Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark

by Sidney Sheldon

  This last piece of news seemed to upset Matt immensely.

  “Once the money’s in, he’ll have no reason to spare her. He’ll kill her, just like he killed the others!” His eyes welled up with tears. “How could I have fallen asleep? Why didn’t I hear something, feel something? He took her, Danny. He snatched her right from my bed. Oh Jesus.”

  Danny did his best to calm Matt down. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, we don’t know for sure that it was Lisa’s money that went to the charities. Second, we don’t know for sure that the other widows are, in fact, dead. We don’t have any bodies.” Matt raised an eyebrow, but Danny pressed on. “Third, you’re assuming Lisa was kidnapped. But it’s far more reasonable to assume that she left of her own accord.”

  “No.” Matt shook his head.

  “But, Matt,” Danny said reasonably, “your drink was drugged, right? That had to be her. She needed you unconscious so she could get away.”

  “No!” Matt slammed his frail fist down on the coffee table. With his rational brain he knew McGuire was right. But his heart wouldn’t let him believe it, or at least wouldn’t let him acknowledge the truth out loud. “She loved me. She wouldn’t have gone willingly.”

  “I’m not saying willingly, necessarily. Maybe it was under duress. Maybe this guy has some sort of hold over her.”

  Matt was staring into the middle distance. “We were going to run away together. To Morocco.”

  Danny looked dumbfounded. “You were what?”

  “Liu was trying to frame her,” muttered Matt. “We had to get away. To disappear.”

  “And what about me?” said Danny. “Were you going to disappear on me too? I’m not trying to frame anybody, Matt. All I want is the truth. To find out who’s been committing these savage murders, to know what happened to those women. What might be happening to Lisa Baring right now.”

  “Don’t!” Matt clamped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, rocking back and forth like an autistic child. “I can’t bear it.”

  Maybe his sister’s right, thought Danny, concerned. Maybe he really has lost it. Then he remembered how far gone he himself had been in the dark days after Angela Jakes’s disappearance. For all Céline’s fears, Danny McGuire had never loved Angela Jakes the way that Matt Daley clearly loved Lisa Baring. But dark thoughts of Angela being tortured, abused or killed had still brought Danny to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Was it any wonder that Matt was so screwed up?

  “It’s okay,” he said quietly. “We’ll find her. But we have to work together. And you have to promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”

  “Stupid? Like what?”

  “Like taking off again. Like going to look for her yourself. The one thing we do know is that this guy, this killer, is extremely dangerous. Leave any showdowns to the professionals, for Lisa’s sake as much as your own.”

  Matt put his head in his hands. “I can’t just do nothing. I can’t sit by while she…she…” His voice trailed off into an anguished moan.

  Danny said, “I’m not asking you to do nothing. I’m asking you to help me. Help me to help her.”

  “How?”

  “By talking.” Danny switched on his pocket tape recorder. “Tell me about Lisa Baring, Matt. Tell me everything you know.”

  LATER THAT DAY, BACK IN HIS hotel room in Santa Monica, Danny McGuire lay on the bed, eating a big bag of Lay’s potato chips and inputting everything Matt Daley had told him into the Azrael files.

  Later, he’d have Richard Sturi work on the data to see where it fit into his statistical patterns. Danny had enormous admiration for Sturi, for the way the German could take raw information and give it life and meaning, like a potter fashioning a sculpture out of a lump of clay. But Danny McGuire also respected something that Richard Sturi would have dismissed as superstitious nonsense. He respected instinct. Intuition. Especially his own.

  What pieces of what Matt Daley had told him today were important? Of all the minute details, what leaped out at him?

  Without thinking, Danny started typing.

  New York. Morocco. Sister.

  He’d come to L.A. primarily to do some more hands-on digging into the whereabouts of Lyle Renalto. But today’s meeting with Matt Daley had changed his mind. Lisa Baring was the key to all this. If he found out who Lisa was, he stood a chance of figuring out where she was. And if he found Lisa, Danny McGuire felt sure, he’d find the killer.

