Falcone went silent, thinking. It was an odd moment, Teresa thought. For once he looked as if he were racked by doubts.
Somewhere outside a car started with a sweet, certain rumble.
“Join me,” Falcone ordered and walked to the window. There he pointed to an expensive-looking Lancia travelling across the car park towards the exit, too fast for the treacherous conditions.
“Know who that is?” Falcone asked.
“What am I?” she snapped. “Superwoman, perfect night vision through a car roof or something?”
“Filippo Viale. Top-rung spook from SISDE. I thought you might have bumped into him in the past.”
She didn’t say a word. This was so unlike Falcone.
“Viale sat in on the entire conversation with Moretti. Truth is, he, not Moretti, was running things there.”
“Leo?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he grumbled. “I’m just pissed off. I’ve got the Americans telling me I report to them about what we’re doing. I’ve got Viale telling me I report to him about what the Americans are doing. And somewhere in the middle of all this I need to find out what happened to that woman and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
He was scared. No, that wasn’t right. He was lacking in confidence, and in Leo Falcone that was almost the same thing.
“I’m sorry,” she replied. It was deeply out of character for Falcone to give away details like this, particularly the part about the SISDE officer. Those people moved in and out of the building like ghosts, unremarked, almost unseen. It was standard form that no one acknowledged their presence, let alone admitted to taking orders from them.
She reached for some papers in the folder in front of her.
“Since this is for you and you alone I’ll make it short and sweet. Silvio? Get the camera.”
Silvio slunk off to the filing cabinet and came back with a large, semi-professional digital Canon.
Teresa Lupo looked at him. “Lights, Silvio. Action.”
Hands shaking slightly, he fired up the screen. She took it and started flicking through the shots there.
“Do we know who she was, this tourist?” she asked.
“Not really,” Falcone answered. “Just the name. Her hotel. Is it relevant? You heard what Leapman said. This man is supposed to select his victims at random. The only linking factor is that they’re all American tourists.”
“I know that. But what did this woman do? What was her job?”
Falcone shook his head. “I’ve no idea. I don’t hold out much hope we’re going to find out either. Leapman has put out a statement to the papers saying she was a divorcée from New York. No profession. No personal details. We’re supposed to refer all media inquiries to him from now on, which is the one part of this piece I am quite happy with.”
“Illuminating.”
She pulled up a shot of the woman’s torso and hit the magnification button. “Of course, this would be so much easier if I had a body to work with, but I’ll do my best. You see this?”
She was pointing to an obvious scar on the left-hand side of the woman’s stomach.
“Appendix?” Falcone asked.
“Are you kidding me?” she gasped. “What kind of surgeon leaves an appendix scar that size, with that much loss of flesh? If they did that in the States this poor bitch would have sued them for billions. She wouldn’t be holidaying in Rome, she’d own the place.”
Di Capua was rocking backwards and forwards on his heels now, sweating a little, distinctly uncomfortable, as if he knew where this was going.
Falcone scowled at her. “So-”
“So I don’t have a damn body. I can’t take a better look at this under proper lighting. I can’t try and see what lies underneath the scar tissue. Thank you, thank you, thank you-”
“What is it?” Falcone interrupted.
“My guess? It’s the scar from a bullet wound. Nasty one too. Judging by the size of the affected area, she got shot close up. She was probably lucky to live through it.”
Falcone’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “A bullet wound? How old?”
She traced her finger over the photo. “Can’t be exact. More than three years. It happened to her as an adult. After she’d stopped growing. Beyond that I don’t know. Of course it would be easy to clear this up if we could get the woman’s medical history. What was she called?”
“Margaret Kearney,” he replied. “We won’t get any medical records out of the Americans. You saw what they’re like.”
“This happened in Rome, Leo!” Her voice had risen a couple of decibels. “Why the hell are we being pushed around as if we’re disinterested bystanders or something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because of who his last victim was. A diplomat. What’s the point in asking? We just have to learn to live with what we have. You think I should walk back into Moretti’s office and ask him to change things around? Do you really believe this kind of decision’s coming from his desk? And that’s all you’ve got?” he added. “That she had a bullet wound? Even if it’s true, so what? It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”
“I guess not.”
She looked at Silvio Di Capua, who was quaking in his small, very clean Chelsea boots. “Get the cord, Silvio. And the hair.”
He went away making a soft, squeaking noise of terror, and came back with a couple of sample bags.
Teresa Lupo picked up the first. “In order to stop you screeching the place down, let me say I removed this entirely innocently from the woman’s neck. They only said they wanted the body. I didn’t think they’d miss it.”
The fabric lay coiled like a tiny serpent inside the evidence bag.
“That’s the thing he used?” Falcone asked. “It’s a cord?”
“It looks like a cord,” Teresa replied, then took out the fabric and, with two sets of tweezers, carefully unrolled it. “Until you take it apart a little.”
Falcone blinked at the object unfurling under her precise fingers.
It was dark grey and green, an odd patchwork that had been tightly rolled into the ligature which had killed the woman.
“Recognize the shape?” Teresa pulled the fabric tightly to make her point.
It was the Maltese cross pattern from Emily Deacon’s sacred cut. As near as dammit.
“He cut it out of a piece of fabric and then used it to kill her?” Falcone asked, bewildered.
“That’s one explanation. This is very tough fabric, though, and it seems manufactured to me. I’ve asked forensic to take a look.”
Falcone scowled. “I don’t see where that gets us.”
“Patience, Leo. So what about this?”
Falcone looked at a familiar sight: a sample of hair in a transparent morgue bag.
“This is from Margaret Kearney’s head,” she explained. “Black as coal, as you can see.”
He nodded, not understanding the point.
“You’re a gentleman, Leo. I’ll say that for you. The poor cow was stone dead on the floor there and you didn’t even take a good look down below, did you? This is not her natural hair colour. This”-she held up the second slide. A hank of light brown hair lay trapped between the pieces of glass-“is what her head’s supposed to look like. We took out the dye just to make sure. You can’t rely on what the pubic zone tells you. This is a general observation that goes beyond the matter of body hair, by the way. I trust you and Silvio will take it to heart.”
Falcone sighed and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now nearly nine. “So you think she had a bullet wound. He killed her with some crazy piece of cloth. And you know she dyed her hair.”
“Oh, Leo, Leo,” she protested, “you really know nothing about women, do you? Naturally, her hair was a pleasant brown. Personally, I would have been quite happy with it. See?”
She waved her own lank crop at him. “What colour’s this?”
“Black,” he replied.
“No, no, no! How can a man like you, someone who’s usually so observant, be so blind? It’s really a very dark brown. Genuine black, the colour you have here”-she held up the second slide-“that’s quite rare naturally.”