Angel of the Dark

Fear coursed through David Ishag’s body. A year ago, the idea of death wouldn’t have fazed him. If it was his time, it was his time. But now that he had Sarah Jane, everything was different. The thought of being torn away from her so soon after they’d found each other filled him with utter terror.

The pistol protruded from the man’s inside jacket pocket. He reached for it. David closed his eyes, bracing himself for the shot. Instead, he heard a polite American voice asking him, “Are you all right, Mr. Ishag? You don’t look well.”

David opened his eyes. The man was holding up an Interpol badge and an ID card. They must have been in the same pocket as the gun.

The relief was so overpowering David felt nauseous. He clutched at the desk. “Jesus Christ. You almost gave me a heart attack. Why didn’t you say you were a cop?”

Danny McGuire looked perplexed. “I didn’t have much of a chance.”

David sank back into his chair. He reached for a glass of water with shaking hands. “I thought you were going to shoot me.”

“Do visitors to your office often try to shoot you?”

“No. But they aren’t usually armed either. Your inside jacket pocket?”

“Ohhhhh.” Pulling his regulation Glock 22 automatic out of its holster, Danny McGuire laid it down on the desk. “Sorry about that. It’s standard issue. Half the time I forget I’m carrying it. Danny McGuire, Interpol.”

The two men shook hands.

Now that his heart rate had slowed to something approaching normal, David Ishag asked, “So how can I help you?”

Danny McGuire frowned. This was going to be difficult. But he’d learned long ago that when you had bad news to break, it was best not to beat around the bush.

“I’m afraid it concerns your wife.”

Those six words ripped into David Ishag more powerfully than any bullet.

“Sarah Jane?” he said defensively. “What about her?”

Danny McGuire took a deep breath. “Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Ishag, but we think she’s planning to kill you.”

EVEN IN DANNY MCGUIRE’S NO-NONSENSE, UNFLOWERY prose, it took over an hour to fill David in on the long and convoluted history of the Azrael killings. An hour during which David listened intently, searching for flaws in McGuire’s thinking, for reasons not to believe that any of this crazy story had anything to do with Sarah Jane, his wife, and the one woman on earth with whom he believed he could be truly happy.

When McGuire finished, David was silent for a long time. He wasn’t going to roll over and simply accept that his marriage, his entire relationship with Sarah, had been a sham, just because some unknown police officer told him it was. Eventually he said, “I’d like to see the photographs of the other women.”

“Of course. You can come down to our headquarters and see them, or I can have them e-mailed to you here.”

“Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say Sarah Jane has lied about her name and background.”

“That much is a provable fact.”

“Okay, fine. But it doesn’t make her a killer, does it?”

McGuire felt bad for the guy. He didn’t want to believe that his wife was a murderer, any more than Matt Daley wanted to accept that Lisa Baring had conspired in Miles’s death, or than he, Danny, wanted to blame Angela Jakes for her husband’s death all those years ago. Even now, despite knowing what he did, Danny McGuire found that part the hardest to accept. That the Angela Jakes he remembered, that sweet, good-natured, innocent angel of a woman had never really existed. She was a character, an act, a shell. An identity assumed for a purpose—a deadly purpose—just like Tracey Henley was an act, and Irina Anjou and Lisa Baring and now Sarah Jane Ishag.

Angela Jakes’s words on the night of the first murder came floating back to him.

“I have no life.”

If only he’d realized then that she meant it literally. Angela had no life. She didn’t exist, had never existed. And neither did Sarah Jane.

“It makes her an accessory to multiple homicides,” Danny said bluntly. “It also makes her a liar.”

David longed to jump in and defend Sarah’s honor, but what could he say? At a minimum she had lied to him. He clung to the hope that the pictures McGuire sent him of the other Azrael widows would somehow exonerate her, but deep down he knew that they would not. Interpol wouldn’t have sent a senior director to see him if all they had were wild accusations.

Even so, it all sounded so preposterous, so impossible to believe.

McGuire went on: “Clearly, she’s not acting alone. As I said, there’s been a sexual element to all the Azrael killings, with each of the ‘wives’ apparently raped and beaten at the scene. We have clear forensic evidence that a man was present at each homicide. We don’t know whether the rapes were conceived as a cover, to throw us off the scent, or whether violent sex is a part of the motive. This woman, whoever she really is, may get off on the sadomasochistic element.”