Ripper. Isabel Allende
sought out Alan, who called him up, taunting him with her desire and her humor, suggesting they meet up at the Fairmont, flattering and praising him.
Alan never detected any falseness or scheming on her part. Indiana was outspoken. She seemed utterly in love, happy and beguiled. It was easy to love her, yet he did not allow himself to be tied down, considering himself a wayfarer in this world, a traveler who did not take the time to look more deeply into anything except art, which alone seemed to offer permanence. He had had his share of conquests, but no serious lover until he happened on Indiana, the only woman ever to captivate him. He was convinced their relationship worked precisely because they kept it separate from the rest of their lives. Indiana made do with little, and this selflessness suited him, though he considered it somewhat suspect; he believed that all human relationships were a trade-off in which the cleverest came out on top. They had been together for four years and never mentioned the future, and though he had no intention of getting married, it offended Alan that Indiana had not raised the subject. He thought of himself as a good catch—especially for a woman of no means like her. There was still the problem of the difference in their ages, but Alan knew a lot of men in their fifties who dated women twenty years their junior. The only thing Indiana had insisted on from the beginning, from that first unforgettable night spent beneath the Indian silk canopy, was fidelity.
“You make me really happy, Indi,” he said in an uncharacteristic surge of honesty, mesmerized by what he had just experienced without recourse to pills. “I hope we can go on seeing each other.”
“As a couple?” she asked.
“As lovers.”
“Meaning we’d be exclusive. . . .”
“You mean monogamous?” He laughed.
Alan was a social animal; he enjoyed the company of interesting, sophisticated people, particularly of the women who naturally gravitated toward him because he knew how to make them feel special. He was the must-have guest at the parties that appeared in the society pages. He knew everyone, was up-to-date on all the latest gossip, the celebrities and their scandals. Although he deliberately strutted like a playboy to provoke desire among the women and jealousy among the men, he found that sexual relationships merely complicated his life, giving him less pleasure than good conversation or an entertaining show. Indiana Jackson had just proved there were exceptions.
“Let’s agree on one thing, Alan,” she proposed with unexpected seriousness. “Whatever this is, it has to be mutual—that way neither of us will feel betrayed. When I was married, I was very hurt by my husband’s affairs, by his lies—it’s something I don’t want to go through again.”
He readily agreed to monogamy—he had no intention of telling her that sleeping around was the least of his priorities. She agreed, but warned that if he did cheat on her, everything would be over between them.
“And you don’t need to worry about me,” she added. “When I’m in love, I have no problem being faithful.”
“Then I’ll have to make sure you stay in love with me.”
Lit by the faint glow of candles in the darkened bedroom, Indiana sat naked on the bed, her legs drawn up, her hair tousled, a work of art open to Alan’s expert gaze. He thought of The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich—the rounded breasts and pale nipples, the broad hips; the childlike dimples at the elbows and the knees—except that this woman had lips that were swollen with kisses and the unmistakable look of sated desire. Voluptuous was the word, he decided, surprised by the reaction of his own body, which had responded with a swiftness and a stiffness he could not remember ever experiencing.
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.
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