Murphy's Law

  Dee Dee, in ten years’ time, would be puffy and over the hill. Faith would look even better. She’d probably fill out some. Like Nonna, she had the kind of facial structure that aged well.

  Right now, she was sexy and vibrantly alive as she held the undivided attention of all the men in the room, whose collective IQ was probably as high as the amount of money he had in the bank.

  Faith made a comment, something crazy about… He leaned forward to hear better. Was she talking about hysterias? Whatever it was, it was sparking another round of laughter. Nick shook his head. No wonder the geeks had stayed away from the jocks in college. They didn’t even speak the same language.

  But Faith was definitely queen of these people, the high IQ tribe.

  Oh God, he was lost. Nick stood still, watching her, not moving, barely breathing. Fuck. This was it.

  Lou made fun of his lack of brains but he knew he wasn’t stupid. It was true though that he didn’t analyze things, he went with his instinct, which was better. You don’t have time out on the ice to reason things through, you go with your gut. He trusted his, and right now his gut was telling him that Faith was the one.

  He’d fucked his way through a sea of women and now this woman was the one. She didn’t look at him through a glaze of lust or greed. She saw him, Nick Rossi, warts and all, and she liked him. Maybe even loved him. She was mad at him still but he could work around that. Give him another day or two and he’d charm his way back to her heart.

  Oh yeah.

  Faith was smarter than he was but he could compensate for that. He smiled. His best attribute wasn’t his brains. Whoa, it all felt better now. The loss of hockey had left this huge empty hole in his life but Faith could fill it. A family of his own could fill it. Because if you’d held a blowtorch to his feet he’d have denied it, but his sex life was getting old. He wanted a partner. He wanted Faith.

  A bell rang and Faith turned, murmuring something in that dry tone of hers. The room erupted into laughter again and Faith looked up. She froze when she saw Nick at the back of the room.

  Her body language had been smooth, even elegant, but now her movements became jerky. Her mouth tightened and she declared the session adjourned.

  He just had to make sure she wanted him right back.

  He waited patiently as ten or twelve of the geeks scrambled out of their seats to huddle around Faith like groupies around a rock star. He was surprised they didn’t ask for autographs, though one of them did ask her to write something on the blackboard. She scribbled some impenetrable symbols, and the man nodded, humming a little.

  Nick couldn’t read anything of what she’d written—it was in math and God knew he had enough trouble with English.

  He’d been slightly dyslexic as a child. Luckily, his parents were loving, attentive and smart. He got help early, but he distinctly remembered that feeling of helplessness in school—everyone understanding but him. Even now, when he got too tired or anxious, the words danced about on the page.

  Faith certainly didn’t have that problem.

  Actually, Faith didn’t have any problems at all that he could see. Kane’s death had liberated her. She was going to be successful and she was on the verge of understanding what a desirable woman she was. Kane’s death had done that. For a moment, Nick almost wished Faith really had offed him. It would have been poetic justice.

  He hung back as Dante walked forward into the little flock of mathematicians.

  “Faith,” Dante said, his voice somber, “I need to talk to you again.”

  One of the geeks stepped forward, the one Nick particularly hated. The one who thought he had a claim on Faith. Tim—Tim Something. Tim Something glared at Dante. “What’s this about?”

  Dante barely glanced at him. “I need to talk to Miss Murphy,” he repeated.

  “Well, we’re in the middle of work here and we need to talk to Faith, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oui.”

  “Si.”

  “Hai.”

  The men’s voices formed a chorus.

  “What is this, Dante?” Leonardo Gori asked with a frown. “We’re busy here. Whatever it is, won’t it keep?”

  “It’s a little matter of murder, Leonardo, and no, I’m sorry, but it won’t keep.” He beckoned with his hand. “Now, Faith, come with me, please.”

  Nick was used to seeing Dante as his cousin, his best friend, a guy he’d practically grown up with. Good-natured and kind beneath his casual exterior. But this was a new Dante—Dante the Cop.