  A FEW MILES ACROSS TOWN, MATT Daley was also in bed, staring at a computer screen.

  But it wasn’t his computer. It was Lisa’s.

  He’d thought briefly about handing it over to McGuire this morning. Maybe Danny’s crack team of Interpol experts would uncover something that he himself had missed. But the truth was, as much as he liked the man, Matt no longer fully trusted Danny McGuire. He was a good guy and his heart was in the right place. But he wasn’t convinced of Lisa’s innocence. He hadn’t said he suspected her in so many words. But Matt could just sense it, in his questions, his facial expressions, in all the things he didn’t say.

  Danny McGuire’s job was to find the killer, to get a conviction. Matt Daley wanted that too, but it was no longer his primary focus. His primary focus was to save Lisa.

  Since smuggling her laptop back from Asia, he’d already searched every crevice of every drive it contained, from old e-mails to photo files to Word documents, looking for something, anything, that might tell him who this man was. Lisa’s lover. The one she was protecting. The one who had stolen her from him. But there was nothing. The only lead Matt had was a single vacation photograph, an amateurish shot showing Lisa hand in hand with a man. Lisa’s face suggested that the photo was relatively recent, a year or two old perhaps but no more. She was just as Matt pictured her every night in his dreams. But the man’s face was obscured by a dazzling light. Very bright sunshine, perhaps, or a reflected camera flash. Both of them were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, and standing in front of an aged stone harbor wall.

  Bringing up the photo, Matt examined it again. The wall looked European. Europe in the summertime. A sign in the top left-hand corner caught his eye. He zoomed in, waited for the image to refocus, then zoomed in again. At last he saw it, a single word, hand-painted in cursive, italic script: GELATO.

  Italy! They were in Italy. An Italian harbor. Somewhere on the coast.

  With a jolt Matt’s mind jumped back to Bali. On the veranda at Mirage with Lisa…staring into the fire…watching the flames dance the night they first made love…What was it that she had said?

  “We had a fire pit like this in Positano. Miles loved it.”

  The man in the picture wasn’t Miles Baring. But maybe it had been taken on the same trip to the Amalfi coast.

  Was that where she met him? Was that where the nightmare all started, where she somehow fell into his trap?

  Matt Daley had promised Danny McGuire he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Breaking promises to Danny McGuire was starting to become a bad habit.

  Closing the computer with trembling hands, he started to pack.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  DAVID ISHAG GAZED OUT THE WINDOW of his twenty-third-floor office in Mumbai’s central business district, grinning like an idiot.

  David Ishag wasn’t an idiot. Born to an Indian mother and an English father of Jewish descent, David Raj Osman Kapiri Ishag was one of the most well-respected entrepreneurs of his generation. He had engineering degrees from both Oxford and MIT, and was the founder and CEO of Ishag Electronics, India’s fastest-growing exporter of component hardware. At forty-eight years old, though he looked much younger, with his mother’s smooth coffee skin and his father’s strong patrician features, David Ishag was handsome, brilliant and obscenely rich. Although he considered himself Indian—Ishag Electronics had offices all over the world, but the Mumbai tower overlooking Nariman Point would forever be its headquarters—in reality, David Ishag was a true global citizen. Raised in India, educated in England and America, steeped i
n not one or even two but three religions—his mother’s Christianity, his father’s Judaism, and the Hinduism of his native land—David could fit in almost anywhere. More even than his academic brilliance, it was his global worldview, and his ability to relate to people from all cultures and walks of life, that had made David Ishag the business phenomenon that he was.

  This morning, however, his famed commercial acumen was in sleep mode.

  This morning, all David Ishag could think about was a beautiful woman’s face.

  THEY HAD MET TWO MONTHS EARLIER at a charity function. It was one of those tedious, overdone white-tie affairs at the Oberoi, where hedge fund and private equity types bid hundreds of thousands of dollars for lackluster raffle prizes ostensibly in order to “Raise Money for Street Kids” but more truly in order to show off in front of their girlfriends. Normally David avoided these things like the plague. He gave plenty of money to charity, anonymously and by bank transfer, like any normal, decent human being, and had zero interest in being pursued around a ballroom by dozens of frenzied, money-hungry socialites. The women at these events were worse even than the men, shameless gold diggers with faces shot up with Botox and craniums full of nothing at all. They could virtually smell your net worth from across a room, the way trained police dogs sniffed out hidden caches of drugs. They scared him.

