The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (2 page)

Several uniformed cops, their eyes fixed on the ground, were sifting through the undergrowth, but Mahoney knew in his gut they were not going to find anything. There would be no torn-off buttons today, no threads caught on a branch, no spent bullet casings, no perfect clue.

As a murder crime scene it was a dead loss. He grinned, excusing himself the pun.
Agatha Christie would have had just one perfect footprint
, he thought longingly.
Me, I’m left with just a body.

And once the rescue services had arrived, that body had taken precedence. Everything must wait until it had been retrieved, even if it meant trampling on the evidence. The woman in the ravine still had her rights as a person, though probably for the last time. Then she would become just another toe-tagged Jane Doe in the chilly steel drawer in the city morgue until the public medical examiner finally got around to carving her up in search of physical evidence. Or until some distraught parent or grieving—though maybe not—relative recalled that Aunty Flo or sister Joleen or Cousin Peggy Sue hadn’t been seen around in a while and came inquiring.

Mahoney turned reluctantly to face the TV news cameras and told them briefly what he knew: that the body of a woman had been discovered early that morning by a man out walking his dogs. No, the man was not a suspect. And no, he had no other suspect as of that minute. Thank you and good-bye.

Franco Mahoney had been a cop for fourteen years, seven of them as a detective on the Homicide Squad. He was said to be one of the best, a meticulous sifter of information and a finisher. He was known as a cop who never let go of a case. Years might pass, but Mahoney never forgot an unsolved murder. The facts and evidence rerolled themselves in his head in bed at night, and sometimes something clicked. He’d gotten convictions on a number of homicides that had been pushed to the back of the filing cabinet, labeled “unsolved,” by sheer persistence, hard work, and intuition.

He had a “nose” for a killer. “It’s like I can smell them. They are like bad meat, guys. That’s all there is to it,” he would tell the news reporters whose favorite he was because he always kept his sense of humor and always gave them a good story, and besides, he looked good on TV. The perfect macho cop.

“She’s coming up,” the chief of the rescue squad yelled.

Franco watched as the sling stretcher was winched carefully upward. He had seen more murder victims than he cared to remember. Like any cop, he knew the only way to keep his sanity was to keep a mental distance between him and the victim. When that victim was a child, it was humanly impossible, and when it was a young woman, like this one, it was tough.

She was maybe twenty-four; her face was grotesquely swollen, a mass of purple bruises with livid red patches where the skin had been scraped away. There was dried blood on her nose and ears, indicating a fractured
skull, and her copper hair was matted with dark, congealed blood. Maybe she had been pretty, he thought bitterly. Fun-loving, free. Until last night, when some cheap bastard decided not to let her live.

He stepped back to let the paramedics take over as she was winched over the edge. Clearing his throat, he began to take notes: “Female Caucasian. Probable age 24. Estimated height 5′7″. Weight 115. Hair red—”

“Jesus, man, there’s a pulse. She’s still alive!”

The paramedics were kneeling over the stretcher, frantically inserting a drip into her arm, feeding her oxygen through a mask, wedging her broken skull with sandbags. They quickly eased pressure pants over her legs, inflating them to constrict the blood flow, forcing the blood pressure into her upper torso and head, then enveloped her in shiny aluminum shock foil.

“Wait a minute.” Franco stared at the double row of puncture wounds along her right forearm. “What’s that?”

The paramedic looked closely at the punctures. “Damn me, Mahoney, those are teeth marks. A dog bite, I’d say. And a biggie.”

Mahoney followed them back through the woods as they rushed the young woman back to the waiting ambulance and loaded her quickly in. “Think she’ll make it?” he asked.

The paramedic shrugged. “I don’t even know if we can stabilize her to get her as far as Trauma.”

Mahoney sighed as he assigned a uniformed cop to the San Francisco General Trauma Unit. “Stay outside the operating room,” he ordered. “Let me know if she wakes up.” It was no longer his business to care. He was a homicide detective. He needed a body before he could do his job.

“No need for us yet, Mahoney,” said the medical examiner, Pete Preston, climbing into his car. His job also came after death.

“Not yet, Pete,” Mahoney said. “But I have a feeling in my bones this one’s gonna be murder.” He sighed, shrugging off the early morning’s events. “How about I buy you a cup of coffee?”

2

I
n the Pacific Heights apartment where she lived alone, Phyl Forster awakened, as usual at 7:30
A.M.
There was no need to turn off an alarm because she didn’t need one. It was part of her medical training. She had learned to catnap when she had a spare ten minutes and to wake up routinely.

Thirty-seven today
, she thought, striding toward the bathroom.
Surprising how it creeps up, and funny that I still feel only thirty-six.
She paused and looked around her glamorous apartment. She glanced at the huge windows with their view of San Francisco Bay, at the shelves of books, the interesting paintings and pieces of sculpture by young American artists. She admired the old silk rugs that were scattered on the pale wooden floors, and the hi-tech bathrooms and kitchen, all steel and halogen, white, gray, and black.

Some people considered her home, with its deliberate lack of color, soulless, but Phyl thought the rugs and artworks and books were what gave it life. All the rest was just background, the accoutrements of living: there to serve and not for show. “Plain but good,” as
somebody’s grandmother would surely have said approvingly. And all bought and paid for by herself.

