Sidney Sheldon's the Silent Widow

by Sidney Sheldon

  The murders themselves fascinated him. Like everyone else, Derek had followed the story in the papers and on TV. Willie Baden’s very young, very beautiful mistress – who also happened to be one of Nikki Roberts’ patients – had been horribly tortured by a knife-wielding maniac, before being stabbed in the heart and her corpse dumped, naked, in scrubland beside the freeway. Three days later, a young African American boy named Treyvon Raymond – Nikki Roberts’ assistant and close family friend – had met the exact same fate, surviving long enough to make it to the hospital, but passing away before he could identify his assailant. So far so horrible. But it got worse. Baden’s mistress had evidently fought for her life, and some of the killer’s DNA had been preserved under her fingernails. After multiple leaks about those samples containing dead human cells, the whole ‘zombie’ soap opera took off in earnest, first on the internet and later in the mainstream media. It was truly ridiculous what people were prepared to believe these days. Back in the real world, however, no one had been arrested for either killing, never mind charged. No clear motive had been established. The whole thing was a genuine mystery.

  ‘So LAPD still have no suspects?’ Williams asked Nikki.

  ‘Not officially. Although I think one of the detectives on the case, Johnson, suspects me. He certainly treats me like a criminal every time I speak to him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t read too much into that,’ said Williams. ‘All cops are rude.’

  Not all, thought Nikki, thinking of the charming Goodman. But she kept the thought to herself. Instead, to Williams’ astonishment, she blew things wide open right off the bat by admitting to him that she’d lied to detectives in her interview.

  ‘They asked me if I knew a boy named Brandon Grolsch. I said no. But I do know him. At least, I did. He used to be a patient of mine. My husband referred him to me, through one of his clinics.’

  ‘Why were they asking about this boy? And why’d you lie?’ Williams asked.

  Nikki shrugged. ‘I’m not sure why they were asking. I presume because they thought he might have been involved in the murders. But I know he wasn’t. Brandon wasn’t capable of anything like that. He was very gentle, very sweet.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘I suppose I lied to protect him. I didn’t really think about it at the time.’

  ‘You do realize that’s obstruction of justice?’ Williams pointed out. ‘If the cops found out and wanted to get nasty about it, they could.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t care,’ Nikki said boldly. ‘The fact is, I don’t trust them, Mr Williams.’

  Williams could have high-fived her then and there. Well, that makes two of us, honey. ‘But you trust me?’

  ‘I’m paying you,’ Nikki grinned. ‘That creates a very different dynamic.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, it sure does.’ Williams grinned back. ‘So this Brandon kid. When did you last hear from him?’ he asked.

  ‘Quite a long time ago. More than a year,’ said Nikki. ‘He called me from Boston. He was using again, feeling very low. He wasn’t in a good place at all, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Do you think he’s dead?’ Williams asked bluntly.

  Nikki shrugged. ‘It’s certainly possible. But I don’t know.’

  ‘OK.’ Williams changed tack, filing Brandon Grolsch under pending. ‘Tell me about the detectives running the case.’

  With a heavy sigh, Nikki launched into a description of Detective Mick Johnson: his raging hostility and paranoia towards her, his determination to view her as a perpetrator rather than a victim. ‘He told me to my face that he thought I’d made up the story about the guy in the SUV trying to kill me. It’s absurd. His partner’s much more reasonable. Detective Lou Goodman.’ Williams noticed the way Nikki’s face instantly brightened when she said his name. ‘He’s different.’

  ‘Different in what way?’

  ‘In every way. He’s polite, he’s hard-working, he’s educated. Open-minded.’

  ‘But still not getting anywhere with the case,’ Williams reminded her.

  ‘I suppose not,’ Nikki admitted reluctantly. ‘Not fast enough anyway. He believes that I may have been the killer’s target all along. That Lisa Flannagan could have been killed by mistake, because she was wearing my raincoat and outside my office when she was attacked.’

  Williams looked skeptical. ‘That seems a bit of a stretch.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nikki. ‘It was dark and raining. And we did look somewhat similar, Lisa and I. Superficially, at least. I mean, obviously Lisa was much younger and more beautiful.’

