Leigh knew what was coming next, and she braced herself. Jason was a brilliant wordsmith, but he’d made the mistake of openly patronizing a sixteen-year-old who had a genius IQ and absolutely no social inhibitions about saying whatever it took to shock her adversary into speechlessness. Leigh had seen Courtney in action on a few other occasions.
“The Noah Maitland from Palm Beach?” Jason persisted.
“Yes.”
Jason gaped at her youthful, freckled face and undeveloped figure. “How could that happen?”
“The same way it always happens: Sperm meets egg, fertilization occurs—”
“I mean,” Jason interrupted, “I was under the impression Noah Maitland was in his forties.”
“He is. Noah and I have the same father, but different mothers.”
“Ah,” Jason said, his mind inevitably focusing on the possibility of obtaining yet another backer for a future play, a backer with bottomless pockets. Trying to atone for his former blatant disinterest in her, he began plying Courtney with the sort of questions he assumed other people must ask sixteen-year-olds. “And do you have any other brothers or sisters?”
“No, but my father has had four wives, so I’m sure he tried.”
“It must have been terribly lonely for you growing up,” he said sympathetically.
“Not at all. Two of my father’s wives were nearly as young as I was. I played with them.”
Jason gawked at her, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open, and Leigh reached for Courtney’s hand and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “Courtney, you don’t realize it, but this is a momentous occasion. Normally, Jason is responsible for saying the sort of things that make people look exactly as he does right now.”
Jason reached the same conclusion, and for a moment he stared at Courtney with what appeared to be disgruntled awe; then he leaned back and grinned at her. “I’ll bet you are a first-class pain in the ass.”
“No,” she corrected him proudly, “I am a world-class pain in the ass.”
Since Jason and Courtney seemed to have established a reasonably cordial truce, Leigh leaned back against the sofa and pulled a peach cashmere throw over her that she’d been using earlier.
Their voices ebbed and flowed around her.
Her eyes closed. . . .
She awoke with a start when Jason kissed her cheek. “I’m leaving. My ego cannot bear another affront. Not only did my hostess fall asleep while I was talking, but that irritating brat just relieved me of fifty dollars in two hands of gin rummy in the kitchen.”
When he left, Leigh listened for a while to O’Hara and Courtney playing cards in the kitchen; then she forced herself to get up. Michael Valente would be arriving at any time, and she decided to splash cold water on her face and brush her hair. For nearly a week, she’d been wound tight with tension, unable to sleep, shaking inside and outside. Now she could barely put one foot in front of the other.
Chapter 24
* * *
The day after the cabin was located, it had taken Shrader and Littleton only an hour at the local county courthouse to obtain a copy of the property tax records with the owner’s name and last known address.
It took the next two days to locate the deceased owner’s heir, a grandson, who was sailing on his yacht in the Caribbean. On Sunday morning at seven, he finally returned Shrader’s call from his ship-to-shore radio. He told Shrader everything he could remember about his grandfather’s property in the Catskills, including the existence of a narrow garage built into the back of a hillside during the early 1950s. Originally intended as a bomb shelter, it was hollowed out of the rock, supported with timbers, and lined with shelves where canned goods and emergency supplies had once been stored.
After that, it took less than an hour for a county sheriff to locate the entry to the bomb shelter-garage. The doors opened outward, and the snow on the hillside had slid downward, creating a giant drift that had to be completely cleared away at the base before they could be opened. After an hour of hard shoveling, the sheriff was finally able to open one door wide enough to beam his flashlight into the blackness of the hillside cavity.
Four shiny chrome letters leapt out at him: JEEP.
Chapter 25
* * *
Shrader picked up Sam at her apartment an hour after the Jeep was discovered, but the medical examiner and CSU were already at the scene when he and Sam arrived. He pulled to a stop behind several other vehicles parked on the main road and, with Sam in the lead, they made their way down the slippery path trampled into the snow by the parade of heavy, booted feet since Friday.
