Dying For Siena (27 page)

Finally, all nine horses were lined up, the tenth on the outer perimeter ten paces back, allowed to enter at a gallop.

The crowd fell silent as the horses pranced in place, the jockeys trying to keep them from touching the
canapo
, the rope. Expectation was ripe in the golden air. Dante could see the
mossiere,
the starter,
move toward the medieval machine that would drop the ropes. The starter stretched out his hand and Dante could feel his nerves stretching, too.

In about a minute and a half, two tops, it would be over…

“Dante.”

The deep voice behind him wrenched him out of his concentration. He swiveled with a frown. This was
not
the time…

It was Nick with a pale Faith beside him. “I really need to talk to you, Dante.”

“Just a minute, Nick.”

The horses knew the time was near. The jockeys had to work to keep them in line. Lina raised her head and whinnied. Dante could see the whites of her eyes.

“Now, Dante.” Nick thrust a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand. “I need you to read this
now.
”

Seconds now
… Dante’s heart was thundering in time with the six or seven thousand other Snails in the square, eyes riveted on Lina, who was starting to shy backwards.

“Please, Dante.” Nick pushed on the back of Dante’s head. Hard. Angling it downwards.

“Hey,” Dante said, angry, but the word was drowned out by the
mortaretto’s
bang and the roar of the crowd.
They were off
!

Nick’s mouth was close to his ear and somehow his voice carried over the delirium of the crowd. “Faith found that in her briefcase. Read it.”

First lap, and Saturno, the Panthers’ horse, was in the lead. But he was already flagging. Lina was third, and had taken the
San Martino
curve, possibly the most dangerous horse track curve in the world, with sublime elegance.

“Read!” Nick hissed, and jabbed Dante hard in the side with his elbow.

Second lap. Lina was slowly drawing even without breaking a sweat, Nerbo barely tapping her hindquarters with the whip. In following the horses around the racetrack, Dante’s eyes fell on Nick’s grim face.

There wasn’t a man in the world he would look away from a trial heat of the
Palio
for, except Nick. Not even for Mike. With the crowd’s wild cries in his ears, he straightened out the crumpled paper.

He read the message once, then twice as the heat finished, and the crowd erupted. Lina had won. The other Snails jumped up and down in delight as his heart sank. A grizzled geezer tried to give Dante a whiskery kiss, but he elbowed him aside.

He looked again at the message.

“Oh, shit,” he said, but his voice was drowned out by the roar of the crowd.

Chapter Twelve

When things just can’t get any worse, they will.

“So what can you tell me? Huh? Who the hell wrote that note? There’s got to be a way to tell who the bastard is.”

Nick hovered belligerently over Dante, who elbowed him away. “Back off, Niccolò.”

“Okay.” Nick stepped back half an inch, but craned his chin that same half-inch forward. “So? Who wrote it? Can you tell?”

Nick didn’t care when Dante rolled his eyes and sighed heavily for the benefit of his fellow cops. He didn’t care that they thought he was obsessed. He was. He knew he was.

They were on the third floor of the
Questura
, one floor above Dante’s office. Any other time, he’d be looking around with interest. The place was crammed with odd-looking equipment and he imagined this was the heart of where Dante and his crew sleuthed.

But right now he was more interested in finding out who’d written a threatening note to Faith. Just the memory of those stark words on a white sheet of paper was enough to make him break out in a sweat.

He’d left Faith down on the ground floor, and he and Dante had given the two
ispettori
there strict instructions to keep her in their sight. Then he had doggedly followed Dante up the stairs, bad leg or not.

“Who wrote it?” he asked again.

The note in question was now a crumpled piece of paper covered in gray powder on a Formica-topped table.

Dante turned to the frowning young man who had placed it on the table in pincers. “Mario?”

The man shrugged. “Can’t tell, boss. The paper has been handled so much we can’t get a clear print. We’ll send it to Florence. They have a better lab.” He waited politely for Dante and the others to snort, since Siena didn’t
have
a lab worthy of the name. “But if they can lift something useful from this, it will be a miracle.” He looked at Nick. “Amateurs.” His voice was thick with disgust.

