Murphy's Law (3 page)

She shot another glance at Professor Kane. He still showed no flicker of response. Probably out cold
,
she thought in disgust. What an asshole.

How could so much intellectual power be packed into such a miserable human being? Still, he was her boss, so she couldn’t give in to her urge to haul back and kick him as he so richly deserved.

Standing on tiptoe and craning her neck, she could see out the window. The view was like an impossibly beautiful painting by a Renaissance artist.

Lovely trees marched up and down gentle hills. They were tall, dark green, as slender and as elegant as church spires.
Cypresses,
she thought. In the distance topping the highest hill was Siena, golden-red and magical.

The intense colors, the landscape which looked as if an impossibly gifted gardener had planned it down to the finest, most meticulous detail, the bright, cloudless cobalt blue sky—everything called out to her and touched a chord deep in her heart she hadn’t known existed. There wasn’t a human being alive whose soul wouldn’t thrill to that view.

Well, maybe not the pig at her feet. Professor Kane’s soul, she was certain, was probably as diseased and inert as his liver. Faith flicked a glance down at him. He looked exactly like what he was—a self-centered monster.

His lean face was heavily crisscrossed with lines of cruelty and bad temper. No soul at all there—merely a brain. A brain that, for all its brilliance, was unable to appreciate the beauty beckoning from his window. Otherwise he wouldn’t be passed out at her feet.

At least he wasn’t snoring. Faith frowned as she realized that.
Why wasn’t he snoring? Wouldn’t a drunk snore?
Nick had… She stopped herself.
Don’t go there.
She didn’t want to think of that. It had been awful enough living it.

Oh God. Her thighs clenched. A day and a half after the most humiliating episode in a life filled with them, her thighs had no shame at all. They should have been impervious to any thought of Nick, who’d forgotten her name. But no. Heat zapped through her body as she had a flash of Nick lying on top of her, Nick
in her
. No. Not going there.

She drew in a deep breath and tried to concentrate on Professor Kane. Horrible as he was, it was better to think of him than of Nick.

Damn. She had to wake Kane up. Last night Griffin Ball had said if it turned out that she needed XRL array time, Kane would have to authorize the call to the computer center at Southbury.

She needed the array and this was a perfect time. It was 3 a.m. back in Southbury and the XRL would probably be free. If she waited until Professor Kane sobered up, she’d likely find the XRL in use. She’d give anything to just tiptoe back out of the room, but she couldn’t.

“Professor Kane?” He didn’t even stir. Faith cursed her soft voice. Even though her classes were in a small classroom, she needed amplification for the lessons.

Faith cleared her throat and pitched her voice louder. “Professor Kane? Professor Kane, I’m sorry to bother you—”

Faith broke off and frowned. Her distaste for the man had kept her from looking too closely, but now that she focused on him she could tell that there was something wrong. Very wrong.

His normally sallow complexion was ash-gray, the eyes deeply sunken into the bruised-looking flesh around them. His features were like wax, utterly still and immobile.

Faith wondered whether he had had a heart attack. But that wasn’t possible. Professor Kane didn’t have a heart.

Maybe a stroke. That was more like it. He certainly had a brain.

Faith had read somewhere that you weren’t supposed to practice first aid on stroke victims. Good. This had better be a stroke and not a heart attack. The idea of giving Professor Kane mouth-to-mouth resuscitation made her skin crawl.

She looked at his chest, hoping to tell by sight alone whether he was breathing, and trying not to think about the fact she should be trying to get a pulse. She didn’t want to touch him either.

His chest didn’t appear to be moving. Professor Kane’s left hand was lying under him in what must have been a viciously uncomfortable position and his right fist was clenched on his chest. The upper-left quadrant. So it might be a heart attack, after all.

With a sigh, Faith dropped to her knees beside him. She was going to have to touch him. It was her duty to help a fellow human being and Roland Kane
was
a human being, after all. Sort of.

