“I don’t care if she saw us kill Corsini or not, she saw us. When the news gets out that someone was garroted in the old church, she’ll remember seeing us there.”
He’d shrugged. “What does it matter? We’ll be l
ong gone, and we’ll look completely different. No one will connect either of us with the hit—we’ve made sure of it. We just go ahead as we’d planned—spend the night in town and then move on. She’s no danger to us.”
“Since when have you become so sentimental? She’s a liability, and I’m not about to endanger myself because you’re feeling sentimental.”
“Our orders concerning collateral damage have changed and you know it. We don’t need to add to the body count,” he’d said irritably. He’d had no choice but to kill Corsini’s chauffeur—the man had tried to cut his throat—but he still had blood on his hands, and he was feeling like god-damned Lady Macbeth. There was only so much Claudia’s perfumed wipes could remove, and even he couldn’t bring himself to rinse his hands in the font of holy water at the entrance to the church. Too much of his ancient Catholic upbringing coming back to haunt him, he thought.
“Changed for the worse,” Claudia had snapped. “I don’t care how squeamish Peter Madsen is, I’m not going to feel comfortable until she’s disposed of. If you’re too much of a pussy to do it, I will.”
Bishop had kept his temper under control. “I’ll check her out. If I think she’s a problem, I’ll take care of it,” he’d said shortly.
“She’s a problem.”
“That’s for me to decide.”
“No, it isn’t. Cut her throat, dump her with the chauffeur, and then get your ass back down to the town.”
He’d given her the silky smile that always pissed her off. “And what makes you think you’re in charge here, Claudia? You’re the operative, I’m the handler. You took care of the old man, but I’m overseeing the operation. I make the decision—you live with it.”
Claudia had snarled at him before taking off in the Lexus, peeling out of the parking space and tearing down the hill at suicidal speeds. He’d watched her go for a moment. It would make things a lot simpler if she simply took one corner too fast. She was unstable, and that was always a concern. Sooner or later Madsen was going to have to do something about her, but that wasn’t his problem. He was just going to have to put up with her bad temper back at the hotel.
Which was the least of his worries. If he had to silence this particular witness he was going to be in a thoroughly rotten mood himself.
She had stopped and looked at Corsini, and he wondered if she could see anything. She didn’t look perturbed, just continued down the aisle toward him, and for a crazy moment he thought of a bride walking to meet her groom. Some bride, he thought, the trace of a smile tugging at his mouth. She looked as if she’d been rolling in dust, she had scrapes on her long legs, and her hair beneath the bandanna was a mess.
She finally reached him, and if there was a slight hesitation in her step only he would have noticed. She looked him in the eye, plastered a totally fake smile on her face, the same one she’d given them before, and greeted him as she had before, in American-accented Italian, though this time with a hint of a question in her greeting.
He answered in the same language, with a better accent. “Good afternoon, signorina. It’s a very fine church, isn’t it?”
She was definitely nervous, looking up at him uneasily despite her friendly smile, but that could be simply because she was alone in a deserted place with an unknown man. For Claudia that would be enough to blow her head off. He wasn’t as trigger-happy. “Very fine,” she agreed. “I’ve been studying it.”
“You are a student?” He was stringing out this inconsequential conversation while he covertly watched her. She was looking at him as if he were a murderer, he thought resignedly. He was going to have to kill her after all.
“Sort of,” she answered, and he wondered why she was prevaricating. It raised his suspicions. “If you’ll excuse me, signor, I have to get back to town . . .”
“You’re American, aren’t you?” he said suddenly in English. Maybe he could get a better sense of her in her own language.
She looked startled. “Y . . . yes. And you?”
“From Connecticut,” he lied, but an East Coast polish went better with his current incarnation. He was actually from the endless winters of Wyoming, from miles and miles of emptiness and spiky mountains and bone-deep cold. “What is your area of interest?”
She clearly wasn’t in the mood for idle conversation. She seemed anxious to get away from him, and that might have sealed her fate. “Medieval clerical architecture,” she admitted finally. “With an emphasis on walled towns. And now I really need . . .”
“You picked a good town for it then,” he said, cutting off her excuse to leave. “I haven’t been back home for a number of years, but unless things have changed drastically I wouldn’t think there’d be a whole lot of jobs in that area.”
“I teach college. I already have my degree, I’m just working on a project.” She seemed to struggle with the words, and he wondered what she really wanted to say. What was she covering up?
“You’re an academic?” he said, and she winced.
“I suppose so,” she said reluctantly. “Excuse me, but I really need to go.” She was already edging away, and he kept himself from reaching for her. If she ran he could catch her. That, or bury a bullet in the back of her brain with the same amount of care it took him to tie his shoes.
“Do you have a car?” he asked, stalling her as she turned to leave.
She blinked those gorgeous green eyes of hers. They were startling—a clear emerald color that had to be from contacts, just as his own eye color was.
She was looking at him warily, filled with distrust. Shit.