His hair hurt. His eyelashes hurt. His fucking toenails hurt.
The telephone rang again and hammered sharply pointed spikes into his skull. He tried to bring a hand up to his head, but there was something on his arm. Nick moved his hand—even that small movement caused pain—and touched a soft, springy mass. Hair. Human hair. He hoped.
He opened one eye. Cautiously.
Yeah. A human. The way he felt maybe he’d had sex with an orc. But no, it was a girl. He lifted his head slightly, grimacing at the pain, to see if he knew her.
She was sleeping slightly turned away from him. All he could see was a finely-drawn pale profile surrounded by a cloud of brandy-colored hair.
Ok. He knew her. He knew he knew her. If only his brain could shoot him some info through the thick fog that fucked with his head he’d figure out who she was. As it was, merely trying to conjure up the memory of the face—and of last night—taxed his pain threshold.
The phone rang again, the bell echoing shrilly in his head for long seconds. Each second seemed like a lifetime. Everything was happening in an unsteady, sickening slow motion, as if he were on a boat at sea. The girl turned over in bed, the rustling noise of the sheets sounding like thunder. She looked at him, wide-eyed, all fresh and innocent and not at all as if she was in the bed of a hundred-year-old man, which is what he felt like.
He took in her features one by one, his brain too blasted to put the parts together. Pale skin, with a spattering of freckles across her nose. High cheekbones. He knew—without knowing how he knew—that she blushed easily.
Her eyes were large, the same brandy color as her hair and the whites were milky-white, like a child’s. Small straight nose, arching sandy eyebrows, lips which he knew were full, but were now compressed in a thin line.
It was an unusual face, not conventionally pretty but…arresting. He knew her, a friend of Lou’s, fuck…her name was going to break through the cobwebs. Any second now…
A loud noise made him start in pain. It was his answering machine kicking in in the next room. The answering machine Lou bought him and installed because he never answered his cell and never ever checked his voicemail. His recorded voice sounded preternaturally loud in the room. “Hi, this is Nick Rossi. Sorry I can’t come to the phone, but if you leave a message and a phone number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
There was a hum, and then a high, breathy, impossibly sexy female voice came on, making loud kissy kissy noises. “Nick, love, sorry I couldn’t make it last night, but I was held up. I hope you didn’t go looking somewhere else for fun and excitement because, believe me, I’m going to make it up to you tonight and I want you fresh.” Another spectacular phone kiss ended the message. Nick winced.
The girl bolted up in bed like a startled fawn. Nick tried to think of something to say. Something, anything. But nothing was happening up there.
“Y-You—” she stammered softly. “You…and I…last night, we…and all the time—you were supposed to be with someone else?”
“Huh,” he replied, trying to jumpstart his head. Who is she? It was on the tip of his furred tongue. He would remember in just a minute…
But he wasn’t going to have that minute. She was pulling on clothes in a hurry, her movements jerky and awkward, as if she weren’t used to dressing in front of someone. Whoa.
He should be saying something, but what? He sat up in bed, regretting the movement instantly. The contents of his stomach—mostly liquid, very sour—were moving up his gullet. By the time the room stopped spinning and he breathed the bile back down, she was fully dressed and halfway to the door.
Fuck.
He didn’t know why he wanted to stop her, he only knew that he did. “No, wait, ah—”
And then, horribly, his mind pulled a complete blank. Utterly empty, like the rink in summer.
She turned and her light brown eyes widened even more. “Oh—my—God.” She brought her small fist to her mouth. “You don’t even remember my name.”
“Don’t be silly. Of course I do, ah—” But it was too late. She had gone and the sound of the door slamming behind her was so painful he couldn’t even breathe for a full minute.
Then he ran to the porcelain god, fell to his knees and emptied his stomach.
By the time he could think again, he could hear the elevator slowly taking her down to the ground floor. Then, suddenly, his treacherous memory kicked in. Images from the previous night blossomed in his mind. It had been wonderful, extraordinary…and he had the horrible feeling that he had just cut himself off from the sweetest thing in his life.
