Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark (20 page)

“I got nothing to say.”

Dublenko's living room was disgusting, a fetid dump littered with stained cushions, needles, dead marijuana plants and half-eaten plates of food. Down the hallway, the two bedrooms were cleaner. Clients expected a certain standard of hygiene, and Victor Dublenko made sure he provided it. Bedrooms were for business. But for himself, Victor was quite happy to live in shit.

“I don't like cops.”

Danny McGuire shrugged amiably. “I don't like pimps. But hey, what are you gonna do? We're each an occupational hazard of the other.”

Victor Dublenko laughed, a phlegmy, guttural sound that quickly morphed into a hacking cough. Pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, he spat something vile into it and stuffed it back into the pocket.

“So we don't like each other. But we can still do business, right? You pay, I talk.”

Just then a very young, very skinny girl in shorts and a vest wandered into the room looking disoriented. Victor Dublenko snarled at her and she scurried out like a frightened beetle.
Poor kid,
thought Danny. She
couldn't have been more than fifteen. Scum like Dublenko made him want to puke. But he reminded himself why he was here, how many lives might depend on Dublenko's information, and bit his tongue. Pulling a wad of fifties out of his jacket pocket, he licked his fingers and made a show of counting them before carefully putting them back.

“I prefer ‘you talk, I pay,' if it's all the same to you, Mr. Dublenko.”

Without taking his eyes off the pocket with the money in it, the pimp said flatly, “So whaddaya want to know?”

Danny handed over the yearbook picture. “Do you remember this guy?”

“Jesus!” Dublenko smiled, revealing a crooked collection of mostly gold teeth. “Frankie Mancini, man. Where the fuck you get this?” The coughing was back with a vengeance. Danny McGuire waited for Victor to clear his tobacco-ruined lungs, gasping for breath like a stranded fish.

“From the Beeches. I was there earlier. A Mrs. Waites mentioned that you and Frankie were both residents of the home between 1986 and 1988 and that you were close. Is that correct?”

Victor Dublenko's green eyes narrowed. “Mrs. Waites. That old bitch is still alive?”

“Is that correct, Mr. Dublenko?”

Victor nodded. “You know a lot about my past, Detective. I'm flattered.”

Danny didn't bother to conceal his contempt. “Frankly, I'm not interested in your past. I'm interested in Frankie Mancini. When did you last see him?”

Dublenko shook his head. “A long time ago, man. Years, too many years. Maybe twenty?”

“Where?”

“Right here, in New York. He got transferred to another home the year after this picture was taken and we kept in touch for a while. But then he got a job out west somewhere and that was that.”

Out west. Los Angeles…Where he became Lyle Renalto and met Angela Jakes…Where it all started.

“You never heard from him again?”

“We weren't exactly the pen-pal types,” Dublenko sneered. “So what are you after him for? He done something wrong? Robbed a bank?”

“Would it surprise you if he had?”

Dublenko reflected for a moment. “Yeah, it would, actually. I always figured he'd do well for himself.”

“Why'd you figure that?”

“Well, for one thing, he was smart. Foreign languages, math, there was nothing that kid couldn't do. And for another, just look at him. With a face like that, your life is easy.”

The words could have been interpreted as bitter, but there was no resentment in Dublenko's tone. Quite the opposite in fact. He sounded admiring. Nostalgic. Affectionate, even.

“Easy in what way? You mean he was successful with girls?”

A grin spread across Dublenko's toadlike features. “Frankie wasn't interested in girls, Detective. That wasn't his team, if you know what I mean.”

A shiver ran down Danny's spine. What had Claire Michaels said to him about Matt Daley's call from Italy?
“Lisa's lover wasn't her lover. He was gay. He couldn't be Azrael. You're on the wrong track.”

“Now, that's not to say women weren't interested in
him
. The bitches were all over him like flies. And like I say, Frankie was smart. He used that power to his advantage.”

Danny thought of Lyle Renalto, the way that he'd wheedled his way into Angela Jakes's life, how he'd gotten her to trust him, perhaps even lured her to her death.

“Used it in what way?”

