A Season for the Dead nc-1

by David Hewson

“He’s psychotic, Nic. You saw those pictures. He had a sexual obsession for her.”

  “No. Someone made him like that. Deliberately. And then they set us on his tail knowing the direction we would take, because it was a direction they had already laid out in advance.”

  It was the only explanation that made sense, but even so there were gaps. “And that destination was Michael Denney, all along,” he continued, thinking about the man in the Vatican, with the Caravaggio copy on the wall of his poky little apartment, desperate for a life beyond those walls. “I picked up the fake appointment with his phone number attached to it. I brought Denney into this case just like I was supposed to. Luca was trying to tell me all along the whole thing stank. Now Falcone has the man wriggling on the line. He’s got the evidence that’s forced the Vatican to eject him.”

  His head was spinning, trying to comprehend the possibilities. “And it can’t just be Falcone.”

  She reached out and touched his hand. “You’re going too far, Nic. Take some advice. The world isn’t black and white. Sometimes you have to look the other way. Leave this alone.”

  He stared at her." I don’t like looking the other way. It’s not why I came here. Think of the people who want Denney dead. A few politicians. A few Mafiosi. A few people who worked alongside him in the Vatican. They knew each other anyway. Luca understood that. I was too stupid to listen. Fosse is loose in the city, a crazy priest who’s never, as far as we know, had to fend for himself for one day of his life. Someone’s looking after him. Someone’s providing him with weapons, money, presumably. Falcone couldn’t do that. The risk would be too great. I doubt it would come from inside the Vatican either. But there’s plenty of criminals who could help. We keep trying to fool ourselves this is just one lunatic working his way through a list. It’s not like that at all. This is a concerted, organized campaign. Three distinct sets of people, each with their own agenda, working together to get Cardinal Denney on the run because that will suit them all. I just walked right in and did what they wanted. Now Luca and some other poor cop are dead and Falcone’s walking around with something on his face you could just about mistake for guilt.”

  She glowered at him. “Don’t judge people without the facts. Not yourself. Not Falcone either. It was Gino Fosse who murdered these people. Whatever took him there. All of this is conjecture. Luca just had doubts, that’s all. There’s no evidence. Just a lot of inconsistencies.”

  “Inconsistencies,” he repeated. “You’re right. Here’s the biggest. Why did Gino Fosse start in the first place? He was bad material, but there’s nothing to suggest he was a killer before. What was his trigger?”

  He recalled the picture on the TV: Sara Farnese with her arms around the old man. “They were lovers, I guess,” he continued. “Sara and Denney. I know she denied it but they were. Gino Fosse knew her through his work in the Vatican. He knew she was sleeping around somehow but not with Denney, not to begin with. When he found out…”

  He waited for her to interrupt, in vain. “He what? Went 'crazy’?" he said. ”That’s all it ever comes down to and it isn’t enough. Fosse is crazy, I don’t doubt it. Everything we know about these killings confirms that. But it still doesn’t tell us why it began.“

  He thought about Sara. She was an extraordinary woman. It was not just her beauty. There was some luminescent quality that made him need her, made him feel that her presence provided some form of completeness for his life. Gino Fosse could have felt this way. It would have been easy. Still, it wasn’t enough to kill for.

  “None of this makes sense,” he said. “The way she slept with these people. Fosse’s reaction.” He recalled the tiny tower on Tiber Island, with its smell of meat and blood. And the cryptic message that was still running around in his head.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said. “Even Fosse told us this wasn’t all it seemed. That’s why he wrote that on the wall. He was laughing at us all the time. He knew we’d look the wrong way. He’s been taunting us all along.”

  She looked into his eyes, not liking what she saw there. “You want some advice? Go home. Pour yourself a drink. Read a book or something. Falcone’s put you out of this for a reason. There’s nothing more you can do.”

  He reached inside his jacket, pulled out the service pistol and put it on the table. It was a Beretta 92FS semiautomatic, the matte-black police workhorse they all carried. The fifteen-round clip was full.

