Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8)(126)

She made a scoffing noise. “I figured you was gonna want to talk about that. Believe me, it ain’t possible. I know it for a fact.”

He waved the envelope. “I want you to look at these pictures. But they might not be easy to look at. The people in them are dead.”

“I’m seventy-six, baby-face. I been looking at dead folk years since you was suckin’ on your mamma’s tit. How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine,” he told her.

“Hah!” She cackled. “A baby! I helped lay out my cousin Torruccio when I was thirteen! He got plugged by bandits who was stealing his sheep. And when my Zio Rosario got thrown down a well, we didn’t find him for six weeks, and when we finally pulled him out—”

“That’s OK, you don’t have to tell me,” he said hastily. “I can imagine it just fine.”

“He was messin’ with somebody’s wife,” she said. “Pig.”

They gazed at each other. He flapped the envelope against his hand, letting her curiosity build. “So,” he said. “Can I show you these?”

She held out a plump, imperious hand. “Lemme see.”

Petrie shook the pictures into his hand and handed them to her.

The first photo was of the stiff they’d found on Wygant Street, right after Ranieri’s fight. Rosa Ranieri stared down. Frozen.

Petrie leaned forward and tapped it with his finger. “This is the guy that I mistook for Bruno. I’d seen Bruno’s photo, the one that’s displayed in the diner, that Portland Monthly magazine cover. I’m sincerely sorry about that mistake, but now that you see it, do you blame me?”

She made no reply. She looked at the second photo, Aaro’s self-destructing barfly, and he heard her gulp. The pictures shook in her hand.

Then the third guy, the youngest one. The one whose neck Ranieri had admitted to snapping in the course of the brawl outside the diner. The resemblance to Bruno was less, but it was still there.

The other cadavers made no impression on her. She leafed through them without stopping and went back to the first three. The ones who shared genetic material with Bruno. Her silence told him what he needed to know. She was gray. Sweat had popped out on her brow. She breathed in shallow pants, patting her voluminous bosom.

“Ms. Ranieri?” He knelt down next to her. “You OK?”

“Madonna santissima,” she whispered. “These people . . . it’s not possible. These pictures are recent?”

“Taken a few days ago. They’re awaiting identification in the Medical Examiner’s office. They died within hours of each other. You’ve never seen them?”

She began to rock. He was getting nervous. The toddler squirmed in her arms and started to whimper. “I gotta go,” she muttered.

“Go where?” he asked. “Back to Newark? Isn’t that where your niece Magda lived when Bruno was a kid? Is that where he went?”

Her face sharpened, lips tightening. “No! You tricky son of a bitch, I ain’t tellin’ you nothin!”

No problem, since she already had. “So you don’t know them?”

Her eyes welled full of tears. “No,” she said, her voice froggy. “I don’t know these poor young people. Never seen ’em before in my life.”

He studied her face as she said it. He’d listened to a lot of people lie. He was willing to bet that Rosa Ranieri wasn’t lying about this. She would be a loud, blustering liar. Not a crying type of liar. That was a different type of woman. He raised his voice to be heard over the baby’s fussing. “But you’ve seen people who looked like them?”

Her eyes flashed, defiant. “So what if I have? It happens, right? It’s a coincidence. They say everyone has a double, right?”

“My next question,” he said. “After having seen these, do you think there might be things you didn’t know about Bruno’s mother?”

She recoiled. “No! Magda was a good girl! And these people are too young! She would never have . . . it’s not possible!”

“You mean, not possible that these are her children, too?”

Rosa Ranieri flapped her hand in denial, and the toddler started wailing in earnest. “She is dead! The only baby she ever had was Bruno, and she was a good mother! She died to save her son! She died a hero!”

“I don’t doubt it, ma’am. But the DNA has been tested. The probability of these people and Bruno being full siblings is overwhelming. That’s not random.”

She began to blink. “Take the baby,” she gasped, pushing the toddler toward him. “Call Sveti.” The photos scattered at her feet.

“But I—but . . .” He held the yelling toddler out at arm’s length, dismayed, as Rosa Ranieri toppled sideways on the park bench. “Oh, f*ck,” he muttered, looking around in desperation. The newborn in the baby carriage woke up and began its earpiercing squall.

He spotted the bombshell, who was playing soccer with the two older kids, and bellowed at her. “Hey! Sveti! Help!”

The girl named Sveti spun around and sprinted toward him, shrieking at the kids to follow her. He tried to soothe the kid he held, jiggle the baby carriage, and keep Rosa from rolling off the park bench and onto the muddy ground by trapping her on it with his thigh.

“What did you do to her?” Sveti gasped, pounding toward him.