Homeport

down, she realized. To get dressed and go out and walk the streets without destination, without some purpose driving every step. Just to look in store windows, to wander along the river. To feel alive.
    “Miranda.”
    She drew in a breath, glanced over her shoulder and saw Ryan standing in the terrace doorway. “It’s a beautiful morning. Spring, rebirth. I don’t think I really appreciated that before.”
    He crossed the terrace, laid a hand over hers on the parapet. She might have smiled if she hadn’t seen the look in his eye. “Oh God. What now? What happened?”
    “The plumber. Carlo Rinaldi. He’s dead. Hit-and-run, last night. I just heard it on the news.” Her hand turned in his, gripped. “He was walking home near midnight. There weren’t many more details.” A cold fury worked through him. “He had three children, and another on the way.”
    “It could have been an accident.” She wanted to cling to that, thought she might have been able to if she hadn’t looked into Ryan’s eyes. “But it wasn’t. Why would anyone kill him? He isn’t connected to the lab. He can’t know anything.”
    “He’s been making a lot of noise. For all we know, he might have been in on the whole thing from the beginning. Either way, he found it, he had it for several days. He would have studied it. He was a loose end, Miranda, and loose ends get snipped.”
    “Like Giovanni.” She moved away from him. She could live with it, she told herself. She had to. “Was there anything in the news about Giovanni?”
    “No, but there will be. Get dressed. We’re going out.”
    Out, she thought, but not to wander the streets, to stroll along the river, to just be. “All right.”
    “No arguments?” He raised an eyebrow. “No where, what, why?”
    “Not this time.” She stepped into the bedroom and closed the doors.
    Thirty minutes later, they were at a phone booth and Ryan was doing something he’d avoided all of his life. He was calling the cops.
    He pitched his voice toward the upper scale, used a nervous whisper and colloquial Italian to report a body in the second-floor lab at Standjo. He hung up on the rapid questions. “That should do it. Let’s get moving in case the Italian police have caller-ID.”
    “Are we going back to the hotel?”
    “No.” He swung onto the bike. “We’re going to your mother’s. You navigate.”
    “My mother’s?” Her vow not to question was swallowed up in shock. “Why? Are you crazy? I can’t take you to my mother’s.”
    “I figure there won’t be a nice linguine and red sauce for lunch, but we’ll catch a pizza on the way. That should give it enough time.”
    “For what?”

    “For the cops to find the body, for her to hear about it. What do you figure she’ll do when she does?”
    “She’ll go straight to the lab.”
    “That’s what I’m counting on. That should give us a nice window to search her place.”
    “We’re going to break into my mother’s home?”
    “Unless she leaves a spare key under the mat. Put this on.” He pulled a ball cap out of the saddlebags. “The neighbors will spot that hair of yours a mile away.”
     
    “I don’t see the point in this,” Miranda said an hour later, sitting on the bike behind him half a block down from her mother’s home. “I can’t justify breaking into my mother’s home, rummaging through her things.”
    “Any paperwork dealing with your tests that was kept at the lab is a loss. There’s a chance she might have copies here.”
    “Why would she?”
    “Because you’re her daughter.”
    “It wouldn’t matter to her.”
    But it matters to you, Ryan thought. “Maybe, maybe not. Is that her?”
    Miranda looked back at the house, caught herself ducking behind Ryan like a schoolgirl playing hooky. “Yes, I guess you called this part of it.”
    “Attractive woman. You don’t look much like her.”
    “Thank you so much.”
    He only chuckled and watched Elizabeth, ruthlessly groomed in a dark suit, unlock her car. “Keeps her cool,” he noted. “You wouldn’t know to look at her that she’s just been told her business has been broken into, and one of her employees is dead.”
    “My mother isn’t given to outward displays of emotion.”
    “Like I said, you’re not much like her. Okay, we’ll walk down from here. She won’t be back for a couple of hours, but we’ll do this in one to keep it simple.”
    “There’s nothing simple here.” She watched him sling his bag over his