Murphy's Law (26 page)

“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 resentment 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…

“Faith, he’s just doing his job.”

She didn’t say anything until they reached the corner. She sighed. “Yes, I know. I suppose I can’t blame—”

“Faith!” A comic figure jumped out from one of the meeting rooms. He rushed to Faith and bent to take her hand. “Mahvelous talk you gave today, my dear, simply
mahh-velous
.”

Who the hell spoke like that? Like some idiot in a bad film.

He bared huge yellow teeth. “We’ll be discussing it for months back at Manchester. I loved the way you brought in non-linear probability for S-shaped growth. And the implications you drew for hysteresis—magnificent!”

While he babbled, Nick studied him.

He was tall and gangly with shoulders no wider than his hips. Wispy red hair on top of a narrow face with pale, powdery skin. A sparse red beard grew down to the first purple button on his amazingly ugly print shirt.

There were bits of lunch in the beard. Nick could recognize pieces of what looked like fettuccine and almost an entire cherry tomato. Nick’s eyes traveled down the unkempt body to the man’s amazingly long feet in white socks and sandals.

It was illegal to dress like that in Italy. They threw you out of the country if you went around looking like that.

The guy was jabbering, again something about tipping—what
was
it with these people?—and still holding Faith’s hand. Nick noticed Faith wasn’t pulling her hand back either. No, she kept it engulfed in the guy’s huge hand with the cracked fingernails and she was smiling at him.

Smiling!
And talking. Math talk Nick couldn’t follow.

And this creep wasn’t letting go of her hand.

Fuck this.

He coughed and nudged Faith’s elbow, hard enough to shake the nerd’s grasp. The geek turned and stared at him, blinking. “I
say
.”

“You say
what
?” Nick asked softly, moving right up into his face, almost stepping on the hole in the guy’s sock.

The geek was several inches taller, but Nick had at least seventy pounds of pure muscle on him. The man’s sparse ginger eyebrows drew together. Puzzled, the geek turned to Faith. “Faith?”

Faith sighed. “It’s okay, Richard. He’s a—”

Nick moved even closer. “Friend. He’s Faith’s friend.
Close
friend, if you get my drift. You might want to remember that.”

He heard Faith draw in an outraged breath. “Nick Rossi! You apologize right now!”

“Apologize?” Nick bared his own teeth in a smile. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? I’m sorry she’s my friend because she’s been giving me nothing but grief lately, but she is
my
friend and there you are.” He grabbed Faith’s hand and limped away as quickly as possible.

Faith tried to tug her hand away, but one thing Nick had going for him was strength. He might not have smarts, he might not have a sophisticated mind, he might not even have a job, but he had strength and, by God, she wasn’t going to pull away from him. He made sure he wasn’t hurting her, but he also made sure she couldn’t pull away.

Grimly, he headed for the exit, limping up the ramp. He nodded his head at Egidio, the gatekeeper, who walked out from behind his desk to stand in the doorway, unabashedly watching the proceedings.

Luckily, Dante had insisted they take separate cars. They’d made quite a little procession going up the hill, first Dante in his fancy
Polizia di Stato
Lancia, then himself in
Nonno’s
ancient Dedra.

Now he held Faith’s hand tightly and practically dragged her to the Dedra.

Faith jerked her hand so hard he had to let go or she’d hurt herself. She leaned against the front fender.

Her chest wasn’t as generous as that of Sara Pellegrini’s, but Nick remembered it very fondly. Her breasts had been small and round and milk-white. And had tasted like a small cone of vanilla ice cream. He closed his eyes, slightly dizzy.

It was either the secondary effects of the concussion or his memories of the night with Faith.

It didn’t matter. Both were dangerous.

“Okay,” Faith said to Nick, crossing her arms over her chest. They were just outside the Certosa gates, in the corner formed by the stucco
façade
and the fieldstone wall of the Romanesque chapel.

She was uncomfortable. The gravel of the walkway leading to the high arched brick entrance was hurting her feet. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes against the bright gold of the early afternoon sun. She’d left her sunglasses inside with her briefcase, and remembering that she’d been rudely pulled away from her briefcase—and her life—made her angry.

She turned to Nick. “Right now you’re going to give me a very good reason why you just chased off the head of the math department of Manchester University, who happens to be a top man in our field and the editor of
Quantimath
. A leading publication, by the way, which now has an article of mine on system dynamics under consideration. My career is happening here, Nick. Right here. Right now. Just because you don’t have one any more doesn’t mean I don’t get a shot at mine.”