Murphy's Law (7 page)

It was pure chance, fate at its most ineluctable, which was why it was so important to even up what the fates doled out by putting together the craftiest arrangement of bribes and alliances possible.

A microcosm of Italian life.

Dante heard a garbled noise from his brother. “What?” He curved in toward the wall. Mike was trying to shout above the noise of the crowd. Dante pressed the phone closer to his ear. The roar of the crowd was like the ocean in a tempest.

“I said we drew Lina. Lina! Do you hear me?” Mike’s voice was exultant, and Dante wanted to shout with joy.

“Lina!” His voice carried loudly in the empty corridor, echoing faintly, and he dropped his voice to a whisper. “Lina! That’s great! My God, Mike, we’re going to do it this year.”

“Bet your ass, brother! Bet your ass!” Dante’s normally staid, correct-to-a-fault brother became a wild man during the days of the Palio. Another wave of sound crashed over the phone. “I’ve got to go now. We’re taking Lina back to the stables.”

“Keep a close eye on her.”

“You’d better believe it.” The horse was being escorted by wildly exulting Snails to the special stables in the
contrada
. From now until the moment of the race itself, Lina would be anxiously watched day and night. Rivals had been known to slip laxatives in the feed of horses that weren’t well watched.

“Who’d the Turtles draw?”

“Big bay named Cioccolato.”

“He any good?”

“Yeah. Fast,” Mike said, and Dante could hear the anxiety in his voice.

The only thing worse than not winning the Palio was watching your mortal enemy win it. The Snails and the Turtles had been enemies forever. But the Turtles weren’t going to win this year.

Eat your hearts out, Turtles,
Dante thought.
The Palio
will be ours.

“Keep an eye on Nerbo, too,” Dante admonished. With a strong horse like Lina, the chances of the Snail winning the Palio had just increased dramatically. Nerbo would be inundated with offers of bribes and he was an avaricious son of a bitch. Hell of a rider, but he didn’t have an honest bone in his body.

“Don’t worry. We won’t let anything slip past us.” Another wave of sound. “Listen, Dante, I have to go.” Mike rang off.

Dante closed his cell phone slowly. It was going to happen this year. He could feel it in his bones. This year, his
contrada
would take the Palio, a silken banner, home to the little
contrada
museum where it would be kept with the other Palio banners for a thousand years, and admired by generations of school kids. He couldn’t wait to get back down into town. He wanted to see Lina for himself, in the stable where she’d be pampered until…

“There you are, Dante!” a voice boomed. “I think you should be there when I examine the body. What are you doing hiding out here?”

“Speaking with Rome,” Dante lied coolly as he turned around.

The medical examiner, Dr. Aldo Guzzanti, was watching him steadily, white bushy eyebrows drawn together. He was a tall, lanky man, with a deeply ironic view of life, and Dante liked him eleven months of the year. He knew Aldo Guzzanti very well. Not just in his official capacity as coroner, but in his official capacity as enemy. Dr. Guzzanti was a Turtle.

“What does Rome have to do with this?” Alas, Guzzanti was not only an enemy but also highly intelligent.

“Ahm…” Dante thought quickly. “The dead man is an American. I had to talk to the embassy in Rome. Protocol, you know.”

Guzzanti looked at him for a long moment. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s get going. Your inspector is practically panting with excitement. I’ve had to keep him from trying to pick latents up from the ceiling.”

Oh yeah. That sounded just like Loiacono.

“
Commissario
, sir!
Dottore
!” Loiacono bellowed as Dante and Guzzanti entered. “Photographer Pecci—” The lanky youth kneeling next to the body threw him a sardonic look. “—has almost completed his photographic survey, sir. He has taken photographs of the complete perimeter of the body and lambent photographs of the murder area.”

“Last one,” the photographer said, unfolding his length as he rose. He nodded to Dante. “I’ll put the shots on a flash drive for you,
Commissario
. And email them.”

“All right, Carlo,” Dante said.

Carlo moonlighted as a photographer for weddings and christenings. The last time he’d been called in to photograph the scene of a crime had been eight months ago, at the site of a vandalized discotheque.

Dante looked around at the gray dust. He turned to Loiacono. “How about the prints? They finished?”

