The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (11 page)

The train continued its steady chug, and I stared out the window at the passing Campania countryside.

Rossi killed him.

I looked up at Dante once again. His eyes were concerned.

“I can help with the Italian if you want to buy a plane ticket to return home to the United States,” he said. “And I’m begging you to do that.”

What he said barely registered.

“Dante,” I said thoughtfully, “let me ask you something. You mentioned
camorra
, the Naples Mafia. They are drug runners, right?”

“Eh, of course. Drugs, and other things.”

“Is it possible that Rossi is one of them? Could a Naples police officer be mixed up in that kind of thing?”

“It is possible that a Naples police officer can be mixed up in
camorra
. Yes. It is also possible that a
camorra
boss could impersonate a police officer. Our law enforcement—what would an American say?—sucks.”

“So if I go to the police to report Rossi—”

“Don’t. Just don’t. Katrina, go home.”

“I can’t go home.” Tears sprang to my eyes, and I blinked them back. “Can’t you see that I can’t just go home? Rossi took something from me. Something dear to me that I will never get back. I need answers. I need justice. Or I might as well have let him shoot me back there.”

Dante looked pensive for a moment, and I thought I saw a tear in his eye as well. He looked down at the floor of the train. “He killed your husband.” It was not a question.

I nodded miserably, my eyes fixed upon my lap.

“If you keep looking, he will kill you, too.”

“If I don’t,” I replied, “then I’m already dead.”

The train shuddered to a halt, and I glanced out the window. “Are we in Naples?” I asked.

Dante’s eyes widened. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Come on!” he said and led me off the train.

I looked around. “This isn’t Naples…” I began, and a moment of panic took me as I wondered why he had led me off the train at the wrong stop.

“I know,” Dante explained. “We jumped onto the train so quickly that we took the wrong one. We took the one coming
from
Naples, through Herculaneum, through Pompeii. It goes the wrong way.”

As he said it, I realized he was right. We had boarded the train at the same platform where we had arrived from Naples.

“We are now in Pompeii,” Dante said.

“Aw, fuck.” I began looking around for the platform for the return train.

“No, no… this could be good,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Dante looked up at the sky and then at his wristwatch. Then he turned and looked into my eyes. “Are you sure you want to keep looking? Are you completely sure?”

I gave him a dirty look.

“That’s what I thought. Then this is where you should be. Pompeii is bigger than Herculaneum. It is more popular. There is more to see. There are more guides. More of the information is written in English. You can learn whatever you need to learn about the Villa dei Papiri, the history, the plant. Maybe you can figure out what Rossi is after. And maybe I can help.”

“How so?”

“I know a lot about the ancient Romans.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I study their religion. I’m a pagan theologist.”

I glanced at his youthful, heavily tattooed flesh and backward baseball cap, now slightly askew from our dash through the ruins of Herculaneum. “No, you’re not,” I scoffed.

“Oh no?” His eyes were suddenly challenging. “Look again.”

I did, and I could not believe my eyes. “Incredible,” I said. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice before.”

Many years ago, I took a backpacking trip through Eastern Europe with a girlfriend. In the Bucovina region of Romania is a series of monasteries. Each monastery is completely covered, exterior and interior, top to bottom, in intricate frescoes depicting Biblical scenes. Each wall tells a story in the universal language of pictures.

Standing at the entrance to the ruins of Pompeii, I realized I was looking at the pagan equivalent, and Dante Giordano’s flesh was the canvas. My eyes took in the mythical stories running down his arms. Every square inch was covered. No, not covered. Layered. The images blended into one another so flawlessly as to create a global appearance of pattern, but it took more than a passing glance to notice the purpose. And there was movement within the images.
His tattoo artist is a genius
, I thought. I wondered with some degree of embarrassment how many more stories were hidden beneath his clothes.

