Free Costa 08 - City of Fear by David Hewson

distressing ones, of another case, one that was briefly in all the papers, on every police notice board until one final outburst of violence had brought it to a close.
    Gianni Peroni stared at the features of the wild-eyed blue creature plastered to the wall and felt his heart grow cold.
    Then he closed the locket and turned it over. On the back, barely visible after so many years in a wilderness he could only guess at, was the inscription, part English, part Italian.
    To My Beautiful Marie on the Birth of Our Son, Daniel. 19 August 1986. Mia per sempre, Renzo
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11
    A FIERCE, DRY BREEZE ARRIVED THAT AFTERNOON. BY evening the natives were complaining about the unseasonably hot weather, and much else besides. In the space of a few hours Rome had changed, become a tense, nervous city, jumpy at the sight of its own time-worn shadows. Armies of workmen had descended on the area around the Quirinale Palace, erecting tall, ugly fencing and security gates at every intersection. High, threatening guard posts were beginning to spread as far as the broad, open thoroughfare Mussolini had carved through the Forum, and in the open central square of the Piazza Venezia itself. The media had adopted Palombo’s terminology, calling it a “ring of steel” to protect the world leaders who were starting to arrive to attend the summit inside the palace. They forecast that the Quirinale hill and most of the area around it would become a forbidden zone for all but the most privileged of citizens, and few Romans or tourists would find life easy for several days to come.
    Little of this appeared to concern police pathologist Teresa Lupo, who, thanks to her recent elevation to head of the forensic unit in Commissario Esposito’s Questura, had acquired a new smartphone—one that, for the moment, seemed more interesting than the present company. Costa watched her tapping frantically into her little gadget at their table in Sacro e Profano, a small church in a back street behind the Trevi Fountain that had been converted into a Calabrian restaurant and pizzeria. She had celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday three weeksbefore, though Costa felt she had scarcely aged in the six years he’d known her. Awkward, doggedly persistent, blessed with an acute intelligence that sometimes led her astray, she was, like Peroni and Falcone, one of his closest friends. Now that she and Peroni were an established couple, and his divorce had finally come through, there was speculation in the Questura that one day soon they would marry. Costa thought he would like that, that he could imagine the two of them together on the big day, both uneasy in new clothes, their big, shambling frames encased inside something they’d never wear again. There was an everyday honesty and devotion between the two of them, a friendship that embraced love too and made them a pleasure to be around, even when the work turned dark and relentless.
    He took his attention away from Teresa, tapping away at the phone with her fat fingers, her pale, broad face entirely absorbed in the moment. Their table was on the upper level, where the church organ might once have sat. This gave them a grand view of the vast wood-fired oven that seemed to provide almost everything—pizzas, meat, fish, vegetables—the place produced, and wafted the occasional wisp of smoky aromatic oak up from the nave below.
    He could scarcely believe they were eating out together so soon after the afternoon’s brutal events. When the sound of gunfire interrupted his bewildering conversation with Dario Sordi in the palace gardens, Costa had raced to the scene with Esposito and Falcone. It was easier to run than drive through the stationary snarl of Roman traffic. Whoever was responsible for the attack had been wise to rely on two wheels for their escape.
    At least all three officers were safe, even if the news about Giovanni Batisti was as bad as anyone might have feared. Soon the narrow stretch of the street where the