Mitchell McCord’s face was not youthful or handsome. In fact, it was a long way from being handsome. But it was stamped with so much character and etched with so much hard-bitten experience that it was—beyond any doubt—the most charismatic, riveting face she had ever seen on a man.
When her next thought was one of passing regret that she hadn’t washed her hair and worn something nicer than a sweatshirt and jeans, Sam frowned in surprised disgust and brought herself up short.
McCord hung up the phone a moment later and addressed his comments to Shrader, not Sam, which was appropriate given Shrader’s superior rank and experience. “Okay, bring me up to speed. Give me a minute-to-minute, blow-by-blow of everything that’s transpired so far.” He glanced at Sam. “If he leaves anything out, speak up immediately, don’t wait, and don’t hold back any details, no matter how small.”
Without another word, he picked up the yellow tablet and pencil from his desk, swiveled his chair to the side, propped his ankle on one knee, and propped the tablet on his lap. He began making notes as soon as Shrader began speaking.
Sam made several mental notes herself, but they concerned his face, his body language, and the fact that his brown loafers were polished and shiny. After that, she devoted her attention totally to the subject at hand and, in the process, she managed to forget how strangely attractive she thought McCord was. She did that so well that when he glanced sideways at her and fired his first question at her, she answered him calmly and concisely.
“In the hospital,” he asked her, “did you believe Leigh Manning when she said she didn’t know Valente, that she’d met him for the first time at a party the night before?”
“Yes.”
“At that time, were you also convinced that her concern for her husband was genuine?”
“Yes,” Sam said again, and nodded for emphasis.
“In retrospect, now that you know she was lying, can you think of any small thing she said or did that would have given her away—if you’d been watching for it?”
“No—”
He caught her hesitation and homed in on it. “ ‘No,’ what?”
“No,” Sam said, and reluctantly added, “and I’m not certain she’s been lying about her fear for her husband. The first night we saw her in the hospital, she was drugged and she was confused and disoriented, but she wanted to see her husband and she seemed to truly believe he could be somewhere in the hospital. The next morning, she was no longer disoriented, but she seemed frantic, and she also seemed to be struggling to keep her panic under control. She did not seem to be trying to put on a frenzied show for us, she seemed to be doing exactly the opposite.”
“Really?” he said, but he was patronizing her, and she knew it.
After asking a great many more questions of Shrader, and not a single additional one of her, he finally came to the end and laid down his pad. He unlocked a drawer in his desk and extracted the tan evidence envelope that Harwell had signed for in the mountains and delivered to Captain Holland at Shrader’s instructions. McCord removed the clear plastic bag inside it containing Valente’s handwritten note. Smiling, he turned it in his fingers, and then he read what it said aloud: “ ‘It was harder than I ever imagined it would be to pretend we didn’t know each other Saturday night.’ ”
Still smiling, he looked at Sam. “You thought her alleged stalker sent the basket of pears, and that’s why you hunted this note down, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Why did the pears bother you?”
“Because Mrs. Manning mentioned that she always eats them for breakfast and that her husband teased her about it. The basket of pears was an elaborate, expensive gift, and I assumed whoever sent them had to have knowledge of her personal habits.”
“Did it occur to you that her husband might have sent them himself? He’d vanished mysteriously, and suddenly the pears turned up without a card. It could have been a private communication between the two of them. Did you consider that?”
“Not then, no. If I hadn’t found the note from Valente, I’d have started wondering about that if, and when, Logan Manning didn’t turn up alive.”
“He isn’t going to turn up alive. Valente will make certain of that. Unfortunately, this note to Leigh Manning isn’t incontrovertible proof of a murder conspiracy. He’ll deny he wrote it; we’ll get handwriting experts to testify he did; then his lawyers will find handwriting experts to refute our experts. Handwriting analysis isn’t perceived by juries as a legitimate science, and handwriting experts generally make unconvincing witnesses. As far as this stationery goes, Valente’s lawyers will argue that anyone with a two-hundred-dollar printer could have made it—including some enemy of Valente’s who wanted to implicate him.”
Glad for a chance to contribute something of value to the discussion, Sam said, “Valente’s name isn’t printed on that stationery, it’s engraved. That means a professional printer somewhere did the work.”
“How can you tell?”
“Turn it over and run your finger lightly over the back of it; there’s a slight indentation behind each letter of his name.”
“You’re right, there is.” She couldn’t tell if McCord was impressed at all by this information, which was fairly common knowledge to women who’d priced invitations or stationery in a good department or stationery store, but she didn’t feel a need to mention that fact to him. She had the distinct feeling he was more than a little ambivalent about letting her remain on his team.
“All right, we know with a little effort we should be able to prove she’s been having an affair with Valente, and we also know her accident occurred when she was driving back to the city, not into the mountains.” He looked at her steadily, and Sam began to wish he weren’t, particularly when he asked the next question. “What’s your opinion of the way the case is shaping up at this point?”
Sam wondered if he was testing her by throwing her a trick question, because, at that point, there was no case. “What case?” she replied cautiously.
“Based on what you’ve seen and heard so far,” he clarified impatiently, “what is your theory?”