“Hey!” Nick rose, upset. “What the—”

“Cut it out.” Dante put his hand on Nick’s shoulder and pressed. Hard. Nick sat down. “What could’ve been a very crucial piece of evidence has been crushed and smeared beyond any possible reading of it.” He eyed Nick sternly.

“Crime scene evidence mustn’t be tampered with. Even if we found a clear print of someone who isn’t you and isn’t Faith, and that’s going to be a real long shot, we wouldn’t be able to go to court with it.” He snorted. “Nice going, Nick.”

Nick was devastated. With a sick lurch in his stomach, he remembered crushing the paper in his hands in fury, then smoothing it out again later with the flat of his palms. He’d folded it up and put it in his pocket, then taken it out a couple of times, holding it flat so he could read the message and get enraged all over again. He remembered crushing the paper over and over again in his pocket as he searched desperately for Dante in the crowd.

Hell, and he’d watched the O.J. Simpson trial almost every day. Because of his stupidity, a murderer might get off scot-free. He hung his head.

Christ, he hadn’t been thinking. The only thing on his mind had been to race down to Siena, plow his way through the excited crowds in the
piazza
to find Dante and be in on the arrest.

“Hey.” Dante slapped the back of his chair and frowned. “Stop it. There’s no fun in jumping on you and chewing you out if you’re going to get all depressed and morose on me.” He waited a beat. “Nick?”

Nick raised his head. “Sorry,” he said between gritted teeth. “I am so sorry.” His head whipped around as the tech picked up his hand.

“We need these for reference,” the tech said, as he took the prints of each finger, first the left hand then the right, and placed the cardboard strips in a holder. “We need to be able to exclude you. We already have
Signorina
Murphy’s prints on file.”

“Sure,” Nick said miserably.

He looked up as Dante squeezed his shoulder.

“Hey, for your information, people who write threatening notes almost never go through with it.”

Almost never.
Nick pinched his nose, then realized he was probably leaving ink blotches on his skin. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yeah, that’s supposed to make you feel better. Go on downstairs, pick up Faith and we’ll meet at the
cenone
later tonight.”

Nick perked up a little. Incredibly, he’d forgotten that the
cenone
, the good luck dinner held in the streets of all the
contradas
the day before the big race, was tonight. He’d rarely missed one, not even the year he’d busted up his shoulder and had had to travel in a body cast.

Good food, better wine, lots of flirting and shouting out insults to the rival
contradas
, kids sneaking sips of wine, geezers sneaking kisses. The best night of the year, except for the celebratory dinner—that the Snails hadn’t celebrated in seventeen years.

“Well, that got you smiling. Come on, get out of here and let me finish up. We’ll meet at the
Fonte Gaia
in about—” Dante checked his watch, “—in about two hours, okay? Faith will love it and afterwards you can drive her back to the
Certosa
.”

“Before I go, tell me you can at least find out where the note originated. I read somewhere that you can figure out what machine typed a message, then find who used the typewriter.”

Dante snorted. “The book where you read that must be a few decades old, when people still used typewriters, and anyway, that was only possible when the typewriter had a defect which matched the defect on the typed page.

“This note was laser printed, perfectly. Perfect fonts. Perfect toner. There is nothing to distinguish the type of print. There are ten thousand completely compatible printers within a radius of ten kilometers. The
Certosa
has eight printers—all laser. I checked just now.”

“So we can’t know where it was printed.”

Dante sighed. “Nope. And the paper was standard A4, eighty gram weight. Two thousand reams of that paper are sold in Siena every day. And before you say anything, yes, I checked.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“I don’t know about you,” Dante said, fingering his chin. “But I’m going home for a shower and a shave, then to the San Marco.”
Dante clasped his shoulder. “Come on, Nick, loosen up. Go down and get Faith, celebrate and then drive her back to the
Certosa
. Make sure she locks her—excuse me.” The phone rang and Dante picked it up.

“Rossi here.” He listened with a frown for a moment, then his face cleared and he nodded his head. “Okay. Right away.” He put the phone down and turned to Nick with a grin.

