“No, that won’t work,” Sam said resignedly, but firmly. “Let’s trade explanations instead?” She waited for him to agree in advance. Instead he lifted his brows and regarded her in noncommittal silence, so Sam took a major gamble and offered her explanation anyway. She explained why the basket of pears had originally concerned her and she told him exactly how she’d ended up finding and reading his note. When she finished, Sam paused deliberately, in order to lend greater significance to her next comment. “Mr. Valente, do you remember what you wrote in that note?”
He nodded impassively, but the implications of his written words—and what the police would naturally infer from them—registered on him, because his expression became fractionally less guarded and distant than she’d ever seen it.
Sam smiled a little without realizing it. “How did you conclude I’d found the note when I mentioned those two names?”
He hesitated a moment; then he reluctantly answered her. “I specifically wrote those names on my note because they were the only names Leigh knew me by in the old days. Now ask yourself a question,” he instructed shortly. “Do you think I would have needed to further identify myself on my own letterhead if she already knew who Michael Valente was?”
Sam shook her head. “No,” she said, and then she probed a little deeper. “When did Mrs. Manning finally realize you were her old friend ‘Falco Nipote’?”
A sudden, fleeting smile flickered in his golden eyes and touched the corners of his mouth, momentarily softening his features in a way that made Sam catch her breath at the transformation. “I evidently said something very funny just now?” she ventured, trying to maintain her calm, businesslike approach.
He inclined his head in a slow nod, traces of the smile still lingering in his eyes, but he remained frustratingly silent.
“Give me a break—” she joked before she could stop herself.
He thawed another degree at her joking plea and actually gave her that break. “Falco is Italian for ‘hawk,’ which was my nickname in the old days. That’s the name that Leigh heard me called.”
“And Nipote?” Sam pressed. “That’s Italian for—?”
“Nephew.”
Sam’s eyes widened in puzzlement. “That’s what we were told when we checked with people who are fluent in Italian, but we thought it must have some other meaning between you and Mrs. Manning. Why would she know you as ‘nephew’?” Sam realized the answer before she finished the question, but waited for him to confirm it.
“Leigh used to hear my aunt call me that, and she assumed it was my name.”
“You didn’t know each other well at all then?”
“We rarely spoke.”
“I see.” Sam remembered the important question that had started her down this surprising path, but which still remained unanswered. “When did Mrs. Manning realize that you were her old friend from Great Jones Street?” she asked as the car pulled over to the curb just past the corner at Park Avenue and Forty-eighth Street.
“The same night she learned her husband was dead. I had gone to see her specifically to tell her who I was, and to see how she was doing.”
“Were you still with her when we talked to her that night?” Sam asked as the chauffeur got out and opened the back door of the limo. Her fragile truce with him collapsed the instant she asked that question, because he realized she was no longer playing completely straight with him.
“You know damned well I was,” he retorted, then he nodded curtly to the open car door and said brusquely, “This is where we get out.”
With no choice except to get out, too, Sam did so, and both men followed her onto the sidewalk, leaving her there. Valente paused to say something to his driver and then strode off with Buchanan, both of them with briefcases in hand. Sam walked to the rear of the limo, her arms clasped around her, craning her neck for a cab; then she turned around to see where Valente and Buchanan were headed. She had no coat and no purse, ergo, no money for a taxi, but she could pay for one when she got back to the precinct.
Valente and Buchanan walked into the huge building that took up the whole block, and, on an impulse, Sam decided to follow them. “Where are you going, miss?” Valente’s chauffeur called out as she ran past him. “Mr. Valente told me to take you back to the precinct—”
“Wait here or circle the block,” Sam called to him. “I forgot to ask him something,” she lied.
She dashed into the building just as the elevator doors closed behind Valente and his attorney. Backing up, Sam watched the lights above the elevator flash as it passed the floors, then glow a steady green on the sixteenth floor.
