“Boss. Great timing. Listen, I just got a call from Liu.”
“Never mind that,” Danny McGuire said briskly. “I need you to e-mail me the clearest pictures we have of all the widows. Face shots only.”
“Sure, I can do that. But about Liu. He wants you to call him urgently. He—”
“Now, Claude. I’ll be waiting by my laptop.” Danny McGuire hung up.
What was it with these big-shot detectives? Didn’t anybody have the time to let you finish a sentence anymore?
ON THE BED IN HIS NEW York hotel room, Danny gazed at his in-box.
One minute. Five minutes. Ten. What the fuck? How long did it take to download and send a few lousy JPEGs?
When at last he heard the longed-for ping of a new message in his coded Azrael folder, Danny’s heart leaped, then sank when he saw that there were no attachments.
“Pictures to follow,” Claude Demartin wrote. “And by the way, Inspector Liu’s message was: ‘They’re in India.’ You need to call him right away.”
India! That was good news indeed. So was Demartin’s use of the word they. It meant Lisa Baring was still alive and that she was still with…who? Frankie Mancini? Danny would call Liu in a moment and get the whole story. Just as soon as Claude sent him those damn images.
Finally, after what felt like millennia but was in fact about a minute and a half, a large file landed in Danny’s in-box. The e-mail was entitled: WIDOWS.
Danny clicked it open with a trembling hand.
There they were, smiling at him across the years, their faces running along the screen from left to right in chronological order.
Angela Jakes…Lady Tracey Henley…Irina Anjou…Lisa Baring.
At first it wasn’t obvious. There were the superficial differences: hair color and length, subtle changes in makeup and some of the images, particularly the ones of Irina, were blotchy and blurred. Age had wreaked its usual black magic, etching a spiderweb of fine lines over once-smooth skin. Weight had gone up and down, making some of the faces look gaunt while others looked blooming and chipmunk-cheeked. Then there were the more fundamental things. Angela Jakes’s face was the loveliest of the four, youthful and innocent, untouched by the passage of time. Tracey Henley, the redhead, on the other hand, seemed harder and more artificial-looking. While she was still undeniably beautiful, Danny now saw that her nose was unusually narrow at the tip, almost as if she’d had some plastic surgery. Lisa Baring had the same small nose, although on her it appeared more natural. Her brow was higher, though, and smoother.
What really leaped off the screen, however, were the four women’s eyes. Laugh lines and crow’s-feet might come and go, cheekbones and mouths and noses might be surgically altered. But the eyes themselves remained the same. Deep brown, like molten chocolate. Sad. Sultry. Mesmerizing.
The first time Danny McGuire saw them he’d been untying Angela Jakes from her husband’s corpse. Slipping in and out of consciousness, Angela had opened those eyes and looked at him. Danny’s life had changed forever.
Years later, those same eyes had lured Sir Piers Henley to his death.
They had hypnotized Didier Anjou.
Enchanted Miles Baring.
Made a besotted fool out of Matt Daley.
Mocked Inspector Liu.
Each of the women’s faces was different. But the eyes gave them away.
Azrael isn’t a “he.” He’s a “she.”
They’re all the same woman.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE MAN QUICKENED HIS PACE. THE alley was dark and smelled of spices and human shit. Saffron, cumin and excrement: the essence of India. The man laughed at his own joke, but it was a nervous laugh, only a shade or two from hysteria.
He was being followed again.
Weaving his way between the rickshaws and scurrying brown bodies, he ducked behind a baker’s stall. A narrow passage opened through a brick archway into a yard where kilns heated the flat naan bread and paratha. Curious half-naked children swarmed around him, intrigued by his foreign, white man’s face. He brushed them away, his heart pounding. The only way out of the yard was the way he came in. If his pursuer had seen him slip behind the bread stall, he would catch him for sure. Catch him and kill him. The man expected no mercy.
At first he thought his pursuers must be police, but no longer. The shadows lurking behind him were far more sinister. Wherever he went in the city, he could feel their presence, cold and threatening like a malignant ghost. His nerves were in tatters. It was getting harder to make decisions.