Emily Deacon placed both drawings side by side on the desk. “Vitruvius used the human body-a holy vessel as far as he was concerned-as the starting point for the proportions needed to create the perfect building.”
Her slim fingers traced the outlines of the shapes. “The Vitruvian Man squares the circle, just as the making of the sacred cut does. This had a religious importance. It symbolized the marriage of the earthly, the physical fact of the square, with the ineffable perfection of the celestial, the circle. It was about…” She looked across at Leapman, who was beginning to get restless with the explanations. “Finding some kind of truth, God even, inside a shape. The shape of a human body. The shape of a building. The proportions are the same. Look at these.”
She indicated the outlines of the sacred cut. “There you have just about every shape and proportion you are going to find in a great building. Even the rectangles the cut creates fit a classically correct, arithmetic rule an architect calls the golden mean. It’s the way things are meant to be.”
Costa tried to remember some of his old art lessons. They’d talked about the golden mean. It permeated everything: architecture, sculpture, painting, mathematics, even music.
Deacon wasn’t done. “When this man, whoever he is, places a body in the centre of the Pantheon, or a place like it, what he’s doing is making some kind of statement. Laying down a piece in a puzzle, trying to complete the picture. The Pantheon is simply a larger version of the geometric pattern he’s describing with those dead limbs. A circle cut by a square. The woman lay where Hadrian must have once stood himself, looking out from the focus of an artificial cosmos, through the eye of the oculus, out to what he regarded as heaven. She was at the epicentre of this structured view of the universe he created. Equally, the real universe was looking back at her. Whoever this man is, he knows all this. He’s not just some… nut.”
“Really?” Leapman sighed. “So where does this get us? Profiling has got us nowhere so far.”
“I don’t know yet,” she half snapped in reply. “Maybe it makes him feel he’s holy somehow. Maybe he’s looking for something, trying to get order back into his world. But we’ve no data, so it’s just guesswork. There’s a missing piece here. This man is smart, educated and very, very capable. Something started him on this path. If we could find out what that is-”
“But we haven’t,” Leapman interruped. “And the odds are we won’t. Why do we keep going over this? I don’t want to understand the bastard. I want to catch him. This guy’s killed at least eight people now, maybe more. All Americans. If we get the chance to ask him why once he’s in jail, fine. But I’m not going to lose any sleep if he’s just plain dead either. We’re not going to nail down this animal by profiling or mumbo jumbo. We get him through work.”
He glared across the desk at Falcone. “If we’re lucky, we get him through you.”
A hint of a smile crossed the inspector’s face. “I’m not a great believer in luck, Agent Leapman. And by the way, it’s nine victims. We lost a photographer last night, if you recall. He was Italian, but all the same.”
Leapman cursed under his breath, then glowered at the images of the dead, scarred backs.
“I do believe in detail, though,” Falcone continued. “Why don’t you just turn over everything you have and let us go through the material to see if there’s anything you’ve missed?”
“We don’t miss things,” Leapman snarled.
“Let me rephrase,” Falcone said, correcting himself carefully. “Perhaps there’s a fact, an event in there that means something to us and nothing to you.”
To Costa’s surprise, Leapman didn’t throw the idea straight out of the window into the snow. “It’s got to work both ways,” he said eventually.
“Meaning?” Falcone wondered.
“Meaning a quid pro quo. Deacon works with you from now on. She reports back to me on what you find. In return, you get some files and she fills me in on anything you discover.”
The woman looked up from the desk, her face suffused with sudden anger. “Sir-”
Leapman interrupted, waving a dismissive hand in her direction. “I can spare you. Saves me hearing all this shit about profiling and numbers and stuff.”
Falcone nodded and smiled at her. “Agreed,” he said. “Welcome on board.”
Leapman dragged the keyboard of his PC towards him. “I’ll e-mail you some documents. Let me say this again: these are confidential. If you copy them outside the loop to anyone else, we’ll know and I will personally drag your ass to the Palazzo Chigi for a serious kicking. If I see them reported in the press you’ll be writing parking tickets in Naples before the week’s out.”
“You seem to have such influence,” Falcone said with a faint smile.
“If you like,” Leapman replied, “you can test me.”
“No,” Falcone demurred. “But you could tell me one more thing.”
“What’s that?” Leapman answered without looking up.
“How long you’ve been here in Rome, waiting for this man to turn up. How he sent you here in the first place. And-”
Falcone reached over and pushed the keyboard out of Leapman’s reach, making sure the American had to look him in the face.
“-why the hell we had to wait for two people to die before you got around to telling us we had this monster on our streets.”
Leapman glowered at him. “Deacon?”
She blinked, hesitating, then punched the remote. Costa could feel the hatred rolling off her. A new photo came on the screen: an oriental temple, red-walled with three roofs, set behind rows of white marble steps.
“The Temple of Heaven, Beijing,” she explained. “A Chinese Pantheon, if you like. The cosmology, the proportions, are virtually identical. It was a sacrificial altar once too.”
“Still is for the man out there,” Leapman said quietly, almost to himself.
Emily Deacon was struggling to keep her composure. “This is the last we know of before Rome. In September another body was found there. It took us a little while to get on the case. We never expected to see him outside North America or Europe. And”-she flicked the remote and pulled up more tourist shots of the temple-“there were other reasons.”
“Show the good people,” Leapman ordered.
She pulled up another shot. The man was on his back, naked, face contorted in death, a noose of cord biting cruelly into his neck.
“Excuse me,” she said and walked briskly out of the door.
Leapman sighed and picked up the remote, keying up the next picture: the victim turned facedown, with the now-familiar horned shape carved into his skin.
“After this,” he continued, “we had some intelligence. It pointed us to Rome.”
“Intelligence?” Falcone asked.
“Intelligence. Don’t ask because I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted. Just take my word for it. We had some idea that he was on his way here. So”-Leapman closed his eyes for a moment as if this were boring him-“here I am, eating shit food, living in a service apartment, biding my time. Because my masters in Washington decide we should set up an office over here, wait around a little while and see what happens. Why didn’t we tell you? Well, what do you think, Inspector? We didn’t have any proof he was here. We didn’t have a single clue when or where he might do anything if he did turn up. What, exactly, would you have said if I’d walked in and dumped this bunch of half-guesses and supposition on your desk?”
Leapman waited for an answer. It didn’t come. “I’ll take that as a sign you see my point. We had to come. We had to wait. Now we know this animal’s loose we’ve got to track him down once and for all. He’s fucked around with us too much already. Besides…”