“Oh, you know. He'd get girls to do stuff for him, get him gifts, cover for him when he broke curfew. Little shit like that. But he never really
dug
women, if you know what I mean.”

Danny was growing tired of Dublenko's less than subtle euphemisms. “I get it, Dublenko. Frankie was gay.”

“Yeah, he was gay, all right, but it was more than that. I kinda got the feeling that women, like, repulsed him. Not just sexually, but as people. Apart from the princess, of course.”

“The princess?”

Dublenko's expression soured. “Princess Sofia. That's what he called her. Fuck knows what her real name was. Frankie was totally obsessed by her.”

“You resented their friendship?”

“Ah, whatever.” Dublenko waved a hand dismissively. “It was bullshit, that's all. I remember Frankie telling me she was descended from the Moroccan royal family. Like, sure. That's how she wound up dumped on the streets in Brooklyn, right?”

Danny hesitated. Something Dublenko just said had reminded him of something, but he couldn't think what.

“I left the Beeches before Sofia arrived there, but I met her once, right before Frankie left town, and a precious little bitch she was too. I heard that before she met Frankie, the male staff at her previous home used to pass her around like one of those blowup dolls. Give it to her up her royal ass.” Victor Dublenko laughed lecherously at the memory. “She was just another skank, used goods, but Frankie didn't want to hear it. ‘My princess,' he called her. She put some kinda spell on him.”

After satisfying himself that Dublenko had told him all he knew, Danny paid him and caught a cab back to his hotel. It was dark now and bitterly cold outside. Retreating to the warm cocoon of his room, he locked the door, threw his notes, tape recorder and briefcase on the bed and checked his messages. Nothing interesting. After a brief call to Céline—for the third night in a row Danny got to tell his wife's voice mail how much he loved and missed her—and another failed attempt to reach Matt Daley, he dialed Claire Michaels's number.

“This gay guy that Matt mentioned, Lisa's lover. Did he tell you his name?”

“I don't think so,” said Claire. “Oh, wait. He might have said something in passing. Franco? Francesco? Is that possible?”

Hanging up, Danny stripped off his clothes and jumped into the shower. Something about pounding jets of hot water always helped him think. He felt as if today he'd been handed multiple pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. And if he could only somehow see how they fit together, he might have the answer to this riddle. The problem was that they weren't the pieces he'd been looking for.

He came to New York looking for information about Lisa Baring's past. Instead, he'd learned a lot about Lyle Renalto's. Only there
was
no Lyle Renalto, there was only this Frankie Mancini. Frankie Mancini…who was gay…so he couldn't be Azrael the rapist-killer, right?…but
who
was
apparently linked with Lisa Baring. Though not as her lover. Just as Frankie had not been “Princess Sofia's” lover, whoever she may have been. Just as Lyle Renalto had not been Angela Jakes's lover. Everything was linked, but each link came full circle back to itself rather than connecting with the others.

Lisa…Lyle…Frankie.

Lisa…Angela…Sofia.

What am I not seeing?

It wasn't just the people who came full circle but the places too. New York, L.A., Hong Kong, Italy, New York.
And Morocco. That's it. Dublenko said Frankie's Princess Sofia claimed to come from Morocco. That's where Matt Daley and Lisa were going to run off to, before Lisa disappeared.

Was Morocco important, or just a coincidence? Danny's head ached.

Drying himself off, he sat down on the bed and looked again at Frankie Mancini's photograph in the Beeches yearbook. Lyle Renalto smiled mockingly back at him. Frankie was younger than Lyle, his face more fleshy and rounded. Yet despite the differences, they were clearly the same person.

On instinct, without really knowing why, Danny switched on his computer and pulled up the picture Inspector Liu had provided of Lisa Baring, the one he'd given the NYPD and various agencies and organizations in the city with so little success. He stared at Lisa's face for a long time, almost as if he expected her to speak, to reveal her secrets. Finally, he zoomed in on her eyes, the eyes that had bewitched Matt Daley—and presumably Miles Baring before him—reducing him to a shadow of his former self. They reminded Danny of other eyes he had seen. Eyes he had seen somewhere else. Eyes he had seen long ago.

