Murphy's Law Read online

  “I see you do know her well.” He even had the Rossi charm. His English was excellent, with only a faint hint of an accent. He leaned forward. “So, Faith, what happened?”

  It was smooth and friendly, but Faith was under no illusion that this was anything but a police interrogation.

  “Nothing actually happened, in the sense of action. The man was dead after all.” She spoke slowly. Dear God, she was so tired. “I knocked on Professor Kane’s door at eight a.m. this morning.”

  Reflexively, Faith looked down at her wristwatch. God. Only an hour ago. It felt like a century. “I needed to ask for some information. His door was ajar so when I didn’t get an answer, I pushed it open slightly. Then I saw him stretched out on the floor.” Her lips tightened. “I thought he was drunk.”

  “Hmm.” He looked down at his notepad. “You must have known him well to make such an assumption.”

  “Well, I’ve worked under Professor Kane for a year now, so I was aware of…of his habits.”

  Dante Rossi wrote quickly in his notepad with bold, certain strokes, unlike Nick who wrote painstakingly slowly, a letter at a time.

  A bird chirruped loudly outside, interrupting the silence. Faith swayed in her chair with exhaustion. Part of it was hunger—she hadn’t eaten much last night and hadn’t had breakfast yet—part of it was sleep deprivation, but a goodly portion of it was emotional burnout.

  Too many things happening all at once, none of them good.

  The luck of the Murphys, holding true.

  Dante looked up, pen hovering.

  Faith took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Pinwheels danced across her eyes and she shut them for a moment. Which wasn’t good, because she saw Roland Kane’s ill-tempered features right there, on the inside of her lids. Her eyes snapped open. Seeing Dante Rossi instead of Kane was a distinct improvement.

  “And?” he prodded

  “So, I walked in and, um, coughed.”

  “To get his attention?”

  Faith looked at him, startled. “That’s right.”

  He smiled. “You look surprised that I understand. I see you’re used to Nick. He’s a little slow.”

  That was Faith’s cue to defend Nick. He was often the butt of family jokes and she’d heard them all—that he played hockey with a warped stick, that his think tank leaked, that he’d played too often without a helmet. Nick wasn’t dumb, just a little clueless at times.

  Faith opened her mouth then closed it. Let Nick defend himself, the rat.

  “And you didn’t get his attention, right?”

  Faith blinked. “Nick’s?”

  He sighed. “No. Professor Kane’s.”

  “No.” Faith frowned. Maybe Nick wasn’t the only clueless one. “He was dead.”

  “Yes, of course he was. But you couldn’t have known that at the time now, could you?”

  His blue, blue eyes were laser-sharp. No, the man wasn’t clueless. She’d better wake up and get her act together before she found herself in handcuffs.

  “No,” she admitted. “I couldn’t. So what I did was cough and make little humming sounds.”

  “Did you shuffle your feet? That always works with the Vice Questore, my boss, when he’s trying to ignore me.” He smiled that charming Rossi smile. Lou and Nick got away with a lot when they did that smile.

  “Yes, I shuffled. I was getting annoyed. Today’s a big day and there’s a lot of work to be done to prepare for the conference. Then I noticed he looked a little…odd.”

  “Odd?”

  “Well, he seemed grayer than usual. And then I noticed he wasn’t breathing.”

  Dante nodded. “That’s a pretty good indication of death right there.”

  “Exactly. So I thought maybe he’d had a heart attack because his fist was clenched over his chest.”

  “Which fist?”

  “The right. He was holding it clenched over his heart, which is why I thought he had had a heart attack. So I tried to pull his hand away and it came away with difficulty, which must mean—” She looked at him closely. “Rigor?”

  “Maybe,” he said calmly. “The coroner will tell us. So, Faith, we have you in a cell with a dead man and you pull his hand away from his chest. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it came away with difficulty?”

  “It came away with a knife. Not a knife so much as a…a stiletto. Very long and sharp.”

  “Did you touch the knife?”

  Those blue eyes were watching her so carefully.

