The Villa

since I'm a corporate suit, not a detective."
    Tyler studied him over his coffee. "From what I've seen so far you're not much of a time-waster. And you're not so bad, for a suit."
    With a half-laugh, David lifted his own coffee. Steam from it rose and merged with the mist. "Coming from you, that's a hell of a kudo."
    "Damn right."
    "Well. From what I can tell, Margaret never even met Baptista. He was dead before she took over Avano's accounts and started the travel to Italy."
    "Doesn't matter if they were random victims."
    David shook his head. "It matters if they're not."
    "Yeah, I've been thinking that, too." Tyler got up to stretch his legs, and they began to walk the rows together.
    Somewhere along the way, he realized, he'd lost his resentment of David. Just as well, he thought. It took so much damn energy to hold a grudge. And it was a waste of that energy and valuable time when both of them were on the same page in any case.
    "They both worked for Giambelli, both knew the family." Ty paused. "Both knew Avano."
    "He was dead before Margaret uncorked the bottle. Still, we don't know how long she had it. He'd have had plenty of reason to want her out of the way."
    "Avano was an asshole," Tyler said flatly. "He was a prick on top of it. But I can't see him as a killer. Too much thought, too much effort and not enough guts."
    "Did anybody like him?"
    "Sophie." Tyler shrugged and wished he could keep her out of his mind for more than ten minutes at a time. "At least she tried to. And yeah, actually, plenty did, and not just women."
    It was the first time David had been offered a straight and uncensored picture of Anthony Avano. "Because?"
    "He had a good line, put on a good show. Slick. I'd've said grease through a goose slick, but he got away with it." As his own father did, Ty mused. "Some people, they just slither through life, knocking over bystanders with, you know, impunity. He was one of them."
    " La Signora kept him on."
    "For Pilar, for Sophia. That's the family end. On the business front, well, he knew how to keep the accounts happy."
    "Yeah, his expense account shows just how much he put into that effort. So with Margaret leapfrogging over him, he was losing his opportunities to wine and dine on Giambelli's tab. Had to piss him off. At the company, at the family, at her."
    "His style would've been to try to fuck her, not kill her."
    Tyler stopped, his breath streaming out as he looked over the rows, scanned them line after line. It was colder now. His internal farmer's gauge told him it was edging down toward thirty degrees.
    "I'm not a corporate suit, but I've got to figure all this trouble is costing the company plenty in profit and in appearances, which can translate to the same thing. If somebody wanted to cause the family trouble, they found an inventive and nasty way to do it."
    "Between the recall, immediate public panic and long-term consumer distrust in the label, it's going to cost millions. It's going to affect profit across the board, and that includes what's yours."
    "Yeah." He'd already faced the grim reality of that. "I figure Sophia's smart enough to take the edge off that long-term distrust."
    "She's going to have to be more than smart. She'll have to be brilliant."
    "She is. That's what makes her a pain in the ass."
    "Stuck on her, are you?" David waved the comment away. "Sorry. Too personal."
    "I was wondering if you were asking as a corporate suit, an associate or as the guy who's dating her mother."
    "I was aiming toward friend."
    Tyler thought about it a moment, then nodded. "Okay, that works for me. I guess you could say I've been stuck on her on and off since I was twenty. Sophie at sixteen," he remembered. "Christ. She was like a lightning bolt. And she knew it. Irritated the hell out of me."
    For a moment, while the misting water sizzled and froze, David was silent. "There was a girl when I was in college." He was pleasantly surprised when Tyler tugged a flask from his pocket and offered it. "Marcella Roux. French. Legs up to her ears, and this sexy little overbite."
    "An overbite." Ty settled into the image. "That's a good one."
    "Oh yeah." David drank, letting the brandy punch into his system. "God, Marcella Roux. She scared the hell out of me."
    "A woman who looks like that, who is like that, just wears you out." Tyler took the flask, drank. "Me, I figured if you had to be stuck on a woman, which is an annoyance itself, you might as well get stuck on one who's easy to be