The children pushed away the wet dirt and dead grass. They discovered that the “something unusual” was the arm of a human being. The arm was attached to the rest of a decomposing body, that of a man. The body had been stripped of clothing, jewelry, or any other pieces of identification.
The children ran off and told their parents. One of the fathers phoned his brother, who was a policeman in Castel Fusano on the Mediterranean coast. The brother drove to the area, saw the body with his own eyes, and used his cell phone to file a report.
The local police discovered that the dead man had been buried with a female companion, one body stacked up on top of the other. It was as if those getting rid of the bodies had been too lazy-or in too much of a hurry-to dig two graves and weigh them down with stones, the normal procedure in the area.
Not long afterward, federal police were called, notably the anti Mafia brigade. The Castel Fusano police were happy to get rid of the remains.
The bodies were shipped to Rome where they were stored here in the central obitorio where more experienced technicians could examine them. They were also frozen at a temperature of thirteen degrees below zero centigrade to arrest the decomposition and assist the forensics units.
Lt. Rizzo listened to all this very thoughtfully, saying nothing until Santangelo had finished. Then, “Have these victims been identified yet?” Rizzo asked.
“No,” Santangelo answered. “We received them here only two days ago. We have some leads that may help us soon, however. Perhaps within the next day or two.”
“Then why did you phone me?” Rizzo asked.
“Please follow me, if you would,” Santangelo said.
Neomie rezipped the bags and summoned more help from the next room. The team at the morgue would return the bodies back to their own deep freeze.
Santangelo walked his visitors to a computer at a desk in an adjoining office. He sat his guests down at chairs which afforded a view of the screen. A few entries on the keyboard and Santangelo brought up the information that he wanted.
On a split screen, there were photographs of bullet fragments, courtesy of the central Roman police CSI records. Thumbnails first, then enlarged images.
A CSI techie who had been working on recent crimes had been looking for links among several shootings in the central and southern parts of Italy. The techie had grouped the homicides in the area in the last month by weapons and then, among the gun crimes, matched the subgroups by caliber. He had struck gold.
“The ammunition on the left,” Santangelo explained, “are the bullets that were used in the shooting in Rome,” he said. “The musician and a young woman. I believe you were the ranking investigating officer at that scene.”
“Yes, I was,” Rizzo said. “The musician was a local guitarist with links to local drug traffickers. The young woman had three passports. We’ve determined that she was a Canadian named Lana Bissoni from Toronto. She was the signatory on the apartment. How and why she had three passports is a question as yet unanswered.”
Santangelo nodded.
“But here is what should interest you, Gian Antonio,” Santangelo said. “The fragments on the right were recovered from the bodies in the marshes,” Santangelo said. “If you look carefully, you’ll see that they match the fragments shown on the left. These four murders are linked. Find the person or people who committed one of these crimes and most likely you’ve resolved the other case as well.”
For the first time since he had stood in the cluttered apartment on the Via Donorfio, Rizzo began to grasp the possible scope of the various murders before him. Could it be that there were not two sets of two, but rather one set of four?
That, in and of itself, suggested a methodology, as well as motivations that were not easy to explain. The fact that the dead girl at the musician’s apartment had three passports suggested some sort of international spin-dirty international business or espionage of some sort. And then there had been precision execution of two Americans on the streets of Rome the evening before the musician and the girl. Now, this carnage in front of him, plus where their corpses had been dumped, suggested killers who did this for a living, not for amusement or as a hobby.
He lost himself in thought for a moment, trying to tie it together. Gut instincts? His guts were exploding with them.
“How long can you keep these bodies here?” Rizzo finally asked. “I’ll probably require further tests and examinations.”
“Under the law, if they remain unclaimed, and if you get me the proper papers,” Santangelo said, “forty-five days.”
Rizzo then went into an adjoining room and filed the proper warrants.
“Now do me one more favor, if you would,” Rizzo said as he placed his fountain pen back into his pocket.
“What would that be?” Santangelo asked.
“If anyone else expresses any interest in these corpses, if there are any inquiries out of the ordinary, please give me a call immediately.”
THIRTY
Gian Antonio Rizzo sat quietly in his car. His assistant DiPetri drove silently through the cluttered Roman roads back to his office on the via Trafficante.
All right. Bernardo had given him something more that he could work with, although the next part of pulling things together was not yet in sight.
Traffic was jammed. Morning rush hour in Rome. DiPetri was muttering about the truck in front of them. Rizzo had half a mind to tell DiPetri to slap the flashing blue light on top of the car and drive up on the damned sidewalk if necessary, but just get them out of there.
Why didn’t DiPetri think about the blue light and the siren? Because DiPetri didn’t care, that was why.
Increasingly, DiPetri irritated Rizzo. It had been a long time since DiPetri had contributed in any way to a case. DiPetri was burned out worse than he was. He had been a good cop years ago, but few people could remember that. These days, he had two loves: drinking and fishing. Some day, they were going to find DiPetri dead in a bathtub of beer with a drunken tuna fish.
On the other hand, the traffic jam afforded Rizzo time to think outside of the office. At least DiPetri could be counted on to keep his trap shut.
Rizzo pondered a new angle. As far as the ballistic links were concerned, the lieutenant had another idea that might play out. There were a couple of younger people working in the homicide bureau these days, a couple of new hires and a pair of interns from the university. They were amiable kids in his opinion, both the boys and the girls. The boys had funny haircuts that looked like someone had used an electric mixer and whipped up their hair like meringues. But the girls dressed cute and Rizzo liked to flirt with them.
No contact. Just harmless flirting. Nothing wrong with that.
The real value of these kids, however, was their willingness to crunch statistics and poke around various computer systems. They knew all the new computer games and websites and could hack just about anything. Not just in Rome, but for a few Euros on the side they could even hack Interpol across Europe and some of the American sites in Washington and Virginia.
So, good. He would feed this new information to the kids in the office. He would do it individually with each of them, the girls first, so that each would think he or she was working on something special. Then he’d see where that would take them.
Who knew? He might get lucky.
After twenty minutes of sitting in traffic, which seemed like twenty days, DiPetri broke the silence in the car.
“I’ve got an idea,” DiPetri said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He turned on the siren, threw the blue flasher onto the roof, and jumped the car onto the sidewalk. He navigated an armada of frightened pedestrians and within a minute had accessed the main boulevard, pointed back to headquarters.