“These must be Plympton’s,” I said, “and there must be nitrates on them. He probably had these when handling the explosives at the hospital.”
Owlstone and her men looked greatly relieved. Me, too. I fished a red rubber ball out of my pocket and tossed it in the air so Ghost could leap up and catch it. He returned it to me for another toss and tried for a third, but two catches was the reward for finding something and he knew it. His tail thumped happily on the floor, though, and that image was grotesquely at odds with what lay on the bed four feet from where the shepherd sat.
The bodies lay straight and proper. Fully dressed, the woman in a neat red skirt, white blouse, and a vest with snowmen embroidered on it. She had a Christmas wreath pin on her left breast. Her hair was as neat as possible, given the conditions. Beside her was a teenage girl who looked like she would have been beautiful, had time and the cruelest of Fates given her a chance. Her eyes were closed, long lashes brushing perfectly smooth cheeks. She wore the skirt and blazer from an expensive girls’ school, but she had earrings in the shapes of Christmas bulbs.
Both of them had been shot in the head. Blood trails led from the bed to the bathroom, and when I gingerly stepped past Lamba I could see that the ugly work had been done in there. The handgun, an old Webley top-break revolver, sat on the closed toilet lid. The gun was broken open, the bullets removed. The three spent shells stood in a precise line with the three unfired rounds. Bloody fingerprints smeared the casings and the toilet. The precision with which the rounds had been arranged was at odds with the smears of blood. Just as the neat and tidy positioning of the bodies belied the condition of the victims.
“Bloody hell,” whispered Lamba. “What is this? Some kind of ritual?”
“Looks like a professional hit,” said Pettit. “The sense of order is—”
“No,” I cut in. “No … this is pain. I think the husband did this, and I think he made them as pretty as he could so that they wouldn’t suffer any further indignities.”
Pettit cocked an eye at me. “Are you a forensic specialist?”
“No,” I said, but I didn’t care to explain my thought patterns to him. I knew I was right. “There will be another note.”
Owlstone said, “Okay, lads, you two take charge of the hall. No one comes in.” The constables nodded, clearly happy to leave the apartment. I wanted to go with them.
Once they were gone, Owlstone called in to headquarters. She listened for almost a minute. “Yes, sir,” she said crisply, and disconnected. Then she threw a calculating look my way. “Well, Captain, I just spoke to the Chief Superintendent, who said that we are to break investigative protocol and that I was to assist you in an examination of the crime scene.”
“And you have a problem with that because—?”
“Mucking about with a crime scene before Forensics arrives is a great way to lose evidence.”
“We could wait, but this is a matter of terrorism. The murder investigation is secondary. It’s more important right now to find a lead to the terrorists than it is to build a court case.”
“If we cock this it’ll ruin me in the department,” she warned.
“Me, too. So, let’s not cock it up.”
I gave her my very best “hey, I’m a blond-haired blue-eyed all-American guy” smile. That smile would charm the knickers off the Queen. Owlstone’s eyes were cold and her mouth was a stiff line of disapproval, but … she nodded. And she kept her knickers on, which in light of that smile spoke to a great deal of self-control.
We turned and faced the bed.
The stupid smile I wore crumbled slowly into dust and fell away.
“Damn,” I said softly.
Owlstone sighed, and we set to work.
Interlude Twelve
Near Shetland in the Orkney Isles
December 18, 10:21 A.M. GMT
Rafael Santoro pulled the folds of his coat around him and tried not to shiver. The jacket he’d worn around London was inadequate for the wind that blew like knives across the North Sea. His gloves, purchased to allow dexterity, were equally useless.
“’Ere, Father, take this ’fore you freeze.”
Santoro looked up into the lined, weather-worn face of the captain of the hired boat. The man held out a battered tin mug of steaming coffee.
“Bless you, my son,” murmured Santoro as he took the cup and buried his nose in the steam. He preferred tea, but now was not a time to be fussy. He blew on the scalding liquid and took a careful sip, but even then he burned his tongue. He winced.
“Aye, it’s not very good,” said the captain, misreading the wince, “but it’s ’ot.”
“It’s fine, thank you.”
The captain was a lumpy man with a Cockney accent and a bulbous drinker’s nose webbed with purple veins. He lingered, clearly wanting something else. What now? Had the man noticed or discovered something? Did he want a bribe? Santoro looked up, hoisting a smile onto his face.
“Something—?”
“Well,” began the captain, fumbling with it now that he was up to it, “you see … the thing is, Father, it’s about wot ’appened in London. The fire and all. Those terrorists.” He paused. “I try to be a good Catholic, Father, but I can’t understand why God would allow this kind of thing to happen.”
“God gives us free will, my son. He allows us to make our own choices. One day all of the wicked will be called to account for what they have done.”
“Yeah, but that’s just it, Father. Who would want to do something like this?”
Santoro smiled sadly and shook his head. What kind of man indeed?
After the captain shambled away, shaking his head in confusion, Santoro closed his eyes and drifted into a comfortable doze. The question had triggered so many memories, and as the boat rocked on the waves his dreaming mind drifted back to the very first event he had orchestrated for the Seven Kings.
Bombay, India
March 12, 1993
At 1:03 in the afternoon, a small man with a tidy mustache drove into the parking garage beneath the Bombay Stock Exchange, found a spot near the elevator, and turned off the engine. He sat behind the wheel for several minutes, pretending to read notes in a file folder as two carloads of employees from the exchange, returning from a late lunch, walked—laughing and talking—between the rows of parked cars, waited for the elevator, and then piled into the lift. When the doors closed, the small man got out of his car. He walked quickly up and down the rows to make sure that he was alone. When he was satisfied, he unlocked his trunk and pulled back the orange blanket that covered the unconscious Pakistani man.
The Pakistani was drugged but uninjured. Under other circumstances he would wake up in under an hour. He was dressed in the traditional clothing of a Muslim, a dark and formal sherwani and an embroidered velvet kufi. The small man bent and lifted the Pakistani out of the trunk, grunting and cursing with the effort. The drugged man was barely 140 pounds, but he was totally slack, and the small man had trouble pulling him over the lip of the trunk. It took four minutes to drag him to the open driver’s door and another three to adequately position him behind the wheel.
By the time the small man was finished, he was bathed in sweat. He mopped his forehead very carefully so as not to remove the makeup. Though Rafael Santoro’s own Mediterranean complexion was dark, he was not as dark as an Indian. He checked his watch. One sixteen. He smiled. Plenty of time. All that remained now was to close the car door and walk away.
He took the elevator to the lobby and walked out through the revolving door. He paused at a sidewalk stand that served nariel pani and drank the coconut water right there. So soothing after his exertions. He asked the vendor to scrape out the tender kernel inside, then strolled away, nibbling thoughtfully on it as he mentally counted the last three hundred seconds in his head to see if his calculations matched the digital timer in the trunk.