  He’d fitted the sight on the end of the barrel to make it more accurate. Not that it made much difference. He was a lousy shot and knew it.

  “So you’re going to take on the world with that?” she demanded.

  “I went into this job for a reason.”

  “They all do, Nic! Luca probably said the same thing when he joined. Falcone too. Then you see the world for what it is. You learn to bend, before you break.”

  “Bend enough to conspire in a judicial murder?” He touched the black metal. “Because, if I’m right, isn’t that what’s going on here? Falcone doesn’t plan to arrest Cardinal Denney. He just wants to step aside when some hood moves out of the shadows and does the deed. What’s the betting Fosse never makes it out alive either? What does that do for Falcone? One more feather in his cap. He gets to close all the options on the case, put a few corpses in the morgue he feels belong there and probably pick up some money on the side. Is this the first time? Did Luca know that already? Am I the idiot around here? The only one who doesn’t know what’s going on?”

  She didn’t argue and that gave him his answer.

  “The gun won’t do you any good,” she said.

  “I know. I was just going to hand it in. I quit. I threw my card at Falcone this morning. Enough’s enough.”

  “Wonderful,” she groaned. “I imagine that really made an impact. How many men do that to him in a week, do you think? He adores that kind of thing. You can take it all back, Nic. Think of it as part of the initiation.”

  “Initiation?” he asked, astonished. “Into what? A world of compromises? A world where you’re willing to cut deals with crooks, of all kinds, because that’s the easiest way to get what you want?”

  “There are people who’d say that’s just being pragmatic.”

  “I know,” he said. “Falcone. Our man in the Vatican. The people it suits to think that way. Not me.”

  “So what do you think you can do?”

  “Something. Maybe.” The words sounded lame even as he said them.

  “Try to make sure this crap doesn’t happen again.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Then I look a fool. So what’s new?”

  She closed her eyes. “Is there anything I can do to dissuade you from this madness?”

  “Doubt it,” he shrugged.

  “You’re a stubborn kid.”

  “I’m twenty-seven. I’m not a kid. Not anymore.”

  She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. The smoke curled out toward the open window, out into the smoggy heat of the morning.

  “No,” she agreed. “You’re not. You know what worried Luca most about you? He couldn’t understand why you couldn’t let things go. Why you just hung on like a terrier when any rational person would just say enough’s enough. Luca knew what Falcone is. We all do. Listen to me, Nic. That doesn’t make Falcone a bad cop. This has all gone wrong for him now but you don’t think for a moment he would have countenanced any of this if he knew his own men would get killed, do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do.” She said it firmly. “And he doesn’t take money either. In his book, he’s as honest as they come. He just happens to think the ends justified the means. When you think that way, sometimes it all goes horribly wrong.”

  He thought about that. She was probably right. He could see the pain etched into the inspector’s bitter features. “So what if you’re right? Doesn’t bring Luca back. Doesn’t put me on Falcone’s side either. Blame my old man. It must be in the genes.”

  “Oh, God
.” Teresa Lupo looked at him, then picked up the folder in front of her. “Hell, let’s live dangerously together. Here…”

  She took out two one-page reports and put them both on the table, turned toward him.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “You wanted a reason why Fosse did what he did. You wanted his trigger. There it is and it isn’t anything any one of us could have guessed. Even Falcone, I think, though someone else knows because they must surely have used it.”

  He looked at the pages. They were both DNA analysis reports from Fosse’s home in the Clivus Scauri. It took him a little while to understand. When the revelation came, it was, somehow, a relief too, the final and welcome piece of the puzzle falling into place.

  He checked his watch. In ninety minutes Michael Denney would get into the car that would, surely, take him to his death. Then a memory entered his head: of the day he stood outside the church of San Clemente, with Jay Gallo’s drowned corpse inside, listening to Sara recount the tale of the fake Pope Joan and how she was torn to shreds by the mob once they understood her true nature.

