The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (4 page)

M
ahoney leaned back in his swivel chair in the squad room on the fourth floor of the precinct station, concentrating on what he had just read about the Jane Doe found in Mitchell’s Ravine. It wasn’t much, that was for sure. Multiple injuries, in particular two depressed skull fractures that might have been caused by a blunt instrument. On the other hand, they might have been sustained when she bounced from the rocks.

Then there were the dog bites. Obviously she had raised her right arm to protect herself from an attack. The dog was big, no doubt about it. “We’re talking your Rottweiler, Doberman-type dog,” the experts had told him. “Not your pit bull, though. They have a different grip. And a pit bull would never have let go.”

Had a stray Rottweiler attacked her? Chased her to the edge of the ravine? Maybe she had stepped back, unthinkingly, into the abyss. He shook his head; he didn’t think so. Where there was a dog like that, there was a man. Had he set the dog on her? Had he planned to rape, then kill her? He shrugged wearily. The world was full of crazies. Anything was possible.

He went over the details yet again. There was still no
identification. There was an around-the-clock uniformed cop waiting at the hospital, and since he hadn’t heard anything from him today, he guessed the girl was still in a coma. It was still a “will she or won’t she make it” situation.

He thought about suicide and decided there was no chance. If you wanted to throw yourself off a high place in San Francisco, it wasn’t Mitchell’s Ravine.

No, this was an attempted homicide all right, and if it weren’t for the fact that the undergrowth had caught and held her, and for the marvel of modern neurosurgery, then it would have been “homicide,” not just “attempted.” And God knows there was nothing harder to prove than “attempted” murder; he knew only too well that it was likely to be downgraded to “aggravated assault.” Either way the poor girl was the loser. She either lost her life or lost the satisfaction of sending her assailant away for a lot of years.

He pushed back his chair and strode to the coffee machine. He took his coffee black with no sugar. Tasting it, he wished it were stronger, then decided that with the amount he drank on any given day he’d probably be a shaking caffeine wreck if it were.

Mahoney was a big man, thirty-nine years old, a fitness fanatic who spent what spare time he had working out at the Y or running in the hills. A two-time San Francisco Marathon runner, he had plans for the New York event. Maybe he would do it next year, if he could make enough time to train up to it—and get off the coffee habit. Still, the caffeine addiction was better than the addiction of the Italians on his mother’s side of the family, who drank more grappa than anyone he knew and still stayed standing. And the Irish half, his father’s side, who could put away the Paddy’s with the best and still sing “Galway Bay” at the end of a long night without tripping over the words.

He leaned his bulk against the wall, sipping the coffee, watching the early Friday evening turmoil: a dozen
phones ringing; an early drunk yelling obscenities in the holding tank; a blank-eyed man being interviewed; a desperate-looking couple demanding help finding their teenage son; an arson suspect; a youth accused of a stabbing. He thought you needed the patience of a saint to be a cop, and that was something you weren’t told at cop school. That, and never to assume anything. He couldn’t say how many times he’d proved that one right. Because, folks, he thought, wending his way back to his desk to pick up his ringing phone, in the real world virtually nothing was the way it seemed.

“Yeah?” He leaned back, his feet on his desk, the phone clamped between his shoulder and his ear, sipping his coffee. “Doctor who d’ya say? She’s here now? Okay, tell her I’ll be right with her.”

He checked his notes again. A Dr. Forster had been appointed by the neurosurgeon to help in the rehabilitation of Jane Doe. He hadn’t known she was a woman doctor, though. He sighed, suddenly realizing who she was. Female and famous. Great. Just what he needed on a busy Friday night with a virtually clueless attempted homicide. He guessed he was one of the few who had never seen her on TV or read one of her books. And he didn’t see how she was going to be of much help now. He knew if the girl came out of the coma, Dr. Phyl Forster would want to protect her from his questioning. And he knew he had a job to do. He would want to question her as soon as possible, before she forgot what she remembered.

He decided to let Dr. Forster wait awhile. Give the lady psychiatrist a little character test. See if she could keep her cool or whether she would play Miss High and Mighty Famous doctor with the poor dumb cop.

