Murder in the Land of the Witches (Jackie Holiday Murder Series Book 2) Read online

  Murder in the Land of the Witches

  Copyright: Jackie Holiday

  Published: February 19 2015

  The right of Jackie Holiday to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this e-book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  MURDER BOOKS IN ORDER

  Murder in the E.R.

  Murder in the Land of the Witches

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 ~ The Job

  Chapter 2 ~ Transatlantic

  Chapter 3 ~ The Family

  Chapter 4 ~ Venice

  Chapter 5 ~ The Fitting

  Chapter 6 ~ The Wedding

  Chapter 7 ~ Carabinieri

  Chapter 8 ~ The Gambaros

  Chapter 9 ~ Two Cops, a Girl and a Cameraman

  Chapter 10 ~ Verona

  Chapter 11 ~ Poverty, Sickness and Love

  Chapter 12 ~ Bruno

  Chapter 13 ~ Adelina

  Chapter 14 ~ Welcome to San Marco

  Chapter 15 ~ I Don’t Like This Train

  Chapter 16 ~ The Brothers

  Chapter 17 ~ Sisterly Love

  Chapter 18 ~ The Test

  Chapter 19 ~ Tommaso and his Donkey

  Chapter 20 ~ One of Us

  Chapter 21 ~ Donna

  Chapter 22 ~ Moonlit Ride

  Chapter 23 ~ Let’s Go Hunting

  Chapter 24 ~ Machine Gun Fire

  Chapter 25 ~ Shooting Balloons

  Chapter 26 ~ Flight

  Chapter 27 ~ Reunion

  Chapter 28 ~ The Catacombs

  Chapter 29 ~ The Dark

  Chapter 30 ~ Don Vittorio

  Chapter 31 ~ The Wedding

  Chapter 32 ~ The Honeymoon

  List of Characters

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  The Job

  Two men, bound and gagged, lay on the Turkish rug. One of the men grimaced in pain as the black hose running beneath his thigh heated. One end of the hose snaked across the living room floor, out the broken window of the Italian villa and disappeared into the back of a white milk truck parked in the gravel drive. The other end of the hose wound its way up the marble stairs, down a hall, into a lavish bedroom, coming to an end in a walk-in closet. In the closet, kneeling beside the massive steel safe was a young man. The veins on the backs of his hands stood out as he held the drill in position. The muscles in his arms and chest were cast in vivid relief by the light from the bedroom reaching into the dim closet. Dull titanium drill bits littered the floor.

  27 years old and ruggedly handsome, Rico paused, wiped the sweat from his brow and looked over his shoulder. Standing in the doorway, blocking his light, was his younger sister.

  Adelina's silhouette stood outlined in the doorway. Dressed all in black: sports bra, spandex pants, ankle length boots and a nylon tactical belt slung low on her hip, bearing a silenced pistol and an assortment of razor-sharp throwing knives.

  “Adelina, what are you doing? You're supposed to be in the truck with the equipment.”

  Brow furrowed, chin thrust forward in defiance, Adelina said, “How come I'm supposed to be in the truck? How come you're not in the truck?”

  Rico, exasperated, said, “Now is not the time, Adelina. Get back in the truck. I’m almost done here. Go get things ready.”

  Adelina looked down at her older brother with a scowl and started to open her mouth. Seeing the look in her brother’s eyes, Adelina bit back her retort and with a grunt, turned on her heel and left the room. Rico picked up the heavy drill, squirted some oil on the bit, and went back to work.

  Thin corkscrews of shiny steel fell from the bit, making a glittering pile on the floor. As the drill bit passed through the inside wall of the safe, Rico took a deep breath and pulled it out. He held the bit to the light coming from the bedroom and was pleased to see the end covered with a thin film of gold. Rico picked up the thick black hose and slid the shiny tungsten end into the hole he had just drilled. From a toolbox he pulled a steel strap, placed it over the hose and screwed it securely to the floor with a battery operated drill. Rico clicked the talk button on his walkie-talkie and said, “Start the gas.”

