Vincenzo didn't appear to hear her. His eyes were fixed on the bathroom sign. It seemed that the one thing that might not be holding up as well as his looks was his bladder. 'Un momento brevissimo,' he pleaded and ducked inside. Nancy waited patiently, her eagle eyes spotting some chipped paintwork that would have to be touched up once the summer season was over and all the guests had gone. Mr Capello duly reappeared, shaking water from his just washed hands. 'You like Italy?' he asked.
Italians visiting La Casa Strada always asked that, and Nancy loved the fact that they wanted her to share their passion for the country. 'I adore Italy,' she said with gusto. 'We've been here a couple of years now and I feel more and more at home every day.'
Vincenzo's face lit up. 'Meraviglioso, wonderful,' he said.
'Let me show you the damage,' said Nancy.
As they walked outside, she slowed down and looked around. It was something she did every time she stepped outside La Casa Strada. To her, every view around the hotel was a visual feast, a delicacy marinating in time itself, growing deliciously better every day she spent there. Today the sunlight in the private garden behind the kitchen was as soft and golden as pure honey.
'It's just down that slope there,' said Nancy, pointing across the garden. 'You can see where my husband has moved some old fencing across to stop anyone going down.'
Vincenzo nodded and walked slowly over, his eyes drinking in the view across the lush valley towards Mount Amiata in the south and Siena in the north. Nancy watched him disappear down the banking, and then, amid the birdsong in the orange trees she heard a strange sound, a sort of harsh clunk and click, a metallic kind of noise, the type that simply didn't belong in a garden. She took a couple of paces around a tree and was startled to find herself face to face with her highly inquisitive fellow American, Terry McLeod.
'Excuse me,' she said abruptly, 'it's private back here. Would you mind returning to the guest gardens?'
'Oh hell, I'm sorry,' said McLeod jovially. 'You've got such a wonderful place; I was just walking around taking some photographs. I'm real sorry.'
Nancy noticed the expensive-looking camera strung on a thick Nikon strap around his neck, his finger still on the shutter button. 'That's okay. Just please remember in future.' There was something about McLeod she didn't like, something that she just couldn't work out.
'New camera, I just can't leave it alone,' said the American. He lifted it from his neck to show her and in the same moment clunk-clicked off a head and shoulders shot of Nancy. This irritated the hell out of her. 'You never think of asking permission, do you?' she snapped, her face colouring.
'Hey, sorry again,' said McLeod, disingenuously. He sauntered off without saying goodbye, swinging the camera on its strap.
For one moment Nancy's mind went into flashback. The heavy black camera looked strangely familiar. Why?
And then she remembered. It looked identical to the square, black object she'd seen the previous night. The object in the hand of the burglar in her bedroom.
49
FBI Field Office, New York Angelita Fernandez put down the desk phone and grimaced as she turned to Howie Baumguard. The big guy really looked as though he could do with a break. And this wasn't going to be it. 'I just talked to Gene Saunders out at Myrtle. Seems our man Stan is a no-show.'
'He ever done that before?' asked Howie, lost in some work on his computer.
'Nope. Doesn't seem that way. His boss at UMail2 Anywhere says he's a good kid. Always bang on time. Never swings a day off without asking, or at least calling in with a reason rather than an excuse.'
'Sounds like Jack's right,' said Howie, typing with two fingers. 'Poor kid.'
Fernandez tried to picture what the delivery boy looked like and settled on young, thin and scrawny, still trying to make his way in life. 'You really think Stan got wasted before BRK did a runner from Myrtle?'
'It's sure starting to look that way,' said Howie.
Fernandez picked up a pencil and twirled it like a baton through the fingers of one hand. It was a trick she'd picked up in high school and somehow it helped her concentrate. 'I'll check on the bones downstairs. Dental should have some results now on Kearney. You think it's a match?'
'I'm banking on it,' said Howie. He'd asked for the dental check to make doubly sure that the skull they'd found was really Sarah Kearney's and not someone else's. He didn't want the embarrassment of finding out later that they had all been jerked around yet another time by BRK. He stopped typing and turned to Fernandez. 'You know much about necrophilia?'
'You're kidding, right?' she said, shooting him a disapproving stare. 'I've dated some deadbeats in my time, ex-husband top of the list, but not literally.'
'Necrophiles,' said Howie, paraphrasing an FBI entry on his screen, 'get their rocks off having sex with dead bodies.'
'Go away. I would never have guessed that. Now I see why you got the big stripes.'
'Shut up and listen, I might just need your help here.'
She twirled her pencil again and thought he was kind of cute when he pretended to be annoyed.
'The word is Greek in origin, comes from nekros meaning corpse and philia, which as we all know means love.'
'I kind of like those two words when they're not in the same sentence,' said Fernandez.
Howie shot her another shut-the-fuck-up glance. 'The psych notes say necrophiles have poor self-esteem, have a need for power over or revenge against something or someone that makes them feel inadequate, and have been deprived of certain key emotional contact.'
'Hang on though,' said Fernandez, getting serious for a moment. 'What little I know about these creeps, which again I stress is not through any personal dating, is that they don't usually kill. They like their meat cooked already. Ain't that right? As you so eloquently said yourself, they "get their rocks off" by messing around with dead bodies, not by making people dead for them to mess around with.'
'Subtle difference, but yeah, you got a point,' admitted Howie, searching the on-screen files for more info. 'But let's agree that having sex with a dead body isn't normal. Now, from that intellectual standpoint, it ain't too big a leap of faith to think that an abnormal guy, who likes stiffing it to a stiff, might just start making stiffs for himself if his regular stiff supply has run dry.'
'You got a natural gift with words, anyone ever tell you that?' said Fernandez sarcastically.
'I'm constantly fighting the urge to write poetry,' countered Howie, scrolling to a new page.
'Why does BRK qualify as a necrophile?' asked Fernandez.
Howie started to run through a list. 'He keeps the bodies after death. Look at how long he kept the Barbuggiani girl after he killed her. He takes trophies from them. He goes back to graves, digs up their corpses and hacks off their heads. Sounds like a necrophile to me.'
'So this guy could be a serial killer and a necrophile. A kind of hybrid?'
'That's what I'm thinking,' said Howie 'A double-trouble psycho. Maybe he started killing for a non-sexual reason.'
'Revenge, accident, opportunity?' suggested Fernandez.
'Something like that. Then when he was faced with a dead body, he suddenly got turned on by it.'
'You got any case studies in there that I can read up on?' she asked.
Howie hit a search function. 'Yeah, here you go. Man, there's one hell of a list coming up: Carl Tanzler, Richard Chase, Winston Moseley, our old pals Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy – those last three seem to be pretty much in every classification there is.'
'Lazy research,' said Fernandez, scribbling down their names. 'If everything that was written about Bundy was true, he'd have had to have lived three lifetimes.'