Her own body began to shake so hard she had to clutch the window frame to keep herself from sliding to the floor. “It was so cold the night of the blizzard,” she whispered brokenly. “Did he have wood to build a fire? I haven’t seen any wood. I hope he wasn’t cold—”
“There is plenty of wood stacked outside the kitchen door,” Detective Littleton tried to reassure her.
Leigh wasn’t reassured. She’d just realized the implications behind Shrader’s warning. “Why don’t you want me to touch anything?” she whispered.
“Since we have no idea what happened to your husband,” Shrader said, “we’re following standard procedure—”
It was Michael Valente who lost control—his temper erupted against Shrader and he brushed past the startled officer on the porch. “You’re either a sadist or a moron!” he said, stalking into the house and going to Leigh’s side. “Listen to me,” he told her. “That asshole doesn’t know any more about what happened to Logan than you do! There’s a chance he’s snowbound somewhere else, waiting for someone to dig him out. Maybe he got hurt and can’t walk out on his own. Whatever the case, the best thing you can do now is let me take you home. Let the police do whatever it is they think they need to do here.”
Surprisingly, Detective Littleton seconded that idea. “He’s right, Mrs. Manning. It would be best if you left now. We have a wide area to search, and we’ll phone you in the city the instant we find any clue to what happened here.”
Leigh stared at her, sick with fear that Valente had alienated both detectives so completely that they’d never tell her anything. “Do you promise you’ll call, no matter what?”
“I promise.”
“Even if it’s just to tell me you don’t know anything else?”
“Even then,” Littleton agreed. “I’ll call you tonight.” She walked to the doorway and waited for Leigh and Valente to step outside on the porch; then she nodded at one of the police officers standing there. “Officer Tierney here will drive you back to your helicopter, just tell him where it is.”
When they left, Sam Littleton motioned to another NYPD officer standing nearby, brushing packed snow off his legs and jacket. “Get some rolls of crime-scene tape and start blocking off the area from that point there—” She pointed to the end of the driveway visible from the house.
“Don’t you want it up at the road, too?”
“No, it would only arouse curiosity and invite attention, but I want an officer stationed up there around the clock until CSU has been here and gone. No one gets down here without permission from Detective Shrader or me.”
“Got it,” he replied, turning to leave.
“One more thing—Ask one of the local departments if we can borrow a generator. We’re going to need lights and heat down here.”
“Anything else?”
Sam gave him a beguiling smile. “Since you asked, two cups of hot coffee would be very nice.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
SHRADER WAS ON THE PHONE with Holland, making arrangements for a crime scene unit to be sent to the cabin ASAP. When he finished his call, he gave Sam a ferocious scowl, which, on Shrader, looked so much like his happy face that Sam wasn’t certain whether he was amused or angry. “Valente called me an asshole!” he exclaimed, and Sam realized he was actually delighted.
“He did,” she agreed, “—and you were.”
“Yeah, but you know what I found out?”
Sam shoved her hands in her pockets and grinned. “That he also thinks you’re a sadistic moron?”
“Besides that.”
Sam tipped her head to the side. “I give up. What else did you discover?”
“The Feds call Valente the Ice Man—but I found out he has a warm, soft, sensitive spot. It’s Mrs. Logan Manning. Our people are going to find that very interesting.” He crouched down in front of the fireplace and took a pen out of his pocket. “I don’t know how she’s made it as an actress onstage.”
“You don’t think she can act?” Sam uttered in surprise.
Shrader gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Hell, yes, she can act! She gave us an Academy Award performance in the hospital and again right here. The problem is she doesn’t seem to remember her lines. In the hospital Wednesday morning, she got all righteous and indignant when I asked her about Valente’s phone message. Today, two days later, she shows up in his private helicopter and he carries her down here in his arms.”
Since they’d already covered this topic on the way here from the accident site, Sam said nothing.
“In order to be a good liar, you’ve got to have a good memory,” Shrader declared as he poked around in the ashes. “This looks like ordinary wood ash to me, probably oak. The problem with Mrs. Manning,” he continued, “is that she not only has a bad memory, she also has a real bad sense of direction. She was twelve miles south of here when her car went over the embankment, and she was heading south, not north. That means . . . what?” He looked over his shoulder and lifted his brows, waiting for Sam to fill in his verbal blank.
“Is this a quiz?” she said with amusement. “It means it looks as if she was on her way back home, not on her way here, when she went off the road.”
“Right. Now, what bothers you about this place? Anything stand out?”
It dawned on Sam that this was the first case they’d started on together, and that Shrader was truly trying to get a sense of how observant she was. “There are several things that stand out. First, someone swept this floor very clean, very recently, which is why you didn’t bother to keep everyone out of here. You already knew CSU wouldn’t be able to get any footprints off this stone, not only because it’s been swept, but because it’s too uneven.”
“Good. What else?”
“You let Valente walk in here, in the impossible hope that CSU could somehow lift a partial print of his shoes and that they’d match up with a print somewhere else on the stone floor in here.”
“So I’m a dreamer.”
“By the way, in case you didn’t notice, Mrs. Manning left at least a partial print on that window.”