  From the small speaker, Adelina's voice said, “Done.”

  Rico pressed a red button several times creating a spark with the pezio-electric crystal inside the safe. On the third press he could hear the torch kick to life with the roar of a blast furnace. Rico again used his walkie-talkie to call down to Adelina, “Up the gas and turn up the power on the heating coil.”

  Again he heard Adelina's monosyllabic reply, “Done.”

  Rico thought, “This had better work…” It had all been his idea. He had explained it to his father weeks ago…

  “Papa,” he had said, “One hole! One hole is all we need!”

  His father had sat back in his leather armchair and shaken his head. “How, Rico? How are you going to get one thousand kilos of gold out of a safe with one hole? It’s impossible.”

  “Heat, Papa. We take a hose and inside that hose we run four smaller hoses: two of them for oxygen and acetylene to melt the gold, one for a vacuum line to suck the molten gold out and another to suck out the exhaust fumes. We’ll have to heat the hose as well to keep the gold from turning solid as we pump it…”

  Rico’s father sat in thought and reached for a cigar case that was no longer there. Disappointed, he withdrew his hand and said, “Hmm… That safe is state of the art. It’s supposed to be uncrackable… If this could work…”

  Rico pulled a paper from his pocket and passed it to his father. “See, the melting point of gold is about 1000Celsius. Oxy acetylene gas will give us 3500, thermite burns at 5000but in an enclosed space such as a safe we won’t need it. At 3500 we shouldn’t even need to heat the hose, but just in case, we can wrap it with an electric heating coil.”

  Rico’s father asked, “How long before you can try it?”

  “A month, maybe less. We can do trials with lead, do surveillance on the Gambaro’s villa and we’ll have to re-enforce the suspension of a truck…”

  Rico’s father thought, “Stealing gold from the Gambaro family will bankrupt them.” He nodded his consent and said, “Don Gambaro is a romantic fool to store all his money in gold. Get started.” As Rico turned to leave, his father had said, “I want Adelina to work with you.”

  Rico didn’t argue. Nobody argued with Rico’s father and lived to tell about it.

  Rico aimed a laser thermometer at the safe and read it’s outside temperature. “1200 C, any hotter and the steel’s going to melt… Then again it has to be nearly empty,” he thought. Sure enough, moments later, Rico heard the satisfying sound of the vacuum sucking air.

 
As Rico walked down the stairs he could smell something burning… burning flesh. As he came into the living room, he could see the two men he had left bound and gagged lying still. He walked over to their lifeless bodies and saw a bullet hole in each of their foreheads. The man with the heated hose running under one of his legs was giving off plumes of black acrid smoke. Rico gagged and swore under his breath. He crossed the room quickly, stepped up onto the windowsill and hopped lightly down to the ground. As he took a breath of fresh air, he looked around to see that no one had been alerted to his presence.

  Rico opened one of the back doors of the truck. The escaping heat hit him in the face like an oven. Adelina stood in a silver heat suit, the kind worn by volcanologists when working on active volcanoes. A stream of gold flowed from the end of the hose, which she held with an asbestos mitt. Adelina moved the end of the hose over the molds as a baker making cupcakes. When the last drops of molten gold dripped into the last of the empty ingot molds, Adelina turned off the flow of oxygen and acetylene and switched off the power to the heater coil. Rico put one arm over his face and reached in for a pair of heavy cutters. Grasping the long handles, he took the cutter to the black hose and like a proud father, cut the umbilical of his “brain child”. Rico jumped into the driver’s seat, started the truck and put it in first gear. With over a ton of gold weighing down the truck, the engine protested, then quieted down as he picked up speed. With the windows open, the truck lost the feel of Dante’s inferno. Rico spoke into his walkie talkie, “Everybody move out.” Men slipped from the doors of the villa and from behind trees; non-descript men, dressed as field workers, who disappeared into the surrounding woods.