All at once, there it was. Literally staring him in the face.

Heart pounding, Danny McGuire picked up the telephone.

How could I have been so blind?

I
NSPECTOR
L
IU LOOKED AT THE HOTEL
manager distastefully. The man was bald, apparently uneducated and morbidly obese, his whalelike blubber squeezed into a gray polyester suit two sizes too small for him and so shiny it was almost silver. Yet he seemed to be running one of the most expensive establishments in Sydney, a five-star hotel right on the harbor whose clients included rock stars and politicians. There was no justice in this world.

“You're quite sure it was her?”

“Look, mate,” the manager wheezed, handing back the photograph of Lisa Baring. “I might not be Stephen friggin' Hawkins, all right, but I know how to recognize a face. Especially a face that gorgeous. It's part of my job.” He scratched his armpits unselfconsciously. “It was a couple of months ago now. Stacey upstairs'll have the exact dates for you. She checked in with a bloke, good-looking fella, but she paid the bill. I'm pretty sure they reserved under ‘Smith.'”

“You don't verify your guests' passports?”

The manager snorted derisively. “We're not the bloody FBI, Mr. Liu.”

“
Inspector
Liu,” Liu said coldly.

“And no offense, but we're not the Chinese police state either,” the fat Australian went on, ignoring him. “If I started sniffing around every Mr. and Mrs. Smith who checked in here, I'd soon go out of business, let me tell you.”

“Who paid the bill?”

“She did, the sheila. In cash.”

“But they left no forwarding address, no credit-card billing address, nothing?”

“Like I said, I don't think so, but check with Stacey. She's the eyes and ears of this place if you know what I mean.”

Stacey was a meek mouse of a woman in her sixties who corroborated everything her boss had already told the inspector. Mrs. Smith had paid in cash. No, she'd never mentioned anything about future plans, at least not at the front desk. Mr. Smith was “quiet” and “attractive.” Stacey declined to hazard a guess as to his age.

“I'd like to see their room.”

The suite was palatial, even by the hotel's grand standards. “Mrs. Smith” must have needed a wheelbarrow of cash to pay for a week's stay here. Then again, Lisa Baring could afford it, what with her old man's money burning a hole in her thieving, conniving pocket. He and his men scoured the rooms for fingerprints, hair, or other forensic evidence, but after two months and God knows how many subsequent occupants, not to mention twice-daily cleaning by the hotel staff, they weren't hopeful.

Every chambermaid was interviewed, along with the concierge, bar and restaurant staff and someone named Liana at the spa where Mrs. Smith had availed herself of the hotel's signature hot stone massage.

“She seemed a little emotional, to be honest,” Liana remembered, batting her heavy false eyelashes in Inspector Liu's direction and almost asphyxiating him with a gust of CK One perfume. “She was tearful during her treatment, I remember that. But guests often are.
So
much gets released when you really hit those meridians, you know what I mean?”

“Did she say anything about what might have been upsetting her? Any information at all might help us.”

Liana thought about it. “She didn't. But I'd say it was man trouble. I saw her with her hubby in the lobby a couple of times and he was always holding her hand or fussing over her, but she didn't seem into it. She kept shrugging him off.”

By the end of the day, Inspector Liu was frustrated. He'd flown out to Sydney in person, because the Australia sighting was the first solid evidence he'd managed to get hold of, since Mrs. Baring's second attempt at absconding, that she was (a) alive, and (b) a free agent, not locked up in
some sex offender's dungeon, as certain bleeding-heart factions seemed to believe. But the trip had been a bust. He'd discovered nothing that he couldn't have learned from a ten-minute phone call from Hong Kong.

Leaving three men behind to finish collecting the physical evidence, he took his leave. “One of our chauffeurs can take you to the airport,” the fat manager offered magnanimously. “If you have to leave Sydney, you might as well do it in style.”

Sitting in the back of the plushly upholstered, air-conditioned limo, Liu brooded on the fact that Lisa Baring and her lover seemed always to manage to remain one step ahead of him. You could bet your bottom Hong Kong dollar that
they
had left Sydney in style. Suddenly a thought occurred to him. He rapped on the window that separated passenger from driver, which promptly rolled down.

