Sam nodded, but gestured to the elevators. “Let’s go upstairs where it’s warmer, and I’ll tell McCord at the same time I tell you two.”
“McCord already left,” Shrader told her. “He had appointments.”
“With who?” Sam said, too disappointed to hide it.
“I don’t know, but his schedule’s on his desk, where it always is. He left a note on your phone. What did you get from Valente?.”
Sam told them what she’d learned, but the information lost much of its significance in the middle of the noisy, bustling first floor, where the facts and timing couldn’t be put into proper context, analyzed, and fully evaluated.
Shrader’s reaction was understandably noncommittal. “I don’t know what to think. Maybe he paid somebody to do the deed?” Distracted, he looked at his watch. “Womack and I are going to start checking out Solomon and his boyfriend. See you in the morning.”
Frustrated at having to wait to talk to McCord, Sam jogged up the stairs to the third floor and went to her desk. He’d been so upset about mishandling Valente’s interview himself that she couldn’t believe he hadn’t waited around to hear what she might have learned. On the other hand, McCord always kept his appointments and he expected everyone else to keep theirs.
Propped against her telephone was a folded note with her name written on it in his now-familiar handwriting. He had a remarkably legible handwriting for a man, Sam thought fondly—and then she remembered the astonishing thing he’d said to her on the way to the interview room this morning. In the uproar, she’d completely forgotten he’d been jealous of Valente and she’d been unable to bear that. She remembered the scene now though, in every poignant detail, right down to the knowing half-smile on his handsome lips as he said,
“;I think we got through our first lovers’ quarrel pretty well, don’t you?”
Sam’s heart did a swift little quickstep at the memory, so she firmly set the memory aside. She was not going down that path with Mitchell McCord—at least no farther down that path.
Calmly, she opened his note.
Sam—
In my center desk drawer is the file with notes from my interview with Valente this morning. Since you aren’t back yet, I assume you talked to him. Add your own notes to mine, while they’re fresh in your mind. I’ll be back by 5:30. We’ll talk then if I haven’t already reached you by phone.
Mack
He’d signed his note with his nickname for the first time, and Sam’s entire nervous system suffered a momentary meltdown. As far as she knew, very few people felt entitled to use that nickname. The mayor had called him “Mack” one day when he stopped by during a strategy meeting; Dr. Niles, the chief medical examiner, called him “Mack”; and so had his sister when she gave Sam a message for him one day. Everyone else called him “Lieutenant,” which was respectful and appropriate.
Sam was not a relative of his, or a friend of longstanding, or a political leader. If she were to use his nickname, she would be assuming a relaxed, easy familiarity with him that she did not have. Sam wasn’t certain if he, by signing his nickname, was subtly telling her she could have that familiarity with him. Or . . . should have it? Or . . . already had it?
Sam shook her head, trying to clear it, and headed for his office. The man was driving her crazy. He was assuming a relationship that did not exist, and then he was making her react as if it did. This morning, he’d looked at her with irate, narrowed blue eyes because he was jealous, but he had no right to be jealous, and she had no reason to melt with regret for making him jealous.
The problem, as she saw it, was that McCord was so beguilingly subtle, so brilliantly nonchalant, and so smoothly indomitable, that she never quite realized he was leading her onto very shaky ground until she was already there.
Sam had been having a recurring vision of herself being led docilely along a path through the woods, attached to McCord by a gossamer thread she couldn’t see or feel, and while she was looking around, admiring the flowers—and his muscular back and narrow hips—she was going to step off a cliff into thin air.
Inside his office, Sam studied his “desk calendar,” which was actually an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven spiral-bound daily planner with a full page allocated for each day. Thinking he might be able to return sooner than he’d written in his note, she looked at the crowded afternoon he’d scheduled.
His mornings were usually blocked out for whatever work he could accomplish in his office, by phone or computer, and for the intensive meetings he held with Sam, Womack, and Shrader.