The building’s directory was located between the elevators, and she scanned the names listed on it with suites on the sixteenth floor. There were only four names shown, which indicated they were very large suites. “Knightsbridge Obstetrics and Gynecology”; “Truman and Horn, Certified Public Accountants”; “Aldenberry, Smith, and Cromwell,” a very well known law firm. Sam ruled out the obstetricians with an inner laugh. When Valente and McCord had been together in the interviewing room earlier, the atmosphere had been positively crackling with macho, killer-instinct, maleness. Definitely not the obstetricians. Valente’s cousin handled his financial matters, and Valente was already represented by one of the most prestigious law firms in New York, so she ruled the other two firms out. The fourth suite of offices on the sixteenth floor belonged to a company called Interquest Inc.
Sam went to the reception desk, pointed to the ID badge hanging from a chain around her neck, and spoke to the guard. “What can you tell me about Interquest?”
“Not a whole lot, Detective. About all I know is they’re a private investigation firm on the sixteenth floor, and they must be expensive as hell, because they’ve got a suite of offices up there you wouldn’t believe.”
“Thank you very much,” she replied, glancing at his name tag, “Leon.”
LOST IN THOUGHT, Sam gazed out the window of Valente’s limousine at the tide of pedestrians hurrying past on the sidewalk, their heads bent into the wind as they outpaced the snarl of lunchtime traffic.
Since Valente and Buchanan had requested a meeting at the precinct to discuss Manning’s murder, and then gone directly to a private investigation firm, Sam had a strong hunch that Valente had hired his own investigators to try to find Logan Manning’s murderer. A very odd thing for a man to do if he thought the woman he was in love with had done the deed. Either that, or Valente’s lawyer was looking for viable, alternative suspects to throw at McCord like decoys now—or to bring up in court later in order to confuse a jury into believing there were other people besides Mrs. Manning with a motive and opportunity to kill Logan Manning.
That, of course, assumed that Valente’s alibis checked out and removed him from the list of suspects. Even if they did check out, there was also the possibility that Valente had paid someone else to murder Manning.
Sam sighed. That was all perfectly possible and even believable. What wasn’t believable was that Valente had actually bothered to send her back in his nice, warm limousine.
On the sixteenth floor, Michael stood at the window, idly watching his car inching through traffic with Sam Littleton in it. “Littleton followed us into the building,” he remarked to Buchanan.
The founder of Interquest, Stephen Wallbrecht, walked into his office and heard Michael’s remark. “Samantha K. Littleton—” he provided, “the youngest and most inexperienced member of the team investigating Manning’s murder.”
Chapter 57
* * *
A subtly dynamic man, Wallbrecht was tall and slender, with thinning hair, keenly intelligent light gray eyes, and an aura of absolute competence and relentless energy.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Michael,” he said, shaking hands with him and then Buchanan. He sat down behind his desk and removed some files from his bottom right-hand drawer. “As usual, I’d like to start by quickly evaluating our adversaries.” While he spoke he handed both men a set
of dossiers and laid the third set on his desk for reference if necessary. “You probably know already that the investigative team on the Manning case is made up of four members.”
To Michael he said, “You mentioned Samantha Littleton, so we’ll start with her first. She’s thirty-three, and she only got her gold shield a little over a month ago. From what I can gather, whatever she lacks in experience, she evidently makes up for in raw intelligence and gut instinct. If you decide to piss her off,” he added humorously, “be sure you’re under cover. She’s a crack shot, and she got her black belt in karate when she was still a teenager. Her father,” he added meaningfully, “was Ethan Littleton.”
“The football coach?” Buchanan asked. When Wallbrecht nodded, Buchanan said, “So that would make her Brian and Tom Littleton’s sister?”
“Right again—two Heisman Trophy winners and a legendary coach in one family. Of the four remaining brothers, two are high school football coaches, one still plays minor league baseball, and the last one owns a gym here in New York. Samantha was the youngest of the seven kids, and according to some friends of the family, the boys got all the muscles, but she got most of the brains. After her father died, her mother remarried.”