“There's a call button if you want it, mate. You see that console there on your left?”

But Inspector Liu wasn't interested in call buttons and consoles.

“How many chauffeurs does the hotel employ?”

“There's six of us.”

“And do you keep records of your journeys? Which guests go where?”

“There's a logbook, yeah. It's in the office.”

“Turn around.”

“But…your plane. I thought you said the last flight to Hong Kong—”

“Turn around!”

Stacey in the office was dismayed to see the grumpy Chinese policeman back so soon.

“Inspector. I thought you said you were—”

“I need the drivers' logbook,” said Liu. He gave her the dates. “I need to know who chauffeured the Smith party to the airport.”

“Not all of our guests use the cars,” the woman warned him. “Most check out under their own steam.”

But Liu wasn't listening. There it was.
Smith, 10:20
A.M
. Marco.

“I need to speak to Marco. Right now.”

“I'm afraid that won't be possible,” Stacey said nervously. “Marco's off on compassionate leave. His mother passed away a week ago.”

Inspector Liu could not have cared less about Marco's mother. “Give me his address.”

 

M
ARCO
B
RUNELLI WAS STILL IN HIS
underwear and a stained vest when the Chinese policemen knocked on his door. Actually they didn't so much knock as hammer.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” Marco swallowed nervously, thinking about the stash of weed lying there in plain sight on his bedside table, his failure to pay his last year's tax bill and an incident with a pole dancer at Blushes nightclub that had occurred the previous month. Not that the latter was his fault.

“You work at the Huxley Hotel, as a driver?”

“That's right. I'm on leave. It's my mum you see. She—”

“Saturday the sixteenth, in the morning, you drove a party named Smith to the airport. Do you remember?”

“Smith.” Marco frowned. “Smith, Smith, Smith.” The policeman handed him a photograph of a very attractive dark-haired woman. “Oh,
her.
Yeah, I remember her. And her husband. Yeah, that's right, I drove them to the airport. Why?”

“Did you know where they were flying to?”

“You know, that's a funny thing,” said Marco, more relaxed now that he realized it was these clients the police were after, not him. “Normally clients are chatty in the back of the car, especially the Americans. They want to talk about what a great stay they've had, where they're going next, all that guff. But those two were silent as the grave. Didn't say a word.”

Inspector Liu felt his hopes fading.

“But after I dropped them, on my way back into town, I noticed that the bloke had left his briefcase on the backseat. So of course I hightailed it back there and went racing into the terminal. The guy was so happy to see me he gave me a big hug and a two-hundred-dollar tip. They were just in time for boarding. So that's why I remember where they were going.”

Marco smiled broadly. Inspector Liu could hardly bear the suspense.

“Mumbai, India,” the driver announced proudly. “Was that all you wanted to know?”

 

C
LAUDE
D
EMARTIN WAS HAVING AN UNUSUALLY
enjoyable afternoon at work. The Azrael team's office, deep in the bowels of Interpol headquarters, had begun its life as a windowless cubicle. But thanks to Danny McGuire, it had
evolved into something of a happy bachelor's pad, complete with squishy couches, dartboard, and a minifridge stuffed full of the sort of cheap, high-calorie American food Claude was never allowed to eat at home.

Better yet, today Claude was manning the fort alone. Richard laugh-a-minute Sturi was off diddling with his statistical projections somewhere, the boss was still in the States, and the three other junior detectives were in London, attempting what Danny McGuire had hopefully described as a “charm offensive” with Scotland Yard to get them to share more information from the Piers Henley case files.

So far, after a little light updating of the database and a token call to Didier Anjou's bank in Paris, tying up some loose ends, Claude had beaten himself three times at darts, enjoyed a satisfying session of World of Warcraft and eaten two family-size bags of Cheetos, which was probably officially a crime in certain parts of France. So when the phone rang, he answered in high spirits.

“Interpol, Azrael desk. How may I be of service?”

