Dying For Siena Read Online Free PDF Page B

smell of alcohol—of whiskey—coming from the body as well, and he knew that the deceased’s blood would have to go to Florence, too, since Siena didn’t have a forensic toxicology lab. The blood was pure alcohol, judging from the smell.
    He hunkered down and surveyed the body somberly. The dead man was about a meter seventy-five. He was stretched out on his back, dressed in a cheap, ill-cut suit with more polyester than cotton that no Italian male above the poverty line would be caught…well, dead in.
    He wondered if the man would be buried in a similar suit. He wondered if the dead professor had anyone at home who even cared what he would be buried in.
    Dante remembered when his Uncle Francesco had died seven years ago. Aunt Sara had insisted her husband be buried in a new suit and new shoes.
    He had accompanied his cousins Laura and Andrea to buy the suit and they had picked it with exactly the same kind of care and disregard for expense that would have gone into buying a suit for a wedding. They had chosen pure cotton underwear and shoes that wouldn’t pinch.
    Professor Kane was lying supine with his right hand over his stomach. There was a long, sharp stiletto knife about a meter away. Dante examined it without touching it. Schauble was finely engraved on the haft.
    It was a good German brand that produced excellent cutlery and knives. Sold both in Europe and in America. Only lab analysis would yield any information on the blood, and Forti, his lab tech, would be lifting any latents, though he knew Faith Murphy’s fingerprints were already on it.
    A dumb move for what looked like a smart woman. Unless she’d killed him.
    If she had, touching the stiletto had been a very smart move. She’d instantly had a perfectly reasonable motive for her fingerprints being on the knife that had killed a man.
    Dante had seen lots of dead bodies in his twelve years as a police officer, especially when he’d been stationed in Naples. The dead bodies he’d seen in Siena had been traffic accidents mostly. Overturned tractors. Once, horribly, a child drowned in a well fifteen days before. A few fires.
    As a policeman, Dante had seen most of what life did to humans and his soul had hardened some.
    But murder still gave him a primeval sense of dread—man usurping the natural order.
    He wasn’t a religious man—no Rossi was. From the patriarch, Senio, who still had his lithograph of Lenin—not in its heavy walnut frame on the living room wall any more, since times had changed and not even the Communists were Communists now—on down. The lithograph was tucked away in Senio’s sock drawer, though Dante suspected he took it out now and again to look at it.
    Senio still drank to the Revolution on November 7th. From Senio to Michelangelo’s youngest, unbaptized son, the Rossis were mangiapreti —priest-eaters, fiercely anticlerical. So, too, was Dante. He didn’t believe in an afterlife. There was only this life—with all its sweetness and bitterness, to be drunk down to the dregs. There wasn’t anything after this. There were no second chances. This was it.
    This was certainly it for the man lying on his back in the sunlight-filled room. Outside the window of cell seventeen could be seen Siena, the graceful tower whose bell tolled constantly on the mornings of the Palio , the copper cupola of the cathedral gleaming in the distance, the brick walls shining red-gold in the sun.
    The man had had one of the best views in the world, but he would never see it again.
    He would never feel the summer sun’s rays on his face again. He would never go strolling in the countryside again. He would never make love to a woman—or to a man if his tastes ran that way—again. He would never sip coffee in an outdoor square with friends again. Life had flown from his body.
    The dead man didn’t have a face that looked as if he had enjoyed many cups of coffee with friends.
    How a murdered man had lived his life was the greatest clue to his