Someone to Watch Over Me

“What do you mean ‘indirectly’ responsible for them?”

“Trumanti built a few little fires with those early fraudulent charges, but he also created plenty of smoke, and prosecutors tend to believe the old adage ‘where there’s smoke there’s fire.’ They’ll start hunting on their own for the blaze that escaped them the last time.” He picked up another file and tossed it aside in contempt. “After a few years, Valente actually made himself into a bigger and bigger prosecutorial target.”

Sam lifted her hands in confusion. “How did he do that?”

“By making a habit of annihilating his opposition in court, not just beating them. When I read the pleadings and transcripts in these files, it was obvious that Valente’s battalion of attorneys have two assignments from him when they go into court. Their first assignment is to beat the charges, but their second is to beat the shit out of whoever is running and prosecuting the case. When I read the files, I could not believe some of the remarks Valente’s attorneys made on the record. In every case, his attorneys started out by spanking the prosecutors—belittling them for things like spelling errors, grammatical errors, typos, being two minutes late—minor mistakes that, in their hands, begin to take on the taint of incompetence. In several of the transcripts the judges actually started going along with them and reprimanding the prosecutors.

“Once Valente’s attorneys have embarrassed their opponents and made them look foolish, they get nastier and nastier, until they’re on a tirade using terms like ‘incurable stupidity’ and ‘inexcusable negligence’ and ‘gross incompetence.’?”

He stalked back to his desk and sat down. “Attorneys like Valente’s that cost two thousand dollars an hour or more do whatever they need to do to win a case. Period. They do not waste their time or their clients’ money exacting revenge, but Valente’s attorneys do it every time, and they obviously do it on his orders. Valente doesn’t call them off until he’s got the prosecutors’ faces in the mud and his foot is planted on their heads. Then, and only then, does he let them up.”

“I really can’t blame him for wanting a little petty revenge.”

“There’s nothing ‘petty’ about his revenge. Prosecutors who are made to look like fools in big cases like Valente’s can pretty much kiss their career ambitions good-bye. But prosecutors also have long memories and they can carry very big grudges. Moreover, every time Valente sends a few of them running for cover with their tails between their legs, there are a dozen more who are dying to step up to the plate and prove their own mettle by being the first and only one to successfully take Valente down.”

He picked up a pencil lying on his desk and then tossed it aside with the same impatience he’d tossed aside the file folders. “When I took over this case, I thought Valente was nothing but a big shark who’d been chewing through our legal nets for years. I wanted to harpoon him for the same reason the prosecutors did. I’m no different from them.”

“That is completely untrue!” Sam said so forcefully that surprise erased some of the anger on his face.

“How am I different?”

“You believed he was guilty of everything he’d been accused of when you took this assignment. Some of those prosecutors had to know they were making a mountain out of nothing.”

Instead of replying, he shook his head at something else he was remembering: “The day Trumanti summoned me to One Police Plaza and told me he wanted me to head this investigation as ‘a personal favor,’ I sensed there was something almost obsessively vindictive about his attitude toward Valente. Besides cursing him out in every breath, Trumanti kept telling me that nailing Valente was his dying wish. I think the old man has actually convinced himself Valente is guilty of everything, beginning with Holmes’s ‘manslaughter.’?” He glared at the top of his desk. “When I told him I was about to hand in my retirement notice, he told me if I nailed Valente on first-degree murder, I’d retire as a captain.”

“Did that have anything to do with why you took the case?”

“If I had any real desire to make captain,” he said with a disdainful smile, “I’d have simply managed my career a little differently.” Nodding toward the table again, he added, “When I started going through that pile of crap over there, I noticed that the prosecutors were out of control with some of those charges. Even I could tell they couldn’t make them stick. Valente’s no Mafia kingpin with a network of minions doing his dirty work so it can’t be traced to him. He runs a legitimate multinational corporation. With the kind of intense scrutiny he’s always under, his corporation must be squeaky clean, or else some prosecutor somewhere would stick him with something. The most they’ve ever found were some minor internal accounting irregularities like you’d find at any big corporation.”

