“Well, after what happened to me in Boston, Detective Lanaghan decided to take this a little more seriously.” Nancy’s voice had an edge. “She had his prints compared to the ones found on the coffee cup in Lucia’s apartment. As I suggested they do weeks ago.”

“And they match?” Nell asked.

“They match,” Nancy echoed quietly. “She just called me.”

The sisters were silent. Nell forced out a shaky sigh. “It’s Marco,” she said, with absolute conviction. “Lucia’s long-lost husband.”

“Yeah,” Nancy said. “It must be. He came to find her and got murdered that same night. By the same person who killed Lucia.”

Nell squeezed her eyes shut, and pressed her hand against her forehead. It felt clammy. “That poor old guy. How awful.”

“At least they’re together now,” Nancy pointed out, her voice soft. “I think, probably…that she loved him. To the very end.”

“You could look at it that way,” Nell agreed. “If you believed in love and eternity and all that good stuff that’s dusted with sparkly haze.”

“And you don’t?”

“Not right now,” she admitted, her voice cracking. “You’re madly in love, Nance. You’ve got sparkly haze happening by the bucketful. But in the real world, it’s actually a pretty rare commodity.”

Nancy paused for a long, painful moment. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was just trying to cheer you up.”

Nell felt guilty. Scrooging on her poor sister, whose only crime was in getting lucky in love. “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m glad for you. Really. So did you tell Detective Lanaghan about the letter in the picture frame?”

“Yes, and she said it’s a great lead, but since all we have is the guy’s first name and the name of his town, it’s going to take a while. She has to contact the local police in Italy, find an interpreter, et cetera. So I started to think, in the meantime…since you speak Italian…”

“You want me to call the cops there?”

“Would you?” Nancy asked eagerly. “Just to facilitate things?”

Nancy looked up at the clock, calculating time zones. “I can do it tomorrow morning, before I leave for work,” she said.

The sisters went through their now obsessive routine of admonishing each other to be careful. When they finally hung up, Nell stared at the wall for a long time, her hand pressed against her mouth.

She was grateful for a job to do. Something that might help, a move that might actually yield some answers. But whatever answers she might find were not going to be comforting. This thing kept getting scarier and scarier. But dwelling on that fact would not help matters.

Nothing to do now but get her ass busy.

A thick sheaf of essays later, she rubbed her eyes, stretched, and flopped onto her bed with a groan. The surface of her bed was covered with books. There was just a narrow strip the size of her body to sleep in. It made her smile, grimly. What a perfect metaphor for her life. She could never take a lover. Where would she put him? Between her complete Riverside Shakespeare and her twenty-pound annotated Dante’s Divine Comedy?

The black-haired man popped into her mind, predictably enough. He was her default mode, whenever she wanted to avoid an uncomfortable thought. She pondered him, wondering why she was so pathetically obsessed with the man. It was weird. She wasn’t the type.

Probably because he was so clueless. Emotionally inaccessible to the point of being practically autistic. What could be safer for a coward like herself? She knew nothing about the guy, except that he had a stunning capacity for concentration, and he really, really liked strip steak. And thinking about him was more fun than thinking about that poor old guy, still lying in the morgue in Jamaica. Nameless, unclaimed, unmourned. The cold, stark loneliness of it made her roll over onto her belly and shove her hot face against the pillow.

Maybe tomorrow, she could put a name to the old man who may or may not have been Lucia’s husband. Recognition, the dignity of a name. The best she could hope for.

Her eyes started to close, and sometime later, she woke from a dream of the black-haired man. In her dream, weirdly enough, he was smiling at her. A really beautiful smile. His face practically shone.

She’d never seen the guy smile in real life. As she drifted to sleep again, she wondered if he even knew how.

“What is she doing now?”

The sharp tone, loaded with tension and implied criticism, made John Esposito flex his fingers until his knuckles popped. Bloody, murderous fantasies flashed through his mind, red tinged and wet.

He carefully did not turn his head from the monitor, and kept his voice very flat. “She appears to be reading papers,” he said.

“Reading? Reading what papers?” Ulf Haupt came hobbling over, his cane tap-tap-tapping against the floor. He leaned down to peer over John’s shoulder. John had a fantasy of jabbing an elbow into the decrepit asshole’s gut. Hard enough to cause internal hemorrhaging.

“Students’ essays,” he said, with grim patience. “She’s a teacher.”

“Essays?” Haupt leaned lower, his head bobbing far too close to John’s face, and he leaned away to keep his space.

“Keep watching,” Haupt snapped. “She might get another phone call. You must let nothing slip through the cracks. Nothing. Tomorrow, she will make that call to Italy, and identify Barbieri’s corpse. This is already a disaster, John. A disgrace.”

The old man’s shrill, accusing tone put John’s teeth violently on edge. “Why?” he demanded. “It’ll tell them nothing. I need to take a piss. The stupid bitch hasn’t moved in four hours. Watching her is about as relevant as watching water evaporate.”

“I’m not paying you to be entertained,” Haupt shot back. “Keep your eyes on this one. Since you lost the other two.”

“I did not ‘lose’ the others!” John said, stung. “I know exactly where they are at all times. The youngest one is in Pennsylvania, working at a crafts fair, and the older one is with her fiancé in Denver. If you want me to take the young one, I could drive down to—”

“No. Stay here, where I can direct you, blow by blow. I do not like the results when you are left to your own devices, John.”

John bit back what he wanted to say. He loathed having someone look over his shoulder. By the end of this gig, he might just cut the whiny old bastard’s throat and punish the D’Onofrio sisters for no recompense at all. Just for having been such pains in the ass.

He stared at Antonella as she tossed the essay in a pile and grabbed another. He was staring almost at the top of her head, the camera being hidden in her smoke detector. A great angle for cleavage, of which she had a goodly amount. She was chubbier than her sisters, with tits and ass to match. He liked that. Something to grab and shake.

The pendant he was supposed to take from her sparkled from that beautiful plump cleft of pale flesh that bulged from the neckline of her gray tank. She had peeled down to loungewear. Gray cotton stretch shorts over her hips. Taut, pinchable nipples poking through her tank.

He thought of her older sister, the one who had eluded him twice. Rage grabbed him deep, and twisted. He glared up into Haupt’s eyes. “I’ll go get the dumb bitch right now, if you like,” he offered. “She’s alone in her apartment. I have the code to disarm her alarm. And then she won’t make that call to Italy.” Anything to get this goatfuck moving.

“No,” Haupt said coldly. “You will wait. They will identify Barbieri anyway, now. It’s only a matter of time. Discipline, John. She’s finally getting back to her normal schedule and back in her own apartment again. And once you take her, you will have to move fast for the other sister.”

“I have backup for that. And for following Antonella tomorrow.”

“I hope they will prove more competent than that idiot you hired before. I want this done without mistakes that end up on the evening news,” the old man lectured. “We lost weeks waiting for the noise to die down. Keep watching.” He hobbled out of the room.