Murphy's Law

  She wasn’t meeting Nick until four and she was suddenly ravenous. A little trattoria in a secluded square, eating panzanella in the shade…

  “Okay, okay.” He smiled, but a nerve twitched in his cheek.

  If she didn’t know him better, she’d say he was high on something. He was certainly wired.

  “Just one more thing to show you. You’ll like it.”

  Faith had a sudden overwhelming desire to get out. The museum was dark, and she wanted the light. Empty, and she wanted people. “Another time, Tim. Come on, let’s go now.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He wasn’t listening. He grabbed her hand again and pulled her down another corridor.

  Faith tried to drag her feet, but he was surprisingly strong. Also, he seemed to be obsessed with showing off his knowledge of Siena. Maybe out of jealousy of Nick. Shrugging, she gave up her resistance and followed him.

  He sure had reason to be jealous of Nick. It was uncharitable of her to think it, but the two weren’t even on the same planet in terms of attraction. And it wasn’t just the physical attraction. Apart from being gorgeous, Nick had an ease with himself and others Tim couldn’t even hope to match.

  It was unfair and she knew it. Nature had favored Nick in every way there was. He was beautifully made and athletically gifted. He had a sunny personality. He had a wonderful family and they loved him. Nothing had ever gone wrong in his life. All right, he had to stop playing hockey, but that would have happened sooner or later anyway. That it had happened now would allow him to do something else with his life, instead of happening ten years from now when it might be too late.

  Even in misfortune, Nick was fortunate.

  Tim had pulled her through a door, dropped her hand and forged ahead. With a sigh, she followed him.

  Unexpectedly, the door led outside. Her eyes took a moment to adjust from the gloom of the museum to the glare of outdoors. As everything came into focus, she realized she was something like six stories up off the ground on a narrow walkway, inside a great marble arch suspended in the bright blue sky.

  Tim was in the middle of the tall, narrow arch, silhouetted against the brilliant, cloudless sky, elbows resting on the marble balustrade. He beckoned her over and she rested her elbow companionably next to his.

  “Beautiful, huh?”

  It was beautiful. Faith looked down at the people far below, tiny in comparison to the immense bulk of the cathedral filling the sky in front of them.

  Tim looked sideways and upwards, his eye following the marble facing of the inside of the arch. “Actually we’re in a window, believe it or not. This was supposed to be the façade of the new cathedral, the largest in the world. Look.” He pointed to the side of the cathedral across a vast space. “That was supposed to be the back of the cathedral and we’re in the façade and all that space was going to be the central nave. You’ve got a great bird’s eye view from up here.”

  A throaty warble and whirring of wings and she was staring at a pigeon perched on one of a series of small stone tablets jutting out along the wall to the right and left of the arch. The pigeon stared at her unblinkingly, then took a delicate step to the right to come to rest on the next tablet.

  “Pigeon’s eye view is more like it.” Faith turned her head to discover Tim had moved closer and was staring at her with the same unblinking intensity as the pigeon had done. Unobtrusively, with a smile on her face, Faith moved toward the arch’s side.

  What was she doing here with Tim when she wanted to be with Nick? Again, she felt that sense of unease, but more intense this time. Behind her was the Questura, where Nick was.

  What’s Nick doing? Is he helping Dante take Madeleine’s confession?

  Tim brushed her arm and she shifted. Tim moved again. Unease prickled in her veins.

  Would Nick have finished? It was about one. Surely he was going to grab a bite to eat before meeting her at four in the Piazza del Campo. She had a violent wish to see him limping up the street, crossing Cathedral Square.

  When would he be free? How long would it take them to take Madeleine’s statement?

  “About what?” Tim asked, and she realized she’d spoken the thought aloud.

  Faith turned her head. “About the murder. I wonder how long it’ll take her to confess to Roland’s murder.”

  Tim’s smile broadened and she recoiled from the expression in his muddy brown eyes. “Well, that’s the thing, Faith,” he said, leaning close. “Madeleine didn’t kill Roland. I did.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  All great discoveries are made by mistake.

