Kiss Me While I sleep (4 page)

When she slowly, laboriously made her way out of the lavishly appointed marble bathroom, Rodrigo was sitting in the chair by the bed, waiting for her. He was dressed all in black, turtleneck and trousers, a dark omen in the white-and-cream bedroom.

Immediately all her instincts went to a higher stage of alertness. She couldn’t play Rodrigo the way she had Salvatore. For one thing, as wily as Salvatore had been, his son was smarter, tougher, more cunning-and that was saying something. For another, Salvatore had been attracted to her, and Rodrigo wasn’t.

For the father she had been a younger woman, a conquest, but she was three years older than Rodrigo and he had plenty of conquests of his own.

She was wearing a set of her own pajamas, brought from her flat yesterday, but she was glad of the extra covering of the thick Turkish robe she’d found hanging on a hook in the bathroom. Rodrigo was one of those overtly sexual men who made women very aware of him, and she wasn’t immune to that facet of his personality, even though she knew enough about him to make her cold with disgust. He wasn’t innocent of the majority of Salvatore’s sins, though he
was
innocent of the murders that had moved her to vengeance; by chance, Rodrigo had been in South America at the time.

She struggled to the bed and sat on it, clinging to one of the posts at the foot for support. She swallowed and said, “You saved my life.” Her voice was thin and weak.
She
was thin and weak, in no shape to protect herself.

He shrugged. “As it happens, no. Vincenzo-Dr. Giordano-says there was nothing he could do to help. You recovered on your own, though not without some damage. A heart valve, I believe he said.”

She already knew that, because Dr. Giordano had told her the same thing that very morning. She had known the possibilities when she took the risk.

“Your liver, though, will recover. Already your color is much better.”

“No one has told me what was wrong. How did you know I was sick? Did Salvatore become ill, too?”

“Yes,” he said. “He didn’t recover.”

Some reaction other than, “Oh, good,” was expected of her, so Lily deliberately thought of Averill and Tina, of Zia with her adolescent gangliness, her bright, cheerful face and nonstop chatter. Oh, God, she missed Zia so much; it was an ache in the center of her chest. Tears filled her eyes, and she let them drip down her cheeks.

“It was poison,” Rodrigo said, both his expression and tone as calm as if he’d commented on the weather. She wasn’t deceived; he had to be in a rage. “In the bottle of wine he drank. It appears to be a synthetic, designer poison, very potent; by the time the symptoms occur, it’s already too late. Monsieur Durand from the restaurant said you tasted the wine.”

“Yes, one sip.” She wiped the tears from her face. “I dislike wine, but Salvatore was insistent, and he was becoming angry because I didn’t want to taste it, so I did… just one very small sip, to please him. It was nasty.”

“You are lucky. According to Vincenzo, the poison is so potent that had you drunk any more than that, if the sip hadn’t been very small, you would be dead.”

She shuddered, remembering the pain and vomiting; she had been that sick without actually swallowing any of the wine, just letting it touch her lips. “Who did this? Anyone could have drunk that wine; was it some terrorist who didn’t care who he killed?”

“I think my father was the target; his love of wine was well-known. The eighty-two Chateau Maximilien is very rare, yet a bottle mysteriously became available to Monsieur Durand the day before my father’s reservation at his restaurant.”

“But he might have offered the wine to anyone.”

“And taken the risk that my father would hear about it and take umbrage that this rare wine wasn’t offered to him? I think not. This tells me the poisoner is very familiar with Monsieur Durand and his restaurant, and the clientele.”

“How was it done? The bottle was uncorked in front of us. How was the wine poisoned?”

“I imagine a very thin hypodermic needle was used to inject the poison through the cork. It wouldn’t have been noticeable. Or the bottle could have been uncorked, then resealed if the proper equipment was available. To Monsieur Durand’s extreme relief, I don’t believe either he or the waiter who served you are culpable.”

