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?”