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Valente’s savage voice was like the crack of a whiplash. “I would say you’re out of your fucking mind.”

McCord’s head snapped toward Valente, and Sam watched the two foes finally confront each other eye to eye—a cunning hunter, a dangerous predator. They were silent for a moment, mentally circling each other; then the hunter smiled. “I was under the impression you and Mrs. Manning were complete strangers until the night you met at her party. Do you have more than a casual interest in her?”

“Cut the bullshit!” Valente snapped, rolling to his feet with the sudden, deadly grace of the panther he reminded Sam of at that moment. “You’ve had us both under surveillance for weeks. You know damned well she spent the night with me last night.”

Buchanan hurriedly stood up, too, giving Sam the impression the attorney was worried about what his client might do next, but McCord was moving in for another attack. “You knew her a long time ago, didn’t you? Fourteen years ago, to be exact.”

“You just figured that out?” Valente shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the stupidity he had to deal with: then he walked out with Buchanan on his heels.

For several moments, McCord stared after them, his jaw clenched with inexplicable anger; then he said softly, as if to himself, “Son of a bitch! He was ready to talk. . . .”

He glanced over at Sam and said in furious self-disgust, “I should have gauged him myself, but I thought I knew everything there was to know about him from his files, so I shoved him into a wall right from the start. I showed him how tough I was, so he had to show me he didn’t give a shit. You were right, Sam. The Ice Man has a hot spot—no, he’s got a soft spot for Leigh Manning. If I hadn’t strong-armed him, if I’d have played straighter with him, I think he’d have told me something I needed to know. He’ll never give us another shot—”

Jumping to her feet, Sam ran for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To try to play straight with him!” she called over her shoulder, racing toward the back hall and the stairwell there. She shoved past a startled Captain Holland and his group, who were still standing by the one-way mirror, talking about Valente’s visit. Praying the elevators would be as crowded and slow as they usually were, she slammed against the heavy stairwell door and sprinted down two flights of stairs, her footsteps ringing loudly, her heartbeat almost matching them.

Chapter 56

* * *

The first floor was crowded with the usual mix of uniformed police officers, ordinary citizens, and attorneys heading in different directions, but Valente and Buchanan were nowhere in sight. Sam sprinted to the main doors, shoved one open, and saw the two men walking swiftly down the steps toward a black Mercedes limousine gliding up to the curb. “Mr. Valente!” she shouted.

Both men turned and watched her run toward them, Buchanan with a frown of surprise, Valente with an expression of scathing disbelief.

Specks of snow were swirling in the wind as Sam wrapped her arms around herself and tried to take control of a situation for which she was neither prepared, nor even dressed. “Mr. Valente,” Sam began, “there are some questions, I’d—”

Buchanan interrupted her, his tone as frigid as the wind flattening her thin shirt against her skin. “You had your chance to ask your questions upstairs, Detective. This is an inappropriate place for whatever you have in mind.”

Sam ignored the irate lawyer and focused the full force of her appeal on his cynical client. Trying to “play it straight,” she said sincerely, “Mr. Valente, I’m a minority of one, but I’ve never been convinced that either you or Mrs. Manning murdered her husband.”

“If this is a good-cop, bad-cop routine,” Valente said contemptuously, “you’re lousy at it.”

“Give me time, I’m still new at my job,” Sam quipped, shivering, and she thought she witnessed a slight, momentary crack in his glacial expression. Resorting to a tone of innocent sincerity that bordered embarrassingly on naïveté, Sam tried to sidle through that crack in his resistance. “I’ve only been a detective for a few weeks, so maybe I’m doing this all wrong, but if you could just explain something to me, then maybe I could help—”

“I repeat, Detective—this sidewalk is not the place for you to question my client,” Buchanan warned angrily. To Valente he added, “We’re going to be late.” The chauffeur was standing at the rear of the limousine, and he opened the door as soon as Buchanan turned toward him.

The lawyer got into the car and Valente turned to follow him, but Sam stayed on his heels. “Mr. Valente, why did you and Mrs. Manning pretend not to know each other?”

“I’ve never pretended anything of the kind,” Valente said curtly, sliding onto the backseat of his car.

That was true, Sam realized, recalling his behavior with Leigh Manning when Sam had seen them together. She leaned into the car so the chauffeur couldn’t close the door, and, shivering convulsively, she tried to reason with Valente one last time. “That’s right, you didn’t—but Mrs. Manning did pretend, and that’s what’s creating our doubts and suspicion. If you really want us to look elsewhere for suspects, then you need to answer my question. Do you want us to look elsewhere—” She started to say “other than you and Mrs. Manning”; then she pressed his button with Leigh Manning: “—elsewhere, other than Mrs. Manning?”

He hesitated, and then to Sam’s joyous surprise, he snapped, “Get into the car.”

Sam climbed in, and the chauffeur closed the door. “Thank you,” she said, rubbing her arms and trying to stop her teeth from chattering. She opened her mouth to ask a question, then stopped in shock as the limo pulled away from the curb.

“I’m late for an appointment in midtown,” Valente said, his words clipped. “Do you want to get out?” he challenged. “Or do you want to go along for the ride?”

Sam caught the veiled irony in that last question, and she discarded several glib replies that came to mind. Her instincts warned her against sparring with him on any level, because she had the feeling Michael Valente was a far more formidable opponent than even his reputation allowed. She hesitated, wondering if she dared reveal anything about the note he wrote Leigh Manning to accompany the pears: then she decided to risk it. If he had an alibi, that note wasn’t going to do McCord a bit of good. Even if his alibi didn’t hold up, Buchanan would learn of the note under the rules of discovery.

“I’m waiting, Detective,” Valente said impatiently.

Sam decided to opt for absolute sincerity if he’d let her—and for a new career if she’d already made the wrong decisions. “When Mrs. Manning was still in the hospit

al,” she explained, “Detective Shrader came across a phone message from you, and he asked her if she knew you. She lied and said she’d met you for the first time at her party, a few nights before. Do you know why she lied?”

“She wasn’t lying,” he retorted.

Sam began to lose faith in McCord’s judgment about Valente being “ready to talk.” She looked at him, searching his forbidding features. “How long have you known Mrs. Manning?”

“Fourteen years.”

Sam breathed an imperceptible sigh of relief. That at least was an honest answer, but she wasn’t pleased with how she had to go about getting it. Carefully banishing all confrontational undertones from her voice, she said quietly, “If you will try to overcome your understandable resentment of having to answer my very personal questions—and answer them fully—I will try to ask as few of them as I can. And I’ll even answer yours. Deal?”

Although he refused to make any such “deal” with her, he at least clarified his last answer. “She didn’t recognize me when she met me at her party, because we hadn’t seen each other in fourteen years. I had a beard when she knew me before.”

“Are you saying she didn’t even recognize your name?” Sam asked skeptically.

“She knew me by another name.”

“Would that be ‘Falco’ or would it be ‘Nipote’?” she prodded, watching for his reaction.

His reaction was a short, sardonic laugh. “You took the note I sent her with the pears,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. “You people are unbelievable.”

Reluctant to admit she had the note if she didn’t need to, Sam said, “How would you reach a conclusion about a note from what I asked you?”

“You figure it out, Detective.”


Tags: Judith McNaught Romance