“That was Giorgetti downstairs and he sounded desperate. He wants you to pick up Faith and get her out of here as quickly as possible because she’s creaming him at chess and he’s never going to live it down.”

Faith’s opponent was incredibly handsome, even when losing badly at chess. All the police officers in the central station were ridiculously good-looking, which she thought was a bit of a waste in a policeman. What do you need a cute cop for?

Actually, everyone she’d seen so far in this country was impossibly, outrageously, extravagantly good-looking. She’d once read a short story describing a dinner party so elegant everyone looked Italian. She’d never understood that line before.

I do now,
she thought, as the young officer flashed a white, thousand-toothed smile.
A nervous smile,
she thought with satisfaction.
And well he should be nervous.

“Check and mate.” She sat back with a gratified sigh.

There was a whoop of derisive laughter from the other police officers milling around the small entrance with the glassed-in reception cage in the corner. The officer in the cage leaned out and shouted a question and received a laughing reply.

The body language of the responding officers could have been read by a Martian. The American lady had whupped Officer Giacometti’s ass, and they were all delighted.

The whuppee grinned sheepishly and reached across the chessboard to shake her hand. His grip was firm and dry, and she had to remove her own hand since he was holding it a few seconds too long.

“That’s enough Kasparova,” Dante said, and she looked up in surprise at the two Rossi cousins, one smiling and one scowling. “You’ve created quite enough havoc amongst my men for tonight. I want you and Nick out of here, right now.”

The
Questura
was closed to the public after 7:30 p.m., so he unlocked the door himself and shooed them out.

Before Faith could blink, they were out in the fading light of another beautiful Sienese sunset.

She’d been to the
Questura
so often lately she knew the way home. Without question, she turned left and started walking down to the
Via di Città
.

Nick was limping more heavily than usual and, though she didn’t want it to, her heart turned over in her chest. Watching a limping Nick was like seeing a wounded panther. He didn’t deserve her sympathy, the rat, but he had it, nonetheless.

She took his arm casually and was distressed to note that Nick leaned heavily on her. Casually, as if she wanted to peruse the nonexistent shop windows in the short stretch of street, she slowed down to his speed.

“Did our eagle-eyed sleuths find anything out? Whose prints were on the paper?” She’d calmed down, having figured out who had probably written the note.

“Don’t know,” Nick answered sourly. “I smudged all the prints beyond recognition. I even crushed the paper then smoothed it out.” He shook his head in disgust. “Basically, I destroyed any chance of finding out who printed it out and left it in your briefcase.”

Faith looked at him sharply. He wasn’t sleeping well and he wasn’t shaving well either. That Dick Tracy lantern jaw was stippled with cuts and scrapes, the red scabs matching the red of his eyes. He looked tired and dispirited.

With a pang, Faith realized he blamed himself for the lack of fingerprints.

“Come on, Nick,” she said softly.

Lou usually jolted Nick out of his rare down moods with sarcasm and an elbow to the ribs, but he was looking so…so un-Nick, a kinder approach might be better. “Anyone smart enough to print something out and put it in my briefcase unnoticed with an entire gaggle of scientists swirling around, is certainly going to have the smarts to use gloves.

“Probably those thin latex ones that aren’t visible if you don’t look too closely. I’m as sure as sure can be that the only prints on that piece of paper are ours.”

“We could’ve nailed the guy. You’ve got a nutcase loose and he’s probably dangerous.”

“For writing a note? Oh, come on, Nick.”

“For writing a note and murdering that professor of yours.”

“He wasn’t my professor and anyway, it’s a long jump from printing out a note to sticking a knife in someone’s heart. No, I don’t think if we found the author of the note that we’d necessarily have the murderer. So stop worrying about it.” She breathed in the sweet evening air and patted his arm. “Relax now, and enjoy the evening.”

“I should’ve been more careful,” he muttered.

Faith abandoned kindness and subtlety. They were pointless around Nick anyway. Once he got an idea into his head, it took a hammer to get it out. “Weren’t you listening to what I said? Chances are there weren’t any fingerprints to be found. Who is going to write a threatening note and leave fingerprints on it? That would be crazy.”