The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (16 page)

“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, Mahoney,” Phyl retorted coolly.

“That’s what they all say, ma’am,” he countered, taking the cat basket from her and following her up the stairs.

“If you make any comments about the size of my butt, Mahoney,” she said over her shoulder, “I shall have you arrested for sexual harassment.”

“Now why would I make comments about your butt, Doc?” he asked plaintively. “It looks great to me.”

“Mahoney!” Her eyes flashed as she swung around, and then they both laughed.

“You are a fool,” she said, walking into his home.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Maybe you’re right.”

He poured her a glass of wine—Italian and red—as she wandered interestedly around the apartment. The windows were flung open to catch the last rays of the
setting sun and the breeze coming from the ocean. A Wagner opera was blasting from the speakers, and three cats—two slender Siamese and a well-fed tabby that looked like a plumped-up cushion with yellow eyes—clustered on the kitchen counter, staring hostilely at the newcomer cat still in its carrying case.

The apartment was basically one room, cleverly divided by Japanese screens, and furnished with an eclectic mix of junk shop, Crate & Barrel, and Williams-Sonoma. There were some good secondhand oriental rugs and a few interesting antique pieces, and two of the walls were lined with bookshelves.

Phyl noticed that there were learned works on the psychology of the criminal mind, as well as bound scores of most of the operas. There was a huge section of poetry and dozens of cookbooks and old copies of
Gourmet
, a couple of shelves on cats and a stack of several years of Cat
Fancy Magazine.
There were also hundreds of detective novels.

“Everything for the well-rounded personality,” she said, laughing, as she inspected the enormous cat playhouse that took up one entire corner of the room. She admired his stereo, the best Bang & Olufsen, and she told him she thought the paintings, most of which were just stacked against the walls, were intriguing.

“Yeah, they’re all by unsuccessful young artists. Quite a few of them live around here, and they’re all I can afford. Which doesn’t mean to say they’re not good,” he added. “Anyway, I like them. I chose each one carefully for the pleasure it gave me.”

She ran her hand over a piece of sculpture. It was carved from wood and was composed of subtle curves with a tactile smoothness that was irresistible.

“Ah, the wood sculptures,” he said bashfully. “I confess to having created those myself.”

“There really is no end to your talents, is there, Mahoney?” she said, sliding onto a stool at the kitchen counter.

“None,” he agreed immodestly. “And to prove it, the kitchen you are looking at so critically was designed and built by me.”

She stared at the steel restaurant stove, the butcher-block countertops, the copper-bottomed pans hanging from a rail behind it, and the battery of whisks and spatulas and lethal-looking knives and cleavers.

“What the hell are you doing, being a cop, Mahoney?” she demanded finally. “You could have been a great chef. Or a cat breeder. A sculptor. A poet. A professor. An opera star.”

He looked at her and laughed. “Everything but the opera star. You haven’t heard me sing! But
chef
maybe. Now this is a Roger Vergé recipe—fricassee of chicken with fresh herbs—and believe me, that man knows what he’s cooking. I tell you, if I could, I’d swap places with him tomorrow.”

He swept the cats off the table and set down their plates. “Vergé’s restaurant is right there, where you’re heading. In the south of France. You should try it. Tell me how my version compares.”

“Maybe I’ll do that.” She hesitated, wishing for a minute he were coming with her. “Mahoney, Bea called me this afternoon. She said she had found the dream villa. The one she told me about when I hypnotized her.”

He listened seriously while Phyl told him about the villa and about the woman who had died there. She told him that it had been uninhabited for decades and that Bea had remembered songbirds that were no longer there.

“How do you explain that, Mahoney?” she demanded finally.

“There are only two logical ways she might know the place: Either she
has
been there before or someone told her about it.”

“That would have to be a remarkably vivid storyteller for her to remember all the details, the smell of
mimosa, the songbirds.” She looked at Mahoney. “I have no answers for her,” she said honestly. “And poor Bea is relying on me to help her.”

Mahoney shrugged sympathetically. “You can only do what you can do.”

“Oh, dammit, mouthing platitudes isn’t going to bring back her memory,” she snapped angrily. Then she looked at him apologetically. “I’m sorry. I just thought if you could find her attacker, we would know who she is.”

“Chicken or the
egg
,” he said quietly.

He got up, put on another record, poured more wine. He said, “The National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes, the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit, prepared a psychological profile of Bea’s killer. Would-be killer, I mean. There wasn’t much evidence for them to go on, just the method of the crime. The lack of use of a weapon indicated that he was a person who wanted to keep his hands clean, so to speak. It had to look like an accident, not for her sake but for his. This tells us that he is a person who cares what society thinks about him, a man with a public image. Perhaps even famous. Anyhow, he’s your white-collar killer. They say he is probably in his late thirties or early forties, successful, charismatic, and attractive. And that people who know him probably think he’s a nice, regular guy.”

“But why would he want to kill her?”

Mahoney shrugged. “Personally, I believe she is a threat to him. He couldn’t allow her to live.”

“
Bea
is a threat?”

“She knows something about him that he couldn’t allow anyone else to know. Something that threatens his existence.”

