Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark

by Sidney Sheldon

  I can’t lose her. I can’t lose another person I love. If I do, I’ll lose my mind.

  INSPECTOR LIU TURNED ON HIS TAPE recorder as Jim Harman began to speak.

  An Englishman who had grown up in Hong Kong, the son of well-to-do expat parents, Jim ran his own security and electronics business on the island. He had personally overseen the installation of the alarm system at the Baring estate on Prospect Road.

  “I’ll tell you this, mate,” he told Inspector Liu firmly. “There was nothing wrong with that alarm system.”

  Tall and skinny, with a face like a weasel and small, widely spaced eyes, Jim Harman was prepared to defend his reputation vociferously.

  “I installed it myself, with more fail-safes than the fucking White House, pardon my French.”

  Liu asked calmly, “Then how do you explain the fact that Mr. Baring’s killer was able to get around it?”

  “He didn’t ‘get around it,’” Jim Harman said matter-of-factly. “Someone let him in.”

  “And why would they do that?”

  Harman shrugged. “I’m a systems guy, not a detective, Inspector. You tell me. But the only explanation is that someone deliberately disabled the system and let the guy in.”

  “And who knew how to do that?”

  For the first time, the weasel-faced Englishman looked perplexed. “That’s the thing. No one. Mr. Baring and myself were the only ones who knew how to work that security system. It makes no sense.”

  The interview over, Inspector Liu hopped on the DLR to Wan Chai, in the northern part of the island, in search of some lunch. The underground trains were clean and ran on time, a rarity in Hong Kong. Taking them calmed Liu and helped him to think.

  “It makes no sense,” Harman had said. But it did make sense. Indeed, the possibilities were clear and satisfyingly finite: either Miles Baring had given his wife instructions on how to disable the security system, or Miles had disabled it himself, unwittingly opening the door to his killer.

  Was it someone he knew?

  Was it Lisa’s lover?

  Was Lisa’s lover a friend of her husband’s?

  Stranger things had happened.

  Inspector Liu emerged from the subway blinking into the Wan Chai sunshine like a reluctant mole. His phone rang the very same instant.

  “Liu speaking.”

  “Sir.” It was one of his surveillance team, a small, elite group who’d been dispatched to Bali to keep an eye on the beautiful, headstrong Mrs. Baring. “We got some better shots of the villa today from the long-range cameras.”

  “She still hasn’t left the property, then?”

  “No, sir.”

  Villa Mirage, the Barings’ Balinese retreat, was so secluded as to be almost completely inaccessible and extraordinarily difficult to photograph. Liu had tried to have the place bugged, but Mrs. Baring’s private security detail was excellent. None of his men had been able to get near her. He’d hoped he might have more success if, by a piece of luck, she should venture out of the place by car, but so far she had lived as a virtual recluse. It was as if her every action, or inaction, had been specifically designed to frustrate him.

  “We do have some good news, though, sir. It appears there’s a man staying at the house with Mrs. Baring.”

  Liu almost choked. “A man?”

  “Yes, sir. A Westerner. They had breakfast together on the terrace this morning. They looked…”—the detective searched for the appropriate word—“intimate.”

  Had Inspector Liu been a different kind of man, he would have punched the air with excitement. Lisa Baring’s lover! She’s smuggled him in! It was hard to believe that anyone could be so reckless. Surely she must know that the police would still be watching her? Inspector Liu had never been in love and he hoped he never would be. What fools passion made of people.

  All they needed now was some physical evidence. If this man’s fingerprints or any trace of his DNA were found at the Baring house, they’d have enough evidence to arrest the two of them. Danny McGuire from Interpol had warned him that the killer was likely to stay close to Mrs. Baring. That as long as Liu held Lisa Baring, he held the bait.

  The problem was that Inspector Liu no longer “held” Lisa Baring.

