With her elbows on her desk and her neck between her palms, Sam idly massaged her nape with her fingers while she read the last report in Leigh Manning's file—a boring printout listing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every single neighbor Leigh Manning had ever had, at every address she'd ever lived at in New York.

Sam had been through all the files once already, but in her spare moments, she was going through the files on Leigh Manning and Michael Valente again, looking for something to connect the two of them prior to Logan Manning's murder. The handwritten note Valente had enclosed with the basket of fruit was some proof of that, but the district attorney wanted to build a case against Valente for either first-degree murder or conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. After five weeks' investigation, however, they still didn't have a scrap of evidence to indicate the alleged conspirators had so much as spoken on the telephone prior to the weekend of Manning's death.

Shrader strolled past Sam's desk carrying his daily morning snack—two doughnuts and a cup of coffee. "Hey, Littleton," he gloated as he sat down next to her at his own desk, "did you happen to see your grieving widow on the news last night? She was all dressed up and going out to dinner with her boyfriend."

"I saw her," Sam said. She'd already been through this same routine with Womack this morning, and she was ready to concede that Leigh Manning's behavior at Dr. Winters's office may merely have been a fantastically convincing performance.

"She's brazen as hell now, isn't she?" Shrader barked cheerfully.

"They're not keeping their relationship any secret," Sam murmured, glancing at him.

Shrader took a bite of doughnut and a swallow of coffee; then he picked up a piece of paper propped on his telephone. "I got a note here from McCord that says he wants us in his office at nine-forty-five. You know what that's about?"

Sam nodded and turned the last page at the back of the earliest file on Leigh Manning. "The Special Frauds guy is coming over to tell us what they found when they audited Manning's books and records. Forensics sent up their final written report on everything collected at the cabin, but there's evidently nothing we didn't already know from the preliminaries. McCord wants a full review and update of the case with us after that."

Finished with Leigh Manning's "life history," Sam dragged the thick summary file on Michael Valente across her desk and opened it. It was hard to imagine two more opposite people than Valente and Leigh Manning seemed to be. Leigh Manning had never had so much as a traffic ticket, and she was a member of the mayor's commission on fighting crime. Michael Valente had been charged with a series of crimes and he was on the police commissioner's personal "Hit List" of known criminals whose activities he wanted closely monitored.

Beside her, Shrader made a phone call to an assistant DA who wanted to prep him for trial on an upcoming homicide case that Shrader had handled. Sam picked up a pen and began making a list containing the date of each case brought against Valente, the principal charges filed, and the ultimate outcome each time—one case per line.

She worked backward, starting with the most recent case, occasionally referring to the additional data on the summary sheets to clarify the details of the crimes he'd allegedly committed against city, state, and federal laws. One of the things she noticed was that the prosecutors had frequently gone to the grand jury to get an indictment, which usually meant they didn't have a strong enough case to get a judge to sign an arrest warrant.

When she was finished, she had an impressive list of arrests and grand jury indictments over the last ten years for nonviolent crimes including attempted bribery, fraud, intent to defraud, grand larceny, insider trading, and income tax evasion, along with many variations on those same themes.

The right-hand column, listing the outcome of each case filed, had only three results: "Case Dismissed."

"Charges Dropped."

"Not Guilty."

In every one of those cases, Valente had been represented by arguably the best criminal defense law firm in New York, but it was difficult to believe that even Buchanan, Powell could have gotten a patently guilty man completely off on every single case.

There were also occasional charges brought against him for minor offenses, including possession of a controlled substance, careless and reckless driving, and disturbing the peace. Sam had already read the individual files on each case; and, in her opinion, the controlled substance case had been particularly ludicrous. According to what she'd read, that arrest had evidently been based on Valente's having had a prescription for a painkiller on him when he was busted for speeding—at six miles over the limit.

Once again the right-hand column had only three results for these lesser cases: "Case Dismissed."

"Charges Dropped."

"Not Guilty."

