“Possibly,” she conceded. “So tell me what you want me to do.”
“Me?” Peroni replied. “Hell, I don’t know. None of us has a clue where to begin here. We haven’t had a gang war in Rome in living memory. If that’s what it is—”
“What else could it be?”
“Search me. But if it is a gang war it’s a pretty one-sided affair, don’t you think? Somehow from behind his iron gates, with no troops whatsoever except a few golf buddies, the American whacks Neri’s accountant and lays out all those documents that mean Neri has to take to his heels. At least I guess that’s how he feels. Then the fat man goes ballistic and puts a little leaving present outside his own house for us.”
She knew what he meant. “It’s a funny kind of war.”
“Sort of unbalanced, don’t you think? And Wallis. He’s just sitting there in that big house of his, twiddling his thumbs, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. The DIA’s bugging his phones. Bugging him direct too, I suspect, because they just love playing with those toys of theirs. He’s not retaliating. He’s not doing a damn thing as far as we can work out.”
Teresa sat up straight. She could talk cop again, and she liked that. She smoothed down the crumpled front of her blue shirt, wondered if it wasn’t time to lose a little weight from the old frame. She was big-boned. That was what her mamma always said. But she could get fit if she wanted. She could meet these men at their own game. “What about Barbara Martelli’s old man? You’re telling me Wallis didn’t do that?”
“Now there,” he said with a sudden assurance, “we do know something. Wallis had nothing to do with it. Not unless he’s running Neri’s family for him. We got a good ID from a man who was seen leaving the building. The guy saw someone go in before Martelli got shot. It was Neri’s own son did that one. Dumb bastard left prints too. Makes sense. I guess Neri thought Martelli might tell us what was really going on in that fuck club of theirs. So he sent his boy round. Still doesn’t add up to a war. Not in my book.”
“Unless it’s over already,” she suggested. “The American’s thrown in the towel.”
Peroni didn’t look convinced. “Maybe. A part of me hopes that’s so. The trouble is, I can’t help thinking that if that is the case we’ll never get to the bottom of anything. We never get to understand why poor Barbara whacked the professor and then drove into that big hole chasing you.”
This repetitive refrain was beginning to piss her off. “Poor Barbara… Why’s she always ”poor Barbara“?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Because she’s dead, Teresa. And whatever happened, whatever she tried to do to you, it wasn’t her. It was something else. Something that affected her. Surely you can see that?”
She could, but she didn’t want to face it just then. She’d come close to the edge herself at times. There was craziness in the air.
“What about poor Suzi Julius?”
He shrugged and looked abruptly despondent. “We thought we had a sighting last night. Just before the bangy thing went off. Nic went over there to chase it.” Peroni hesitated, reluctant to go on.
“Well?” she wondered.
“Haven’t heard a word from him since. His phone’s dead. No sign of him in the street. Never went home.”
It always happened with bad news. A picture of the person involved just flew into her head. Teresa Lupo had, maybe unwittingly, got very close to Costa over the last year. He had qualities she didn’t see in abundance around the Questura: persistence, compassion and a dogged sense of justice. And he never caught the cynicism bug either, which, perhaps more than anything, made him stand out from the crowd. “Oh crap. What the hell can have happened?”
“We have no idea,” Peroni said honestly. “But I like that young man, Teresa. He is going to be driving me around when I go back to my old job. No one’s taking that privilege away from me.”
He flexed those big shoulders and she began to understand something else about Peroni. He wasn’t a man to give up easily.
“You could have told me about Nic earlier.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“So what do you want from me?” she asked again.
“Look, I’m not telling you how to do your job. Nor is this a request from Falcone or anything. To be honest with you, everyone back there’s clutching at straws anyway. I just want to say this. We’re all short on resources right now. We all have to think about priorities. You’re a good pathologist, you know the rules, you stick by them, mostly—”
She finished the coffee, looked him in the eye and said, “Cut the crap.”
“OK, OK. I just can’t help thinking that somewhere in that workload of yours there’s something that can help us. And it’s not going to be in the obvious places, or the most recent ones. I know you got to do it on all those poor bastards. I was just hoping you wouldn’t kind of focus on the easy ones first. I mean, Toni Martelli, the accountant guy. Those people from outside Neri’s house. We know how they died. We need forensic, sure, but I don’t think our answer’s going to come from looking at those corpses. Whereas—”
He left it at that, hoping she’d pick up the bait.
“Whereas—?” she wondered.
“Oh God. Do I have to say this? You were right all along. Whatever prompted this shit began with that kid we dug out of the bog. If we could work out what the hell happened to her, and where, then maybe we’d get some better perspective on what’s going on.”
She looked across at the skinny bartender playing with his ponytail and said, “After you’ve washed your hands you can make me another coffee.” The youth slunk off to the kitchen then returned and started working the espresso machine.
Peroni eyed her, just a hint of admiration in his face. “You’re direct, Teresa. I like that in a woman.”
“This Mickey Neri. He killed Barbara’s old man. The Julius woman identified him hanging around her daughter too.”
“Yeah?”
“And if I recall correctly,” she continued, “this same Mickey Neri met Eleanor Jamieson. I saw the notes. They said Wallis and she took a family holiday in Sicily with the Neris six weeks or so before she died.”
“Stands to reason—”
“Oh yes.” She swallowed half the cup of coffee and felt the caffeine and sugar buzz start to hit the back of her head.
“You want to be careful with that stuff,” he said. “It can give you nightmares.”
“I don’t need coffee for that. Do you?”
Peroni glanced at his watch. “Well?”
“We haven’t touched any of yesterday’s,” she said. “Well, hardly anyway. I spent most of last night trying to complete the autopsy on Eleanor Jamieson. I did try to come up and talk to you people about this. Around two thirty. If I recall correctly, you were all too busy.”
His mouth hung open, hungry for information. Quite deliberately she slowly finished the coffee then wiped out the dregs with her index finger and sucked it, making little squeaks of pleasure all the time.
“Please—” he begged.
“I got it wrong, twice over, big time. She wasn’t some virgin sacrifice. Or to be more accurate, she may have been a sacrifice but she wasn’t a virgin. I was wrong too that you couldn’t get any DNA out of a body that’s been sitting in all that acid peat for sixteen years. There’s one circumstance that allows this.” She looked at him. “You want to guess?”
“No!”
“If there’s a foetus. Even a tiny one. Eleanor Jamieson was pregnant. Six weeks or so I’d say. Probably just at the stage she was starting to notice, starting to wonder whether she dare tell the father.”
Peroni’s eyes were shining with hope and outright joy. “Jesus, you beautiful woman.”