  Adelina finished stripping off her heat suit, slid into the cab and dropped into the passenger seat. 22 years old, she moved with the grace of a panther. Her jet-black hair and piercing eyes, light brown, almost golden eyes, had always reminded Rico of a panther as well.

  Cradled in an asbestos mitt, Adelina held one of the gold ingots, which sparkled in the sun. Gazing at the ingot she asked, “Can I have this one?”

  Rico, not taking his eyes from the road said, “Sure. Why not?” Adelina laughed with pleasure. Rico took a quick glance at the ingot and asked, “What's so special about that one?”

  “The gold in this one was coming out a little chunky. I was afraid that the hose was going to get clogged. As the ingot filled I could see little specs of green, red and clear sinking to the bottom and realized that they were emeralds, rubies and diamonds. There must have been some jewelry in the safe as well as the gold.”

  Those gems could be worth a fortune, but Rico had already said yes…

  As they turned onto the main road, Rico remembered the two dead men. His orders had been clear: No killing if it could be avoided. They were out to bankrupt the Gambaros, not kill them… Rico didn’t like to be made the fool, even by his little sister. He asked, “Was it necessary to kill those two men? You knew who they were.”

  Adelina kicked off her boots, lay back in her seat and hung her bare feet out the window. She put her hands behind her head and said, “You're too soft, Rico. You’ve always been too soft, even when we were children. Remember that fox we found in the trap? The one that you wanted to let go?”

  Rico remembered. It still made him uncomfortable to think back on that day. He could picture the scene in his mind… Adelina in her pretty dress, bashing the fox's head in with a stone. She had been covered in gore and laughing her head off. When he had turned away she had called him a baby. Rico said, “It's one thing to bankrupt a rival family, it's another to kill their men. Do we really want a war?”

  Adelina smiled and said, “I do. I’ll show father who his worthy successor is. I don't think he'll choose a weakling like you.”

  Rico glanced in the rearview mirror and asked, “You think he'll choose a hot-head like you Adelina? You just killed Don Gambaro’s sons. If you were Don, you'd have the whole of Sicily on fire within a week.”

  Adelina drew her feet in from the window, leaned forward towards Rico and said, “And our family would rise from the ashes like a phoenix and be the one great family that Sicily hasn't seen in a thousand years.”

  Chapter 2

  Transatlantic

  A fourteen hour flight. Tony stretched his legs. He was bored out of his mind. He'd have liked to look out the window, but he'd done the “gentlemanly” thing and had given Deirdre the window-seat. Deirdre was curled up next to him, fast asleep and looking beautiful. It was hard to imagine that just a few months earlier she had been a bloody mess. The scenes of her ordeal flashed in Tony's mind's eye, from her hit and run “accident”, to her close brush with death. How Tony had been given the case to investigate the death of Miss Nancy Miller, who had been murdered for her pristine organs, transplanted into a rich Dubai businessman, and her AB negative blood, which only 1% of the world populace has. Tony had followed several false leads, but had solved the case just as the head surgeon and his nurse were preparing the same fate for Deirdre and her organs. Tony’s partner, Sully, had shot the surgeon, Dr. Pritchett, to death and Pritchett’s nurse was sitting in a cell awaiting trial. Tony and Deirdre still hadn't discussed it in detail and Tony didn't want to push it. He figured it best to give her some time and to be there when she was ready to talk about it. While investigating the Nancy Miller case, he had fallen for the petite blonde now sleeping beside him. Tony wasn't sure if he believed in love at first sight, even so, their transatlantic flight was speeding them towards their wedding.