The single exception to all that was the item at the bottom of her list—a charge of manslaughter in the first degree, brought against Valente when he was seventeen, for the shooting death of William T. Holmes. Unlike the other crimes, that one had been violent and Valente had pleaded guilty to it—his first and only time to plead guilty, rather than fight the charges and beat them. He'd been sentenced to eight years in prison, with eligibility for parole after four.

Sam flipped through the folders on her desk, looking for the case file on the manslaughter conviction, interested in the reason he'd done the crime, wondering if perhaps—that time—a female had been in any way responsible for his single violent act.

Unable to find the file, she leaned toward Shrader's desk, but none of his folders had red labels. Womack's desk was directly behind Shrader's, and she swiveled around in her chair.

"What are you after?" Womack asked, returning from McCord's office with a pile of folders in his hands.

"The file on Valente's manslaughter conviction," Sam told him.

"Haven't got it," Womack told her.

Sam got up and headed for McCord's office. He wasn't in there, so she started toward the table where the rest of Valente's files were all neatly stacked, but as she passed McCord's desk, she noticed a red-labeled file folder on it that was glaringly out of geometric order. Instead of being neatly placed on a corner or in the center of McCord's desktop, it looked as if it had been thrown down. In fact, it was not only off center, it had papers spilling out of it. On a hunch, Sam checked the label on the folder and saw that it was the file on Valente's manslaughter conviction. She wrote a note on McCord's yellow pad to tell him she'd borrowed the file and returned to her desk.

Inside the file, she found the arresting officer's report, but all it said was that Valente had quarreled with Holmes and shot him with an unregistered forty-five semiautomatic belonging to Valente. There were no witnesses to the actual shooting, but the arresting officer had been driving by, heard the shot, and had reached the scene before Valente could flee. McCord had drawn a broad circle around the arresting officer's name and then written an address inside it.

Based on the information in the file, William Holmes had been a good kid with a clean record. Valente, however, had previously committed some other juvenile offenses, prior bad acts that the judge had taken into account, along with Valente's age, when handing down his sentence.

Sam closed the file, thinking… At the age of seventeen, Valente had taken a life, which meant he was capable of the act, but based on the details in that file, he'd done it in the heat of anger. Premeditated murder was a different kind of crime.

Lost in thought, she doodled on the tablet, trying to get a fix on who Valente really was, what made him tick, what made him turn violent—and why Leigh Manning would prefer him to a cheating, but otherwise respectable, husband.

She was still pondering all that when Shrader stood up. "It's nine-forty," he said, and then half seriously added, "Let's not be tardy and give the lieutenant a reason to start the day pissed-off again."

"God forbid," Sam said flippantly, but she lost no time grabbing the borrowed file on Valente, a pad and pencil, and then getting up. McCord's grim mood yesterday had coincided with a trip he'd made to Captain Holland's office. When he walked in, he'd reportedly closed the door behind him in a clerk's face. When he walked out, he'd supposedly slammed it.

"Usually this place is an icebox. Today it's hot," Shrader complained, stripping off his jacket and tossing it next to a crumb-covered napkin. Sam, wearing a light-rust-colored shirt, suede belt, and matching wool pants, left her blazer on the back of her chair and headed for McCord's office.

She thought McCord's tense mood yesterday might have been the result of having caught hell from someone because the investigation wasn't moving fast enough, but five weeks wasn't a long time for a homicide investigation—particularly an investigation meeting McCord's incredibly meticulous demands for documentation and research. To McCord, everyone they interviewed was either an important potential witness who could help them or a very damaging potential witness who could help the defense—and he wanted to know everything there was to know, either way.

A few weeks ago when Womack had shown Valente's doorman a picture of Leigh Manning and asked him if he'd ever seen the woman at his building, the doorman had firmly denied it. When Womack reported that in a meeting several days later, McCord had reamed him out for not asking the doorman how much Valente tipped him.

Womack went back to the doorman, got that information, and reported the figure to McCord. McCord then ordered Womack to run a background and financial check of the doorman to ascertain his living style—just in case several thousand dollars, instead of several hundred dollars, had changed hands between Valente and the seventy-two-year-old man.