“Is that a threat, Detective?”
“Call it what you like,” said Danny.
Renalto opened his mouth to respond but the elevator doors closed, denying him the last word. Judging from his twitching jaw and the look of frustration etched on his handsome face, this wasn’t something that happened very often.
“Good-bye, Mr. Renalto.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER, BACK ON WILSHIRE Boulevard, Danny’s cell phone rang.
“Henning. What have you got for me?”
“Not much, sir, I’m afraid. Nothing in the pawnshops, nothing online.”
Danny frowned. “It’s still early days.”
“Yes, sir. I also checked out Jakes’s will.”
Danny brightened. “And?”
“The wife gets everything. No other family. No charitable causes.”
“How much is everything?”
“After taxes, around four hundred million dollars.”
Danny whistled. Four hundred million dollars. That was quite a motive for murder. Not that Angela Jakes was a suspect. The poor woman could hardly have raped and beaten herself. Even so, Danny thought back to the words Angela had murmured repeatedly to herself last night: I have no life.
With four hundred million in the bank, she certainly had a life now. Any life she wanted.
“Anything else?” he asked his sergeant.
“Just one thing. The jewelry. A little over a million bucks’ worth was taken from the safe and Mrs. Jakes’s jewelry box.”
Danny waited for the punch line. “And…?”
“None of it was insured. Seven figures’ worth of diamonds, and you don’t add it to your homeowner’s policy? Seems strange, don’t you think?”
It did seem strange. But Danny’s mind wasn’t focused on Andrew Jakes’s insurance oversights. “Listen,” he said, “I want you
to run a check for me on a guy named Lyle Renalto. R-E-N-A-L-T-O. Says he was Old Man Jakes’s lawyer.”
“Sure,” said Detective Henning. “What am I looking for, exactly?”
Detective Danny McGuire said honestly, “That’s the problem. I have no idea.”
CHAPTER TWO
MARRAKECH, MOROCCO
1892
THE LITTLE GIRL GAZED OUT OF the carriage window at streets teeming with filth and life and noise and stench and poverty and laughter, and felt sure of one thing: she would die in this place.
She had been sent here to die.
She had grown up in luxury, in privilege and above all in peace, in a sprawling palace in the desert. The only daughter of a nobleman and his most favored wife, she had been named Miriam, after the mother of the great prophet, and Bahia, which meant “most fair,” and from her earliest infancy had known nothing but praise and love. She slept in a room with gold leaf on the walls, in a bed of intricately carved ivory. She wore silks woven in Ouarzazate and dyed in Essaouira with ocher and indigo and madder, shipped in at great expense from the Near East. She had servants to dress her, to bathe her, to feed her, and more servants to educate her in the Koran and in music and poetry, the ancient poetry of her desert ancestors. She was beautiful inside and out, as sweet-faced and sweet-tempered a child as any noble father could wish for, a jewel prized above all the rubies and amethysts and emeralds that adorned the necks and wrists of all four of her father’s wives.
The palace, with its cool, shady courtyards, its fountains and birdsong, its plates of sugared almonds and silver pots of sugary mint tea, was Miriam’s whole world. It was a place of pleasure and peace, where she played with her siblings, sheltered from the punishing desert sun and all the other dangers of life beyond its thick stone walls. Had it not been for one terrible, unexpected event, Miriam would no doubt have lived out the rest of her days in this blissfully gilded prison. As it was, at the age of ten, her idyllic childhood ground to an abrupt and final halt. Miriam’s mother, Leila Bahia, left her father for another man, riding off into the desert one night never to return.