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

solitary couple, with few friends. No one had ever seen Mary Rinaldi with a bruised face. No one had heard her complain about the behavior of her husband. They were, it seemed, a bland, childless pair struggling to make ends meet. Falcone was right: There had to be more. The bank statements and the threats from the bank were symptoms, surely, of some larger malaise in the Rinaldis’ life.
    Something else bothered him. Mary Rinaldi didn’t work, the report said. Rinaldi must have earned a decent package at the university. They should have been able to survive. Yet here they were with a sizeable debt outstanding on a mediocre home, fighting to keep their heads above water. Where was the money going? He went back to the bank statements and found the answer: cash. Stefano Rinaldi’s salary from the university amounted to almost six thousand euros a month after deductions. Even with a tidy mortgage, that should have been enough to live on. The statements told a different story. Rinaldi immediately transferred a quarter into his wife’s bank account, standing payments accounted for a further half, and the rest disappeared in credit card bills and some huge cash withdrawals, sometimes as much as one thousand euros a week.
    Nic Costa had been around long enough to understand there were only so many reasons why a man wanted ready money in his hand in this kind of quantity: women, booze and drugs being the main ones. Maybe Sara Farnese had been expensive to maintain, though somehow he doubted that. The woman seemed too independent to rely on someone like Rinaldi for money. Maybe there was someone else now in her place. But if that was the case, why was Rinaldi so furious with Sara that he wanted to kill her current boyfriend?
    There was always a simpler answer. While Rossi ran through the answering machine Costa went into the bathroom which was small, covered in mirrors and had just a toilet, a washbasin with a plain cabinet above it and a shower in the corner. He opened the cabinet door and looked inside: a woman’s razor, some headache pills, a packet of laxatives, and two neat rows of white plastic tablet containers from a health store. He read the names: evening primrose oil and ginseng, gingko biloba and selenium. There were eight different preparations in all. One or both of the Rinaldis must have rattled like a pillbox when they went out of the apartment in the morning.
    Costa picked up the biggest container, the one with evening primrose oil inside, opened it and looked at the round, shiny yellow capsules. There were only about ten left and they sat on a wad of cotton wool. Gelatin health pills nestled on a soft white bed of fluffiness.He hated cotton wool. The feel of it gave him the same shivers some people get from running their nails up and down a blackboard. It seemed so pointless. They put cotton wool in pill containers only to stop things rattling around and breaking. A flexible gelatin capsule couldn’t break, not easily. Costa turned the container upside down and emptied the visible contents into the sink. Then he righted it and gently pulled out the cotton wool from the base.
    Beneath it was a small transparent plastic bag containing white powder. Costa swore at the incompetence of the squad who had made the first search. He took out the bag, unwrapped it, tasted the coke, confirming what it was. The source of the Rinaldis’ cash problem was now apparent. Perhaps dope would explain Stefano’s excitable state. Except that the autopsy had so far failed to uncover any trace of drugs.
    Costa swore again. It had to be significant: It was the only thing he’d found so far that was.
    He returned to the living room and showed the dope to Rossi, who commented, “And these are supposed to be intelligent people? Why do they go around picking up gutter habits like that?”
    “No family,” Costa said. It was astonishing how often that factor cropped up in his line of work. Except every dopehead had a kind of family: the