Angel of the Dark

“Frances Lyle Mancini was always a beautiful-looking kid,” Petridis explained. “Even as a child, he had the same dark hair, blue eyes, olive skin and athletic physique you see in this courtroom now; the same face and body that would make him so fatally attractive as an adult. But Frankie’s good looks were his curse.”

“How so?”

The doctor paused before answering. He explained how the first eight years of Frankie’s life had been happy. Then one day, a few weeks before his ninth birthday, Frankie’s father, a selfish, womanizing naval officer—whose good looks and appetite for risk Frankie clearly inherited—abandoned Frankie’s mother, Lucia, and their three children, sailing off to and setting up home in the Philippines with a much younger woman. Frankie’s adored mother was destroyed by this betrayal and never recovered her sense of self-esteem, never even laughed again. Frankie described what it was like to be forced to witness this disintegration in his sessions with Dr. Petridis.

“Lucia Mancini wound up remarrying a much older man,” Petridis went on. “His name was Tony Renalto. According to Frankie, she hoped that Renalto would provide her young family with financial security and stability.”

“And did he?”

“Yes, he did, but at a terrible cost,” Dr. Petridis said grimly, and told the court how, as well as bullying and belittling Frankie’s mother, the boy’s elderly stepfather routinely physically and sexually abused Frankie himself. When Frankie complained to his mother, she did not believe him. The sexual abuse only stopped when, at the age of fourteen, Frankie bludgeoned his stepfather to death with a table lamp.

“He told me during our sessions how he fled the scene of the crime, never to be seen by his family again, and lived on the streets for a year until he was picked up by the police and sent to the Beeches. That was where he met Sophie.”

Ellen Watts asked, “Did you report this crime, the killing of his stepfather, to the authorities.”

“I did, of course.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. The police did a token interview. Frankie denied it. The case had been closed two years earlier, with the records showing that Renalto had been the victim of a bungled burglary.”

Like Andrew Jakes, thought Danny.

“No one wanted the trouble of opening the thing up again. By all accounts, no one much missed Renalto, and other than Frankie’s retracted testimony, there was no evidence.”

At the defendants’ table, Frankie Mancini sat back and smiled, like a man who’d just learned that his investments had doubled during a bear market.

“Presumably Frankie stopped confiding in you as his psychologist at this point?” asked Ellen Watts. “Once he knew you’d ratted on him to the police.”

“No, actually. He continued our weekly sessions. He just made sure nothing was ever taped.”

A titter of amusement swept the court. It was remarkably easy to be impressed or amused by Mancini, to fall for his looks and charm. Somehow, smiling and posing at the defendants’ table, he seemed dissociated from the gruesome crimes that had brought both him and Sofia Basta here.

“Frankie liked to talk,” Dr. Petridis went on. “It was one of the things that connected him to Sophie and to me. We were a captive audience. Of course, by this point, he was seventeen and severely disturbed. He was homosexual, but had little or no sex drive.”

The doctor dropped this bombshell as casually as if he’d been describing Frankie’s taste in shirts or his favorite baseball team. The jury foreman’s mouth literally fell open, like a dumbstruck character in a comic book. Ellen Watts, however, was prepared for the psychiatrist’s answer.

“This is very important, Dr. Petridis,” she said seriously. “As you know, there is clear forensic evidence showing sexual activity at all four of these crime scenes. Violent sexual activity. The chances of the semen recovered from those homicides not belonging to Frankie Mancini are well over two million to one.”

Petridis nodded. ?

??That’s consistent with what I saw. In the course of ordinary life, Frankie’s libido was depressed. What turns him on isn’t men or women. It’s control, of either sex—because he grew up with none. Frankie has a deep-rooted hatred of men who abandon their wives and families, like his biological father did…and of old, rich men, like his stepfather, whom he sees as abusers. I imagine that those were the motivating factors behind both the violence and the sex in these homicides.”

“Thank you.” Ellen Watts smiled across at Alvin Dubray. “I have no further questions.”

To everyone’s surprise, not least Judge Federico Muñoz’s, William Boyce got to his feet. So far he’d declined to cross-examine any of the defense witnesses, considering his case so watertight as to need no further emphasis. But Petridis’s testimony had been so convincing, he clearly felt a token parry was in order.

“Dr. Petridis, you say that in your sessions Mr. Mancini displayed a ‘deep hatred’ of older men.”

“That’s right.”

“Yet you would not describe him as pathological? It wasn’t a ‘pathological hatred’?”

“In the common parlance, you could call it that. But clinically speaking, no.”

“I see. And you also described Ms. Basta as being like an ‘empty shell,’ a vessel into which Mancini could pour his own consciousness and opinions.”

“That’s right.”