  Williams didn’t correct her. Nikki Roberts was a good-looking lady for her age, no question, but he’d seen pictures of Lisa Flannagan. The girl had been a knockout. What a waste.

  Later, Nikki told Derek about the photograph stolen from her bedroom, and filled in the gaps about the mysterious black SUV that had tried to run her down and the young man who’d come to her aid. She also gave him a copy of the death-threat email she’d received the night before. He couldn’t understand why this detective Johnson wouldn’t take those incidents seriously, especially in the context of these gruesome murders and Nikki’s close connection to both. It made no sense. Did Johnson know something that his partner didn’t?

  He made notes of all his questions, then sat back and listened patiently while Nikki brought the conversation back around to the real reason she’d hired him: her husband’s affair.

  The story Nikki told him was gut-wrenching. But Williams’ gut told him it was also incomplete. There seemed to be several vital pieces of the puzzle missing, facts that Nikki either didn’t know or wasn’t ready to tell him – yet.

  According to Nikki, the first she knew about her husband’s mistress was the night of his death. Doug Roberts had lost control of his car on the 405 one night and been killed instantly. When Nikki got the call from police, she learned that he hadn’t been alone. A woman passenger had been in the car with him.

  ‘They asked me if I knew who she was, but I had no idea. At that time I assumed maybe she was one of Doug’s patients, or a colleague he was giving a ride home. It was a few days later when I learned the truth. I overheard two of the cops talking. They’d interviewed staff at the hospital where Doug worked and multiple people had told them the woman was Doug’s girlfriend. I didn’t believe it at first. It made no sense to me at all – it still doesn’t. But when I confronted Doug’s best friend Haddon, he admitted Doug had been seeing someone. As you can imagine I was devastated. I begged Haddon for details, but he claimed not to have any.’

  ‘You didn’t believe him?’

  ‘Would you?’ Nikki asked. ‘He and Doug were best friends. Maybe he thought he was protecting me, or protecting Doug’s memory. I don’t know. But I need answers, Mr Williams. All I’ve been able to find out so far is she was Russian and that her first name was Lenka. The rest is a total blank.’

  ‘What would you like to know?’ asked Derek.

  ‘Everything.’ Nikki’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘I want to know everything. Who she was, how long it had been going on, how they met, where they met. I want to know how often they slept together, and where, and I want to know why. Why did he do this? Why? We were happy. He didn’t need anyone else! We were incredibly, incredibly happy.’

  Williams said nothing to this, but he watched Nikki’s reactions closely. Watched as all the poise and control, all the calm with which she’d discussed the murders and the attempts on her life, flew out of the window, replaced by an unstable mix of grief, denial and a powerful, almost tangible anger.

  There are two sides to this woman, he thought.

  One that’s in control of her emotions. And one that’s not.

  One that lives in the real world. And one who takes refuge in fantasy.

  One that tells the truth. And one that lies. Even to herself.

  It also struck him that even when her own life was in danger, the thing that mattered to Nikki Roberts most was solving the riddle of her husband’s mistress. Was there something she wa
sn’t telling him? Something about ‘Lenka’ she was holding back? Perhaps that obsession was also where her courage came from? The poor woman had already died inside a thousand times over. She’d already been tortured by the circumstances of her husband’s death, and the betrayal it had revealed to her.

  Perhaps, after that, nothing scared her any more?

  In Williams’ experience, there were few people more dangerous, or more powerful, than those with nothing left to lose.

  By the time he’d finished making his own initial notes, another hour had passed. It was now eleven thirty, almost lunch time, but for once Derek Williams’ stomach wasn’t his number one priority. Running a hand almost lovingly over the manila folder Nikki had handed him earlier, he opened it now for the first time.

  He was curious to see which details she had chosen to include in her dossier of ‘facts’ and which she had omitted or edited out. Her honesty about Brandon Grolsch and lying to the police had been disarming. So, on one level, she trusted him. But Derek Williams wasn’t naive enough to believe that any client ever gave him the unadulterated truth. If such a thing even existed.