  “What does ‘date rape drug’ mean?” Carmine Loiacono’s strong Sicilian accent mangled the English words.

  Nick leaned over his shoulder. While waiting for Dante to do his cop thing he’d been roped in by Loiacono to translate the full text of the files sent by the Southbury police department on Roland Kane, Griffin Ball, Faith Murphy, Madeleine Kobbel and Tim Gresham.

  Loiacono’s English was grammatically correct, but the Chief of Southbury PD’s version of English strained his vocabulary. Nick had eagerly accepted Loiacono’s request for help to keep his mind off the woman in Dante’s office.

  He’d never hit a woman in his life, but he had been tempted. Fuck, had he been tempted.

  Madeleine Kobbel had almost killed Faith. Nick didn’t give a damn about the fact she’d probably killed the Professor, too. The important thing was right now he could be arranging for Faith’s body to be transported back to the States and back to the family that didn’t love her. But he wasn’t, thank God.

  The files Southbury PD had sent were interesting, with an official and unofficial version. There was dirt on everyone except, he was glad to see, Faith. Griffin Ball had once been arrested for lewd behavior while intoxicated on a gay beach in Florida. His family was rich and powerful and, in the end, the charges had been dropped. He had twice sued Roland Kane for harassment.

  Madeleine Kobbel had been married to Roland Kane in the late nineties. There had been a child, a girl with multiple birth defects. Nick noted that Roland Kane had filed for divorce the day his daughter died. He shook his head. He never understood men who didn’t stand by their families. He never would.

  The mother of Tim Gresham, the man Nick loved to hate, had been married five times. Tim had been adopted once by an Englishman, John Dunham, and had lived a few years in England until his mother married again. They moved back to the States where his mother had married a Barry Simmons. At the age of eighteen, Tim had changed his name back to his biological father’s, Gresham.

  For an instant, Nick had a pang of sympathy for the creep. Having four stepfathers, two names and two nationalities couldn’t have been easy. Then he remembered Tim’s proprietary attitude toward Faith and his sympathy evaporated.

  “Allora?” Carmine Loiacono’s sharply intelligent face was turned up to his.

  Nick snapped out of his reverie. “Date rape drug? It’s a drug put in the drink of an unsuspecting woman and it renders her either unconscious or incapable of resistance. They have no memory of what happened when they wake up.” He’d heard the stories of spiking a girl’s drink and then using her when she was unconscious. The thought made him sick. “Why? Why are you asking?”

  “That’s why.” Loiacono pointed to the printout in front of him. Roland Kane’s file. Nick read slowly. Now here was an interesting set of data. Roland Kane had cut a wide swath in life, leaving behind burnt earth. Multiple law suits, charges of fraud, harassment…

  Loiacono tapped the file impatiently. Nick was a slow reader, so he scrolled down, focusing on where Loiacono’s finger was.

  Nick read out loud slowly.

  “October 27, 2012. Roland Kane accused of raping Candace Simmons, a freshman student at Southbury. Massive amounts of Gamma hydroxybutyrate—” He stumbled over the word. “—were found in the bloodstream of the victim—”

  “Wait!”

  Nick looked up frowning at Loiacono’s shout.

  Contrary to Ame
rican prejudice, southern Italians were anything but voluble, dramatic and over-emotional. Until recently, they had lived in a poor and dangerous world where one wrong word to the wrong person, an attitude of disrespect, could get you a bullet in the back from the local version of a sawed-off shotgun, the lupara. They kept their emotions reined in.

  But now Loiacono, normally so stiff and formal, was shouting and waving his hands.

  “Gamma hydroxybutyrate, GHB…” He was pawing wildly through a sheaf of documents. “Ecco!” He thrust a sheet into Nick’s hands. “Look at that!”

  “That” was a computer printout of some kind of medical analysis from the Florence toxicology lab in Careggi. Nick tried to run his eyes down the page quickly, but the words and numbers had no meaning and the font was tiny. The words shimmered on the page.

  “What?” Nick asked plaintively.

