Killer Move

She’d gone early, too. It was still only seven fifteen. I put a pot of coffee on and fetched my laptop—now destined to be looked over by Kevin at his very earliest in/convenience—and my phone. I copied the folder of photographs off onto a USB thumb drive and deleted the original from the laptop. If Kevin was going to geek all over my computer, the folder clearly couldn’t remain in place. Then I picked up my phone and found Melania’s number. My finger was a quarter inch from tapping it when there was a knock on the front door.

I swore irritably and went to open it.

Outside was a man in a police uniform. He had short brown hair and was about the same height as me, but with the trim, fastidious-looking build that comes from working out with free weights. His upper arms looked, in fact, as though he’d come straight from doing bicep curls.

“Mr. Bill Moore?”

“Yes,” I said. “What—”

“Deputy Hallam,” he said, showing me his ID. I blinked at it. He stowed his badge and held something else up. “This yours?”

It was one of my Shore Realty business cards. “Yes,” I said. “But what are you doing with it?”

“Can I come inside? I’d like to talk with you.”

“What about?”

“A man called David Warner.”

I took the policeman back through to the kitchen and offered him a coffee, which he declined. I poured one for myself, feeling as if I was acting a part.

“I should tell you straightaway,” I said, “that I don’t know the guy well.”

Hallam held my card up again, this time flipping it over to show me the other side.

Call me when you’re ready to do business.

“I found this wedged into the entry system of Mr. Warner’s property,” the cop said. “Is that your handwriting?”

“I called round yesterday morning, on the off chance. He wasn’t there. I left my card.”

“The message could be interpreted as threatening, sir. Snippy, at the very least.”

“I was feeling snippy,” I said. “I was supposed to meet with the guy. He gave me the runaround.”

“How?”

“We arranged I’d view his property at eight o’clock on Tuesday evening. But he wasn’t there. The meeting was rearranged, for a bar in town. He didn’t show up to that, either. So I bailed. Got home at midnight, a couple beers down, which did not make me popular with my wife.”

The cop didn’t respond to this attempt at guys-together chumminess. Either he didn’t have a wife or being unpopular with her was business as usual.

“Next morning I happened to be near the guy’s house, so I stopped by in the hope we could talk. He wasn’t there. I left my card, went to work.”

“You arranged these meetings with him direct?”

“No—via his assistant, on the phone. What exactly is the problem here, Officer?”

“The problem,” the cop said, returning my card to the pocket of his short-sleeve shirt, “is that David Warner seems to have disappeared.”

My stomach turned over, as if I was in a plane that had suddenly dropped five hundred feet.

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

He cocked his head. “That’s a word most people have a ready understanding of, sir. You really need help with it?”

“Pardon me?”

“I apologize,” he said, his gaze flicking away. “Mr. Warner is an extremely wealthy person, and my boss is all over this. Warner was supposed to be having lunch with his sister yesterday, but didn’t show up at the agreed place and time. It’s under twenty-four hours, in which case normally we wouldn’t be paying any attention. But with Mr. Warner, evidently we are.”

“At what point did he, uh, stop being where he was supposed to be?”

“That’s what I’m trying to establish.”

“I know my colleague Karren White had a meeting with him late morning, day before yesterday.”

“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.”