  Teresa watched him, waiting for his response. “We just assumed what they wanted us to assume all along,” he said. “That she was Denney’s mistress, sleeping with these people to try to help him. We never began to think there could be some other explanation.”

  “No,” she said, with some regret. “Not that one.”

  He ran his fingers across the report. His brain was fighting to get all this straight. There were so many answers here if he could put his finger on them. Explanations that tied up everything, and left Sara as much a victim as anyone. “This couldn’t be some mistake, Teresa?”

  “DNA doesn’t lie. Sara Farnese is Denney’s daughter. Gino Fosse’s sister. Nonidentical twin. I checked their birthdays through the driving license records. Same day. Him supposedly in Palermo, her in Paris. God knows where in reality, but they’re twins, Sara and Gino. There’s no other explanation.”

  He remembered what she told him about growing up in a convent in Paris. While she’d been surrounded by nuns, Gino Fosse must have been fostered by two Sicilian peasants, then shipped off to church school as soon as he was old enough, perhaps because his true nature was already apparent. All the while Michael Denney had kept tabs on them both. Somehow Denney had managed to bring both close to his side, never telling one about the other. Perhaps he judged Fosse was too unstable to handle that knowledge. Perhaps the old man just liked playing these games. Whatever, he wanted his family near. Costa could only guess at the reasons.

  “Sara’s doing this because he’s her father,” he said. “She knows the trouble he’s in. She knows he’s frantic for a way out. So she’s sleeping with anyone he tells her to, letting Fosse take pictures, just to give him some hope, a chance, maybe. And none of it works. In fact, it just makes things worse because someone’s been watching the games Gino’s been playing. Someone with a reason to get Denney out of there. So this someone tells Gino who Sara really is, knowing this is the trigger. Gino realizes Denney’s been… pimping his own sister and using him to make the delivery. Getting him to take pictures of her. Christ…”

  “That would piss me off,” Teresa noted. “And I’m halfway normal. Nic?”

  She watched him, worried. Costa seemed lost in his own world of startled shock.

  “Nic?”

  “I can’t just sit back and let this happen.”

  He picked up the phone and dialed the farm. Marco answered. He sounded happy, almost young.

  “Is Sara there?”

  There was a pause on the line.

  “What do you mean?” Marco asked. “She said she called you and checked it was okay.”

  “Checked what?”

  “She wanted some things from her apartment. Bea drove her there half an hour ago. Sara said she’d make her own way back.”

  He swore, then snatched the gun up from the table. It was an hour before noon and the weather was starting to change. Clouds of tiny flies hung in the humid air, as if held there by some electrical charge from the angry, gray sky. The pressure was rising.

  It gave Teresa Lupo a headache. Looking at the tense, absorbed faces on the street, she knew she wasn’t alone. She had pumped a couple of plainclothesmen on the street. They’d disclosed that an unmarked police car with two detectives inside would draw up at a small rear gate of the Vatican, north of the public library entrance, and pick up Michael Denney at midday. The media had been thrown off the scent by one more carefully placed leak. They had stationed themselves in the Via di Porta Angelica, a ragged mass of reporters, photographers and TV cameramen, squabbling in the baking heat. Teresa Lupo had seen them as her car took her to Falcone’s lair, a long, plain khaki van sprouting antennae which was now parked just off the large square of the Piazza del Risorgimento, close to the bus stops. From here, she guessed, Falcone could jump into a car and follow Denney all the way to the private jet at Ciampino, waiting for Fosse to emerge from the shadows and do what was expected of him.

  She wondered where they would let the lunatic loose. Not at the gates of the Vatican, surely. If Denney died there the outcry, against the State and the Rome police, would outweigh the gain from his death. Nor was the airport an obvious option. They could hardly ask a man who had once dined with presidents to walk alone across the runway, bag in hand, waiting for his fate to overtake him. Some other eventuality was in hand and she was determined to find it.