He was quiet for a moment, looking to his left at the chalkboard where they’d kept track of the circumstantial evidence they had been compiling against Valente: then he shook his head and gave a short, grim laugh. “I think it’s safe to conclude that Valente didn’t kill Logan Manning, nor did he hire someone to do it for him.”

“What makes you so certain?” Sam asked, suppressing a pleased smile.

“Because, if Valente was willing to commit murder, he’d have targeted Trumanti a long time ago.” He stood up then, still looking at the chalkboard, and he said of Valente, “Now there is a man who lives by the saying ‘Never Complain, Never Explain.’ No wonder you liked him.”

Sam stood up, too. “What are you going to do now?”

“Among other things, I’m going to find out who really killed Manning. We’ll start all over tomorrow morning, looking at alternative suspects and theories.” Walking around his desk, he picked up his jacket and shrugged into it. “Get your coat,” he told her. “I’ll take you home.”

He’d never offered to do that before. McCord had a car, but in decent weather Sam walked home; otherwise she took the subway. She started to decline, but she didn’t do it. She told herself it was because he’d had a difficult enough day without her adding rejection of a nice offer to it. The truth was that he looked so weary and disheartened that she ached for him.

Chapter 60

* * *

A small crowd was waiting for the elevators, so McCord turned toward the stairwell and Sam followed him. He was two steps in front of her, which gave her time to dwell on the short hairs at his nape that touched his collar.

His mind was still on his unwitting part in trying to hang a crime on the wrong man. “I’m so damned glad I gave Valente the benefit of the doubt when I questioned him this morning,” he told her sarcastically. “They’ve been trying to lock him up for years, but I was going to help them stick a needle in his arm for something he didn’t do. How much worse can abuse of power and authority get?”

“I think he’s actually a very lucky man,” Sam replied behind him.

“How do you figure that?” McCord said derisively as they neared the landing on the second floor.

Sam’s right hand actually lifted toward his shoulder, but she pulled it back. She’d been able to withstand his magnetic appeal when he was strong and sure of himself, but she was evidently not proof against Mitchell McCord when he was troubled. “Because you’d never have let that happen. You’re nobody’s henchman. That’s what makes you so incredible—”

He stopped walking and turned so sharply that Sam couldn’t stop her descent to the next step or her hand from colliding with his on the railing. Her heart began to beat frantically when she found her face only an inch from his, and her fingers seemed to have fused themselves to his on the railing.

Swallowing, she struggled free of the momentary spell and stepped upward a step. He stepped up onto the one she’d vacated, giving her a close-up view of the tanned column of his throat at the V of his open collar. Fear of their discovery by anyone walking into the stairwell made her chest rise and fall rapidly, and his gaze dropped to her breasts, noting it. What he said, however, was exactly the opposite of anything she would have imagined

:

“No,” he said on a harsh laugh, as if he couldn’t believe he’d walked up that last step. “No.” Turning, he moved down the stairs rapidly with Sam right behind him, completely mortified and adamantly determined not to show it. The outer door opened onto a tiny, badly lit parking area behind the building. “It’s a nice night,” she lied with a cheerful voice, stepping into the freezing air. “I’d really like to take the subway and stop for some—shopping on the way home.”

She turned with a bright smile and then frowned when his hand locked around her elbow. “Get in my car,” he ordered.

Sam pulled her elbow free, but not roughly—not in a way that would show she was upset. Showing a male that you were upset made him leap to a variety of conclusions, none of which were ever what you wanted him to conclude. However, laughing at a man in that same situation thoroughly threw him off guard. Sam laughed good-naturedly. “I appreciate your offer, but I would really rather take the subway and go shopping.”

“Get in the car,” he commanded, putting his hand in the small of her back to ensure she did that.

The next big mistake you could make with a male in McCord’s inexplicably domineering mood, Sam knew, was to appear to make a big issue over nothing. Which of course made them conclude that the “nothing” was a big “something” to you.

Sam got into his car, and he closed the door behind her, then locked it with his key.

She almost got the giggles over that. “We’re both armed, you know,” she told him when he slid behind the steering wheel.