lthough Valente had consented to see them, Sam didn't expect a warm welcome from him and they didn't get one. He was standing behind his desk, his expression cold and forbidding.

Sam smiled a greeting anyway. "Thank you for seeing us," she said, and then she tried—without success—to inject a little humor into the taut moment by gesturing to McCord, who was on her left, and saying, "Unfortunately, you two have already met."

Valente's gaze sliced over McCord like a razor. "Your 'ticket of admission' buys you three minutes of my time," he warned him; then he added, "You realize, of course, that you're breaking the law by attempting to question me without my attorney present?"

McCord's primary interest at the moment was the tape recorder he spotted on Valente's desk. "I'm going to turn this off for a moment," he said calmly. "If you want to turn it back on after I start talking, you can, and then we'll leave."

Valente shrugged. "As long as you're going to do the talking, be my guest."

McCord pressed the off button and stepped back. "Now, the situation is this: We are not breaking any law by being here, because I have eliminated you as a suspect in Manning's murder. At the moment, you're under surveillance, which you already know, and your phones are tapped, but I'm going to let all that stay as it is—"

Valente laughed, a harsh contemptuous laugh. "Of course you are, you son of a bitch."

"You know," McCord said, "there's a part of me that would like to walk around that desk and beat the shit out of you for making this so hard."

Valente glanced at the floor near him and said in a soft, deadly voice, "Consider yourself invited."

Sam actually tensed during that opening exchange, but once McCord had fired his warning shot, he turned and strolled over to the windows. Looking out at the skyline, he said evenly. "But then there's another part of me that has to answer for how I would feel if I were in your position. How would I feel if I'd spent four years in prison paying for a crime the cops knew I didn't commit, all because the doped-up punk I killed in self-defense, with his gun, not mine—happened to be named William Trumanti Holmes."

Shoving his hands into his pockets, McCord studied Valente's reflection in the glass as he continued. "How would I feel if, after I got out of prison and started building an honest business, Trumanti sent three minions after me, each one swearing a false oath in consecutive cases that I tried to bribe him?"

From the corner of her eye, Sam saw Valente lean his right hip on the credenza behind his desk and fold his arms over his chest, his expression coolly speculative, rather than ominous.

"The attempted bribery cases were only the beginning," McCord said, switching to his own point of view, rather than continuing to speak from Valente's. "As the years passed, the bigger you got, the bigger the arsenal Trumanti hauled in to bring you down. The city got the state involved, then the Feds got into the act. You've become the target of every law enforcement agency around, and you haven't broken one goddamned law that I know of."

With a grim laugh, he added, "You're no martyr, though. The prosecutors who've gone after you end up lying bloodied on your battlefield, their careers and reputations destroyed. That's your revenge. Of course, it costs you millions in legal fees, and you still can't buy back the reputation they stole from you."

McCord turned slowly from the windows and faced him, his hands still shoved into his pockets. "Did I get the story right?"

"You had me in tears," Valente mocked.

McCord said nothing to that, and Sam studied the male tableau before her with fascination. They were still hunter and predator, still instinctive foes—cunning, wary, and aggressive—but for the moment, each man was maintaining a deliberately casual, noncombative stance: Mack with his hands in his pockets, Valente with his arms crossed over his chest and his hip perched on the credenza.

Separated by some silently agreed upon neutral zone of about eight feet, Valente wasn't on the offensive anymore, but he was refusing to engage. McCord was calculating the best way to make him engage—but not attack.

Switching to an offhand, almost friendly tone, McCord said, "I have a very clear picture of what happened in all those other cases, but now we come to the Manning case—my case—and my picture is a little hazy in places. Here's the way I think you got involved, but I'd like you to correct me if I'm wrong."

In reply to that request, Valente noncommittally raised his eyebrows, but at least he was listening, and the three minutes he'd allotted them was over.

"I think you got involved on November twenty-eighth," McCord began, "when you attended a party at the home of a girl you used to know. I think the last time you spoke to her, she was still an ordinary college kid and you were a guy with a beard and no money, who was working in your aunt's grocery market and going to school. But by the night of the party, things were a lot different for both of you. She's a Broadway star now, and you're a very rich man—a tycoon, in fact, but one with a bad history. I also think—and this is where I'm guessing—that you had a real 'thing' for her in the old days. Am I right?"

Sam held her breath, waiting for Valente to answer—to agree to engage.

"Big time," Valente finally confirmed.

While Sam gave a mental cheer, McCord continued with his scenario: "Now, at the party, she doesn't recognize you. She takes you at face value—a notorious billionaire with an unsavory reputation, and she's notvery friendly. Even so, you're anxious to spend a little time with her. Unfortunately, she won't give you much time. While you're still trying to decide if, and when, to tell her who you really are, she hands you over to a friend—an astrologer—and your opportunity vanishes. And here's the real kicker to that," Mack speculated wryly, "although you only spent a few minutes with her at the party—you got hooked on her again, didn't you?"

Sam saw a slight smile deepen the corner of Valente's mouth, and she assumed Valente was dismissing McCord's statement as ludicrous—until Valente slowly nodded, and Sam drew the only other possible conclusion: Valente was unwillingly impressed that a "tough guy" like McCord could have made such a leap of logic about another man—particularly one with Valente's reputation.

"A couple of days later," Mack continued, "you hear she's been in a car wreck, and she's in the hospital. You know she loves pears, because she used to buy them at your aunt's market. So you send her a basket of them with a note on your letterhead, and you sign it with the only names she ever knew you by. But she doesn't get the note because we have it. A few days later, when she gets home from the hospital, you go over to her apartment to see how she's doing—"

McCord stopped there and asked another question. "How did you get her to agree to let you come up to her apartment if she still didn't know who you were?"