  Leonardo Gori shut up.

  Without a word, Faith put down the pen and moved forward. She walked past him silently and followed Dante out of the room. If Nick had told her to follow him, she would have turned in the opposite direction.

  If this is the effect you get, Nick thought, then maybe I should become a cop.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Anything that begins well, ends badly.

  Anything that begins badly, ends worse.

  Faith watched the two Rossi cousins’ broad backs as she followed them into the central cloister. She stifled a sigh. She’d been having such a good time with her colleagues, then the room had narrowed and all she could see was Nick.

  He was like a curse. He simply sucked all the oxygen out of the room and she couldn’t think, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. Ack! This was her time! She should be beyond yearning after Nick, but apparently she wasn’t.

  They passed through two big wooden doors, the cop Rossi shouldering them open, the jock waiting for her to pass then following hard at her heels, then another set of glass doors which opened onto a corridor. They must be somewhere near the kitchen because she could smell cooking.

  Roast beef for dinner, she thought.

  They went through the third and last door on the left. Coming in from the dim hallway, Faith had to shield her eyes.

  They were in a corner room of the monastery and light flooded in through four large windows. Like the other rooms, it had high ceilings, but there the resemblance ended. It was sparsely furnished with cheap utilitarian furniture. A Formica-topped table and six matching Formica chairs, pure vintage ’70s, and a gray-green metal bookcase holding document classifiers, each folder with the date written in pen on a label. The dates ran from 1973 through 1991 when, presumably, some form of computerization had taken place.

  Perched on the edge of one of those lethally uncomfortable-looking chairs was an attractive, dark-haired woman.

  Her glance moved briefly and without interest over Faith, then immediately to the two Rossi men. She beamed at both, and Faith bristled before she remembered that Nick wasn’t hers. Had never been, never would be hers.

  Faith stopped a few paces into the room and looked at Dante. This was his show.

  “Please sit down, Faith.” As he had the first time he’d questioned her, he didn’t take a chair to sit behind the table, to show authority, but sat down in the nearest chair.

  Nick leaned his shoulders against the wall, hands deep in the pockets of his loose tan cotton trousers.

  Dante gestured to the woman. “This is Sara Pellegrini, Faith. She’s one of the wait staff working at the Certosa while the conference is on.”

  Faith nodded to the woman and received a chilly smile in return.

  “Now, I want you to tell us once again about the night you saw Ms. Pellegrini, the night Professor Kane was murdered. I want you to tell us every detail. Don’t leave anything out.”

  Faith frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. When did I see Ms. Pellegrini?”

  “The night you arrived. The night Professor Kane was murdered. We need to know—”

  The woman broke out in angry and voluble Italian. It was quick and liquid. Faith recognized the words mai—never—and whiskey. Dante heard the woman out until she wound down, more out of a lack of breath than of things left unsaid. He nodded once, briskly, and turned back to Faith.

  “Now, about the night Professor Kane was murdered. I trust you haven
’t forgotten it already.”

  Faith looked around. Her glance crossed Nick’s who was watching her steadily. Her heart—treacherous organ—thumped hard and her gaze shot back to Dante.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I remember.”

  “Well, then, do you want to run through it for me again?”

  “All right. We all ate together—”

  “No, later,” Dante interrupted her. “When you were going to bed. You saw a maid bring a bottle of whiskey to Professor Kane’s room.”

  “That’s right.” Faith was mystified. This must have been the fifth time she’d told this story. It wasn’t even a story, it was an incident. “I left soon after Professor Kane…retired.” Stumbled to his bed would be more like it. “My bedroom is on the other side of the cloister, but I got lost and crossed Professor Kane’s corridor by mistake. The corridor was empty except for a maid carrying a bottle of whiskey on a tray.”

  “And how could you tell it was whiskey?”

  As if Rory Murphy’s daughter couldn’t recognize a whiskey bottle at a hundred paces.