“I don’t have a theory. There are no facts to support any theory. We know that Mrs. Manning and Valente knew each before last week and that they wanted to keep it a secret. Beyond that, all we know is that Mrs. Manning wanted to get to the cabin as quickly as possible last week, and she was willing to be seen with Valente in order to do it. Are we trying to prosecute them for adultery? Because if we are, we couldn’t do that with what we—”
The look McCord gave her made Sam feel as if she were flunking his test—a test he had hoped she’d pass—and she stopped in mid-sentence, completely confused. He picked up his tablet, turned in his chair again, and propped the tablet in his lap. “Are you telling me you haven’t seen or heard anything in the last week that makes you suspicious?”
“Of course I’m suspicious.”
“Then let’s hear your opinion.”
“I haven’t formed an opinion worth giving,” Sam said stubbornly.
“Americans have opinions about everything, Detective,” he said impatiently. “No matter how ill-informed, one-sided, or self-serving that opinion may be, they have a compulsion to not only share it, but to try to inflict it on each other. It’s a national pastime. It’s a national obsession. Now,” he said sharply, “you’re supposed to be a detective. By definition, that means you’re observant and intuitive. Prove it to me. Give me some observations, if you can’t come up with opinions.”
“About what?”
“About anything! About me.”
Sam’s six older brothers had spent most of their lives trying to goad her; she’d become supremely impervious to male goading a long time ago. But not completely—not right at this moment. At this moment her defense system was under unexpected siege and the only thing she could do was deny him the one satisfaction males wanted most at a time like this: the satisfaction of knowing she was riled. For that reaso
n, she widened her eyes and smiled warmly at him when he snapped, “If you’re at all aware that I’m here, Detective, let’s hear your observations about me.”
“Yes, sir, of course. You’re approximately six feet one inches tall; weight about one hundred seventy pounds, age mid-forties.”
She paused, hoping he would back off, knowing he wouldn’t.
“That’s the best you can do?” he mocked.
“No, sir. It isn’t. You had every piece of furniture in this office scrubbed, not merely dusted, which means you’re either unusually fastidious or you’re just plain neurotic.”
“Or it could mean I don’t like cockroaches in my desk drawers.”
“You didn’t find cockroaches in your desk. The canteen is on the other side of this floor and if we were going to have roaches on the third floor, that’s where they’d be. But they aren’t there, possibly because this floor was fumigated less than two weeks ago. I know because I’m allergic to the chemical.”
“Keep going.”
“You can’t stand clutter, and you have an obsession with orderliness. The furniture in here is centered exactly on the walls; the files on your desk are arranged in precise corners. If I had to guess, I would say you are probably a control freak, and that is usually symptomatic of a man who feels powerless to control his own life, so he tries to control every facet of his surroundings. Shall I stop?”
“No, please go on.”
“You’re wearing brown loafers, brown pants, and a brown belt. Your face is tanned, which makes you look healthy, but you’ve lost a lot of weight recently—possibly due to an illness that required you to take enough time off in the winter to get that tan.”
“What makes you think I’ve lost weight?”
“Because the jacket you’re wearing is too big for you, especially in the shoulders.”
“Which could mean that I stayed at my sister’s house last night and borrowed this jacket from my brother-in-law when I realized I had to come in here today.”
“You wouldn’t use someone else’s clothes; you don’t even like using someone else’s office.” She paused and asked with convincing meekness, “How am I doing so far?”
He looked down at his tablet, and the crease of his scar deepened enough to give Sam the impression he might actually be smiling. “Not bad. Go on.”
“Instead of facing people at your desk, you sit sideways in your chair. That could mean you’re self-conscious about your scars, which I doubt. It could mean you have a hearing problem that is helped when you turn your good ear to whoever is speaking, which I also doubt. It’s possible you sit that way because you have some sort of back problem, or because it enables you to concentrate better. People with ADD sometimes do that.”
“And do you have an opinion as to which of those theories about the way I sit might be correct?”
“Not one worth giving,” Sam said stubbornly, but with an innocent troubled expression.
“Give it anyway.”
Graciously, she inclined her head, yielding to his rank and his right to command. “I think you sit that way so you can hold your tablet out of sight where no one can see what you’re writing. I also think it may have been a necessity for some reason in the past, but that now you do it more out of habit.”
“What color are my socks?”
“Brown.”
“What color are my eyes?”
“I have no idea,” Sam lied. “I’m sorry.” He had steel blue eyes, but she had already won his tournament, game, set, and match. She was not going to let him score a point for his ego in overtime!
However, her confidence began to fade a little as she waited for him to write something on his damned yellow pad—an evaluation of her observations, an appraisal of her, a grade. She knew instinctively he intended to do exactly that; she knew it as surely as she knew that after he wrote down his evaluation and his decision about keeping her on the team, he would tear the yellow sheet off his pad and put it into the folder near his elbow that had her name on it. What she couldn’t figure out was why he was still sitting there, pencil in hand, taking so long to make up his mind.
She stared at his inscrutable profile, willing him to write something down. She was watching him so closely that she actually saw the muscle at the corner of his mouth move before the movement became a hint of an actual smile, and he finally began to jot notes on his tablet.
