Dalton took Cora’s hand. It was warm and strong.
“Thank you, Cora. I promise that when I get back to London—”
“I thought you were stationed here? At the Consulate?”
“My base is in London,” he said, glad that this at least was true.
“Then you must go back tonight. I will go with you!”
“I will go. Not tonight. But as soon as I can find out what happened to Porter.”
She withdrew her hand, her expression closing. “You’re an idiot,” said Cora. “I’m sorry. But it is true.”
“Yes. I am.”
She sat back and glared at him, her face reddening. “Fine. Basta. I don’t care. Who are you to me? I don’t even know you. It is ridiculous to care. I do not care.”
She turned and looked behind her: by chance, she happened to be glaring right at Naumann, who stiffened, his ironic detachment vanishing.
“And the same for you, Signor Spettro Cancrenato, mostra che divora i cadaveri, chi si diletta di orrori. Io ti caccio via! Ciao!”
Here a vulgar but classic Italian gesture — done with snap and fire — and then she rounded again on Dalton, her face flushed and her dark eyes glittering.
“So. Dove conduce questa strada? Back to business. You are pleased to imagine that if this man, he wants to harm your friend, that he will do this by giving him this… this drug?”
“It’s a theory,” said Dalton, rattled by the intensity of her concern, and even more so by her unshakable conviction that profoundly ugly things awaited him in the medical line if he didn’t get to a hospital right now. “The catch is, there’s nothing to connect Porter directly to… to this man. Other than a restaurant.”
She hesitated. Dalton could see she was holding something back. He waited it out, saying nothing to distract her.
“Yes. There is,” she said, at last, with a resigned sigh.
“What is it?”
“If I understand you, it is possible that this Mr. Sweetwater — this Indian man — was in Cortona. When your friend died.”
“How do you know that?”
She reached down and lifted up the paper bag with Mercato Via Gesa printed on the side.
“This. It was in the refuse bin.”
“A shopping bag?”
“It is not mine. The rooms are cleaned every day and all the garbage goes out. Every day. But today my woman was not able to come. So this bag was left by Mr. Sweetwater himself. And it is not old. A very new bag.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mercato Via Gesa is a grocery store.”
“Yes?”
“It is a grocery store in Cortona.”
Dalton’s cell phone rang, a high-pitched shriek that made them all jerk. An expression of fleeting resentment flashed across her face as she stood up and walked away to the windows, passing right through Naumann’s ghost on the way, her back stiffening reflexively as she did so and a tremble rippling down the length of her body. She stood at the open window and looked out at the spire of the Ognis-santi basilica, her strong arms folded across her breasts and her expression closed, shuttered, cold.
Dalton fumbled through his coat pockets, found his phone:
“Hello. Yes?”
“It’s Mandy. Where are you? I hope you’re still in Venice.”
“Last chance to bail, Micah,” said Naumann. “From here on in, it’s all running with scissors.”
“Mandy? Yes, I’m still in Venice. What’s the matter?”
“Get to Marco Polo Airport. The company jet is waiting. You have to come back to London. You have to come back right now.”
“Why? What the hell’s the problem, Mandy?”
“You want it in the clear?”
Naumann’s ghost was standing near to Cora as she stood by the window, her back to the room, staring out at the red-tiled rooftops and the spire of the Church of All Saints, at the clouds of swifts that swirled around the spire, crying and wheeling, rising in the wind. Naumann was looking at Dalton and the expression on his face was closed, unreadable. After a moment, he shook his head slowly and turned away.
“Yes, Mandy, I want it in the clear.”
“Okay. It’s Joanne. And the girls.”
“Yes. What?”
“They’re dead.”
“Dead?”
“Butchered, Micah. Slaughtered. It’s awful. They’re saying Porter did it. They’re saying he killed them. You have to come home.”
4
The shadow of the Bighorns had stretched out across the rolling brown hills of the Powder River country as far east as Ranchester and a deep cobalt night was rising up out of Kansas when Pete Kearney came out to call for his dogs. Pete was tall and hard-looking, with a weathered mahogany face and deep-set black eyes. He stood on the porch of his cabin, his Winchester 94 in his left hand, and waited for a while in the twilight, watching the light changing on the plains far below the limestone outcrop on which he had built his home. In the stand of lodgepole pine beside the square-cut log cabin, a horde of crows had settled into the trees for the night, and the sound they made reminded Pete of dry corn husks rattling together. He pulled in a breath and whistled for the dogs again — three clear high-pitched tones, descending. The echoes of the whistle bounced off the limestone cliffs behind him and faded into the forest all around.
Nothing.
The dogs did not come.
Pete frowned and stood a while in quiet consideration.
This was not like Cisco, the wizened old blue tick, who in their sixteen years together had never missed the dinner bell, but it was like Brutus, the young piebald bull terrier who had come ambling out of the brush only six months back, black eyes full of fun, tongue hanging out, grinning like a crocodile, trailing a snapped leather leash. His paws were bruised and bloody and his muscular shoulders had withered from hunger. His ribs showed like barrel staves along his flanks. It had taken Cisco a while to warm to the young pit bull, but Pete had taken to the stray right off. Nobody had ever called to ask about a missing pit bull, and Pete never put it out that he had one, and in the eastern Bighorns people kept to themselves, so the time passed and it was just Pete and his dogs and the day-to-day of living in the half-wild.
Until tonight.
“Cisco! Brutus! Come on, boys! Dinner’s up.”
The crows began to caw in the lodgepole stand, and a few flew up in a rattle of black feathers, settling again after a few wheeling turns. A dry wind stirred the pine needles and set up a dust devil in the clearing in front of the porch. A feeling got started in Pete Kearney’s belly. It slithered around his hips and started to crawl up his backbone and he lifted the Winchester, levered a 30–30 round into the chamber, and stepped down off the porch.
His boots made a dry, scraping sound as he crossed the clearing and walked to the drop-off fifty yards ahead. He stood there for a while, looking out over the sweeping valley floor a thousand feet below, listening to the woods around him. The Winchester was heavy in his hand, and a cutting chill was in the wind off the eastern plains.
He did not call for the dogs again. He walked to his left, moving as quietly as he could, keeping the ledge beside him, heading for the turn in the drive. As he moved he looked at every bush and tree, looked down at his feet and up into the treetops, their branches swirling in the rising wind. The leaves began to hiss and bristle and rust-colored pine needles skittered across the stony ground. Pete reached the curve of the gravel drive and looked down the tree-branch tunnel as the road curved around and bent itself out of sight. Shadows grew along the edge of the road, and darkness welled up as if from out of the ground, like black water. Pete lifted the carbine and stared down the iron sights, traversing the road and the woods along its edges. It was the only way in here, and if someone was coming for him, this is where he would have to come from. This narrow gravel track was the only way in.