Sidney Sheldon’s Angel of the Dark: A gripping thriller full of suspense

The anger in her voice was unmistakable. Matt’s spirits sank. Why do I always seem to make her angry?

“To be honest, I sort of forgot about it. I heard about it a few months ago, but I thought it might upset Dad if I showed too much of an interest, so I let it go. But now that Harry’s gone, I figure it couldn’t hurt to explore it. Networks are really into ‘personal history’ right now. And murder and money always sell.”

The rest of the car ride passed in silence. By the time the Daleys reached home, two obsessions had been born.

Raquel’s was with a four-hundred-million-dollar fortune.

And Matt Daley’s was with the unsolved murder of his biological father: Andrew Jakes.

OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, WHILE his wife spent fruitless hours consulting lawyer after lawyer, hunting for the loophole that would restore “their” fortune, as she now thought of the Jakes estate, what started as a research project for a documentary became the all-consuming focus of Matt Daley’s life. By day he would trawl the L.A. libraries and galleries, greedily digging up every scrap of information about Andrew Jakes he could find: his businesses, his modern art collection, his real estate portfolio, his friends, enemies, acquaintances, lovers, interests, pets, health problems and religious beliefs. At night, holed up in his study like a hermit, Matt did more research online. Soon he was barely sleeping. Like a cuckoo chick demanding attention, the file marked Andrew Jakes grew bigger and fatter each day, while what little was left of Matt and Raquel Daley’s marriage slowly starved to death.

After a while even Claire Michaels became concerned that her brother was overdoing it. “What are you hoping to achieve with all this?” she finally asked one day.

Standing in the kitchen of her bustling house in Westwood, with a baby on one hip and a pot of tomato sauce in her hand, surrounded by the noise and mess of a cheerful family life, Claire made Matt feel happy and sad at the same time. Happy for her, sad for himself. Would things have been different if Raquel and I had had children?

“I told you,” he said. “It’s for a documentary.”

Claire looked skeptical. “How’s the script coming along?”

Matt grimaced. “I’m not at the scriptwriting stage yet.”

“Well, what stage are you at?”

“Research.”

“Who have you pitched the idea to?”

Matt laughed. “What are you, my agent?”

He tried to make a joke of it, but inside he knew his sister was right. All his friends had said the same thing. The mystery surrounding his biological father’s murder was becoming an addiction, a dangerous, time-consuming habit that was distracting him from his marriage, his work, his “real” life. Yet how was Matt supposed to let it go when the LAPD investigation had left so many holes, so many glaring, unanswered questions?

According to the official file, Andrew Jakes had been killed by an unknown intruder, a professional thief who’d turned violent. No one was ever arrested for the crime. No specific suspects were even named. Meanwhile, his widow, Angela, seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, as had the jewelry and miniature portraits taken from the couple’s house that night. Her attorney, Lyle Renalto, had driven her to the airport but claimed to have no idea where she was headed and had apparently not heard from her since. Police had questioned him repeatedly, but he never changed his story. There was some talk of Mrs. Jakes’s being sighted in Greece, but nothing had ever been proven. Danny McGuire, the detective in charge of the case, quit the force not long afterward and left L.A., taking whatever insights he may have had with him. Meanwhile, the semen from Angela Jakes’s postrape forensic examination had never been matched to any other crime, before or since. Neither were the few smudged fingerprints found at the crime scene at 420 Loma Vista.

Matt said to Claire, “It’s like one day this couple was living their lives in their beautiful mansion, planning for the future. And the next day, poof, it’s all gone. The house, the money, the paintings. The couple themselves. And after the murder, his widow just hops on a plane one morning and is never heard of again.”

“Yes, Matt, I know the story,” said Claire patiently.

“But doesn’t it scare you? The idea that all this”—Matt waved around the kitchen at his nephews, their schoolbooks, all the detritus of Claire’s full, busy life—“could be gone tomorrow? Gone.” He clapped his hands for emphasis. “Like it never was.”

Claire was quiet for a long time. Finally she said, “I’m worried about you, Matt. I think you need to talk to someone.”

Matt agreed. He needed to talk to someone all right.

The problem was that the someone he needed to talk to lived in Lyon, France.

CHAPTER SIX

HE GLANCED AT THE FLASHING BLUE lights in his rearview mirror and checked his speed. Sixty-five. A mere five over the limit, on a virtually empty stretch of road on the outskirts of the city.

Petty. It was little stunts like this that gave the Lyonnais police a bad name. Rolling down the window to give the overzealous gendarme a piece of his mind, his frown changed to a smile.

The officer in question was a woman. An extremely attractive woman. She had red hair—he had a thing for redheads—blue eyes and full breasts that not even her unflattering police uniform could fully conceal.

“What’s your hurry, sir?”

Oh, and the voice! Low and husky, the way that only Frenchwomen could do it. Perfect. The voice clinched it.

He smiled flirtatiously. “Actually, Officer, I have a date.”

“A date? You don’t say.” The gorgeous russet eyebrows went up. “Well, is she going to spoil if you don’t get there right this second?”

“She’s already spoiled.”

Leaning out through the driver’s-side window, he kissed her passionately on the lips.

“What time will you be home for dinner tonight, honey?” his wife asked him, when they finally came up for air.