He paused again for effect, and then dropped a small verbal bomb. “Detective Littleton’s stepdaddy is Senator Hollenbeck.”
“I wish I’d known that a little earlier,” Buchanan said ruefully. “I might have been slightly less offensive. Hollenbeck and I sit on a committee together, and we have friends in common.”
Wallbrecht’s phone rang, and he reached across his desk and pressed a button to silence it. Without commenting on Buchanan’s remarks, he said, “When Samantha made detective and said she wanted Homicide, the senator pulled strings to get her into the safest precinct in Manhattan, which is the Eighteenth. I’m told that particular little ‘sweetheart deal’ was made between the senator and Captain Holland and that Detective Littleton doesn’t know about it. She’s not particularly close to her stepfather, possibly because he’s as domineering as her father and brothers were. That last is unconfirmed gossip I collected for you, by the way, not necessarily fact.”
Buchanan had opened her dossier, and Wallbrecht waited politely until the attorney was finished perusing it; then he moved on to the next member of the investigative team. “Malcolm Shrader is an experienced detective with one of the best arrest-to-conviction ratios in the entire department. He’s a hell of a lot smarter than he looks, so don’t ever underestimate him. Word has it that he was mad as hell when he got stuck with Littleton as a temporary partner, but he’s quite a supporter of hers now, so my advice to you both is—don’t underestimate Littleton either.”
Since neither man had opened Shrader’s dossier, Wallbrecht moved on to Womack. “Detective Womack isn’t as smart as Shrader, but he’s good at his job. He’s a plodder, but he’s thorough. That’s about all you need to know of him for now.”
He paused, waiting for questions, and when none were forthcoming, he said, “Now we’ve come to Mitchell McCord, and therein, gentlemen, lies our most interesting challenge.” Leaning back in his chair, he shifted his gaze to Michael and said bluntly, “According to my sources, Commissioner Trumanti handpicked McCord and gave him a single assignment: That assignment was to nail you on the Manning murder, or on anything else that might come to light during McCord’s investigation of it.”
“Trumanti should have chosen somebody who understood his assignment better,” Michael said angrily, “because the son of a bitch he picked isn’t sticking with me; he’s trying to go after Leigh Manning.”
Wallbrecht rolled his pen between his fingers, studying Michael Valente’s face curiously; then he gave his own assessment of McCord. “Mitchell McCord is a human Sidewinder missile with a high-functioning intellect and a Ph.D. in criminal psychology,” he argued. “If Mack decides you’re guilty, he will lock on to you, and he will stay with you, and nothing you can do will shake him off or sidetrack him. He will keep closing the distance —and he will bring you down.”
Wallbrecht waited for some sort of reaction to that, but there was none. Smiling slightly, he admitted, “You’re right about what you said, though—Trumanti did pick the wrong man for this job. You can’t send Mack after the wrong target and order him to stay on it for some self-serving reason of your own. If you try to do that, what you’ll get is a shitload of embarrassing fallout, because Mack will not only go after the right target on his own, he’ll bring him down and then he’ll go after you. And that,” he finished with a chuckle at Buchanan, “is why Mitchell McCord isn’t next in line for Trumanti’s job. He’s the best detective the NYPD has ever had, but he won’t play politics, and he won’t kiss anybody’s ass.
“I’ve been trying to lure Mack over here with an offer of a full partnership and a gigantic salary, but every time he’s ready to turn in his resignation, somebody over at the department hands him a case he just can’t resist.” Wallbrecht tipped his chin and looked at Michael. “This time, the irresistible case was . . . yours.”
Finished with his review of the major players in the case, Wallbrecht said, “Beyond that, all I can tell you right now is that your telephones are tapped and you have a tail, which you already knew. Mrs. Manning has a tail but no wiretaps yet. Now, tell me what you want me to do next.”
