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“The kids obviously figured McCord was crazier and more dangerous than their captors, because they all landed in a heap on the ground, and the sharpshooters opened fire. When the smoke cleared, there were four dead captors. That’s when he got promoted to sergeant. No—no, he got that promotion after he cracked a bribery-and-extortion case that involved some high-level city officials. A couple years ago, he moved over to the Organized Crime Control Bureau, and made a record for himself there, too; then he transferred back to Borough Command and made detective lieutenant.
“He’s in his mid-forties, and everybody figured he’d make division captain in a couple more years, then maybe chief of detectives, but that’s not what happened.”
“What did happen?” Sam asked, glancing at her watch. They still had fifteen minutes to waste before they were supposed to report to McCord.
“Nothing. A year ago, he told people he’d decided to retire w
hen his twenty years were up, which is anytime now. I heard last month that he’d already left, but maybe he had a lot of vacation time piled up and decided to use it.” Shrader nodded toward the empty metal tables scattered around the canteen. “We might as well sit in here instead of hanging around outside McCord’s door like a couple of peons waiting for an audience with the pope.”
Normally the canteen was crowded at this time of day, but everyone on duty this Saturday had evidently eaten earlier, because the remnants of their meals were all over the tops of the round metal tables. Sam looked for the table with the fewest used paper plates, crumpled napkins, and sticky substances on it, but Shrader had no such compunctions. He sat down at the closest table and shook a few more M&M’s into his palm. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for something to wipe off this chair with,” she replied before she thought about it. Shrader guffawed.
“Littleton, how are you going to be able to stomach digging through garbage Dumpsters, looking for evidence?”
“I’m planning to wear gloves, like everyone else does,” she informed him as she sat down on the chair.
Shrader generously held out his hand with a colorful supply of M&M’s in his palm. “Here, have some.”
They looked good. “Have you touched anything besides the back of your chair with that hand?”
“You do not want me to answer that.”
Sam looked at him in disapproving silence while a slight smile touched the corner of her mouth. The silence was to discourage similar remarks in the future; the smile was a good-natured acknowledgment that, this time, she’d inadvertently given him an irresistible opening for a line exactly like that.
Shrader understood the subtlety behind both gestures and settled for regaling her with more glowing tales of McCord’s feats in the area of law enforcement.
By the time they stood up, Sam was looking forward to meeting the man who evidently possessed the instincts of a clairvoyant, the intellect of a rocket scientist, and the persistence of a pit bull.
“Wait one second,” Shrader said as they passed the rest rooms on the way to McCord’s office. “I want to stop in here.”
While she waited for Shrader, several men and women walked past her down the hall, cops and clerks and detectives she’d seen around the precinct before, but instead of snubbing her as they’d done before, most of them nodded or mumbled a greeting. A shift was taking place in the general attitude toward her, and she realized it was because Shrader had gone out of his way to make certain that Holland—and several of the cops in the Catskills—knew she’d made some sort of an inroad on the Manning case herself.
Despite the stocky build and ferocious appearance that had reminded her of a rottweiler and caused her to think of him as “Shredder,” she had a feeling there was a streak of kindness in Shrader that he carefully disguised with scowling brusqueness. When he finally emerged, Sam forgot about all that and bit back a wayward grin. He had carefully wet down his short black hair with a little water, tucked in his shirt, and straightened his tie. “You look very spiffy,” she joked. “McCord is going to be dazzled when he sees you.”
Sam had little expectation of actually liking Mitchell McCord herself, but she was now doubly eager to meet the man who could actually make Shrader self-conscious about his appearance. In the Catskills, Shrader had worn the same three shirts and trousers for a week. Although he’d spoken only of McCord’s heroics and accomplishments, she wondered if Shrader had stopped to “primp” just now because he also knew McCord had a reputation for being appearance-conscious. Given McCord’s rapid ascension up the ladder at division headquarters, Sam surmised he was not only talented, but also politically astute, probably arrogant, and possibly a good dresser.
Chapter 21
* * *
The main area of the third floor was the squad room, a vast bull pen of metal desks and filing cabinets used round the clock by three different shifts of detectives, including Shrader and Sam. The place was always busy, and this Saturday afternoon was no exception. Several detectives were filling out reports and making phone calls, two robbery detectives were interviewing a group of indignant tourists who’d witnessed a mugging, and a woman with a wailing child in her lap was filling out a complaint against her husband.
Lieutenant Unger’s former office was on the far side of the floor, facing the bull pen.
