Free The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani Page A

didn’t happen like that. It had taken him months to get it out of his head, and then just when he was beginning to forget about the whole damn thing, who should pop up out of nowhere but Madeleine Laurent. Or whoever she was.
    So far, the search for Laurent was going nowhere. The Erika Mann credit card had been real enough, but who was she? The address from the credit company had led him to a deserted warehouse in an industrial zone of the city. No big surprise.
    So now there was more to add to the bunch of unanswered, nagging questions that already clustered around the Llewellyn case.
    Madeleine Laurent wasn’t the only mystery connected to the drowned man. There was the matter of Fred Meyer, too. Meyer had a lot in common with Llewellyn. Too much. Both musicians, both pianists, both dead. Just a few kilometres apart, and both on the same night. Llewellyn’s watch, an old clockwork relic, had stopped when the water hit it and they pretty much knew the exact time of death. When they’d found Fred Meyer hanging in his student digs, he’d been dead about twelve hours. Which meant the two pianists had met their end within a short time of one another. Meyer first, probably, then Llewellyn soon after.
    There’d been no suicide note in the Meyer case, no apparent motive. Interviews with family had thrown up no history of depression. As for most students money was tight, but he’d been careful and there was no significant debt hanging over him. No emotional problems either, and from all accounts he was getting on well with his steady girlfriend. He’d recently landed a job teaching music at a school in Salzburg and was looking forward to starting after the summer, when his studies at the Vienna Conservatoire were over. Life had been pretty good for Fred Meyer. Until he’d found himself on the end of a rope.
    OK, coincidences happened and maybe there wasn’t anything to connect one musician’s foolish accident to another’s pointless suicide. At least, that was what Kinski had been trying to make himself believe over the last few months. Just one other detail stuck in his craw, like a breadcrumb that wouldn’t go down. It was the matter of the opera tickets found in Meyer’s room.
    Kinski sighed and looked out across the misty lake. The ice was still too thin to walk on, but in a few weeks it would have thickened enough to take the weight of a man. He’d seen people out here skating on the lake sometimes.
    He tried to imagine what it would be like to fall through ice. The shock of the freezing water, enough to stop a man’s heart. The current carrying you away under the solid ice sheet, so hard it would take a sledgehammer to fight your way back to the air just a couple of inches away.
    He thought about all the different types of death he’d seen, and the looks on the faces of all the dead people his work had brought him into contact with. The look on Oliver Llewellyn’s blue, half-frozen face had been one of the worst things he’d ever seen. For months afterwards he only had to close his eyes and it was there staring at him. No shutting it out. Standing here by the lakeside was bringing that image back sharp in his mind.
    He glanced at his watch. He’d been here too long. His misgivings about the case seemed to hold him here, when he should be getting back. He’d told Helga, Clara’s sitter, that he’d pick the kid up from school himself today for a change. She was growing up fast, coming on nine and a half now, and he was missing a lot of it. It would be a nice surprise for her. He was determined to spend the evening doing something fun, like taking her skating, or going to a movie. He threw everything at his child-the private bilingual school that would give her the best education, the violin lessons, the expensive toys. Clara had everything, except time with her father.
    He heard footsteps coming up behind him in the frosty grass. He turned. ‘Hey, Max, where were you?’
    The dog sat on his haunches and