He pushed himself to his feet, dusted off his hands, and tucked the pen in his pocket. “She put her hand on the frame, not the glass. I was watching.”
“I think her hand slid over onto the glass when she turned around.”
Shrader’s eyes narrowed. “If you’re certain, make a note of it.”
“I will.” Turning, she walked into the kitchen. “Are you going to say anything to Tierney? He let Valente get past him and walk in here.”
“You bet your sweet ass I am! Sorry—no personal, inappropriate, or offensive sexual connotation was intended.”
“None taken,” Sam assured him gravely, but her mind was on the glasses in the kitchen sink. Those glasses seemed as odd to her as the single sleeping bag seemed to Shrader, and she said that aloud.
“What bothers you about the glasses?” he asked.
“Why are they in the sink? The bottles of water weren’t opened, neither was the bottle of champagne or the bottle of chardonnay. So if the glasses were unused, why did he put them in the sink?”
“He probably figured they’d be safer there, less likely to get broken.”
Sam didn’t argue.
Chapter 16
* * *
The brief jubilation of thinking she’d found Logan, followed by the shattering reality of finding only a deserted cabin, had drained Leigh’s mental and physical strength to an unprecedented low. Lying on a living room sofa, wrapped in an afghan, she watched CBS 2 News reporting that day’s discovery of the cabin. . . .
“Police have roped off the area and a full-fledged investigation is under way at the scene,” Dana Tyler, one of the coanchors, reported. “In the meantime, hopes of finding Logan Manning alive and unharmed grow dimmer. Our reporter, Jeff Case, was at One Police Plaza this afternoon, where NYPD commissioner William Trumanti had this to say regarding the investigation. . . .”
Leigh listene
d for anything new, but Trumanti said only that they were following up several leads and that kidnapping had been ruled out because no ransom demand had ever been made. Leads, Leigh thought wearily. They had no leads. Shrader and Littleton were as clueless about Logan’s whereabouts as everyone else. Commissioner Trumanti finished his brief statement, but the reporters weren’t through. “Is it true that Leigh Kendall was flown by helicopter to the site this morning?”
“That’s correct.”
“Did the helicopter belong to Michael Valente, and did he accompany her?”
At the mention of Valente’s name, Commissioner Trumanti’s expression hardened. “That is my understanding.”
“How does Valente figure into all this?”
“We don’t know yet,” Trumanti said, but his words and his tone seemed to imply that wherever Valente was involved, there was something sinister that needed to be investigated.
Leigh felt a brief spurt of angry energy at the sheer injustice of that remark, but she’d already exhausted her supply of anger on the unsubstantiated rumors and lurid speculation she’d read in the day’s newspapers. That morning, The New York Times had run a story alongside a picture of Logan and her at a charity fund-raiser with a headline that asked, “Manning Missing: Tragedy, Foul Play, or High Drama?” The accompanying article included comments from an “official source” that hinted at the possibility that Logan’s disappearance was some sort of publicity stunt.
The Post had found out about Leigh’s stalker and was building a case for “kidnapping by stalker.” To promote interest in that theory and lend credence to it, the Post included a detailed “profile” of Leigh’s stalker created by some expert on celebrity stalkers.
The National Enquirer had another theory, and they splashed it across the front page of their latest issue as if it were fact, not fiction of their own invention: “MANNING-KENDALL MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS BEFORE MANNING DISAPPEARED.” According to the Enquirer’s “undisclosed sources,” Leigh had been planning to file for divorce because she “was fed up with Logan’s infidelities.” In the same article, “a friend close to the couple” was quoted as saying that Logan had refused to give up the woman with whom he’d been having an affair.
The Star favored that theory, but according to the Star, Logan’s secret lover was a man, not a woman, and the two of them had been spotted holding hands in Belize.
Until that morning, the media had at least been forced to limit their speculation and occasional slander to Logan and Leigh, but now they had rich new fodder in Michael Valente, and they were having a feeding frenzy. Photographs of him were splashed across the front pages of the evening newspapers, along with Logan’s and hers. The articles about Valente centered on his unsavory background and past run-ins with the justice system, but they were also delving into his relationships with women. According to one article, he’d been involved with the daughter of the head of one of New York’s crime families before he embarked on several closely guarded relationships with “unnamed, married socialites.”
Leigh’s only reaction to all that was a vague sense of guilt because he’d been dragged into the ugly limelight merely for having committed an impulsive act of kindness to aid a virtual stranger. Proof again that no good deed goes unpunished.
She reached for the television’s remote control and turned the set off; then she picked up the large framed photograph she’d put on the coffee table earlier so she could see it.
Logan’s handsome face smiled back at her from the deck of the forty-five-foot sailboat he’d rented for a weekend last summer to celebrate their anniversary. Leigh was in front of him, at the helm, ready for her first sailing lesson. One sail was unfurled, his hands were on the wheel beside hers, and the breeze was blowing their hair. In the photograph, they were both laughing because Logan had persuaded a passerby to snap the photograph and, although it looked as if they were sailing, the truth was, they were still tied up at the dock.