Afternoons were set aside for appointments, interviews, and whatever legwork he wanted to do. McCord handled departmental and administrative business by telephone, but he did almost everything else face-to-face, which required an astonishing amount of legwork.
He’d mentioned yesterday that he’d made arrangements to meet with every law enforcement official he could find who’d ever dealt with Valente on a personal basis, and as Sam ran her finger down his list of appointments, she could see that he’d started that process. Four consecutive afternoons were covered with them, starting at noon today with Duane Kraits, the arresting officer who’d successfully busted Valente on the manslaughter charge.
McCord was particularly interested in that case for the same reason Sam had been: It involved Valente’s only violent crime, and it was the single instance where the charges against him had stuck. As Sam looked at McCord’s busy afternoon schedule, she realized there was no way he would finish up and be back before five-thirty.
Disappointed, she sat down on the swivel chair behind his desk, opened his center drawer, and took out Valente’s file. She made a few appropriate notes in it, but when she finished and slid the file back into McCord’s desk, she felt curiously deflated.
Standing up, she looked around at his clean, neat office while she trailed her fingertips over the desk where he sat and wrote his copious notes. She’d joked about his compulsion for order in the beginning, but the truth was, she really liked his neat office and organized habits.
She’d grown up with six brothers, and until she was a teenager, she hadn’t been able to walk through the family room without being hit by a throw pillow—usually a barrage of throw pillows, coming at her from different directions.
Her brothers had contests to see which one of them could be the most disgusting. If Sam’s parents weren’t there, they had belching contests at dinner. And—oh, God—the farting contests!
They kicked off their raunchy sneakers in the utility room when they came home, and no gymnasium on earth could smell as bad as that room did. And their gym socks were not to be believed. When they sat around watching television in their stocking feet, the odor made Sam’s eyes sting and water. She complained about it only once, when she was eight years old. The next morning, when she woke up, her pillows were covered in smelly gym socks.
She learned early to pretend she didn’t notice things, because if the boys knew something grossed her out, they would find a way to torture her with it.
When she was little, they seemed to regard her as an animated, talking toy with multiple uses. If they played baseball in the vacant lot next door, they stood her in the outfield—holding her doll—and she was their designated “home run line.” During backyard football practice, Brian and Tom had her hold up her arms like a goalpost while they kicked field goals at her.
They would have killed anyone who tried to hurt her, but at the same time, they teased her constantly and played endless jokes on her that weren’t always funny.
Sam’s father thought boys who were jocks should be allowed to be incredibly sloppy and unruly, but then what else would you expect from a man whose children called him “Coach,” instead of “Dad”? The family housekeepers, of which there had been an army, never lasted more than a year.
Sam’s mother disagreed with her husband about many of the things the boys were allowed to do, but she was outnumbered, and besides—she doted on him and on all her children.
McCord’s
neatness suited Sam just fine, she realized, walking out of his office and then turning in the doorway for one last, unconsciously tender look around. The truth was, everything about Mitchell McCord suited her. Even his nickname had a pleasing ring to it.
By the time she reached her own desk, she realized she was hungry and restless, and she really needed to get away for a little while.
Regular working hours for detectives on the day tour were from eight A.M. to four P.M., but Shrader, Womack, and she had been working late nearly every night and coming in on the weekends. Sam already knew she’d be working late tonight again, since McCord wasn’t due back until five-thirty. She’d more than earned the right to take a few hours off now as “lost time.”
Picking up her purse, she pulled on her jacket, and decided to go to Bergdorf’s after-Christmas sale.
She checked her cell phone to be sure it was on and slipped it back in her shoulder bag. McCord was predictable and adhered to his schedule, so she didn’t have to worry about being back here until five-thirty.
AT THREE O’CLOCK, Sam was on her way into a dressing room to try on a fabulous little cranberry knit dress and jacket, when her cell phone rang. She dug it out of her purse and was surprised to see Mack’s office phone number flashing on her caller identification screen. She was even more surprised by the terse, ominous sound of his voice. “Where the hell are you?”
