Author: Sidney Sheldon
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/38519_85
Andrew Jakes, their first kill, with blood spurting from his neck like thick red water from a fountain.
Piers Henley, funny, cerebral Piers, who’d fought back until they shot him in the head, splattering his brilliant brain all over the bedroom walls.
Didier Anjou, pleading for his life as the blade sank into his flesh again and again and again.
Miles Baring, collapsing instantly as the knife pierced his heart.
Matt Daley, the one true innocent of all of them. Matt who had loved her, who had given her hope. Matt who lay dead and cold at her feet.
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She thought of the living. Her sister, her flesh and blood, out there somewhere. David Ishag, stirring groggily back to life on the bed.
“SLIT HIS THROAT!” Frankie’s voice, excited, aroused as it always was by blood and death and vengeance.
“POLICE!” Sledgehammers pounded against the door, splintering the wood.
“I can’t,” Sofia said calmly, closing her mind to the clamor and roar as she let the knife drop at her feet. “Shoot if you want to, Frankie. But I can’t do it. Not anymore.”
At long last the door gave way. Armed men swarmed into the room.
“Police! Put your hands in the air!”
David Ishag opened his eyes just in time to see Danny McGuire, gun drawn, panting in the doorway.
“You sure took your bloody time,” he murmured weakly.
Then somebody fired a single shot.
And it was all over.
PART IV
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
ONE YEAR LATER…
LOS ANGELES COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE Federico Muñoz was no stranger to front-page homicide cases. Two years ago in this very courtroom, room 306 on the third floor of the Beverly Hills Courthouse, a jury had found a much-loved movie actress guilty of killing her violent lover after years of abuse. Judge Muñoz sent the actress to death row, to the outrage of her fans, family and many in the national news media. Not long afterward, the judge received the first of the death threats that would be made against him periodically for the rest of his life.
He was delighted.
Death threats were what enabled Judge Federico Muñoz to demand a permanent security detail to escort him to and from work. Arriving every day at the imposing white-pillared courthouse at 9355 Burton Way, surrounded by a phalanx of armed guards, made Judge Muñoz feel inordinately important, as did the ongoing media interest in his life. Publicly, of course, he denounced this interest as prurient and mean-spirited, taking particular umbrage at the L.A. Times’s dubbing of him as “Judge Dread.” Privately, however, he loved every minute of it. Judge Federico Muñoz was already famous in Los Angeles. Now, thanks to the Azrael trial, he was becoming famous around the world.
The trial that had been going on now for two weeks—it had taken the prosecution that long to present their case, so huge was the mountain of evidence at their disposal—could not have been more sensational. Four wealthy men brutally murdered in identically staged and plotted circumstances around the globe. The accused, a married couple in their forties, both blessed with movie-star good looks, caught in the act of attempting to murder a fifth. All the elderly victims had been lured into marriage by the female defendant, known to the media as “the Angel of Death.” And yet this woman had herself submitted to violent, sexually sadistic assaults during each murder, administered by the male defendant. Willingly, if the prosecution was to be believed.
Neither party denied the murders, but each claimed coercion, identifying the other as the ringleader. Throw in the soap-opera-perfect twist of a “Robin Hood” motive—all the victims’ millions had been donated to children’s charities—and the tabloids could not have asked for more.
But they got more. They got a female defendant who had successfully assumed a new identity each time she tempted a fresh victim into her marriage bed, and had apparently undergone multiple surgeries to alter her appearance over the course of the past decade or so, but who remained drop-dead gorgeous. Sitting passively through the prosecution’s evidence, only occasionally tearing up when photographs of her husbands’ tortured bodies or her own injuries were shown to the jury, the woman seated at one end of the table in courtroom 306 looked as pristine and unsullied as a newborn baby, and as radiant as any angel. The press couldn’t get enough of her.
On the opposite side of the dock sat her codefendant, Frances Mancini. The pair had met when both were orphaned at a New York City children’s home during their teens. Mancini lacked his wife’s radiance, the aura of serenity and goodness that seemed to emanate from her person like light, despite the terrible crimes she’d confessed to committing. Nonetheless he was a compellingly attractive man, with his dark hair, strong jaw and regal, smolderingly arrogant features. Mancini had been shot while resisting arrest in India, and still had difficulty standing up and sitting down, wincing with discomfort each time he moved. When he was at rest, however, Mancini’s thin lips were curled into a permanent knowing smile, as if the whole spectacle of the U.S. justice system had been contrived solely for his amusement. Neither he nor his wife had fought their extradition to the United States despite the fact that in France or England, where they could equally well have been tried, there was no death penalty. Here in California, both defendants were on trial for their lives, in front of a hostile jury and the toughest judge in the L.A. County Superior Court system. Yet Frankie Mancini seemed to view today’s proceedings as little more than a piece of theater, a melodrama if not a boulevard farce, to which the fates had generously decided to allocate him a front-row seat.
This might have had something to do with the lawyer for the prosecution, William Boyce. A tall, angularly built man in his early fifties with close-cropped gray hair and a fondness for cheap charcoal-gray suits, Boyce, who was known for his even, measured delivery, was the antithesis of the hotshot attorney one expected to find in such a high-profile case. He was the proverbial “safe pair of hands,” competent, professional and painfully ordinary to such a degree that it was often said that the only remarkable thing about William Boyce was how very unremarkable he was. Why the state had chosen Boyce to prosecute such a case was almost as much of a mystery as the homicides themselves. Perhaps the powers that be had decided, in the face of such overwhelming evidence, that a monkey could have succeeded in condemning both the Azrael killers to death row…and William Boyce was the closest thing they could find to a monkey.
In any event, it was quite an achievement to be able to bore a jury with a case as sensational as this one, but over the past two weeks William Boyce had managed to do just that, reciting the facts pertaining to the four murders in a monotone that had effectively blunted their emotional impact. He’d spent an entire day getting bogged down in the complex international legal agreement whereby the British, French, and Hong Kong Chinese authorities had consented to the evidence being heard jointly in California. His witnesses had livened things up a bit. Andrew Jakes’s Spanish housekeeper, in particular, gasped and sobbed her way through hideously graphic testimony that had made the front pages of all the tabloids the next morning. But all in all, Judge Muñoz could see how the prosecution had earned Frankie Mancini’s contempt. Like everyone else in courtroom 306, and those following the trial around the world, he was looking forward to hearing the defense’s case. Today, at last, that time had come.
Because each defendant claimed to have been coerced by the other, they had chosen separate representation. Frankie’s attorney, Alvin Dubray, was a short, fat man with a permanently untucked shirt and mad-scientist hair. Dubray arrived at courtroom 306 dropping papers from the pile under his arm, looking for all the world like a muddled old grandfather who’d gotten lost on his way to the library. In reality, as Judge Muñoz knew well, Dubray’s mind was so sharp and his memory so prodigious that he had no need of notes of any kind. But the bumbling-old-buffoon act had been endearing him to juries for over twenty years and he wasn’t about to abandon his shtick now. With a client as cold and unsympathetic as Frankie Mancini, Alvin Dubray would need to endear the hell out of today’s crowd.
In that regard, the “Angel of Death’s” attorney had the easier job. Ellen Watts was young and relatively inexperienced. This was only her second murder trial. But she had already made a name for herself on the Superior Court circuit as an insightful and talented trial lawyer, manipulating evidence with the artistry and ease of a potter molding clay on the wheel. With her bobbed blond hair and elfin features, Ellen Watts was usually considered a beauty. Next to her client, however, she faded away like a camera flash aimed at the sun.
“All rise.”