“Faith,” he groaned as he fell back onto the mattress. “Faith Murphy.”
Chapter Two
Smile. Tomorrow will be worse.
Thirty hours later, Certosa di Ponteremoli near Siena, Italy.
Faith was expecting Professor Roland Kane to be cold and unresponsive to her request.
She wasn’t expecting him to be dead.
At first, it wasn’t entirely clear he was dead. The door to Professor Kane’s cell had swung open unexpectedly at her tentative knock. Unsure what to do next, Faith peeked into the room where generations of monks had lived out lives of prayer and meditation.
The cell was familiar—an exact replica of the one she was inhabiting during the yearly Quantitative Methods Seminar at the Certosa di Ponteremoli near Siena, Italy, a former monastery. The cell was simple and spare as befitted the monastic life.
One small metal cot, one laminated desk and wardrobe combination, one wicker-seat chair.
One full Professor of Applied Mathematics, stretched out on his back on the floor, eyes closed.
At least he was fully dressed. Faith could remember once entering the office of Professor Harlan White, another mathematical genius, and finding him in the lotus position. Naked. With a full view of what looked like an acorn nestled in dry leaves.
It was like the old joke. Why do universities have math departments? Because it’s cheaper than institutionalizing them all.
So, for all she knew, Professor Kane was working out a new quantitative theory stretched out on the terracotta tiles with the buttery Italian sunshine streaming in through the open window.
Indeed, what better place to meditate on the infinite than in this former Franciscan monastery perched picturesquely atop a Tuscan hill, with Siena a russet turreted vision on the horizon and the very air redolent with the echoes of centuries of chants by monks?
Of course, Professor Roland Kane, for all his genius, was anything but a monk. Though in mathematical terms he was a genius, in human terms he was a pig. A monstrously intelligent pig. A drunkard and a lecher and a despot and an opportunist.
And a pig.
And a genius.
Which was why Faith was here. Only Roland Kane had enough clout to get her a few minutes of time with Southbury’s 500 Teraflop array. She desperately needed access for her paper. She had been shoehorned into the conference at the very last minute as a replacement for Tim Gresham, sick with the flu.
Some of her calculations were still incomplete. Otherwise, there was nothing on this earth that would have her knocking on Roland Kane’s door at eight a.m. on a sunny Italian morning.
Faith stood in the doorway and made polite humming sounds. Then she coughed. Professor Kane didn’t show a flicker of response. “I, ah—” Faith coughed again, louder. “Professor Kane?”
Faith took two steps into the room and wrinkled her nose, overwhelmed by the smell of alcohol. An open bottle of Glenfiddich, three-quarters empty, stood on the laminated plastic desk next to another full bottle, still sealed.
Faith remembered the incredible fuss Roland Kane had made at Rome Fiumicino Airport when the customs officer had halted him to check the clinking sounds in a carry-on bag and discovered four bottles of Glenfiddich.
Four bottles for a three-day seminar. God forbid he should run out.
Bottle number one was almost finished by day one. Kane’s liver probably looked l
ike pus-filled custard at this point.
Faith stood in the doorway a moment longer then stepped cautiously into the room. Professor Kane didn’t seem to be paying her any attention so she edged over to the left, rising a little on tiptoe, eager to get a look at the view through his window.
The Southbury contingent had arrived late the previous night and so far all Faith had seen of Italy was Rome Fiumicino Airport, the Florence Airport, and some of the dark Tuscan countryside from Florence to Siena from the minivan which had picked them up.
All she’d seen of fabled Tuscany was the rather dingy outskirts of Florence and a few hilltop towns on the dark horizon. They had arrived very late at the Certosa and their Italian hosts had been so anxious to feed them that they hadn’t seen anything at all but the refectory and the cell each mathematician had been assigned.