Tenderly, Leigh traced her finger over the image of his beloved face, remembering the way his skin felt to her touch. He hadn’t shaved that weekend, and beneath her finger now, she could almost feel the curve of his jaw and the roughened texture of his skin with its two-day growth of beard.
In her memory, she could hear his laughter that halcyon summer day as he stood behind her at the helm. “Where to, Captain?” he’d asked, brushing a kiss on the nape of her neck.
Leigh closed her eyes against the hot tears gathering there and pressed the photograph to her heart. “Wherever you are, darling,” she whispered.
Chapter 17
* * *
Hilda was on a ladder, dusting the tops of doorframes, when the telephone rang at eleven-fifteen Saturday morning, and so it was Joe O’Hara who answered the kitchen phone and took the call from Dr. Sheila Winters. He recognized her name immediately, partly because she’d phoned in a prescription for Leigh Manning a few days before, but also because Brenna had several times referred to her as a very close friend of the Mannings.
“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Manning,” Dr. Winters told him.
O’Hara hesitated and then reluctantly recited the excuse Hilda, Brenna, and he had been told to make to anyone who called with a similar request. “I’m sorry, Dr. Winters, but Mrs. Manning isn’t taking phone calls today. She’s resting.”
Callers—except for reporters—always accepted that and politely left messages, but not this caller. As if she’d picked up on O’Hara’s reluctance to brush off her call, she began chatting with him. “Who is this?”
“Joe O’Hara. I’m Mrs. Manning’s chauffeur.”
“I thought it might be you! You’re also a bodyguard, aren’t you?”
“If necessary, yes.”
“Leigh and Logan told me how happy they were to have you working for them for the next few months. As things stand right now, I’m especially glad you’re there.” She was so warm, and genuinely concerned, that Joe instinctively liked and trusted her. “Is she really resting?” Dr. Winters asked abruptly.
Joe leaned back and peered past the dining room into the living room, where the subject of the discussion was staring at a framed photograph of her husband on a sailboat, her face so tense and forlorn that it was heartbreaking.
“She isn’t resting, is she?” Dr. Winters guessed from his hesitation.
“No.”
“I’d like to come over and see her this morning. Do you think that would be a good idea?”
“Maybe so,” he said; then he remembered Brenna’s saying she wished Dr. Winters had been allowed to come over yesterday, and he strengthened his reply. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
“How could we work it out?”
Joe tucked his chin close to the phone and lowered his voice. “Well, if you were to tell me that you’re coming over this morning—and that you won’t take no for an answer when you get here—then I’d have to tell Mrs. Manning that, and I don’t think she’s in any condition to put up much of an argument about anything right now.”
“I see,” Dr. Winters said with a smile in her voice, and then she became very stern and coolly professional. “This is Dr. Winters,” she informed him as if they hadn’t already been talking, “and I’m coming over in a few minutes to see Mrs. Manning. Please tell her that I will not take no for an answer when I get there!”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll give her the message,” O’Hara said. He was hanging up the phone when Hilda’s gruff voice made him twist around in surprise. “Who were you talking to?”
“Dr. Winters. She insisted on coming over. She said she won’t take no for an answer.”
Hilda glared at him in disdain. “Sure, and this dustcloth I’m holding is really a hand puppet!”
O’Hara glowered back at her. “You callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m calling you a meddler!” she retorted, but she marched around him and down the back hall to the laundry room without threatening to expose him or spoil his plan.
O’HARA STROLLED into the living room an
d cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Manning,” he lied.
The woman on the sofa hastily swiped the tears from her wet cheeks before she looked around at him. “Yes, Joe?” she said, making an ineffective effort to smile a little and look composed.
“Dr. Winters just called. She said she’s coming over in a few minutes—”
“Did you tell her I wasn’t seeing anyone and that I was resting?”
“Yep. I told her that. But she said she will not take no for an answer when she gets here.”
Leigh was surprised for a moment, then annoyed, and then resigned. “That sounds just like Sheila,” she sighed, and when he looked uneasy, she added, “Don’t worry about it. I should have talked to her days ago. She’s a very dear friend.”
“It’ll do you a lot of good to talk to a close friend,” he predicted.
Leigh didn’t think anything could do her much good, but Sheila was the one person she could be completely honest with. Among other things, Sheila Winters had recognized the pitfalls Logan and Leigh were facing in their relationship, and she’d steered them around them.
In the early years of their marriage, it had been Leigh who made most of the money, with Logan contributing his Social Register background and a driving desire to see her succeed that surpassed Leigh’s own. After using all of his family’s social connections to ensure that Leigh came into personal contact with anyone who was influential in Broadway theater, Logan single-mindedly devoted himself to restoring the Manning family’s fortune, which had been squandered by his grandfather during a lifetime of gambling debts and harebrained business schemes.
A love of gambling was a Manning family trait, but, with the exception of Logan’s grandfather, the Manning men also possessed sound business judgment. Logan’s great-great-grandfather, Cyrus Manning, had carved a comfortable little empire in the canning industry, only to invest everything in a huge gamble on textiles, followed by another, even bigger gamble on oil. Like him, Logan was always willing to gamble on the next big venture. And like old Cyrus’s, Logan Manning’s gambles nearly always paid off.