  He had to get inside that villa.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ALONE AT THE CORNER TABLE OF a quiet café, Danny McGuire picked flakes from the top of his pain au chocolat and waited for his team to arrive. After Inspector Liu formally requested Interpol assistance, Danny’s boss, Deputy Director Henri Frémeaux, had reluctantly authorized a small task force to devote “no more than eight hours per week” collating evidence for the case now code-named Azrael.

  “It’s from a poem,” Danny had explained to Frémeaux, back at headquarters. “Azrael’s the Angel of Death.”

  Frémeaux stared at him blankly. He wasn’t interested in poetry. He was interested in statistics, facts and results. Danny had better justify this use of manpower, and quickly, if he wanted his agency support to continue.

  By “small task force,” it turned out Henri Frémeaux meant two additional men. Danny chose Richard Sturi, a German statistician with about as much personality as the croissant Danny was currently eating, but with an uncanny gift for seeing meaningful, real-life patterns in unintelligible strings of numbers, and Claude Demartin, a forensic specialist. For the nitty-gritty detective work he would have to rely on himself and Matt Daley, his “mole on the ground” in Hong Kong.

  So far, Daley had been his biggest disappointment. He’d seemed so gung ho in the beginning. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Matt Daley, the Azrael investigation would never have gotten off the ground. But after a fruitless first week in Hong Kong, Matt had sent Danny precisely one brief e-mail about “casting his net further afield” and proceeded to disappear on some jaunt around Southeast Asia. After weeks of unreturned e-mails and phone calls—other than a single voice mail left in the middle of the night assuring Danny that Matt was “okay” and “working on it”—Danny had officially given up. Inspector Liu threw him occasional tidbits of information, but like most local police chiefs, the man in Hong Kong was more interested in receiving data from Interpol than sharing his own. As Henri Frémeaux reminded Danny repeatedly, “This is a Chinese case, McGuire. Our job is merely to support and facilitate.”

  It was then that Richard Sturi showed up, wearing his usual suit and tie and clutching his laptop like a security blanket. Sturi’s eyes blinked uncomfortably in his round, owl-like face as he took in the “unusual” meeting place Assistant Director McGuire had chosen. External team meetings were unusual at Interpol, and frowned upon, but Danny was determined to get his little team bonding and throwing ideas around outside of the stifling atmosphere of HQ. When he arrived moments later, Claude Demartin was also formally dressed, but being French, unlike Sturi, he was never averse to meeting in a café. He ordered himself a café crème and a croque-monsieur before things got started.

  “Okay, guys,” Danny began. “Right now we have nothing tangible out of Hong Kong. What we do have is a huge paper file on the Jakes case, which I believe you’ve both seen, and you’ve been inputting into the I-24/7. Richard, is that right?”

  The German statistician nodded nervously. He seemed to do everything nervously and wore the permanent expression of a man who was about to be hauled before the Gestapo and summarily shot.

  “In terms of maximizing the use of our time, I suggest we focus on the Henley and Anjou cases, see if we can dig up anything that the local investigators missed.”

  “Are the local police being cooperative?” asked Claude Demartin, downing the last of his coffee.

  “In a word, no. We’ve all got to tread carefully and try not to upset too many applecarts. There’s a lot of professional pride on the line. Up to now this guy has gotten away with murder three times, and it looks as if he’s going to make it a fourth in Hong Kong. Frémeaux’s already looking for an excuse to shut us down, and if we piss off Scotland Yard or the
LAPD or any of the other local forces, he’ll have one. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Two nods.

  “Good. So what do we have so far? Our killer is male. He targets wealthy, older men with young wives. His motivation is at least partially sexual. And he is unusually savage in his murders. Anything you would like to add to this?”

  Claude Demartin looked like he was going to say something, then thought better of it and clammed up.

  “What?” Danny urged.

  “I’m a forensics guy. I’m not an expert in any of this other stuff.”

  “I’m not looking for experts. I’m looking for ideas, theories. Just go with your instincts.”

  Richard Sturi visibly winced.

  “Okay,” Demartin began. “Well, then I’d say he’s a sophisticated man.”

  “Because?”

  “He’s well traveled. Probably he speaks several languages. The crimes took place all over the globe.”

