The Villa

you whether, in your opinion, my cousin killed my… killed Anthony Avano."
    "Ms. Giambelli." Maguire set her coffee aside. "It isn't our function to speculate. We gather evidence."
    "We've been connected, you and I, for months. You've looked into my life, into the personal details of it. While I understand that the nature of your business requires a certain professional distance, I'm asking for a little compassion. It's possible Donato is still in Italy. My daughter's in Italy, Detective Maguire. A man I care for very much was nearly killed. A man I was married to for half my life is dead. My only child is six thousand miles away. Please don't leave me helpless."
    "Ms. Giambelli—"
    "Alex," Maguire began before he could finish. "I'm sorry, Pilar, I can't tell you what you want to hear. I just don't have the answer. You know your cousin better than I do. Tell me."
    "I've thought of it, of little else, for days," Pilar began. "I wish I could say we were close, that I understood his heart and his mind. But I don't. A week ago I would have said, oh, Donato. He can be foolish, but he has a good nature. Now there's no doubt he was a thief, that he and the man I was married to were in league together stealing from the woman who allowed them to make a living."
    She picked up her coffee cup to fill her hands. "Stealing from me. From my daughter. But even then, even knowing this, when I try to picture him sitting in my daughter's living room, facing a man he'd known all those years and killing him. I can't do it. I can't put the gun in Don's hand. I don't know if that's because it doesn't belong there, or because I can't bear to believe it."
    "You're worried he'll go after your daughter. There's no reason for him to do that."
    "If he's done all these things, isn't the fact that she exists reason enough?"
     
    In her office, behind closed doors, Kris Drake raged. The Giambellis, headed by that little bitch Sophia, were still trying to ruin her. Sicced the cops on her, she thought as she pounded a fist into her palm. It wouldn't do them a damn bit of good. They thought they could weasel it all around, pin her with Tony's murder. Even tie her to the product tampering, to big-shot Cutter's little accident in Venice.
    Shaking with fury, she thumbed open a pill bottle, dry-swallowed a tranquilizer.
    They couldn't prove she'd been the one to give Sophia that helpful shove on the terrace. They couldn't prove anything. So what if she'd slept with Tony? It wasn't a crime. He'd been good to her, appreciated her, understood her and what she wanted to accomplish.
    He'd made her promises. Promises the Giambelli bitches had seen to he couldn't keep. The lousy cheat, she thought with affection. They'd have made a good team if he'd just listened to her. If he hadn't let that whore talk him into marriage.
    But it all lay down on the Giambellis, she reminded herself. They'd made certain that slut Rene Foxx knew about her, too. Now her name was being tossed around in the press, and she was getting smirking looks from coworkers.
    Just as she had at Giambelli.
    She'd come too far, worked too hard to let those Italian divas ruin her career. Without Jerry's support, she might already be out on her ear. Thank God he was standing up for her, that he understood she was a victim, a target.
    She owed him the inside information she was passing on. Let Giambelli try to sue her over it. La Coeur would fight for her. Jerry had made that clear from the beginning. She was valued here.
    La Coeur was going to give her everything she'd always wanted. Prestige, power, status, money. By the time she was forty, she'd be listed as one of the top one hundred women in business. She'd be the fucking female executive of the year.
    And not because someone had handed it to her in the cradle. Because she'd earned it.
    But it wasn't enough. Not enough payback for the interrogations by the police, for the smears in the press, for the slights given her when she'd been at Giambelli.
    Giambelli was going down, she thought. But there were ways to make the family tremble as it fell.
     
    It was a long flight across an ocean, across a continent. He slept through most of it, and when he'd revived himself with coffee, called in for an update. Though he reached Eli and got filled in on what happened in Italy since he'd left, he was disappointed to have missed his kids and Pilar.
    He wanted home. And by the time he landed at the Napa airfield, he resented even the short drive that