  ‘What have you got for me sweetheart?’ he muttered under his breath.

  Pulling out the first page from Nikki’s folder, it took him a moment to recognize the unfamiliar feeling in his chest. It wasn’t stress, or indigestion, or heartburn. It was happiness. He was happy.

  Overnight, it seemed, his luck had changed. He had a new case, a new client, a new challenge.

  Derek Williams was back.

  Thorough to a fault, he read the files in silence for a long time. Then he read them again. And again. Minutes turned into hours. There was a lot here, a lot of different places where he could choose to start.

  In the end though, one name leapt out at him, from the scores Nikki had chosen to mention. In terms of the two murders, it was the name of a bit player, a minor figure, tangential at best to the case. And yet it was a name that Derek Williams knew well – too well – from another case, another time.

  His mind wandered back.

  Almost a decade back …

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Nine years earlier …

  Derek Williams peeked through the glass door of his office at the couple sitting in the waiting room.

  It was a great office, new and expensive, and the waiting room was impressive – high-ceilinged and furnished with designer couches and high-end ‘lifestyle’ magazines, as advised by Williams’ new wife, Lorraine.

  ‘You gotta spend money to make money, baby,’ was one of Lorraine’s favorite catchphrases, along with ‘You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.’ Derek tolerated Lorraine’s greeting-card philosophizing because he loved her, and because she had a terrific ass and great tits and he was lucky as all hell that she’d chosen him, out of all the guys who wanted to bone her. Also, so far at least, she seemed to be right about the ‘spend money to make money’ thing. Since taking the lease on the fancy offices he’d raised his rates sixty percent and seen his volume of business triple. ‘People feel reassured when they pay a lot of money for something. No one wants a cheap service,’ said Lorraine. She was right about that too.

  Today’s couple had paid Derek a small fortune in fees, plus hefty expenses, for the job he’d recently completed on their behalf. He couldn’t help but feel bad for them, and nervous about their imminent meeting. They sat together, hands clasped, but staring straight ahead, as stiff and rigid as statues.

  The man, Tucker Clancy, was stocky and well built, the type who looked as if his shirt collar was permanently choking him. He dressed in the classic preppy uniform of khakis and a white shirt, and probably had the Republican Party elephant tattooed somewhere on his super-fit body. There was nothing disheveled about him, nothing undone. And yet his face was a craggy ruin, bearing all the hallmarks of devastation and grief. He was only in his mid-forties but looked twenty years older at least. To have a child die was terrible enough. But to have your only daughter disappear into thin air, to be left with an agonizing sliver of hope that perhaps she might one day return to you, against all the odds, that the nightmare might end? Derek Williams could not imagine anything worse.

  The wife, Mary, seemed to have held up better. She looked exhausted too, but resigned, somehow, to her fate in a way that her husband wasn’t. If she still held out hope for her daughter, it didn’t show on her kindly middle-aged features.

  That’s good, Williams thought. At least one of them has accepted reality.

  He’d spent the last three weeks down in Mexico City, hunting for any traces of the Clancys’ daughter, Charlotte, trying to piece together her last-known movements and come up with some sort of credible theory as to what might have happened to her. A slim, attractive blonde, unusually tall for her age, Charlotte would have cut a striking figure anywhere, but especially in a place like Mexico where she towered over the local girls, as All-American as apple pie. And yet no one, it seemed, had laid eyes on her since the evening she disappeared.

  The Clancys hadn’t given him much to go on in their initial meeting, largely because the Mexican police had given them nothing. In the beginning, Tucker Clancy had put this down to his ingrained, knee-jerk belief that all foreign police, and especially the Mexican police, were useless and that as soon as ‘superior’ American officials got involved, things would improve. It had caused Tucker great pain to discover that neither the FBI nor the staff at the US consulate were any improvement on the Mexicans. In fact in some ways, they were worse, seeming at times to be actively dismissive of the Clancys’ concerns, rather than simply incompetent.

