Murphy's Law

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “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.

  One of the spare rooms.

  Ever since his sister Lou had forced him to buy into this luxury condo as an investment, he had more room—rooms—than he knew what to do with. He’d put the answering machine in the room Lou called “The Botanical Gulag” because it was where he put all his plants after they’d died on him.

  He didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. His parents were at a conference in Miami, Lou was on an out-of-town business trip and the only other person he wanted to talk to would probably cut off her finger before punching in his number.

  Faith thought he hadn’t remembered her name after an entire night spent having sex. What Faith hadn’t realized was that he couldn’t remember his own name at the time.

  After the team neurologist had told Nick, gently but firmly, that he’d never play professional hockey again, he had gone out on a booze cruise and had basically emptied Southbury of alcohol.

  And Faith had ended up as road kill.

  He picked up the phone and started punching out the numbers. Again. Cell. Landline. Cell. Landline. Faith had to answer some time, didn’t she?

  Siena, Italy

  Commissario Dante Rossi kept his voice low. “Ms. Murphy?”

  The young woman didn’t answer for a moment. She was utterly white-faced. Probably in shock. Finding a dead body would do that to a person. He was about to repeat the question when she answered in a steady voice.

  “Yes, I’m Faith Murphy.” She peered at him closely. “Rossi. Commissario Rossi. Are you Lou’s cousin?”

  He inclined his head. He leaned forward and took her hand gently in his. “The same. I was going to call the Certosa today. Lou called me to look you up. A murder wasn’t quite what she had in mind.”

  “No.” Faith Murphy’s smile was shaky. “No. It, ah, came as a shock to me, too.”

  “I imagine it did.” Dante looked around the small reception area. The Certosa had changed since he and Nick had run wild as teenagers through the ruins of the old monastery. Now it was restored and elegant, even stately. He turned to the night porter and asked in Italian, “Where can I speak with the American lady in private?”

  “More or less every room in the main cloisters is set up for the conference and the University of Siena people are everywhere. You’ll have to go into the next courtyard. Go down the ramp, through the archway, fourth door on the right. There’s a meeting room called the San Francesco room. That will give you some privacy, Commissario.”

  Dante narrowed his eyes. “Do I know you?”

  The man grinned. “Egidio Pecci. You went to school with my boy Carlo.”

  “Ah, Carlo Pecci. From the Caterpillar.” Now Dante remembered the laughing, black-haired boy he’d gotten into endless scrapes with. He resembled his father.

  The family was from the Caterpillar contrada, one of the seventeen districts in Siena, seventeen little mini-states with their own flags, colors, symbols, mottos and songs, and all locked in an endless thousand-year-old battle to win a silken banner, the Palio, twice a year, in a horse race. Being from the Caterpillar was all right. The Rossis were from the Snail contrada, which had been allies of the Caterpillars for going on seven hundred years. “Wh
at’s Carlo doing now?”

  The man’s grin disappeared and he lifted his hands heavenward. “Gone,” he said mournfully. “Carlo works for the Monte dei Paschi and they sent him to Milan.”

  In Siena, working for the Monte dei Paschi, the oldest bank in the world, was the equivalent of working for God. You followed His inscrutable ways, even when they meant exile. The way Egidio had said Milan, Dante knew he might just as well have said his son had been posted to Iceland.

  Dante understood. He, too, had been posted for three tedious, interminable years to the Questura, the police headquarters, of Bolzano, the northernmost city in Italy, practically in Austria’s lap, where the food had been bad and the women Teutonic and boring. The four years in Naples with good, spicy food and bad, spicy women had been better. But it hadn’t been Siena. He knew what exile from Siena was like.

  “Too bad,” he said sincerely, placing a hand on Egidio’s shoulder.

  “Particularly this year, when the Caterpillar is bound to win the Palio,” Egidio said with a sly look at Dante.

  “In your dreams, Caterpillar,” Dante said cheerfully. “In your dreams.”