“I decided to take a few hours of lost time. I’m in midtown—at Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue,” she said.
“You just went back on duty. Get over here.”
“What’s wrong?” Sam said, thrusting the cranberry knit dress into the arms of a startled clerk who happened to walk past her.
“I’ll tell you when you get here. Where’s the recap you were putting together this morning of all the charges ever filed against Valente?”
“It’s in my desk.” Sam was already at a near run. “I’ll be right there.”
Chapter 59
* * *
Sam paused at her desk just long enough to dump her purse in a drawer, lock it, and strip off her winter jacket; then she headed swiftly toward McCord’s office, stopping uncertainly just inside the doorway.
He was standing behind his desk, facing the wall, with his hands shoved into his hip pockets and his head bent, as if he were looking at the computer on his credenza—except the screen was dark and his torso was so taut that the brown leather strap of his shoulder holster had tightened across his back, wrinkling the broadcloth of his shirt.
The file with her recap of Valente’s arrest records was lying open on his desk, and his leather bomber jacket was flung over a chair—another sign that something was alarmingly out of the ordinary.
Sam decided to interrupt him and quietly said, “What’s up?”
“Close the door,” he said flatly.
Sam closed the door, her unease escalating. McCord never closed the door to his office when they were alone in it. Everyone on the third floor could see into his office because the upper half of the walls facing the squad room were glass, and Sam had sensed from the beginning that McCord was a good enough administrator to realize that frequent closed-door meetings between Sam and him would be noted and widely misconstrued—to the detriment of her future relationships with coworkers.
With his back still to her, McCord said, “Does the name William Holmes mean anything to you?”
“Of course. He was the victim in Valente’s manslaughter conviction.”
“What do you remember about that manslaughter case, based on the official information in our file?”
Sam’s foreboding began to increase when he didn’t turn around while she answered him. “The victim, William Holmes, was an unarmed sixteen-year-old male with a clean record who quarreled with Michael Valente in an alley over an unknown subject,” Sam responded. “During the quarrel, Michael Valente—seventeen-year-old male with a long juvenile record—shot Holmes with a forty-five semiautomatic belonging to Valente. A patrol officer, Duane Kraits, heard the shot and was on the scene within moments, but Holmes died before the paramedics arrived. Officer Kraits arrested Valente on the scene.”
“Go on,” he said sarcastically when she stopped. “I want to be sure you read the same things in that file that I did.”
“The M.E.’s report listed cause of death as a forty-five-caliber slug that ruptured the victim’s aorta. Ballistics confirmed the slug came from Valente’s unregistered forty-five semiautomatic. Valente’s prints were on the weapon. The tox reports showed no sign of drugs or alcohol in Holmes or Valente.”
Sam paused, trying to imagine what other salient points he wanted her to recount, and she mentioned the only items that came to mind. “Valente was represented by a court-appointed attorney and he pled guilty. The judge in the case took Valente’s age into consideration, but nailed him because of his priors and the unprovoked viciousness of Valente’s act.”
McCord turned around then, and Sam mentally recoiled from the menacing glitter in his steel blue eyes. “Would you like to know what really happened?”
“What do you mean—‘what really happened’?”
“I spent a half hour with Kraits today. He’s retired and he lives alone with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and his memories of ‘the good old days on the force.’ He was already half-tanked when I got there, and he was especially happy to talk to me about his true part in the Valente manslaughter bust because—in his words—he’s ‘a real big fan’ of mine. It seems the report he filed about Holmes’s death was a little skewed because his captain needed it that way, and in ‘the good old days’ cops stuck together and did favors for each other. Can you guess who his captain was?”
Sam shook her head.
“William Trumanti,” he bit out. “Now, guess who the victim was.”
“William Holmes,” Sam said unhesitatingly.
“William Trumanti Holmes,” McCord corrected acidly. Too restless to sit, he ran his hand around the back of his neck and leaned against the credenza. “Holmes was Captain Trumanti’s sister’s only child. Since Trumanti had no other siblings, young William was the last possible branch on their little family tree. Are you starting to get the picture here?”
