“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.”