  Fifty-One

  Falcone looked up from the row of radio operators stationed at the communications desk and asked sourly, “What the hell are you doing here? We’ve got no corpses for you. No customers at all.”

  “I have the DNA results from the Fosse place,” she told him. She held out the folder. “I thought you’d like to see them.”

  He was watching a computer screen with a digital map of the city on it. A red marker winked from a street around the corner. It was, she guessed, a trace on the car that Denney would take.

  “We know all we need to know.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He glared at her, annoyed. “You’ve something to tell me?”

  “I’m just a lackey. I deliver messages.”

  He looked at the offered papers, refusing to touch them. “Well?”

  “Gino Fosse is Denney’s son, all right. But Sara Farnese isn’t his lover. She’s his daughter. She and Fosse are nonidentical twins.”

  He was astonished. “That’s impossible!”

  “It was all there on the DNA from Fosse’s place. They found menstrual residue on that underwear. Hers. We could match it with the photographs.”

  The tanned face wrinkled in disbelief. “Are you sure?”

  “Look at the reports. Look at the dates on the birth certificates. There’s no other possibility.”

  “Jesus.” He seemed genuinely shocked. “That place is just full of secrets. Hanrahan should have told me. We will have words. On that and other matters.” His face was lined, his eyes dead. Falcone looked terrible, damaged by events.

  “Does it make a difference?” she asked.

  “Not that I can see,” he replied, shrugging. “So Denney’s an even bigger bastard than we thought. Whoring his own daughter to try to get himself out of that place. Imagine sending your own flesh and blood around to sleep with that fat creep Valena. And the rest of them…”

  “Imagine being the kind of woman who’d agree to that.”

  “Family,” he muttered. “There’s no comprehending those ties sometimes.”

  Falcone seemed pensive for a moment. She felt like pushing it. “Or imagine being Gino Fosse,” she continued. “Discovering the woman you’ve been driving around on these engagements, the woman you’ve been photographing, staring at on your wall, this woman’s your sister. Who told him that?”

  The dead eyes held her. Falcone really didn’t know, she realized.

  He’d been fooled as much as everyone. “Search me. I don’t care anymore. It’s irrelevant.”<
br />
  “Irrelevant?” she asked, exasperated. “Whoever did this is as culpable as Fosse himself.”

  “Stick to forensics. Why are we having this conversation?”

  “Prurience.”

  “That’s my job. Not yours. And as for this…” He picked up the folder and waved it at her, then slapped it down. “I don’t want to see a word of this in the media. Not for as long as you can stop it leaking out of the station. I don’t want anyone seen in some kind of sympathetic light. They’re all losers. Understand? The story that the Farnese woman is Denney’s mistress stands.”

  “But it’s untrue. It paints her to be something she isn’t.”

  “Fine! So she just whores herself around to a handful of influential jerks who might be able to do her father a favor. That’s better somehow? Here…”

  He snatched the pages off the desk, then tore them to shreds in front of her eyes, walked to an open window of the van and dumped the pieces out into the hard light beyond the glass.

  She folded her arms and shook her head at him. “My. I am so impressed.”

  “Enough. I want no more of this. And no more of you.”

  “I’d like to stay. I’d like to observe. That’s an official request.”

  “Request refused. You…” He nodded at one of the plainclothesmen working the radio desk. “Show Crazy Teresa to the door.”

  She was just a little shorter than Falcone but she had some bulk on him. Teresa Lupo took one step toward him, leaned in, close to his face, and noted the way he drew back. Then she jabbed a finger into his chest.

  “You should never piss off a pathologist,” she said carefully.

  “You know why?”

  He said nothing.

  “Because in your line of work, Falcone, being someone with your manners, your warped sense of integrity, and your kind of friends, it is just possible I will one day find you on my table. And for that”—she ran her finger down the curve of his tanned cheek, pressing it like a scalpel into his flesh—“I would be delighted to set aside a great deal of time indeed.”

  The dark face turned a touch paler.