The Secret of the Villa Mimosa (45 page)

He turned to smile good-bye at her. “Wait for me, Rebecca,” he said as he closed the door.

33

P
hyl listened for the sound of his car leaving before she ran to her room and began frantically throwing her things into her bag. She telephoned the airport and booked a seat on the next flight out Then she called a cab and paced the floor nervously until it arrived. A silent Chinese servant appeared from nowhere to carry the bag for her, and she wondered, surprised, how he had known. He must have overheard, she decided, wondering what else the servants overheard in this house of secrets.

She hesitated at the door, thinking what Brad would do when he found her gone without an explanation. She decided to write him a note: “Brad, it’s better if we do not see each other again. There is nothing I can do to help you.”

She gave it to the servant and climbed quickly into the cab, looking over her shoulder through the rear window, half expecting to see him come tearing down the road after her with that vicious Doberman at his heels.

The flight was already boarding, and she took her seat. She breathed a sigh of relief when the doors were
finally closed. She almost wept, realizing how frightened she had been. She didn’t even want to think about the implications of Brad’s confusing her with Rebecca. All she wanted was to sleep and wake up five hours later in San Francisco. And then she wanted to see Mahoney. She shivered with fright.
Oh, God
, she thought,
I really need Mahoney
.

It was a slow Sunday on the 8:00
A.M.
to 4:00
A.M.
shift. Mahoney figured the clock must have gotten stuck a couple of hours ago. He guessed he should be glad the drug dealers and the armed robbers and the domestics were giving him a break, but time was dragging.

He fiddled with the computer until Brad Kane’s name came up again. He had replayed the details endlessly because there was still something about Mr. Hawaii that bothered him. And here he had confirmation that the man was violent.

The first incident had taken place in college. Brad had attacked another guy in a bar. Nothing unusual, you might say, for college kids with too much beer inside them. Except this had been a particularly vicious attack: a broken glass shoved in the other guy’s face. Mr. Hawaii had gotten reprieved on that one because his father had hired him a smart lawyer. An undisclosed amount of damages had been paid to the victim, and Brad Kane had gotten a two months’ suspended sentence.

A couple of years later he had been arrested for possession of an offensive weapon, a knife. He hadn’t used it, but the victim said he had threatened to, and this time the victim was a woman. A hooker, in fact. In Honolulu. Again money changed hands and a warning was issued, and nothing more was said.

The third episode was more recent A few months ago a servant in the Kane household had been killed. The report said that one of Brad Kane’s dogs, a Doberman, had suddenly gone wild and attacked him. Brad
Kane had shot the dog himself, then had called the police. He told them he was devastated. The victim was an old man who had been employed by the family for more than fifty years. He said he had to leave on urgent business, but he would answer any questions on his return. And he had—a month later, when he came back from Paris. By then the old man had been buried, at Kane’s expense, and the inquest was a mere formality. A sworn statement, an expression of regret, and that was it.

Mahoney sighed as he shut down the computer. One incidence of youthful violence after drinking might be dismissed. Two certainly were not. A third, inexplicable one was just too much in any man’s life.

He considered calling Phyl in Hawaii and telling her what he had found, that he didn’t like it, and to get the hell out of there. Just then the phone rang.

It was Phyl. There was a booming sound. “I’m calling from the plane,” she said. “I need to see you, Mahoney.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked quickly. “Did he harm you?”

“No. I’m okay. My flight gets in around three.”

“Why don’t you come around to my place? I’ll leave a message on your machine if I get hung up here.”

“I need you, Mahoney.”

“Glad to hear it, Doc. After all, we are here to serve.” He could tell she meant it.

The phone rang again almost immediately. When he picked it up, an English voice said, “This is Nick Lascelles. I’m a friend of Bea French and Phyl Forster.”

“How ya doin’, Nick?” Mahoney replied breezily. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Bea. And I want to tell you all of it was complimentary.”

“I can’t get hold of Phyl,” Nick said, “so I thought I’d better call you. We were doing some research, finding out about the villa. I guess Bea told you about it. Well, we found out the connection. She remembered
the little boy in her dream was her father. He lived in that house until he was five years old. He took her back there when she was fourteen and told her the whole story. She’s really upset, Detective Mahoney, because she also remembered her parents were killed in a car crash last year. He was the artist John Jones.”

Mahoney gave a whistle of amazement. He knew and admired Jones’s work. “I remember reading about it in the newspapers,” he said. “It’s a tough break. But what about the rest of her family?”

“There is none. She was left alone.”

Mahoney wondered if that was one of the reasons she had lost her memory. It was surely a big enough trauma. “What about Mitchell’s Ravine?”

“That’s just it. She still doesn’t know who tried to kill her. Or why. It’s driving her crazy. She was terribly upset, but the children helped her, and she seems better now. Still, I thought I had better call you and let you know. Bea says you’re a friend.”

“Yeah. We’re good buddies. Bea didn’t seem to have too many friends when this happened, though. And it sounds as though they are a bit thin on the ground even now. What the hell, the girl is the daughter of a famous artist. Surely somebody would have missed her.”

“She said she had just dropped out for a while after the funeral. She came back here to their farm in Provence. She wanted to be alone. I guess people respected that, so no one bothered her. Eventually she went back to the States, to their house in the Berk-shires, and she doesn’t remember anything else after that.”

