Isabel Allende - Ripper

A month later he began to spy on her. He could not believe that in the hedonistic atmosphere of San Francisco, this beautiful young woman would be faithful to him simply because she had given her word. He was so eaten up with jealousy that he hired a private detective, a man named Samuel Hamilton Jr., and instructed him to keep tabs on Indiana and a record of the men she met, including her patients at the Holistic Clinic. Hamilton was a short little man with the innocuous air of a vacuum cleaner salesman, but he had inherited the nose of a bloodhound from his father, a journalist who had solved a number of crimes in San Francisco back in the 1960s and was immortalized in the detective novels of William C. Gordon. The son was the spitting image of his father: short, red-haired, balding, keen-eyed. He was dogged and persistent in his fight against the criminal underworld but, overshadowed by his father’s legend, had never managed to truly develop his potential and so scraped by as best he could. Hamilton tailed Indiana for a month without discovering anything of interest, and for a while, Alan was reassured, but his calm was short-lived; soon he would call the detective again, the cycle of mistrust repeating itself with shameful regularity. Fortunately, Indiana knew nothing about these machinations, though she ran into Samuel Hamilton so often, and in such unexpected situations, that after a while they would say hello to one another.

Tuesday, 10

Bob Martín arrived at the Ashton residence in Pacific Heights at 8:55 a.m. that Tuesday morning. At thirty-six, he was young to be deputy chief of homicide in the Personal Crimes Division, but no one questioned his competence. Shortly after he graduated from high school—with great difficulty, having distinguished himself only on the sports field—he had spent a week partying with his buddies, forgetting that he was recently married and that his wife had just given birth to a baby girl. So his mother and grandmother forced him to wash dishes in one of the family restaurants, working shoulder to shoulder with the poorest Mexican immigrants—half of them illegals—to teach him what earning a living was like with no qualifications and no profession. Four months under the tyrannical regime of these twin matriarchs had been enough to shake him out of his idleness: he did two years of college before enrolling in the police academy. Bob Martín had been born to wear a uniform, to carry a gun, to wield authority. He learned to be disciplined; he was incorruptible, courageous, and stubborn, with a physique capable of intimidating any criminal and an absolute loyalty to the department and to his fellow officers.

As he drove to the crime scene, Bob punched the number of his trusty assistant Petra Horr into his cell phone and she gave him the lowdown on the victim. Richard Ashton was a psychiatrist, famous for two books he had written in the 1990s—Sexual Disorders in Pre-Adolescents and Treating the Juvenile Sociopath—and more recently for his participation at a conference where he demonstrated the advantages of hypnosis in the treatment of autistic children. A video of the conference had gone viral on the Internet, since it coincided with the news that the incidence of autism had risen at an alarming rate in recent years, and because Ashton’s stunt had been worthy of Svengali. To silence the skeptical whisperings from the audience and to prove how susceptible we are to hypnotism, he asked all the delegates to clasp their hands behind their heads. Moments later, though they tugged and twisted, two-thirds of those in the audience were unable to unclasp their hands until Ashton broke the hypnotic trance. Bob could not recall ever having heard of the man, still less his books. To his admirers Ashton was a leading figure in child and adolescent psychiatry, Petra Horr told Bob, and to his detractors he was a neo-Nazi who distorted facts to support his theories and used unlawful methods on underage, mentally challenged patients. The man frequently appeared on television and in the papers to discuss controversial subjects, Petra added, and sent him a link to a video that the deputy chief watched on his cell phone.

“Check it out,” said Petra. “It’s a video of Ashton’s third wife, Ayani.”

“Who?”

“Aw, come on, chief, don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Ayani! She’s one of the most famous supermodels in the world. She was born in Ethiopia. She’s the one who campaigned against female genital mutilation.”

On the screen of his smartphone, Bob recognized the woman with the high cheekbones, the languid eyes, the long neck, from the covers of various magazines. He let out a low, admiring whistle.

“Shame I didn’t get to meet her before!” he quipped.

“Well, now she’s a widow you can try your luck. You’re not a bad-looking guy—if you’d just shave off that drug-dealer mustache of yours, you might even be handsome.”

“Are you flirting with me, Ms. Horr?”

“Don’t sweat it, Chief, you’re not my type.”

The car drew up outside the Ashton residence, and the deputy chief ended the call. The house was hidden behind a tall, whitewashed wall above which he could see the tops of evergreen trees. From the outside, there was nothing ostentatious about the house, but the Pacific Heights address itself was a clear indication of its owners’ elevated social status. The high wrought-iron gates allowing access to cars were locked, but the door for pedestrians was wide open. Bob noticed a fire truck parked on the street and silently cursed the efficiency of the paramedics, who were frequently the first to arrive, blundering in to offer first aid without waiting for police backup. One of the officers led him through an overgrown garden to the house itself, an eyesore composed of concrete and glass cubes jumbled together as though dislodged by an earthquake.

In the garden, a number of police officers and first responders waited for orders, but the deputy chief had eyes only for the ethereal figure coming toward him, a dark-skinned nymph floating on a cloud of blue veils—the woman he had just seen on his cell phone. Ayani was almost as tall as he was, and everything about her was vertical. She had a complexion the color of cherrywood, a body lithe and supple as a bamboo stem, the undulating movements of a giraffe—three similes that immediately sprang to Bob’s mind, though he was a man little given to poetic flights of fancy. As he gazed at her, dumbfounded, she glided toward him in bare feet, wearing a silk shift the color of the sky reflected in a lake, and proffered a slim, elegant hand whose fingernails were unvarnished.

“Mrs. Ashton, I presume. . . . I’m Deputy Chief Bob Martín of the Personal Crimes Division.”

“You can call me Ayani, Deputy Chief,” the model said, sounding remarkably calm. “I called the police.”

“Tell me what happened, Ayani.”

“Richard didn’t come back to the house last night, so early this morning, I went to his study and brought him some coffee—”

“How early?”

“Between eight fifteen and eight twenty-five.”

“Why didn’t your husband come back to the house to sleep?”

“Richard would often spend the night reading or working in his study. He was a night owl, so I wasn’t worried if he didn’t come back to the house—sometimes I didn’t even notice, since we have separate bedrooms. Today was our anniversary—we’ve been married one year today—so I wanted to give him a surprise. That’s why I brought the coffee to him instead of Galang, who usually takes it.”

“Galang?”

“The butler—he’s Filipino, he lives on the property. We also have a cook and a maid who work part-time.”

“I’ll need to talk to all three. Please, carry on.”

“It was dark, the curtains were drawn. I turned on the light and . . . and then . . . I saw him. . . .” The beautiful woman’s voice quavered, and for a moment her perfect poise faltered, but she quickly composed herself and gestured for Bob to follow her.