Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark

by Sidney Sheldon

  The court was not to be entirely disappointed, however. For the first time since the trial began, Sofia Basta appeared to be overcome with emotion. Letting out a stifled sob, she clutched the edge of the defendants’ table.

  “Mrs. Darcy, can you confirm your name for the court?”

  “Rose Frances Darcy.” The old woman’s voice was strong and clear. “And it’s ‘miss.’ I never married.”

  “I’m sorry. Ms. Darcy, are you acquainted with either of the defendants in this case?”

  “I am. With the young lady.”

  The old woman looked across the room at the accused, her eyes welling up with tears of affection.

  “I see,” said Ellen Watts. “And when did you first meet Sofia Basta?”

  “I never met Sofia Basta.”

  The jury members exchanged puzzled frowns. For a moment Ellen Watts looked equally perplexed. It would be just her luck to discover that her first witness had lost her marbles.

  “Ms. Darcy, you just told the court that you know the female defendant. But now you’re saying that you never met her?”

  “No,” the old woman said testily. “I never said that. I’ve known her”—she pointed at the defendants’ table—“since the day she was born. What I said was, I never met Sofia Basta.”

  “But, Ms. Darcy…”

  “That’s not Sofia Basta.” Rose Darcy finally lost her patience. “Sofia Basta doesn’t exist.”

  IT TOOK JUDGE MUÑOZ A MOMENT to bring the court to order. Once the gasps had died down, the old woman continued.

  “Her real name is Sophie. Sophie Smith. I don’t know where this ‘Basta’ baloney came from, but it wasn’t the name she was born with.”

  Ellen Watts said, “You said you knew Sofia—Sophie—since birth. You knew her mother?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m a social worker. Her mother abandoned her at birth at a maternity clinic in Harlem. I happened to be working at the clinic that night, so I saw her soon after she was born. Tiny little thing she was, but a fighter even then. She spent the first three weeks of her life withdrawing from heroin. Mom must have been using throughout the pregnancy. She was lucky to survive. It was the workers at the clinic who named her Sophie.” She turned and looked at the stricken figure at the defendants’ table. “She’ll always be Sophie to me.”

  “What contact did you have with Sophie after that night?”

  Rose Darcy smiled sadly. “Not as much as I would have liked. Although I probably had more contact with her over the course of her childhood than anyone else. She was a sweet little girl, very loving, very sensitive. But she was troubled from the beginning.”

  “Psychologically troubled?”

  William Boyce lumbered to his feet. “Objection. Leading the witness.”

  “Objection sustained. Be careful, Ms. Watts.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. Ms. Darcy, in what way would you say the defendant was troubled?”

  “Her psychiatrists could give you a clinical opinion. But from my observations, she was withdrawn, poorly socialized among her peer group, prone to fantasy and self-delusion. Child Welfare Services was aware of her as a problem case. She was moved repeatedly between facilities.”

  “Why was that?”

  Ms. Darcy turned toward her former charge and said affectionately, “Because no one could handle her, that’s why. No one understood her.”

  “But you did?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, no. After she turned thirteen, she told her caseworkers that she didn’t want to see me again and we lost touch. I never did know why.”

  Sofia Basta was crying openly now, with every TV camera trained on her beautiful, tear-streaked face.

  “That must have been hard for you.”

  “It was,” Rose Darcy said simply. “I loved her.”

  Ellen Watts’s next witness, Janet Hooper, had worked at the Beeches, the home where Sophie lived in her late teens. A heavyset woman, with hunched shoulders and heavy bags under her eyes that suggested she might be one of the chronically depressed, Janet Hooper, it soon became clear, felt none of old Ms. Darcy’s affection toward the defendant.

  “She was difficult. Rude. Withdrawn. Kinda snooty toward me and my colleagues.”

  “Sounds like a typical teenager.”

  “No.” Janet Hooper shook her head. “It was more than that. She traded on her looks in a real cold, cynical way. The records from her previous home said the same thing. Once she hit puberty, the boys were all over her, as you can imagine. But she didn’t discourage it. She reveled in it.”

  Ellen Watts frowned. “She became promiscuous?”

  “Very.”

  Alvin Dubray blinked his rheumy old eyes in Ellen’s direction, as if to say, Just what on earth do you think you’re doing? Calling witnesses who painted her client as a calculating slut was hardly the most obvious way to win a jury’s affections. If anything, vilifying “Sophie” was his job.

  But Ellen Watts plowed on, regardless. “I see. And how long did that behavior continue?”

  “Until she was around sixteen, I believe. Until she got close to Frankie.” Janet Hooper turned toward Frankie Mancini, who met her gaze with his usual withering disdain.

  “Frankie Mancini changed Sophie Smith for the better?”

  Alvin Dubray couldn’t believe his ears. Ellen Watts was making his case for him.

  “Frankie Mancini changed Sophie Smith completely. She was a new person once she met him. Completely under his control.”

  The first warning signals went off in Dubray’s mind.

  “Under his…control?”

  Janet Hooper nodded. “Yeah. Like Frankenstein’s monster.”

  Oh God.

  “She worshipped the ground Frankie walked on. Did everything he told her to.”

  Ellen Watts smiled smugly at Alvin Dubray. “Can you give us some examples, Mrs. Hooper?”

  “Well, changing her name, for a start. It was Frankie who started this whole ‘Sofia Basta’ thing. Convinced her she was a Moroccan princess or some such nonsense. That she had a twin sister who’d been separated from her at birth. He created this whole past for her, this whole identity. I think he got the story from a novel. Anyway, Sophie started acting like it was real. She was out of her mind.”