She dressed in the same spare style: monochromatic understated chic by Japanese designers. With her shiny black hair sleeked into a chignon, her pale skin, her red lipstick, and her startled-looking deep blue eyes, she was a familiar figure on television and at book signings across the country. As well as having a successful psychiatric practice, she also wrote popular psychology books that sold in the millions.
Dr. Phyl Focuses on: Matrimony. Dr. Phyl Focuses on: Menopause. Sibling Rivalry. Divorce. Drugs, Alcohol, Domestic Violence.
Any trauma you could name Dr. Phyl could explain in simple terms and tell you how to cope or how to overcome it. Oprah loved her.

She showered, thinking of the day ahead: a morning clinic at the San Francisco General Hospital, where she gave her services free, the afternoon at the University of California Medical Center, where she was a consultant, then private patients from four-thirty to seven-thirty. Try to beat the traffic on her way home. Shower, then a glass of red wine.

Afterward, wrapped in a white terry robe, with her black hair tumbling free from its tight chignon, her face clean of makeup and artifice, she would have supper. Alone. Again.

But now she was toweling her hair dry as she watched the early-morning newscast on TV. Political scandals; traffic; weather … plus some news just in. Another homicide. A macho-looking detective told her that the victim was a young woman discovered in a ravine by a man out walking his dogs.

Phyl watched, fascinated as the cameras zoomed in on the rescue services clambering down the ravine to the woman’s body, half hidden among the foliage of a large bush. They got her into a sling and began to haul her up. She caught a glimpse of coppery red hair, an
outflung pale arm, a foot with a red leather sandal still dangling from the toe.

She shuddered and pushed the off button, horrified at her own voyeurism. She had surely seen enough dead bodies in her years as a hospital intern and resident, but this was obscene. The girl looked so vulnerable, her final moments exploited by prying TV cameras. Last night she had been alive, perhaps out with her friends, walking, talking, maybe having dinner, dancing. Poor thing. Phyl knew she had to be somebody’s “little girl.” And no doubt today that mother would be told the dreadful final truth.

“Goddamn,” Phyl said savagely. She switched on the hair dryer and glared at herself in the bathroom mirror. Life could be rotten, as many of her patients could testify, but it was better than what had happened to that poor girl.

She dried her hair, swept it back so tightly her scalp hurt, then twisted it into a knot at the nape of her neck. She dressed quickly. She wore minimalist silk underwear: She was lean, and her curves had no need of underwires and Lycra, and besides, the silk was her touch of luxury, her secret beneath the facade of severe black and white she presented to the world. Sometimes she shared that secret, but not often these days. She shrugged as she buttoned the jacket of her black pantsuit. What the hell, work ruled. Besides, celibacy was fashionable.

Leaning into the mirror, she applied the Paloma red lipstick carefully. Without the bright lipstick her mouth looked soft and vulnerable. Colored a vivid velvety red, it made a statement. She was a woman to be reckoned with. A woman at the top of her profession. A woman who knew what she was doing every minute of her day. Even if sometimes, she thought with a pang, her nights seemed a bit lonely.

She clipped gold and onyx studs in her ears, no other jewelry, just a man-size watch, big enough for her
to tell the time without lifting her arm, big enough so her patients wouldn’t think that she was keeping her eye on the clock.

She picked up her black suede purse, felt for her keys, and checked her working uniform one last time.

After grabbing the big black bag containing the files she needed for the day, she took the elevator down, got her car, a compact black Lexus, as understated as she was. Then she drove to the real world: the San Francisco General Hospital on Potrero Hill.

It was only 8:20
A.M.
, and her first appointment wasn’t until 9:00, so she headed for the cafeteria and the cup of coffee she hadn’t been able to stomach earlier, after seeing the dead woman on television. Halfway along the corridor she changed her mind. The Italian deli down the street made more powerful coffee—and a wickeder Danish.

Outside, she heard the scream of an ambulance. She turned to watch. The paramedics were out in a flash, and a second later they had the stretcher on a gurney and were running with it, one holding the drip leading into the patient’s arm, toward the waiting group of doctors and nurses. The patient’s body was swathed in shiny aluminum shock foil. Her head was strapped to the stretcher and supported by sandbags on either side. Phyl caught just a glimpse of a bruised ashen face, tightly shut eyes, blood-matted copper hair.
The girl from the ravine.

She’s not dead after all
, she thought, surprised. Then, remembering the waxen color, she added grimly,
Not yet.

Somehow the Danish didn’t seem as enticing as it had a moment ago. She turned on her heel and walked back into the hospital, her head down, thinking about the young woman; about the parents who would be summoned to her bedside, about her chances of survival. It was clear she had serious head injuries, and
Lord knew what other damage, internal as well as external.

Poor, poor girl
, she thought sadly.

Shaking her head to clear it, she grabbed a cup of coffee from the machine and headed down the shiny corridors to her office to begin her day.

By twelve-thirty she had seen eight patients, and she was starving. Gathering together her notes and her files and putting them in the black bag, she thought hungrily of tomato, chicken, and fresh basil on focaccia. Halfway to the door she hesitated, glancing undecidedly at the telephone. She still hadn’t been able to get the sight of the young woman from the ravine out of her mind. Right through all her interviews this morning she had kept superimposing herself on her thoughts: the foot with the jaunty red sandal dangling from its toe; the battered face as colorless as moonstones; the bloody head. A shudder ran through her, and she strode quickly out the door and down the hall to the Trauma Unit.