"I told her that her husband had some documents that belonged to me and I needed them."

McCord nodded, assimilating that. "Was that true?"

"No."

"But the ploy worked," McCord continued. "As a result, you were there when we called to tell her we'd found her car, and you volunteered to fly her to the site in your helicopter. Hell, why wouldn't you volunteer to do that?" Mack asked with a shrug. It was a rhetorical question, one he answered himself on Valente's behalf. "You cared about her—you didn't know her husband was dead, and you have nothing to hide. In fact, you landed your helicopter, with her in it, on the road right in front of a row of police vehicles.

"Even after you found out that Manning was dead, you kept right on going to see her—and you did it knowing damned well the NYPD would try to make a case against you on any flimsy excuse you gave them. But you weren't worried about that, because you didn't know we had an excuse—and it wasn't flimsy. We had the note you sent Leigh Manning—a note that is so damning that anyone who wrote it would become Suspect Number One in a murder-conspiracy case."

As McCord came to his role in the scenario, he walked over to Valente's desk and restlessly picked up a paperweight, studying it as he spoke. "But you aren't just 'anyone,' " he said. "You're the object of Trumanti's vendetta, and from the moment he heard about that note you wrote Leigh Manning, his one goal has been to live long enough to sit in front of the window when you're given a lethal injection. That's where I come in," McCord added bluntly, putting the paperweight down and looking straight at Valente. "I'm Trumanti's handpicked 'assistant executioner,' whose job it is to help him stick the needle in your arm."

Sam couldn't see McCord's face because his back was to her, but she could see Valente's face, and he was scrutinizing McCord very closely, as McCord finished, "I'm not going to cancel the surveillance on you and Mrs. Manning or the wire taps on you. I can't risk giving Trumanti any reason to replace me with someone else who'll do his bidding. The best I can do right now is return that note you wrote to Leigh Manning as a gesture of truce—of goodwill."

"How many copies of it did you keep?" Valente inquired blandly.

"Six," McCord replied bluntly. "However, they're in my custody and they'll stay there unless I find out I'm all wrong and you did kill Manning. That's the best I can do right now. I'm sorry, but you'll have to live with it."

In reply, Valente pressed a button on his credenza, and a dark glass panel slid open. Behind it glowed tiny red lights on an elaborate sound system. "I can live with that," he said, removing a cassette tape from the recorder, "as long as you can live with this."

McCord's eyes narrowed on the tape and then lifted to Valente's face. "Just out of curiosity, what do you intend to do with that?"

"It will remain in my custody," Valente replied, repeating McCord's earlier words, "unless you change your mind and decide either Leigh Manning or I killed her husband."

The day before, McCord wouldn't have believed a word that came out Michael Valente's mouth. Now he took his word about a very damaging tape and eyed his former foe with reluctant admiration. "Nice trick," he commented.

Sam bit down on her lower lip to keep from laughing and made a show of searching for something in her handbag.

"We need to talk to Mrs. Manning now," McCord explained, "because I think the murder may have been related to her husband's financial dealings. Naturally, you can be present while we talk to her."

"Naturally," Valente agreed dryly, reaching into his desk drawer and removing a cell phone. He glanced at it for a moment as if it were unfamiliar to him, then he turned it on.

"New phone?" McCord speculated with a twinge of a smile.

Valente looked at him as if the answer was obvious. "One of several," he averred, pressing the numbers on the keypad.

"I imagine they're probably the newest digital models, too—the ones that are very hard for us to monitor? And I imagine they're registered to someone besides you?"

"I'm beginning to see how you got to be a lieutenant," Valente told him with mocking amusement; then he broke off as his call was answered. "O'Hara," he said, "can Leigh take a phone call right now?"

While he waited for O'Hara to bring the phone to her, Valente explained, "Leigh's at the theater, rehearsing, but she should be finishing up about now. She's going on tonight—"

Sam heard the unmistakable pride in his voice as he made that announcement, but a moment later when Leigh Manning took his phone call, Valente's deep baritone gentled and his features softened so much that Sam was transfixed by the change. "McCord and Littleton are in my office," Valente told Leigh. He chuckled at her reply; then he looked straight at Sam and McCord as he said, "I made that same suggestion to them when they arrived, but they were very persistent." Teasingly, he added, "Aren't you the one who once told me it was every citizen's civic duty to cooperate with the police?"

When he hung up, his attitude reverted to brisk and businesslike. "She'll be here in a half hour. I've already asked her about Logan's finances, but she doesn't know of anything unusual—other than the fact that he seems to have paid cash for an expensive piece of jewelry he gave her the night of the party."

"Maybe she'll think of something when we talk to her," McCord replied, standing up. "We'll wait in the reception room until she gets here."

Valente looked at McCord for a long moment. "Why is it you're not trying to hang the murder on Leigh?"

"There's always a chance she killed him," McCord said, playing it absolutely straight, "but the only suspicious thing she's ever done was appear to be having an extramarital clandestine relationship with you—with a man who has a criminal record for a violent crime. Once I take all that out of the equation, she looks to me like any other widow."

WHILE they waited for Leigh Manning to arrive, McCord asked Sam to arrange for them to see Sheila Winters later that same day if possible. Sam phoned the psychiatrist and after some wrangling, Dr. Winters agreed to see them at four-forty-five, after her last appointment.