Vigiles had gathered around Regulus by this time, coming to their leader’s aid.
I yanked Scaevola from Regulus and punched him full in the face.
As Regulus bellowed with laughter, Scaevola drew a knife from the recesses of his tunic.
I punched him again. Vigiles grabbed for me, but I shook them off and seized Scaevola’s wrist, turning the knife point from my ribs. My rage lodged in my throat, and I couldn’t speak.
Cassia’s cool voice said the words for me. “You killed Secundus, the landlord at the popina,” she stated in her clear tones. “You put him inside our door so all would believe Leonidas murdered him. The captain of the vigiles would have the key.”
I’d reasoned the same thing. Scaevola would either have already made a key or taken it from the wine merchant, with the excuse that he needed access to check for fires. I’d realized how very few people could have put the dead landlord inside our stairwell and locked the door again.
I tore the knife from Scaevola’s hand. “You killed Secundus to keep him from telling anyone who’d hired him. You’d do anything to keep attention from the building site, where you killed a slave and buried him under the foundations ten years ago.”
Scaevola gaped at me, blood running from his nose.
Regulus glared at me. “What are you talking about?”
Laurentius had made it to the circle of vigiles, out of breath. Behind him came Servius, the praetorian, along with a few more of the elite guards from the Palatine.
“I remember him,” Laurentius said, pointing to Scaevola. “He turned up at our place not long after Secundus hired us. Wanted to know why a landlord from the Quirinal was visiting. Mother chased him off.”
I imagined Camille, Duilius’s wife, quickly losing patience with Scaevola, especially when it seemed he was coming between her family and a lucrative job.
I shook Scaevola by the tunic. “Who was the slave? Why did you kill him?”
“He was no one!” Scaevola roared. “If his owner wants compensation, why doesn’t he just say so? Why the elaborate ritual?”
“To make sure no one ignored it,” Cassia said. “He is a man who expects the world to do as he bids, but no one cared that he’d lost a slave. So, he set out to get the attention of the most powerful man in the land.”
“But a slave isn’t a person,” Scaevola protested. “What does it matter? I noticed that particular slave poking around a building site where he didn’t belong, and went to investigate. He fought me, I struck him, and he died. I didn’t have enough money at the time to pay for him, so I buried him. I didn’t want to be brought to court.”
I imaged a younger Scaevola, fresh from the army, with only a bunk at the vigiles’ house for a home. He wouldn’t want anyone to know what he’d done, in case the slave had belonged to a wealthy man. He’d not be prosecuted for murder, but he might owe the slave’s owner a high price. Burying him where a foundation would be erected would keep anyone from finding the young man for a long, long time.
But his master must have realized what had happened. The slave had been special to him—for what reason, I didn’t know. The young man might have been a lover, or even the man’s son. It wasn’t uncommon for a patrician to sire an illegitimate child with a slave—the offspring would be born a slave as well.
Having gone a little mad, as Cassia had speculated, the dead slave’s master had devised a plan for a search to be made in the young man’s last known whereabouts.
“Secundus wasn’t a slave,” Cassia pointed out. “He was a free citizen of Rome. So might have been the man you struck and pushed into the river, believing him to be Laurentius.”
Scaevola paled at her words but maintained his resolve. “You cannot prove I did either crime.”
That was true. Unless I found someone who’d seen him with Secundus near our apartment or who’d watched him strike down the man at the river, I had no evidence.
“Starting a fire is even worse,” I said, my voice rasping from the smoke. “I have a witness who watched you do that.”
“What witness?” Scaevola snapped.
“I don’t know his name,” I said. “But he’s a freedman, who works as a guard for Sextus Livius.”
I’d asked Livius’s guard who looked like a former gladiator to watch Scaevola when we chased after the fire with him, and he’d agreed. No doubt he was even now reporting what had happened to Livius.
Scaevola’s eyes filled with alarm. Most people knew the name Sextus Livius, who was wealthy enough to command respect. Livius, who had also once been a slave, wouldn’t be sympathetic to Scaevola’s dismissal of one’s murder.
“You started the fire?” one of the vigiles demanded of Scaevola, horror in his voice.
“Not that one,” Scaevola jerked a hand at the thinning smoke on the higher street. “That was another fool careless with a brazier. It simply gave me an opportunity.”
“To trap me and Cassia in the water tower and build a fire in front of its door.” I was close to breaking Scaevola’s neck for that.
