Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark

by Sidney Sheldon

  Finally, class was dismissed. Sinéad and Rachel made themselves scarce. The lovebirds were alone.

  “Why did you come here, David? What do you want?”

  Anger still flashed in Sarah Jane’s eyes. David chose his words carefully.

  “You. I want you.”

  “On your terms.” Sarah Jane gathered up her books and started stuffing them furiously into her briefcase.

  David put a hand on her arm. “I’m not going to let you go over some stupid miscommunication. I want you, Sarah Jane. On any terms.”

  For a moment a look of real sadness crossed her face. “You don’t even know me.”

  David recoiled, stung. “How can you say that?”

  Because it’s true. Because I barely know myself sometimes. It’s like I’m playing a role, the leading role in my life, but somehow I only received a copy of half the script.

  “If you really knew me, you’d know I don’t give a fig about your stupid money.”

  “I do know that,” David protested.

  “Then why do you need a prenup? You might as well have written me a letter saying ‘I don’t trust you.’”

  David tore at his hair in frustration. “I’m worth the better part of a billion dollars, Sarah Jane, okay? Whether you like it or not, that sort of money brings complications. Trustees, shareholders, tax implications. I can’t simply run off and get married without considering my responsibilities.”

  “Well, you won’t need to worry about them now, will you? Because we won’t be getting married!”

  Not since his college girlfriend, Anastasia, had David had to deal with such an unreasonably stubborn female. Ironically, Anastasia was the only other girl he’d ever been in love with. But when she got pregnant with his child, she had not only refused to marry him, but refused to have anything more to do with him at all, insisting he was “too immature” to be a father. After running back to her parents in Moscow to give birth to a baby girl, she severed all contact. By the time David recovered sufficiently to fly out to Russia and insist on seeing his daughter, Anastasia had gone. No letter, no forwarding address, no nothing.

  He was not about to let history repeat itself.

  “For God’s sake, Sarah Jane.” Pulling her to him, he refused to let go. “I thought that was what you meant when you told me to ‘sort out the legals.’ It never crossed my mind it would upset you like this.”

  “You thought I meant a prenup?”

  “The documents Elizabeth brought you today were nothing out of the ordinary. Not for a man in my position. But if I made a mistake, I’m sorry. I do trust you, totally. And I need you to be my wife.”

  He kissed her. Despite herself, Sarah Jane melted into him. He was such a good man. So decent. So attractive. So strong. He reminded her of someone, someone she needed to forget. It was all so confusing, so hard to tell right from wrong.

  David whispered in her ear. “Please say you’ll marry me.”

  “No prenup?” Sarah Jane whispered back.

  “No prenup.”

  MATT DALEY SAT ON THE HARBOR wall in Positano, Italy, pulling hunks of bread from a freshly baked loaf and eating them slowly. The bread was delicious, flavored with rosemary and sea salt, soft and satisfying beneath the hard, seeded crust. Matt could have happily wolfed down the lot, but knew he had to make it last.

  He’d been in Italy for ten days and his money was running out at an alarming rate. What Raquel had left him after the divorce barely amounted to a deposit on a Hershey bar. What little he had left didn’t go far in a country that charged you two euros just to use a public bathroom and where gasoline seemed to cost roughly the same as liquid platinum. Restaurants were a total no-go. For the last two days Matt had survived on salami sandwiches and water from drinking fountains, but at this point meat of any kind was becoming a luxury—hence the bread-only lunch. He’d already traded in his modest room in a local guesthouse for a hostel, which was half the price but looked and felt like prison, complete with communal showers, bunk beds and a strict midnight curfew. And after all that, he was no nearer finding Lisa’s mystery lover than he had been when he arrived.

