weapon in the burning man’s right hand, which now appeared blackened and useless, gripping the familiar black shape out of nothing more than fear.
Costa pushed her to one side and triggered the extinguisher.
A crowd was gathering. The spray doused the shrieking figure, which staggered and fell to the floor. His skin was black with soot, red with livid burns.
He was recognisable, just.
“Medics,” Costa said, dropping to his knees beside the man, wondering if there was much life left in him. Blood was beginning to seep through the scorched clothing. He was wounded, perhaps more than once. “They’re coming. Hold still. It will be all right …”
A noise escaped the blackened lips, a long, painful groan that blew the stink of burnt petrol straight into Costa’s face. It was the final breath. He knew it. So did Josh Jonah, dying in his arms.
They were around him now, looking, unable to speak.
Costa didn’t wait. Two steps took him to the door to Vogel’s apartment; he found the light switch, tried to take in what he saw.
The place was wrecked. There’d been a fight, a bloody one. Money—fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills—was scattered across the table in the living room. A lot of money. Thousands, surely.
Falcone and Catherine Bianchi weren’t far behind him.
“Let’s put out a bulletin for Vogel,” she said, pulling out her radio. “Then we figure out how the hell I’m going to explain all this to Gerald Kelly and keep my job.”
Costa tried to take in what he was seeing. “I wouldn’t make any hasty decisions. There were three people in here. I heard them.”
He walked on through the scattered mess on the floor, into the bedroom.
The smell he’d first noticed, that of blood, hung heavy in the air, mingling with the harsh chemical stench of petrol. There was something else, too …
A single naked bulb swung lazily over the bed as if someone had recently brushed against it. Martin Vogel didn’t live in style. Or die that way either. The corpse was on the bare mattress. Vogel wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and the plaster cast on his arm. A gaping wound stood over his heart like a bloody rose poking its way out from the inside.
“You can hold the bulletin,” Costa said, mostly to himself.
The window was open, just a fraction. He walked to it. There was a fire escape outside. Someone could have escaped undetected.
Maybe they did kill each other—Vogel and Jonah. Or maybe it was meant to look that way.
Catherine Bianchi walked over to the table, picked up some of the notes and let them drop through her fingers. Costa watched Falcone biting his tongue, wanting to tell her not to touch a thing.
“What was it the Carabinieri’s pet professor said?” she asked. “Next we’d get the Avaricious and the Prodigal?”
She shook her head and cast a brief glance at the bedroom, and then the corridor, where Josh Jonah’s corpse lay like a burnt and bloodied human ember escaped from some recently extinguished bonfire.
“How do you tell which one was which?”
The stink of petrol drifting into the room from around Vogel’s bed was becoming overpowering. It must have been in the carpet, the curtains, everywhere.
So Josh Jonah intended to set fire to the place and had been caught by his own misdeed, shot by the wounded Vogel. Costa’s mind struggled with that idea. Jonah was ablaze when he died. If he’d been close to the petrol trail he’d been laying, that would have ignited, too. There was a gap in the scenario somewhere.
“I think we should get out of here until the fire people take a look,” he began to say. “This isn’t a safe—”
Something hissed and fizzed in the corner and finally he managed to place the last unknown smell. It was one from childhood. Fireworks on the lawn of the house, bright, fiery lights in the sky. A fuse burning before the explosion.
In the corner of the room, safe on a chair above the fuel-stained carpet, sat an accordion-style jumping firecracker. A long length of cord had been attached so that it wound across the seat of the chair, lengthening the burn time. Most of it was now charred ash. Scarcely half a finger of untouched material remained, and that was getting rapidly eaten by the eager, hungry flame working its way to the small charge of powder that would take the incendiary and fling it into the room.
It was a perfect homemade time bomb and it was about to explode.
Costa shoved