“Then you don’t think it was a random murder attempt that anyone might have done, but it just happened to be Bea?”

“No. I don’t think that. I think our man knew exactly what he was doing. Did you ever think about
those teethmarks on her right forearm? How about this scenario? Bea meets our man. His dog is trained to attack. He gives it the command. The dog goes for her throat and kills her. He shoots the dog, claims it turned wild. He is heartbroken about the accident.”

Mahoney’s blue eyes were suddenly implacable as they met Phyl’s. “Homicide by canine. That would be a first, now, wouldn’t it, Doc? No guns, no mess. And absolutely unprovable.”

Phyl stared at him. “The person you are describing is a sociopath. He would rationalize his actions. He would feel no remorse. It would all seem logical and simple to him. Something that had to be done.
But why?
”

“That’s what we still don’t know, Doc. That—and who Bea really is.”

Later Mahoney had driven Phyl home, and she had sat silently beside him, not even throwing a dig at him about the vintage Mustang. He could tell she was brooding over what he had told her, and when they arrived at her apartment building, he looked at her with compassion. Then he leaned across, put his hand under her chin, and tilted her troubled face up to him.

“Hey, hey,” he chided. “This doesn’t look like a woman on her way to Paris, glamour capital of Europe and culinary capital of the world. Look, forget what I told you. Just have a great time. And give Bea my love. Tell her I’m looking out for her. I’m not giving up.”

Phyl leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Thanks, Mahoney,” she said, opening the door and sliding out of the seat. “I’ll think of you in Paris.”

“You do that, Doc,” he said, smiling. “And don’t forget. Vergé. The Moulin de Mougins. Think of me when you’re eating that chicken.”

“I’ll try,” she said with her mocking grin.

That had been last night, and Mahoney had spent the rest of it awake and prowling his apartment until it was
time for his midnight shift, wondering what the hell he was going to do next on the Bea French case. Because there was sure as hell no evidence. Even her clothes had gone through the laser fingerprinting tests at the FBI and had come back negative. And there had been no stray fibers or hairs or scraps of any identifiable materials on them that could have been a clue.

Mahoney thought Bea French’s would-be killer had got away with it. And his only chance to catch him would be if he tried again.

15

P
hyl was almost never late. She sat in the back of the limo taking her to San Francisco International Airport, glancing nervously at her watch, fretting about the bumper-to-bumper traffic filtering slowly out to Candlestick Park. The sea of red taillights in front of her stretched into infinity, and she groaned. She should have left more time, but she had just had to see that last patient; he had been desperate, she couldn’t leave him for a week without counseling. He needed her.

That was the trouble, she thought: They all needed her. It was one of the reasons she had decided on a career as a psychiatrist: she’d wanted desperately to be needed again. It could never replace the need of a mother for her child, but it satisfied some bleak, lost part in her own soul. Having gone through her own personal agony and mental turmoil, she empathized with her patients. It was only rarely that she let it get the best of her, only when she was particularly tired, like today.

Last night, when she finished packing, she had sat wearily on her bed, staring at the locked suitcases. If it
had not been for the thought of Bea, with her pretty face and her anxious brown eyes, waiting for her in Nice, she might easily have picked up the telephone and canceled the whole trip. All she really wanted to do was crawl into bed and stay there for about a week.

But of course, she had not; even if Bea had not been the beloved friend she now was, she was still her patient, and that was where her duty lay.

She scowled, glaring at the traffic. “How are we doing?” she asked the driver, thinking worriedly of the time of her flight.

“We’ll be okay once we’re past the stadium,” he said. “Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ll get you there in time.”

She sank back and closed her eyes, thinking how many times she had told people there was no point in worrying about the inevitable. That the only answer was to deal with it. But that didn’t apply to her and missed flights, she thought, feeling the stress in her spine. God, she hated to be late, she hated delays, and she had never missed a flight in her life.

The driver was right; at the Candlestick Park exit the traffic divided into a tributary of red lights, and the limo surged toward the airport. The driver summoned a porter and hastily unloaded her two bags while she ran to the first-class check-in. “I’m late,” she said guiltily, handing over her ticket.

“The flight has already boarded, Dr. Forster,” the man said, “I’ll call ahead and tell them you’re on your way. They won’t close the gate till you get there.” He handed her back her ticket with a smile. “But you’d better hurry.”

“Thanks.” She grabbed her hand luggage, turned quickly, and almost fell into the arms of the tall blond man standing behind her.

“Oh,” she gasped, grabbing at him to keep from falling. When she looked up, the female in her noticed quickly that he was very attractive, even as she made her apologies. “I’m late,” she called over her shoulder
as she fled down the concourse to the gate. “I’ll miss my flight.”

She heard his laughter following her as she ran and thought with irritation it was all right for him to be so cool; his flight probably wasn’t for another hour yet. An airline agent was waiting at the gate to escort her on board, and she glanced around the empty first-class cabin as she sank thankfully into her seat.
Good
, she thought,
I’ve got the place to myself. I’ll just close my eyes and get some sleep. Then maybe I’ll be up for this conference after all.
She shook her head, sighing impatiently at herself; a conference of international experts in her field was something she should have been looking forward to, not treating like a chore.