Murphy's Law by Lisa Marie Rice

gray head. “I’ll try to contain my grief, Commissario ,” she said dryly.
    Dante searched her eyes and found no trace of grief, sadness or much of anything else. She met his gaze evenly and coolly.
    As Faith Murphy had done.
    Maybe mathematicians were like that. Maybe working with cold numbers all day turned them into cool numbers themselves.
    Being so attuned to women, Dante felt he could read Madeleine Kobbel’s history in her face.
    She was decent-looking, with high cheekbones and unlined skin, but did absolutely nothing to enhance her looks. Her hair, which must have been dark brown once, had been allowed to go steel gray, which aged her. She had on no makeup. Her dress was dark red, long-sleeved and too warm for the day outside.
    “So, Professor Kobbel…” He leaned back in his chair, relaxed, a man idly passing the time chatting with an intelligent woman. “How well did you know Professor Kane?”
    “Well enough,” she replied evenly. “We were colleagues. The mathematics faculty at Southbury is small. There are only fifteen of us, plus some adjunct professor s like Faith. So we all know each other fairly well.”
    “How long have you worked in Southbury, Professor?”
    “Five years in all. Four years on staff,” she said. “Originally I worked as Roland Kane’s personal assistant for a year. He paid my salary out of his own pocket. That year he produced his Theorems of Mathematics , which has become a standard textbook. I liked Southbury itself and I liked the environment at the university. There was a job opening, I applied and I was accepted.”
    “So, the two of you wrote a book together?”
    She was still a moment. “Only Roland’s name appears on the book jacket,” she said finally, her voice neutral.
    “But would it be fair to say that you had…how shall I phrase it?” Dante pursed his lips. He thought about stroking his chin, but decided against it. Overkill. “That you had a—a certain…input into the book?”
    “Oh, yes.” Her voice was dry and she inclined her gray head. “It would be fair to say that.”
    Dante wondered whether stealing someone’s academic work warranted murder.
    He would have thought not, but years on the force had taught him otherwise. He’d once arrested a man in Naples who had burned down another man’s house for winning at briscola , the local card game. Dante had learned long ago that the human heart was fathomless. And this was a female heart, the most mysterious object in nature.
    Time to cut to the chase.
    “And what was Professor Kane like? Can you tell me something about the man? His character? His likes and dislikes?”
    A faint smile creased her face. “As you will no doubt find out, Commissario Rossi, if you haven’t already, Professor Kane was a most unpleasant man. He liked power—both academic and personal—money and alcohol. He was more or less averse to everything else in life. He was intensely disliked by everyone who ever met him. He was an indifferent administrator, an uninspired teacher and a disloyal colleague.”
    Whoa, Dante thought. Why don’t you tell me what you really think?
    “He was also,” Madeleine Kobbel added with a sigh, “a brilliant mathematician. He had, perhaps, too great a love for applied mathematics, for anything he thought would earn him money or prestige or power, but nonetheless he had an extraordinary intuitive grasp of problems. I wouldn’t hesitate to define him as a genius.”
    So most likely it wasn’t being a superior mathematician which had gotten Roland Kane killed. It was being an inferior human being.
    “Did you, personally, dislike him?”
    The corner of her mouth tilted upwards. “If you mean was he my favorite human being, then no. There was no way he could be, given the type of man he was. If the subtext to that question is ‘did you kill him’, then the answer is no once more.”
    “Hmm,” Dante said neutrally. “Can you tell me about last night, Professor Kobbel? Who was there at