  Danny nodded encouragingly. “Good.”

  Demartin warmed to his theme. “Also he plans pretty meticulously. And he seems to have a knack for handling complicated security systems. Makes me suspect he’s an electrical engineer or a computer whiz of some sort.”

  The security angle had always bothered Danny. Thinking of the Jakes case, he remembered that the alarm system at 420 Loma Vista had been highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art in its day. The Henleys had a straightforward but reliable Banham system in London, and Didier Anjou’s Saint-Tropez home was surrounded by CCTV cameras, all of them suspiciously blank the night of his murder. According to Inspector Liu of the Hong Kong police, Miles Baring had installed a security system to rival the one at Fort Knox. And yet in all four cases, a single man had slipped in and out of the victims’ homes entirely unnoticed.

  A killer with unusual expertise in matters of technology was one possibility. But there was another, simpler one, one that had haunted Danny since his days on the Jakes case.

  “Maybe someone in the household knew the killer,” he said out loud. “Someone let them in. A servant or something.”

  “Or the wives.” Claude Demartin baldly stated what Danny couldn’t bring himself to utter. “Here’s a theory. This killer, this sophisticated, intelligent guy, targets the bored young wives of his victims. He grooms them, winning their trust, maybe seducing them sexually. Then, once he has them under his spell, he cons them, persuading them to give all their husband’s money away to charity.”

  “Then what?” Danny asked skeptically. “He breaks into their homes?”

  “Why not? By then he already has inside knowledge of the property, security codes, camera positions, et cetera. He conceals his identity with a mask…does something with his voice presumably so the women don’t recognize him. Murders the husbands. Rapes the wives. Then he returns later as the shoulder to cry on for the widows. Once the money’s safely in the accounts of the charities, he persuades the widows to disappear with him. Safely removed from the crime scene, he kills them too, disposes of the bodies and moves on to the next hit.”

  All three men were silent. Demartin’s theory was a serious stretch on many levels. Assuming that the killer attempted to disguise himself at the time of the break-in, was it actually possible that a woman would fail to recognize her own lover? It seemed pretty far-fetched. And wouldn’t the cops have come across the killer in his shoulder-to-cry-on guise? Surely if some slick, presumably handsome, intelligent young man was hanging around the victims…

  Danny froze.

  There had been such a man. With Angela Jakes. Hanging around her like a bad smell.

  Lyle Renalto.

  Demartin was talking again, enjoying his newfound role as Sherlock Holmes. Stuck in a forensics lab at Interpol, he rarely got a chance to let his imagination run wild.

  “Or we could consider some alternatives. How about this? The killer does not conceal his identity. The wives know full well who he is and they let him into their homes deliberately. The wives aren’t his victims. They’re his accomplices.”

  Danny McGuire thought back to Angela Jakes’s terrible injuries after her rape. She was so badly beaten that when he first saw her, tied to her husband’s corpse, he’d thought she was dead. He shook his head. “No. No way. There was nothing faked about those rapes. Not the one I saw, anyway. Not in a million years was that sex consensual.”

  Claude Demartin raised an eyebrow. Americans could be dreadful prudes when it came to sex. “Are you sure? Some women like it rough.”

  “Not that rough,” said Danny. Not that woman. She was so sweet and gentle. An angel.

  Demartin shrugged. “Don’t forget there were hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in each of these killings. People will tolerate extreme suffering to obtain enormous amounts of money.”

  “But none of the widows kept the money. They gave it away.”

  “Except Lisa Baring.”

  “Except Lisa Baring. So far.”

  Silence fell again. Demartin’s theory was plausible. One killer. Possibly Lyle Renalto? Grooming wives. Gaining access. Killing husbands. Diverting funds. Of course it still begged a number of questions. Not the least of which was “why?”

  Danny said, “Motive’s still a problem.”

  Richard Sturi laughed loudly. It was the first sound he’d made in a good fifteen minutes and both Danny and Claude Demartin turned to stare at him in surprise.

