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 his 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?”