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.”