The cabin was tucked close against a high tree-covered hill at the rear, a position that gave it shelter from behind while allowing a spectacular, unobstructed view of the mountain scenery from the front. The bomb shelter-garage was around the corner and on the back side of that same hill. “Who’d have thought there was a hole in the damned hill behind this place?” Shrader commented as they trudged past the cabin, following a fresh path of footprints around the hill to the back.
McCord was standing just outside the open garage doors watching an NYPD crime scene unit methodically going over the narrow interior, gathering samples and taking photographs. Two more members of the unit were standing outside with him, waiting to go inside when there was more room.
“What have we got?” Shrader asked McCord.
McCord started to answer, but the M.E., a heavyset man with red cheeks and blue earmuffs, walked past the doorway just then and assumed the question was directed at him. “We’ve got a corpse, Shrader,” Herbert Niles said cheerfully. “A nice, perfectly preserved corpse, thanks to this underground freezer he’s been sitting in. He’s not as pretty now as he looked on his driver’s license, but it’s definitely Logan Manning.”
As the M.E. spoke, he walked into the garage, leaned into the Jeep and carefully lifted first one wrist and then the other, swabbing each hand on the back, the fingers, and the palm with sticky pads used to pick up traces of nitrates found in gunpowder residue. “We’ve also got what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the right temple—”
Sam moved to the side and got a full view of the male body slumped partway between the steering wheel and driver’s door, the window beside his head heavily splattered with blood and brain matter, the passenger’s window partway open and unharmed.
“Weapon?” Shrader prodded.
“There’s a recently fired thirty-eight special, with two empty cartridges in the chamber, lying near the victim’s foot—” Niles paused to deposit the last sticky pad into an evidence bag and write down the part of the hand where he’d taken the swab. “One slug penetrated his skull and exited on the left side, traveling through the driver’s side window and lodging in the left wall.”
“What about the second one?” Shrader asked.
“I think we can reasonably conclude that he didn’t fire the second one after he blew his brains out. That could mean he missed his own head the first time he aimed at it, or—more likely—and this is the theory I like—he fired the first shot a year ago at an empty beer can on a fence.”
Since transferring to homicide, Sam had worked with only two other M.E.’s, both of them as humorless as the work they did. Herbert Niles was in charge of the M.E.’s office, and despite his glib remarks, he was reported to be even more conscientious than the more serious-minded M.E.’s who reported to him. She glanced at McCord, but he was watching one of the CSU people who’d stopped taking photographs and was using a flashlight to inspect the old cans and containers on the steel shelves. He was looking for that second slug.
Niles backed himself out of the Jeep and stripped off his rubber gloves. “The light is lousy in this cave, and the battery’s dead on the Jeep, so we can’t use its headlights. CSU has more lights with them, but there’s no room for them in there until we get the vehicle out.” He looked at the men waiting outside with McCord. “I’m done. Go ahead and push the vehicle out; then we’ll bag and tag Mr.
Manning and I’ll take him back home. After that, this place is all yours.”
He looked at McCord. “I suppose you’ll want to know what’s on those swabs first thing in the morning, Mack?”
Instead of replying, McCord lifted his brows.
Niles sighed. “Right—I’ll let you know in about four hours. That gives me three and a half hours to make the drive back and a half hour to study the swabs under the microscope. Assuming your dead guy didn’t warm up in there during the last week, any powder residue on his hands will still be there, and the swabs should have picked it up. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for us to match up prints and start the rest of the process. Don’t expect much from me on a T.O.D.” he added. “Manning’s body is perfectly preserved with no apparent signs of deterioration.”
“Not a problem,” McCord said. “Detective Littleton has already figured out when Manning died.” It was the first time he’d actually looked at Sam since she arrived. “Haven’t you?”
Sam slid her sunglasses low on her nose and eyed him reproachfully above the frames for subjecting her to another pop quiz. “I’d put his time of death at last Sunday, between three P.M. and three A.M. the next morning—probably closer to three P.M., Sunday.”
