His partner nodded at the wrecked Renault. “If he doesn’t get there first.”
That sparked something in Costa’s head. “He’s got bigger things on his plate, don’t you think? Besides…” He wished there was more time to mull over what they knew and less spent chasing phantoms. “He could have killed her last night if he’d wanted, surely? Emily Deacon’s not that great a deterrent. But he didn’t. Have you worked that one out yet?”
“No,” Peroni confessed. “Unless the Deacon woman broke his stride somehow. Not that that makes much sense. What the hell. Let’s put it to one side for now.”
He walked towards the back of the car. A lone idiot in a Santa Claus uniform stood on the corner forlornly shaking a bell. The city never had this particular American import until recently. This Christmas they seemed to be springing up everywhere.
The fake Santa shook his bell, held out a candy stick, looked Peroni in the eye and nodded at the bucket that stood between them on the snow.
“Have you been a good boy, Officer?” the man asked.
“Define ”good,“ ” Peroni snapped and brushed past him.
Nic Costa looked at the sign round the man’s neck: a charity for foreign kids. He threw a couple of notes in the bucket, then shook his head at the candy stick.
“Give it to your friend,” Santa suggested. “Might sweeten him up a bit.”
“I doubt that somehow,” Costa murmured and joined the team by the car.
Falcone was off to one side, just outside the deserted McDonald’s, talking solemnly with a couple of plainclothes cops, watched by the bored-looking Joel Leapman. Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua were working steadily on something in the boot of the car, half-concealed by badly placed screens, one of which Peroni was moving to get access to the vehicle.
Peroni took one glance at the mess in the boot, one at Teresa Lupo, then turned away and asked sharply, “Anything we should know?”
The pathologist moved her head out from under the shadow of the car, nodded at Di Capua to keep going, then walked over to them. “Did you find her?”
“Not yet,” Costa said quickly. “We got called here instead. She didn’t say anything…?”
“No,” Teresa began. “I’m sorry, Gianni…”
“Me too,” Peroni mumbled. “It’s just so… inadequate.”
There were tears starting to work their way into Teresa Lupo’s eyes, something Nic Costa realized he’d never witnessed before.
Peroni spotted them, put his hand on her arm, briefly kissed her cheek and mouthed, “It’s OK.” He cast a vicious glance at the buzzards leering at them from behind the crime scene tape: photographers, reporters and a whole bunch of spectators with nothing better to do.
“I guess you’ve been asked this a million times,” Peroni said when she’d got her act together again, “but how’d this one die?”
Teresa shrugged, regaining her old self. “This is all preliminary, understood? I’m just telling you what I told your boss, with the same reservations. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, not out here. Also, unless someone tells me otherwise, I get to take this lady home. That American bastard isn’t playing body snatchers this time around. Even if she is one of his, there’s no way of knowing yet.”
“How?” Peroni asked again.
“Still working on the method. Let me put this delicately. She’s not exactly complete.”
There was something she didn’t want to say, probably for Peroni’s sake. “She’s naked. Not a scrap of clothing on her. The tags have been taken off the suitcases. I’ll hand them over to forensic once we’re done here. They don’t look like a common make to me. Expensive too. Maybe…”
They looked at each other and knew what each of them was thinking. Work of that nature took a long, long time.
“You haven’t asked me yet,” she said. “That question.”
“He’d marked the skin?” Costa asked.
“Kind of.” She shrugged again. “It’s the same man. But it’s not like the others, though. If you want to look, I can…”
Both men had their hands up before she’d finished the sentence.
“Understood,” she continued. “The honest answer is I don’t know if the cuts were made by the same instrument. Ask me when I’ve cleaned her up a little back in the morgue. There are a lot of cuts on this woman. But there are marks on her back that aren’t just… practical, if I can put it that way. They could be made by a scalpel. Maybe.”
Costa thought of Emily Deacon drawing the pattern, so easily, so naturally, in the American embassy the previous day. “And the shape?”
“I’m sorry. But if you want something concrete, look at this.”
She reached round into the depths of the boot and came back with a hank of bloodstained material encased inside an evidence bag like a dead insect.
“It’s the cord,” she told them. “He’d removed it from the neck this time. It was in one of the suitcases. This is the same material that he used on the woman in the Pantheon. Not a scintilla of doubt.”
Costa didn’t know what to make of the thing. “But it’s not a cord.”
Teresa frowned. “Leo didn’t tell you, huh? I guess he’s had other things on his mind. No, it isn’t a cord. It’s a piece of very tough fabric cut in that exact same shape we all know so well, then wrapped tightly to make a cord. At first I thought he must have done it himself, though it would have taken a hell of a long time. Still, he’s a gentleman with an obsession, no?”
Peroni was getting interested. “But?”
She handed the bag to Costa, then picked up her briefcase and shuffled through the mess of papers in it until she found what she wanted.
“Silvio had this report waiting for me from forensic when I got here. Fastest piece of work those people have ever done.”
Costa took the single page. Peroni joined him and read it simultaneously.
“Has Falcone seen this?” Nic asked.
“Oh yes,” Teresa continued. “I didn’t dare hold back on that one, not that he seems to know what to do with it right now. Your American friend over there doesn’t have a clue, though. Or an inkling that I still have the original cord from that poor cow in the Pantheon. In fact, from what I’ve heard of his bullshit already, if you were to talk to him you would find he doesn’t think this is part of the same game at all. Not directly, anyway. He’s got a theory.”
Peroni blinked, bewildered. “A theory?”
“Oh yes,” Teresa added. “And guess what? It’s one that lays all the crap at our door.”
“ ”Our door“?” Costa repeated.
“You bet,” she said with a smile. “Now would you boys like to borrow that report for a little while? Maybe you can give Leo some ideas.”
“Yes,” Gianni Peroni replied, and began walking towards Leo Falcone and Joel Leapman with a look of pure fury on his face.
THERE WAS TOO LITTLE TIME and too much information. It was like being lost in a forest of unreadable signs and signals. She’d typed in the name Nic had mentioned, “Henry Anderton,” and got a brief uninformative report on the attack that had triggered the alert over security for American visitors. It seemed routine, unconnected to the present case. The dead man was simply an academic who’d been the victim of unprovoked street violence in a small square in the ghetto, the Piazza Mattei. The name rang a bell. It had a tortoise fountain in the centre. Her father had shown it to her a couple of times, taken her picture standing beside it on one of their many walks around Rome. However, nothing connected that assault with the current investigation. The victim had been badly beaten. According to the records, he’d been flown back to America by his health insurer and hospitalized in Boston. A short search on the Internet proved that Costa’s suspicions were unfounded. Henry Anderton was a famous professor, now retired. There was only one item of minor interest in what she could glean of his background from the Net. One academic paper he’d published, on the structure and funding of Islamic terrorist groups, acknowledged the assistance of several FBI officers in the provision of advice and information. It was a tenuous link, but hardly earth-shattering.