“I want you to find out who killed Logan Manning. Whoever did it is walking around free, while his widow can’t even eat in a restaurant without having people talking about her. Also, she had a stalker. Gordon will give you all the details. Whether he’s involved with Manning’s murder or not, I want him found and taken off the street so she doesn’t have to worry about him anymore.”
Wallbrecht leaned back in his chair and gazed at him in amazement. “So that’s the way it is?” he said softly. “You’re not interested in protecting yourself—it’s Mrs. Manning you want to protect?”
“That’s exactly the way it is,” Michael said flatly. Opening his briefcase, he tossed the dossiers into it; then he snapped it and the locks closed.
Wallbrecht pulled a sheet of paper from a tray on his desk and held his pen poised to make notes. “Okay, what can you give us on Manning that might be helpful?”
“Very little, but you’ve got a file on him already. He wanted to do business with me, and in the course of normal operations, I not only asked him for a financial statement, I had one of your people check him out. Go over the report you gave me and look for anything irregular in his finances.”
Wallbrecht’s pen stilled. “I would have started looking for an irate husband or boyfriend of one of his bed partners. Why his finances instead?”
“Several reasons,” Michael replied, standing up. “I threw my copies of his financial statements out, but I remember thinking he wasn’t as solvent as I’d expected him to be, considering what I knew of his overall lifestyle.”
Wallbrecht jotted a note. “What else?”
“The night before he disappeared he gave his wife a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar ruby-and-diamond pendant in a Tiffany’s box. For obvious reasons, she later decided she didn’t want it, but when her secretary tried to return it to Tiffany’s, she was informed it hadn’t come from there. When the two women looked for a record of who he did buy it from, there was nothing—no record of a check being written for it, no credit card receipt, no bill—nothing.”
Wallbrecht’s expression turned suspicious. “He paid cash?”
“Evidently. There’s one more thing—during one of our few dinner meetings, he bragged about a clever way he knew to spend offshore money in the U.S. without attracting the notice of the IRS. He didn’t actually say he was doing it, but he may have been. If he was laundering dirty money, then whoever killed him may have wanted some of it.” He shook his head in disgust as he shrugged into his topcoat. “I knew when Manning didn’t turn up after a few days, he was never going to be found alive. Besides what he told me about the offshore money, he also mentioned he’d bought a gun.�
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Wallbrecht laid his pen down and looked at Michael in bewilderment. “Why would he tell you, a virtual stranger, that he owned a gun and knew of a scam to spend offshore money?”
“Because he thought I’d be interested and impressed,” Michael said, picking up his briefcase from his chair. “After all, I’m the tough ex-con who keeps beating the system in court.” Ready to leave, he nodded at Buchanan, who was going to take a cab back to his own office; then he looked at Wallbrecht and said, “I don’t care how many people you have to put on this or how much it costs; find out who killed that worthless son of a bitch.”
He strode to the door; then he stopped and turned, with his hand on the knob. “There’s one more thing,” he informed Wallbrecht. “I want you to tell McCord that if he ever uses Leigh Manning’s name in front of me again in connection with that murder, I will take him down, and there aren’t enough cops in the city of New York to stop me.”
When he walked out, Wallbrecht and Buchanan looked at each other in stunned, wary silence. “I can’t believe this,” Wallbrecht finally said. “That’s the same man who shrugged when the state of New York filed six counts of fraud against him.”
Buchanan didn’t smile. “Do us all a favor—find us a lead on the real murderer, and do it fast. Because if your friend McCord tries to implicate Leigh Manning, I guarantee you that Michael Valente will not be controllable.”
Chapter 58
* * *
Shrader and Womack were walking down the precinct steps when Sam got out of Valente’s limousine, his chauffeur holding open her door. Ignoring their derisive grins, she ran past them, her arms clutched around herself for warmth. “Why didn’t you tell Valente you wanted a fur coat instead of a car?” Womack joked, following her inside, with Shrader right beside him.
“Did you get anything from Valente?” Shrader asked.
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