“Sir! Yes! Specialist Carducci and Specialist Falugi have dusted this room and the door. They’ve gone downstairs to fingerprint the suspects. There was a half-empty bottle of whiskey and they’ve taken it to the toxicology laboratory, where Toxicologist Biagi will analyze it.” Like all southerners, Loiacono loved titles. Whatever a person’s job, Loiacono managed to upgrade it to a title. Gas Station Attendant Manzini. Garage Mechanic Trotti. Dante fully expected him one day to refer to his wife as Wife Anna.

“There was an unopened bottle of whiskey as well, Inspector Loiacono,” Dante said. “I want you to take that bottle and the half-empty bottle and any other bottles you might find and send them to Florence for analysis.”

Loiacono’s face fell. The person Loiacono so grandly called Toxicologist Biagi was actually a police cadet who had been sporadically studying for a degree in chemistry these past three years.

Loiacono was always crushed when he realized that the Siena Police Department wasn’t the FBI. There
was
no toxicology lab, unless you counted the Bunsen burner used to brew coffee in a moka when the espresso machine broke down, and a perfectly useless microscope with scratched lenses pressed into service as a paperweight.

Everything went to Florence for analysis.
Where,
Dante thought irritably,
they took their own sweet time about responding.

Guzzanti was kneeling by the body and had opened his black medical bag.

Dante hated everything pertaining to doctors and illness and had to school himself not to look away from the array of hideous instruments Guzzanti was placing on the floor.

Guzzanti snapped on latex gloves and examined the body carefully, head to toe.

“What do you think, Guzzanti?”

Guzzanti looked up. “Dead, Dante. He’s definitely dead.”

Guzzanti had always been ornery. Dante was suddenly very glad that he hadn’t married Simona Guzzanti, good in bed as she had been. Having Guzzanti and his sharp tongue as a father-in-law would have been hell. “I mean, when did he die? Can you tell?”

Guzzanti touched the body for the first time, picking up the right hand and holding it, turning the body slightly. He unbuttoned the first button of the shirt to loosen it and lifted the body slightly to check the dead man’s back.

“Okay, here’s what I can tell upon visual examination. The body’s cold, so algor mortis has already set in. But that happens immediately. Rigor has begun. The skin of his face, neck and hands is ashen, so blood has started to drain from the topmost part of the body. He has lividity on his back. He has a normal expression and there is no sign of a struggle. He must’ve been taken by surprise. The stiletto was slipped right between the fourth and fifth rib for an instant death. Not an easy thing to do.”

Dante deeply, deeply wanted to get out of the room. “So…time of death?”

Guzzanti sighed. “I’ll need to do a test for that.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a strange-looking thermometer. He looked up at Dante. “The Americans, bless them. They don’t know how to cook and can’t manage to make a decent wine, but boy do they know their dead bodies. I’m going to measure the temperature of the body’s liver.”

“Liver?”
Dante gaped. “But—but the liver is
inside
the body.”

“Good going, Sherlock. Indeed it is. And that is why,
Commissario
Rossi—” Guzzanti looked over his half-moon glasses as he stressed Dante’s title, “—I’m going to need your permission to remove the dead man’s jacket and shirt, punch a hole in his side and measure the temperature of his liver.”

Dante didn’t know about the temperature of Roland Kane’s liver, but he did know that the temperature of the room suddenly shot up ten degrees. He tried desperately to think of some reason why Guzzanti couldn’t do this, but it was hard to think with his stomach sliding greasily up his throat.

He deepened his voice. “I’m not certain I can give you permission at this time, Guzzanti, because it might violate the integrity of the crime scene, and—”

“Shut up, Dante,” Guzzanti said, scrutinizing the bottom of his bag. “I’m going to need an extra pair of hands here.”

Dante looked down at his own hands and put them behind his back.
No way.

“Me, doctor.” Loiacono trembled with eagerness. “May I be allowed to assist you?”

“You may, inspector. Put these on.” Guzzanti held out a pair of latex gloves and Loiacono donned them with a snap.

“Okay.” Guzzanti looked up. “This is what’s going to happen. I am going to open up the man’s jacket, pull up his shirt and undershirt, if he has one, and expose the lower right quadrant of his torso, find myself a nice intercostal space, take out a punching awl and punch a hole through the skin with enough force to reach the center of the right lobe of the liver. After which I will insert a thermometer into the hole and thence down to the liver. Any questions?”

