A Season for the Dead by David Hewson Read Free Book Online

forty-three cats. Two thousand four hundred and one kittens. That adds up to two thousand eight hundred.” He thought of the tiny enclosed room in the tower and the stink of meat in it. “But what the hell does that mean?”
    The inspector scowled. “It means you don’t understand riddles. And you just wasted a lot of effort not answering the question you were asked. ‘I
met
a man with seven wives . . .’ They were all going in the opposite direction. There was just one person going to St. Ives. The narrator. You were looking in the wrong place all along. The obvious isn’t always the right answer.”
    Nic Costa shook his head. “That’s the kind of game a lunatic would play.”
    “And not finish the line?” Falcone asked. “Why would a dead man set an incomplete riddle? Can you tell me that?”
    There was no ready answer.
    “I want you to go round to Rinaldi’s home,” Falcone ordered. “We’ve been there already but maybe we missed something. Try to work out what kind of man he was, whether there’s anything to explain this. And try not to piss off Hanrahan again. He’s been on the phone twice to me already. You certainly made an impression there.”
    Costa failed to understand the relevance. “Hanrahan? You know him?”
    “Oh, we’re just the best of friends.” Falcone was, Costa hoped, being sarcastic. Sometimes it was hard to tell. “Now . . .”
    He was out of his seat, standing in front of the window with his back to them, watching the traffic in the street, thinking, or so he wanted them to believe. Another Falcone ritual. The two detectives knew when their time was through.
    Rossi led the way out of the room.

6

    The Rinaldis owned a large, restored apartment in a late nineteenth-century block on the Via Mecenate, a residential street by the park which led from the Via Merulana toward the Colosseum. The neighborhood was on the cusp of acceptability. It was only a few minutes’ walk to the smarter, older quarters of the Caelian Hill. Nero’s Golden House lay beneath the parched summer grass about a hundred yards from the entrance to the block. The apartment was well decorated in a lean, modern style, generously proportioned and quiet, since it gave out onto the vast internal courtyard of the building, not the street in front. Still, Nic Costa was unable to dispel the idea that the Rinaldis were not exactly rolling in money. The Via Merulana was not a place to wander with pleasure at night. It was only a little distant from the squalor of Termini Station. If he looked closely outside he would see the signs: needles in the gutter, used condoms in doorways. At night the park became a haunt for rent boys. A university professor would prefer to live somewhere else, Costa felt. It was one of those neighborhoods that was always up and coming but never quite got there.
    The apartment had been thoroughly searched already. Costa and Rossi studied the preliminary report: a small amount of cannabis, no messages on the answering machine, no incriminating letters, nothing on the cheap desktop computer that sat in the tiny study next to the bedroom. He wondered how Falcone expected them to come up with something new.
    Rossi found the Rinaldis’ bank statements tucked into a drawer of the computer desk. Costa’s suspicions were correct. Rinaldi and his wife maintained separate accounts and both were in the red, Stefano Rinaldi’s to the tune of a quarter of a million euros. There were threatening letters from the bank too. Unless the Rinaldis cleared some of their debt, even the modest apartment in the Via Mecenate was in jeopardy of disappearing from beneath them.
    Was this enough to turn someone like Stefano Rinaldi into a multiple killer? Falcone would never accept such a flimsy idea. Where was the evidence? Costa made a note to re-interview the neighbors. The preliminary report came up with so little. All the usual comments they got in domestic incidents, stories that painted the victims as a quiet,