A Season for the Dead

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.”

“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.

“Out,” he snapped.

She turned and left, stopping by the short metal external staircase, exchanging glances with the uniformed man there. He seemed vaguely familiar. They all did. Over the years she must have met almost every cop in Rome. She offered him a cigarette. He shook his head. He was bored. He was like all the uniforms, she guessed, just manpower for the day, a bunch of innocents who could be persuaded to check how shiny their shoes were when the time came.

“So you’re going all the way to Ciampino?” she asked.

“Right,” he said. “The long way around.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You didn’t hear? The Cardinal wants to make one final stop in the city. A sentimental journey. We go there. Then we take him to the plane.”

“Sentimental journey,” she repeated, and then they talked a little more.

Three minutes later she began to walk toward the river, back toward the hulking shape of the Castel Sant’Angelo, frantically punching the buttons on her phone, wondering if she could get there before the sky broke and brought with it the mother of all storms.