Read Costa 08 - City of Fear for Free Online Page B

lived on the ground floor, he was lying.”
    It was a three-story building. Peroni strode into the road to get a better view of the upper floors. The windows on each level looked much the same as those below: old, grimy, and opaque. Except the pair at the top.
    He walked to the pavement opposite to make sure. Both sets of panes had been thrown wide open. There was something else odd. Rosa came to stand next to him. “What’s that?” she asked, staring upward.
    A black swarm of insects was moving in and out of the window. A cloud of tiny bodies buzzing angrily, as if fighting over something.
    “Flies,” Peroni murmured, then looked across the street.
    The young
agente
was grinning at him. His finger was prodding at the old red paint on the door and finding little in the way of resistance. Beyond it, Peroni could just make out a dark, bare hallway.
    Open
, Mirko Oliva mouthed.
    Peroni walked back, pushed the door open, and was greeted by the damp, fusty smell of rotting walls and bad drains. His fist stayed on both bell pushes as he edged into the property. There wasn’t a sound anywhere.
    He caught sight of Oliva with Rosa Prabakaran behind him. Her hand was already close to her jacket, feeling for the weapon there, just to make certain, the way any half-experienced officer did these days.
    “I’m sure this is nothing at all,” Peroni told them. “I go first, all the same.”
    Mirko Oliva looked a little surprised. “Shouldn’t we tell the control room before we go in?”
    “I was about to say that,” Peroni lied.
    Oliva pulled out his secure police phone. “What’s this street called?” he asked.
    “It’s the Via Rasella,” Rosa Prabakaran said immediately.
    The name jogged some distant memory in Peroni, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was.
    The interior stank of something worse than bad drains. Rats, he guessed. Dead ones. Peroni walked to the half-open door of the first downstairs room, gun in right hand. No one had been in this part of the building in years. Old machinery, half-finished chairs, and the skeleton of a table stood gathering dust. Oliva was at his shoulder, peering around inquisitively. Peroni took one step into the room, placed his large right foot into the grime on the floor, then dragged it backwards. The effort left a long, sweeping mark on the boards.
    Oliva smiled and tipped an imaginary cap. Point taken. Rosa watched them both, as if she were in the company of children.
    “We’re wasting time,” she complained.
    “You mean in the house?” Peroni asked. “Or checking out the ground floor first?”
    “Both, probably.”
    She was a bad-tempered piece of work at times.
    “If someone’s still here,” he said patiently, “they won’t be hiding where we expect them to hide. Now, will they?”
    “If …”
    Enough
, Peroni thought, and walked on with Mirko Oliva by his side, checking out the other rooms on the floor. Two were as barren as the first. The third was locked and looked as if it had been that way for years.
    It was just one call among many, Peroni reminded himself. All the same, he did something he hadn’t done in years. In the absence of a key, he kicked hard at the door. The thing fell in on itself. In the dust and cobwebs lay a very old and very dirty toilet.
    Rosa clapped her hands to a slow, sarcastic rhythm.
    The second floor was more promising. There were marks in the dust in the main room.
    “Squatters,” Rosa declared, coming back with some trash from the kitchen: an empty bag from a local bread shop, a discarded tuna can.
    “Why’d they leave?” Oliva asked.
    “That kind never stay anywhere more than a week.” There was an impatient scowl on her dark face. “They know we can arrest them if they hang around too long. Can’t we get this over and done with, Peroni? We’ve six more calls to make.”
    “Carelessness is a privilege of youth,” he announced. “If we need prints off anything you’ve handled, forensic will call