Intimate Betrayal (6 page)

At least with the cathedral, something was being built rather than torn down.

The camera shifted to the defendant, who was sitting stiffly beside his attorney, his face was drawn, and there were visible
lines around his mouth that Annie was sure hadn’t been there that day two and a half years ago when he’d crushed her
hopes of saving Fabrications.
How the mighty are fallen,
she thought.

According to the prosecution, it was Carlyle who had inflicted the heavy blow to Francesca’s face that had caused her to fall
and strike her head. Afterward, he’d thrown her unconscious body over the side of the yacht and in the Bay, where she drowned.

Carlyle’s motive, said the district attorney, was simple: If Francesca had carried out her threat to divorce him, he would
have lost half of his $4 billion fortune.

As Annie settled down on the sofa to watch the verdict, she focused on Matt Carlyle’s face. She was amazed to feel a pulse
of sympathy for him. How awful it must be to sit in a courtroom waiting to hear yourself judged by twelve strangers.

Dressed in a conservative dark suit and tasteful tie that his jury consultants had no doubt recommended, he sat upright, a
model of restraint and self-control. His face was expressionless, but every now and then the camera caught a flicker of anguish
in his eyes. It seemed to Annie that it was all the more vivid because of his efforts to hide it.

He doesn’t deserve my pity,
she reminded herself.
If I must feel sorry for someone, it should be for Francesca.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?”

“Yes, Your Honor, we have.”

Annie felt her heart rate accelerate. Had he done it? He was certainly ruthless enough.

“We find the defendant, Matthew Carlyle, not guilty,” the jury forewoman said.

The courtroom erupted in pandemonium.

“You see, I told you,” Darcy said with disgust. “A rich
man can get away with anything in this country. So much for the American system of justice. Francesca Carlyle lies unavenged
in her grave because the law will always side with the members of the power elite.”

Annie couldn’t think of much to say. Essentially she agreed with Darcy, although she didn’t think the verdict indicated a
social conspiracy. “I guess that as far as the jury was concerned, the prosecution didn’t prove its case. At least not beyond
a reasonable doubt.”

“Of course it did! Anyway, who else had any reason to kill her?”

“I don’t know,” Annie said. “Maybe the man she was having the affair with.”

“If
she was having an affair.”

Carlyle’s high-priced defense team had asserted that Francesca’s behavior that night at her party had been an embarrassing
but oft-repeated feature of a turbulent marriage. She was an alcoholic who frequently had affairs and threatened to leave,
but when sober she always changed her mind. After the party had ended and all the guests had gone, she and Matthew had reconciled.
Her death the next morning was a tragic and unexpected blow to her grieving husband.

The defense had further asserted that it must have been her lover who had murdered her, likely because he was enraged at losing
the chance to marry Francesca and her $2 billion.

But the lover, if she’d had one, had never come forward, nor had the police ever figured out who he was.

Annie had wondered several times about Sid Canin, who had looked so possessively at Francesca on the final night of her life.
Like everybody else at the party, he’d been questioned by the police, but there couldn’t have been any evidence
against him, since Sid had not been called as a witness at the trial.

Could a person have an affair without anybody ever finding out? Probably, Annie thought. No one had ever questioned
her
about what had nearly happened between herself and Matthew several years ago in England.

Abruptly, the cameras cut away from the analysts in the studio to the street outside the courthouse. Carlyle was emerging
with his attorney. Annie expected him to be whisked away into a car, but instead the acquitted billionaire strode right up
to the reporters whom he had been ignoring for months. They rushed to surround him, sticking their microphones in his face.

“I have a statement to make,” he said over the voice of his attorney, who seemed to be about to say something himself. “I
am grateful to the people of California for hearing my case and evaluating the evidence fairly. As far as I personally am
concerned, justice has been done. But—” he paused for a second, looking intensely into the dozens of cameras pointed at his
face, “justice has not yet been done on Francesca’s behalf. She was brutally murdered. Her murderer is still at large. The
San Francisco police, regretfully, stopped searching for him in their zeal to develop a case against me. I consider that a
travesty.”

He stopped speaking and was immediately assaulted with questions from the reporters, all of which he ignored. “That’s all
I have to say at this time,” he said, then belatedly added, “Thank you.”

He had sounded sincere, Annie thought. He had sounded as if he really thought that the killer was still out there.

Matthew Carlyle got into the waiting limousine and was driven away.

A free man.

That night, Annie could not sleep. Her mind kept replaying memories. She tried to focus them on Charlie and all the myriad
joys of their life together, but memories can be wild horses, impossible to harness. And that night her memories were all
of Matt Carlyle.

She had been flying to London for a meeting with a wealthy client who had hired Fabrications to design the San Francisco branch
offices of his international corporation. The client had sent her first-class tickets and arranged first-class accommodations
at the Dorchester Hotel in London.

Annie had never been to London, and she’d hoped that Charlie would accompany her, but Charlie had one quirk that he had never
been able to conquer—he was afraid of flying. There was no way he would get on a plane and fly ten hours from San Francisco
to London.

So she’d gone alone. And seated beside her in the first-class section was Matthew Carlyle, also traveling to London on business.

The dim interior of an airliner during a night flight to Europe can be a strangely intimate place. You meet a stranger, exchange
a little personal information—no last names, of course—and sometimes something clicks. You end up saying things to the stranger
that you would otherwise never say. In most cases, you’re secure in knowing that after the plane lands, you’ll never see your
seatmate again.

But in this case, going first class all the way meant that
Annie and Carlyle were staying at the same deluxe hotel. And when he heard that she had hopes of doing some touring in London,
he told her that it was his favorite city in the world, and he offered—no, he’d insisted—on showing her around.

