Death Night

“Understood.”

“But when I stepped outside and noticed that there was still police activity going on at the museum, I thought you’d be here.”

“You thought correctly.”

Kat had finally reached the sidewalk. She started to shake Henry’s hand, changed her mind, and went in for a hug. She felt a little foolish as she wrapped her arms around his waist. Still, the hug was as long as it was tight.

“You shouldn’t have left like that,” she said. “You didn’t even say good-bye.”

Henry, stiffened to the point of paralysis by her embrace, cleared his throat. “I sent you a postcard.”

“That’s not a good-bye. That’s an ‘Oh, by the way, I skipped town.’ I never thought I’d see you again.”

“I’m sorry,” Henry said. “It was wrong of me to vanish like that. And it’s good to see you, too.”

Kat took it to mean she should stop hugging him. But when she finally pulled away, she noticed that Henry Goll, the most stoic man she had ever known, was now smiling.

5 A.M. (#ulink_1f855457-5e92-592b-8067-fc29bdd676c8)

He wasn’t remotely tired, although he should have been exhausted. Sleeping on a plane isn’t the same as sleeping in a bed, and his rest during the flight had been fitful at best. But it was 11 A.M. in Rome, and Henry was as wide awake in Perry Hollow as he would have been there. Jet lag was a bitch.

Kat Campbell, however, looked ready to sleep for days. When they climbed into their booth at the Perry Hollow Diner, the first thing she ordered was a pot of coffee. She then looked across the table at Henry and asked, in all seriousness, “What will you be drinking?”

Henry also ordered coffee, although a single cup and not the whole pot.

They were the sole customers at the diner, the only place in town that was open all night, so their java came quickly. Kat gulped hers down like a man stumbling parched from a desert. Henry sipped his, finding it disappointingly weak. Ten months in Italy had turned him into a coffee snob. If it wasn’t espresso of the highest quality, his taste buds wanted nothing to do with it.

“How have you been?” Kat asked rapidly, fueled by the caffeine. “Where have you been? Tell me everything.”

“But I want to know how you’re doing,” Henry said. “And James. And Nick.”

“You first,” Kat demanded.

He quickly brought her up to speed on all that had happened since they last saw each other. First was the recovery period, slow and painful. Then his decision to escape his past (again) and start a new life (again) in a place far away—this time Italy. Since he was already fluent in Italian, it didn’t take him long to get a job at the country’s largest daily newspaper. It was based in Rome, but he wrote almost exclusively about American issues.

“I’m like a foreign correspondent,” he told Kat, “except I never leave.”

He talked at length about life in Italy. The charming apartment where he could glimpse the top of the Colosseum from his bathroom window. The great food that forced him to double the length of his daily workouts. The amazing opera productions, including a performance of La Traviata at La Scala in Milan, which was the best thing he had ever seen and heard. The excellent wines, which got him through the frequent nights when what happened in Perry Hollow haunted his dreams.

As he spoke, he felt the heat of Kat’s gaze on his face. She hadn’t seen him since that horrible night in the Perry Mill. Henry had made sure of that. Now she was making up for lost time, studying him in an attempt to survey the damage. The attention to his scars would have annoyed him if it was coming from someone else. He let Kat look because he knew she cared.

“You can talk about it,” Henry told her. “I don’t pretend they’re not there.”

“It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be,” Kat said. “You suffered a lot. And I assumed the damage would be worse.”

“The doctors did what they could.” Henry took a sip of his coffee. It was piping hot and came close to scalding his tongue. His lips, however, felt none of it. The scar tissue there desensitized everything. “The rest I have to live with.”

Kat stared into her coffee cup, suddenly unable to look him in the eyes. “Henry, I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner. I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”

Henry reached across the table and took her hands. They were soft and surprisingly delicate. He had expected someone as tough as Kat to have equally hardened hands.

“I refuse to listen to an apology from you,” he said. “You helped save my life, and I will always be grateful for that. Besides, I had scars before all that happened.” He pointed to the mark at his temple before moving down to the long line that sliced through his lips. “Or don’t you remember these?”

“I just wish that I could have done something to spare you from getting more of them.”

“I prefer scars to death,” Henry said. “Besides, you have no idea how intriguing it makes me to the Italians.”

That was probably the thing that surprised him most about living in Rome. Many women, and a good number of men, came on to him in bars, at work functions, on the street. It helped that he kept himself in peak physical condition. But he had a feeling that the scars, which made him feel like a freak and an outsider in the United States, gave him an air of mystery to the Italians. In a country full of beautiful people, he stood out by being the opposite. During his first week in Rome, a woman had approached him in the Piazza di Spagna, asking if she could paint his portrait. Henry declined the offer.

“It sounds like you’ve created a good life there,” Kat said. “But are you happy?”

She knew about Henry’s past. The wife who died when she was nine months pregnant. The car accident that had given him his first round of scars. The torture he had been subjected to at the hands of the Grim Reaper. More than anyone else, Kat Campbell understood his pain.

“Yes, I’m happy,” Henry answered.

He was lying but not by much. He wasn’t unhappy. He was content to live in quiet solitude—that hadn’t changed since his Perry Hollow days—and deep down he understood that’s how it was meant to be. Both times he had grown to love someone, they had been taken away from him in very different ways. He now knew it was foolish to fall in love a third time, so he didn’t even try.

But the funny thing about living in Rome was that he was never truly alone. The ancient city was always bustling, filled with tourists and locals alike, all pressing up against each other in the squares, on the buses, in the restaurants still thick with cigarette smoke. Henry enjoyed that feeling of being by himself yet simultaneously being a part of something bigger.

“Now another question,” Kat said. “The big one. Why on earth are you back in Perry Hollow?”

“I’m on assignment.”

“But you said you never leave.”

“I don’t,” Henry said. “But something came up. A story. So my editor sent me here.”

“What kind of story?”

“You ever hear of a man named Giuseppe Fanelli?”

Kat shook her head.

“He’s an Italian businessman. Very rich. Worth billions. And very famous. He lives for publicity, good or bad. He’s like the Donald Trump of Italy. With better hair, of course. A few days ago, we got word that he was tied up in something in the United States.”

Kat gasped. “The mafia?”

“No,” Henry said dryly. “But great job stereotyping an entire nation.”

“If I ever get to Italy, I’ll be sure to apologize.”

“Fanelli’s reputation is clean. He’s a real estate developer. Over the summer, he formed a U.S. subsidiary of his European company. Fanelli Entertainment USA. It was registered in Philadelphia and created, we presume, for the express purpose of buying land and developing projects in America.”

Kat straightened in her seat, suddenly—and seriously—interested. “What kind of projects are we talking about?”

“Megamalls. Skyscrapers. Soccer stadiums. Fanelli never buys any land unless he intends to build something huge there.”

“So I’m assuming he bought some land close to here.”