“Not yet.”
“No, of course not,” he said, his jaw clenched so tightly that the thin scar on his cheek stood out. “You weren’t around in his fucking ‘good old days.’ Let me fill in the blanks for you. I’ve already verified the important points by phone with another retired cop from Trumanti’s old precinct. Here’s what the file didn’t include: William Holmes was a punk—who used to get hauled in along with his pal, Michael Valente. When that happened, his uncle had him turned loose and kept his record clean. From time to time, Captain Trumanti—who was Lieutenant Trumanti back then—also saved young Mr. Valente’s butt.”
Sam leaned forward in her chair. “Michael Valente and Holmes were friends?”
“They were best friends. In fact, they were childhood chums. Unfortunately, Holmes was not pals with Valente’s older cousin, Angelo. The night Valente ‘quarreled’ with his pal and killed him—it was because William had just carved Angelo to pieces. Valente went looking for him, and young William was waiting for him—stoned out of his mind, still covered with Angelo’s blood, and armed with a forty-five semiautomatic. That piece didn’t belong to Valente, it was Holmes’s, and Valente’s prints were on the barrel, not the grip. Now do you have the whole picture?”
Sam sensed he needed to vent some of his fury. “I’d rather hear it from you.”
“Trumanti wanted vengeance for his sister, and he fixed it so a seventeen-year-old kid got railroaded right through the system and shipped off to prison. Valente was no angel, but he wasn’t a pusher, he wasn’t a user, and he hadn’t been in any trouble for quite a while. And,” McCord added emphatically, “he sure as hell wasn’t guilty of first-degree manslaughter.”
He ran his hand around his nape again and flexed his broad shoulders, as if trying to loosen the tension i
n his body. “If he’d had a decent lawyer, he’d have gotten off with self-defense, and if the judge wouldn’t completely buy that argument, he’d have gotten second-degree manslaughter with probation. Instead, Trumanti, Kraits, and the good old boys at the local precinct set Valente up; then they sent him away for four years. But that was just the beginning,” he added scathingly.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked, but she already had an ugly premonition of where he might be heading.
“What do you remember about Valente’s next few busts?” Leaning forward, he shoved the recap file across the desk to her. “Here, refresh your memory.”
Sam automatically reached for it because he’d ordered her to; then she drew her hand back because she didn’t need to look at the file. “For the first few years after Valente was released, his record stayed clean. There was a flurry of arrests for really minor stuff—speeding a few miles over the limit—possession of a controlled substance which turned out to be a prescription for a painkiller.”
“And after that?” McCord prodded.
“About ten years ago, the charges became serious ones. The first one was attempted bribery of a city official—Valente attempted to bribe a building inspector who was going to write him up for some building code violations. There were several other, similar attempted bribery charges brought against him after that, and then the scope and number of the charges became much larger as time went on.”
McCord dismissed that information with a look of withering scorn. “My second appointment today was with that building inspector Valente allegedly tried to bribe. Mr. Franz is in a nursing home now, and he’s a little worried about what God is going to think of some of the things he’s done in his life. He unburdened himself in five minutes.”
“What did he say?”
“Valente never tried to bribe him, nor did he try to bribe the two other guys who claimed he did in later cases that were filed. Trumanti put them up to it.”
Straightening, he walked over to the table piled high with thick folders of information on the other court cases filed against Valente. He picked up a file and dropped it in disgust. “I can already tell you why all these cases ended with either ‘Charges Dropped,’ ‘Case Dismissed for Insufficient Evidence,’ or ‘Not Guilty,’ according to your recap. It’s because they’re a pile of crap. Fortunately, by the time they were being filed, Valente could afford his own attorneys to defend him instead of having to rely on the kind of public defender who let him plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter. I would also bet you that Trumanti was either directly or indirectly responsible for at least half of these accusations.”