  “Move to strike,” droned William Boyce. “The witness is not an expert and not qualified to comment on the accused’s mental health.”

  “Sustained.” Judge Muñoz preened self-importantly for the cameras, pushing back his newly dyed black hair. “Where are you going with this, Ms. Watts?”

  “Your Honor, the relationship between Mr. Mancini and my client is key to this case. I intend to show that Mr. Mancini’s grooming of my client was cynical, calculated and started from a young age. That she was as much a victim of Mr. Mancini as the men that he killed. Let’s not forget that during each of these brutal attacks, my client was raped by Mr. Mancini.”

  “Objection!” It was practically a howl from Alvin Dubray. “She was turned on by the killing! Sex was consensual.”

  “With those injuries?” Ellen Watts shot back. “The police reports all said ‘rape.’”

  “The police didn’t know she was in on it!”

  This was television gold, watching the defense “team” rip each other’s throats out. After two weeks of William Boyce’s monotone speeches for the prosecution, Judge Federico Muñoz finally had the spectacular trial he felt he deserved, complete with a balcony full of salivating television crews and news reporters. Tomorrow his name would be on everyone’s lips.

  “I’ll allow it,” he said graciously, “but I hope you have some expert psychiatric witnesses for us, Ms. Watts. The jury’s not interested in the opinions of amateurs.”

  Ellen Watts nodded gravely, dismissing Janet Hooper and calling her next witness.

  “The defense calls Dr. George Petridis.”

  A handsome man in his early fifties, wearing a three-piece suit with a vintage silver pocket watch, Dr. Petridis was chief of psychiatr
y at Mass General Hospital in Boston. He radiated authority, and both Alvin Dubray and William Boyce noticed with alarm the way the jury members sat up with attention when he spoke. Even Frankie Mancini seemed interested in what the esteemed doctor had to say. Throughout his testimony, you could have heard a pin drop.

  “Dr. Petridis, what is your relationship with the defendants in this case?” Ellen Watts asked.

  “I treated both of them in the late 1980s, when they were teenagers. I was working as a psychologist for New York State Child Welfare Services at the time, dealing almost exclusively with adolescents.”

  “Prior to these homicides being brought to light, did you remember these patients at all? Twenty years is a long time. You must have counseled hundreds of kids since then.”

  The doctor smiled. “Thousands. But I remembered these two. I also keep meticulous notes, so I was able to check my memories against what I recorded at the time.”

  “And what do you remember about the defendants?”

  “I remember an intensely codependent, symbiotic relationship. She was a sweet kid with a lot of problems. She was clearly psychotic. I prescribed Risperdal from our very first session, but she was resistant to the whole idea of drugs. The boy disapproved.”

  “What form did her psychosis take?”

  “Well, she was a fantasist. At best, she had a very fluid sense of self. At worst, no conscious identity at all, at least none that bore any resemblance to reality. I suspect maternal, prenatal drug use was a major factor. Effectively the kid was like an empty shell, a mold waiting to be filled with somebody else’s consciousness. In a very real sense, the boy ‘created’ her.”

  In the front row of courtroom 306, Danny McGuire shivered. “I have no life.”

  “Changing her name was probably the clearest external manifestation of her condition. Sofia was the name of her exotic, Moroccan alter ego. It was a psychotic affectation, lifted from a romantic novel one of the nurses had given her as a child. Frankie recognized her attachment to this story and her need for a past, an identity. He pretty much took the two things and meshed them together.”

  Ellen played devil’s advocate. “Is a seventeen-year-old boy really capable of that sort of sophisticated manipulation?”

  “Usually, no. But in this boy’s case, absolutely. He was highly intelligent, highly manipulative, a uniquely adaptable and capable individual. He was amazing, actually.” Dr Petridis looked across at Frankie Mancini rather like a zoologist might look at a particularly fine specimen of some unusual species.

  “In your opinion, was Frances Mancini psychotic?”

  “No. He was not.”

  “Did you prescribe any psychiatric medication for Mancini at any time while you were treating him?”

  The doctor shook his head. “There’s no pill that could have cured Frankie’s problems. We tried talking therapies, but he was highly resistant. He knew what he was doing, with Sophie, with everything he did. He had no interest in changing.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr. Petridis. But are you saying Frances Mancini was ‘bad’ rather than ‘mad’? That he did what he did deliberately and consciously, knowing that it was wrong, that it was evil?”

  Dr. Petridis frowned. “Bad and evil are both moral terms. I’m a psychiatrist, not a judge. I can tell you that Frankie certainly wasn’t ‘mad’ in the sense of insane. Like most of us, like Sophie, he was a product of his childhood.”

  “Did he talk to you about that?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Petridis solemnly. “He talked.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, Dr. George Petridis outlined the horror story that was Frankie Mancini’s childhood. As he spoke, at least two female jurors were reduced to tears. In the front row, the trio of Matt Daley, Danny McGuire and David Ishag listened intently, hanging on the doctor’s every word. For Danny McGuire in particular, it was like finally being given the answers to a crossword puzzle that had defeated him for years. With each word, the Azrael murders began to make more sick, twisted sense.

  “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.”

  “Yet when Ms. Basta acted out these hatreds, when she assumed them as her own, you say that they were pathological.”

  “Yes, but that’s different.”

  “How so, Doctor?”

  “Well, in her case there was transference. She was acting as someone else, for someone else.”

  “But wasn’t he doing the same thing? Wasn’t he, according to your testimony, acting out the fantasies of a disturbed, abused little boy? Wasn’t he transferring his hatred from Tony Renalto and his own father to the victims he butchered?”