Phyl had driven straight from the hospital to the precinct house. The neurosurgeon had told her that Mahoney was anxious to interview the girl as soon as she came out of her coma, and she wanted to explain personally that he must not. At least not yet. She paced the
corridors, peering impatiently through the glass doors at the organized chaos inside. She thought it was a bit like the hospital: a sudden slice of real life that jolted her out of the safety of her own carefully planned and controlled environment.

She glanced impatiently at her watch. Goddammit, where was the man! She had been waiting ten minutes, and she was exhausted. Maybe it was reaction to seeing the girl come back to life, like a swimmer surfacing from deep water. God, the relief. Then the flutter of apprehension when she realized the girl didn’t even remember her name. Anyhow, she just thanked the Lord she was alive, that her motor senses were functioning properly, and that she was rational, if understandably distressed.

“Ms. Forster?”

She swung around and met Franco Mahoney’s Irish blue eyes.
Unsmiling
eyes, she noticed. She offered her hand. “I hope I’m not interrupting, but I wanted to talk to you about your Jane Doe. The woman in the ravine.”

His eyes hardened. “Is she awake? I asked to be told the moment she came out of it—”

“And I came here to tell you exactly that, Mr. Mahoney.”

“Detective,” he corrected her.

“
Detective
Mahoney.” She sighed. She could tell he was going to be difficult. He was handsome, too, if you liked big and brawny with half a day’s growth of beard. Six-four or thereabouts, broad in the shoulders, narrow at the hips, and with that macho gun in his holster. He had thick black hair with a wave in it, worn combed straight back, a strong nose, a firm jaw, a wide, easygoing mouth, and his sea blue eyes had crinkles at the corners, as though he smiled a lot. Though you’d never believe it now. If this wasn’t a head-to-head confrontation, then she had never seen one.

“She regained consciousness just over an hour ago.
I’ve spoken to the neurosurgeon, and he agrees that it is too soon yet to start asking her questions. She is still very ill. And she is distressed.”

Mahoney heaved an exasperated sigh. “Miss Forster—”

“
Dr.
Forster.”

His blue eyes grinned mockingly at her. “
Dr.
Forster. You understand we have an attempted homicide here. My job is to catch the perpetrator of the crime. The assassin.”

“The girl is not dead.”

“Would-be assassin,” he amended impatiently.

“And
my
job is to help return her to health.
Mental
health, Detective Mahoney. Apart from her considerable physical injuries, she has suffered severe mental trauma. If, as you suggest, it wasn’t an accident after all, and someone really did try to kill her, you can only imagine what she is going through. Trying to remember.”

“
Trying
to remember?”

“Right now, Detective, your Jane Doe cannot even remember her own name.”

“Jesus.”

He slumped back in his chair, ignoring her. She stared at him stonily.

Leaning across the desk, she gave him her most feminine pleading smile. “I’m sorry, Detective Mahoney, but it’s for the girl’s own good. Imagine if she were
your
wife or
your
daughter. You wouldn’t want her to be forced to confront the facts about what happened, before she was well enough to withstand the shock.” She shrugged sadly. “This young woman is suffering from retrograde amnesia, a loss of memory for events preceding the trauma. Caused obviously by the injuries to the skull, but I feel certain also by the mental trauma of the assault. Often in these cases the memory returns involuntarily. Maybe by tomorrow she will have remembered; maybe she’ll be eager to talk about it, anxious to
get to the truth, finally. If not, then I shall try to help her. Meanwhile, bear with us. Please.”

He sighed. “Okay. If you say so.”

Times might change
, she thought exasperatedly,
but not men. At least not all of them.

“I guess you’re right,” he admitted grudgingly. “But you’ll understand I’m just as concerned as you are, Dr. Forster. Somebody tried to kill her. If she dies, then it’s my job to bring that person to justice, and in order to do it, I’m gonna need her help.”

“So what do you know about her? Besides her probable age and what she looks like?”

“I can tell you in two words. Not much. When she was found, she was wearing Levi’s and a white Gap T-shirt. A blue cashmere sweater was found nearby. And sandals.”

Phyl remembered the red sandal dangling forlornly from the girl’s toe. She shivered. “No jewelry? A watch, a wedding ring?”

“Only pearl earrings.”

“Good pearls.”

