Chapter 30

She is free.”

“Free?”

Beatrice Renza continued speaking to Ercole Benelli. “She recently has broken up from a long relationship. But it had been ending for some time.”

“Some time?”

“Why are you repeating my statements as questions?”

Honestly. This woman. Ercole’s lips grew taut. “I don’t understand. Who are you speaking about?”

Though he had an idea. No, he knew exactly.

“Surely you do. Daniela Canton, of course.”

He began to repeat the name, as a question, but stopped fast, lest he give the brittle woman more ammunition to fire his way. (Besides, as a police officer, he well knew that repeating questions is virtually an admission of guilt: “Poaching? Me? How can you say that I’m poaching?”)

Instead, a different inquiry: “Why are you telling me this?”

They stood in the laboratory on the ground floor of the Questura. The situation room for the Composer case was presently devoid of Ercole’s colleagues. Only Amelia Sachs, Rhyme and his aide Thom were there—co-conspirators in the Garry Soames matter—so he felt confident in slipping into the lab to ask Beatrice to analyze the evidence they’d collected at the scene of the sexual assault, the roof of Natalia’s apartment. Before he had been able to ask her to do this, however, she had regarded him with a tilted head and, perhaps seeing his lengthy glance toward Daniela, up the hall, had fired away.

She is free…

“It was a sad story.” Apparently Beatrice had no interest in responding to his question about why she was sharing Daniela’s story. She pushed her green-framed glasses higher on the bridge of her nose. “He was a pig,” she snapped. “Her former lover.”

Ercole was offended, for two reasons: One was this prickly woman’s assumption that he had any interest whatsoever in Daniela. The other was his affection for pigs.

Still, interesting: Daniela. Unattached.

“I hadn’t wondered about her status.”

“No,” the lab analyst said, clearly not believing him. Beatrice had a round face, framed by a mass of unruly black hair, presently tucked under a plastic bonnet. She was pretty in a baker’s-daughter sort of way, Ercole reflected, though he knew no bakers, nor the offspring of any. Short of stature, she had a figure that could be described as, well, bustily squat. Her feet pointed outward and she tended to waddle when she walked, making a pronounced shuffling sound if she wore booties. Daniela moved through the halls with the grace of…what? Well, Beatrice had brought up the animal metaphor. Daniela moved with the grace of a lean cheetah. A lean and sexy cheetah.

Beatrice was more a sloth or koala bear.

Then, realizing the comparison was unkind and unfair, Ercole blushed in shame.

Pulling gloves on and taking the evidence bags, Beatrice said, “She was with Arci—Arcibaldo—for three years. He was somewhat younger. As you can see, Daniela is thirty-five.”

That much? No, he could not see it, not at all. He was surprised. But he was intrigued that she liked younger men. Ercole being thirty.