope to God you were.”

“Excuse me a moment, sir.” He covered the phone and told Nola that he would join her in a moment.

“You need privacy?” she asked.

“I’ll go in the other room. I should lock it up to make sure nothing’s disturbed anyway. Could I get the key from you?”

She handed a key ring to him.

Once back there, he said, “I’m sorry to make you wait, sir. I was about to take a look at some photos of a man I believe to be co

“Good work. Let’s get rolling on this.”

“If I may ask, sir, what prompted you to call me?”

“I’m over at the crime lab. They told me they were sending a tech out at your request. Keep me posted, Brandon.”

“Yes, sir.”

He locked the room. Nola’s door was closed, and he knocked softly.

“Come in,” she said.

She was standing near the desk, looking at a photo of the man she had known as Eric Grady.

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice the difference.”

“Not your fault,” he said, handing back the keys.

She didn’t answer. She gave him the stack of photos. “The one on top is the most normal.”

He thanked her, glanced through the others, then said, “It’s much better than the others. You said this is a digital photo, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to fax this copy to my office, and get a copy of the file, too.”

“No problem.”

The tech arrived. He dusted for prints and gathered the pencils and a few other materials from the desk that he thought might be promising for identification evidence. Before he left, he told Alex that he thought he had picked up some good latent prints from areas of the desk that had probably been touched only by the suspect.

Alex began questioning Nola again. She had a good memory for details, but he doubted much of what the pretender had told her was true. Still, sometimes liars gave away more of the truth than they intended.

The story of the Eric she had known was surprisingly similar to the one Ciara had told him of the real Eric. He thought the pretender must have known Eric Grady, or at least talked to him at length. Alex would have to learn more about the crowd Grady had been in contact with in Topanga.

She said, “He dyed his hair.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t the same color all the time. But a lot of guys do that, you know.”

“Always dark?”

“Yes. But sometimes too dark. And his roots were lighter than his hair. I think his natural color is lighter.”

“Any sports, hobbies?”

“None that he ever talked about. I didn’t like him much.”

She burned a copy of the photo files onto a CD and handed it to him.

She stared for a long time at the photo they had faxed, her head bent over it. He saw a tear slide down her nose, saw her brush it away. She took off her glasses and covered her face with her hands.

“Nola-” He put an arm around her shoulders. She took a great hiccuping breath, turned her face into his shoulder, and wept in earnest.

“Harmless! I told you he was harmless. Jesus Christ, he probably killed the real Eric. A killer, and I worked with him on a show about killers. God, I saw him almost every day. A fucking murderer. And I told you I thought he was harmless.”

He waited until she had calmed down. She stepped away, pulled four tissues from a box on her desk, and blew her nose noisily. He almost smiled.

“I can’t stay here,” she said. “I’m going home.”

“You okay to drive?”

She nodded and gave him a watery smile. “Thanks. I don’t cry much, but when I do, I guess I really go for broke.”

This time, he did smile.

In the parking lot, she suddenly turned and gave him a brief hug, then hurried to her car without looking back. She wouldn’t touch him again, he knew. It was a liability of the job.

He had come to such moments many times, when he stopped being the person with the interesting job, the curious occupation. No one really wanted murder to come close to them. It had come close to Nola now. She would no sooner reach for him than she would reach to touch a corpse.

He told himself it was just as well.