The Sacred Cut nc-3 Read online

  Emily Deacon smiled. “If it’s that easy, don’t you think he might be doing it too? This girl must have seen what happened. She must know things we’d dearly love to hear. Why else would he want to kill her?”

  Costa gave his partner a hard look. They should have thought of this themselves. They’d been distracted by the meeting at the embassy, and having an outsider attached to the investigation.

  “I’ll drive,” Costa said.

  * * *

  By the time Peroni was renewing his acquaintance with the first name on his long list of East European hoods, Teresa Lupo was dictating the preliminary autopsy results on Mauro Sandri, running through all the familiar terms she’d come to learn over the years when dealing with firearms deaths, still unable to push what she’d heard in the American embassy out of her head.

  Silvio Di Capua was busy cleaning the stainless-steel table, watching her out of the corner of his beady eyes with the same guarded awe she’d come to expect, wondering, perhaps, what she saw in the big old Tuscan cop who was now sharing her home. It was none of his business, even if it was a good question. Gianni Peroni was a good human being: honest, decent and kind, in spite of his tough outward appearance. She liked his company.

  At least Silvio Di Capua’s crush on her had waned a little since her assistant realized she was no longer available. He was by the door now, washing his hands and looking ready to grab his too-short black leather bomber jacket and head home for the night when Leo Falcone walked in. She watched with some dismay the way Silvio flinched at the sight of the inspector, like a mouse catching sight of a bird of prey. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that the analogy was appropriate. Falcone, as his surname suggested, had the beady eyes of a raptor and a bare, birdlike skull too. The sharp jut of his goatee only enhanced further the impression of a hunter. He was the kind of person someone like Silvio Di Capua feared the most. Not just for his acerbic tongue or the sudden, direct habit he had of tackling every issue head-on. Worse, much worse sometimes, was the way he never let anything go. This irked Di Capua more than anyone because, when it came to morgue matters, he was the one Falcone chose as the weak point, the place to start poking at with a long, suspicious forefinger.

  Teresa Lupo was apt not to play things by the book, if a few unorthodox methods suited her better, but she made a point of keeping those habits under her hat, most of the time, anyway. It was always Di Capua whom Falcone squeezed for proof, turning those bleak, suspicious eyes on him and asking all the questions the little man never wanted to hear. Then there’d be the recriminations and, worst of all, in the end Teresa would have to hear out Silvio’s grovelling apology for blabbing, accompanied, as always, by an invitation to dinner.

  She looked up from her notes, feigned a smile and said, “Inspector. Good evening. And you’ve come alone too. Not with those nice new American friends of yours. How pleasant.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Falcone objected. “You heard, didn’t you?”

  “Actually, no. I was trying to work out a few things in my head. Such as why a very odd corpse was stretched out on the floor of the Pantheon like that. Listening to cops bitch at one another is a secondary diversion at such times and I’m happy for it to stay that way.” She switched off the tape recorder. “So what can I do for you?”

  As usual, Falcone came straight to the point. “You can tell me what you two found out when you had the woman to yourself. And don’t tell me it’s nothing because I won’t believe you.”

  She beamed at him. “This is because of your great faith in our abilities?”

  “If you like,” he conceded grudgingly. “Or maybe I just know when you’re not telling us something. There’s an air of smugness around this place right now and I’d very much like to puncture it.”

  “You don’t want the report on that poor photographer?”

  “I know what happened to the photographer. I was there. Remember?”

  She looked into his miserable face and felt a twinge of guilt. Falcone wasn’t happy about any of this. It wasn’t fair to bitch. All the same, she did have something to bitch about.

  “So you want me to offer some insights into a corpse which, with your full agreement, was snatched away from me right in front of my eyes, quite without reason, and completely contrary to Italian law, too, I might add?”

  “Don’t start,” Falcone said. “I’ve just been upstairs listening to Bruno Moretti, among others, telling me how we need to keep the FBI sweat at every turn.”

  Falcone went silent, thinking. It was an odd moment, Teresa thought. For once he looked as if he were racked by doubts.

  Somewhere outside a car started with a sweet, certain rumble.

  “Join me,” Falcone ordered and walked to the window. There he pointed to an expensive-looking Lancia travelling across the car park towards the exit, too fast for the treacherous conditions.

  “Know who that is?” Falcone asked.

  “What am I?” she snapped. “Superwoman, perfect night vision through a car roof or something?”

  “Filippo Viale. Top-rung spook from SISDE. I thought you might have bumped into him in the past.”

  She didn’t say a word. This was so unlike Falcone.

  “Viale sat in on the entire conversation with Moretti. Truth is, he, not Moretti, was running things there.”

  “Leo?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he grumbled. “I’m just pissed off. I’ve got the Americans telling me I report to them about what we’re doing. I’ve got Viale telling me I report to him about what the Americans are doing. And somewhere in the middle of all this I need to find out what happened to that woman and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  He was scared. No, that wasn’t right. He was lacking in confidence, and in Leo Falcone that was almost the same thing.

  “I’m sorry,” she replied. It was deeply out of character for Falcone to give away details like this, particularly the part about the SISDE officer. Those people moved in and out of the building like ghosts, unremarked, almost unseen. It was standard form that no one acknowledged their presence, let alone admitted to taking orders from them.

  She reached for some papers in the folder in front of her.

  “Since this is for you and you alone I’ll make it short and sweet. Silvio? Get the camera.”

