He managed to control himself. He had established the identity of the dead woman and the musician who had been murdered in the apartment above deaf old Signora Masiella. He had now linked the bodies in the marsh at Castel Fusano to the disappearance of an American couple from a Ritz hotel in Rome. But he, and those who worked for him, were now drawing a double blank.
Who were the Americans who had been murdered on the street?
And what was their link, if any, to the musician and his live-in girlfriend?
He turned. “All right then,” he said, controlling himself. “We’ve done what we can and it has not been successful. But we need to do more. We need a link. A connection. Somewhere in this city someone knows something. What is the feeling in this room? Do we need more investigators? More shoe leather on the street? More money from the ‘reptile fund’ to buy an informer? Tell me. What is it we want?”
Again, no answers. Now Lt. Rizzo was about to explode. A moment later, however, there was a soft knock on the door.
One of the technicians from the lab, a girl named Mimi, a university student, had something interesting.
The sight of Mimi settled Rizzo down. She was a criminology student at the American University in Rome. Fluent in English and Italian, she was one of the four young interns to whom he had thrown some tidbits of information from Bernardo Santangelo.
Mimi had caught Rizzo’s eye more than once in the past. Mimi sailed through life in the orbit of the magical girls of Sailor Moon. She had Technicolor hair, chopped short in a trendy fashion and streaked with red, blue, green, and yellow, like her favorite Japanese manga characters. Under her lab coat, she favored boldly colored miniskirts, school girl white socks, and low cut sneakers, also in keeping with the anime motif.
She didn’t look like the type who would come bearing news that could kick a homicide investigation in a new direction. But then again, Rizzo knew, the Case Breakers never do, which is why he’d included her with such important information.
He always prized the people who could think outside the normal channels. On a day like this, he prized anyone who could think at all, and if Mimi had come up with something, well, it just proved that he was a genius and totally justified in flirting with all those younger females.
Magical girls, indeed.
“Yes, Mimi?” he asked.
She looked at the detectives at the table, two of which had been on the force longer than she had been alive, as had Lt. Rizzo. Ten professional eyes stared back at her in silence. Eight of them were hostile. Rizzo’s were adoring.
“May I mention something?” she asked.
“Of course you may, Mimi,” Rizzo said. “These officers are under my command. Anything you say to me I would relate to them immediately, and as you can probably tell, they are in dire need of all the help they can get. So please tell us what you have.”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” she said, “but maybe it’s something.”
Mimi sat down at the table and Rizzo closed the door.
Mimi had been doing some research and some digging, she explained, trying to relate the ballistics tests that Rizzo had shown her to anything else going on in Europe. So, helpful young chick that Mimi was, she hacked into some English-language military sites just to check out some pictures of real sailors and see what else was there.
Penetrating fifty million dollars of US Defense Department software took Mimi six and a half minutes. The United States Naval Station at Rota, Spain, she discovered, had recently finished its part of an annual weapon and ammunition moving and tracking exercise called CAWDS.
Under the CAWDS, or Containerized Ammunition Weapons & Distribution System, several boatloads of small arms and ammunition had been moved in standard shipping containers by air and sea.
The exercise had started in September 2007 and had run through June 2008. Under the system, computerized, numerical micro-imprints had been placed on all equipment to further facilitate their tracking.
“It’s a very complex process,” Mimi said. “But as we all know,” she said, “firearms examiners use a comparison microscope to determine whether or not a bullet was fired from a particular firearm. The comparison is based on the individual marking left on fired ammunition components that are unique to a particular firearm. That’s how we have the linkage of the weapons used in these two cases that Lieutenant Rizzo is discussing.”
“Good so far,” Rizzo said. His instincts told him to trust her.
“But the CAWDS system suggests something further,” she said. “Apparently one of the boxes of containerized ammunition disappeared from a United States Navy warehouse in Sardinia. Stolen, in other words. It was, or so it was believed, hijacked by members of the Sicilian Mafia who sold the contents on the black market.”
Rizzo blinked rapidly several times. This was all taking on a bizarre geometry.
“The pistols involved had been inventoried at Rota, Spain,” she said. “The guns were unique among their manufacture because the others of the same series have never been removed from their shipping containers. I ran an Internet check. They are all in the hands of the US Navy except this one crate that was stolen. One of these pistols was used in these two crimes.”
Mimi pushed a printout in front of the detectives at the table. They leaned forward to see it.
“So?” Rizzo pressed. “Anything else?”
“Si, Tenente,” Mimi said. “The rest of the pistols turned up in southeastern Europe,” Mimi said, “in the hands of underworld people there. We know this from recent arrests. The stolen naval cargo seems to have been trafficked by an agency called The Caspian Group.”
“Caspian?” Rizzo asked. “As in, the ‘Caspian Sea’?”
“Mafia ucraina,” Mimi said. “It’s a supposition and I might be wrong. But you could link all four of these assassinations to gangsters from Kiev.”
FORTY-TWO
At 11:00 a.m. on the dot, the gates of the US Embassy in Kiev swung open. The police escort emerged first, Ukrainian vehicles first, sirens blaring. A phalanx of police poured onto Kotsyubynskoho. Ukrainian flags flew on the front and rear of the cars. A few moments later, the president’s limousine pulled out of the gates of the embassy compound. It moved onto Kotsyubynskoho, then followed the streets of Kiev, closely guarded by American vehicles.
Alex rode in the eighth car, an armour-enforced van. She had a window. Federov, who had arrived punctually at the embassy at 10:00, sat beside her in a middle seat.
“Still expecting trouble?” she asked him in Russian.
He didn’t directly address the question. “I’ve told you everything I can,” he said.
She turned away and watched history unfurl before her through bulletproof glass.
The streets again were lined with spectators. Again snow flurries swept across the city. Most spectators were cheering, craning their necks for a view of the lead car of the motorcade. There were many old people who had lived through the very hard times. They remembered Stalin and the war and never thought they would lay eyes on the leader of America, much less live in a more open society. There were younger people who remembered the Orange Revolution and still held dearly to its principles. There were middle-aged people who had lived through Ukrainian Communism and had accepted it as their fate or even believed in it. They mostly just remembered, all of them, huddled together against the frigid weather.
The motorcade crept through the city streets, an armada of Mercedes limousines, including empty backups in case of a disaster. They moved as quickly as safety would permit. At each crossroad there were heavily armed police and soldiers, Ukrainian and American, who secured the intersections and kept wary eyes peeled for trouble.