Someone to Watch Over Me

“Lodged in the timbers of the right-hand wall of the garage.”

The Jeep had been pushed outdoors and was being dusted for prints and checked for fibers, which left room inside for CSU’s battery-operated high-wattage lights. “We’d have spotted it sooner if we’d been able to get our lights in here earlier.” He walked over to the wall on the right and pointed to a fresh hole in the timbers about four and a half feet up from the floor. “Was there anything in front of it on the shelf?” Sam asked.

“Nope. No one tried to hide it. We just couldn’t see it until we lit the place up.”

Silently, Sam gauged the height of the newly discovered hole and turned, comparing it to the height of the open window on the passenger door of the Jeep.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Shrader said, arriving at the same possibility Sam had reached.

“I assume the window on the passenger side was down when you got here?” Shrader asked him.

“If it’s down now, it was down when we got here.”

“Was that a definite yes?” Shrader said impatiently. “Or was it ‘I think so, it should have been, it probably was.’?”

“The windows are electric and the battery is dead, so it had to have been down when they got here,” Sam pointed out in a low voice.

“I know that,” Shrader said irritably. “I just don’t want to listen to any smart-ass answers on my day off.”

“It was definitely down when we got here, Detective,” came the more respectful reply.

“Thank you,” Shrader retorted.

An hour after Niles left with Manning’s body, Sam and Shrader hiked back up to the main road behind McCord. “It’s two-thirty,” McCord said. “By the time we get back to the city, Niles should know whether or not Manning was holding that thirty-eight when it fired. Once we know that, we can call on his widow in person and watch how she takes the news.”

“I’m going to let the two of you handle that yourself,” Shrader told him. “I had to miss my granddaughter’s birthday party today, and I’d like to go by and see her before she’s in bed asleep. Is it okay if Sam rides back with you?”

“It’s fine,” McCord said.

Her unexpected attraction to McCord yesterday had surprised and concerned Sam so much that she’d made a very deliberate, and successful, effort to rationalize it out of existence by the time she went to bed. As a result, she was able to spend three and a half hours in the car with him, talking about nothing in particular, without experiencing so much as a tiny, inappropriate tremor of sexual awareness. There was no more banter between them on the trip back to the city, no stimulating repartee or personal comments.

Only two things bothered Sam in that regard: One, she rather missed all that, and two, she didn’t think McCord even noticed it was missing.

Shortly before six P.M., McCord stopped at a convenience store to buy a sandwich, and while Sam waited in the car, Herbert Niles phoned. He was still reexamining the last swab under a scanning electron microscope, but he was eager to impart his findings to Sam the instant she picked up McCord’s cell phone from the seat and answered it. “There was no residue on Manning’s right palm,” Niles told her, “so he wasn’t holding up his hand in a defensive pose when the shot was fired. I got residue off the fingers of his right hand, so there’s no doubt his hand was on the weapon when it fired at least one of those shots. But you know where else I ought to find residue if he fired that weapon without any ‘assistance’?”

Sam named the only other location he would have swabbed: “On the back of his hand.”

“That’s right. I’m looking at the swab of the back of his right hand right now, and it’s perfectly clean. You’ve got yourself a homicide, not a suicide, Detective.”

Sam tried not to sound as surprised as she felt when she relayed Nile’s findings to McCord a few minutes later: “Niles called. Someone else’s hand was covering Manning’s and holding it on the thirty-eight when it fired.”

“There was no powder residue on the back of his hand?” McCord’s smile was slow and satisfied.

Sam shook her head. “No. The only residue was on the fingers of his right hand.”

“I knew it,” McCord said softly. “I knew it was going to play out this way as soon as CSU dug the second slug out of the wall. It always amazes me . . .”

“What does?”

“The stupid mistakes murderers make.”

Chapter 26

* * *

Courtney glanced at the clock in the kitchen. “It’s almost six, and I’ve got a lot of work to do for class tomorrow.”

“You’re calling it quits?” O’Hara said with relief, tallying up the score. “Why stop now, when I’ve still got some money left in my pension fund?”

“Call me softhearted.”

“You’re a cardsharp. Do you fleece those people you’re staying with out of their money, too?”

She grinned as she slid the cards back into their box. “The Donnellys are either out, or they’re sleeping—” The telephone rang, and since Hilda had gone to a movie, O’Hara got up to answer it. When he hung up a moment later, he was frowning.

“Was that about Mr. Manning?” Courtney asked worriedly.

“No. It’s Michael Valente. He’s in the lobby. Mrs. Manning is expecting him.”

“What’s he like?”

“All I know is that he’s big trouble for Mrs. Manning. You saw what happened when the reporters found out she’d been with him on Friday in the mountains. You’d have thought she was sleepin’ with the devil or something, just for being in his helicopter. I was with the two of them every second, and nothing happen

ed. Nothing. Mrs. Manning doesn’t even call him by his first name.”

“I’d never heard of him until I saw all that stuff about him on the news this week,” Courtney admitted. “I guess he’s really famous, though.”

“Yeah, for a whole lot of bad stuff. I owe you sixteen dollars.” He dug the money out of his pocket and put it on the table.

“Did he seem like a bad guy the day you were with him?”

“Let me put it this way—I wouldn’t like to be around if he ever loses his temper. The cops were needling him that day, especially a cop named Harwell, and Valente didn’t like it. He got real, real quiet . . . And his eyes got real, real cold . . . Know what I mean?”

Courtney was intrigued. “He looked like . . . what . . . murderous?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“Maybe I should stay while he’s here, just to make sure Leigh is all right?”

The buzzer at the front door sounded, and O’Hara dismissed her suggestion. “I’ll be close by while he’s here, but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. From what I’ve read over the years, he’s involved in a lot of shady business deals, but he hasn’t done anything violent in a long time.”

“How reassuring,” Courtney said sarcastically.

“Well, maybe this will be more reassuring . . .” he said with a confiding wink. “That day in the mountains, the cops told Mrs. Manning to wait up at the road while they checked out the cabin. When nobody came back up to tell us anything, Valente picked Mrs. Manning up and carried her in his arms through the snow, down to the cabin. Then he carried her all the way back up to the road. He turns into a real Sir Galahad when he’s around her.”

“Really?” Courtney breathed. “How . . . interesting.”

“I’ll call you when we hear anything about Mr. Manning,” O’Hara promised on his way toward the living room.

Instead of letting herself out the service door to the kitchen, Courtney strolled quietly over to the doorway into the dining room. Leaning her shoulder against the doorframe, she peered thoughtfully at the tall, broad-shouldered man walking down the foyer steps into the living room. According to what she’d read and heard about him this week, Michael Valente was as adept at eluding reporters as he was at eluding attempts to put him in prison.