“Put me through to McGuire.”

Claude Demartin recognized Inspector Liu's voice. Cheerless as ever, there was an impatience in his tone today—part excitement, part anger—that Claude hadn't heard before.

“It's urgent.”

“Assistant Director McGuire isn't in the office this week, I'm afraid. He's traveling. Can I help you? This is Officer Claude Demartin.”

“No.”

“Well, perhaps I can take a message. It's Inspector Liu, isn't it? From Hong Kong?”

Liu was silent. He didn't want to exchange pleasantries with this French monkey. He wanted to talk to the organ grinder. On the other hand, he did have vital information to impart.

“Did you make any progress in Australia?” Demartin pressed. “I assure you the moment we hear something from McGuire, I'll insist that he contact you. But is there anything the team should know? Any way we can help you?”

“Tell McGuire they're in India,” Liu said tersely. “If he wants to know more, he can pick up the damn telephone.”

The line went dead.

India.
All Demartin could think of was how nicely the news fit with Richard Sturi's theories of where Azrael would strike next. The German was cocky enough already. He'd be insufferable after this. Before he could pick up the phone to call McGuire, it rang again.

“Azrael,” Demartin said, more businesslike this time.

“Hi, Claude. It's me.”

“Boss. Great timing. Listen, I just got a call from Liu.”

“Never mind that,” Danny McGuire said briskly. “I need you to e-mail me the clearest pictures we have of all the widows. Face shots only.”

“Sure, I can do that. But about Liu. He wants you to call him urgently. He—”

“Now, Claude. I'll be waiting by my laptop.” Danny McGuire hung up.

What was it with these big-shot detectives? Didn't anybody have the time to let you finish a sentence anymore?

 

O
N THE BED IN HIS
N
EW
York hotel room, Danny gazed at his in-box.

One minute. Five minutes. Ten. What the fuck?
How long did it take to download and send a few lousy JPEGs?

When at last he heard the longed-for
ping
of a new message in his coded Azrael folder, Danny's heart leaped, then sank when he saw that there were no attachments.

“Pictures to follow,” Claude Demartin wrote. “And by the way, Inspector Liu's message was: ‘They're in India.' You need to call him right away.”

India!
That was good news indeed. So was Demartin's use of the word
they
. It meant Lisa Baring was still alive and that she was still with…who? Frankie Mancini? Danny would call Liu in a moment and get the whole story. Just as soon as Claude sent him those damn images.

Finally, after what felt like millennia but was in fact about a minute and a half, a large file landed in Danny's in-box. The e-mail was entitled:
WIDOWS
.

Danny clicked it open with a trembling hand.

There they were, smiling at him across the years, their faces running along the screen from left to right in chronological order.

Angela Jakes…Lady Tracey Henley…Irina Anjou…Lisa Baring.

At first it wasn't obvious. There were the superficial differences: hair color and length, subtle changes in makeup and some of the images, particularly the ones of Irina, were blotchy and blurred. Age had wreaked its usual black magic, etching a spiderweb of fine lines over once-smooth skin. Weight had gone up and down, making some of the faces look gaunt while others looked blooming and chipmunk-cheeked. Then there were the more fundamental things. Angela Jakes's face was the loveliest of the four, youthful and innocent, untouched by the passage of time. Tracey Henley, the redhead, on the other hand, seemed harder and more artificial-looking. While she was still undeniably beautiful, Danny now saw that her nose was unusually narrow at the tip, almost as if she'd had some plastic surgery. Lisa Baring had the same small nose, although on her it appeared more natural. Her brow was higher, though, and smoother.

What really leaped off the screen, however, were the four women's eyes. Laugh lines and crow's-feet might come and go, cheekbones and mouths and noses might be surgically altered. But the eyes themselves remained the same. Deep brown, like molten chocolate. Sad. Sultry. Mesmerizing.

The first time Danny McGuire saw them he'd been untying Angela Jakes from her husband's corpse. Slipping in and out of consciousness, Angela had opened those eyes and looked at him. Danny's life had changed forever.

Years later, those same eyes had lured Sir Piers Henley to his death.