“Who was he?” Falcone demanded.
“Tourist from New York,” Leapman replied. “Traveling alone. He’d been hanging out in gay bars, which complicated things for a while.”
They could just about make out the withering glance Leapman was casting them across the room. “That’s the trouble with city cops,” he continued. “Narrow minds. They like to jump to quick conclusions. The San Francisco guys figured they had another dead queer on their books. They didn’t even call us in. We hadn’t a clue any of this was starting to happen. Not for another month.”
He nodded at Emily Deacon. She cued up a shot of a classical building, with a white colonnaded portico and a rotunda dome, partly in brick. Only the stars-and-stripes flag fluttering from a pole told them this was not in Italy.
She took up the story. “ Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia. End of June now. This was Thomas Jefferson’s home, which may or may not be significant. Jefferson designed it himself. The neoclassical influence probably comes from his time as ambassador in Paris but you don’t need to be an architect to see where the idea originated.”
“Dead tourist in the hall when they opened up,” Leapman interjected impatiently. The image of a body came up on the screen. “Woman this time, local, from Virginia. You can imagine the picture.”
“Still nothing sexual?” Falcone asked.
Leapman shook his head.
“Can I see the autopsy reports for some of these people?” Teresa Lupo asked.
“No,” Leapman replied. “We don’t have copies here. Besides, I don’t see the point.”
“Maybe-” she began.
“The answer’s no. Next.”
It could almost have been the same building, except for the window in the portico, which had now changed shape.
“This is Jefferson too,” Emily Deacon explained. “The University of Virginia just around the corner. The Rotunda is effectively a half-size copy of the Pantheon. Just four days later. A man’s body in the centre of the hall, and this is pretty much what we saw today. The killer’s got the pattern he wants now and he doesn’t shift from it.”
She keyed up the corpse. The arms and legs were at the selfsame angle as those of the woman in the Pantheon. A second photo showed the cadaver turned onto its front.
“His scalpel work is improving,” Leapman said.
“Plus,” Deacon interjected, “he’s getting picky about the way he positions the body. The head faces due south. He kept to that afterwards. From now on, too, he alternates the position of the limbs. Sometimes angled like this. Sometimes with the feet together and the arms at ninety degrees to the torso.
“The point about facing south is particularly odd,” Emily continued, “because in most of those buildings there was no obvious reason. They weren’t aligned in any particular direction. We only picked up on this later. In the Pantheon itself the entrance and the high altar do face north-south. You could see why he’d lay the body that way. All these ones before-it’s as if he was planning for what happened last night. As if the Pantheon was some kind of final destination.”
“How hard is it?” Costa said.
“What?” Leapman asked.
“What he’s doing to their back.”
Leapman looked at his colleague. He seemed out of his depth once he went beyond purely procedural matters.
“It’s not simple and it’s not that difficult either,” she said. “I can give you the summary of the psychological profiling later. We’re not done here yet.”
Another photo, a tiny circular building almost hidden in a wood, but still with an obvious ancestry. “We were on the case by this time but he wasn’t making it easy for us. There was another hiatus now, until the middle of July. Perhaps he was worried he was pushing his luck. This is a folly in Chiswick, west London. Again, an American visitor. This time a woman.”
Now another Pantheon copy, this time by a lake. “Ten days later, Stourhead in Wiltshire, southwest England. By now he’s stretching out the miles. Maybe he knows we’ve seen something. Maybe he wants us to see something.”
A familiar facade from Venice filled the wall. “End of August. Il Redentore. By Palladio, which has clear echoes of the Pantheon. The killer’s playing games and earning a lot of air miles. The victim’s a man this time.”
“How many?” Falcone asked. “In all?”
“Seven that we know of, excluding last night,” she said. “There’s nothing to suggest we have them all, though. This guy’s clever. He hops countries. He kills at unpredictable intervals. It’s only over the last few months that we’ve managed to collate the information to prove there’s a pattern that goes beyond those first killings in the States. All we know for sure is that he’s murdered five men and three women. All American. All Caucasian. All middle class. All unexceptional. For all we know they were picked at random to prove a point.”
“Which is?” Costa asked.
She played with the remote and pulled up a composite shot, seven scarred backs, each with the flesh marked in a similar fashion, then moved on to a graphic.
“This is the pattern from one of the later deaths. Probably the closest he got to what he was trying to achieve.”
She turned on the room light, picked up a printout of the composite of the wounds, and placed it on Leapman’s desk. Then she reached into a drawer and took out a thick black pencil, a ruler and a compass and drew a square on the sheet, almost to the edges.
“The pattern’s actually a subset of a more complicated idea.”
Very quickly, with the kind of skill Costa associated with an architect or an artist, she marked four straight lines inside the square, running from the point where the arms of the cross met the perimeter. Finally, she used the compass to join the points where both the curving lines and the straight ones met at the edge, describing a perfect circle.
“This is what’s called the sacred cut,” she told them. “With the first couple of victims you can even see the marks he used to align it properly.”
She pulled up two morgue shots, early versions of the shape. “If you look closely, you can see he drew a couple of lines in felt-tip to help him get the hang of things. The other pointer to suggest a link is the way he alternates the position of the limbs. This is a direct reference to the Vitruvian Man. A naked man, arms and legs outstretched, vertical and horizontal. Drawn within both a square and a circle. It’s the same concept.”
She exchanged a brief glance with Costa. He understood the prompt.
“Like the body in the Pantheon,” he said. “I get it.”
“Good for you,” Leapman muttered, making a point of looking at his watch. “So, Agent Deacon. You’re the architect here. What does it mean?”
“I have a degree in architecture,” she replied. “It doesn’t make me an expert.” She struggled to form the right answer, then looked at each of them in turn, as if to make sure they understood: she wasn’t too sure of all this herself. “On one level it’s a construct used to explain the geometry behind ancient architecture. On another it’s a metaphor for perfection, kind of a mystical symbol. It’s supposed to represent a faultless union between the physical world and the spiritual one. Remember the way the body was laid out in the Pantheon?”
She sketched out a copy of the familiar da Vinci sketch, rapidly and with some skill. “The Greeks were the first to set down in writing the idea that great buildings depended upon precise geometric proportions, though they probably stole it from Asia and the Middle East because you see the same theory in earlier buildings there. The Romans picked up the belief that those proportions came directly from the Gods through the shape of a human being. Vitruvius was a soldier under Julius Caesar before he became an architect. He wrote ten books that became the bible on the subject. They got lost for some centuries, until the Renaissance, when Vitruvius again became the primary source for most of the architects we respect today. Michelangelo drew Vitruvian bodies constantly, with limbs in both positions along the perimeter, trying to get inside the idea, and he wasn’t the only one.”