Dying For Siena (2 page)

His lean face was heavily crisscrossed with lines of cruelty and ill 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 my feet,
she thought in disgust.

At least he wasn’t snoring. Faith frowned as she realized that.
Why wasn’t he snoring? Wouldn’t a drunk snore?
Her father certainly did, though admittedly Nick hadn’t… She stopped herself.
Don’t go there.
She didn’t want to
think
of that. It had been humiliating enough living it.

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

The thought was distasteful, but she had to wake him up. Last night Griffin Ball had said if it turned out that she needed Cray time, Kane would have to authorize the call to the computer center at St. Vincent’s.

She’d been up all night, frantically trying to ready her paper, but a few vital calculations were missing and her laptop wasn’t powerful enough.

She needed the Cray and this was a perfect time. It was 2:00 a.m. back in Deerfield and the Cray would, in all probability, be free. If she waited until Professor Kane sobered up, she’d likely find the Cray in use. So—though what she would really have liked to do was tiptoe back out of the room—she braced herself.

“Professor Kane?” That was no good. He hadn’t even stirred. Faith cursed the fact she had a soft voice that didn’t carry. 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. No, 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. She certainly hoped it was 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.

His chest didn’t appear to be moving. For the first time, Faith noticed that 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. In a manner of speaking.

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, Faith’s normally sharp mind finally snapped to attention. Her thought processes had been slowed and were fuzzy and vague from sleep deprivation. Well, after all, 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…

Stop that
, she told her mind sternly.
Concentrate.
She studied Professor Kane’s chest then reached out to the clenched hand. She couldn’t pry it 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, for blood stained the shaft.

Well what do you know?
Faith thought.
He had a heart, after all.

Without really thinking, she tugged and the slim haft slid through Professor Kane’s claw-like hand into hers.

Shock and horror coursed through her system as she slowly rose to her feet. Unsteadily, Faith stood and turned and reached for the door. She stopped on the threshold, stymied for a moment. The Quantitative Methods Week organized by the University of Siena and St. Vincent’s 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. She didn’t speak Italian. She didn’t even know where the rest of the contingent had been lodged. She only knew where Professor Kane was because she’d checked last night.

The only thing she could think to do was report it 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 door to the monastery. Last night, there’d been a guard posted in the cubicle. Maybe that was authority enough.

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.

Just where she’d rather be this morning—having a real Italian espresso instead of scurrying off to report a murder. On that grim thought, Faith walked into the guardhouse.

“Excuse me.”

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

“I’d like to—” Faith coughed to loosen her tight throat. “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. Probably thinking 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. She must be more tired than she’d realized not to have thought of it sooner. “
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 man,” 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 St. Vincent’s.

But there was an abyss between fantasizing about killing a nasty, overbearing man 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 the nose and cheeks, and wide, light-brown eyes. Pale face, pale eyes. 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. 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 at the circus. When she’d tagged along with Nick and Lou and all the assorted Rossis, 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 hadn’t heard anyone come in. Shaken from finding Professor Kane, shaken from her thoughts of Nick, she just stared at the newcomer.

“Nick?” she breathed. “What on earth are you doing in—” she began, 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 instead of blue-black hair, his hair was dark brown and he wasn’t smiling. Nick always smiled.

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

Chapter Two

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

Deerfield, Massachusetts

Nick let the phone ring fifteen times. The shrill sound of the rings hurt his ears. For that matter, 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 until he’d talked to Faith. Which, it appeared, wasn’t going to be 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, as far as Nick was concerned. The later, the better.

It was why he wasn’t answering the phone and why he had put his answering service in the spare room.

One of the spare rooms.

Ever since his sister Lou had had him 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 service 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 own finger before dialing his number.

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

After the team neurologist had told him, gently but firmly, that Nick would never play professional hockey again and that, if he were smart, a bracing game of tiddlywinks would be the extent of his competitive playing, he had gone out on a booze cruise and had basically emptied Deerfield of alcohol.

And Faith had ended up as road kill.

He picked up the phone and started punching out the numbers. Again. Faith had to come back to her apartment some time, didn’t she?