“How did you arrive at that?” Niles asked.
“There were a couple inches of snow on the Jeep in the garage, which means Manning put the vehicle in there sometime after two P.M., when the snow really started falling. By three A.M., there was almost a foot and a half of snow on the ground, so the drifts down here would have barricaded the doors completely, preventing him from being able to move the vehicle in or out. The doors were still barricaded by snow this morning, which means he’s been in there all this time.”
“Sounds good to me,” Niles said, jotting down notes about her timing.
McCord wanted to look around the inside of the house. “I’ve been over the photographs CSU took last week,” he said to Littleton, “but I’d like you and Shrader to show me what you saw and point out where everything was.”
They were standing in the main room a few minutes later, discussing the glasses in the kitchen sink and the presence of only one sleeping bag, when one of the CSU guys poked his head inside the open doorway. “We’ve got the second slug, Lieutenant.”
All three of them turned at once. “Where was it?” McCord asked.
“Lodged in the timbers of the right-hand wall of the garage.”
The Jeep had been pushed outdoors and was being dusted for prints and checked for fibers, which left room inside for CSU’s battery-operated high-wattage lights. “We’d have spotted it sooner if we’d been able to get our lights in here earlier.” He walked over to the wall on the right and pointed to a fresh hole in the timbers about four and a half feet up from the floor. “Was there anything in front of it on the shelf?” Sam asked.
“Nope. No one tried to hide it. We just couldn’t see it until we lit the place up.”
Silently, Sam gauged the height of the newly discovered hole and turned, comparing it to the height of the open window on the passenger door of the Jeep.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Shrader said, arriving at the same possibility Sam had reached.
“I assume the window on the passenger side was down when you got here?” Shrader asked him.
“If it’s down now, it was down when we got here.”
“Was that a definite yes?” Shrader said impatiently. “Or was it ‘I think so, it should have been, it probably was.’ ”
“The windows are electric and the battery is dead, so it had to have been down when they got here,” Sam pointed out in a low voice.
“I know that,” Shrader said irritably. “I just don’t want to listen to any smart-ass answers on my day off.”
“It was definitely down when we got here, Detective,” came the more respectful reply.
“Thank you,” Shrader retorted.
An hour after Niles left with Manning’s body, Sam and Shrader hiked back up to the main road behind McCord. “It’s two-thirty,” McCord said. “By the time we get back to the city, Niles should know whether or not Manning was holding that thirty-eight when it fired. Once we know that, we can call on his widow in person and watch how she takes the news.”
“I’m going to let the two of you handle that yourself,” Shrader told him. “I had to miss my granddaughter’s birthday party today, and I’d like to go by and see her before she’s in bed asleep. Is it okay if Sam rides back with you?”
“It’s fine,” McCord said.
Her unexpected attraction to McCord yesterday had surprised and concerned Sam so much that she’d made a very deliberate, and successful, effort to rationalize it out of existence by the time she went to bed. As a result, she was able to spend three and a half hours in the car with him, talking about nothing in particular, without experiencing so much as a tiny, inappropriate tremor of sexual awareness. There was no more banter between them on the trip back to the city, no stimulating repartee or personal comments.
Only two things bothered Sam in that regard: One, she rather missed all that, and two, she didn’t think McCord even noticed it was missing.
Shortly before six P.M., McCord stopped at a convenience store to buy a sandwich, and while Sam waited in the car, Herbert Niles phoned. He was still reexamining the last swab under a scanning electron microscope, but he was eager to impart his findings to Sam the instant she picked up McCord’s cell phone from the seat and answered it. “There was no residue on Manning’s right palm,” Niles told her, “so he wasn’t holding up his hand in a defensive pose when the shot was fired. I got residue off the fingers of his right hand, so there’s no doubt his hand was on the weapon when it fired at least one of those shots. But you know where else I ought to find residue if he fired that weapon without any ‘assistance’?”
