Intimate Betrayal (11 page)

Matthew looked blank, so Annie added, “Giuseppe is the stained glass expert whom Francesca recommended to us. He did some
work in the old UPC church before it was torn down, so I thought you might have met.”

Matthew’s expression changed—he seemed to grow more alert. But he shook his head and said, “No.”

“I regret I was in my native Italy when Signora Carlyle died,” Giuseppe said. “After that I was in England, doing restorations.
I have only recently returned to this country.”

“I remember that she spoke of you,” Matthew said. Annie thought she detected an edge to his voice, but his face was once again
under careful control, and she had no inkling of what he was thinking.

“A beautiful lady,” Giuseppe said gently. “She is missed.”

“Thank you,” Matthew replied.

He was polite, but there was an audible finality to his words. It was clear that he did not wish to discuss his dead wife.

They spoke briefly about the stained glass, and Giuseppe seemed somewhat preoccupied as he explained what he was doing. Then
he turned to Annie. “May I speak to you a moment?”

She stepped aside with him. “I’m having a few problems installing the largest panel,” he told her. “I’d like to come into
your office tomorrow and have a look at the blueprints.”

“Of course, but don’t you have your own copy of the latest CAD file?” she asked, referring to the computer-aided design
software that all architects and designers used to assist in modern blueprint preparation.

“Alas, I seem to have lost a page of the blueprints,” Giuseppe said. “I’d like to see the original file, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ll have to come to my office at the firm for that,” she said.

“That’s fine. Tomorrow, perhaps?”

“Okay. I’ll be in by nine.”

“Good,” he said, and with a polite nod to Matthew he climbed back up the scaffolding and resumed his work.

“Anything wrong?” Matthew asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

As they left the cathedral, Annie noticed that Jack Fletcher was leaning against a column only a few yards away, half hidden
in the gloom.

“I don’t know why I’m so nervous about this meeting tonight,” Annie said to Darcy as she changed her dress for the third time.

“Hey, I’d be nervous too, having dinner with a murderer. Jeez, Annie, at least you could have insisted on meeting him in a
restaurant! Going alone to his house doesn’t sound very smart.”

“It’s really not fair to keep referring to him as a murderer.”

“He did it—I know he did. I have a strong intuition about these things. Besides, the potential for violence is clear in Carlyle’s
chart.”

Annie raised her eyebrows. She didn’t agree with Darcy’s beliefs that everything had a cause or an explanation in the stars.

“How does this one look?” she asked, slipping into a black sheath with short sleeves and a V neckline. She and Darcy
regarded her reflection in the full-length mirror in Annie’s bedroom.

“That’s good. Sexy and sophisticated but not too wild.”

“I don’t want to look sexy.”

“Honey, all women want to look sexy. We want men to think we’re sexy, too. We just don’t want them to actually do anything
about it—at least not while we’re having a business dinner.”

“You’re right, I should have insisted on a restaurant.”

“Billionaires don’t meet people in restaurants. They order you to come to their mansions and be tended by their servants and
fed by their cooks. But I wouldn’t worry
too
much. He can hardly rape you in front of his entire household staff.”

“Whatever he’s thinking,” Annie said tersely, “it’s too late.”

“You’re still mad at him for saying no to you about Fabrications, aren’t you?”

Annie shrugged. Her feelings about Matt Carlyle were, at best, mixed.

“I just read a book on male friendships as compared to female friendships,” Darcy said. “Just goes to show—men are so different
from us!”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

“We think of our best friend as someone we can talk intimately to. A man’s best friend is someone he can
do
something with—you know, hunt, fish, watch football. And even when they do have a conversation, they rarely listen and empathize
the way women do.”

“They’re too busy giving advice,” Annie said ruefully.

“Right. They even define the term
friend
differently than we do. Maybe they haven’t seen or talked to someone for
twenty years, but because they were on the football team together in high school and swore an eternal pact of friendship,
they still feel loyal.”

“Whereas for us, friendship is more day-to-day, in the present.”

“Exactly. Women are more practical about friendship. You and I haven’t known each other very long, for example. But we’re
close friends.”

