Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark (7 page)

Tracey shrugged. “That's all right. Why wouldn't you assume? Was there any other questions?”

“Just one.”

She'd already been incredibly helpful, giving detailed descriptions of the stolen items of jewelry—Lady Henley knew a
lot
about jewelry, settings, carats, clarity, you name it—as well as of her attacker. He was masked at the time of the attack, so she never saw his face, but she described him as being of strong build, stocky, with a scar on the back of his left hand, a deep voice, and a “strange” accent she couldn't quite place.
Considering the ordeal she'd just been through, it was a lot to remember. She was certain she'd never met him before.

“This might be difficult,” Inspector Drew said gently, “but did your husband have any enemies? Anyone who might have borne a grudge toward him?”

Tracey laughed, a full, raucous, barmaid's laugh, and Inspector Drew thought what fun she must have been to be married to. A few hours ago Sir Piers Henley must have considered himself one of the happiest men alive.

“Only a few thousand. My 'usband had more enemies than Hitler, Inspector.”

Inspector Drew frowned. “How so?”

“Piers was a rich man. Self-made. In the 'edge fund business, wasn't he? Nobody likes a hedgie. Not the blokes who do up their kitchens, not their partners, not their competitors, not even their investors half the bloody time, no matter 'ow much money you make them. It's a dog-eat-dog world, Inspector, and my Piers was a fuck-off Doberman with a mean set of teeth.” Tracey Henley said this with pride. “People hated him. And that's just 'is fund. If you want to get into the personal stuff, there's the bloke he gazumped to buy this place, the car dealer he never paid for the Aston 'cause he didn't like the way he looked at me, everyone he blackballed at White's—that's a long list, I can tell you. Then there's 'is ex-wife, 'is ex-mistress. His current mistress, for all I know.”

Inspector Drew found the idea that any man married to Tracey Henley would seek sexual pleasure elsewhere extremely hard to believe. According to her statement, she was thirty-two but she looked a decade younger.

“Piers had an army of enemies,” Tracey continued. “But he only had one real friend.”

“Oh? And who was that?”

“Me.”

For the first time that night, Tracey Henley gave way to tears.

D
ANNY
M
C
G
UIRE LOOKED UP FROM THE
file in front of him as if he'd just seen a ghost. He'd been reading, in total silence, for the last twenty minutes.

“How did you hear about this case?”

Matt Daley shrugged. “I read about it online. I got interested in the Jakes case and I…well, I came across it. The Henley killing was a big deal in England. There was a lot of press at the time.”

“What exactly
is
your interest in the Jakes case, Mr. Daley?” Danny asked. “You never said in your e-mails.”

“I'm a writer. I'm fascinated by unanswered questions.”

Danny's eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You're a journalist?”

“No, no, no, a screenwriter. TV. Comedy, mostly.”

Danny looked suitably surprised. He nodded toward the file. “Not much to laugh about in here.”

“No,” Matt agreed. “But I also have a personal connection. Andrew Jakes was my father.”

Danny did a double take.
Had Andrew Jakes had children?
It took him a few moments to dredge up the memory. That's right. There'd been a first wife, decades before he met Angela. One of the junior members of his team had gone to check out the lead but obviously thought it was nothing significant. Was there a kid?
I guess there must have been.

“I never knew him,” Matt explained. “Jakes and my mother divorced when I was two. My stepfather adopted and raised me and my sister, Claire. But biologically, I'm a Jakes. Do you see any family resemblance?”

An image of Andrew Jakes's almost severed, graying head lolling from his torso flashed across Danny's mind. He shivered.

“Not really, no.”

“When I learned my father had been murdered, I got curious. And once I started reading up on the case, I was hooked.” He grinned. “You know how addictive it can be, an unsolved mystery.”

“I do,” Danny admitted.
And how painful. This guy seems nice, but he's so eager, like a Labrador with a stick. He wouldn't look so happy if he'd seen the bloody carnage in that bedroom. The bodies trussed together. Jakes's head hanging from his neck like a yo-yo on a string.

“When I read about the Henley case, I tried to get in touch with you, but that's when I learned you'd left L.A. I tried Scotland Yard directly, but they weren't too helpful. Didn't want to talk to some crackpot American writer any more than the LAPD did.” Matt Daley smiled again, and Danny thought what a warm, open face he had. “You cops sure know how to close ranks when the shit hits the fan.”

That's true,
thought Danny, remembering his own years in the wilderness, begging for help finding Angela Jakes, before he joined Interpol. It felt like a lifetime ago now.

“Anyway, it took me awhile after that to track you down. I couldn't believe it when I discovered you were at Interpol. That you were actually in a position to help me.”

Danny McGuire frowned. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I agree that the two cases have similarities. But for my division to get involved, for Interpol to authorize an IRT, we have to be approached by a member country's police force directly.