  “She—the maid—she wasn’t holding it right in front of her body. She was holding it a little off to the side.” Awkwardly, Faith mimed holding a tray on the flat of her hand. “Whiskey bottles usually have distinctive shapes. And I recognized the label.”

  “Which was?”

  “Glennfiddich. Everyone knew it was Professor Kane’s favorite brand. He always kept a bottle of it in his office. It’s got this huge red deer on the label. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Believe me, you couldn’t mistake it for anything else. It wasn’t a bottle of water or anything.”

  Dante leaned forward, watching her intently. “And did the maid notice you?”

  Faith looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember all the details of that evening—the unexpected heat, the maid walking toward Roland Kane’s room, the long walk back to her cell. What she mainly remembered was being tired.

  She frowned. “I don’t—I don’t really think so. Well, no, now that I come to think of it. I had on sneakers still. You know—from the trip? So I don’t think she did. She didn’t turn around.”

  “So…I guess it would be your word against hers then. That she’d brought a bottle of whiskey to Professor Kane’s room, as you suggested.”

  Faith felt rather than saw Nick stir. Dante shot him a steel-edged glance and he subsided back against the wall.

  “Yes, I—I guess so,” Faith said.

  “Because—” Dante leaned forward, elbows on knees. He looked at her and at the sultry woman “—because Miss Pellegrini maintains she didn’t deliver anything to Professor Kane’s room that night.”

  “If she says she didn’t, then I’m sure she didn’t,” Faith said evenly.

  “And yet, you say you saw her delivering the bottle that evening.”

  “I said I saw a maid delivering a bottle of whiskey. I have no idea if it was Ms. Pellegrini.” Faith studied the other woman in the room. She was a beauty and Faith frowned.

  A beauty. There was something about that…a beautiful woman. She closed her eyes, trying to remember—and suddenly, everything snapped into focus. She had a vivid vision of that night, the tiredness, the stillness of the Certosa, the silence. Not a creepy stillness and silence, but the silence of peace and serenity. Walking to her cell feeling happy to be in Italy, sad about Nick.

  Seeing a lone woman walking down the corridor to Roland Kane’s room. Thinking—He won’t be bothering her. Because— “This isn’t the woman I saw that night.”

  She heard Nick draw in a sharp breath. Dante’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. The woman I saw was shorter and…tubby.”

  “Tubby?” Dante repeated the word, as if uncertain of its meaning.

  “Overweight. Her legs—she had big calves. They were short and bunched while she walked. And she had gray hair, gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck. She had a thick neck and no waistline. Believe me, Dante, when I say it wasn’t this lady.”

  He sat back. “Well, it’s beginning to look as if, indeed, it wasn’t this lady.” He rubbed his chin. “Because Miss Pellegrini denies she brought a bottle of whiskey—or anything else for that matter—to Professor Kane’s room. The problem is, there aren’t any other women on the wait staff at the moment. Miss Pellegrini is the only one. So, if you didn’t see Miss Pellegrini bringing Professor Kane his bottle of whiskey, then who is it exactly you did see?”

  Faith felt as if she were walking a tightrope. She’d been yanked back into Roland Kane’s death and wanted desperately to move back on the other side of the divide. She so wanted to just concentrate on the conference and on not thinking about Nick. “I don’t know, Dante,” she said slowly. “I just don’t know.”

  “Could it have been the other woman in your group, Madeleine Kobbel? After all, she knew the professor well.”

  Faith shook her head. “No. Professor Kobbel is tall and slender, and that woman was short and stout. They had entirely different physiques. I would certainly have recognized Madeleine from the back. But why is this so important? Does it really matter who took the bottle of whiskey to Professor Kane’s room?”

  “It matters when that bottle was full of a drug that would’ve killed a horse and certainly would’ve killed Professor Kane if he hadn’t already been dead.”

  Dante dropped that little bomb into the room and complete silence descended. After a moment or two, Faith remembered to breathe. “Drug?”

  “Drug.” Dante nodded.

  “In the—”

  “Whiskey bottle. The same whiskey bottle which a mysterious woman only you seem to have witnessed brought to Professor Kane’s door.”

