“I watched some of the TV coverage because of the connection to Ron and your restaurants. Liam Raven got the charges against the mayor’s wife dropped before she ever came to trial.”
“Liam must be good at his job. Ron was good at his job, too.” Luke gave an ironic shrug. “I guess professional competence runs in the Raven family.”
“You can’t get away from news items about the Ravens these days.” Anna leaned back in her chair, nursing the last of her wine. “I saw a picture of Ron’s Chicago wife in a magazine at the dentist’s office last week.”
“Avery Raven.”
Anna wrinkled her nose. “Avery Fairfax. That’s the name she goes by these days, apparently. She was attending an opera performance to benefit abused wives, which struck me as somewhat ironic given her personal situation.”
“Or perhaps just very brave,” Luke suggested.
“Maybe.” Anna sounded unconvinced. “Avery’s beautiful, but I saw her interviewed on Larry King and she struck me as a real snob. The sort of woman who has her initials embroidered on her underwear and would never leave the house without wearing her pearls.”
“Is that how she struck you? In the clips I saw of her after Ron died, she looked pretty much shell-shocked to me.”
Anna shrugged. “That, too, I guess. Anyway, the point is you must have been mistaken about seeing Ron Raven.” Her voice took on a hint of amusement. “He’s six months dead, which kind of rules out the possibility that he was eating dinner here at Bruno’s.”
Luke suspected he was being foolishly stubborn, but he fought against Anna’s simple logic. “The cops never found Ron’s body, or the body of the woman who was in the hotel room with him. Who’s to say he’s really dead?”
“The entire world, except you.” Anna frowned, amusement vanishing. “The only reason the cops didn’t find any bodies is because the killer took a boat miles out to sea and tossed them into the Atlantic. You saw those chilling security videos of the murderer using a dolly to wheel the bodies onto a yacht. The video was on every TV channel and in every newspaper. You couldn’t avoid the clips even if you wanted to.”
Luke shrugged. “Those videos never struck me as proving very much. All you saw was a masked person—you couldn’t even determine male or female—pushing something onto a boat deck.”
“Not something. The guy was clearly wheeling body bags.”
“Okay, body bags. But they were zippered shut, for heaven’s sake! They could have contained anything from dirty laundry to the Russian Imperial crown jewels.”
“Yep, you’re right, they could,” Anna said crisply. “But the cops believe those bags contained the bodies of Ron Raven and the woman who’d been with him in the hotel room and they’re most likely right. After all, the cops found traces of blood in various places on the boat and you yourself told me a reputable lab used DNA testing to confirm that the blood belonged to Ron Raven. DNA matches don’t lie, Luke.”
“I understand that. I’m not disputing that the DNA evidence confirms the blood on the boat deck was Ron’s.”
“Well, there you are.”
“The fact that a lab established the blood was Ron’s doesn’t tell us anything about how the blood got onto the boat,” Luke pointed out. “If I took a vial of your blood and dripped it across the floor of my bedroom, it doesn’t mean you’re dead or even that you were in my bedroom. A DNA match would simply prove that the blood on my bedroom floor was yours.”
“And this is relevant to Ron Raven’s murder because…?”
“Because we have no clue if Ron was dead or alive when his blood ended up on the deck of that stolen yacht.”
“What exactly are you suggesting?” Anna’s gaze focused on him with new intensity. “That Ron and some unknown woman faked their deaths convincingly enough to persuade the entire Miami police force they’d been murdered? Good grief, Luke, get a grip.”
“I just saw Ron, so that’s what must have happened.” Luke knew he sounded as stubborn as he felt. “It would have been easy enough for Ron to cut himself and sprinkle blood to fake a shooting.”
“It wouldn’t have been easy at all.” Anna shook her head. “There was a lot of blood. We’re not talking about Ron pricking his finger. We’re talking lots and lots of blood, in a spatter pattern that suggested he’d been shot.”
“If Ron had a good reason to disappear—and presumably he did—he might have been willing to sacrifice a pint or two of blood.”
“You’re forgetting something important—the police identified his murderer.”
“Yeah, so they did.” Luke’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “And we all know the cops have never pinned a murder on the wrong culprit.”
Anna turned her left hand palm up and wiggled her fingers. “Okay, on this side we have weeks of intensive professional investigation and a ton of forensic evidence suggesting Ron Raven was murdered in his hotel room by a man who’d already committed other murders.” She turned over her right hand. “On this side we have the fact that you saw somebody who looks like Ron Raven eating dinner in Cousin Bruno’s restaurant.”
She tilted her head in exaggerated perplexity. “Hmm…let’s see. Which theory should we go with? Is Ron dead or alive? Gee, I can’t imagine.”
Luke leaned across the table. “Stop being a smart-ass and explain to me what we know about Ron Raven’s disappearance that makes it impossible to believe the guy faked his own death.”
“I thought I just did that, but I’ll do it again.” Anna ticked off on her fingers. “There was enough blood in Ron’s hotel room to suggest he was seriously injured. Ditto for his female companion. In that same hotel room, the cops found DNA from a convicted felon who’d already spent years in prison for murdering two other people. So we have two bleeding victims and a known killer in the same hotel room. Plus there’s been no activity at any of Ron’s bank accounts since the day he disappeared. If he faked his own death, he walked away from a load of money. Why would he?”
“Because he was a bigamist and his life was getting complicated?”
“He’d been a bigamist for decades,” Anna retorted. “Neither of his wives suspected anything.”
“Maybe he left for financial reasons, then.”
“He wasn’t under any unusual financial pressure. Everyone agrees Raven Enterprises was profitable at the time he disappeared.”
Luke pushed back his chair, giving in to a burning need to do something more productive than argue the odds with his sister. Or maybe he just didn’t want to acknowledge the logic of his sister’s viewpoint. “I need to talk to the server who waited on Ron Raven.”
“The server who waited on Ron’s look-alike,” Anna corrected.
He ignored her reproof. “Sorry, Annie, I won’t be more than a minute or two. Choose something decadent for dessert, okay?”
Luke made his way across the room and stood quietly while the young woman served entrées to a party of five businessmen. He stopped her as she hurried back toward the kitchen, glancing at her name tag as she whisked past.
“Hey, Merrie, I’m sorry to delay you, but my name’s Luke Savarini. Bruno Savarini is my cousin.” He nodded across the room toward Anna. “And that’s my sister, Anna. You might recognize her since she’s one of your regular customers.”
“I’m sorry. I’m new here.” The server smiled, trying not to look as impatient as she undoubtedly