  Unfortunately, being a prominent member of Mumbai’s business community meant that occasionally David Ishag had to put in an appearance at such charitable functions. On this particular evening, for the first time ever, he was glad he had.

  He saw her at a corner table, looking as bored as he was. Not the arrogant, affected boredom of the models who eyed David when he walked in, so intoxicated by their own beauty that they considered everybody else beneath them, but the genuine, profound boredom of an intelligent person who finds herself stuck making small talk with a table full of braying donkeys.

  She was simply dressed in a decidedly noncouture black column, but her beauty needed no adornment. With her high cheekbones, pale skin and intelligent dark brown eyes, framed by a sharply cut Cleopatra bob of black hair, she had a presence, almost an aura that drew David to her. Catching him staring, she looked up and smiled.

  Her name was Sarah Jane Hughes. She was a schoolteacher, working for a charity that helped educate slum children across the subcontinent. She was Irish, only a few years younger than David and hilariously funny. Her imitations of the investment banking bores at her table had David in stitches for days afterward, just as her haunting face had him skipping out of meetings early just to check if she’d called him back and agreed to go out on a date.

  She hadn’t.

  David Ishag had dated other girls who played hard to get. The smart ones knew that Mumbai’s most eligible, and also its most confirmed, bachelor was unlikely to be impressed by neediness. But Sarah Jane wasn’t playing. She was genuinely busy, with the children at her school, her teaching, her life. She’d had no idea who David was when they met, and when she found out, she didn’t care.

  David Ishag already knew he was in love. For him, it was instantaneous. But once Sarah Jane agreed to go out with him, it had taken him a month to persuade her that she felt the same way. Just when he’d started to believe it was never going to happen for him, that the tabloids were right when they said he simply wasn’t the marrying type, David had found the woman of his dreams. He was sublimely, ridiculously happy.

  The buzzer rang. “Someone here to see you, Mr. Ishag. A young lady.”

  David’s heart soared. Sarah Jane! They weren’t supposed to see each other till dinner tonight. After she’d accepted his marriage proposal last week—David had wanted to fly her to the perfect romantic location, Mauritius or at the very least Goa, to pop the question, but Sarah Jane point-blank refused to take time off work, so in the end he was forced to produce the ring over dinner at Schwan’s—they had a lot to discuss. But David knew that if he had to wait another six hours to see her, he wouldn’t get a stroke of work done today. He was delighted she’d bothered to come all this way, leaving her beloved classroom.

  But when the office door opened, David’s heart sank. Not Sarah Jane. Elizabeth Cameron. My lawyer. He’d totally forgotten about their meeting.

  Elizabeth Cameron smiled. “Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.”

  David tried hard to maintain his professional demeanor, but the disappointment was etched on his face. “Not at all, Elizabeth. What can I do for you?”

  Elizabeth Cameron was blond, attractive and ambitious. A promising young lawyer, she knew how important a big client like David Ishag was to her firm, not to mention to her own career. Please, please don’t let him shoot the messenger.

  “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. Ms. Hughes has returned the documents to us. Unsigned.”

  “Oh.”

  If David Ishag looked surprised, it was because he was. The papers in question were a fairly standard prenuptial agreement. Sarah Jane was the one who’d wanted a quick wedding, somewhere private and low-key, with no elaborate preparations. “As soon as you sort out the legals, we’ll do it” had been her exact words.

  “Are you sure she understood what the papers were?”

  Elizabeth Cameron shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Quite sure. She read them thoroughly. I handed them over myself. Her response was…well, it was…” She trawled her memory banks for an appropriate word. Forthright…pithy…

  “Spit it out, girl,” said David with uncharacteristic anger. “What did she say? Exactly.”