McCord wasn’t in the office when Sam and Shrader arrived, but the lights were on and the transformation that had taken place in there made it clear that the office was definitely under new management. Like any unoccupied space in an overcrowded building, Unger’s old office had quickly been appropriated for a variety of unauthorized uses, including an auxiliary canteen, a meeting area, a storage closet, and a depository for broken furniture. All that had abruptly changed.
Gone were the pictures of the mayor, the governor, and the police commissioner that Sam had seen hanging on the wall behind the desk; gone were the plaques, citations, certificates, and commendations that had covered the rest of the wall. The old bulletin board on the left-hand side of the room had disappeared along with the notices, clippings, and ads pinned to it. The dusty chalkboard on the right-hand side of the room was the only surviving adornment on any of the walls, but now it was scrubbed perfectly clean. The wooden tray attached to the bottom of it was devoid of dusty erasers and bits of used chalk; instead, there was a single, fresh box of chalk and one new eraser positioned in the center of the spotless tray.
The only furniture in the room was a metal desk that faced the doorway, a credenza behind it, and two guest chairs in front of it, plus one narrow table with two chairs against the left-hand wall. “It looks like McCord likes to keep things a little more orderly than Unger,” Shrader whispered as they settled onto the pair of chairs in front of McCord’s desk.
Sam thought that was a wild understatement. The metal furniture had not only been scrubbed and repositioned, it was actually centered and aligned with the walls. The credenza behind McCord’s desk was empty, except for two computer screens, one of them on a laptop unit that obviously belonged to him, the other a bulky monitor-type that belonged to the department. The laptop was positioned directly behind McCord’s chair, its dark blue screen lit up by two flashing white words: “Enter password.” The larger computer monitor had been shifted to the left and was turned off. Four neatly labeled stacks of files were arranged on his desk, one stack per corner, one color label per stack. In the center of the desk, directly in front of his vacant swivel chair, was one fresh yellow tablet and one newly sharpened yellow pencil. Beneath the yellow tablet were two file folders, covered up either by accident or design, the labels on them partially visible.
Sam wouldn’t have been quite so fascinated with all this housekeeping if McCord had been trying to set up a more personalized environment for himself, one that might make it more pleasant for him during an investigation that could last for weeks or even months. But that didn’t appear to be the case. There was not a single picture of a wife, a girlfriend, or a child in evidence; no personal coffee mug, nor paperweight, nor memento of any kind was in evidence anywhere. Not even the nameplate that every cop took with him and put on whatever desk was his at the moment.
Despite the tales she’d just heard of McCord’s manly courage and exploits, Sam decided Shrader’s hero had either a prissy, fastidious streak or an outright neurosis. She was leaning over to tell Shrader that when she caught the name on one of the file folders peeking out from beneath the tablet and realized that McCord had commandeered their personnel jackets. “Shrader, is your first name . . . Malcolm?”
“Do I look like a Malcolm?” he shot back indignantly, but Sam knew embarrassed denial when she saw it.
“That’s a perfectly good name. Why deny it?—You’re Malcolm Shrader.”
“In that case,” Mitchell McCord interrupted as he strode swiftly into the office, “you must be Samantha Littleton.”
Shock, not protocol, drove Sam to her feet nex
t to Shrader for an exchange of handshakes. “And if I’m right so far,” McCord added dryly, “then my name must be McCord.” In one swift motion, he nodded for them to sit down, sat down himself, and reached for his phone. “I have one quick call to make, and then we’ll get down to business.”
Glad to have a few moments to gather her wits, Sam looked at Mitchell McCord’s scarred cheek and roughhewn features, and instantly discarded the notion of prissiness, but she could not come up with words to classify him. Nothing about him seemed to fit exactly with the overall impression he gave. He was tall and he moved with the quickness of a man who was physically fit, but he was thinner than he should have been. He was in his middle forties, but his hair was gray and was cut in a style that reminded her a bit of George Clooney. He was dressed well, particularly for a detective; his brown trousers were freshly pressed, his leather belt was just the right shade of brown, and his beige polo shirt was immaculate—but the brown tweed jacket he was wearing was too large for him, particularly in the shoulders.
None of that mattered, of course; Sam knew you couldn’t tell much about a man from the way he dressed; but that face of his was another matter entirely, and in some ways, just as puzzling. He was sporting a deep winter tan, an indication that he possessed not only the money, but also the temperament, to spend weeks in the tropics, lying on a beach in the sun. Obviously he possessed both those things, but there was absolutely nothing idle or self-indulgent about that harsh-featured face with its two-inch-long scar curving down his right cheek, or the thicker scar slashing across the eyebrow above it. In addition to his scars, he also had deep grooves at the sides of his mouth, creases in his forehead, and twin furrows between his eyebrows.
