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hectare of decrepit vineyard that had produced its last wines fifty years before, they had built one of the largest wineries of the Val d’Arno.
    A year ago, Pietro had been spending a few quiet weeks at his vacation cabin in the Casentinese, and Nola was supposed to have come to pick him up in her car and drive him back home to the villa, but they’d never shown up there. The family had called the police that night. There had been an extensive search of the area over the next few days, which had produced the wife’s parked car not far from the cabin, but nothing else. The investigation that followed had led to dead ends. Today’s telephone call was the first thing that sounded as if it might be a real lead.
    The last few kilometers to the location were on an unmarked road—a pair of ruts, really—that even Rocco’s GPS didn’t know about, and they had to concentrate to keep from wandering off it onto even vaguer pathways. Still, Rocco’s mind was working on the case. It was too early to arrive at any hypotheses, of course—it had yet to be determined whether these were or weren’t the Cubbiddus—but he couldn’t keep a couple of speculations from rattling around his brain. First, whoever they were, he thought that foul play probably
was
involved. One person falling accidentally to his death from a mountain path; that was possible. But two people? Unless they’d been caught in an avalanche, highly unlikely. Second, and this wasn’t so much a hypothesis as an archaic word that he couldn’t get out of his mind:
faida
it was in Italian, and though the deadly, senseless—but undeniably romantic—institution was a thing of the past on the mainland, it was still alive and well in the remote, mountainous interior of Sardinia, from which the Cubbiddus had come.
    Vendetta.
    • • •
     
    THE unique and particular chunk of earth identified by its coordinates as 43.87983, 11.758633 turned out to be a flat rock, most of which was hidden from view at the moment by a smiling fat man sitting cross-legged on it, like a statue of Buddha, with his hands folded in front of his belly. He was chewing contentedly on a stick of red licorice. Beside him was an ancient black physician’s bag, its leather so cracked and peeling it looked like alligator hide.
    “I’d say it’s about time you two got here,” said Melio Bosco, Florence Province’s senior police physician. Bosco, well into his seventies, had first started contracting with the office of the
medico legale
thirty-seven years ago. Rocco had been two years old at the time.
    “Hello, Melio. Crime-scene crew isn’t here yet?”
    “Not yet.”
    “The public prosecutor?”
    “No sign of him. Perhaps he’s gotten lost.”
    “From your lips to God’s ear,” Martignetti said. In Italy, all police agencies, including the
Carabinieri
, work under the close supervision of the public prosecutor, commonly referred to as the magistrate. And every one of them chafes at it. The two men were pleased to have their initial look at the scene without having a magistrate looking over their shoulders.
    “So?” Rocco said. “What do we have?”
    “We have the skeletal remains of a man, and we have the skeletal remains of a woman.”
    “And?”
    “And after careful analysis I am ready to certify that they are both deceased.”
    Despite the age difference, the two men had become friends. Like Rocco, Dr. Bosco took the hidebound formalities of the criminal justice bureaucracy with a golf-ball-size grain of salt. And he had a sense of humor, not something in great supply within those precincts.
    Rocco looked around the wooded surroundings. There were a lot of boulders, most of them big. “Which ones are the skeletons behind?”
    “Oh, I don’t know that I’d call them
skeletons
, exactly. The animals have been at them, you see. Wolves, bears, marmots . . .” He frowned. “Perhaps not marmots. Are marmots carnivores?”
    “I don’t know, Melio. It’s something I’ve