Author: Sidney Sheldon
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/38519_60
What pieces of what Matt Daley had told him today were important? Of all the minute details, what leaped out at him?
Without thinking, Danny started typing.
New York. Morocco. Sister.
He’d come to L.A. primarily to do some more hands-on digging into the whereabouts of Lyle Renalto. But today’s meeting with Matt Daley had changed his mind. Lisa Baring was the key to all this. If he found out who Lisa was, he stood a chance of figuring out where she was. And if he found Lisa, Danny McGuire felt sure, he’d find the killer.
A FEW MILES ACROSS TOWN, MATT Daley was also in bed, staring at a computer screen.
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But it wasn’t his computer. It was Lisa’s.
He’d thought briefly about handing it over to McGuire this morning. Maybe Danny’s crack team of Interpol experts would uncover something that he himself had missed. But the truth was, as much as he liked the man, Matt no longer fully trusted Danny McGuire. He was a good guy and his heart was in the right place. But he wasn’t convinced of Lisa’s innocence. He hadn’t said he suspected her in so many words. But Matt could just sense it, in his questions, his facial expressions, in all the things he didn’t say.
Danny McGuire’s job was to find the killer, to get a conviction. Matt Daley wanted that too, but it was no longer his primary focus. His primary focus was to save Lisa.
Since smuggling her laptop back from Asia, he’d already searched every crevice of every drive it contained, from old e-mails to photo files to Word documents, looking for something, anything, that might tell him who this man was. Lisa’s lover. The one she was protecting. The one who had stolen her from him. But there was nothing. The only lead Matt had was a single vacation photograph, an amateurish shot showing Lisa hand in hand with a man. Lisa’s face suggested that the photo was relatively recent, a year or two old perhaps but no more. She was just as Matt pictured her every night in his dreams. But the man’s face was obscured by a dazzling light. Very bright sunshine, perhaps, or a reflected camera flash. Both of them were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, and standing in front of an aged stone harbor wall.
Bringing up the photo, Matt examined it again. The wall looked European. Europe in the summertime. A sign in the top left-hand corner caught his eye. He zoomed in, waited for the image to refocus, then zoomed in again. At last he saw it, a single word, hand-painted in cursive, italic script: GELATO.
Italy! They were in Italy. An Italian harbor. Somewhere on the coast.
With a jolt Matt’s mind jumped back to Bali. On the veranda at Mirage with Lisa…staring into the fire…watching the flames dance the night they first made love…What was it that she had said?
“We had a fire pit like this in Positano. Miles loved it.”
The man in the picture wasn’t Miles Baring. But maybe it had been taken on the same trip to the Amalfi coast.
Was that where she met him? Was that where the nightmare all started, where she somehow fell into his trap?
Matt Daley had promised Danny McGuire he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Breaking promises to Danny McGuire was starting to become a bad habit.
Closing the computer with trembling hands, he started to pack.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DAVID ISHAG GAZED OUT THE WINDOW of his twenty-third-floor office in Mumbai’s central business district, grinning like an idiot.
David Ishag wasn’t an idiot. Born to an Indian mother and an English father of Jewish descent, David Raj Osman Kapiri Ishag was one of the most well-respected entrepreneurs of his generation. He had engineering degrees from both Oxford and MIT, and was the founder and CEO of Ishag Electronics, India’s fastest-growing exporter of component hardware. At forty-eight years old, though he looked much younger, with his mother’s smooth coffee skin and his father’s strong patrician features, David Ishag was handsome, brilliant and obscenely rich. Although he considered himself Indian—Ishag Electronics had offices all over the world, but the Mumbai tower overlooking Nariman Point would forever be its headquarters—in reality, David Ishag was a true global citizen. Raised in India, educated in England and America, steeped i
n not one or even two but three religions—his mother’s Christianity, his father’s Judaism, and the Hinduism of his native land—David could fit in almost anywhere. More even than his academic brilliance, it was his global worldview, and his ability to relate to people from all cultures and walks of life, that had made David Ishag the business phenomenon that he was.
This morning, however, his famed commercial acumen was in sleep mode.
This morning, all David Ishag could think about was a beautiful woman’s face.
THEY HAD MET TWO MONTHS EARLIER at a charity function. It was one of those tedious, overdone white-tie affairs at the Oberoi, where hedge fund and private equity types bid hundreds of thousands of dollars for lackluster raffle prizes ostensibly in order to “Raise Money for Street Kids” but more truly in order to show off in front of their girlfriends. Normally David avoided these things like the plague. He gave plenty of money to charity, anonymously and by bank transfer, like any normal, decent human being, and had zero interest in being pursued around a ballroom by dozens of frenzied, money-hungry socialites. The women at these events were worse even than the men, shameless gold diggers with faces shot up with Botox and craniums full of nothing at all. They could virtually smell your net worth from across a room, the way trained police dogs sniffed out hidden caches of drugs. They scared him.
Unfortunately, being a prominent member of Mumbai’s business community meant that occasionally David Ishag had to put in an appearance at such charitable functions. On this particular evening, for the first time ever, he was glad he had.
He saw her at a corner table, looking as bored as he was. Not the arrogant, affected boredom of the models who eyed David when he walked in, so intoxicated by their own beauty that they considered everybody else beneath them, but the genuine, profound boredom of an intelligent person who finds herself stuck making small talk with a table full of braying donkeys.
She was simply dressed in a decidedly noncouture black column, but her beauty needed no adornment. With her high cheekbones, pale skin and intelligent dark brown eyes, framed by a sharply cut Cleopatra bob of black hair, she had a presence, almost an aura that drew David to her. Catching him staring, she looked up and smiled.
Her name was Sarah Jane Hughes. She was a schoolteacher, working for a charity that helped educate slum children across the subcontinent. She was Irish, only a few years younger than David and hilariously funny. Her imitations of the investment banking bores at her table had David in stitches for days afterward, just as her haunting face had him skipping out of meetings early just to check if she’d called him back and agreed to go out on a date.
She hadn’t.
David Ishag had dated other girls who played hard to get. The smart ones knew that Mumbai’s most eligible, and also its most confirmed, bachelor was unlikely to be impressed by neediness. But Sarah Jane wasn’t playing. She was genuinely busy, with the children at her school, her teaching, her life. She’d had no idea who David was when they met, and when she found out, she didn’t care.