Now or Never (4 page)

She tore out the report, folded it and placed it in her green leather Filofax, already crammed with notes and cards, names, addresses, telephone numbers and other important information. Then she stuffed it in her sand-colored Bottega Veneta bag.

Besides her passport and tickets, her itinerary and traveler’s checks, the bag was also stuffed with the papers she meant to read on the Concorde flight to London. Plus two pairs of narrow gold-rimmed eyeglasses, two identical pairs of sunglasses, several packs of pocket-sized Kleenex and a jumbled bag of cosmetics and lotions.

There was also a Mont Blanc rollerball pen, a couple of unmatched earrings, a few ticket stubs from the last trip and odd bits of foreign currency. On top was a black cashmere sweater that would do double duty in an emergency, day or evening, as well as a change of underclothes.

She had learned from hard experience to be prepared for any eventuality—the time her baggage had not turned
up in Rome for the three days of a long holiday weekend, and every store in the city had been firmly closed.

Mal smiled as she thought of the old saying: You could tell exactly what a woman was like from the contents of her handbag. A stranger would probably assume she was a nervous traveler, a pessimist expecting the worst to happen, sloppy and untidy with a chaotic home life. The sort of woman whose car was littered with a week’s debris: old coffee containers and take-out cartons, and an assortment of clothes intended for the cleaners—whenever she found the time to get them there.

In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth.

She was thirty-seven years old, tall and slender, with the short blond hairdo of a network anchorwoman, impeccably dressed in a simple but expensive beige suit. There was no run in the pantyhose that sheathed her long legs, and her sand-colored suede pumps were pristine and unscuffed. Her makeup was minimal but perfectly applied; the mocha lipstick outlining her full soft-lipped mouth, the brown liner adding a faint emphasis to her large sapphire blue eyes, and the faint, haunting scent of Nocturnes, by Caron, that seemed to enfold her.

Mal Malone was known as “the TV detective.” On her prime-time show she followed up violent cases of murder, of fraud in high places, of sex scandals in Washington, and of Mafia drug-running in Miami.

She was famous for taking up the causes of forgotten murder victims, after public outrage had died down and the media had gone on to the next sensational case. With the assistance of the DA, she would delve out every detail, then reenact the crime on TV, jogging the memories of potential witnesses who might just remember something crucial.

The public was riveted by her. She had her finger on the nation’s pulse. She knew what was bothering them and she showed them why.

It was debatable whether Mallory Malone was a beauty. Sometimes she looked breathtaking; at others she looked downright plain. It all depended on her mood.

When she was up and hot on a case, waves of energy lit up her face with a thousand watts of candlepower, giving her skin a golden glow and turning her eyes luminescent with concern. And at television award shows and dinners, she was ravishing in her trademark plain evening dresses in her favorite muted colors, the low necklines showing off her pretty shoulders and breasts.

On other days, less frequent now, Mal Malone, the famous TV personality, seemed to disappear into the background. She could walk down Fifth Avenue and not a head would turn in recognition. The golden hair would be slicked back, lacking life and luster. The expensive jacket would somehow look as though it had come from the bargain sale racks. And the glow of vitality, the curiosity, the intelligence that had propelled her into the spotlight would be dimmed like a TV screen fading into a pinpoint of light before being extinguished altogether.

Nobody but Mal understood the phenomenon, and she chose not to explain it to anyone. She was a woman who kept her own secrets, but it was an image that haunted her.

Most days, however, Mallory Malone was on top of the world. This morning, she was on her way to London to interview a voluptuous young American actress who had just become engaged to a man four times her age: a billionaire with a not-too-perfect past and a hunger for more future than was left to him.

Mal had charmed the happy couple into appearing on her show, knowing that the actress was eager for publicity. She was flattered to be interviewed, though Mal had warned her that she would be asking some “impertinent” questions of a personal nature.

“Oh, I know what you mean,” the young actress had
cried, delighted. “Like, am I marrying him for his billions? Well, I can answer that right now, Mal.
Truthfully
. I’m a woman in love. It’s as simple as that. And if you knew him, you’d understand why.”

