Good Blood

“Well, what the hell do you call kidnapping and murder?” Caravale demanded.

“I said ‘proof.’”

“I have two men dead. I have a boy kidnapped and held for ransom. That’s not enough proof for you?”

“For me, yes. For the Latvian Court of Justice...mm, no. You’re out of luck, Tullio. Maybe two years from now you’ll squeeze a little information from them. Even then, I doubt if they’ll be able to tell you who the account holder is. Or was; I expect he’ll close the account and disappear the minute he gets the money. Wouldn’t you?”

Caravale shook his head. Where did he go from here? There were no leads, no voices to try to trace (except for that indistinct “Louder, kid.”), no evidence that could be physically linked to them, no vehicle to put a tracking device on...

He sighed. “Well, thanks for your help, Massimiliano.”

“Next time you envy my assignment in Rome,” d’Este said, “just remember that I have to deal with this kind of frustration every day.”

“Who said I envied your assignment in Rome?” Caravale said.

AFTER four days spent with the travel group, Gideon was getting a little desperate. It wasn’t that the Pedal and Paddle Adventure itself had been unpleasant—the leisurely days of kayaking and sightseeing from Arona at the south end of the lake up past Stresa and through the Borromean Islands had been relaxing and fun, at least until the rains had hit that morning, and the food had been decent. The bicycling was still to come, a two-day trip to and around little Lake Orta that would conclude the tour, and Gideon would probably give that a skip, especially if the rain kept up. Even the camping accommodations, truth be told, hadn’t looked too bad, although the well-equipped, two-and four-person platform tents were usually set up in the midst of smelly, lumbering RVs packed with French- or German-speaking families loaded with noisy kids. And while Phil had asked Gideon to help out once or twice, the duties had hardly been onerous.

He’d been able to stick to his clean-bed, private-bath stipulations by driving out in the rented Fiat to meet the group every morning, spending the day with them, then getting a taxi back to the morning’s starting point—they covered only five or six miles a day, so it was easy enough—getting back into the car, and returning to the Hotel Primavera in Stresa for a solitary, enjoyable glass of wine, usually at a sidewalk cafe, and a good meal in one of the town’s many restaurants. Everything seemed to be working out just fine.

Well, almost. By day four he was feeling a bit like a fifth wheel—unneeded and maybe a little in the way. Or it could have been that he was simply getting restless. Gideon was one of that unfortunate breed who could take only a few days of pure vacation at a time before he began to get twitchy. He needed something to do. Classes had been out for almost two weeks, and it had been two months since he’d finished his last forensic case. He wished now that he’d brought a paper or a course curriculum to work on, although he knew that there would have been no way to do that without hauling a great load of research materials to Italy with him. And regardless of how much he brought, the items he would turn out to need wouldn’t be among them; he’d learned that through experience. Still, that didn’t prevent him from feeling vaguely guilty and at loose ends.

The tour members, by and large, were pleasant enough—mostly middle-aged, travel-experienced couples from around the United States, appreciative and undemanding. However, as he soon learned, the Prime Law of the Classroom—in every group of students, no matter how delightful otherwise, there must be one whose mere presence makes you cringe—also applied to tour groups. (This law, as all professors knew, was so immutable that even if you were lucky enough to somehow get rid of the offending member, another would invariably come forward in his or her place.)

In the case of the Italian Lakes Pedal and Paddle Adventure, the inevitable fly in the ointment, or maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, was Paula Ardlee-Arbogast, one of the few singles and the quietest and most retiring of the group—a stick-thin, flat-muscled woman of forty-five who kept pretty much to herself. But on the fourth day, after Gideon had helped the group stow their kayaks in the racks at the Campeggio Paradiso “camping village”—jammed, as they all seemed to be, even on a wet, gloomy day like this—and after he’d taken his now-customary “quality time” walk alone in the rain with Julie along the lake, Paula approached him respectfully just after he’d called for a taxi from the public telephone. He was seated, soaked to the skin despite his windbreaker, at a covered picnic table, waiting for it to arrive.

She hesitated. “Am I bothering you?” She was wearing a plastic raincoat, but she looked as waterlogged as he was. Dripping, ginger-colored hair hung in strings beneath the brim of a transparent rain hat.

“Of course not,” he said. “Sit down, get out of the rain.”

She sat on the bench across from him, shoulders hunched, hands clasped in her lap, screwing up her courage. “This is fantastic!” she surprised him by gushing. “I can’t believe I’m actually here talking to you.” Her eyes were stretched wide. “I read your book.”

“Oh, did you?” Gideon asked. He had two books to his credit: A Structuro-functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phylogeny, a 400-page text now in its third edition; and Bones to Pick: Wrong Turns, Dead Ends, and Popular Misconceptions in the Study of Humankind, a popular treatment for the general reader, published last year. Whenever a stranger would come up to him and say “I read your book,” he had a pretty good idea which one they were referring to. Not that it happened often enough to do anything but please him.

“I thought it was absolutely fascinating.”

“Thank you.” Bones to Pick, all right. “Fascinating” wasn’t a word likely to be applied to A Structurofunctional Approach.

“Especially the chapter on the contribution of demographic factors to the demise of the Neanderthals. I’m very interested in the Neanderthals.”

He blinked. Amazing. The woman had actually read A Structuro-functional Approach! Other than graduate students and professional colleagues, this was a first. “Well, thank you,” he said, this time with complete sincerity.

“I wanted to ask you—uh, do you have a minute?”

“Sure, I’m just waiting for a taxi to show up. What did you want to ask?” A professor through and through, he was always ready to talk about his subject with an interested audience.

“I wanted to ask your opinion of the EBE-interference theory.”

“Um... I’m not sure I’m familiar—”