Angel of the Dark

“That’s why they all had to die. Andrew, Piers, Didier, Miles. It was for the children. The children had to be avenged.”

You could have heard a pin drop as Ellen Watts asked her next question.

“Who killed Andrew Jakes, Sofia? Was it Angela or Frankie? Or did they both do it together?”

Sofia answered without hesitation. “It was Frankie.” She broke down in sobs.

“That’s a lie!” Mancini jumped to his feet. “This is bullshit, it’s a fucking performance. She chose Jakes as the first kill. She picked him out, not me!”

Judge Muñoz sternly called for order, and court officers quickly subdued Frankie and wrestled him back into his seat.

Sofia was still talking, in a trance, apparently unable to stop. “He slit Andrew’s throat. It was awful! There was blood everywhere…I’d never seen so much blood. Then he raped poor Angela…She was begging him to stop, but he wouldn’t, he went on and on and on, hurting her. Then…then he tied them together and he left.”

“And where were you while this was happening, Sofia?” Ellen Watts asked. “Do you remember that?”

“Of course.” Sofia looked surprised by the question. “I was where I always was…Watching.”

ELLEN WATTS QUESTIONED HER CLIENT FOR another hour before Judge Muñoz ordered a two-hour recess. Officially this was to allow the other attorneys to prepare their cross-examinations. In reality, the extended break would give the slew of media people time to indulge in an orgy of comment and speculation on Sofia Basta’s spectacular performance on the stand so far, earning the Azrael trial maximum exposure and guaranteeing it a place as the lead item on the East Coast lunchtime news.

The second hour of Sofia’s testimony had continued in the same dramatic vein as the first. She had interludes of perfect lucidity, when she seemed fully aware of who she was, where she was, and why she was answering questions. During these periods she appeared calm, intelligent, articulate and remorseful about her role in the killings. But when asked to go back to the nights in question, she inevitably slipped back into the third person, talking about each of her alter egos—Angela, Tracey, Irina, Lisa and Sarah Jane—as if they were real women she had known and befriended, dissociating their experiences entirely from her own. In her warped mind, Tracey’s love for Piers and Lisa’s for Miles Baring were not acts. The love, the sorrow, that the wives felt were real emotions. For each murder, the message was the same: Frankie had arranged, orchestrated and carried out the killings, driven by his own desire for “retribution.” He had “created” the various wives to help him. And then he had hurt them—while poor Sofia watched.

The question now was: Was her apparent insanity an act, as Frankie Mancini vociferously insisted, a charade designed to send him to death row while she lived out the remainder of her days in some cushy psychiatric ward? Or was it the truth?

Roused from his usual torpor by the mesmerizing effect that Basta’s evidence appeared to have had on the jury, particularly the women, William Boyce opened the session that began after the break aggressively, going straight for the jugular.

“Ms. Basta, when you assumed different identities expressly for the purpose of marrying and murdering defenseless elderly men—”

“Objection!” Ellen Watts screeched.

“On what grounds, Your Honor? She’s admitted that much under oath.”

“I’ll allow it. You may finish the question, Mr. Boyce.”

“When you assumed these identities, presumably that required a lot of preparation?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh, I think you do. Before each crime you had to change your appearance, and invent and learn an entirely new backstory for your new ‘character.’ You’d have had to practice accents, find employment, make friends. Establish a base from which you could engineer a meeting with the intended target, then begin the business of seducing him.”

Ellen Watts got to her feet again. “Is there a question here?”

“There is. How long did it take? To become Angela or Tracey or any of the others?”

Sofia looked uncomfortable. “It varied. Sometimes months. Sometimes years.”

“So you would spend months, or even years in training, preparing for your next kill?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Oh? What was it like?”

“Frankie would take me away for a while, after…” Her voice trailed away.

“After the murders?”

She nodded. “We were supposed to go and visit my sister. We were going to find her together. But then we’d end up moving again. The new names were supposed to be a fresh start. They weren’t part of any plan.”

“Of course they were part of a plan, Ms. Basta! Did you or did you not know, when you met Sir Piers Henley, that you intended to marry him?”