Matt leaned forward excitedly. “We're not talking about ‘similarities.' These crimes are carbon copies. Both the murder victims were elderly, wealthy men, married to much younger wives. Both wives were raped and beaten. Both wives conveniently disappeared shortly after the attacks. Both estates wound up going to charity. No convictions. No leads.”

Danny McGuire felt his heart rate began to quicken.

“Even so,” he said lamely, clutching at straws. “It could be a coincidence.”

“Like hell it could. The guy even used the same knot on the rope he used to tie the victims together.”

A double half hitch.
Danny McGuire put his head in his hands. This couldn't be happening. Not after ten years.

“Look, I know you have procedures you have to follow,” said Matt Daley. “Protocol and all that. But he's still out there, this maniac. Matter of fact,” he announced, playing his trump card, “he's in France.”

“What do you mean?” Danny asked sharply. “How could you possibly know something like that?”

Matt Daley leaned back in his chair. “Two words for you,” he said confidently. “Didier Anjou.”

S
AINT
-T
ROPEZ
, F
RANCE
2005

L
UCIEN
D
ESFORGES SAUNTERED DOWN THE
R
UE
Mirage with a spring in his step. Life, Lucien decided, was good. It was a gorgeous late spring day in Saint-Tropez with omens of summer everywhere. On each side of the road running from La Route des Plages down to the famous Club 55, bright pink blossoms were already bursting forth from the laurel bushes, pouring like floral fountains over the whitewashed walls of the houses. Lucien had often been struck by those whitewashed walls. It seemed incongruous to have such humble exteriors surrounding such lavish mansions, each one stuffed full of every luxury money could buy.

Lucien was on his way to one of those very mansions, one that many Tropeziens considered the grandest of them all: Villa Paradis.

Terrible name,
thought Lucien.
Talk about vulgar. But then what was one to expect from a former pop star and matinee idol, a street kid from Marseille who made fantastically, miraculously good? Certainly not good taste.

Villa Paradis was owned by one of Lucien's clients. One of his best, most important, most consistently lucrative clients. True, he wasn't always the easiest of clients. His continued association with the organized
criminals he grew up with, two-bit Marseillais mafiosi with a taste for extortion, fraud and worse, had caused Lucien innumerable headaches over the years, as had his utter inability to keep it in his pants (or, if out of his pants, safely shrink-wrapped in Durex). But at the end of the day, Lucien Desforges was a divorce lawyer. And if there was one thing Villa Paradis's owner knew how to do, expensively, publicly and repeatedly, it was get divorced.

Over his morning coffee in Le Gorille earlier, Lucien had laughed out loud when he realized that he had, in actual fact, forgotten how many divorces he had handled for this particular client. Was it four, or five? Would this one make five? Lucien had made so much money in fees from this man, he'd lost count.
Que Dieu bénisse l'amour!

Keying the familiar code into the intercom on the gate, Lucien wondered how long he could draw out this latest marital parting of the ways. His client had only been married to this particular wife for a matter of months, so the case wouldn't be as lucrative as some of those from the past.
If only the old goat had fathered a child with her. Then we'd really be in business.
But as the gates swung open and the crystal-blue Mediterranean twinkled before him like an azure dream, Lucien reminded himself never to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The point was that Didier Anjou was getting divorced.

Again!

It was going to be a beautiful day.

 

T
HE MARRIAGE HAD BEGUN SO WELL.
Which was strange, given that all of Didier Anjou's other marriages had begun so very, very badly.

First there was Lucille.
Ah, la belle Lucille!
How he'd wanted her! How he'd pined! Didier was twenty at the time, and starring in his very first movie,
Entre les draps
(Between the Sheets), which was exactly where Didier longed to be with Lucille Camus. Lucille was forty-four, married, and played Didier's mother in the movie. The director had begged her to take the role. He'd always had a soft spot for Lucille.

It was probably why he'd married her.

In 1951, Jean Camus was the most powerful man in French cinema. He was a Parisian Walt Disney, an old-world Louis B. Mayer, a man who
could make or break a young actor's career with a nod of his shiny bald head or a twitch of his salt-and-pepper mustache. Jean Camus had personally cast Didier Anjou as the male lead in
Entre les draps,
plucking the handsome boy with the black hair and blacker eyes from utter obscurity and propelling him into a fantasy world of fame and fortune, of limousines and luxury…and Lucille.

Looking back, decades later, Didier consoled himself with the fact that he'd never really had a choice. Lucille Camus was a goddess, her body a temple begging, no,
demanding
to be worshipped. Those swollen, matronly breasts, those obscenely full lips, always parted, always tempting, inviting…Didier Anjou could no more
not
seduce Lucille Camus than he could breathe through his elbows or swim through solid stone.
Elle était une force de la nature!