  “There! There!” Loiacono jabbed at the paper so hard it tore. “See?”

  Nick didn’t. Then he did. Gamma hydroxybutyrate had been found in an unopened bottle of whiskey on Roland Kane’s desk. He frowned and read further. No GHB found in Roland Kane’s blood. “Someone tried to poison him, but didn’t?”

  “Strange, no?” Loiacono was quivering like a bloodhound on the scent.

  “It seems to me that someone wanted to poison the man with his own drug. But then he didn’t. That’s weird.” Nick read further down the transcript. “The girl’s disappearance was reported by her brother, a professor of mathematics at Southbury.

  “He testified Candace Simmons had had an appointment with the head of the department, Roland Kane, to discuss a few academic matters and hadn’t returned that night. The brother of the victim—”

  Nick sat up straight. “Whoa.”

  “What?” Loiacono asked, bending forward. His thick black eyebrows formed almost a straight line across his forehead. “What?”

  “The brother—” Nick continued reading slowly. “—Tim Gresham, was worried when his sister didn’t come back to her dorm. He reported her missing on the morning of the 28th. She was found at ten that morning naked in Lone Ridge Park with signs of violent rape.

  “She remained in a coma for five days. Ms. Simmons has been confined to a psychiatric hospital since November 10th.”

  Nick met Loiacono’s eyes.

  “Jesus Christ,” Nick breathed, and Loiacono made a quick sign of the cross.

  Tim’s quiet words seemed to echo in the clear still air.

  Madeleine didn’t kill Roland. I did.

  Tim smiled again. “But you knew that, didn’t you, Faith? You’ve known since last night. I could see it in your eyes. You recognized me. And to think I told you to get out, to go home. I was afraid this would happen.”

  “You—you left the note? Why?”

  “Like I said. I knew that at some point you’d remember. That you’d recognize me.”

  Faith’s mind was stumbling, tumbling. “I don’t know what you’re—recognize you? Where? How? What are you talking about?”

  “Last night.” Tim’s shoulder rubbed against hers in a friendly fashion. It creeped her out. “Come on now…don’t be coy. You and I both know what happened. You saw me coming and you recognized me.”

  She shook her head. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Coming where?”

  Tim gave an exaggerated sigh. “All right. Think back. Last night, coming down Via di Città toward the square. I was with Richard . You were further down the street. You saw us, and you froze. What were you thinking of?”

  How perfect Nick was compared to you. How could she possibly say that? She couldn’t. “I, ah—” She fumbled for words and his voice rode right over hers.

  “Of course you recognized me. I realized that right away. I had no idea anyone had seen me that night until you told me. The perfect crime and here there was a witness.” He shook his head. “I’ve been planning this for ten months, Faith. I’m sorry you had to get in the way.”

  Faith bristled. It was so like a man. She was being made to feel guilty for something she had no memory of doing. “Listen, Tim, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” she began heatedly. Then stopped, because she did. Jesus Christ, she did. No wonder she’d been feeling so ill-at-ease around him.

  “Oh, my God.” It came out without thought. She flashed again on her first night in Siena. The maid carrying the tray with the bottle, strong calf muscles bunching as she walked. Broad back, no waist, stubby legs. Tim. “You—you were the maid I saw that night. You were the one who brought Roland that bottle of whiskey. You were the one—”

  “—who killed Roland. I already told you that, Faith. Weren’t you listening?”

  Faith searched his eyes for signs of violence or madness, but all she saw was the same old Tim. A little agitated, a little excited maybe, but essentially the mild-mannered nerd she’d known for over a year. The first man she’d slept with, though that was hard to remember just now.

  There was an immense silence, as if the whole world had suddenly gone away. For the moment there were no tourists to be seen in the square, none of the police officers from the Questura around the corner lounging on the cathedral steps, sneaking a smoke, even the damned pigeons had disappeared.

  Faith was suddenly conscious of being high up on a deserted walkway with a confessed murderer.

  “But—but why? And how?” she blurted, then bit her lip. This was no time for explanations.

