The Secret of the Villa Mimosa Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’ll understand I’m just as concerned as you are, Dr. Forster. Somebody tried to kill her. If she dies, then it’s my job to bring that person to justice, and in order to do it, I’m gonna need her help.”
    “So what do you know about her? Besides her probable age and what she looks like?”
    “I can tell you in two words. Not much. When she was found, she was wearing Levi’s and a white Gap T-shirt. A blue cashmere sweater was found nearby. And sandals.”
    Phyl remembered the red sandal dangling forlornly from the girl’s toe. She shivered. “No jewelry? A watch, a wedding ring?”
    “Only pearl earrings.”
    “Good pearls.”
    He nodded. “Small but good, they tell me. Still, she could have bought them anywhere. Same with the jeans and the T-shirt. The cashmere sweater had no label, and the sandals were French. Expensive, like the earrings and the sweater, but you can purchase them in good stores across the country. Or even in France, I guess. No purse. We searched that ravine thoroughly. There was nothing else. There’s no missing person matching her description. No fingerprints on record. No one has come forward claiming to know her.”
    “So tell me, Mahoney, what makes you think someone tried to kill her?”
    He gave her a long, exasperated look and then said slowly and deliberately, as though he were explaining to a child, “The ravine is far enough out to need a car to get there. No car was found near the scene. She did not live in the area, so she wasn’t just out walking herdogs. She had to have been taken there and then dumped. Or, more likely, pushed over the edge.”
    “She wasn’t raped.” Phyl knew that from the medical reports.
    He shrugged. “Maybe she wouldn’t come across and the guy got mad. It happens. More often than you think,” he added grimly.
    “So there are no clues?”
    “None, other than the dog bite. And what she herself can tell us.”
    “And that brings us back to the reason I’m here. She gave him the smile again and a little feminine shrug of the shoulders.
    “So it does,” he said abruptly, standing up, dismissing her. “You’ve got forty-eight hours. Then we’ll have to reassess.”
    He walked her to the door. “Thanks,” she said sarcastically as he opened it, “for your cooperation.”
    He watched her walk down the corridor, noting her long, slender legs and the swing of the hips under the black suit. “Hey, Forster,” he called after her. She hesitated, then turned slowly around.
    “It’s
Doctor
,” she said icily.
    “Yeah.
Doc.
There’s a nice little Italian restaurant around the corner from the hospital. Maybe after I’ve interviewed the girl, you and I could go there. Have a bite? Compare notes?”
    She laughed at his chauvinist cheek. “Why, thank you for the invitation, Detective Mahoney,” she retorted sweetly. “I’ll have to think about it, and ‘reassess.’”
    Phyl was back at the hospital, bearing flowers, at nine the next morning. She had puzzled all night over what might have happened to the girl and about who she might be, worrying why no one had come forward to claim her. No mother had come in search of her lost daughter; no lover; no husband. Not a co-worker or agirlfriend. She was like the invisible woman—there, but no one could really see her.
    She was there all right this Saturday morning, though. In person, sitting up and taking nourishment. It was a shock, seeing her shaved head with the livid scars running across the scalp, and the still-bruised and swollen but undeniably pretty face.
    “Well, well,” Phyl said, smiling with genuine pleasure. “Aren’t you the lively one today.” She leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, depositing the big bunch of flowers on her lap. “For you.”
    The girl’s eyes widened with pleasure. She picked them up and buried her nose in them. “Mimosa,” she whispered. “Such a heavenly scent. I smelled them when I first woke up. It must have been you who brought