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.
The deputy chief told the patrol officers to call for backup and to set up a cordon around the house to keep away rubberneckers and the media, who, given the victim’s celebrity, would probably descend on the place very soon. He followed Ayani along one of the side paths to a building adjoining the main house, built in the same ultramodern style. She explained that her husband used the study as a consulting room for his private patients, since it had a separate entrance and there was no connecting door with the house.
“You’ll catch cold, Ayani,” said Bob. “Go and find something to wrap up warm, and put some shoes on—”
“I grew up with no shoes—I’m used to it.”
“Well, then, wait outside, please. There’s no need for you to have to see this again.”
“Thank you, Deputy Chief.”
Bob watched as she glided away across the garden and adjusted his pants, embarrassed by his ill-timed and deeply unprofessional reaction, which unfortunately he experienced quite often. He shook his head to dispel the images provoked by this African goddess and stepped into the annex, which was made up of two large rooms. In the first, the walls were lined with bookshelves and the windows screened by thick linen curtains; there was an armchair, a brown leather sofa, and an antique carved wood table. On top of the wall-to-wall cream carpet lay two well-worn Persian rugs whose quality was evident even to someone as inexperienced in interior design as Bob. Making a mental note of the coverlet and the pillow on the sofa—it must be here that the psychiatrist slept—he scratched his head; why would Ashton rather sleep here than in Ayani’s bed? Now if it were me . . . He pulled himself out of his daydream and returned his attention to his duties.
On the table rested a tray with a coffeepot and a clean cup; when Ayani set it down, she must not yet have seen her husband. Bob stepped into the other room, which was dominated by a large mahogany desk. He was relieved to see that the first responders had not actually set foot in the studio itself but had assessed the situation at a glance and withdrawn so as not to contaminate the crime scene. He had a few minutes before his forensics team arrived in force. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and began a preliminary inspection.
Richard Ashton’s body lay supine on the floor next to the desk, bound and gagged with duct tape. He was dressed in gray pants and a pale blue shirt; his blue cashmere cardigan was unbuttoned, and he was barefoot. The wild, staring eyes bore a look of sheer terror, but there were no signs that the man had struggled: everything was neat and tidy except that some papers and books were damp. The ink from the documents had run a little, and Bob carefully moved them away from the spilled liquid. He studied the body, careful not to touch it; it had to be photographed and examined by Ingrid Dunn before he was allowed to lay a hand on it. He could see no visible wounds, no blood. He glanced around for a weapon, but since the cause of death was not yet known, it was a superficial glance.
Indiana’s peculiar ability to heal by her mere presence and to somatize the ills of others first manifested itself when she was a child, and she bore it like a cross until she finally found a way to put it to practical use. She studied the basics of anatomy, earned a license as a physiotherapist, and four years later opened her consulting rooms at the Holistic Clinic with the help of her father and her ex-husband, who subsidized her rent until she acquired a client base. According to her father, Indiana’s instinctive ability to distinguish the precise site and severity of a patient’s pain was like the echolocation of a bat. Using this sonar system, she made her diagnosis, decided on a course of treatment, and verified the results, but in healing, what served her best was her kindness and her common sense.
Her ability to somatize was capricious and manifested itself in different ways; sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not, but when it didn’t she resorted to intuition, which never failed her when it came to the health of others. Two or three sessions were enough for her to determine whether a patient was making progress, and if not, she referred them to colleagues at the Holistic Clinic who practiced