  “Motive’s a problem? Everything’s a problem! You haven’t a shred of hard factual evidence to support any of what you’ve just said.”

  The German’s tone was contemptuous. His French colleague instantly bridled. “All right, then, Albert Einstein. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say about the crimes.”

  Wordlessly, Richard Sturi removed his sleek Sony laptop from its case and placed it on the table. As he lovingly stroked its cover, Danny had a sudden image of Blofeld, from the Austin Powers movies, with his cat.

  “This is just some initial analysis. Very basic.”

  Danny McGuire and Claude Demartin both gazed at the screen in awe. The graphs lit up the screen one by one in an array of eye-popping colors. Red for the Jakes murder, blue for the Henley case, green for Anjou, and livid purple for the Barings. There were time lines, showing the length of time between the date of each marriage and the respective husband’s murder, and from each murder to the wife’s disappearance. Bar graphs, analyzing everything from the age gap between each couple to the geographical distance between the crimes. Richard Sturi had done his homework and then some. On the last screen, in yellow, was another, as-yet-untitled set of graphs.

  Danny pointed at them. “What are those?”

  “Projections. Not conjecture, you understand.” Sturi looked at Demartin with an expression hovering between pity and contempt. “Mathematical probabilities, drawn from the limited known facts. I’ve been building up a profile of the killer based on past data. The yellow lines predict his statistically probable next move.”

  Danny swallowed hard. “You mean his next kill?”

  “Precisely. It occurs to me that the most effective way for us to assist a member country in actually apprehending this individual would be to anticipate his next move and prepare for it. Of course, we can’t say who specifically his next victim will be. But we can predict that individual’s age, net worth, geographical location, most likely wedding date. There is a plethora of factors that can be statistically determined, telling us how the killer will behave in the future based on how he has behaved in the past.”

  Danny stared at the jagged yellow lines and for some reason thought of the Wizard of Oz. Is that how we’re going to find him? By following Sturi’s yellow brick road? Perhaps we’ve had the answers all along, like Dorothy and her friends. We just didn’t know where to look.

  Beneath the graphs were numbers, pages and pages of them. Statistical analysis of everything from the DNA evidence, to the dates of the bank transfers, to comparative data about each of the children’s charities, to the four vict
ims’ dates of birth. A sea of numbers that all but made Danny’s eyes cross.

  Richard Sturi concluded, “In my opinion, it is a poor use of our limited time and resources to focus on who the killer might be and why he does what he does. We simply do not have enough factual evidence to answer those questions. This data tells us how he operates, when and where he kills. Look here.” Sturi flashed between screens so fast that Danny saw nothing but a blurry rainbow. “The rate at which he commits his crimes appears to be increasing rapidly.”

  “No ‘appears’ about it,” said Danny. “Nothing happened for four years after the Jakes case, but the Baring murder occurred a year after Didier Anjou’s.”

  “Ah. But you are assuming that Sir Piers Henley was his first kill after Andrew Jakes.”

  Demartin’s eyes widened. “You think there was another murder in between? One that we don’t know about?”

  “I don’t think anything. Thinking’s not my job. But statistically, such a case is likely, yes. Probably in South America, in 1998 or early 1999. I’m looking into it.”

  “Jeez.” Danny whistled. “Okay. Go on.”

  “He kills every two to three years, moving east around the globe, changing his identity, and possibly his appearance, between each strike. He is highly intelligent and a skilled manipulator. The age difference between his victims and their wives is dropping an average of five years with each murder.”

  “The victims are getting younger?”

  “No. The wives are getting older. As, of course, is our killer.”

  Danny thought about this, grasping for something that had eluded him up to now. The age thing felt significant, but he didn’t know why. After a long silence, he asked, “Do you think the wives are dead?”

  Richard Sturi hesitated. “Probably. There is no plausible reason, at least none that I can think of, for him to keep them alive.”

  “Except for Lisa Baring,” Demartin said again.

  Except for Lisa Baring. How Danny wished Matt Daley had gotten further with Mrs. Baring. He’d picked a hell of a time to drop off the radar.