A Season for the Dead Read Online Free PDF

anyone.”
    “Bullshit!” Rossi hissed. “You walked in like it was just another day.” He motioned to the scene-of-crime people outside the church door, smoking just like him. “They’re the same.”
    “Trust me. They’re shaken. We’re all shaken.”
    “Shaken?” Rossi mocked him. “Falcone looks like he could eat breakfast off that corpse.”
    “Luca.” It was the first time Costa had used the big man’s Christian name. “What’s wrong? Why are we working together? Why did they move you here?”
    The big man’s watery eyes cast him an odd, sad glance. “They never told you?”
    “No.”
    “Jesus.” He stubbed out the cigarette with a shaking hand and immediately fumbled for another. “You really want to know? I went to some road accident. Happens all the time, I know. This one wasn’t so different. There was the father behind the wheel, dead drunk. And on the road his kid, who’d gone straight through the windshield and was now in pieces. Dead. Very dead.” Rossi shook his oversize head. “You know what bothered the father? Trying to wheedle his way out of the accident. Trying to convince me he wasn’t drunk.”
    “There are jerks in the world. So what’s new?”
    “What’s new?” Rossi repeated. “This. I picked the jerk up by the scruff of his neck and started throwing him around the place. If the traffic cop on the scene hadn’t been there, I would probably have killed the moron.”
    Costa looked back inside the church, checking that she was still there. When he turned away, Rossi’s sad, liquid eyes were burning at him.
    “They moved me as part of the deal to stop him from suing. To be honest, I don’t really care, not anymore. I’m forty-eight, unmarried, unsociable. I spend my nights watching TV, drinking beer and eating pizza and, right up till that moment, I didn’t mind, I didn’t care. Then something hits you out of the blue. Sometimes the scales just fall from your eyes for the stupidest of reasons. It happened to me. It’ll happen to you one day too. Maybe you get tired, with some bright new kid snapping at your ankles and then you just see this stuff for the shit it is. Maybe it’s something worse. You’ll finally realize this isn’t just some game. People die, for no reason whatsoever. And one day it’s you.”
    “I never thought it was any other way,” Costa replied. There was some personal resentment toward him in Rossi’s voice. Costa didn’t like to hear it. “Go home, Luca. Get some sleep. I’ll deal with everything.”
    “Like hell you will. You think I want Falcone busting my balls tomorrow?”
    Costa put a hand inside the older man’s jacket and pulled out his cigarette pack. It was almost empty. “Well, in that case, get some serious smoking done. We can talk about this later.”
    Rossi nodded at the church. “You want to know something else too? I’ll tell you now. I doubt you’re going to listen.”
    “What?”
    “
She
scares me. That woman in there. A woman who could watch all that stuff and hold it tight inside her. What kind of person can do that? She almost died today. She saw whatever was up in that room—no, don’t tell me. I don’t want people with no skins on them walking around inside my head at night. It’s not healthy. You look at her and you think: She doesn’t mind a damn. That might just be where they belong.”
    Costa felt his hackles rise. “You didn’t see her there, Luca. You can’t judge. You didn’t stay long with her at that altar either, from what I can work out. You didn’t watch her, not knowing where to look, wanting to bawl her eyes out. It takes time with some people. You ought to know that.”
    Luca Rossi prodded him in the chest, hard. “You’re right. I didn’t see.”
    Crazy Teresa came out into the bright sun too, saw them, came over and cajoled Rossi for a smoke. When he reluctantly agreed, the pathologist climbed out of her white polyester suit and stood there, a heavily built woman in her