  On the plus side, the nightmares had at least stopped. If Matt had woken up screaming Lisa’s name at two A.M., the way he had been doing at Claire’s place, he’d have been kicked out of the hostel for sure. It’s because I’m doing something. I’m not sitting on my ass crying, I’m out there, trying to find this bastard, trying to save her. Not that Matt didn’t think about Lisa constantly. But he’d learned to compartmentalize the worst of his terrors. Every hour spent torturing himself about what might have happened to her, or what might be happening to her right now, was an hour wasted. If I fall to pieces, she’ll have no one.

  Armed with a printout of the picture from Lisa’s computer, Matt had visited every hotel in town, from the scummy Pensione Casa Guillermo to the palatial Hotel San Pietro.

  “All reservations are confidential,” said the snooty receptionist at the San Pietro. “We don’t give out information on our guests, past or present.”

  “Never seen her,” said the bored desk clerk at the Casa Guillermo.

  “Don’t think so. But fifty euros might jog my memory,” said the fat manager of the Britannia Guesthouse, rubbing his hands together hopefully. Matt demurred. It was clear the greasy-vested idiot didn’t recognize Lisa. Besides which, Matt could not imagine Lisa ever checking in to a dive like the Britannia, no matter how broke she was.

  Carefully wrapping the last of the bread in a plastic bag and stuffing it into his backpack, Matt headed back into the old town. He had one last contact to see. If that came to nothing, he would leave Positano, perhaps go back to Hong Kong and see what he could dig up there.

  The contact had come from a maid at the San Pietro. Witnessing Matt’s curt dismissal by the reception staff, she’d taken pity on him and followed him out to his car.

  “If it’s gossip about the guests you’re looking for, you ought to talk to Michele,” she told him. “Michele saw everything. Heard all the secrets.”

  Michele, it transpired, had worked as a barman at Positano’s grandest hotel until late last year when he’d been fired for petty theft. Unemployed since, he had a serious drinking problem and a major grudge against the San Pietro’s management, neither of which made him a very reliable source of information. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and at this point Matt Daley was definitely a beggar, both figuratively and literally.

  Michele lived in town in a run-down apartment above a fishmonger. Matt found the place easily. Even without the San Pietro maid’s directions he could probably have smelled his way there. The stench of mackerel and sardines, mingled with sweat and human piss from the alleyway running alongside the building, was bad enough to make him gag.

  “Come in. Valeria told me you were coming.”

  The man who opened the door was younger than Matt expected, and considerably more attractive. He’d been expecting a middle-aged, drunken slob, but other than a five o’clock shadow of stubble and faintly bloodshot eyes, Michele Danieli seemed to be in good shape.

  “I hear you’re looking for someone.”

  “Yes.” Inside the apartment, evidence of a life in disarray became more apparent. Take-out boxes littered the floor, along with empty beer bottles and old newspapers. A half-empty bottle of Scotch was plainly visible next to the kitchen sink. How did a fit, handsome kid like this get so down on his luck? Matt found himself feeling sorry for Michele.

  He handed him the printout of Lisa’s photograph. The barman’s reaction was instantaneous.

  “Yes, I know them. They stayed for five days or so.”

  “When?” Matt asked breathlessly.

  “Late summer, two years ago.”

  The summer before she married Miles Baring.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely,” said Michele. He pulled a cigarette out of a pack on the coffee table and lit it, blowing smoke in Matt’s face. “I never forget a lover.”
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  Matt inhaled sharply. He felt like he’d been hit over the head with a baseball bat.

  “A lover? You slept together?”

  Michele nodded. “Just once.”

  Clearly, there was much about Lisa’s past that Matt didn’t know. He’d accepted that fact long ago. But the idea that she would go on vacation to Italy with one man, then jump into bed with the first good-looking barman who asked her…that hurt. It wasn’t the Lisa he remembered.

  “The guy was a total asshole,” Michele continued. “Violent, depraved. I was bruised so bad the next day, I couldn’t go to work.”

  It took a few seconds for his words to sink in.

  “You mean…the man was your lover?”