  He turned to the woman, sobering up immediately. She had been watching them carefully, big light-brown eyes moving from him to Egidio and back.

  Dante nodded to the door. “We can talk more easily in another room, Signorina Murphy. Over in the other cloister. Down the ramp, through the archway, fourth door to the right. It says Sala San Francesco on the door. I’ll be right there.”

  After she left, Dante leaned close to Egidio. “There used to be only this one entrance to the Certosa.” Except for the broken west wall, which fifteen years ago presented few obstacles to agile teenagers. “Is that still the case?”

  “Yes.” Egidio turned and picked up a huge cast iron key, suitable for the lock of a medieval castle. He hefted it in his hand. “And I have the only key.”

  “Okay. I want you to make sure that no one from the Certosa leaves the premises until I say they can. Where’s the body?”

  “Room seventeen, the lady said,” Egidio answered promptly. “Second floor.”

  “In about fifteen minutes, my men from La Scientifica will be arriving. Tell them I’ll be up straight away.”

  Egidio’s mouth formed an “O” at the mention of the Scientifica, the Crime Scene Squad. There was a very popular TV series featuring the Scientifica, with two babes who looked hot in lab coats. Egidio swallowed and nodded.

  Dante knew that a thousand TV scenes of polished pros poring over a dead body were flashing before Egidio’s eyes. Little did Egidio know that the Siena Crime Scene Squad saw murdered bodies about as often as the Snail contrada won the Palio. Which was never.

  With a sigh, Dante made his way down the ramp, wishing the American had waited until after the Palio to get whacked.

  It was the heart of Palio season, the period the entire city waited for, dreamed of, schemed for all year round.

  Today was the feast day of the patron saints of his contrada, Saints Peter and Paul. All of the Snails would be out in the streets celebrating, from the youngest to the oldest. It was the day in which small children, and the odd infatuated foreigner, would be baptized into the contrada at the little fountain that spouted wine whenever the Snail won.

  Alas, wine hadn’t flowed from that fountain in far too many years.

  This morning would be the drawing of lots to assign the horses to each district, after the horses had had a trial run around the unusual race track, the fan-shaped central square which turned into a golden track of magic twice a year.

  It was a tradition stretching back a thousand years and would doubtless continue for another thousand. So whether Dante was there or not would make no difference whatsoever to the outcome. But he wanted to be there. He didn’t want to be embroiled in the investigation of the death of a foreigner.

  He wanted to watch the horses race, wanted to stand there listening to the old timers judging legs and breadth of chest and stoutness of heart. Word had it that the best horse of all was Lina, a bay. Who knew if fate would assign Lina to the Snail contrada?

  Only ten contrade out of the seventeen raced at each Palio. There were two Palios a year, one in July and one in August. This year, the Snail was running in both, something unusual.

  There was a chance in ten that fate would allow his Snail contrada to draw Lina. They already had the nastiest, craftiest jockey in Italy, Massimo Ceccherini, known to all as Nerbo, after the whip made of calves’ phalluses the jockeys used in the race. Considering Nerbo’s reputation as a skirt chaser—and catcher—the nickname was an apt one.

  Maybe the goddess Fortuna, notorious bitch that she was, would smile on them this year.

  God knew the Snail needed all the help fate could give it. The Snail was the nonna, the grandmother, of all the contrade, the contrada that had gone the longest without a victory. Seventeen long years in the desert…seventeen long years with the grandmother’s bonnet that was a mark of shame. Surely this year…

  Murder is so…so un-Sienese, he thought, as he walked along the cloister skirting the central courtyard of the Certosa. Why risk spending your life in prison where the food was bad and the company worse, just to kill someone?

  Particularly since God or biology—depending upon your personal philosophy—would eventually take care of that problem in time. You just had to wait, that was all.

  With a sigh, Dante walked toward Miss Murphy and his duty.

  Perfect Murphy luck. Cross the Atlantic to get rid of one Rossi only to find another one on the other side, Faith thought as she walked on the herringbone brick walkway.