Of course, had he stopped at seduction, things might have worked out better than they had. Unfortunately, three weeks into their affair, Didier got Lucille pregnant.

“I don't see the problem.” A baffled Didier defended himself, dodging another hurled item of china that Lucille had propelled furiously onto a collision course with his skull. “
Chérie,
please. Just say it is Jean's. Who's to know?”

“Everyone will know, you cretin, you
imbecile
!” Didier ducked as another plate narrowly missed his windpipe. “Jean's infertile!”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh.”

“Well then, you'll just have to get rid of it.”

Lucille was horrified.

“An abortion? What do you think I am, a monster?”

“But,
chérie,
be practical.”

“
Jamais! Non,
Didier. There is only one solution. You must marry me.”

The Camus divorce was the talk of Cannes that year. A heavily pregnant Lucille Camus married her boy-toy lover, and for a few wonderful months, Didier was genuinely famous. But then the baby died, Jean Camus took the grief-wrecked Lucille back, and the ranks of the film community closed around them. For the next eight years, until Jean died, Didier Anjou couldn't get so much as a laundry-detergent commercial in France. He was washed up at twenty-three.

It wasn't until he hit thirty that things finally started to look up. Didier married his second wife, Hélène Marceau, a beautiful, innocent heiress from Toulouse. Hélène was a virgin, unwilling to sleep with Didier until they were married. This suited Didier perfectly. He fucked around throughout their courtship, all the while looking forward to the day when he would take possession of Hélène's tight
chatte
and fat bank balance. Who could ask for more?

The wedding was a coup, the happiest day of Didier's life. Until night fell and, alone at last in the marital bed, Didier discovered why his new bride had been so coy about sleeping with him. It appeared that poor Hélène had grotesquely deformed genitals, a secret she'd kept since birth. The whole innocent, scared-of-sex shtick had been a front, a ploy. The bitch had trapped him!

The union was miserable from the start, yet Didier stayed with Hélène for five years. Naturally he cheated on her constantly, siphoning off every last franc of her fortune into privately produced movies, all of them star vehicles for himself. Hélène knew what her husband was up to, but loved him helplessly anyway. Didier had this effect on women. Each day Hélène prayed fervently that Didier would see the light and come to return her love, despite her unfortunate physical affliction. But it never happened. At thirty-five, famous for the second time in his life and rich for the first, Didier Anjou finally divorced Hélène Marceau. He was back on the market.

Next came Pascale, another heiress who made Didier even richer and bore him two sons but took a regrettably inflexible view about his extramarital dalliances.

One of these dalliances, Camille, became the fourth Madame Anjou the year Didier turned fifty. Thirty years his junior and stunningly beautiful, the top fashion model of her day, Camille reminded Didier of himself at her age. Physically perfect, selfish, ambitious, insatiable. It was a match made in heaven. But after three years of marriage, Camille slept with Didier's teenage son, Luc. With Lucien Desforges's help, Didier cut both of them off without a penny and vowed never to marry again.

He retired to Saint-Tropez, where he became legendary for his vanity, in particular for the vast collection of toupees that he housed in a special dressing room at Villa Paradis, much to the amusement of the
Russian hookers who regularly warmed his bed there. No one, least of all his lawyer, ever expected Didier Anjou to take another wife.

But four months ago, out of the blue, the old roué had done just that, secretly marrying a Russian woman whom none of his friends had ever heard of, never mind met. Her name was Irina Minchenko, and the general assumption was that she was one of the hookers and had somehow managed to bewitch Didier into wedlock.

The general assumption was wrong. In her midthirties, aristocratic and educated, Irina was wealthy in her own right. Even if she'd been poor, she was far too beautiful and smart to be a hooker. From the day they met, at a house party in Ramatouelle, Didier was besotted.

He took his new bride to Tahiti for their honeymoon, to a secluded beachside cottage. For the first time in his life, Didier Anjou did not want the media to follow him. He told Lucien, by now a friend, “Irina is too exquisite to be shared with the world. Whenever I see someone so much as look at her, man or woman, I want to kill them. It's crazy what she does to me!”

Whatever Irina did to him, it's over now,
Lucien thought wryly, strolling around onto the villa's private rear terrace. Just two weeks back from the honeymoon and Didier Anjou had called him, literally howling with rage and fury.

“I want a divorce!” he'd screamed into the phone. “I want to fuck that bitch over, do you hear me? I won't give her a goddamn penny!”

That was last night. Hopefully Didier would be in a calmer mood this morning. It was too early for screaming.

Unfortunately, when Lucien Desforges stepped through the French windows into the living room, the screams were deafening. But they weren't Didier's.

They were his own.