A Season for the Dead Read Free Page B

kind of Vatican official, which was good enough for the three other Swiss Guards who had come to the room, established there was no imminent danger, and now awaited further orders. Costa had no early desire to disillusion any of them. He had, in four years on the force, seen plenty of dead bodies and even a couple of shootings. But finding a corpse and the epidermis of another, and in the Vatican, was a new experience, one he was unwilling to relinquish.
    His mind was working overtime. He let it race. The effort almost pushed the smell of the room from his consciousness, making the stench of blood and the way it mixed with the hot, arid air from the open windows just a little less noticeable.
    He let Fratelli babble out his story, unable, all the time, to take his eyes off the woman who sat on a chair, back to the wall, watching everything. She was something short of thirty, modestly dressed in a tight, gray business suit. She had shoulder-length dark hair, expensively cut, large green eyes and a serious, classically proportioned face, like one in some Renaissance painting. Not Caravaggio, she was too beautiful for that. No one had that kind of radiance in his work, not even the madonnas. It wasn’t supposed to exist. She looked, too, as if she were holding everything that had happened inside her, trying not to let it explode.
    When the guard was done she stood up and walked over to him. Costa noticed that her gray suit was spattered with blood. She seemed unworried by it. Delayed shock, he thought. Sometime soon she would realize how close she had come to being murdered, how a man had been shot to death in front of her after displaying this strange and gruesome trophy on the desk. The skin still lay there, looking like the castoff from some bad Halloween party. Nic Costa found it difficult to believe it had once belonged to a human being.
    “You’re city police?” she asked, in a voice which had some odd tinge of accent to it, as if she were half English or American.
    “That’s right.”
    “I thought so.”
    The Swiss Guards looked at each other and groaned but had yet to find the courage to argue. They were still waiting for someone.
    Rossi, who had been content to let the kid do the talking, smiled at them. The big man was willing to stand back. It felt a touch weird but Costa had got there first. He already seemed to be in control. All the same Luca Rossi felt a touch gray around the gills. Which he did more and more recently.
    The woman said, “I think Stefano was trying to tell me something.”
    “Stefano?” Costa asked. “The man who was going to kill you?”
    She shook her head and Nic Costa couldn’t stop himself watching the way her hair moved from side to side. “He didn’t try to kill me. That idiot”—she indicated Guido Fratelli, who went red at her words—“didn’t understand what was going on. Stefano wanted me to go with him somewhere. He didn’t get the chance to explain.”
    The guard muttered something in his own defense and then fell silent.
    “What was he trying to tell you?” Costa asked.
    “He said . . .” She was trying hard to think. He could understand why it would be difficult. There was so much crammed into such a short period of time. “He said, ‘she’s still there.’ To think of Bartholomew. And that we should hurry.”
    Nic Costa watched her deliberate these points and he revised his opinion of her. Perhaps it wasn’t delayed shock. Perhaps she really was this cool, this detached from what had happened.
    “Hurry where?” he was about to ask when a man in a dark suit elbowed his way into the conversation, stabbed him hard in the shoulder with a fat index finger, and demanded, “Who the hell are you?”
    The newcomer was about his own size, well built and middle-aged. His suit stank of cigars.
    “Police,” Costa replied, deliberately cryptic.
    “ID?”
    He took out his wallet and showed the man his card.
    “Out,” the suit ordered. “Out now.”
    Costa looked