Murphy's Law Read Online Free

to wake Kane up. Last night Griffin Ball had said if it turned out that she needed XRL array time, Kane would have to authorize the call to the computer center at Southbury.
    She needed the array and this was a perfect time. It was 3 a.m. back in Southbury and the XRL would probably be free. If she waited until Professor Kane sobered up, she’d likely find the XRL in use. She’d give anything to just tiptoe back out of the room, but she couldn’t.
    “Professor Kane?” He didn’t even stir. Faith cursed her soft voice. Even though her classes were in a small classroom, she needed amplification for the lessons.
    Faith cleared her throat and pitched her voice louder. “Professor Kane? Professor Kane, I’m sorry to bother you—”
    Faith broke off and frowned. Her distaste for the man had kept her from looking too closely, but now that she focused on him she could tell that there was something wrong. Very wrong.
    His normally sallow complexion was ash-gray, the eyes deeply sunken into the bruised-looking flesh around them. His features were like wax, utterly still and immobile.
    Faith wondered whether he had had a heart attack. But that wasn’t possible. Professor Kane didn’t have a heart.
    Maybe a stroke. That was more like it. He certainly had a brain.
    Faith had read somewhere that you weren’t supposed to practice first aid on stroke victims. Good. This had better be a stroke and not a heart attack. The idea of giving Professor Kane mouth-to-mouth resuscitation made her skin crawl.
    She looked at his chest, hoping to tell by sight alone whether he was breathing, and trying not to think about the fact she should be trying to get a pulse. She didn’t want to touch him either.
    His chest didn’t appear to be moving. Professor Kane’s left hand was lying under him in what must have been a viciously uncomfortable position and his right fist was clenched on his chest. The upper-left quadrant. So it might be a heart attack, after all.
    With a sigh, Faith dropped to her knees beside him. She was going to have to touch him. It was her duty to help a fellow human being and Roland Kane was a human being, after all. Sort of.
    She tried to lift his hand away from his chest to feel for his pulse and found to her surprise that it wouldn’t budge. His fist was clenched around something. It hadn’t been immediately apparent because everything on his chest was gray—his shirt, his hand, what his hand was holding…
    Then suddenly her slow, fuzzy thought processes, mired in sleep deprivation like glue, snapped to attention. She’d been up most of the night on her computer, frantically trying to ready a half-finished paper after having flown across the Atlantic. And then, of course, she’d been up the night before that with Nick…
    Her heart gave a painful jolt.
    Stop that , she told herself sternly. Concentrate.
    She studied Professor Kane’s chest then reached out to the clenched hand. It wouldn’t open. With great difficulty, she pulled his hand up and away from his chest, then stared.
    The gray thing he was holding wasn’t a pen or a laser pointer, as she’d thought. It was a knife. A stiletto, to be exact. A long, very sharp one. And it must have been plunged straight into Professor Kane’s heart, judging by the blood staining the shaft.
    Well what do you know? Faith thought. He has a heart, after all. She tugged and the slim haft slid through Professor Kane’s claw-like hand into hers.
    Roland Kane had been murdered!
    He deserved it, but still…
    Faith slowly rose to her feet and turned toward the door to go…go where? She stopped on the threshold, stymied for a moment. The Quantitative Methods Week organized by the University of Siena and the University of Massachusetts at Southbury was a yearly affair. She knew that Professor Kane, Griffin Ball, Madeleine Kobbel and Tim Gresham had been attending for years.
    But it was her first time and she didn’t know anyone here. She didn’t speak Italian. She didn’t