  “I’m afraid I did,” Faith said, and he sighed and made an annotation.

  “Pity.”

  “Yes. I suppose that makes me suspect number one.”

  “No.” His dark head was bent as he wrote. He needed a haircut. “Finding the body makes you suspect number one. Now.” She tried not to squirm as he lifted his head and skewered her with his sharp gaze. “Let me get this straight. You knock on the victim’s door at eight a.m. this morning, the door is open, walk in and observe the victim. It takes you a few moments to realize he is deceased.”

  He was making her sound like a moron. “I was very tired,” she said in her defense. “I’d just made an intercontinental trip and I haven’t been sleeping well lately.” Not to mention having wild sex with your cousin the night before, she thought, and turned bright red.

  He observed her carefully. “Okay,” he said finally. “You’re tired and it takes you a while to get your bearings, but then you finally see that something is wrong and you…what? Kneel?”

  “I—I guess so.” Faith closed her eyes for a moment so she could relive the scene. Closing her eyes felt so good she allowed her mind’s eye to roam right out of the room and into the sky…

  “Faith?”

  Her eyes popped open. She straightened. “Sorry.” Falling asleep while describing a murder to a police officer was not smart. “I hunkered down, but my knees didn’t touch the floor.” Did knees leave knee prints? she wondered. “Do knees leave knee prints?”

  “No. Did you touch anything besides the knife?”

  Had she touched anything else? “No. The door, the doorknob, Professor Kane’s hand and the stiletto. That’s about it.”

  “What did you do after you picked up the knife?”

  “Dropped it. I wasn’t expecting it. I thought he was clutching a pen or something. So when I saw what it was, and that there was blood on it…”

  “Recent blood?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Was the blood still dripping, or was it coagulated?”

  “Oh, I see.” Personally Faith thought that, like a vampire’s, Kane’s blood couldn’t coagulate. “Well, it didn’t drip blood, if that’s what you mean. So I dropped the knife and went to tell someone that Professor Kane was dead.”

  “Murdered, you mean.” His gaze was level, as was his voice.

  “Yes. Murdered.” Faith spread her hands. “You know the rest. I waited in the reception room while the guard called the police. You.”

  “Me.” He rose and her eyes followed him up. He was very tall, almost as tall as Nick. “I’m going to have to ask you to be available for further questioning. We’ll want to talk to you again. And we’ll want to talk to your colleagues, as well. Please ask them to be available, and not to leave the Certosa until I say so.”

  Faith rose, too. “Certainly.”

  He smiled faintly. “I’m sorry you’ve had such a…violent introduction to Italy. Lou will be on my case about this.”

  She was startled. “It’s not your fault, Commissario.”

  “I told you. Please call me Dante.” He sighed and tucked his notepad in his shirt pocket. “And of course she’ll blame me. Lou could make rain seem my fault. And Nick’s.”

  It was true. It was one of the things Faith most admired about Lou. Men feared her and desired her, in equal measure.

  Dante held the door open for her and followed her out. He murmured a goodbye, and Faith went to break the news to her colleagues about th
e murder and to look for a cup of coffee.

  Coffee first.

  Chapter Four

  After things have gone from bad to worse, the cycle will repeat itself.

  Commissario Dante Rossi really hated murder.

  He had become a police officer because he loved upholding the peace. He hated it when the peace was broken.

  A wayward husband or two, kids who got overly rowdy, some property damage, Palio fans from rival contradas getting into fist fights…those were perfectly normal events which could be easily put right.

  But murder—well, nothing would put a death to rights. Dante heaved a huge sigh and turned his mind to the business at hand. His crime scene people would be arriving soon. He wanted to get to the scene of the crime before they arrived. Gather first impressions, take the lay of the land, as it were.

  He ran nimbly up the stairs and turned right, his boot heels echoing along the empty corridor as he counted off the cell numbers.

  The door to cell seventeen was open so he looked in, pulling out latex gloves from his pocket as he did so.He couldn’t remember the last time he had been required to wear latex gloves.