He nodded. “Small but good, they tell me. Still, she could have bought them anywhere. Same with the jeans and the T-shirt. The cashmere sweater had no label, and the sandals were French. Expensive, like the earrings and the sweater, but you can purchase them in good stores across the country. Or even in France, I guess. No purse. We searched that ravine thoroughly. There was nothing else. There’s no missing person matching her description. No fingerprints on record. No one has come forward claiming to know her.”

“So tell me, Mahoney, what makes you think someone tried to kill her?”

He gave her a long, exasperated look and then said slowly and deliberately, as though he were explaining to a child, “The ravine is far enough out to need a car to get there. No car was found near the scene. She did not live in the area, so she wasn’t just out walking her
dogs. She had to have been taken there and then dumped. Or, more likely, pushed over the edge.”

“She wasn’t raped.” Phyl knew that from the medical reports.

He shrugged. “Maybe she wouldn’t come across and the guy got mad. It happens. More often than you think,” he added grimly.

“So there are no clues?”

“None, other than the dog bite. And what she herself can tell us.”

“And that brings us back to the reason I’m here. She gave him the smile again and a little feminine shrug of the shoulders.

“So it does,” he said abruptly, standing up, dismissing her. “You’ve got forty-eight hours. Then we’ll have to reassess.”

He walked her to the door. “Thanks,” she said sarcastically as he opened it, “for your cooperation.”

He watched her walk down the corridor, noting her long, slender legs and the swing of the hips under the black suit. “Hey, Forster,” he called after her. She hesitated, then turned slowly around.

“It’s
Doctor
,” she said icily.

“Yeah.
Doc.
There’s a nice little Italian restaurant around the corner from the hospital. Maybe after I’ve interviewed the girl, you and I could go there. Have a bite? Compare notes?”

She laughed at his chauvinist cheek. “Why, thank you for the invitation, Detective Mahoney,” she retorted sweetly. “I’ll have to think about it, and ‘reassess.’”

Phyl was back at the hospital, bearing flowers, at nine the next morning. She had puzzled all night over what might have happened to the girl and about who she might be, worrying why no one had come forward to claim her. No mother had come in search of her lost daughter; no lover; no husband. Not a co-worker or a
girlfriend. She was like the invisible woman—there, but no one could really see her.

She was there all right this Saturday morning, though. In person, sitting up and taking nourishment. It was a shock, seeing her shaved head with the livid scars running across the scalp, and the still-bruised and swollen but undeniably pretty face.

“Well, well,” Phyl said, smiling with genuine pleasure. “Aren’t you the lively one today.” She leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, depositing the big bunch of flowers on her lap. “For you.”

The girl’s eyes widened with pleasure. She picked them up and buried her nose in them. “Mimosa,” she whispered. “Such a heavenly scent. I smelled them when I first woke up. It must have been you who brought them?”

Phyl noted that she recognized the flowers, but she made no comment. She took a seat next to the bed and accepted the offer of a cup of tea from the nurse. “How’s your patient doing?” she asked, smiling her thanks.

“Better than we expected last night, Doctor. You can see for yourself, she’s on the mend.”

“Last night I was in a tunnel.” The girl looked at Phyl despairingly. “I thought maybe I was dead. It was so dark, terrifying. I couldn’t escape. And then I was falling, just falling and falling into an abyss, and I knew I would never come back—”

“Well, now you are back, so you see, it was all just a bad dream.”

“Phyl?” The girl met her eyes. “What happened to me?”

Phyl hesitated, but she knew she had to deliver the truth. “It wasn’t just a dream. You did fall. Down a rocky ravine. Fortunately your fall was halted by the undergrowth. There were a lot of bushes. They saved you.”

The girl looked down, puzzled. “Maybe that’s what I
remember then, the falling…. I’ve been thinking about things, trying to remember. And I can. I mean, I can remember things about San Francisco—buildings and the bridge. But I don’t remember where I live. I remember the taste of frozen yogurt and that I don’t like ice cream. I remember I like the color red, but not whether I have a red dress. I remember the scent of mimosa, but not where I’ve smelled it before. I remember you, from last night, and the nurses and the doctors, but I cannot recall a single person from my past.” She lifted huge frightened brown eyes to her and said, “What am I going to do?”