“Absolutely.”

“Compare that with the long and old friendship between a couple of men. For example, Sam and your date for the evening, Matt
Carlyle.”

“It’s not a date!”

Darcy grinned. “They don’t socialize very often, as far as I can tell. But Sam testified for the defense at Carlyle’s trial.
He risked alienating all sorts of people by standing up in court on behalf of a man whom everybody thought was guilty.”

“I would have done the same thing. Wouldn’t you?” Annie asked. “Surely both men and women are loyal to their friends when
the chips are down.”

Darcy shrugged. “If you asked Carlyle, I’ll bet he’d say that most of his friends abandoned him in his time of need.”

“Well, maybe they did. But I was never a friend of his, Darcy.”

“Still, he’s bound to be angry and bitter. Watch out for this guy, Annie. I’m serious. You want me to come with you—as another
representative of the firm?”

Annie shook her head. “No. I can handle it.” She smiled wryly. “I guess I’ve got to prove that to myself.”

Their eyes met in the mirror, and Darcy nodded solemnly. “You can handle it.”

* * *

The first thing she thought when she arrived at the secluded, gated mansion was that she must have made a wrong turn somewhere.

Surely this dark Gothic horror could not be the home of one of the wealthiest and most sophisticated CEOs in the nation. It
looked like something out of a Stephen King novel.

Carlyle lived in the traditionally upscale area of the city known as Pacific Heights. From the tops of the hills residents
had a fantastic view of San Francisco Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge to the left, the village of Sausalito across the Bay,
Alcatraz Island looking deceptively picturesque out in the blue waters, and the shores of Berkeley to the right.

Carlyle’s home was situated on a hilly lot, with high walls and terraced gardens surrounding it. A steep, winding driveway
led up to the house from a security gate constructed of tall cast-iron pikes of the sort that, in ancient times, were used
to impale the heads of one’s enemies.

The mansion was a four-story monstrosity of “eclectic” style. The architect must have been either drunk or mad, Annie thought
with some amusement as she pulled in and parked. He had combined Georgian ponderousness with a Gothic sense of the bizarre,
and crowned it all with ornate Victorian touches. There were crenellated towers and rooftop galleries that resembled battlements,
and the square, solid walls looked thick enough to withstand the siege of Troy.

Keeping guard over a front doorway, that was tall enough to admit a giant on stilts, were three horrific stone gargoyles that
looked as if they should have been guarding the gates of hell.

What a perfect place for a wife killer to live,
Annie thought with a shiver.

She parked her car in the half-moon area directly in front of the main entrance and climbed the wide stone steps that curved
around the front of the house to the gigantic door. She saw no doorbell, so she raised the heavy knocker (the roaring head
of a lion) and released it. The sound of the bronze striking its metal plate was like a gunshot. Startled, Annie felt little
fear-devils chasing themselves up and down her spine.

“Get a grip,” she ordered herself.

She was expecting a lugubrious butler dressed like Boris Karloff to open the door, but all that happened was that dogs began
barking inside. After thirty seconds or so she knocked again. She heard the sound echo through the house. Still, no one came.

This is odd.
She began to wonder if she had the right day, the right time. She was sure his instructions had been clear, and that she
had carried them out precisely.

She was lifting the knocker one more time when Carlyle himself opened the door. “Sorry for the delay,” he said with a smile.
“I was locking up the dogs, and my housekeeper, Mrs. Roberts, has the night off.” He stepped back and showed her in with a
flourish. “Welcome to the ugliest house in Pacific Heights.”

She smiled. “This
is
quite a place,” she said, crossing the threshold into a large foyer with a vaulted ceiling and a black marble floor.

“Yes, isn’t it. As an architectural designer, you might be interested in knowing that the man who conceived and built it ended
his days in a psychiatric hospital.”

Annie laughed. She remembered his dry sense of humor
from London, but she hadn’t seen much sign of it since then. “It’s certainly a mad mixture of styles.”

“That’s for sure. Francesca and I moved in just a couple of months before her death. She thought it had ‘possibilities.’ She
was going to have it completely redone, of course. But then she died.”

