He opened his hands in an expression of bafflement.
“Look,” she continued, “a woman who had black hair to begin with and went grey might dye it black. The rest of us? Check out the statistics with the hair-dye manufacturers. I have. A lot of women dye their hair blonde because that’s what gentlemen prefer, right? A good number like something chestnut or so, too. Think about it. Have you ever met a woman with nice chestnut hair who had an urge to dye it jet black? OK. You’re struggling to find the experience to answer that question. Let me do it for you. No. It doesn’t happen. It’s weird. It doesn’t compute. Black, real black like this, is something you get handed down in the genes. You learn to live with it. Maybe you learn to get rid of it. What you don’t do is make it happen if it wasn’t there in the first place.”
“That’s it?” he asked. “Maybe a bullet wound? Maybe an inexplicable use of hair dye?”
Silvio groaned. They both knew what Falcone was doing. Daring her to come up with something else. However she happened to have acquired it.
“No. That isn’t it. Silvio?”
“Oh, Jesus.” Di Capua walked towards the deep cabinet drawers where they stored everything that came attached to a death, however ordinary, however apparently meaningless. “Jesus, sweet Jesus. Here comes the shit again, here come the written warnings. Why can I not work with normal people? Why can I not-”
“Shut up!” she yelled.
He picked out a green plastic box, brought it over and placed the thing on the table. The name “Margaret Kearney” was handwritten on a label stuck to the front. Inside were a pile of neatly stashed clothing, a bag and several plastic folders full of personal belongings.
Falcone did a double take looking at it. Finally he said, “The cord I can go along with. Now tell me this isn’t what I think.”
“It’s her stuff, Leo. Hell, if I can’t have her surely I can have her stuff, can’t I?”
“I made it absolutely plain. Leapman had that piece of paper that gave him full authority-”
She was quick to interrupt. “Just a minute. You weren’t there when that team of dumbos he’d hired turned up with the hearse. ”We’re here for the body,“ they said. Well, that’s what they got. I even let them take our gurney. Do you have any idea what those things cost? I’ll be billing the White House personally if we don’t get it back.”
He put a hand on the green box. “This…”
“This is something they never asked for. Will they? Sure, once someone realizes what a stupid mistake they made. And they can have it. I won’t stand in their way. But tell me, Leo. What was I supposed to do? Run after them and say, ”I think you forgot something?“ Or leave it there in the Pantheon, for God’s sake?”
Something extraordinary happened then. Leo Falcone’s shoulders heaved an inch or two. Teresa Lupo realized she was witnessing him laugh, an event which was entirely new to her.
“I’m just a bystander in all this, aren’t I?” he asked finally, then fixed her with a hungry stare. “So?”
“So this.”
She pulled out Margaret Kearney’s US passport and showed him the photo. “Notice how very black her hair is there? How stiff the pose? She didn’t get this done in some supermarket booth, now, did she? I hate passport photos where people are actually thinking about what they look like. It’s so unnatural.”
“And?”
She pointed to the picture. “Note the glasses.” Then she picked up a plastic bag containing a pair of spectacles and began opening it. “These. Don’t worry. We’ve checked for prints. Nothing. No prints anywhere, as far as we can tell. Like the Americans said, this creep is good. Here-try them. Tell me what you see.”
Falcone glowered at the spectacles in her hand. “I don’t wear glasses.”
“Try them, Leo!” she ordered.
He did as he was told and put on the plain black-plastic glasses.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Not fuzzy? No different from normal?”
Falcone removed them and she could see he was starting to get interested now.
“Exactly.”
“No reason it should be. Those are plain glass. They’re not corrective at all.”
And she wondered: would he run straight back to the Americans with this information? Or would he mull it over first? She couldn’t take the risk, even if it did mean he just might go ballistic when he discovered what else she had done. There was an easy way to find out, too.
“One final thing,” she added. “ ”Margaret Kearney.“ There’s an address on her driver’s licence. Leapman and his friends said they’d be contacting relatives, right?”
“They said that,” Falcone agreed.
“The Internet’s a wonderful thing, you know. Tell him, Silvio.”
Di Capua stared at his shiny boots and said in a very low, timorous voice, “There’s no Margaret Kearney in the Manhattan phone book.”
“What?” Falcone yelled.
“There’s no phone number listed,” Di Capua continued. “She could be ex-directory, of course. Except the residential address isn’t an apartment either. It’s just a forwarding service.”
“You’ve been looking up this woman on the Internet?” Falcone bellowed. “This is a morgue. We get paid to do that kind of thing. What the hell gives you the right to interfere with our work like this? Again?”
Gingerly Teresa put a hand on his arm. “But you didn’t do it, Leo. They told you not to, remember? Nobody placed a gagging order like that on us. So, when I noticed the hair, when I looked at that passport, those glasses-please, don’t blame Silvio, if you’re going to blame anyone, blame me-I just kept looking at this woman and I couldn’t stop thinking, ”Something is wrong here.“ ”
He didn’t know whether to shout and scream or thank them, she guessed. It was hard being Leo Falcone much of the time.
“This doesn’t go any further than here,” he told her. “Agreed?”
“Sure,” she said. “And maybe now I should make a call to them explaining they left a few things behind. What do you think? I don’t want them to feel we’re being uncooperative. I don’t want them to get…”
She left it at that. The “suspicious” word could have been pushing things a little too far.
“Do it,” he agreed.
“You see what this means, Leo? We don’t know who Margaret Kearney is. But the hair, the glasses, that stupid fake passport photo, the phone number, the address… we sure as hell know who she isn’t.”
Falcone scowled at the items in the green box, as if a set of inanimate objects could somehow be to blame.
“Still, I guess we don’t need to tell Agent Leapman that,” Teresa added. “Do we?”
She watched the inspector turn this information over in his head. Falcone was one smart man. He was surely there already. All the same, it had had to be said, just to lock the three of them together, deep in all this potential shit.
STEFAN RAJACIC didn’t look like a pimp, Nic Costa thought. He was about sixty years old, squat in an old tweed suit and brown overcoat, with a swarthy, expressive face and dark, miserable eyes. The moustache-heavy and greying, like that of an old walrus-gave him away. It belonged to a world that had vanished, that of Eastern Europe before the end of the Cold War. The man could have been a portlier version of Stalin, trying to fade into old age with plenty of memories and what remained of his dignity. He was the seventh pimp they’d seen that night and the only one Gianni Peroni, who seemed to know every last man of his ilk in Rome, treated with a measure of respect.
Rajacic stared at the photograph of the girl through the fumes of his Turkish cigarette and shook his head. “Officer Peroni,” he said in a heavily accented voice cracked by years of tobacco, “what do you want of me? This girl is what? Thirteen? Fourteen? No more surely?”
“I don’t know,” Peroni admitted.
The Serb waved his hand at the photo. “What kind of a man do you think I am?” He looked at Emily Deacon. “Has he told you I deal with children? Because, if he has, it’s a lie. Judge me for what I am but I don’t have to take that.”