Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark (19 page)

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.”

 

M
ATT
D
ALEY 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.”

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.”

D
ANNY
M
C
G
UIRE 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 home
less 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 cheery. 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?”

“Of course,” Danny said gratefully. “Hopefully I'll be out of your hair before too long.”

It turned out to be a forlorn hope. It was astonishing just how much paper could be stuffed, squeezed, folded and crammed into a single metal drawer. Birth certificates, medical records, police and caseworker reports lay side by side with private letters, children's sketches and even old candy wrappers. Nothing was labeled, and though some official documents were dated, it didn't look like anyone had made even a perfunctory attempt to put things into any sort of order.

After two hopeless hours, a kid wandered in and handed Danny a much-needed cup of coffee. He was about sixteen, lanky and awkward and with punishing acne covering a good third of his face. But he looked Danny in the eye when he spoke—always a good sign—and you could see from his bone structure that he was going to grow up into a good-looking young man.

“Mrs. Bingham said to ask if you could use any help.”

Danny looked up from the midst of the mountainous piles of paper. “Nah, that's okay. If I knew what I was looking for, maybe. But there's no point in two of us wasting our time.”

“It's all stuff from the eighties, right?” said the boy.

Danny nodded.

“Have you seen the old yearbooks? If nothing else, they'll put a smile on your face. The clothes were, like, tragic.” Grabbing a chair, the boy climbed up to the top shelf of a tall cabinet and pulled down a stack of black binders, dropping them on the floor beside Danny with a loud
thud
.

“These are kept separately?”

“Um, sure,” said the boy, looking a little embarrassed. “Not officially. It's kind of sad, I guess, but sometimes we use them to play ‘hot or not.' You know that Web site, where you put up your picture and kids can vote on how attractive you are? It's kind of like a lame version of that. Anyway, these are the eighties ones.”

The boy left, and Danny started flicking through this new treasure trove. Not that he seriously expected to see a photo of a teenage Lisa Baring jump out at him. The odds of that had to be thousands to one. But at least these were pictures, with names, pictures of real kids.

Quite a number of years were missing. The books jumped from 1983 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 1992. It wasn't until he flipped open the ninth yearbook that he saw it.

The photo was dated, and the fashions as unflattering as the boy had warned him they would be. The face staring out at Danny was younger than he remembered, of course, and less polished. The teeth were not quite straight, and the hair was worn loose and long. But it was a face Danny McGuire would never forget. The long, aquiline nose. The regal curl of the lips. The arrogant sparkle in the azure-blue eyes. Beneath the photograph, some female hand from a later decade had scrawled the word
HOT
with several exclamation points.

He was hot, even then. And didn't he just know it.

The head shot was captioned
Frances Mancini—Most Likely to Make It to Hollywood!
But Danny McGuire knew him by another name.

Lyle Renalto.

 

C
LAIRE
M
ICHAELS THOUGHT TWICE ABOUT MAKING
the call. She felt guilty, but she had to do something. She was desperately worried about her brother, and had no idea who else to turn to. She dialed the number.

“Hello?” Danny McGuire sounded extremely upbeat. For some reason, this threw Claire off her stride.

“Oh, hello,” she stammered. “It's me. Claire Michaels. Matt Daley's…you know. We met.”

“In L.A., of course. You're Matt's sister,” Danny said kindly.

“Right. Have you heard any news from him?”

This brought Danny up short. Why would Claire be asking him such a question? Wasn't Matt staying at her house?

To be honest, the last thing Danny McGuire wanted to think about right then was Matt Daley. After stumbling across Lyle Renalto's picture—Frankie Mancini's picture—in the Beeches' yearbook earlier that day, he had hunted down Carole Bingham in high excitement. The director had introduced him to Marian Waites, one of the facility's catering staff and the only individual still on payroll who had been around in Mancini's day.

Danny hadn't expected much from Mrs. Waites, but it turned out
the old lady had an encyclopedic memory, and was able to point out another face from the yearbook, a face that belonged to someone who had known Mancini well. “Thick as thieves, they were, those two.” His name was Victor Dublenko. A quick call to the NYPD revealed that
they
knew Dublenko well, as a pimp and occasional dealer, still alive, currently out of jail and living in Queens, not six blocks from the Beeches, where Danny was standing at that very moment. Danny had been about to head off to Dublenko's apartment when Claire called.

Reluctantly, he turned his attention back to Matt Daley. “No. I haven't heard a word from him since I saw him at your place. He's not there with you?”

“If he were here with me, I wouldn't be calling, would I?” snapped Claire. “I'm sorry. I don't mean to take it out on you. But I'm worried about him. He left me a voice mail last night that literally made no sense.”

“Did he say where he was?”

“Yeah. He's in Italy.”

“Italy?”

“Uh-huh. The Amalfi coast. He said he had some lead about the man who may have abducted Lisa. To be frank with you, I'm surprised he had the money for a plane ticket. God knows how he's surviving out there.”

Danny's heart sank. Matt had sworn to him that he'd let it go, that he wouldn't go chasing down this maniac on his own. Now that the powers that be at Interpol had officially sanctioned Operation Azrael, the last thing Danny needed was a mentally unstable Matt Daley crashing through his case like a bull elephant, interfering with potential witnesses and, for all he knew, withholding key evidence. He'd made no mention of an Italian “lead” when he and Danny met.

“Did he say anything else?”

“He said a lot of things, but like I said, he was rambling. He said Lisa's lover wasn't her lover. He was gay. He said that she knew him before she knew Miles, which for some reason he thought was important, but that he ‘couldn't be Azrael,' that you and the other officers were on the wrong track. Who the hell is Azrael?”

“No one,” said Danny. “It's a code name. Don't worry about it.”

He too was worried about Matt, personally as well as professionally. “I appreciate your calling me,” he told Claire. “I'm on my way to an im
portant meeting right now, but afterward I'll try to contact your brother again. In the meantime, if you hear anything else, anything at all…”

“I'll let you know. He's not…he's not in any danger, is he?”

Danny could hear the anxiety in her voice.

“No,” he lied. “I don't think so. I'll put a call in to the local police in Amalfi, just in case. Ask them to keep an eye out for him.”

The conversation with Claire Michaels was bothering him. Had Matt Daley really gotten a useful lead on Lisa's lover? Without talking to him, it was impossible to figure out how much of what he'd told his sister was real, and how much a figment of his fevered, anxiety-racked imagination. By the time Danny reached Dublenko's apartment, his train of thought was hopelessly muddled.

Lyle Renalto. Frankie Mancini.
What connection could the boy in the yearbook photograph possibly have to Italy and Lisa Baring? Why was Danny even here?

Five minutes later Victor Dublenko appeared to be asking himself the same question, glaring at Danny from his grimy, vinyl La-Z-Boy recliner.