Lily had been out of bed so long that she was trembling with weakness. Rodrigo noticed the tremors that shook her entire body. “You may stay here until you are fully recovered,” he said politely, rising to his feet. “If you need anything, you have only to ask.”

“Thank you,” she said, then uttered the biggest lie of her life: “Rodrigo, I’m so sorry about Salvatore. He was… he was—” He was a murdering asshole son of a bitch, but now he was a dead murdering asshole son of a bitch. She managed to produce one more tear, thinking of Zia’s little face.

“Thank you for your condolences,” he said without expression, and left the room.

She didn’t do a victory dance; she was too weak, and for all she knew there were hidden cameras in the room. Instead she climbed back into bed and tried to seek refuge in strength-restoring sleep, but she was feeling too triumphant to do more than doze.

Part of her mission was accomplished. Now all she had to do was disappear before Rodrigo discovered Denise Morel didn’t exist.

Two days later, Rodrigo and his younger brother, Damone, stood beside their parents’ graves at their boyhood home in Italy. Their mother and father were once more side by side in death as they had been in life. Salvatore’s grave was covered in flowers, but both Rodrigo and Damone had taken some of the flowers and put them on their mother’s grave, too.

The weather was cool but sunny, and a light breeze was blowing. Damone put his hands in his pockets and stared up
&&
the blue sky, his handsome face drawn with grief. “What will you do now?” he asked.

“Find who did this and kill him,” Rodrigo said without hesitation. Together they turned and began walking away from the gravesite. “I’ll also put out a press release about Papa’s death; ft can’t be kept quiet much longer. The news will make some people nervous, wondering about the status of various agreements now that I am in charge, and I will have to deal with that. We may lose some revenue, but nothing that we can’t absorb. And the losses will be short-term. The revenues from the vaccine will make up the difference, and more. Much more.”

Damone said, “Vincenzo has made up the lost time?” He was more of a businessman than Rodrigo, and it was he who handled the majority of their finances from his own headquarters in Switzerland.

“Not as much as we had hoped, but work is progressing. He assures me he will be finished by next summer.”

“Then he is doing better than I’d expected, considering how much was lost.” An incident at Vincenzo’s lab had destroyed much of his current project.

“He and his people are working very long hours.” And would be working even longer ones if Rodrigo saw they were falling behind schedule. The vaccine was too important to let Vincenzo miss the deadline.

“Keep me abreast of the situation,” said Damone. By agreement, because of security issues, they wouldn’t be together again until after the poisoner was identified and apprehended. He turned and looked back at the new grave, his dark eyes filled with the same pain and rage Rodrigo felt. “It’s still so hard to believe,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“I know.” The two brothers hugged, unashamed of their emotion, then got into separate cars for the trip back to their private airfield, where they would each take a corporate jet home. Rodrigo had taken comfort in his younger brother’s presence, in having what was left of his immediate family next to him. Despite the sadness of their purpose for being together, there had also been an ease of companionship. Now each returned to their linked but separate empires, Damone to watch over the money, Rodrigo to find their father’s killer and exact revenge. Whatever steps he took, he knew, Damone would support him.

But the fact was, he hadn’t been able to make any progress in finding who had killed Salvatore. Vincenzo was still analyzing the poison, which might give them an idea of its origin, and Rodrigo had been closely watching his rivals for any hint of knowledge that Salvatore had died, any aberration in their usual pattern of doing business. One might think their less legitimate associates would be seen as the most likely suspects, but Rodrigo didn’t eliminate anyone from suspicion. It could even be someone within their own organization, or someone in the government. Salvatore had had his fingers in many pies, and evidently someone had got greedy enough to want the whole pie to himself. Rodrigo just had to discover which one.

“Drive Mademoiselle Morel home,” Rodrigo told Tadeo after she had been there a week. She was steady on her feet now, and though she seldom left her bedroom, he wasn’t comfortable having a stranger under his roof. He was still busy consolidating his position-unfortunately, a couple of people had felt he wasn’t the man his father had been and were impelled to challenge his authority, which had in turn impelled him to have them killed-and there were some things a stranger shouldn’t accidentally see or hear. He would feel more comfortable when the house was once more a total haven.

