Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.” All reduced to a series of beeps on a piece of silicon.
Costa lowered the zipper and removed the phone.
“Jesus, Nic,” Emily whispered. “I never knew that was there.”
He touched her blonde hair, just for a moment, and murmured, “He’s improvising. So should we.”
Then he looked at the handset, working out the buttons, hit the one for speakerphone and placed it on the chair Filippo Viale had so hastily vacated seconds before.
“Mr. Kaspar,” Costa said evenly, “it’s now a little under twenty minutes to one. By the timetable you set, we have just forty minutes or so to resolve this matter. Best we make this a conference call, don’t you think?”
TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES BEFORE, after briefly calling in at the morgue to pick up some props, Teresa Lupo had taken a taxi to the Via Veneto, then used her police ID to talk herself into reception at the US embassy. She’d checked her notes. She remembered the officer who’d been sent round to clean up after the death in the Pantheon, the one who forgot to take the clothes. In her book, dumb acts denoted dumb people. So she looked up his name from her scribbles and told the security officer at the desk in reception she needed an urgent audience with Cy Morrison that very moment. The uniforms on the door had scarcely looked at the box she was carrying. A bunch of clothes in plastic evidence bags didn’t seem to make much impact on their security scanners.
Morrison, a weary man in his mid-thirties, came out straightaway. He looked overworked and more than a little grumpy. “What can I do for you?”
She held out the box, placed it on the counter and smiled. “Your nice Agent Leapman needs these. He wants them in his office. Now.”
He really didn’t look the brightest of buttons. Or the kind to argue too much. “I tried to call him earlier,” he said. “Agent Leapman’s not here at the moment. I don’t think Agent Deacon’s in the office either. I’ll make sure Leapman gets them.”
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Should I?”
“The Pantheon. Two days ago. You came to pick up the body.”
He swore under his breath. “Oh. That.”
“You forgot something.”
“Miss-”
She flashed the police ID at him. “Doctor.”
“Doctor Lupo. I will take these things and make sure they go to the proper place.”
“Yes, well, you won’t mind if I make sure.”
“What?”
She sighed, as if she were trying to keep her patience. “You left them in the Pantheon, Morrison. I had Joel Leapman screaming down the phone at me this morning as if it were my fault or something.”
“What?” he asked again.
“You came to pick up the body, didn’t you?”
“Yeah! Which we did. Hell, I’m not running some damn funeral-home service here. We shouldn’t be doing this kind of stuff anyway.”
She tapped her shoe on the shiny reception floor. “You took the body. You left her stuff. You wouldn’t be fit to run a funeral home. If it wasn’t for me, these things could have been lost for good. Not that I’m getting any credit for it. Do you wonder Joel Leapman’s going berserk over this?”
The woman behind the counter was starting to stare now. She had a little “serve you right” smile on her face. Joel Leapman couldn’t be that popular around here, Teresa thought. But maybe Cy Morrison wasn’t either.
Morrison walked a little way away from the desk to get a touch of privacy. “Listen,” he said in a low, furious voice, “I’m not interested in what Joel Leapman thinks. I don’t work for him. I’m damned if I’m supposed to clean up whatever mess he leaves behind either. Just give me the things and it’s done.”
“No,” Teresa snapped. “I’m not having him screaming at me because you fouled up again. I want to see them in there. If they turn up missing again he’s going to go ballistic again and I don’t want that coming in my direction.”
“Dammit!” Morrison yelled. “Since when did you get the right to give orders here?”
She took out Emily’s security card and waved it in his face, keeping the photo side away from him, hoping, hoping. “Since Joel Leapman told me to go see ”that moron Morrison,“ gave me this and told me not to let go of this stuff until I saw it safely on his desk with my own eyes. Now, do you want to accompany me there? Or should I just find my own way? God knows,” she lied, “I’ve seen enough of that place and that man these past few days.”
Cy Morrison peered at the security card. Someone like Joel Leapman wouldn’t give these things out lightly, Teresa guessed. It had to mean something. Still, Morrison ought to at the very least check the photo, and some inner reminder of that seemed to be just beginning to work its way into his consciousness.
“Plus,” she improvised, wondering if she was going to foul up here, and what trying to talk your way into a secure office in the US embassy meant for your career, “he needs these urgently.”
Teresa Lupo dug deep into the bottom of the box and retrieved one of the bags she’d taken from the apartment the previous day.
“This was yesterday’s woman,” she said. “You heard about that? Turns out she was American too. Maybe I’ll be calling you to pick up her corpse before long. She was decapitated,” Teresa said, getting his attention on the bag. “While wearing this nightdress.”
The scarlet garment lay in a large evidence bag, the bloodstains black and stiff beneath the plastic. Morrison eyed the bag sideways. He looked queasy.
“Of course if you want to take responsibility yourself…” he managed, “I’d just have to tell Leapman you’d done that, you understand. So if it went missing, if anything got tampered with, damaged, lost, altered in any way which meant it couldn’t be used in a court of law…”
Scaring men was fun sometimes, she thought. A skill to be cultivated.
“You do know about rules of evidence, don’t you?” she demanded. “You do understand what happens if this doesn’t get handled in exactly the right way? If one thumbprint goes in the wrong place?”
“Frankly,” Morrison muttered briskly, “I don’t give a shit. If the guy gave you his card, go wherever the hell you want. And find your own damn way out too.”
With that he stormed off, in the opposite direction, away from the office she wanted, the one just round the corner and down the hall.
Teresa Lupo whistled a little tune as she walked there. Then she ran Emily Deacon’s ID through the security slot, waited for the lock to retreat and walked in.
She’d been thinking this through all the way there, phrasing the right message, tweaking the nuances. She’d had an uncle who took her hunting once, when she was a kid. She’d hated the entire experience. All except for the dog. The wonderful dog who was as lovable as they came but could flush out a single pheasant in a field of corn just by scenting where the bird lived and emitting a single bark in its direction.
A minute. That was all it would take to type a simple e-mail, swiped with Emily’s ID card to authenticate it as genuine, mark the message as urgent as hell, hit Send and stand back to see what happened.
She hammered the keyboard with her fat, clumsy fingers.
“Now run, you bastard,” Teresa Lupo said to herself and hoped to God this made a difference. Those hard canisters she felt as she hugged Emily Deacon’s scared, skinny body kept popping pictures into her head of what they could deliver on her cold, shining table if anything went wrong.
“That was a piece of cake,” Teresa Lupo whispered to herself. “You should do this more often.”