Danny McGuire grinned. “As soon as I can, baby. As soon as I can.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, STRIDING INTO INTERPOL HQ late for his meeting, Danny hoped he wouldn’t have to stay too late. Céline looked so sexy in her tight blue Officier de la Paix uniform, it was painful having to drive away from her. She’d been in uniform the day they met and it was still the way Danny liked her best.

Back in L.A. he’d never have dated someone else on the force. But here in France, everything was different. He’d moved here a decade ago, chasing a shadow. The shadow of Angela Jakes. He never found her. Instead Danny found Céline, love, French culture and cuisine, a rewarding career and a whole new life. Lyon was Danny McGuire’s home now and he loved it, more than he would once have believed possible.

It had all been so different when he first arrived.

Danny McGuire hated France. He hated it because he associated it with failure. His failure. The 1997 Jakes murder had been a remarkable case in many ways, not the least of which was that it was the first and only complete failure of Danny McGuire’s career. He’d never found the man who murdered Andrew Jakes in such a frenzied, sadistic fashion and who raped his stunning wife.

Danny would never forget the morning he’d arrived at Lyle Renalto’s Beverly Hills mansion, pulling back the bedclothes to find the lawyer naked and in a state of obvious sexual arousal, laughing at him. Angela Jakes was gone, Renalto delighted in informing him. Overwhelmed by the pressure of Danny’s “aggressive” questioning, according to Lyle, she had decided to begin a new life overseas. Hiding behind attorney-client privilege, Renalto stubbornly and steadfastly refused to divulge any further information to the police.

It was around this time that Danny McGuire had his first contacts with Interpol. Logging in to the I-24/7, Interpol’s global database designed to assist member countries’ local forces in tracking suspects across borders, he eventually traced Angela Jakes to Greece and began liaising daily with the authorities in Athens, trying to track her down, but to no avail. Meanwhile, back in L.A., his other leads dried up one by one, like tributaries of a drought-stricken river. Andrew Jakes’s killer had vanished, just like his wife and the stolen art and jewelry. Indeed, all that was left of the Jakeses’ life together was Andrew’s fortune, which found its way safely (and tax-free) into the coffers of two different children’s charities, both of which were naturally delighted to receive it.

Danny’s LAPD superiors were deeply embarrassed. They ruthlessly killed any press interest in the Jakes case, ostensibly so as not to encourage “copycat killings” but actually to cover their own hides. The case was closed. Motive: theft. Assailant: unknown. Danny was moved off of homicide onto the fraud squad, a clear demotion, and told to forget about Angela Jakes if he wanted to keep his job.

But he couldn’t forget. How could anyone forget that haunting face? And he didn’t want to keep his job. Quitting the force, he spent the next two years and virtually all his savings traveling around Europe frantically searching for Angela. Working as a private individual, he found he got precious little cooperation from local police forces, and had to rely on unscrupulous private detectives to help him keep the trail alive. Finally, broke and depressed, he wound up in France, where an old contact in Lyon told him Interpol was hiring and suggested he apply for a job there.

Slowly Danny rebuilt his shattered career. He joined as a junior member of a crime IRT (Interpol Response Team) and rapidly earned a reputation for himself as a brilliant original thinker and strategist. IRTs could be deployed anywhere in the world within twelve to twenty-four hours of an incident in order to assist a member country’s forces. Adaptability, quick thinking and an ability to work as a team under strained circumstances were all key to the unit’s success. Danny McGuire excelled at every level. He won plaudits for his bravery and skill in a Corsican gangland murder case. Not many foreign cops could have persuaded people in that tight-knit community to talk, but Danny won over hearts and minds, successfully convicting five of the gang leaders. After that there was the ax murder of an Arab sheikh in North Africa—that one wasn’t so tough to crack; the guy helpfully left his prints all over the victim’s apartment—and the disappearance of a beauty queen in rural Venezuela. The girl in question was the mistress of a wealthy Russian oil magnate, and it proved a great case for Danny, who got a nice clean conviction. (Not so great for the beauty queen. Her body parts were eventually found in trash bags in a Maracay motel.)

Danny enjoyed the work and the novelty of living in France, and began to feel his confidence slowly coming back. Meeting and marrying Céline had been the icing on the cake. But through all his later triumphs, as he rose meteorically through Interpol’s ranks, he never forgot Angela Jakes. Who was she before she married her husband? Why did she run? He knew it couldn’t have been his questioning that scared her off, as Lyle Renalto claimed. There must have been another reason. Most importantly of all, Who had raped her and killed her husband in such a hideous, bloody manner? The official line, that a robbery had gotten spectacularly out of hand, was clearly nonsense. Art thieves didn’t slash an old man’s throat so forcefully they all but severed his head.

In the end it was Céline who had finally persuaded Danny to drop it. Sensing that there was more to her new husband’s feelings for Angela Jakes than professional interest, she told him straight out that she felt threatened.

“She’s gone,” she told him tearfully, “but I’m here. Aren’t I enough for you?”

“Of course you are, darling,” Danny assured her. “You’re everything to me.”

But for years afterward, in his dreams, Angela Jakes still bewitched him with her milky-white skin and reproachful chocolate eyes:

“Find the animal who did this.”