  The lawyer swallowed hard. “Well now…exactly…she said she wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth. She said I could give you back your wretched contract, along with this.” Reaching out her hand, she pressed an exquisite Bombay sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring into David’s palm. “If I’m being completely honest, she did then suggest that you might like to, quote, stick, unquote, both the ring and the documents up your—”

  “Yes, yes, I get the picture.” David was already on his feet. “Where was she when you saw her? At the school?”

  Elizabeth Cameron nodded glumly. “I’m not sure I’d go rushing straight over there, though. She was very, very angry. Speaking as a woman now, not as your attorney…you might want to give her a chance to cool down first.”

  “Sound advice, I’m sure,” said David, pulling on his coat. “Unfortunately I’m completely incapable of taking it. You see, Ms. Cameron, the trouble is, I love this woman. And if she doesn’t marry me, I’m going to have to jump out a window. You’ll see yourself out?”

  SARAH JANE’S COLLEAGUES HAD NEVER SEEN her so angry. In fact, they’d never seen her angry at all.

  Sinéad, the teaching assistant, said, “It’s probably just a misunderstanding.”

  Rachel, the headmistress, said, “Take the day if you need to, Sarah. Go and sort it out.”

  But Sarah Jane didn’t want to “take the day.” She wanted to take an ice pick to David Ishag’s skull. Yes, theirs had been a whirlwind romance. And yes, in many ways they were still getting to know each other. But if David thought, dreamed, that she was going to begin their marriage by signing some horrible, legal insurance policy, clearly he didn’t know her at all.

  The school where Sarah Jane taught was a one-room building, really little more than a long shed, in the heart of the Dharavi slums. Over a million people lived in this fetid network of alleys and makeshift shelters, spread over half a square mile between Mahim in Mumbai’s east and Sion in the west. Two-thirds of that number were children, less than five percent of whom received any formal education at all. The two hundred kids who crammed into Sarah Jane’s school building every day were the chosen few, delighted to be there, eager to learn and, in many cases, remarkably bright. Despite the lack of facilities and the hundred-degree-plus heat in which they worked, Sarah Jane and her colleagues considered theirs to be a dream job.

  Meeting David hadn’t changed that. His daily life might have been about as far removed from h
ers as it could possibly be. But that was one of the things Sarah Jane loved about India. It was a place of extremes, a place where a love affair like theirs might actually work. Of course, it was probably easier for her to take the sanguine view, from the bottom looking up, than it was for David, with the world at his feet. He might be dark-skinned, and have Raj as a middle name, but when it came to living and working among the poor and dispossessed, Sarah Jane was already far more Indian than he was. David had visited Sarah’s school only once. The fear on his face on that occasion as they walked through Dharavi had amused Sarah Jane hugely.

  This was his second visit. Walking into the packed schoolroom, he looked even more terrified than he’d looked the first time, but for quite a different reason.

  “Can we talk?”

  Two hundred chattering kids fell silent in unison. Ms. Hughes’s beau was from another planet, rich and handsome and wearing a suit that none of their parents could have afforded if they’d worked a lifetime.

  “No.”

  “Please, Sarah. It’s important. I don’t know what Elizabeth said to you but—”

  “Don’t blame your lawyer!” Sarah Jane shot back. “You sent her.”

  “I did, yes. But if you’d just let me explain.”

  “I’m teaching.”

  “Fine.” Scared of losing her as he was, David Ishag was no pushover. Pulling a hard wooden chair out from one of the desks at the back of the room, he sat down and folded his arms. “I’ll wait.”

  It was a long wait. An hour. Two. Three. The heat was unbearable. David took off his jacket and tie and, eventually, his shoes. He longed to peel off his sweat-sodden business shirt as well, but felt a full impromptu striptease might not help his cause with Sarah Jane at this point. She was having enough trouble holding her class’s attention as it was. If there was one thing young Indians loved, from the mansions to the slums, it was a good soap opera. This afternoon, the CEO of Ishag Electronics was providing it, waiting like a naughty schoolboy to explain himself to teacher.