Her cell was on the other side of the large quadrangle where the monks had lived and prayed. It had a view over a small, charming cloister with an ivy-bedecked stone well. Right now she wanted to see something of Tuscany in the daylight.
She shot another glance at Professor Kane. He still showed no flicker of response. Probably out cold, she thought in disgust. What an asshole.
How could so much intellectual power be packed into such a miserable human being? Still, he was her boss, so she couldn’t give in to her urge to haul back and kick him as he so richly deserved.
Standing on tiptoe and craning her neck, she could see out the window. The view was like an impossibly beautiful painting by a Renaissance artist.
Lovely trees marched up and down gentle hills. They were tall, dark green, as slender and as elegant as church spires. Cypresses, she thought. In the distance topping the highest hill was Siena, golden-red and magical.
The intense colors, the landscape which looked as if an impossibly gifted gardener had planned it down to the finest, most meticulous detail, the bright, cloudless cobalt blue sky—everything called out to her and touched a chord deep in her heart she hadn’t known existed. There wasn’t a human being alive whose soul wouldn’t thrill to that view.
Well, maybe not the pig at her feet. Professor Kane’s soul, she was certain, was probably as diseased and inert as his liver. Faith flicked a glance down at him. He looked exactly like what he was—a self-centered monster.
His lean face was heavily crisscrossed with lines of cruelty and bad 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 her feet.
At least he wasn’t snoring. Faith frowned as she realized that. Why wasn’t he snoring? Wouldn’t a drunk snore? Nick had… She stopped herself. Don’t go there. She didn’t want to think of that. It had been awful enough living it.
Oh God. Her thighs clenched. A day and a half after the most humiliating episode in a life filled with them, her thighs had no shame at all. They should have been impervious to any thought of Nick, who’d forgotten her name. But no. Heat zapped through her body as she had a flash of Nick lying on top of her, Nick in her. No. Not going there.
She drew in a deep breath and tried to concentrate on Professor Kane. Horrible as he was, it was better to think of him than of Nick.
Damn. She had to wake Kane up. Last night Griffin Ball had said if it turned out that she needed XRL array time, Kane would have to authorize the call to the computer center at Southbury.
She needed the array and this was a perfect time. It was 3 a.m. back in Southbury and the XRL would probably be free. If she waited until Professor Kane sobered up, she’d likely find the XRL in use. She’d give anything to just tiptoe back out of the room, but she couldn’t.
“Professor Kane?” He didn’t even stir. Faith cursed her soft voice. 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. But 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. Good. This had better be 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 either.
His chest didn’t appear to be moving. 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. Sort of.
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 her slow, fuzzy thought processes, mired in sleep deprivation like glue, snapped to attention. 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…
Her heart gave a painful jolt.
Stop that, she told herself sternly. Concentrate.
She studied Professor Kane’s chest then reached out to the clenched hand. It wouldn’t 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, judging by the blood staining the shaft.
Well what do you know? Faith thought. He has a heart, after all. She tugged and the slim haft slid through Professor Kane’s claw-like hand into hers.
Roland Kane had been murdered!
He deserved it, but still…
Faith slowly rose to her feet and turned toward the door to go…go where? She stopped on the threshold, stymied for a moment. The Quantitative Methods Week organized by the University of Siena and the University of Massachusetts at Southbury 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 here. She didn’t speak Italian. She didn’t know where the rest of the Southbury contingent was lodged. She only knew where Professor Kane was because she’d checked last night.
She had to report this 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 entrance gate to the monastery. Last night, there’d been a guard posted in the cubicle. That might do for a start.
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 win
dows 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.
She’d rather be there having a real Italian espresso instead of scurrying off to report a murder. Faith rushed into the guardhouse.
“Excuse me.”
A handsome, middle-aged man looked up from his newspaper with a smile. When he saw her, his smile became flirtatious. “Si, signorina?”
“I’d like to—” How to say this? “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. He probably thought 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. “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.