Leapman just glared back at him, glassy-eyed.
“You need to trust us,” Peroni continued, “because if you don’t we’re just going to keep going round and round in circles, not getting anywhere at all. With this person of yours-of yours-still out there.”
The FBI man sniffed, then looked down the street and signalled for his driver.
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about,” he said and pushed his way between Costa and Falcone, taking the easy route, the one that didn’t go near Gianni Peroni, stomping off down the street towards his car, not bothering to look back.
Peroni frowned and looked at Falcone. Costa knew what the gesture said: I tried.
“Am I helping around here?” Peroni enquired.
Falcone scowled, not at them, at the chaos around all of them. “Ask me later.”
“I’d like to go after the girl, sir,” Peroni said quietly. “Just me. You can spare one man. This isn’t a personal thing. I still think she’s got something to tell us.”
“Do it,” Falcone murmured. “And, Peroni-it was a nice try.”
“Thanks,” the big man murmured.
Costa followed his partner back to the jeep and handed over the keys.
“Where are you going to look, Gianni?”
“Same places as we did before.”
He had to ask-Peroni got wrapped up in himself sometimes. “What if this guy’s still after her, too?”
“Then I guess we might meet. If it happens I’ll call. Besides, I don’t think you’re going to bump into him with Agent Leapman around. Do you?”
“Not really.” All the same, the difficult relationship with the FBI agent had surely been fractured beyond repair now. Was that what they wanted? “When did Leo put you up to this little act?”
Peroni’s face registered mock shock. “Put me up to what?”
“You know damn well.”
He laughed. It was a good sound, one Costa had missed of late. “Look, Leo and I know each other of old. Sometimes you don’t have to put things in words. You just improvise a little. He’s as sick of that asshole as we are. And what I said was true. It’s time for the guy to level with us. Sooner or later he’s going to realize that himself. We’re supposed to be on the same side, aren’t we?”
Leapman had been shaken by the evidence they’d got on the cord, Costa thought. But there was something else bugging the American too: the latest death. For some reason, he still found it difficult to believe it really was the same killer.
Peroni’s face was serious again. “Forget Agent Leapman for a moment, Nic. Tell me this. Why did Laila run away? I don’t get it. I thought we were doing really well and normally I don’t read those situations the wrong way.”
Costa shrugged. “Who knows with a kid like that? Maybe it’s because you were doing so well. Maybe the idea of closeness terrifies her.”
“Nah,” Peroni murmured and gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “I don’t buy that any more than I buy Leapman playing innocent. You don’t know the first thing about kids, do you, Nic?”
“As you constantly remind me.”
He watched Peroni fit his big bulk behind the wheel.
“Call me if you need me, Gianni,” he said.
“Yeah,” the big man laughed and gently eased the jeep out into the street.
Nic Costa hated instincts. They played tricks with your imagination. They lied constantly. He reminded himself of that as Gianni Peroni disappeared down what was once a narrow, medieval lane, now a line of upscale fashion shops running all the way down to the Corso. Some stupid, pointless instinct was nagging at him, raking over the dregs of his memory to find the long-dead face of another partner, Luca Rossi, one who’d wandered off without him in much the same way and never come back.
Instincts intruded into real life, disturbed what really mattered. Besides, something was happening now. Falcone was listening to the squawk of a voice coming out of the car radio. The tall inspector had a look of intense concentration on his face, one Costa recognized. One he liked.
Falcone finished the conversation and scanned the square. Then he caught Costa’s eye, clicked his fingers and pointed, with some urgency, to the car.
JOEL LEAPMAN CAME BACK to the embassy looking uncharacteristically dishevelled, shambling through the door like a bull looking for somewhere to pick a fight. He was in a foul, unpredictable mood.
“Sir?” Emily asked.
“What have you been doing all day? Don’t I get the courtesy of a call from you, girl?”
“I thought…”
She glanced at the computer screen, now back to her customary log-on with its round of low-level information. The camera was still in her purse. That was dumb. She should have taken it back to the apartment, got the evidence out of the building.
“You thought what?”
“I thought you wanted me to wait until you had something for me to do.”
“Jesus…”
Leapman seemed seriously out of sorts. Food spattered his coat.
“Is there something wrong?” she asked.
“Is there something right?” he complained.
Leapman looked like someone with doubts and that wasn’t a position he liked or understood very much at all.
“These cops,” he said. “Falcone. The other guys. Why’d they hate us so much?”
“I don’t think they do,” she answered promptly. “Not for one moment.”
“Really? I just had that big ugly bastard stuff a burger into my mouth. What was that all about?”
She thought about Gianni Peroni. It didn’t add up. “You tell me.”
“None of your business,” Leapman barked back at her.
Emily Deacon was getting deeply sick of this man. Maybe Thornton Fielding was right. She should just file a complaint and get out of his presence.
“Then why ask?”
“Because, because…” he grumbled. “You don’t need to know the reasons. Sometimes events just run away with you, Agent Deacon, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
“If that’s an apology, you should direct it at them.”
Leapman had pissed everyone off. He’d been working on it from the moment they walked into the Pantheon. It had been deliberate, determined.
“So now they’re the good guys, huh? I should go running to them?”
“I think they’re doing their best in difficult circumstances.”
His voice rose. “It’s difficult for all of us, girl!”
Enough was enough. “It’s more difficult for them, Leapman. They think they’re being kept in the dark. They’re right. And one more thing.” She pointed a slender finger at his chest. “Don’t call me ”girl.“ Not ever again.”
Or “Little Em.”
He laughed and Emily Deacon was surprised to find herself thinking that this was, perhaps, what he wanted to hear.
“So you can answer back,” Leapman said. “Who’d have believed it?”
He leaned over to his PC, keyed in a few words, then turned the screen to face her. It was the RAI news website. The lead story was about another murder in the city, with a photo of a burnt-out car by the Spanish Steps.
“We’re losing this, Emily,” he said in a flat, miserable voice. “And I don’t know why. He’s killed someone else and I’ve got to tell you that’s the last thing I expected. This isn’t part of any pattern I can figure out. He’s killed some poor, helpless bitch who got in the way somehow. I never…”
Leapman fell silent and stared at the monitor.
“You never what?”
“I never thought he’d stoop to that.”
He picked up the phone and hit a speed-dial button.
“Viale?” he asked, and there was a different tone to his voice now, a resigned, almost scared resonance she scarcely recognized. “We’ve got to talk… Just a minute.”
Leapman cupped the mouthpiece and stared at her.
“I’d like a coffee, Agent Deacon,” he said. “Cappuccino. The good stuff, from that place over the road. And take your time. I’ve got work to do.”
NIC COSTA TOOK a deep breath and found it amazing that, only an hour earlier, he’d been worried about Gianni Peroni. Wherever the big man was in the white, frozen world that was Rome, it had to be better than this: clinging to a narrow, icy fire-escape ladder a dizzying height above the cobbled streets in the labyrinthine quarter north of the Pantheon, trying to peer through the billowing blizzard that was sweeping all around him.