Sam named the only other location he would have swabbed: “On the back of his hand.”
“That’s right. I’m looking at the swab of the back of his right hand right now, and it’s perfectly clean. You’ve got yourself a homicide, not a suicide, Detective.”
Sam tried not to sound as surprised as she felt when she relayed Nile’s findings to McCord a few minutes later: “Niles called. Someone else’s hand was covering Manning’s and holding it on the thirty-eight when it fired.”
“There was no powder residue on the back of his hand?” McCord’s smile was slow and satisfied.
Sam shook her head. “No. The only residue was on the fingers of his right hand.”
“I knew it,” McCord said softly. “I knew it was going to play out this way as soon as CSU dug the second slug out of the wall. It always amazes me . . .”
“What does?”
“The stupid mistakes murderers make.”
Chapter 26
* * *
Courtney glanced at the clock in the kitchen. “It’s almost six, and I’ve got a lot of work to do for class tomorrow.”
“You’re calling it quits?” O’Hara said with relief, tallying up the score. “Why stop now, when I’ve still got some money left in my pension fund?”
“Call me softhearted.”
“You’re a cardsharp. Do you fleece those people you’re staying with out of their money, too?”
She grinned as she slid the cards back into their box. “The Donnellys are either out, or they’re sleeping—” The telephone rang, and since Hilda had gone to a movie, O’Hara got up to answer it. When he hung up a moment later, he was frowning.
“Was that about Mr. Manning?” Courtney asked worriedly.
“No. It’s Michael Valente. He’s in the lobby. Mrs. Manning is expecting him.”
“What’s he like?”
“All I know is that he’s big trouble for Mrs. Manning. You saw what happened when the reporters found out she’d been with him on Friday in the mountains. You’d have thought she was sleepin’ with the devil or something, just for being in his helicopter. I was with the two of them every second, and nothing happen
ed. Nothing. Mrs. Manning doesn’t even call him by his first name.”
“I’d never heard of him until I saw all that stuff about him on the news this week,” Courtney admitted. “I guess he’s really famous, though.”
“Yeah, for a whole lot of bad stuff. I owe you sixteen dollars.” He dug the money out of his pocket and put it on the table.
“Did he seem like a bad guy the day you were with him?”
“Let me put it this way—I wouldn’t like to be around if he ever loses his temper. The cops were needling him that day, especially a cop named Harwell, and Valente didn’t like it. He got real, real quiet . . . And his eyes got real, real cold . . . Know what I mean?”
Courtney was intrigued. “He looked like . . . what . . . murderous?”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“Maybe I should stay while he’s here, just to make sure Leigh is all right?”
The buzzer at the front door sounded, and O’Hara dismissed her suggestion. “I’ll be close by while he’s here, but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. From what I’ve read over the years, he’s involved in a lot of shady business deals, but he hasn’t done anything violent in a long time.”
“How reassuring,” Courtney said sarcastically.
“Well, maybe this will be more reassuring . . .” he said with a confiding wink. “That day in the mountains, the cops told Mrs. Manning to wait up at the road while they checked out the cabin. When nobody came back up to tell us anything, Valente picked Mrs. Manning up and carried her in his arms through the snow, down to the cabin. Then he carried her all the way back up to the road. He turns into a real Sir Galahad when he’s around her.”
“Really?” Courtney breathed. “How . . . interesting.”
“I’ll call you when we hear anything about Mr. Manning,” O’Hara promised on his way toward the living room.
Instead of letting herself out the service door to the kitchen, Courtney strolled quietly over to the doorway into the dining room. Leaning her shoulder against the doorframe, she peered thoughtfully at the tall, broad-shouldered man walking down the foyer steps into the living room. According to what she’d read and heard about him this week, Michael Valente was as adept at eluding reporters as he was at eluding attempts to put him in prison.