Luigi lifted his face to look at her. Then he nodded. “He was with her. She went to him after Cosmos died. They liked each other. Cosmos would have killed Arturo if she’d run off with him before that. No one could know. I’ve admitted this to the police. Cosmos is dead. There’s nothing he can do now.”
“Were there two bodies in the fire?”
He shook his head, looking older than ever. “Only one. Only a man’s body. There was no car. The police found a suicide note at the Agosto estate from the widow. She said she accidentally killed Arturo, her one love, and she flung herself over the cliff after her husband.”
Lissa sank back on her heels, her mouth open, one hand covering it in shock. “Oh, no. Tio. But if you know she accidentally killed him, then why do you think Tomasso has something to do with his death?”
He dug his fingers into her shoulder in a bruising grip. “You don’t understand. I spoke to Arturo earlier. He had accidentally killed her in their sex games. She liked pain. She got off on pain. He always obliged her, but this time she had some kind of reaction, she couldn’t breathe. He tried to save her. He called me sobbing. I told him to take her back to her house and dispose of her body there. He was alive. She was the dead one. He was alive. How did he get back to the building without a car? How did he get into the cuffs? How did the fire start? There had to be someone else there.”
She was silent a moment. “You think that someone was Tomasso? Did he know Cosmos’s wife as well?”
Luigi shook his head. “I don’t know, but everyone else is accounted for.”
“Then we’ll go talk to him. Make certain he’s home. But, Luigi, is it possible Arturo was so upset over the death of the woman he loved that he killed himself? Is there a way to put himself in the cuffs and rig a fire?”
“No. No. He would never do that. He would talk to me. No, Gia, someone did this terrible thing, and we have to find out who it was and punish them. Kill them. Make them suffer and then kill them.”
For the first time in her life, Lissa had something genuine to compare with her uncle’s acting. This was genuine grief. Instead of feeling compassion for him, she felt anger. Betrayal. When he’d come to her and taken her out of the hiding hole her father had told her to run to, this was not how he’d been. The grief back then had been acting. Totally.
She forced herself to put her arms around him. He was actually trembling. “I’ll go to see if Tomasso is in his room, but really, as much as I dislike his arrogance, you know there is no reason for him to do such a thing. We have to look outside the family. Would Aldo come after you this way? If he suspected you had something to do with Cosmos’s death? If he saw Arturo near the house, with Cosmos’s widow, he might have drawn conclusions.”
She patted his knee when he continued to sit there, shaking his head, his body so stunned she knew he was incapable of walking. “I’ll be right back,” she told him, and turned away.
Luigi caught her wrist so that she was forced to turn back to him and give him a small smile. “What is it, Tio?”
“You’re a good girl, Giacinta. A good girl.”
A girl he planned to kill. It was all she could do not to jerk her wrist away.
“Remember to call me Lissa, Tio. Even now, we can’t make a mistake,” she reminded gently.
She didn’t want to think too much about Arturo’s death herself. He’d been kind to her when she’d been a child. Kind when Luigi was distant. Hugging her when her uncle didn’t. When Luigi had been a stern taskmaster, teaching her the art of assassination, it had been Arturo who had been the one to dry her tears when her uncle was angry with her. He wasn’t that man, but still, those were her memories of him.
“Go to your study, Tio. Call the hotel. Check to see if Tomasso was there tonight. You taught me well. I’ll have a conversation with him and see if he knows anything. Trust me to get to the truth.”
She had to help him stand, which necessitated touching him again. She felt repugnance at the closeness, at the way he leaned on her. Patted her shoulder. Acted like she mattered to him, when he was already plotting her death. Women meant nothing to him, not even his own flesh and blood. Evidently, his own brother hadn’t either. But Arturo, Arturo had mattered.
She waited until he was back down the first flight of stairs and down the hall before she hurried up the stairs to the men’s quarters. Knowing the security cameras were on, she knocked, when she wanted to rush right in.
Tomasso opened the door. He looked as if he’d been asleep, but she knew better. He was dressed in nothing but a pair of soft sweatpants and was pulling a T-shirt over his head with one hand. He stepped back to give her entrance and closed the door after her.