Murphy's Law (21 page)

Guzzanti looked at him curiously and shrugged. “As you please. You don’t really need to watch because I’ll be dictating my findings.” He slipped his face shield on and fixed a little collar mike to the lapel of the lab coat. On a podium nearby was a file. He pressed a pedal with his foot and straightened.

“Okay, let’s see what we have here. We have one—” He looked over to the file on the podium. “One Roland Francis Kane, deceased. Sixty-two years old. One meter seventy-seven centimeters, seventy kilos. This is a man who kept his figure, even though the muscle tone looks poor.”

“One puncture wound of a sharp instrument inserted antero-posteriorally. No noticeable distinguishing marks or abnormalities. Okay, lady and gentlemen, here we go.” He picked up a scalpel and held it up to the light as if it were a jewel. The fluorescent light overhead reflected off the blue-gray surface.

Guzzanti turned to the two students, holding the scalpel as if it were a pencil. “Okay now, Ricci and Barzi. Pay attention because this will be on the exam.” He waggled the hand holding the scalpel up and down, the maestro limbering up his baton hand. “You want to keep your wrist loose, so you can feel the feedback effect. You want to cut through the derma, down through the abdominal wall. We want to see what this man is made of, eh?”

Polite titters from the two students. Dante‘s stomach gave a spasm of protest. They should just shut up, all of them, and get on with it.

“So—” Guzzanti paused dramatically, scalpel high over Roland Kane’s naked, ash-gray, sunken chest. He turned to the two students. “So you want to cut quickly and deep. Three strokes. From the sternum to the pubis, cutting around the navel.”

Nick leaned forward with a frown. “Why?”

“Hmm?” Guzzanti’s hand hovered over the chest, an artist wavering before making that first brush stroke which would turn the canvas from potentiality to art. “Why cut around the navel? Well, because the navel’s tough to cut through. Grisly. Puts you off your slice, as it were.”

Dante’s stomach gave another spasm.

Guzzanti swooped down with the scalpel, opening Kane up in three swift strokes, from left shoulder to breastbone, from right shoulder to breastbone, then from sternum to pubis, delicately cutting around the belly button, while Dante’s stomach swooped up to his throat.

Dante couldn’t watch the body, so he watched the faces. Guzzanti was rapt, the complete professional engrossed in a technical task. Nick looked fascinated as, gruesomely, he munched on his tomato and mozzarella sandwich.

Dante’s peripheral vision told him that what was inside the body looked remarkably like the tomato and mozzarella…hastily he looked at the two students.

The small woman was leaning forward eagerly, the overhead light glinting spookily off her unfashionable, oversized glasses.

The big man had broken out in a sweat, his skin hue remarkably like the institutional gray-green color on the walls above the white tiling. Dante felt a deep kinship with him.

Guzzanti took another, smaller scalpel in hand. He hooked his fingers under the skin at the sternum and pulled with his left, while skillfully flaying away the skin and underlying muscles with the scalpel.

“Test time,” he said. “Anyone recognize this smell?”

The tiny woman lifted her face shield a moment and sniffed deeply, pursing her lips in concentration. “Somewhere between fish and beef.” Her voice was as tiny as her body, high-pitched and breathless.

“The slightly fishy smell is the beginnings of decomposition.” Guzzanti finished and pulled the flap he’d liberated up and over the body’s head as Dante felt his stomach roil greasily. “Nick?”

Nick edged closer, holding his sandwich away from his body. His nostrils flared as he breathed deeply over the open body cavity. “Raw lamb,” he said. “I really miss good lamb in the States.
Nonna
cooks it with a sprig of rosemary and garlic.”

Dante’s stomach lurched.

“Bingo,” Guzzanti said. “Raw lamb.”

The male medical student’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he toppled to the floor with a heavy thump.

“Sergio!” Guzzanti raised his voice and grunted in satisfaction as the
diener
walked in. Hands lifted, he pointed with his elbow to the floor. “Take him away. This guy’s going to be something nice and safe like a dentist or a dermatologist when he grows up and graduates.”

The
diener
bent, hooked his hands under the big man’s armpits and heaved. Sergio couldn’t have weighed more than seventy kilos and the man must have been at least a hundred kilos . The
diener
managed to stagger to his feet and stand, but he was wobbling.