The inside was perfectly in keeping with the outside—with high-ceilinged rooms and a seemingly infinite number of odd angles
and small nooks and crannies. The walls were either painted in dark colors or hung with gloomy wallpaper that had seen the
passage of several decades. The furniture was well made and expensive, but if any attempt had been made to choose the right
piece for the right room, Annie couldn’t discern it.

The interior of the house had no soul. She wondered if this indicated a similar lack in its owner.

“In a way, I like the gloominess of the place,” he said, staring at her as if he guessed what she was thinking. “Its ponderousness
and darkness seem appropriate to me somehow.” He came to stand beside her. “Have you ever been afraid of the dark, Annie?”

She took a step away from him. “Well, yes, actually, I still am. I’m a bit claustrophobic, especially in the dark.”

“I used to be terrified of the dark. As a kid, I’d curl up in bed and cover my head with the blankets, tense as a board, knowing—absolutely
sure of it—that there was a monster waiting to consume me there. I used to pray very hard to God to protect me, back when
I believed in God.”

“Imagination can be a terrible thing, can’t it?” she said lightly.

“So can reality.”

There was nothing she could say to that. She remembered that his reality had included living in a small, dark cell for more
than a year while his trial droned on. She would have gone crazy, locked up like that.

She glanced at him. His expression was closed, his features like granite. A man who was in supreme control of his emotions.
Yet she remembered the way he had appeared on television in the courtroom on the day when the verdict had been announced.
The look in his eyes had revealed his inner turmoil.

Not so tonight, though. Tonight she had no idea what he was thinking.

They stared at each other for a long moment, then he turned away and said in a normal tone, “Come, I never use this room.
There actually is a more pleasant place. Let me show you the garden.”

Sliding doors led from the living room outside to a small intricately laid-out Japanese garden. Here, clearly, a landscape
artist had been at work. There were flowering plants of all sorts, their vividly colored blossoms dancing in the breeze. There
were trees, both natural and exquisitely small bonsai trees, and flowering shrubs. Through the middle of the garden wound
a flowing stream that opened into a fish pool where Annie saw the coppery gleam of carp.

“It’s very beautiful. Almost a fairyland.”

“I’m not a very visually oriented person, so I probably don’t even appreciate some of the finer details, but I do know that
I feel at peace here,” he said. “When I come out and walk in the garden, sit quietly, feed the fish, the rest of the world
seems, briefly, to slip away.”

“Yes, I can see why.”

He turned to her, and she noticed that he was very close. Self-consciously, she took a step back.

“I’m getting the distinct feeling that you’re uncomfortable here with me,” he said.

She met his eyes. “Yes, I am, a bit.” She was comparing the way she felt with him with her feelings about some of the other
men she knew. Sam Brody, for instance. Or Charlie. With Charlie she’d felt a pleasant zing of combined friendship and attraction—the
sort of feeling that blossoms into love, companionship, and trust. But with Matthew Carlyle she already felt the beginnings
of the same wild and sweeping lust that had gripped her so strongly that weekend long ago in England.

It was a strong, earthy, passionate attraction, based purely on sexual chemistry. The sort of thing that did nothing but cause
trouble in the people who were foolish enough to romanticize it.

“So what’s the source of your unease?”

Annie wasn’t about to say that she was fighting a strong and abiding attraction to him! As she fumbled for words, his expression
darkened. “I presume you believe, along with so many other people, that the jury acquitted a guilty man?”

Of course he would think that. Yet, oddly, despite her conversation with Darcy, she hadn’t given any thought to the murder
since she’d arrived. The danger she sensed from him was of another variety entirely.

“No,” she said quickly. “I believe the verdict was fair. And I remind you that my own conflicts with you go back a lot further
than your problems with the state of California.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then he smiled. “You’re right, of course. I’ve reclassified my life into two periods—
Before Francesca’s Murder and After Francesca’s Murder. Anything falling into the Before period seems like ancient history
to me, but of course that isn’t necessarily true of other people.”