A Noble Radiance Read Online Free PDF Page A

redness of her pursed lips.
    'No,' she finally
said. 'Whatever it was, it’s gone’
    Brunetti didn't know
how to ask the next question. 'You said your boyfriend of the time. Are you
still, er, are you still in contact with him?'
    Her smile blossomed,
as much at his question as at the awkwardness of his phrasing.
    'I'm the godmother of
his first son,' she said. 'So it would be very easy to call and ask him to ask
his brother what he can remember. I'll do it this evening’ She pushed herself
back from her chair. ‘I’ll go down and see about the file. Shall I bring it up
to your office?' He was grateful she didn't ask why he wanted to see it.
Superstitiously, Brunetti hoped that, by not talking about it, he could prevent
its turning out to be Roberto.
    ‘Yes, please,' he
said and went back up there to wait
     
    4
     
     
     
    A father himself,
Brunetti chose to delay calling the Lorenzoni family until the autopsy was
completed. From what Doctor Bortot had said and from the presence of the ring,
it seemed unlikely that anything he might discover during it would exclude the
possibility of its being Roberto Lorenzoni, but as long as that possibility
existed, Brunetti wanted to spare the family what might be unnecessary pain.
    While he waited for
the original file on the crime, he tried to recall what he knew about it. Since
the kidnapping had taken place in the province of Treviso, the police of that
city had handled the original investigation, even though the victim was
Venetian. Brunetti had been busy with another case at the time, but he
remembered the diffused sense of frustration that had filled the Questura after
the investigation had spread to Venice and the police tried to find the men who
had kidnapped the boy.
    Of all crimes,
Brunetti had always found kidnapping the most horrible, not only because he
had two children, but because of the dirt it did on humanity, placing an
entirely arbitrary price on a life and then destroying that life when the price
was not met. Or worse, as in so many cases, taking the person, accepting the
money, and then never releasing the hostage. He had been present when the body
of a twenty-seven-year-old woman had been retrieved; she had been kidnapped and
then placed in a living tomb under a metre of earth and left there to
suffocate. He still remembered her hands, grown as black as the earth above
her, clutched helplessly to her face in death.
    He could not be said
to know anyone in the Lorenzoni family, though he and Paola had once been at a
formal dinner party where Count Ludovico had also been present. As is always
the case in Venice, he occasionally saw the older man on the street, but they
had never spoken. The commissario who had handled the Venetian part
of the investigation had been transferred to Milan a year ago, so Brunetti
could not ask him face to face about the way things had been handled or about
his impression of events. Often that sort of personal, unrecorded response
proved useful, especially when a case came to be reconsidered. Brunetti
accepted the possibility, since the body found in the field might prove not to
be that of the Lorenzoni boy, that the case would not be reopened and the body
would prove to be a matter for the Belluno police. But then how explain the
ring?
    Signorina Elettra was
at his door before he could answer his own question. ‘Please come in’ he
called. 'You found it very quickly.' Such had not always been the case with the
Questura files, not until her blessed arrival. 'How long have you been with us
now, Signorina?' he asked.
    'It will be three
years this summer, Commissario. Why do you ask?'
    It was on his lips to
say, 'So that I might better count my joys,' but that sounded to him too much
like one of her own rhetorical flights. Instead, he answered, 'So I can order
flowers to celebrate the day’
    She laughed at this
and they both remembered his original shock when he learned that one of her
first actions upon taking the position as