Invasion of Privacy

high.
    Robinette said, “Lace your fingers behind your head and turn around. Slowly.”
    I complied.
    “All right, now walk forward till I tell you to stop.” Again.
    “Jesus Lord,” said Robinette behind me.
    “They’re both dead as far as I can tell from a pulse. The revolver on the dinner table is mine.”
    “Sit in that chair there, hands where they are.”
    Taking a seat, I saw her going toward the telephone. “You might want to hear me out before calling the locals.” Robinette hesitated. Then she moved toward my chair, stepping carefully around Steven Stepanian’s splayed legs in front of the sofa. “Short and sweet, Cuddy.”

    The police chief of Plymouth Mills was named Niebuhr, a human bowling ball in flannel shirt, uniform pants, and anorak, hood down. A reed-thin detective named Hertel wore a turtleneck sweater and khaki slacks the way a scarecrow wears its waistcoat. I stood with them at the edge of the bog. Behind us, both Robinettes, Kira Elmend-orf, and Paulie Fogerty were among maybe twenty other people from the complex and town. The two patrol officers who had initially responded to the scene in the Stepanians’ unit held the rubbemeckers back from the action.
    A big tow truck with four rear wheels was parked nose to road, the driver playing out metal cable from the winch in the bed of it. A town diver and a State Police one in scuba gear buddied up on parallel ropes to enter the chocolaty water.
    Niebuhr said, “I don’t envy those boys this one.”
    Hertel spoke from the corner of his mouth. “Cuddy, let’s have your story for the chief, huh?”
    I began the version Hertel already had heard, the one Robinette and I had agreed upon in the Stepanians’ town-house. “A banker from Boston named Olga Evorova hired me to look into the background of her almost-fiance, Andrew Dees.”
    Niebuhr said, “Whatever happened to romance?” then spat. “Go on.”
    “I figured a good way of investigating Dees would be to visit his neighbors, using as a cover story this fictional condo complex that was thinking of changing management companies to the outfit that oversees Plymouth Willows here.”
    Hertel spit too, not quite as well as Niebuhr. “Would have been nice to let us in on that when you started asking around.”
    “I saw it as harmless at the time, and it would have been, but for the two psychos who lived next door to Andrew Dees. Apparently my questions about their background—so I could do the same with Dees-—pushed the wrong button in their heads, and they came to think I was investigating them somehow. So, when they overheard Dees and Evorova arguing about me questioning his neighbors, the Stepanians decided to protect themselves the only way they’d learned how.”
    Chief Niebuhr inclined his head toward the bog. “By killing Dees and your client.”
    “Right.”
    Hertel said, “Which the Stepanians supposedly did already to a college girl and their own parents in Idaho .”
    “That’s what I realized from my trip out there.”
    “And you flew across the country on a hunch that maybe this couple wasn’t kosher?”
    “All I had to go on was a school transcript and the bad feeling I got talking to the Stepanians themselves.” Niebuhr said, “Bad feeling?”
    “They were trying so hard to be normal, Chief, they seemed off the beam.”
    Hertel followed up. “And you had yourself a second client, right? This other banker who was willing to pay the freight for the trip.”
    “That’s right.”
    One diver surfaced, looking like a bug stuck in the icing on a birthday cake. The town guy, I thought, but it was tough to tell.
    Taking the regulator out of his mouth, he said, “We got a vehicle.”
    Niebuhr said, “How can you see anything down there?”
    “You can’t, Chief.” The diver caught the clamp end of the cable swung out to him by the truck driver. “But you can feel the bumpers and tires and stuff.” Then to the driver, “When I give this three tugs, start your winch, but really baby it.” Putting the regulator back in his mouth, he slid beneath the surface again.
    “Alright,” said Niebuhr to me. “I get why you thought the Stepanians were hinky. Off the record, I went to one of the School Committee meetings, and the guy seemed to have a rod up his ass the whole time I was there. What I want to hear real slow and clear, though, is why you had to do a Wild Bunch routine back there in the condo unit.” I took a breath. “All I had was a missing