Actually, Mal was not about to ask anything so obvious. Instead, she intended to ask what the rest of the world was asking: Does the lovely twenty-three-year-old have sex with this unpleasant man in his eighties? And if so, what is it like? And if he were not a billionaire, would she even contemplate having sex with him, let alone living out the rest of his days with him?

Mal intended to interview the billionaire separately, have him take her on a tour of his enormous country estate and his palatial London house. She would ask him about his private jet, the suites he kept at the grand hotels around the world, the yacht berthed in Monte Carlo, and the Swiss hideaway where he lived most of the year.

She would draw him out about his achievements, and he would tell her about them because he was a very ruthless old man who really cared for nobody but himself. And then she would ask him, so very gently, about his first wife. The girl from the poor London suburb who had worked at his side in those early years, when they were running a workingmen’s café in London’s East End, before they created their restaurant and hotel empire.

“What happened to that young woman?” she would ask, though of course she already knew. And after his lies and smooth coverup, she intended to confront him with the facts: that as his empire and his wealth had grown, he had no longer considered his wife a suitable consort for a king of business. That his desertion of her and the cruel divorce had left her destitute. And she would ask him about the “accident” at his country home when his ex-wife had gone to beg the business monarch for financial help, a few crumbs from his brimming plate.

The same accident that had left her brain-damaged and
in a state mental institution for over thirty years. Alone, with never a visitor, nor a luxury to ease her pain.

“About that accident,” Mallory Malone would say, smiling. “It seems there were two witnesses to your wife’s ‘fall’ down that magnificent Jacobean oak staircase. How is it they have never come forward to tell what they saw?”

She imagined how his face would redden as he blustered his arrogant way around this. And she would smile and say, “Well, here they are now. Ready and willing to testify that you paid them good money
not
to say what they saw.
That you pushed her down the stairs
. Now they’ve changed their minds.”

And then we shall see what Little Miss Mercenary has to say about how
darling
her billionaire was, she thought grimly. How
virile
and
charming
and
generous
. And how
lovable
.

Odds were, they deserved each other. He had bought the actress on the commodity market, not to line his coffers but to enhance his image. And she had sold her youth and undoubted beauty for the temporary fame and the power of being a rich man’s wife—as well as for the millions she hoped to reap in the divorce court after a couple of years. Unless, of course, he died conveniently before that and left it all to her. Mal doubted that he would.

She stared out the limo’s window at the snarled traffic edging slowly up the expressway, thinking of the report about the rape and murder of Summer Young. The student was almost the same age as the young actress. She too had had all her life in front of her. Until some bastard had put a stop to it.

It was a pretty name: Summer Young. Mal wondered what she had been like, about her ambitions, her family and friends. Perhaps she had been a loner, dedicated to her studies, determined to make her own way in the world. She shivered, thinking about the horror of what had happened to her.

Lifting the telephone receiver, she dialed her office.

“Beth Hardy here,” her assistant answered promptly on the first ring.

“Beth, it’s me. I’m on my way to JFK. Did you catch the report on the rape and murder of the young student at BU?”

“I sure did. That’s my own alma mater, remember? My God, Mal, what’s the world coming to? If only she had called for a student escort! But I know that parking lot—it’s only five minutes away from the library. She probably didn’t think it was worth it, that there was no danger. Poor kid.”

“The police are linking it to two similar incidents in the past eighteen months. Have someone dig out the facts for me, Beth, would you? See what we can get on it.”

“Is this going to be a feature, then?”

Mal stared moodily in front of her. The outlying areas of the airport were coming into sight. “Maybe. It’s a thought. Let’s find out if there’s a story lurking under the surface that the police are keeping to themselves. A serial killer on the loose? That kind of thing.” She frowned as the phone crackled with static. “I have to go now, Beth. Talk to you from London.”

“Bon voyage,” Beth called. “Give a good interview.”

Ten minutes later, Mallory Malone was being VIP’d straight through to the Concorde lounge, where she boarded the flight immediately.