It took only a matter of minutes for the car to be brought around and the woman and her few belongings loaded inside. After Tadeo had left with the Frenchwoman, Rodrigo went into Salvatore’s study-his study now-and sat behind the huge carved desk that Salvatore had loved. Vincenzo’s report on the poison, analyzed from the dregs in the wine bottle recovered from the restaurant’s refuse, lay in front of him. He had looked over the report when he first received it, but now he picked it up again and thoroughly studied it, going over every detail.

According to Vincenzo, the poison was chemically engineered. It contained some of the properties of orellanine, the poison in the deadly galerina mushroom, which was why he had first suspected mushrooms. Orellanine attacked several internal organs, most notably the liver, kidneys, heart, and the nervous system, but orellanine was also notoriously slow. Symptoms wouldn’t appear for ten hours or more, then the victim would appear to recover, only to die several months later. There was no known treatment or antidote for orellanine. The poison had also shown some relation to minoxidil, with the effects of bradycardia, heart failure, hypotension, and depressed respiration-which would help to render the victim unable to recover from the orellanine look alike. Minoxidil worked fast, orellanine worked slowly; somehow the two properties had been combined in such a way that there was a delay, but of only a few hours.

Also according to Vincenzo, there were only a few chemists in the world capable of doing this work, and none of them worked in reputable drug corporations. Because of the nature of their work, they were both expensive to hire and difficult to contact. This particular poison, at such a potency that less than an ounce would kill a hundred-and-fifty-pound man-or woman-would cost a small fortune to produce.

Rodrigo steepled his fingers and thoughtfully tapped them against his lips. Logic told him the killer he sought would almost certainly be a business rival or someone seeking to avenge a past grievance, but instinct kept him looking at Denise Morel. There was something about her that nagged at him. He couldn’t identify the source of his faint discomfort; so far his investigations had told him she was exactly what she purported to be. Moreover, she, too, had been poisoned and very nearly died, which any logical man would say proved she wasn’t the villain. And she had wept when he told her of Salvatore’s death.

Nothing pointed to her. The waiter who had served the wine was a far more likely suspect, but exhaustive questioning of both M. Durand and the waiter had produced nothing but the information that M. Durand himself had put the bottle in the waiter’s hands and watched him take it, without detour, to the Nervi table. No, the person he sought was the one who had brought the availability of the bottle of wine to M. Durand’s attention, and so far there was no record of that person. The bottle had been bought from a company that didn’t exist.

Therefore, the killer was fairly sophisticated in the trade, with the means of procuring both the poison and the wine. He-for convenience‘ sake Rodrigo thought of the killer as a “he”-had researched both his victim and his victim’s habits; he had known Salvatore frequented that particular restaurant, known when he had a reservation, and known with some certainty that M. Durand would of course hold this particular bottle for his very important customer. The killer also had the skill to present a believable facsimile of a legitimate company. All of this pointed to a level of professionalism that practically screamed “competitor.”

And yet, he still couldn’t quite disregard Denise.

It wasn’t likely, but this could still be a crime of passion. No one was beyond suspicion until he knew for certain who had killed his father. Whatever his father had seen in Denise, perhaps some other man had seen the same thing, and been just as obsessed.

As for Salvatore’s past lovers… Rodrigo mentally reviewed them, and all but categorically dismissed them from contention. For one thing, Salvatore had been like a honey bee, never staying long enough with one lover for any real connection to be formed. Since his wife’s death, some twenty years before, he had been amazingly active in the romance department, but no woman had come close to joining his wife in his regard.

Moreover, Rodrigo had investigated every woman who spent time with his father. Not one of them had shown any signs of obsessive behavior, nor would they have had the knowledge of such an exotic poison, or the means of acquiring it, much less the hideously expensive wine. He would investigate them again, just to be certain, but he thought they would all check out clean. However, what about the people in
Denise’s
past?