She tried to lift his hand away from his chest to feel for his pulse and found to her surprise that it wouldn’t budge. His fist was clenched
around
something. It hadn’t been immediately apparent because everything on his chest was gray—his shirt, his hand, what his hand was holding…

Then suddenly her slow, fuzzy thought processes, mired in sleep deprivation like glue, snapped to attention. She’d been up most of the night on her computer, frantically trying to ready a half-finished paper after having flown across the Atlantic. And then, of course, she’d been up the night before
that
with Nick…

Her heart gave a painful jolt.

Stop that
, she told herself sternly.
Concentrate.

She studied Professor Kane’s chest then reached out to the clenched hand. It wouldn’t open. With great difficulty, she pulled his hand up and away from his chest, then stared.

The gray thing he was holding wasn’t a pen or a laser pointer, as she’d thought. It was a knife. A stiletto, to be exact. A long, very sharp one. And it must have been plunged straight into Professor Kane’s heart, judging by the blood staining the shaft.

Well what do you know?
Faith thought.
He has a heart, after all.
She tugged and the slim haft slid through Professor Kane’s claw-like hand into hers.

Roland Kane had been murdered!

He deserved it, but still…

Faith slowly rose to her feet and turned toward the door to go…go where? She stopped on the threshold, stymied for a moment. The Quantitative Methods Week organized by the University of Siena and the University of Massachusetts at Southbury was a yearly affair. She knew that Professor Kane, Griffin Ball, Madeleine Kobbel and Tim Gresham had been attending for years.

But it was her first time and she didn’t know anyone here. She didn’t speak Italian. She didn’t know where the rest of the Southbury contingent was lodged. She only knew where Professor Kane was because she’d checked last night.

She had to report this to the authorities. But this was a foreign country, and who knew what passed for authority here?

She’d seen the reception area last night—a small cubicle just inside the vast iron-studded wooden entrance gate to the monastery. Last night, there’d been a guard posted in the cubicle. That might do for a start.

Faith hurried down the stairs and along the portico rimming the quadrangle. A slight mist rose from the grassy center as the sun’s rays started heating up the cool ground. It was going to be a hot day.

There was no one about and before she could wonder about that, she heard laughter and the clinking of silverware coming from one of the big, wrought-iron-barred windows across the way. Where they’d had dinner last night, she remembered.

There’s no one about because everyone’s having breakfast,
she thought as she walked up the steep stone-cobbled incline to the guardhouse and the entrance to the monastery.

She’d rather be there having a real Italian espresso instead of scurrying off to report a murder. Faith rushed into the guardhouse.

“Excuse me.”

A handsome, middle-aged man looked up from his newspaper with a smile. When he saw her, his smile became flirtatious. “
Si, signorina?”

“I’d like to—” How to say this? “I’d like to report a—a murder?”

The man’s smile broadened, showing acres of strong, blindingly white teeth. “
Si, si
.”

He raised his hand and pointed to a wooden door across the way. Faith was halfway across the room when she saw what he was pointing at. She turned back with a sigh.

“No, no.” Faith shook her head. “I don’t need a bathroom. I have one of my own, thank you. No, I need to report a
murder.
” The guard looked at her blankly. Faith pantomimed a knife going into her chest. “A
murder
.” She knocked on her chest with the edge of her fist and the guard’s eyes followed her hand with interest. “You know. Murder?”

“Muh-duh,” the guard said amiably and shrugged his shoulders. He lifted his eyes reluctantly from her breasts and raised an eyebrow. Out of politeness, he beat his chest, too. He probably thought this was some strange American gesture of goodwill.

“No, no.” She knew it was ridiculous, but she raised her voice, as if that would make him understand. “Murder! Murder! A—man—has—been—murdered.”

Exasperated, Faith put her hands around her neck and shook it. She jerked her head at an angle, rolled her eyes up and allowed her tongue to loll slightly out.

The guard’s smile slipped and he eyed the door. “
Prego, signorina?”

“
Mortus
.” Remnants of high school Latin swam up. “
Homo mortus
.” She couldn’t remember her numbers in Latin, though, so she reached behind the guard. He jerked back, wary now of the crazed foreigner.

“It’s okay. You’re not the dead guy,” Faith said reassuringly. There were forty small cubicles with hooks for the keys to the cells. Most of them were empty. She tapped number seventeen, Professor Kane’s room.