  This was a moment for edging back into the museum, walking downstairs as quickly and quietly as possible, emerging into the central square and then making a run for the police station.

  The hand Tim clamped on her arm was as firm as shackles.

  “Why?” Tim mused. He turned his gaze outward as if just now noticing how deserted the square was. He addressed the side of the cathedral and his profile was hard, tense. “The son of a bitch raped my sister, that’s why. And got off scot-free, the fucker,” he added viciously.

  Faith had never heard Tim swear. And she had never seen that expression on his face before.

  “Your sister?”

  Tim turned then. “You remember the girl who was raped last October? And then the whole thing was hushed up?”

  “Yes.” Faith kept her voice low. “Candace Simmons.”

  “That’s right. Well, Candace Simmons was my sister. Stepsister. My mother married her father when she was seven and I was seventeen. She was a sweet girl, a little young for her age. Trusting, overly sensitive. We didn’t spend much time together growing up because my mom divorced her dad soon after the marriage. But Candy and I kept in touch. Neither of us had siblings and, no matter what, she considered me her big brother.”

  A nerve twitched heavily along his cheek. “She wanted to go to college at Southbury, to be near me. But she refused to let anyone know we were brother and sister, so she wouldn’t get privileged treatment.”

  He gave a short bark of harsh laughter. “Well, she got privileged treatment all right. Roland Kane’s special brand. That guy had radar and zoomed right in on the weak and vulnerable. You. Madeleine. Candace.”

  Faith frowned, trying to remember the story. “Your sister. Stepsister. She’s still…alive isn’t she?”

  “Alive!” Tim slapped the balustrade with his free hand, startling the two pigeons who had come back to roost on the little tablets. They rose fluttering in the air. “She was in a coma for days. When she came out of it, it was as if Candace, my sweet little Candace, had just…disappeared. She’s completely psychotic. She’ll be in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of her life.”

  “But—but if Kane did this, why isn’t he—wasn’t he—tried and put in jail? Why didn’t you press charges? How could you let him get away with it?”

  “Candace couldn’t testify. And there was only my word she had been going to see Kane. Do you know what a decent defense lawyer can do with that? It’s hearsay. And Kane could afford the best lawyer around. There might have been a trial and he might even have lost his job,
but he’d have gotten off. And I didn’t want him on trial anyway.” He turned his head to look at her. “I wanted him dead. I’ve been waiting all year to do it.”

  Faith shivered. All last year, Tim had worked side by side with Kane. They had sat in academic councils together. They had discussed students together and had planned the Quantitative Methods Seminar together. And every second of every day, Tim had been planning Kane’s death.

  The day was hot, but she felt cold. “How?” she whispered through lips that had gone numb.

  “What do you mean, how?” Tim frowned, annoyed. “You know how. You found him. I stuck a knife—oh.” His brow cleared. “I see what you mean. Well, that part was easy. I came over the day before you guys arrived.

  “I’ve been planning this for a long time now and I had it planned down to the last detail. Except for you. You almost ruined everything. I had no idea anyone had seen me.”

  He gave her a steely look and Faith almost apologized. Sorry, Tim, I had no idea you were planning on killing Kane. If I’d known, of course I would’ve stayed home.

  She looked yearningly at the door. Tim’s grip on her arm tightened.

  “I’ve been to Siena seven times and I know the routine down pat. Roland goes up drunk to his room around ten, Grif takes a sleeping pill and sleeps like the dead, and Madeleine goes off to have her yearly affair with the night porter.”

  Faith jolted. Her gossip lobe took instant precedence over the survival instinct. “Madeleine’s been having an affair? With the night porter?” she breathed. “How long has that been going on?”

  “For seven years,” he snapped. “Now pay attention.”

  She shut up.

  “I entered early in the afternoon and hid in one of the rooms with the stiletto, the bottle and the maid’s uniform.” He frowned. “That threw me a little when I found out later that the caterers had changed. All the years before, there’d been an elderly maid.” A look of anger crossed his face, and then he shrugged. The CEO recalling a minor glitch in the company plan.