Murphy's Law Read Online Free PDF Page A

—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. “What’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