Aaron Elkins: Dying on the Vine

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.

• • •

THEunique 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 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 them.”

Martignetti shrugged. “Live and learn. Something new every day.”

“Which one’s the man?” Rocco asked.

“The one with the broken head.”

As Rocco nodded his response, he caught sight of two vehicles inching their way over the rough gravel toward them: a familiar, boxy blue van and a black, sleek, private sedan. “Here they come.” He peered at the sedan. “Oh Christ, the prosecutor’s office has sent Migliorini. That’s all I needed. What can you tell me before he gets here and starts issuing orders?”