Murphy's Law by Lisa Marie Rice Page B

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