  Silvio slunk off to the filing cabinet and came back with a large, semi-professional digital Canon.

  Teresa Lupo looked at him. “Lights, Silvio. Action.”

  Hands shaking slightly, he fired up the screen. She took it and started flicking through the shots there.

  “Do we know who she was, this tourist?” she asked.

  “Not really,” Falcone answered. “Just the name. Her hotel. Is it relevant? You heard what Leapman said. This man is supposed to select his victims at random. The only linking factor is that they’re all American tourists.”

  “I know that. But what did this woman do? What was her job?”

  Falcone shook his head. “I’ve no idea. I don’t hold out much hope we’re going to find out either. Leapman has put out a statement to the papers saying she was a divorcée from New York. No profession. No personal details. We’re supposed to refer all media inquiries to him from now on, which is the one part of this piece I am quite happy with.”

  “Illuminating.”

  She pulled up a shot of the woman’s torso and hit the magnification button. “Of course, this would be so much easier if I had a body to work with, but I’ll do my best. You see this?”

  She was pointing to an obvious scar on the left-hand side of the woman’s stomach.

  “Appendix?” Falcone asked.

  “Are you kidding me?” she gasped. “What kind of surgeon leaves an appendix scar that size, with that much loss of flesh? If they did that in the States this poor bitch would have sued them for billions. She wouldn’t be holidaying in Rome, she’d own the place.”

  Di Capua was rocking backwards and forwards on hi
s heels now, sweating a little, distinctly uncomfortable, as if he knew where this was going.

  Falcone scowled at her. “So-”

  “So I don’t have a damn body. I can’t take a better look at this under proper lighting. I can’t try and see what lies underneath the scar tissue. Thank you, thank you, thank you-”

  “What is it?” Falcone interrupted.

  “My guess? It’s the scar from a bullet wound. Nasty one too. Judging by the size of the affected area, she got shot close up. She was probably lucky to live through it.”

  Falcone’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “A bullet wound? How old?”

  She traced her finger over the photo. “Can’t be exact. More than three years. It happened to her as an adult. After she’d stopped growing. Beyond that I don’t know. Of course it would be easy to clear this up if we could get the woman’s medical history. What was she called?”

  “Margaret Kearney,” he replied. “We won’t get any medical records out of the Americans. You saw what they’re like.”

  “This happened in Rome, Leo!” Her voice had risen a couple of decibels. “Why the hell are we being pushed around as if we’re disinterested bystanders or something?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because of who his last victim was. A diplomat. What’s the point in asking? We just have to learn to live with what we have. You think I should walk back into Moretti’s office and ask him to change things around? Do you really believe this kind of decision’s coming from his desk? And that’s all you’ve got?” he added. “That she had a bullet wound? Even if it’s true, so what? It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

  “I guess not.”

  She looked at Silvio Di Capua, who was quaking in his small, very clean Chelsea boots. “Get the cord, Silvio. And the hair.”

  He went away making a soft, squeaking noise of terror, and came back with a couple of sample bags.

  Teresa Lupo picked up the first. “In order to stop you screeching the place down, let me say I removed this entirely innocently from the woman’s neck. They only said they wanted the body. I didn’t think they’d miss it.”

  The fabric lay coiled like a tiny serpent inside the evidence bag.

  “That’s the thing he used?” Falcone asked. “It’s a cord?”

  “It looks like a cord,” Teresa replied, then took out the fabric and, with two sets of tweezers, carefully unrolled it. “Until you take it apart a little.”

  Falcone blinked at the object unfurling under her precise fingers.

  It was dark grey and green, an odd patchwork that had been tightly rolled into the ligature which had killed the woman.

  “Recognize the shape?” Teresa pulled the fabric tightly to make her point.

  It was the Maltese cross pattern from Emily Deacon’s sacred cut. As near as dammit.

  “He cut it out of a piece of fabric and then used it to kill her?” Falcone asked, bewildered.

  “That’s one explanation. This is very tough fabric, though, and it seems manufactured to me. I’ve asked forensic to take a look.”

  Falcone scowled. “I don’t see where that gets us.”

  “Patience, Leo. So what about this?”

  Falcone looked at a familiar sight: a sample of hair in a transparent morgue bag.

  “This is from Margaret Kearney’s head,” she explained. “Black as coal, as you can see.”

  He nodded, not understanding the point.

  “You’re a gentleman, Leo. I’ll say that for you. The poor cow was stone dead on the floor there and you didn’t even take a good look down below, did you? This is not her natural hair colour. This”-she held up the second slide. A hank of light brown hair lay trapped between the pieces of glass-“is what her head’s supposed to look like. We took out the dye just to make sure. You can’t rely on what the pubic zone tells you. This is a general observation that goes beyond the matter of body hair, by the way. I trust you and Silvio will take it to heart.”

  Falcone sighed and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now nearly nine. “So you think she had a bullet wound. He killed her with some crazy piece of cloth. And you know she dyed her hair.”

  “Oh, Leo, Leo,” she protested, “you really know nothing about women, do you? Naturally, her hair was a pleasant brown. Personally, I would have been quite happy with it. See?”

  She waved her own lank crop at him. “What colour’s this?”

  “Black,” he replied.

  “No, no, no! How can a man like you, someone who’s usually so observant, be so blind? It’s really a very dark brown. Genuine black, the colour you have here”-she held up the second slide-“that’s quite rare naturally.”

  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.“ ”