Two uniform men found Monica Sawyer. They’d taken a crowbar to the boot of the half-burnt-out Renault at the foot of the Spanish Steps, peered inside, wondered about the smell and the dark liquid leaking from the couple of suitcases in there, then popped the locks on them.
One was still in the emergency department of San Giovanni puking up diminishing returns from his breakfast. The second, a raw young recruit who looked no more than twenty, now sat between Costa and Peroni in the jeep, leaning back in the rear seat, eyes closed, face the colour of the grey, wan sky still dumping snowflakes down on the city.
Costa and Peroni had listened in silence to his story. They’d been called in by Falcone as they vainly combed the riverfront for Laila, Peroni complaining loudly that there had to be other cops in town who could handle the call.
Costa had pointed the car towards the Piazza di Spagna as soon as Falcone called. Peroni openly begged down the phone for more time to look for the girl. It didn’t cut any ice. Falcone wanted them there for some reason of his own, and both men had begun to guess what that was. The inspector was feeling cornered, outnumbered, scared even. Big players were gathering around him, people he refused to trust. Costa and Peroni seemed to be at the top of his very short list of confidants just now.
Peroni was right, though. There were plenty of other cops around, all of them on the job already. Plainclothes officers and SOCOs milled around the wrecked vehicle, a tide of white bunny suits and dark winter coats. There were men and women working the nearby shops and offices too. This was a big operation. Falcone wouldn’t commit this kind of resource without good reason. Either he felt that things were coming to a head. Or that they were falling apart.
“Best you go home,” Peroni said to the uniform. The man’s face was utterly bloodless. He’d be seeing the department shrink before long.
“I go off shift at five,” the young officer said curtly. “That’s when I go home.”
Peroni nodded. “What’s your name, son?”
“Sacco.”
“I’ll remember that. You look like a sound guy. This your first?”
Sacco closed his eyes. “The first time I found a body in a suitcase?”
“No,” Peroni replied patiently. “The first murder?”
“Yeah.”
“OK.” Peroni slapped his shoulder and started climbing out of the car. “Take care.”
The two of them walked towards the crime scene, Peroni shaking his head.
“Rookies,” he muttered. “What is it with this macho thing?”
“He’s just doing what he thinks is expected of him, Gianni.”
“Aren’t we all? And what about Laila?”
Peroni’s insistence on treating everyone under the age of twenty-five as somehow not quite fully formed never ceased to astonish Costa.
“Laila’s been living on the streets for months, Gianni. She’s as tough as they come. Didn’t you notice? Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of the situation, I don’t think there’s any doubt about her coping.”
Peroni favoured him with an icy stare. “Coping. That’s what life’s about, is it?”
“Sometimes,” Costa offered lamely. “It’s what you do in between figuring out what you really want to do with your time. I seem to recall getting this lecture from you once.”
“OK, smart guy,” Peroni conceded. “Throw my own bullshit back at me if you like.”
“Look. When we’ve got the opportunity I’ll help you find Laila.”
His partner nodded at the wrecked Renault. “If he doesn’t get there first.”
That sparked something in Costa’s head. “He’s got bigger things on his plate, don’t you think? Besides…” He wished there was more time to mull over what they knew and less spent chasing phantoms. “He could have killed her last night if he’d wanted, surely? Emily Deacon’s not that great a deterrent. But he didn’t. Have you worked that one out yet?”
“No,” Peroni confessed. “Unless the Deacon woman broke his stride somehow. Not that that makes much sense. What the hell. Let’s put it to one side for now.”
He walked towards the back of the car. A lone idiot in a Santa Claus uniform stood on the corner forlornly shaking a bell. The city never had this particular American import until recently. This Christmas they seemed to be springing up everywhere.
The fake Santa shook his bell, held out a candy stick, looked Peroni in the eye and nodded at the bucket that stood between them on the snow.
“Have you been a good boy, Officer?” the man asked.
“Define ”good,“ ” Peroni snapped and brushed past him.
Nic Costa looked at the sign round the man’s neck: a charity for foreign kids. He threw a couple of notes in the bucket, then shook his head at the candy stick.
“Give it to your friend,” Santa suggested. “Might sweeten him up a bit.”
“I doubt that somehow,” Costa murmured and joined the team by the car.
Falcone was off to one side, just outside the deserted McDonald’s, talking solemnly with a couple of plainclothes cops, watched by the bored-looking Joel Leapman. Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua were working steadily on something in the boot of the car, half-concealed by badly placed screens, one of which Peroni was moving to get access to the vehicle.
Peroni took one glance at the mess in the boot, one at Teresa Lupo, then turned away and asked sharply, “Anything we should know?”
The pathologist moved her head out from under the shadow of the car, nodded at Di Capua to keep going, then walked over to them. “Did you find her?”
“Not yet,” Costa said quickly. “We got called here instead. She didn’t say anything…?”
“No,” Teresa began. “I’m sorry, Gianni…”
“Me too,” Peroni mumbled. “It’s just so… inadequate.”
There were tears starting to work their way into Teresa Lupo’s eyes, something Nic Costa realized he’d never witnessed before.
Peroni spotted them, put his hand on her arm, briefly kissed her cheek and mouthed, “It’s OK.” He cast a vicious glance at the buzzards leering at them from behind the crime scene tape: photographers, reporters and a whole bunch of spectators with nothing better to do.
“I guess you’ve been asked this a million times,” Peroni said when she’d got her act together again, “but how’d this one die?”
Teresa shrugged, regaining her old self. “This is all preliminary, understood? I’m just telling you what I told your boss, with the same reservations. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, not out here. Also, unless someone tells me otherwise, I get to take this lady home. That American bastard isn’t playing body snatchers this time around. Even if she is one of his, there’s no way of knowing yet.”
“How?” Peroni asked again.
“Still working on the method. Let me put this delicately. She’s not exactly complete.”
There was something she didn’t want to say, probably for Peroni’s sake. “She’s naked. Not a scrap of clothing on her. The tags have been taken off the suitcases. I’ll hand them over to forensic once we’re done here. They don’t look like a common make to me. Expensive too. Maybe…”
They looked at each other and knew what each of them was thinking. Work of that nature took a long, long time.
“You haven’t asked me yet,” she said. “That question.”
“He’d marked the skin?” Costa asked.
“Kind of.” She shrugged again. “It’s the same man. But it’s not like the others, though. If you want to look, I can…”
Both men had their hands up before she’d finished the sentence.
“Understood,” she continued. “The honest answer is I don’t know if the cuts were made by the same instrument. Ask me when I’ve cleaned her up a little back in the morgue. There are a lot of cuts on this woman. But there are marks on her back that aren’t just… practical, if I can put it that way. They could be made by a scalpel. Maybe.”