“Right. Give me her full name, Nick, and I’ll get to work on it.”

“It’s Marie-Laure Leconte Jones. She was born in 1968, and the family’s main home was the Old Mill, Faversham, Massachusetts. They spent their summers
at their farm, Les Cerisiers, near Bonnieux in Provence.”

Mahoney nodded. “Thanks for being there for her, Nick. Stick with her; she needs all the help she can get.”

He put down the receiver, switched on the computer, and drummed up the long list of names of women flying from warm countries into San Francisco International the week that Bea had been attacked. He scanned them quickly. They all were accounted for. He glanced through the long list again. That’s when he caught it. The name had been marked checked off. Goddamn computers were not infallible. They made mistakes just as people did.

“M. L. L. Jones,” it said. “United Flight 511 from Honolulu. Dep.: 1800 hr. Arr. 2300 hr.”

Hawaii! Again. He whistled in surprise. Maybe lightning did strike twice in the same place after all. As he placed a call to the Honolulu Police Department, he wondered what the young recently bereaved Marie-Laure had been doing in Hawaii. He told himself it was probably just that she had needed a vacation. Still, it was worth following up, and he asked his colleagues in Honolulu to find out when she had arrived, what hotel she had stayed at, and anything else they considered relevant. Then he shrugged on his jacket, signed out, and went home to meet Phyl.

She was waiting for him outside his building. She had on no makeup, and there were deep shadows beneath her blue eyes.

“You look like hell,” Mahoney greeted her.

“That’s the way I feel.”

She fell into his arms, and he held her. “Hey, Doc, what’s going on?” he asked gently. “I know I’m a great-looking guy, but I didn’t think I rated anywhere near as high as Mr. Hawaii.”

Her arms tightened around his neck. “Don’t even
mention his name,” she said in a muffled voice, her face buried in his chest.

“That bad, huh?”

“That bad.”

“I don’t want to be the one to say I told you so. I already gave you my opinion.”

“I know. And you told me not to see him again. I should have believed you,” she said, following him up the stairs to his apartment.

“You should have believed yourself. Your gut and your head told you something was wrong. You just didn’t want to acknowledge it.”

She sank into a chair. “I admit it,” she said, looking up at him repentantly. “How could I, of all people, have been so stupid, Mahoney?”

He shrugged. “It’s easy. You just believed what Brad wanted you to believe. That’s the art of a con man.”

“He’s more than that. He’s very seriously mentally disturbed.”

“Is that right?” He walked into the kitchen and began fixing coffee. “It might interest you to know that I’ve been doing a little research on Brad Kane myself. I can’t say I was totally surprised to find he had a record.” She looked at him with alarm. “Oh, nothing too serious,” he said. “Just cutting up a kid with a broken beer glass in college and threatening a hooker with a knife. Nothing really truly bad. Yet.”

“He scared me, Mahoney,” she said.

“What happened?” He poured thick rich espresso into small cups and put them on a tray with a bowl of brown sugar.

“He called me Rebecca.”

He glanced sharply at her. Then he grinned. “The mother?”

“It’s not funny,” she said defensively.

“You’re damn right it’s not. It’s sicko, baby, that’s what it is.”

“He terrified me. He talked right through the night,
pacing the floor like … like a caged animal. He told me everything about his wicked grandfather and Jack and Rebecca.

“Oh, God, Mahoney,” she wailed, “I think he’s killed someone.”

He handed her the cup of espresso. “Sugar?” he asked politely. She spooned some in, looking numbly at him. “Okay,” he said, “first drink the coffee. Then tell me everything. From the beginning.”

Phyl did as she was told, and for once Mahoney listened in silence. “So you think he killed this guy Monkey?” he asked.

She nodded. “What else could I think?”

“And you thought maybe he was going to kill you?”

“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “He veered between rage and gentleness. I was afraid. You know, that gut feeling, the one you tell me I should listen to. I couldn’t believe it. I looked at him, so nice-looking, so successful and—oh, I don’t know. He’s a man who has it all, I guess. And then I remembered what you’d told me. About murderers and the child abusers looking like regular folks, hiding their sins behind expensive clothes and a facade of normality.

“As a psychiatrist I understood what had damaged him. I understood about Rebecca. And I knew Jack was a bullying father, a man without a scrap of moral sense. I felt almost sorry for him, for a while. And then I realized it was too late. He had gone over the edge into his fantasy. Oh, he was able to keep up a perfect facade. No one would have ever guessed. And that’s when I was afraid, because I knew he was capable of anything.”

“You think he has confused you in his mind with Rebecca?”

“He has,” she agreed quietly. “He swings between love and hate for her. But I know that the hate is winning.”

“We’ve got ourselves a problem,” Mahoney said. “Where is Mr. Hawaii right now?”

“After this night of madness,” she said, with astonishment, “after letting it all out—something I swear he has never done before—he calmly says he has a meeting at the ranch. He’ll fly there and be back later. The ranch comes first, whatever else is happening!” She shuddered. “Thank God he remembered, or I—I don’t know what he might have done….”

“So he’s still in Hawaii?”

“Yes.”

Mahoney grinned. “Pity. I thought I could ask you to stay the night here. For safety purposes, of course, just in case he showed up.”

She laughed, despite herself. “Even you can’t pull that one off.”