“He’s the one who’s dead. Seventeen. Professor Roland Kane.
Mortus
.” Faith met the guard’s eyes. Comprehension was dawning. She nodded and tapped seventeen again. “
Mortus
.”

The guard picked up the phone, never taking his eyes off her, punched out a three-digit number hastily and spoke in quick liquid tones into the receiver. Faith could catch only one word that sounded familiar.
Morto
. Dead.

Shaken, Faith sank down on a cane-bottomed chair. She tried to make it look natural, but her knees were weak. The reality of what she’d seen was starting to sink in.

Professor Kane was dead. Murdered. Faith wasn’t surprised he’d died by someone’s hand—she’d contemplated offing him herself any number of times, as had just about everyone on the faculty of Southbury.

But there was an abyss between fantasizing about killing a nasty, overbearing son of a bitch and actually doing it. Actually taking a knife and plunging it into a human heart. Perhaps holding it in place, watching the light in the eyes fade, watching the life drain away…

Faith shivered. She was alone in the cubicle now. The guard was outside the entrance pacing the wide, graveled driveway, all Latin insouciance gone.

She lifted her eyes and was startled to see a face staring back at her. The face was dead white with pale freckles scattered over nose and cheeks. Wide, light-brown eyes, a cloud of pale hair. Pale face, pale eyes, pale hair. A ghost.

She knew she was seeing what Nick had seen the morning after the night before.

No wonder he hadn’t remembered her name. Who could? She looked insubstantial—pale and lifeless. Plain and utterly forgettable. Faith looked away from the mirror, unable to bear the sight.

How could Nick remember her name? He was brimming with life. It flowed from his fingertips. She felt an electric crackle every time she touched him. She made it seem casual, but she remembered each single time they’d touched over the past year. He seemed to carry a force field around his large, strong frame. Even his coloring was vivid. Blue-black hair, bright blue eyes, olive skin with ruddy undertones.

Faith could see him now, his face alive with joy and excitement. Just being around him was like being plugged into a source of energy. When she’d tagged along with Nick and his sister Lou and all their hangers-on, she’d had to work to keep her eyes off him. Even now, if she closed her eyes, she could see his laughing, handsome face…

“
Signorina
.”

Faith’s eyes flew open. She stared at the newcomer.

Her heart stuttered and her hands shook.

“Nick,” she breathed. “What on earth are you doing in—” she began, and then bit her tongue.

The man standing in front of her was tall and well-built, with olive skin and bright blue eyes and as handsome as sin, just like Nick. But his hair was dark brown, not blue-black and he wasn’t smiling. Nick always smiled, always.

“Not Nick,” he said soberly in perfect English. “Dante.
Commissario
Dante Rossi, of the Siena Police Department.”

Chapter Three

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

Southbury, Massachusetts

Faith’s cell was switched off, so he kept trying her home number. It was Nick’s twentieth call. He let the phone ring fifteen times. The shrill sound of the rings hurt his ears. Shit, breathing still hurt.

His instinct was to lie down for a few days, maybe a few weeks, until he felt better, but he couldn’t. Not until he talked to Faith. Which, it appeared, wasn’t going to happen any time soon. He finally hung up, still hung over.

He’d been calling since the day before yesterday morning. He’d sent flowers, but the florist had called to say there was nobody home to accept delivery.

He’d driven by, shielding his eyes against the nauseatingly bright sunshine, driving slowly because he was sure he still had an illegal amount of alcohol in his system even after two days.

He could just see the headlines if he’d been arrested while still steeped in alcohol.
Former Hunter Star Arrested For Drunk Driving
. And it would all be out.

The concussion, the letter from the doctor, the letter from the team manager. The sympathy, the calls from friends who would soon be former friends, bandwagon fans, newshounds hot after the scent of blood…

It was going to come out soon anyway. Nick Rossi’s forced retirement from hockey was going to be big news and the calls were going to come sooner or later.

Later. The later, the better.

It was why he’d switched off his cell, why he wasn’t answering the landline and why he had put his answering machine in the spare room.