  From outside in, from left to right, from ceiling to floor. He remembered that from his course on Crime Scene Techniques in Rome taught by Claudio Simoni, a man so old he had seemed mummified except for his sharp black eyes. “Observe, observe, observe,” Simoni had repeated endlessly.

  Well, there was nothing to observe about the door. Dante nudged the door open slightly with his foot and it swung silently to the left. Divide the room into four quadrants. He could almost hear Professor Simoni’s voice with its tobacco rasp. Anterior, posterior, left, right. Where is the body?

  Neatly laid out on the median line, he mentally answered Professor Simoni. Feet north, head south.

  The room reeked of alcohol. There was an open bottle of Glenfiddich whiskey on the laminated desk, almost empty, and an unopened bottle next to it. Dante sighed because he knew that the opened bottle—and the unopened bottle as well, just to be thorough—would have to go to the toxicology lab in Florence and it was likely they’d sit on it for days.

  Dante leaned over and sniffed the air deeply. There was a definite smell of alcohol—whiskey—coming from the body as well. The deceased’s blood would have to go to Florence, too, since Siena didn’t have a forensic toxicology lab. The blood was probably three-quarters alcohol, judging from the smell.

  He hunkered down and surveyed the body somberly. The dead man was about a meter seventy-five. He was stretched out on his back, dressed in a cheap, ill-cut suit with more polyester than cotton that no Italian male above the poverty line would be caught, well…dead in.

  He wondered if the man would be buried in that suit. He wondered if the dead professor had anyone at home who even cared what he would be buried in.

  Dante remembered when his Uncle Francesco had died seven years ago. Aunt Sara had insisted her husband be buried in a new suit and new shoes. He had accompanied his cousins Laura and Andrea to buy the suit and they had picked it with exactly the same kind of care and disregard for expense that would have gone into buying a suit for a wedding. They had chosen pure cotton underwear and shoes that wouldn’t pinch.

  Professor Kane was lying supine with his right hand over his stomach. There was a long, sharp stiletto knife about a meter away. Dante examined it without touching it. Knebl was finely engraved on the haft.

  It was a good German brand that produced excellent cutlery and knives. Sold both in Europe and in America. Only lab analysis would yield any information on the blood, and Forti, his lab tech, would be lifting any latents, though he knew Faith Murphy’s fingerprints were already on it.

  A dumb move for what looked like a smart woman. Unless she’d killed him.

  If she had, touching the stiletto had been a very smart move. She’d instantly had a perfectly reasonable motive for her fingerprints being on the knife that had killed a man.

  Dante had seen lots of dead bodies in his twelve years as a police officer, especially when he’d been stationed in Naples. The dead bodies he’d seen in Siena had been traffic accidents mostly. Overturned tractors. Once, horribly, a child drowned in a well. A few fires.

  As a policeman, Dante had seen most of what life did to humans and his soul had hardened some. But murder still gave him a primeval sense of dread—man usurping the natural order.

  He wasn’t a religious man. Dante didn’t believe in an afterlife. There was only this life—with all its sweetness and bitterness, to be drunk down to the dregs. There wasn’t anything after this. There were no second chances. This was it.

  This was certainly it for the man lying on his back in the sunlight-filled room. Outside the window of cell seventeen could be seen Siena, the graceful tower whose bell tolled constantly on the mornings of the Palio, the copper cupola of the cathedral gleaming in the distance, the brick walls shining red-gold in the sun.

  The man had had one of the best views in the world, but he would never see it again. He would never feel the summer sun’s rays on his face again. He would never go strolling in the countryside again. He would never make love to a woman—or to a man if his tastes ran that way—again. He would never sip coffee in an outdoor square with friends again. Life had flown from his body.

  The dead man didn’t have a face that looked as if he had enjoyed many cups of coffee with friends.

  How a murdered man had lived his life was the greatest clue to his death. Dante would be hearing a lot about Professor Roland Kane in the next few hours and days.