Fifteen minutes later she was airborne. Refusing a glass of champagne and orange juice, she sipped a cup of tea. The man sitting beside her seemed eager to talk, but she ignored him.

Thrusting Summer Young from her mind, she took out her papers and went over the questions she would ask in the interview.

The flight was almost over before she knew it. She went to the bathroom, flicked powder over her nice but slightlybumpy nose,
slicked the MAC mocha lipstick over her mouth and brushed her short blond hair. Out of consideration for her fellow passengers, she did not spray Nocturnes onto her pulse points or into the soft hollow between her breasts.

She stared at herself in the mirror, feeling the aircraft move beneath her feet. Here she was, plain little Mary Mallory Malone, a nobody from a small town in Oregon, flying faster than sound and about to meet one of the richest villains in the world. She smiled. Sometimes she didn’t believe herself.

A short while later she was wafted through immigration and into a waiting Rolls, on her way to London and the luxurious Lanesborough Hotel, where she would have a large suite, complete with her own butler.

“Oh, Mary Mallory,” she said to herself, awed. “You’ve come a long way from those all-night buses and the rusting turquoise Chevy with the chrome fins.”

“G
OTTA GIVE YOU
A for effort, Prof,” Rossetti said six hours later, on their way back to Boston. They were at a roadside café eating either breakfast or lunch—he wasn’t sure which, because by now he had lost track of time.

“Thanks. It’s not great, but at least we got the framework of a likeness from them.” Harry stared at the photo-fit picture of the killer. Caucasian, narrow face, big mouth with thin lips, broad forehead, a shock of dark hair. And those staring eyes that had burned into his victim’s memory.

It had taken four hours of intense work to delve from the minds of the two shocked fishermen the vague memory of a man they had glimpsed only for a couple of seconds. At first they had insisted they didn’t recall a thing: it had been too dark, too quick, and he had been gone almost before they registered he was there. But then Harry had gone to work on them, leading them back into the moment before they saw the girl, those vital seconds when their brains had taken an instant flash photo of the killer.

He had told them what the victim had said about the man’s eyes, and they had choked up when he said they were the last words she spoke. They were decent guys, eager to help. Then Latchwell had gone to work, and now they had a probable description.

“‘Medium height and build,’” Harry read again, “‘thin-faced, clean-shaven. Prominent eyes with heavy
brows. Thick dark hair, the bushy kind that stands on end. Wearing dark clothing. Driving a small dark-colored truck or a wagon.’”

He said, “It’ll be front page in the
Herald
and the
Globe
, and in the morning tabloids, and maybe the nationals.”

Rossetti shrugged—he didn’t expect much from the publicity. “We’ll see what it trawls in besides the nuts looking to get in on the act and for a moment of glory. And the little old ladies who are sure he was hiding in their closet last night.”

He slurped his coffee noisily, and Harry glared at him. “You should quit drinking that stuff. Your stomach must be lined with caffeine.”

“Think how ugly I’d look if Doc Blake took his forensic scalpel to me.”

“He’d be afraid to cut you open. There’s coffee in your veins, not blood.” Harry’s eyes met his. “He’s doing the autopsy on Summer Young at six.”

“You going?”

Harry nodded.

“Count me out, man. I can’t take that cutting-open business, weighing the hearts and livers, and all that horror stuff. Tell me, Prof, what makes a guy become a forensic expert, anyway?”

“It’s a science. Without doctors like Blake, we might never know what really happened. He’s a detective, only his detecting is done after death.”

Rossetti shivered. “Yeah, well, I’ll stick with the living, thanks.”

Harry laughed. “Not if you keep on drinking that coffee.”

“So? And speaking of health, when did you last have a real meal? And I don’t mean at Ruby’s.”

Harry thought about it. “Three weeks ago. At Marais, in the company of a delightful woman—unknown to you,
so I won’t bother telling you her name—whom I was supposed to call back.” He shrugged regretfully.

Rossetti stared curiously at him. “A good-looking guy like you, Prof. With your education and that fancy apartment. Women must be fallin’ over themselves to get into your bed.”