  Tony had become somewhat of a celebrity just before his promotion to Detective on the Boston Police Department. He had stopped several terrorists from pumping a van full of mustard gas into the MBTA subway system’s ventilation system. A few weeks later, he had uncovered the murders in the Boston Trauma Center. According to the press, this elevated Tony from celebrity to star. Tony looked over his shoulder at an attractive blond with mile long legs, big hair and a big personality to match, Donna Wells, host of the talk show “Good Morning with Donna”. Tony had been approached by all sorts of news media, but “Good Morning with Donna” had offered to fly Tony, Deirdre and Deirdre's best friend and Maid of Honor, Courtney, to Venice and to pay for everything: airfare, hotel and the wedding itself. It had seemed like a great idea at the time. The thought of just getting away…

  A steady line of passengers, stewardesses and even the pilot, had stopped to chat with Donna and ask for her autograph. Twelve hours into the flight and her smile hadn't faltered. Tony wondered if Botox injections had frozen her smile in place. Donna caught Tony's eye, excused herself from the passengers she was speaking with and walked over. A man sitting to Tony's right in the aisle seat was a member of the “Good Morning with Donna” crew. Donna looked down at the man and raised one eyebrow. The realization that Donna wanted to sit down came slowly to the man, yet when it did, he sprang up like a jack in the box and disappeared down the aisle.

  Donna took his empty seat and asked, “Tony, Tony, Tony, are you excited?”

  Tony stifled a yawn and said, “Right now I'm more cramped than excited. I can't wait to move around. How can you stand it?”

  Donna's smile widened. She leaned in conspiratorially and said, “Honey, try living on 1200 calories a day. After that, a fourteen hour flight is nothing.” Donna inclined her head towards Deirdre and said, “Do you think you can wake up sleeping beauty? We’ll be landing in Paris soon and I need to go over a few things with both of you.”

  Even though Donna was drop dead gorgeous, Tony thought her bossiness and take charge attitude made her somewhat mannish. He nodded and said, “I'll see what I can do.” As he sat looking steadily at Donna, she realized that she was dismissed and that Tony intended to wake Deirdre up in his own way and alone. Donna got up and went back to her seat.

  Tony might not like Donna very much, but he did respect her for being a hard worker and a professional. He looked down at Deirdre and thought that “sleeping beauty” wasn't too far from the mark. He got halfway
out of his seat and gave Deirdre a light kiss on the lips. As Deirdre woke, she returned the kiss and opened her eyes. “Hey,” she whispered.

  Tony smiled, “Hey, back at ya.” Deirdre’s sparkling eyes spoke volumes. Tony thought, “Damn you’re beautiful” and said, “Damn, you’re beautiful.”

  A voice from the seat in front of Tony said, “Beautiful? Women want to be called “hot”, Tony, not beautiful. Let's try it again. Damn, you’re hot! You are so smokin’ hot Dee.” Courtney's head popped up from behind the seat. Instead of neon blue or bubblegum pink, Courtney had dyed her hair blonde for the wedding. Courtney looked from Tony to Deirdre. “Come on, Tony,” she said, “You are so smokin' hot, Dee. Try it.”

  Deirdre reached over and pinched Courtney's lips closed with her thumb and forefinger. Deirdre glowered at her and said, “You are such a buzz kill, Courtney. You know that?”

  Deirdre furrowed her brows and scowled as she shook her fist with her free hand. As Deirdre let go of Courtney's lips they both laughed.

  Tony rolled his eyes and said, “Gee, Court, way to ruin the moment.”

  Courtney patted Tony on the cheek and said, “Come on, Tony. You know I love you guys.”

  Tony did know it. After Deirdre's brush with death, Courtney had been there for her. She’d been there after the operation on Deirdre’s leg and she’d been there in a way that Tony couldn't hope to be. Sometimes a girl needs a girlfriend and Courtney was the best. Tony took Courtney's hand and said, “Love you, too, Court.”

  Courtney's eyes shot open. She looked to Deirdre and asked, “What's gotten into him? Must be altitude sickness.”

  Tony nodded and said, “Must be, yeah. That's gotta be it.”

  “You're not sick, are you, Tony?” Donna Wells had walked up unnoticed to the group. She looked at Tony with concern.