  He would interview Professor Kane’s colleagues. He would find out whether Kane’s colleagues loved him, hated him or merely tolerated him. Uncle Lorenzo would be emailing him the professor’s history, as would his close friend Sam Murray of the Southbury PD. Sometimes the bare bones of a life were enough to know whether that life had been lived well—in peace with loved ones—or badly, in constant strife.

  Judging by the harsh lines crisscrossing Professor Kane’s face, frown lines more than laugh lines, Dante was sure there couldn’t have been too much love in the professor’s life.

  Hatred, then. Envy and jealousy and hostility. And once he had learned all there was to know about the dead man, as day follows night, Dante would know who had killed him.

  There was a clatter in the hallway.

  Shaking his head at the waste, Dante rose to let his men in.

  He really, really hated murder.

  Faith followed her nose back to the refectory, but Murphy luck was holding true. The waiters had cleared away the breakfast things and were already setting the tables for lunch.

  A girl finds a dead body and she can’t even get a cup of coffee, she thought in disgust. Maybe if she begged.

  There were interesting plate-rattling sounds coming from the kitchen. She stuck her head into the spotless room where a chef was stirring something wonderfully savory in a pot and a waiter was chopping salad. They looked up.

  “Coffee?” she asked. “Caffè? Please?”

  Both men were extremely good-looking. The chef smiled and said, “Sì, signorina.” He immediately put a moka maker on the gas stove.

  “Grazie.” She was getting the hang of Italian. Having so many attractive males around was certainly an incentive. Any more thousand-watt smiles from dark, gorgeous faces and she’d be babbling.

  A few minutes later, the waiter walked out with a little tray and an espresso cup. Faith’s stomach growled in appreciation.

  A whiff of a cologne she didn’t recognize but probably cost more than she spent on underwear in a year, a flutter of an incredibly fine linen shirt, and Griffin Ball was sitting beside her, graciously accepting her coffee with a flirtatious smile at the handsome waiter.

  With a movement of his elegant hand he pointed at the cup, held up two fingers. “Un altro caffè, per favore.”

  Trust him to speak Italian.

  He opened the small packet of sugar on the saucer, carefully poured about a third of it int
o his cup and stirred. Slim and elegant, he made sure he stayed that way. He leaned his perfectly coiffed head forward. “Is it true, Faith? The staff here is talking but it seems so—so unreal. Kane dead sounds…”

  “Too good to be true?”

  Grif hid his smile behind a genteel cough. He was from the south and had impeccable manners. He also had a wicked sense of humor, making his witty comments in a deep southern drawl. He was sharp, elegant and urbane. He was the ideal of a mathematician, except he had no talent. All of that had gone to Kane, who had been an animal.

  “So.” He leaned forward. “Is it true, what they’re saying? Is he dead?”

  “Well,” she said, considering. “The last time I saw him he had a knife in his heart and he wasn’t breathing. Looked pretty dead to me.”

  Besides Tim Gresham, Grif was her only friend in the math department. Moreover, he understood her perfectly, always. Their eyes met and they looked away, both a second from grinning.

  In Faith’s case, it would have been a nervous tic of a grin, born of stress and fatigue.

  In Grif’s case, it would probably have been a grin of vindication. Kane had made Grif’s life miserable, too, though Grif wasn’t as powerless as she was. He came from a rich, well-connected southern family, and his partner, Carl, came from a rich, well-connected northern family.

  Carl’s father had donated enough to Southbury to ensure that Griffin Ball, of the South Carolina Balls, be hired for a vacancy in the math faculty. Grif had little math talent, but was a superb administrator and personnel manager, human skills Roland Kane totally lacked. Kane had made Grif’s life miserable because that was his nature. But deep in the convoluted recesses of Kane’s mind there must have been some recognition of how much he relied on Grif’s people skills, because Grif’s job was secure, notwithstanding his second-rate skills as a mathematician.

  Actually, Faith thought in surprise, Grif was, as of now, de facto department head, something he always wanted. The administration had made no bones about the fact that it preferred dealing with him rather than Kane. Admin would undoubtedly confirm the posting as soon as they got home.