“I’ll help you,” Dante said. He positioned himself at the feet of the medical student. “On my three, lift. One, two, three!”

“Thanks,” Sergio said grudgingly. He knew Dante was a Snail.

“Any time,” Dante said, meaning every word. “Guzzanti, I’m going to see to this guy. If I’m not back soon, just carry on and we’ll meet back in your office.”

“Okay.” Guzzanti looked up with a frown. “But you’re going to miss the autopsy.”

“Can’t be helped.” Dante allowed his voice to deepen. “Officers are sworn to avenge the dead, but above all to protect the living. Much as I’d like to stay, I can’t. See you back in your office.”

“In about an hour.” Guzzanti had already lost interest in him, curved over the cadaver, hands in the open chest.

Dante had one last look, enough to give him nightmares for a week, and staggered out with the
diener
.

An hour and a half later, Nick and Guzzanti walked back into the pathologist’s office, where Dante had surreptitiously skimmed the spines of the magazines and books lining Guzzanti’s shelves. They were all in that unique place between horrifying and boring, causing Dante to marvel all over again at how the world was put together. Choosing to be a pathologist was an inexplicable to him as choosing not to live in Siena.

“That was really cool, Dante.” Nick was looking more enthusiastic than he had all morning.

“Glad we could arrange a little entertainment for you, Nick.”

“Your cousin seems to have acquired quite a bit of anatomical knowledge, Dante.” Guzzanti patted Nick on the back.

“That’s probably because he’s broken most of his bits of anatomy,” Dante replied. Nick’s injuries were family legend, though he always kept mum about them. Even this latest one—the career-ending one. Nick hadn’t said more than two sentences about it.

Guzzanti hung up his white lab coat. “So how’s Barzi?”

“Who?” Dante turned to him blankly.

“The med student,” Guzzanti explained patiently. “The one who fainted.”

“Oh, right. Well, if you’re going to faint, I guess a hospital is a pretty good place to do it in. Last I saw him, he was being fawned over by two very pretty nurses.”

“They take his blood pressure at least?”

“Among other things.” Dante smiled.

One of the nurses had made a date with the student for a pizza at her house on Saturday night after he had spun a woeful tale of too many late nights up studying, with no one to cook for him.

No one to cook for you was the Italian male equivalent of homelessness.

Dante leaned forward. “So, what do you have for me, Guzzanti?”

“You want the long version or the short one?”

Dante looked at his watch. His brother would be at the San Marco right about now, drawing up strategies before the morning trial heat. A lot would depend on events in the next few hours, and he was stuck here in a hospital. “Short.”

“All right. Well, it was an interesting autopsy, to say the least.” Guzzanti opened a notebook. “First of all, I’m surprised he wasn’t dead before the knife was actually slipped into his heart, right where it would do the most harm—”

“Between the fourth and fifth rib,” Nick finished.

Guzzanti and Dante turned to him in surprise and Nick shrugged. “I broke the fourth and fifth ribs once and the doctor said I was really lucky a splinter didn’t go into the heart. And I was paying attention during the autopsy.”

Guzzanti smiled. “You’re right, Niccolò. It was between ribs four and five. But what was really interesting was the man’s blood-alcohol level. Three hundred and fifty milligrams. Even without a knife between the ribs, Roland Kane should’ve been lying flat out on the floor. The man was comatose as the stiletto went in, so there was restricted bleeding in the pericardial sac.”

Dante remembered that harsh, hard face. Kane would have been a mean drunk. “We have witnesses who say Kane had been drinking heavily over the past twelve hours.”

“He was about as drunk as a man can get and still be alive,” Guzzanti agreed. “Speaking of which, your murderer basically only hurried things along a little.”

Dante frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that his liver was cirrhotic and he had terminal-stage liver cancer. His liver weighed less than one point seven kilograms.”

“Oh.” Nick sat up. “So that’s why the guy’s liver was pale and rubbery. I was wondering. I mean I just assumed a human liver was like a cow’s liver. Liver-colored, I mean. This guy’s liver looked like a mass of pus.”

Dante closed his eyes briefly.
Thank you, Nick.

“Well, this guy’s number was definitely up,” Guzzanti said. “If the stiletto didn’t get him, the alcohol would have. And if alcohol didn’t get him, liver cancer would have. Take your pick. It was just a question of time. Someone must’ve hated him very much.”