  The cloister was spectacular, as if the careless gods who botched looking after the Murphys were trying to make up for years and years of things gone wrong. A large grassy swath with an enormous oak so old the first branch was a hundred feet from the earth, a wishing well with an ornate wrought-iron cupola, broad topiary evergreens, all ringed by the graceful arches of the arcade. And roses. Everywhere. In full, spectacular bloom.

  The intense smell of roses, ancient tightly-furled roses with bees hovering over them just waiting for the day to heat up enough to entice them to open, tickled her nose.

  Trust Kane to get offed in a gorgeous place.

  Faith was sure her own fate was to end up a week-old dead body in some musty motel in Bumfuck, Nowhere, with the wind whistling down from the North Pole. She’d be dead for days and days, and they’d find her body by the smell.

  Down the ramp. Through the archway. She entered the smaller courtyard—the one she’d seen from her window this morning, delicate and welcoming—and counted four doors. Sala San Francesco, a terracotta tablet informed her.

  Faith knocked briefly, and then walked in. It was high-ceilinged with cream-colored stucco walls and the vestiges of a fresco on one wall. Some anorexic saint calling down miracles from heaven. Or food.

  Chairs in rows in front of a steel desk. Classic classroom. Clearly, the room was used for lectures on some thorny topic, because the chairs looked lethally uncomfortable, with tiny hard seats and spindly legs. She thought of some of her obese students back home. They’d never get an education over here.

  Behind her, she heard the door open then close.

  The Commissario, whatever that was. Of the Siena police, he’d said. She didn’t know what rank Commissario was, but it sounded pretty high.

  Commissars in Soviet Russia had held the power of life and death over people, she remembered reading.

  It was an insane coincidence having a Rossi show up to investigate Kane’s murder. The same Rossi cousin Lou had urged her to call when she’d told Lou she was, improbably, going to Siena, Italy.

  It had been a welcome surprise when Kane had called at the last minute to say Tim Gresham was sick and she was taking his place at the Quantitative Methods Seminar in Siena. It beat sitting in her room, burning with humiliation.

  She had had two hours to pack and had met Lou as she was rushing out of the
building they shared. Sort of shared. Faith low-rented a damp studio in the basement and Lou owned the spacious penthouse, but it was the same building.

  Lou’s father taught at Southbury and she’d met Lou at a university fundraiser. They’d discovered they lived in the same building and, improbably, she and Lou had become best friends.

  Lou had introduced her to her brother Nick, who in turn had introduced her to sex—good sex, at any rate—which had led her to Siena and murder and another Rossi.

  Nothing like circularity.

  Just before leaving, Lou had pressed a piece of paper in her hand. “Here’s my cousin’s number. His name is Dante, and he’s cute and fun and he’s not married and I want you to call him, now.” Lou’s eyes had narrowed. “Wait. Knowing you, you won’t, so I’ll call him and have him call you. You’ll like him.”

  Well, Faith hadn’t had to call him after all. He’d come all on his own.

  Ain’t life grand?

  Faith sat down in one of the spindly chairs and expected Commissario Rossi to take a seat behind the desk and play power politics, but he surprised her by grabbing one of the uncomfortable chairs and sitting next to her. He took out a notepad and pen.

  “So, Miss Murphy,” he began, “I understand you found a body this morning.”

  “A dead one.” Faith nodded. “And please call me Faith. I know your cousin Lou very well.”

  “Lucrezia.” He smiled faintly. Dear God, he looked so much like Nick it was scary. “And you must call me Dante.”

  He was tall and well-built without giving the impression of being a mountain like Nick, but he had the same bright blue eyes, dark hair and the same olive skin and strong features. No wonder she’d mistaken him for Nick.

  “Lucrezia called me yesterday to say you were coming and to look you up. As I said, I was going to call today. I didn’t imagine I’d be meeting you this way.”

  “No.” Faith smiled faintly. “Not even Lou could think up this much excitement.”