  ‘They don’t give a damn about Charlie!’ an outraged and astonished Tucker Clancy had ranted to Williams the day that they decided to hire him. ‘She’s an American citizen, for God’s sake. Why aren’t they out there looking for her? Beating the damn bushes?’

  Williams shared Tucker Clancy’s outrage, but not his surprise. ‘The sad truth is, Mr and Mrs Clancy, unless you’re wealthy or politically connected in some way, the FBI are simply not going to devote resources to a case like this. Your daughter was eighteen when you last heard from her. Plenty of young people take off on their own without telling their parents.’

  ‘Not Charlie,’ Tucker Clancy growled.

  ‘And not for a year,’ his wife added, more calmly. ‘We know something’s happened to her, Mr Williams,’ she said bravely, fighting back tears. ‘We just don’t know what. People, tourists, do get kidnapped down there. I mean, it’s dangerous. Mrs Baden gave us some statistics …’

  ‘Who?’ Williams asked.

  ‘Valentina Baden,’ Tucker Clancy responded gruffly. ‘She’s Willie Baden’s wife and she runs a charity that helps search for Missing Persons. They’ve helped us more than anyone. Tried to get the word out there.’

  Suddenly things clicked in Williams’ mind. He’d seen the Tuckers before, on television. One of those tear-jerker ads that charities put out. He’d only half tuned in, but the thing had aired on a game night in one of the commercial breaks, which must have cost a fortune. Ignobly, he wondered whether any of the Baden coffers had been opened with regards to his own fees, but he let the thought go as Tucker Clancy plowed on.

  ‘I should never have let her go,’ Tucker muttered furiously.

  ‘The thing is, according to Mrs Baden, with kidnapped foreigners there’s usually a ransom request,’ Mary Clancy told Williams. ‘We’ve heard nothing. Now, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.’

  It’s bad, Williams wanted to tell her. He wondered if Willie Baden’s do-gooder wife had told these people that at this point the odds had to be a hundred to one against finding Charlotte Clancy alive. Life was cheaper south of the border than most ordinary, middle-class Americans could imagine. Plus Charlotte was young and naive and attractive. It didn’t look good.

  In any event the Clancys had hired Derek Williams to do a job and he intended to do it, to the best of his abilities.

  He�
�d landed in Mexico City four days later armed only with the name and address of Charlotte’s employers, the first name of a local girlfriend she’d mentioned in a rare phone call home, and some photos and personal details, including her Mexican cell phone number. That was it. He had low hopes, but as Lorraine reminded him, ‘Ten thousand dollars is ten thousand dollars, Derek. And at least you’ll get a tan.’

  He did get a tan. He also got an education. None of his research had prepared him for the utter lawlessness of Mexico City. It was like living in the Wild West. The Clancys must have been out of their minds to allow their naive teenage daughter to take a job out here alone. Drug gangs operated with virtual impunity, and both kidnappings and murders were jaw-droppingly common, genuinely everyday occurrences. Some of the local police were phenomenally brave, facing the menace on their streets head on despite the risks of torture or beheadings or reprisals against their own families. But plenty of others were venal, in the pay of either the gangs or wealthy local families, whom they served exclusively and at the expense of ordinary citizens. As for the elected officials, corruption ran from top to bottom in the city, affecting every aspect of life, like a blue vein of bacteria spidering its way through Roquefort cheese.

  Charlotte’s employers, the Encerrito family, had lived in the city for generations and seemed wearily accepting of both the corruption and the constant threat of violence.

  ‘Sadly, I am certain that Charlotte is dead,’ Juan Encerrito told Williams, in a deep, resonant baritone that betrayed no trace of shock. ‘These things happen here, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why anyone would want to kill her?’ Williams asked. ‘Anti-American feeling, perhaps? Or an assumption her family would be rich and willing to pay a ransom? Although as you know, no demands were ever made to the Clancys.’

  Angelina Encerrito, a pretty woman with elaborately braided dark hair, offered her opinion. ‘In our city, Mr Williams, the gangs don’t need a reason. We did warn Charlie about always staying in the safer neighborhoods, and never driving alone after dark. But I think she was maybe a little impulsive.’