  Michele laughed. “Of course! I don’t do women, sweetheart. Can’t you tell?” He winked at Matt flirtatiously, but a few seconds later his mood darkened. “I’m sure it was him who complained to the hotel about the missing cuff links. Like I’d want to touch his stinking jewelry after the way he treated me.”

  “Just to be clear. You’re saying the man in the picture was gay?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “But he checked into the hotel with this woman? As a couple?”

  “Uh-huh. Married. Don’t look so shocked.” Michele laughed. “It happens all the time.”

  Matt sank down onto the filthy, litter-strewn couch. After ten days of coming up empty, he was getting more from two minutes with Michele Danieli than he’d bargained for. If Danieli was telling the truth, and Lisa’s mystery “lover” was actually gay, he couldn’t be the Azrael killer. Whoever butchered those old men also raped their wives. He got off on sex with women.

  “Do you remember their names, this couple?”

  “He told me his name was Luca. His wife called him something else though. Franco, Francesco…something Italian. I never knew their last name, but the hotel should have records.”

  Not any that they’ll show me, buddy. Interpol, though, could probably find out easily enough, if Matt decided to come clean and share this new information with Danny McGuire. Danny’s team also had money to pursue new leads, something Matt Daley sorely lacked. But McGuire had admitted that he was cooperating with Inspector Liu, and Inspector Liu wanted to frame Lisa. For practical purposes, this made him dangerous. The enemy.

  “What’s your interest in this guy?” Michele piped up. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “It’s the woman I’m more concerned about,” said Matt. “I have reason to believe…I’m afraid she might be in danger.”

  “If she’s still with Luca, I’d say it’s a certainty.” Michele lit another cigarette. Matt noticed that his hand was trembling. “That guy was strange. Scary, actually. I got the feeling she was intimidated by him when I saw them at the bar, but it wasn’t till after I slept with him myself that I realized why. I honestly thought he might kill me that night.”

  “Is there anything else you remember about them, anything at all that might help me find this man? Did he talk about his home, his friends, his job at all? Did she?”

  Michele shook his head. “Sorry, man. Nothing springs to mind.”

  Matt got up to leave. When he reached the door, Michele called out, “Oh! There was one thing. It’s probably not important, though.”

  “Try me.”

  “The woman, Luca’s wife. She was lonely, I think. Anyway, she became friendly with another guest, especially during her last few days here. He was an old man, superwealthy, and he was here on his own. Anyway I remember at the pool, the old guy asked her where her family was from. And she said Morocco.”

  Matt froze. “Morocco?”

  “Yeah. Which was weird, because this girl was as American as apple pie. I mean, like, if she was North African, I’m from Nova Scotia.”

  “Would you recognize the old man if I showed you a picture?” Matt asked, his voice shaking.

  “Don’t need a picture,” said Michele. “He was the biggest tipper I ever had, so I remember his name. It was Baring. Miles Baring.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DANNY MCGUIRE PULLED HIS PUFFY JACKET more tightly around him and braced himself against the cold as he walked through the busy streets of Queens. It was only late September, but New York was already in the grip of its first fall cold spell. Above Danny’s head, russet leaves tipped with frost shook in the chill northeasterly wind. On the corner, three homeless men huddled around a burning oil drum, warming their gloved fingers over the flames. It felt as if it might snow. The FBI had been generous with their time, bending over backward to help Danny dig into Lisa Baring’s early life. But it was like hunting the proverbial needle in a haystack. All they had to go on was what Danny gave them—Lisa’s photograph, her blood type, her presumed age (based on the date of birth on her passport) and a range of dates during which she might have lived in the city as a child.

  “You got anything on her family?”

  Danny shook his head. “We think she had a sister, but no details on that. Parents believed dead. That’s it.”

  The assistant director shrugged. “It’s not much to go on.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Give me a couple of days and I’ll see what I can find.”

