Dying on the Vine Read Online Free PDF

always wondered about.”
    “I don’t either.” Dr. Bosco chewed, smiling and inscrutable.
    “Martignetti,” Rocco said, “write this down: ‘Find out if marmots eat meat.’”
    “At once,
Tenente
, immediately,” Martignetti said, yawning and scratching behind his ear.
    Maresciallo
Antonio Martignetti was five years older than Rocco and had been eight years longer in police work. He and Rocco had been working together for two and a half years and over that time had built a comfortable, easygoing relationship. They understood each other.
    “So what do you say, Melio?” Rocco asked. “You planning to tell us where they are?”
    “Do you see that boulder over there, the biggest one, right up against those trees?” He used the licorice stick to direct Rocco’s attention. “Go and look behind it, and see what you see.”
    What they saw was pretty much what you’d expect a couple of corpses to look like after they’d fallen off a cliff, then lain out in the rain, snow, heat, and cold for the better part of a year, in an area well supplied with meat-eaters: two mostly skeletonized, moldy, greenish-brown things with a dissolved, out-of-focus look, as if they were on their way to melding with the soil (which they were), and if the dividing line between earth and bodies had been blurred. Both of them were clad in jeans and leather jackets, much soiled and discolored.
    If the caller was right (and Rocco thought he was), they had fallen from the cliff that towered some sixty or seventy meters above. Apparently, they’d landed on the sloping scree at its base and rolled (or bounced) down a few more meters into some woods until they’d been stopped by the immense boulder, one jammed against the boulder itself, the other jammed against the first. Both were on their faces or what would have been their faces. The one directly up against the rock had its arms and legs splayed out at crazy angles that no living body had ever assumed; the other, pressed close against it, was crumpled up almost into a fetal position. The two of them looked like a couple of moldy old scarecrows tossed onto a refuse pile, torsos caved in and only one foot, shod in an ankle-length boot, visible between them. The body against the boulder had lost its hands too. As for the other, the arms were wedged beneath it, so it was impossible to tell if the hands were there or not. Only about half its skull was still present; the rear half was pretty much an open hole.
    Ligaments and hardened bits of soft tissue could be seen here and there on the bony surfaces of the bodies. They were long past the stench of decomposition, and now emitted a milder and less stomach-turning odor of decay; a musty, mushroomy kind of forest smell that wouldn’t have troubled you, had you not been aware of its source.
    Rocco stood looking at them for a few moments, his hands on his hips. He’d have loved to start poking around in the human wreckage, but—as he’d learned the hard way—better to wait for the crime-scene van and that goddamn ever-present prosecutor before touching anything.
    “You smell something funny?” Martignetti asked.
    “I do,” said Rocco, who hadn’t noticed it until then.
    They walked the ten yards back to the doctor.
    “Hey, Melio,” Martignetti said. “Something smells funny back there.”
    “Is that so? An odor emanating from a couple of rotting corpses? Gentlemen, you amaze me.”
    “Ha-ha,” said Rocco. “No, something else, something sharper. I can still smell it.”
    “You have a good nose. It’s alcohol spray. I thought it best to spray it into the male’s skull.”
    Rocco’s brow wrinkled. “Why?”
    “Because I preferred not to get stung. There’s a wasp’s nest in there, and it was buzzing away.”
    “No kidding. Does that happen very often?”
    “Often enough for me to carry the spray. Sometimes you find a family of mice nesting happily in one. Cute little things. Those, I don’t kill. I always hate to disturb