  Uh-oh.

  Beside her Nick lifted his shoulders from the wall. “Dante—”

  “Shut up, Nick,” Dante said pleasantly. “Now, Faith, I’ll ask you once again. Who was the woman you observed bringing what turned out to be a poisoned whiskey bottle to room seventeen on the night of June 28th?”

  “I don’t know,” Faith whispered. She spread her hands, then brought them together in her lap. They weren’t trembling, but she was trembling deep inside. “I really don’t know. What drug was it?”

  “Rohypnol. It’s a—”

  “Date rape drug. I know.”

  Dante’s eyes narrowed. “And just how do you know that?”

  “I tutor university students. There isn’t anything about controlled substances we don’t get to know about. Theoretically, of course. But still, we get the whole pharmacopoeia. And you’re saying it wasn’t the drug in the whiskey that killed him?”

  “No,” Dante said dryly. “It was the knife in his heart that killed him. Closely followed by an unholy amount of alcohol. If he’d actually drunk the laced whiskey, it would have been overkill. So to speak.”

  “Pity,” Faith mused. “Death by Rohypnol would’ve been poetic justice. Since human justice didn’t have time to run its course.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to explain that?”

  “Remember I said Professor Kane was charged with raping one of the freshman students? He laced her drink—allegedly laced her drink—with Rohypnol and raped her. Allegedly raped her. Charges were brought, but then dropped because the girl was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown and couldn’t testify.”

  Dante closed his notebook. “So anyone wanting to exact revenge on that rape couldn’t do better than to lace a bottle of his favorite brand of whiskey with this drug?”

  “Yes. Though sticking a knife in his heart came a pretty close second,” Faith said dryly.

  Dante didn’t answer, just sat looking at her for a long time. Faith tried not to fidget. She might be in trouble here. It occurred to her that the woman she’d seen carrying a bottle of poisoned whiskey might be the murderer. Murderess. It also occurred to her—and doubtless to Dante as well—that she was the only witness and that he had to take her at her word.

  A deep-seated flush of rese
ntment started to rise and she suppressed it ruthlessly.

  The Quantitative Methods Seminar was her big chance. It had already changed her professional life, given her a showcase. Things were moving for her, very quickly.

  Leonardo had already talked about letting her moderate the closing session tomorrow and had all but invited her to submit a chapter for an upcoming textbook on quantitative methods.

  It would be hard to do all that sitting in jail.

  She was well aware of the fact she had been given the opportunity of a lifetime. She was also well aware of the fact she was being given this opportunity precisely because Roland Kane was dead.

  She’d had the motive, and if she’d wanted, the means. She was the only one who’d seen the outsider. They had to take her word for it—the word of a woman who had ample motive to kill.

  Dante would be smart to take her in.

  Faith sat quietly and watched him. He was looking at her just as intently, as if his eyes could walk around her head, seeing what was inside. She sincerely hoped he couldn’t.

  “Okay, Faith,” he said on a sigh. “You’re free to go now.”

  She hadn’t been aware of holding her breath. She shot out of the chair and out the door.

  “Faith, wait up!” Nick hobbled a little faster over the herringbone brick walkway, cursing. “Faith!”

  He heard a faint sigh and she slowly turned around. She did it gracefully, her long skirt belling and her long hair curving out to fall in a wave on her shoulders.

  Nick hated that expression on her face, like a porcelain doll’s -- eyes blank, mouth still. He was used to seeing her animated with all that ferocious intelligence brought to bear on the stupidities of the world. Looking at him with a smile on her face, making him laugh, too.

  He kept his voice neutral. “Well, that was interesting, back there.”

  “Mm,” Faith agreed. She started walking again, but at a pace he could keep up with. “Poisoned bottles. Mysterious women. I’m surprised your cousin let me go. I might be a dangerous criminal. I could be plotting my next murder right now.” She looked up at him, tight-lipped and grim, and Nick had an uneasy feeling who she’d off next…