Only some of the figures were familiar to me. I recognized Mercury, with his winged sandals and helmet, floating up the young man’s forearm. Poseidon was perched on his shoulder, surrounded by an intricate network of sea creatures and flowing water. A chubby, naked little boy fluttering around a wrist with wings and a bow could only have been Cupid. Many of the others were a mystery.

“What…” I began, not really knowing what to ask.

“It started as a way to cheat my way through mythology classes,” Dante stated with a proud smile.

I laughed. “Didn’t any of your professors catch on?”

“
You
didn’t,” he observed.

“Pagan theology is hardly a subject I spend much time thinking about,” I said, “and, no offense, I wasn’t really looking.”

“Actually,” he said, “one of my professors
did
catch on. He called me into his office to kick me out of his class.”

“And?”

“And I left five hours later, after a giant theological debate, with an honor’s thesis project. I guess he decided he liked me.”

“So you kept inking yourself and he still let you pass the class?”

“Yep.” He beamed. “And graduate with honors. He is now my Ph.D. advisor.”

I smiled at the notion, but then my purse chirped, indicating a new voicemail. The call must have come in while we were on the train. I withdrew my cell phone. No message. I checked Jeff’s cell phone.

With one hand, I paid for tickets to the Pompeii ruins for Dante and myself. With the other, I held Jeff’s cell phone to my ear and listened to the message. It was from my daughter.

“Jeff, it’s Lexi,” Alexis said. “I need to talk to you, badly. I’ve been trying to call. I texted you a couple of times, too. Just… call me back… as soon as you can. Please…”

It is the last day of Alexis’ freshman year. Jeff and I are still technically living apart, but we spend every evening together.

Jeff’s SUV rolls slowly onto the campus of U.C. Berkeley. From behind the steering wheel, he peers at street signs directing him toward Alexis’ dorm. His eyes track a sign on the right hand side of the car before straying to meet mine. He winks.

I am both excited and nervous. I cannot wait for my new boyfriend and my daughter to finally meet in person.

We round a corner near Alexis’ dorm, and there she is. Lexi is standing on the curb with a group of her classmates. Between two fingers, she holds a lit cigarette. She glances up toward our car and smiles at seeing me in the passenger seat. Nonchalantly, she hands the cigarette to one of the girls standing beside her. Then she runs toward the car.

As Jeff pulls the SUV to the curb, Alexis lays her upper body across its hood in front of my seat as if embracing the car in advance of embracing the occupants inside. I roll down the window, and she hugs me fiercely through it.

“You’ve grown again,” I say as I return her hug. “And when did you start smoking?”

She ignores me.

Jeff and I step out of the car, and my daughter sizes him up.

“So…” she says, feigning suspicion. “THIS is the guy who has turned my mother from a logical, hard-assed scientist into a blushing, giggling teenager!” As if to prove her correct, I feel myself blush and cannot control a slight giggle. Jeff, too, smiles and reddens slightly.

“Seriously!” Alexis continues, laughing at her own wit. “You have no idea what a feat this is! Nobel Prize? Piece of cake. Softening up Doctor Katrina Stone? Virtually impossible. Nice job!”

She approaches Jeff and hugs him like an old friend.

“Are you OK?”

I turned to see a concerned Dante Giordano by my side, his eyes upon the cell phone still held to my ear. The message from Alexis had long since finished playing.

“He was shot in our home,” I said, more to myself than to Dante. “He was shot in our home and had lethal levels of morphine in his system. But the morphine was not a contributing factor to his death, which means he had built up a tolerance to it. Which also means he was on drugs. Now my daughter is frantically trying to get hold of him. I wonder if Lexi is somehow involved in whatever connected Jeff with Carmello Rossi.”

“Which would mean that she, too, is in danger,” Dante said.

“Yes.”

“The morphine—that’s why you were asking about the
camorra
running drugs.”

“Yes.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. Your husband would not have to come to Italy for drugs.”

“I know,” I said, and we stepped into the ruins of Pompeii.