Black Run. Antonio Manzini

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СКАЧАТЬ years of inks and acid solvents in the printing plant where he worked. The dead man’s left hand was missing three fingers. The right hand lay about thirty feet away from the remains of the still unidentified body.

      “I’ve seen hedgehogs on the highway in better shape than that!” said Schiavone, and a billowing cloud of condensation emerged, fat and compact, from his mouth. Then he finally turned to look at the area that the officers had secured.

      It was a mess.

      Aside from the deep tracks cut by the snowcat, there were footprints everywhere. Thirty feet away, at the edge of the woods, there was even an officer taking a piss on a tree. He had his back turned, so Rocco couldn’t tell who it was.

      “Hey!” he yelled.

      The guy turned around. It was Domenico Casella.

      “What the fuck are you doing?” Rocco shouted at him.

      “Taking a piss, Dottore!”

      “Nice work, Casella. Just think how happy the guys from forensics are going to be!”

      Fumagalli shot a glare at Casella, and at Caciuoppolo, who was standing with his skis over one shoulder at a nice safe distance so he wouldn’t have to look at the mangled remains. “You’re all just a herd of pathetic cocksuckers!” the Livornese doctor grumbled.

      “I gotta say. Didn’t they teach you guys anything?”

      Casella zipped up his pants and walked over to the deputy police chief. “No, it’s just that I couldn’t hold it any longer. Plus, Dottore, we don’t have any proof they even killed him here, right?”

      “Ah, we have our own homegrown Sherlock Holmes! Fuck off, Casella. Get the hell away from here and stick close to the snowcat, where you can’t screw things up. Down there, by Inspector Rispoli. Move! Did you touch anything else?”

      “No.”

      “Good. Get over there, don’t move, and try to stay out of trouble.” Then Rocco spread his arms wide in exasperation. “You want to know something, Alberto?”

      “What?”

      “Oh, you’re going to hear from the Aosta forensics team before long, once they find fingerprints from our men, and urine, and pubic hair, and head hair. Once you guys are through with the place, even if the killer took a dump on the ground, they wouldn’t be able to find an uncompromised piece of evidence. Thanks to imbeciles like Casella … and you, too, Caciuoppolo! You say that you secured the crime scene, and then what?”

      Caciuoppolo dropped his head.

      “Look what you’ve done! Here are your footprints all around the corpse, on the road, everywhere! Holy Mary, mother of God! A guy could just give up and go home after this!”

      His shoes were sopping wet. The cold was increasing exponentially as the minutes crept by. Fumagalli’s zero degrees Celsius was just a fond memory by now, and the wind continued to torment him, even under his warm woolen undershirt. Rocco wished he were at least four hundred miles away from here, ideally in the Gusto Osteria, on Via della Frezza, “Da Antonio,” just a stone’s throw from the Lungotevere, eating fritto misto and beef tartare, washed down with a bottle of Verdicchio di Matelica.

      “Do you think he could have been a skier?” asked Officer Pierron, to break the tension; up till then, Pierron had been keeping a safe distance from the corpse.

      Rocco looked at him with all the contempt he’d been accumulating in four months of exile from Rome. “Italo, he’s wearing boots! Have you ever seen anyone go skiing in a pair of rubber-­soled calfskin boots?”

      “No, I couldn’t see them from here. Sorry!” Italo replied, hunching his head down between his shoulders.

      “Well, then, instead of spouting bullshit, take two steps forward and look for yourself! Do your job!”

      “I’d have to decline that offer, Commissario!”

      A wave of depression swept over Rocco. He looked the medical examiner in the eyes. “These are what they give me, and these are all I have to take with me when I work a case. Okay, Alberto, thanks. Give me a call the minute you have something. Let’s just hope he died of a heart attack, fell down, and got covered up with snow.”

      “Sure, let’s hope,” said Alberto.

      Rocco shot one last glance at the corpse. “Give my regards to the forensics squad.” And he turned to go.

      But something struck him, like an insect when you’re riding fast on a moped with no windshield. He spun around again.

      “Alberto, you’re a man of the world. Would you say this guy was wearing technical gear?”

      Alberto made a face. “Well, his pants were padded. His windbreaker was the right stuff, no question: North Face Polar. Couldn’t have been cheap. I bought one just like it for my daughter. Only in red.”

      “So?”

      “It cost more than four hundred euros.”

      Rocco bent over the half-­frozen corpse again. “No gloves. I wonder why.”

      Alberto Fumagalli spread his arms in bafflement. The deputy police chief stood back up. “Let’s think this one over. Let’s think on it.”

      “Well, Commissario,” chimed in Caciuoppolo, who had been leaning on his ski poles and listening, “maybe he’s someone who lives in one of the huts up in Crest. You see? Just two hundred yards from here.”

      Rocco looked at the little cluster of houses hidden in the snow.

      “Ah. There are ­people who live up there?”

      “Yes.”

      “In the middle of nowhere? Huh …”

      “If you love the mountains, that’s the place for you, right?”

      Rocco Schiavone grimaced in disapproval. “Maybe so, Caciuoppolo, maybe so. Nice work.”

       “Grazie.”

      “But he also could have died somewhere else and been carried up here. No?”

      Caciuoppolo stood lost in thought.

      “Even though …” Rocco added, “… that means they put the down jacket on him afterward. Because a person’s hardly likely to die indoors wearing a down jacket. Or else—­why not? Maybe he was about to go out, and then he died? Or else he went to see someone, only had time to get his gloves off, and then died?” Rocco looked at Caciuoppolo without seeing him. “Or else no one killed him at all, he just died on his own, and I’m standing here spouting bullshit. No, Caciuoppolo?”

      “Commissa’, if you say so.”

      “Thanks, Officer. We’ll look into this, too. In any case, I don’t know if you read the memos that circulate, if you keep up with these things, but they’ve abolished the rank of commissario in the police force. Now we’re called deputy police chief. But I’m just СКАЧАТЬ