“No,
sir!
” Loiacono shouted and dropped to his knees.

For one crazy moment, Dante thought Loiacono had had a religious epiphany, but he was only getting close to Guzzanti. Who was going to punch a hole in a man’s liver. Right now. This minute. A trickle of sweat tickled its way down Dante’s back.

“Remove the man’s clothes, inspector,” Guzzanti ordered as he pulled out a long, thin instrument. “I need access to the liver. Very good,” he said as Loiacono bared the right side of the man’s abdomen.

Dante wanted desperately to look away, but he couldn’t. He willed his cell phone to ring. Any interruption would do. Fire. An earthquake. Anything.

Guzzanti put a notepad and pen in Loiacono’s hands. “Okay now, inspector, please take notes.” Guzzanti read off the thermometer. “Ambient temperature twenty-eight degrees.” He drew a line in the air from the body’s nipple down to the edge of the rib cage. He pressed hard against the ribcage with his left hand, while lifting the awl in his right.

“This is the theory, Dante.” He looked up and squinted. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Dante assured him, swallowing bile. “Perfect.”

“All right. Now, this is the point of the exercise. After death, the body cools at a constant rate of half a degree per hour for the first twelve hours postmortem.” He pressed the tip of the awl against the point indicated by his left hand. He pushed hard then, gripping the awl with both hands. He leaned down heavily. “Damn chest wall. Ah!”

With a pop, he broke through the skin, pressing down until the awl had penetrated to the hilt. He probed delicately, frowning. “
Gesù
, the guy’s liver is like butter.”

Dante’s stomach roiled as he remembered eating
fegato alla veneziana
the evening before. The delicate, Venetian liver-and-onion dish was one of his favorites.

Guzzanti pulled back. “Okay, now. Take this, inspector.”

The awl emerged with a slight, sickening pop and Guzzanti handed it to Loiacono. He picked up the thermometer and inserted it into the hole, holding it there for three minutes, which he timed by looking at his wristwatch.

“Right, Loiacono, please record. Ambient temperature twenty-eight degrees, corpse hepatic temperature thirty-point-one degrees, which would indicate…let me see…circa twelve hours from moment of death.”

Loiacono wrote fervidly, while Guzzanti took a felt-tip pen, circled the puncture hole and put his initials next to the circle. “That’s so no one can accuse me of having delivered a killing blow to the liver. Heh-heh.”

Dante smiled sickly.

Guzzanti stood and pulled off his gloves. “Well, that was fun. Trust the Americans to provide the best entertainment. Do you want me to do a vitreous humor test, Dante?”

Saliva was pooling in Dante’s mouth. He had to swallow. “Vitreous…what’s that?”

“I stick a needle in the guy’s eye and syringe out the liquid. ’Course the eyeball collapses, then,” Guzzanti said cheerfully. “Another American technique, bless their souls.”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Dante said. “Loiacono, see to the cleaning up here. Then go downstairs and advise the Americans I want to talk to them, and arrange for their transport down to headquarters. Ask the magistrate for the authority to sequester the foreigners’ passports, and then collect them. The Americans are from Southbury, Massachusetts. It so happens I know the Chief of Police there. His name is Sam Murray. I want you to email him with the names of the foreigners and ask him to email me what they have in their files. Print out the answers and leave them on my desk.”

“Sir!” Loiacono’s dark eyes gleamed. He liked police work, but he loved computers with a passion verging on the aberrant. Dante was sure he’d just made Loiacono’s day.

Dante turned on his heel with dignity and walked carefully down to the communal bathrooms where he relieved his stomach of last night’s liver.

Chapter Five

Don’t be misled by facts.

Southbury, Massachusetts

The good news was that the doorbell ringing didn’t hurt so much anymore. The bad news was that it was his sister, Lou, at the door.

Nick opened the door and stared at Lou, hating her because she looked so good. She was dressed in one of her usual designer outfits in some bright jewel color and not a hair on her dark head was out of place.

“I used to think of you as my big, handsome brute of a brother,” she said idly from the doorframe. Her huge dark-blue eyes, so remarkably like his own, looked him up and down, taking in his unshaven chin, tousled hair and bare chest. “But I guess brute just about covers it now. Do your eyes hurt?”