Lethal Affairs

CHAPTER ONE


Malta

Present Day

Dawn was still an hour away, so relatively few souls were already at work in the sleepy seaport capital of Malta on this cool June morning. Bakers, of course, and vendors at the open-air market, and fishermen returning from another night of casting their nets into the warm azure waters of the Mediterranean. In the Co-Cathedral of Saint John, five priests prepared for Sunday morning mass.

The massive sixteenth century cathedral was Valletta’s most important historical monument. Its lofty baroque interior and priceless art brought in tourists and had inspired Sir Walter Scott to proclaim it the most magnificent place he had ever seen.

As the eldest of the priests replaced votive candles in the chapels, he stopped occasionally to admire the ornately carved stone walls and the inlaid marble tombs of knights that comprised its floor. Stooped and balding, except for the fringed crown of gray around the back of his head that he now scratched at absently, the monsignor had been at St. John’s for thirty of his sixty-four years, longer than any of the others.

In the nave, the monsignor looked up to admire Mattia Preti’s masterpiece, the vaulted ceiling with its vivid scenes from the life of Saint John painted directly onto the plaster in fresco. He was drawn to the scaffolding around one scene and the intense concentration of the woman at work there.

Like most priests, he was a good listener in the way most people are not. He’d heard tens of thousands confess their sins and so was wiser than most in the nature of men and their ability to hide what was in their heart. And he had grown adept at hearing beyond words, at understanding from someone’s sighs and silences, postures, and expressions what they loved, or dreamed, or feared, or needed to confess.

But the young American was an enigma. He had tried on several occasions to strike up a conversation with her about her life or her work and had found her always well-mannered, almost uncommonly polite, but guarded. And her answers to his questions seemed practiced. Never spontaneous.

He had learned she was thirty-three, unmarried, and that she never knew her parents. She traveled a lot and loved her work, she said, particularly when it involved cathedrals, and she told him her time at Saint John’s had been very rewarding.

And she certainly was a dedicated and capable artisan, always there even before he was, working tirelessly, often late into the night. And the result of her painstaking efforts thus far, in the neighboring scenes, was breathtaking.

But there was much she wasn’t saying. Intense, he thought. Very earnest. He wondered why such an attractive young woman always appeared so lonely. Vowing to try again soon to draw her out, he resumed his preparations for mass.

Luka Madison paused to unzip the top of her navy coveralls, shrugging out of the sleeves to tie them around her waist. Beneath, she wore a black, long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, both molded to her fivefoot six-inch frame. Comfortable sneakers completed the ensemble. Standing for long hours, day after day, seldom bothered her. She was in excellent physical condition, trim and athletically toned but not overly muscular, with dexterous hands used to long labor.

Her medium brown hair needed cutting. She generally liked to wear it only to her shoulder blades, with long bangs she could pin back while she worked, but she lacked the obsession with hair and makeup of most women and had let her usual trim slip by a few weeks longer than normal.

She preferred working in the quiet before dawn, when she heard only the occasional muffled prayers of the priests and their soft footfalls as they carried out their duties.

In an hour, the parishioners would arrive and, later, the tourists, whose constant, whispered conversations created a dull white noise to mar her sense of peace. The smell of burning candles, old and new, grew pungent high on the scaffolding, and the incredible acoustics allowed her to make out snatches of conversations from below. The families—the loving parents and patient grandparents with strings of children in tow—saddened her, because they represented memories she had never had.

But at this time of the morning, in her solitude, she was content. For the last few hours, she had been restoring an auburn-haired angel to her brilliant, almost garish former glory, carefully removing years of candle soot and the previous restorer’s handiwork to reveal what the artist had intended. The lovely face, the only area still unfinished, beckoned to her.

Luka checked her latex gloves for rips before she reached for another bottle of saturated calcium hydroxide and carefully dipped her swab. She brought it over her head once again and applied the solution to the angel’s peaceful smile. As it became more vivid it drew her in.

The sudden vibration of the cell phone in her pocket broke her concentration. She checked the caller ID and sighed. Keeping her voice down, she answered. “Good morning.”