Dante shrugged. “That’s usually the case with murder.”

Guzzanti smiled. “Well, it’s a good thing we restrict our hatreds to the Palio, isn’t it? It uses up all the bad feelings and spares us all the murders.”

It was something Dante believed with all his heart. His pencil hovered over his notepad. “So, we have…?”

“Proximate cause of death, puncture wound to the pericardial sac and heart, immediate cause of death, internal hemorrhaging and mechanism of death, shock.” Guzzanti dictated and Dante wrote every word down.

“Okay.” Dante snapped his notebook closed and, signaling to Nick, rose. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” Guzzanti rose, too, and there was a subtle change in the air of the room.

Dante felt it, he knew Guzzanti felt it and just maybe Nick felt it, too, if he could feel anything through his fog of misery.

During the business of the crime scene and autopsy, they had cooperated as two professionals working for the Italian state were supposed to.

Now their business was over and they reverted back to their raw—their true—nature. They were rivals…no, more than rivals,
enemies.
Snails had been hating Turtles for six centuries, the enmity reaching fever pitch during the Palio period, and it was now embedded in their DNA.

“Thanks again,” Dante said. “I’ll be seeing you around.”

“No problem.” Guzzanti’s eyes gleamed wickedly behind his lenses. “And, of course, your horse will be seeing my horse. The back of him.”

Nick got into the car awkwardly and waited until Dante had turned the key in the ignition, then turned to his cousin. “Funny, I’ve known you all my life and I didn’t realize you had such a weak stomach. Ain’t life strange? Who would’ve thought? And you a big, bad cop and all.”

Dante’s hands tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles whitened. “I don’t have a weak stomach.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” Nick’s stomach was pure iron and he could afford to sound smug. He’d been engrossed in what Guzzanti was doing and had been surprised to look up into Dante’s green, sweaty face.

Dante swerved out of the hospital parking lot. “I had to see to that guy who fainted.”

“Uh-huh.”

The car leaped forward onto the narrow country road that would take them back to Siena. “We’re supposed to help citizens in distress. We took an oath.”

“Right.” Nick kept his voice bland. “Absolutely. But you missed some really good bits. Like when Guzzanti was handling the liver and it was so rotten it fell apart in his hands.”

The car swerved, narrowly missing an oncoming Fiat Brava.

“Keep it up, Nick,” Dante said grimly, “and I’m telling
Nonna
who broke that crystal vase she and Nonno bought on their honeymoon.”

Nick shut up. Dante didn’t scare him, but
Nonna
sure did.

“God, I wish I’d been the one to whack old Roland,” Tim said glumly.

Faith shot him a sympathetic look. “Yeah, me too,” she sighed. “But I had more reason to kill him than you did. For two years, he tried to keep me away from this—” Faith waved her hand, encompassing the flag-stone arcaded terrace looking out over the formal gardens below them.

Nearby, tables had been set up for a late lunch, the smell of which had been tantalizing them for the past half hour. Coy cherubs stared down in perfect understanding of human temptation from the frescoed vaulted ceiling.

Since the hand she waved was also holding a glass of excellent chilled white wine and that was included, too.

Though Tim had officially been taken off the program, he’d nonetheless made himself incredibly useful, throwing himself into organizational details by Faith’s side. She had almost forgiven him for being such a jerk yesterday.

For some reason, Leonardo had seemed willing to let her deal with many of the arrangements of the conference. He had seemed distracted and absent-minded, spending most of his time on his cell phone. From the odd snatches of conversation, he seemed to be caught up in the frenzy of the local horse race, the Palio. It seemed an odd hobby, like collecting bottle caps or telephone cards, but she’d long ago learned never to question a mathematician’s obsessions.

Time and again she’d found herself having to make important decisions. Leonardo had simply agreed with what she’d done, Grif had smiled and winked, and Madeleine had glowered.

Leonardo had arranged for a light luncheon to be served on the broad balcony at the back of the main building. Though the day had heated up, the vaulted arcades managed to trap just enough cool air for it to be pleasant.

Lunch would be served soon, and in the meantime, a trestle table covered with a blindingly white linen tablecloth held chilled white wine in coolers, tiny balls of mozzarella and thin slices of a spicy salami.