  While the FBI worked away, Danny spent the next forty-eight hours ricocheting around Manhattan like a deranged shuttlecock. He made a total of 116 phone calls to various high schools, for which his only reward was 116 “sorry, no such name in our records.” He’d gone in person to the DMV, a Social Security Administration branch, the head offices of six retail banks and numerous administrative offices of eight major hospitals. He’d e-mailed Lisa’s picture to the Times, the Daily News and the Post, on the off chance it might ring a bell with someone, and completed an exhaustive search for local news stories about orphaned sisters and/or any references to Morocco and children. Absolutely nothing.

  Depressed and defeated, he’d returned to FBI headquarters only to find his helpful agent in a similarly glum mood.

  “I’m sorry. But like I said, it’s a big city and there’s a loooot of Lisas in it. And that’s assuming her real name is Lisa to begin with. You’re talking about an anonymous kid who may have lived here twenty years ago.”

  Danny sighed. “Thanks for trying.”

  “The only other angle I can think of is the dead parents. If they died when she was young and there was no other family, she might have been placed in some kind of orphanage. The child welfare system doesn’t usually separate siblings, if they can help it, so if she had a sister, they’d probably have gone somewhere together. You want the number for the offices of New York State Children and Family Services?”

  That was yesterday evening. After a long night spent letting his fingers do the walking, today Danny was tramping the freezing streets of New York hitting the children’s shelters in person. Lowering his head against the cold, he checked the GPS on his phone. Almost there. The Beeches was the last institution on his list. With so many homes closing down because of a lack of funds, and a shift in state policy in the nineties that favored fostering orphans out to families rather than keeping them in an institutional setting, there were in fact only twelve orphanages still running that had been operational back in the early eighties. Four of them only took in boys. Of the other eight, Danny had visited seven. Two kept no records at all. Of the five that did, none had taken in a pair of sisters during the dates in question. One had housed a Lisa, surname Bennington, but she was currently serving a thirty-year sentence for aggravated armed robbery in a Louisiana penitentiary. Another dead end.

  The Beeches in Queens was the largest remaining facility for homeless teens in the city. Most children’s homes ceased to provide care after the age of thirteen, when kids were shoved out onto the streets or into halfway houses or foster homes. An ugly, redbrick Victorian building with small windows and a forbidding-looking black front door, the Beeches reminded Danny of something you’d find in a Dickens novel. Once he was inside, however, the decor was surprisingly ch
eery. Some budding artist had spray-painted a brightly colored, graffiti-style frieze on the reception walls. Through double glass doors at the end of the corridor Danny saw a group of young men gathered around a foosball table while another, largely female group was watching American Idol reruns on a communal TV, shouting loudly but good-naturedly at the screen.

  I’ve seen worse places to grow up, thought Danny, thinking of the East L.A. streets he used to work back in his twenties or even the run-down neighborhoods of Lyon. Maybe these kids were the lucky ones.

  “Mr. McGuire? I’m Carole Bingham, the director here. Would you like to take a seat in my office?”

  In her early forties, with short blond hair, a handsome rather than conventionally pretty face and a trim figure elegantly covered by a wool Ann Taylor suit, Carole Bingham looked professional and organized. She was clearly more of an administrator than a house-mother type, but perhaps that was what kids of this age needed.

  Danny explained his quest. He was at pains to point out that the woman he was searching for was not necessarily suspected of murder, or indeed of any crime, but she was a link between four particularly gruesome homicides.

  Carole Bingham pulled out a heavy metal drawer from a large, old-fashioned filing cabinet in the corner. “We’re computerized from 1999 onward,” she explained. “Back during the years you’re talking about, whatever information we have is in here.”

  “You never had anyone input this stuff into your electronic files?” asked Danny, gazing despondently at the mountain of disorganized, dog-eared documents.

  Carole Bingham smiled sweetly. “Are you volunteering for the job? Look, you’re right, of course. We should organize our old records. But the truth is we don’t have either the budget or the time.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “I have a meeting with some bureaucrats from Albany in ten minutes in the main hall. Are you all right sifting through all this stuff on your own?”