Since they were both working during the week, they arranged to see the sights that weekend. They spent Saturday visiting Buckingham
Palace, the houses of Parliament, the Tower of London, and the British Museum. Annie was impressed with Carlyle’s encyclopedic
knowledge of British history. He even knew the city well enough to take her to several lovely little historic pubs and coffeehouses
for occasional breaks from sightseeing.

She felt the chemistry between them right from the start. But she’d been married for five years to a man she dearly loved,
and it was a simple matter to convince herself that what she was feeling was just a silly kind of schoolgirl crush that the
sophisticated Matt Carlyle was completely unaware of and absolutely immune to.

She didn’t discover that he was not only aware but interested until Sunday afternoon, when they took a car trip to Stratford-upon-Avon,
the birthplace of Shakespeare.

Until then she had seen him only in the most trim and proper business suits, but for this excursion he wore jeans, a casual
shirt, and running shoes. Somehow this brought him down to earth, making him seem less like a wealthy captain of the computer
industry and more like an ordinary guy. He’d rented a small MG for the journey, dismissing the limousine and driver who had
been chauffeuring them around the city. Being within its close confines as they drove through the English countryside created
an almost electric sense of intimacy.

The day had started out fine, and they’d explored both Shakespeare’s birthplace and Ann Hathaway’s antique thatched cottage
under a fine August sun. But the weather had turned progressively gloomy, and when they’d emerged that evening from the theater
where they had watched a stirring production of
Henry V,
they’d had to run back to the car in a downpour.

They were both drenched to the skin and laughing when Carlyle stopped fumbling with the door latch and simply pulled her into
his arms, pressed her back against the steaming wet car, and kissed her ravenously on the mouth. Before she could give it
a moment’s thought, her arms had wrapped themselves around his shoulders, and she was entangling her tongue with his, matching
his passion with her own.

Somehow they’d managed to get into the car, where the irresistible magic of hungry male and receptive female continued. She
felt heady with desire as his heat, his touch, his scent combined to assault her senses. She’d forgotten who she was, where
she was, what she was doing. All that mattered was the jagged-lightning rush of passion driving its arrows deep into her soul.

She’d thought often, later, that if they had been in the backseat of the limousine that they’d used for their touring of London,
anything might have happened. But the rented MG was tiny, and there was a gear shift between them. Carlyle had finally broken
off the embrace to whisper, “We passed a pub a couple of miles back. I’m sure they have a room, we can dry off and…”

The reality of what they were doing had penetrated her at those words. She was a married woman—what was she
doing?

“No,” she’d murmured. “No, please.”

And he had held her in his arms and tried to convince her:
“Come with me. Don’t think about it. Just come.”

“I can’t. Please, don’t ask me.”

“You can. You’ve come this far. Some things are meant to be.”

She had told him no. Finally and irrevocably.

But she had never forgotten the way he had made her feel; not during the days when she had hated him and blamed him for the
loss of Fabrications, not even when he was accused of the brutal murder of his wife.

She hated him still; she blamed him still. But, ruthless though she believed him to be, she’d been unable to make up her mind
about his involvement in Francesca’s brutal murder.

Was Matthew Carlyle innocent, and justly acquitted?

Or had the state just freed a coldhearted killer?

Matthew Carlyle sat in his corner office on the third floor of the new building that housed Powerdyme and stared out the window
at San Francisco Bay. A crystal tumbler of the finest single-blend scotch stood untouched on the desk at his elbow. Faintly,
he could smell it, but he left it alone.

The view from his office was magnificent, but the sun was too bright on his computer screen, and despite the climate control,
the room was invariably hot. It was also cramped. And the floor-to-ceiling windows made him feel too exposed.

The new building was, in fact, a disaster.

He hated it, and his employees were none too happy in it either. And it was already too small.

Although sales and profits were up and Powerdyme continued to dominate its end of the software business, a recent survey had
shown that job satisfaction within the company had declined, always a troubling indicator. But it was unclear whether that
was due to the new building or to the economy
or to the fact that the CEO had just spent more than a year in jail.

After the narrow confines of a stark cell in a correctional institution, Carlyle had figured he’d be overjoyed to be back
in his sunny office. But the opposite was true. He hated it here, and he’d never been able to work productively in an environment
he hated. This damn building had been wrong from the start.

Just like everything else in my life.

There are things you don’t think about while you’re locked up in jail, on trial for murdering your wife. You’d go crazy if
you did. You don’t think about the good times—those early days of courtship, surrender, and joy when he and Francesca had
still been in love. And neither do you think of the bad times—the all-too-many days after she’d started drinking when you
did
want her out of your life. How could you persuade a jury to set you free if they knew that you had occasionally committed
murder
in your heart?

None of them could possibly know what it had been like to live with a beautiful but volatile woman like Francesca, whose very
existence seemed calculated to make men crazy. She’d been a superb actress, and only the few people she’d allowed close to
her recognized her for the controlling, manipulative, deeply insecure woman she was.

But you don’t think about that—you simply couldn’t allow yourself to remember all the torments she had put you through. And
you especially don’t dwell on the fact that your unfaithful wife was pregnant, and that DNA tests admitted as evidence during
the trial by your attorneys had proven that you were the father of her child. The marriage had been in trouble, yes, but if
he’d known she was pregnant, after so many years of
trying to have a child, he’d have tried harder to hold things together. Much harder, dammit.

He was forty-one years old. As the tabloids had proclaimed during the trial, for the last twenty years he had “led a charmed
life.” He was the founder of one of the world’s most successful businesses and was, journalistic hyperbole for once accurate,
a billionaire. But, like many extremely successful people, he’d discovered that all the money in the world couldn’t buy happiness,
serenity, or peace of mind. Neither could it protect him from the slow-grinding wheels of the American system of justice.