She had qualified to stay on the team! She knew that much from his expression. Now she wished more than anything that she knew what he was writing.
“Curious?” he asked without looking up.
“Of course.”
“Do you think you have a chance of seeing what I’m writing about you here?”
“About the same chance I have of winning the lottery.”
His smile deepened. “You’re right.” He flipped the page over and wrote several other notes on the next sheet. Suddenly he tore both sheets off and swiveled his chair to the front. He put the first sheet into the folder with Sam’s name on it; he slid the second sheet into his top desk drawer.
“All right, let’s get started,” he said abruptly. “There are four stacks of folders on my desk. The stack with the blue labels on the folders contains all the information we have right now on Logan Manning. The second stack with the green labels covers everything on Leigh Manning. The stack with the yellow labels pertains to their known friends and associates. The stack with the red labels is the tip of the iceberg on Valente. I’m having all his files copied and sent over here, but it will take a few days. By next week, that table over there will be covered with files on him.
“Each of us will take a stack, and we will read every sheet of paper in every single folder. The documents in the folders are all photocopies, so you can take them home with you. When you’ve finished going through all the files in your stack, start on a new one. By the end of next week, I want all of us to be completely familiar with every document in every folder in these stacks. Oh, and one more thing—these stacks are partials; we’re still searching the archives on everyone except Valente. We already know all there is to know about him. Any questions?” he asked, looking from one to the other.
“I have a question,” Sam said as she stood up and reached for the armload of files on Logan Manning. “There were two words scribbled on the bottom of Valente’s note, written in what I assume is Italian. They don’t make sense to Shrader or me. We wanted to check them out. Could I get a copy of the note?”
“No. Nobody gets a peek at that note or a hint of what it says until we’re ready to show it. The last time the Feds went after Valente, there were so many leaks that his lawyers were filing motions to suppress while the Feds were still trying to figure out what evidence they had and what it could mean. Never underestimate Valente,” McCord warned, “and don’t underestimate his influence and connections. His connections go all the way to the top. And that,” he said meaningfully, “is why we are keeping this case right down here, in the Eighteenth Precinct—right at the bottom of the ladder of justice. Valente won’t be looking for it here, and we’re hoping he won’t be able to get at it so easily.”
When he finished, he looked from Shrader to Sam. “What’s bothering you?”
“Instead of making a copy of the note, could I write the two words down?”
Leaning across his desk, he jotted the two words on his yellow tablet, tore off the sheet, and handed it to her. “We’ve already run them through the system. ‘Falco’ turned up as an alias he’s used before. It’s a common Italian surname. We’re still checking the other one out for associations.” He looked at Shrader. “Any comments or questions, Malcolm?”
“One,” Shrader said, looking absolutely ferocious. “I would appreciate it if you would never call me that again, Lieutenant.”
“I won’t.”
“I hate that name.”
“My mother liked it. It was her maiden name.”
“I hate it anyway,” Shrader announced, picking up his stack of fi
les.
As soon as they were out the door and out of hearing, Shrader looked at her and shook his big head. “You lead a charmed life, Littleton. So help me God, when you told him he was a neurotic control freak with a neatness compulsion, I broke out in a sweat.”
Sam thought it was touching that Shrader had worried that much about her. Her next thought was that she should have thanked McCord for letting her stay on the team. Viewed from any direction, this was a chance of a lifetime and she was a neophyte who really shouldn’t be getting such a chance. On the other hand, she reminded herself, if she hadn’t found Valente’s note, there wouldn’t be a “team.” She dumped the files on her desk, asked Shrader to keep an eye on them for a moment, and walked back to the lieutenant’s office.
McCord was leaning back in his chair, reading a file with a red label, a tablet at his elbow, pencil in hand, ready to make notes. He even looked tough and fascinating when he read. She knocked politely on the doorframe, and when he glanced up, she said, “I just wanted to thank you for having enough faith in me to let me work this case.”
He regarded her steadily, his expression amused. “Don’t thank me, thank the cockroaches.”
Sam hesitated, holding his gaze, trying not to laugh. “Is there any particular cockroach I should thank?”
McCord returned his attention to the file folder and turned a page. “The one I found in my desk drawer that’s big enough to drive a Volvo. His cousins live in the canteen.”
Chapter 22
* * *
I can’t believe you’ve kept your friends away for so long!” Jason chided Leigh as soon as Hilda let him in Sunday afternoon. The energy and animation he exuded made Leigh feel both enlivened and exhausted, but she could barely hide her displeasure when he turned aside to hand Hilda his coat and she realized he wasn’t alone. Behind him stood Jane Sebring.
Ruddy-faced from the cold and boyishly eager to see her, Jason left Jane in the foyer and rushed across the room to plant a kiss on Leigh’s cheek. “I couldn’t stop Jane from coming,” he whispered. “She insisted. She got right into the taxi with me. She won’t stay long, though. She has to be back at the theater for the matinee, but I’m free all afternoon!” Straightening, he stood up and surveyed Leigh’s face, his own face registering unconcealed horror. “How long will it be before you look like yourself?”