A Season for the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

thirties, with a long, black ponytail. She wore the baggiest pair of cheap jeans Costa had ever seen and a creased pink shirt. She looked like Rossi, a little wasted. Crazy Teresa lit the cigarette, blew a cloud of tobacco fumes into the scorching afternoon air and said, with a beatific smile, “It’s days like this that make it all worthwhile, boys. Don’t you agree?”
    Costa swore, then went back inside the nave, cursing himself for the way he’d handled that one.
    She was still at the altar, on her knees, hands locked low on her blood-spattered suit, eyes wide open, praying. Costa waited until she had finished. He knew what she was looking at. Ahead of her, behinda painting of the head of Christ, done in gold, like some Byzantine icon, was a bigger image on the wall. It was Bartholomew, about to die. The saint had his hands tied above his head, just as the corpse did in the tower. A grim-faced executioner stood next to him, holding the knife, looking into his eyes as if he just couldn’t work out where to begin.
    Finally, Sara Farnese got off the floor and joined him on the bench.
    “We can do this some other time,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be now.”
    “Ask what you want. I’d rather get this out of the way.”
    She was calm again and he thought about what Rossi had said. Sara Farnese was certainly a woman in control of herself.
    “This Stefano Rinaldi,” he asked, “what was he to you?”
    “He was a professor in my department. I had an affair with him. Is that what you wanted to hear? It was brief. It ended months ago.”
    “Okay. And the woman upstairs in the room. His wife.”
    “Mary. She’s English.”
    “I got that from the papers in her bag. Did she know?”
    Sara Farnese peered at him. “You want all this now?”
    Costa said, “If that’s fine with you. If not, we can do this some other time. It’s your decision.”
    Sara Farnese looked at the painting behind the altar again. “She found out. That was why it ended. I don’t know why it began in the first place. It was a friendship that just spilled over into something else. Stefano and Mary’s marriage was shaky in any case. I didn’t make it that way.”
    He pulled out a plastic bag from his jacket pocket. There was a sheet of paper on it, a message from an office notepad covered in handwriting. “The dead guy in the tower had this in his pocket. It says it’s from you and asks him to meet you here, at the church, as soon as he can. Says it’s really important. Did you send this?”
    She shook her head. “No.”
    “How could Rinaldi know he was coming?”
    “I’ve no idea. Perhaps I talked about it at work. I really don’t know.”
    “The other man was your lover?”
    She winced at the word. “We . . . met from time to time. His name is Hugh . . .”
    “. . . Fairchild. I know. He had his passport with him. You want to look?”
    “Why?”
    “Next of kin. It says he’s married.”
    “No,” she said coldly. “I don’t want to look.”
    “You didn’t know?”
    “Does it matter?”
    Costa wondered. Was he being prurient? And if so, why? “Maybe not. There was that thing about blood and martyrs written on the wall. You saw that, I guess. And that other stuff. Who’s this St. Ives? Is he another martyr or something?”
    “No. It’s a place in England.”
    “And seven wives?”
    “I didn’t even know he had one,” she answered with some bitterness.
    “So what do you think happened?”
    Sara Farnese glowered at him, her green eyes full of resentment. “You’re the policeman. You tell me.”
    “Anyone who looks at this will say one thing,” Costa said with a shrug. “Your old boyfriend found out about your new one and decided it was time to bring things to a close. For all of them, he and his wife included. Maybe you too.”
    “I told you. Stefano didn’t want to kill me. And they weren’t ‘boyfriends.’ They were people I slept with from time to time. In Stefano’s case, months ago.”
    Costa