He could see the greed glinting in the guards’ faces. A part of him wished he could persuade the pair to turn their backs on a visit from Chieko too, though he wondered what the rules of the monastery would be about allowing women into this bright little oasis nestling near the gasworks in Castello. That could be . . . entrancing if it worked.
Then he remembered Massiter crowing about her in that stupid apartment of his inside the glass palace and the way he’d ignored her ever since.
“Well?” he growled. “I don’t have all day.”
“Really?” Lavazzi laughed. “Wait there. I’ll go make a call and check. Maybe . . .”—he glanced at his partner, an expression there Randazzo didn’t understand—“ . . . it’s not such a bad idea after all.”
Malipiero went quiet when his partner was gone. He was, Randazzo judged, the lesser of the pair.
“Who do you two keep calling all the time?” Randazzo demanded, cross for no real reason, wishing his temper would stay in place for once. “Girlfriends. Boyfriends. Those are Questura phones. I get to see the bills when they come in. If you’re running up private business on my account, you’ll get to know about it.”
The man kept staring at his fat, grubby hands, whistling some stupid pop tune that was on the radio all the time. That was, Randazzo thought, the closest he could get to entertainment.
Then Malipiero stopped, glowered at him, and said, “You know, I wish you’d make up your mind. Are you the upstanding honest guy here? Or just like the rest of us? It gets confusing for simpletons like me.”
“Don’t be so fucking impertinent!” Randazzo yelled.
The face came back to the window, offended this time, as close to cross as a monk could get.
“Gentlemen,” the man said, “if you don’t behave correctly here, I shall have to ask you to leave. We are accommodating. We are, however, only human.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Malipiero grumbled, waving him down. “Go say a prayer or something. We’ll leave a little change in the box by the door.”
The monk disappeared, a worldly epithet echoing gently in his wake.
“You just leave one long line of satisfied customers everywhere you go,” Randazzo observed.
The whistling began again, until Lavazzi returned, grinning, carrying something in a plastic bag.
“You’re on,” he said. “We’re clear to go out for two hours. Then it’s back in your cell, Commissario. Hope you brought plenty of money with you.”
“Enough,” Randazzo murmured, staring at the bag.
“Oh yeah,” Lavazzi added, still smirking like a teenager. “That was the condition. You’ve got to go out in kind of a disguise.”
He reached into the bag and took out the contents. It was a brown monk’s habit, complete with dressing gown–style belt.
“With that bald head you’re going to look the part,” the cop declared.
Maybe it was another of the pair’s jokes. Maybe someone back at the Questura really did think he ought to be discreet. Randazzo decided he didn’t care. He was going to have an hour in the outside world, with some real wine, not that piss the monks drank, some real food, in the dining room, at a quiet, shady table, while Lavazzi and Malipiero sat on the pavement in the sun, sweating.
Randazzo picked up the habit.
“Do I get some privacy?” he asked. “To change?”
“There you go again, Commissario,” Malipiero said. “Asking us to break the rules. It’s OK. Really. We’ll just stay and watch.”
TERESA LUPO AND SILVIO DI CAPUA MUNCHED ON COLD pizza and looked at their workload: the e-mailed initial reports from the two labs they had chosen for their research in Mestre, one for chemical analysis, one for pathology, and the earliest results from the material sent via Alberto Tosi to Rome. It was now twelve-thirty. From what Nic had said they had no more than a few hours to come up with something the Carabinieri could throw at the Englishman. It wasn’t looking good.
The most promising route should have been the data files Emily had—one way or another—got out of Massiter’s computer. This was hard evidence, the kind detectives liked because you could pass it round the room and let everyone appreciate its worth without some geek there to translate. Teresa had passed the memory pod on to the plainclothes detective who came to collect it after she’d called, but not before everything it contained was copied to her own machine first.
Silvio, who knew computers so much better than Teresa did, had tried to open the files in any number of ways she failed to comprehend. The best he got, while mumbling low curses and imprecations full of obscure acronyms, was a screen full of garbage and obscure characters. The files weren’t just protected with a password. They’d been encrypted too. When she asked, more out of desperation than hope, whether it could be cracked, Silvio had muttered something about months of work and vast amounts of some obscure thing called MIPS-years. Which, translated into everyday language, meant, as far as she understood it, someone could crack the files, but it would take a lot of time and more computers than someone like old Alberto Tosi would believe existed on the entire planet. Months down the line, if a formal investigation into Massiter got under way, perhaps it could turn into something useful. For the moment it was worthless. Which meant they were back at the beginning, trying to read the runes of the scraps of material and human evidence they had.
After failing with the data files, they had turned to the reports on Uriel’s apron and the wood samples. The more she looked at them, the more Teresa felt like screaming.
She glugged down some mineral water purloined from Nic’s fridge. “You’re the chemist, Silvio. Ketone. What the hell is ketone? Refresh my memory.”
He gave her that “I can’t believe you don’t know this” look that she was noticing more and more these days. Silvio had lost some weight recently and had refined his choice in clothes, which now ran to grey corded slacks and a pale lavender polo shirt. If he kept on like this he’d finally get a girl sometime soon, she thought.
“Industrial solvent. Labs use it all the time. We use it all the time.”
“You know I leave all that chemical stuff to you. Does it burn?”
“Er, yes,” he said sarcastically. “Don’t you read the warning labels on all those bottles in the lab?”
“Don’t have the time. So his apron’s been dipped in some inflammable industrial solvent. That’s a start. At least we know we can rule out the witchcraft now.”
Silvio was staring at her, a testy, disappointed expression on his face. “Contamination,” he said.
“What?”
“The baboons from whatever passes as forensic around here had hold of this stuff before they let us get our hands on it, right? Behold. A classical case of lab contamination. You said yourself these people were amateurs.”
“I didn’t say that at all! I said the man was old.”
“Tosi’s old. The lab’s old. Their procedures are old. It’s shoddy work. These things are covered in the stuff. Did Tosi say the original samples were affected by fire foam?”
“Yes. He said exactly that.”
“There you go. This is the sort of thing they teach junior lab technicians straight out of college. You never ever try to clean up crap with crap. Some moron’s dumped solvent on this to get rid of the foam, and obliterated anything we might have found underneath.”
“For good?” She couldn’t believe they were that stupid.
“Well, no. But it makes it all a lot more difficult. A lot more time-consuming and expensive too. We could try sending the material away to some specialist labs. But with this degree of degradation, I don’t know. And it would take weeks.”