Or, Costa thought, he could do what any Roman probably would in the circumstances. Walk. It wasn’t that large a city really. From Termini, Bramante — a fit and active man by all accounts — could be in any one of a number of suburbs on foot within the hour. And from there? Giorgio Bramante was no fool. He’d know, surely, that it was always simplest to be anonymous in a crowd. With time, the police could work the areas where the vagrant populations lived, shiftless, nameless people among whom any fugitive could easily disappear. Bramante may even have known such men in jail. He could be renewing an old friendship, or calling in favours from the past. For a man willing to sleep rough, able to find the thousands of underground caves hidden beneath the back streets and small parks throughout the city, Rome was an easy place in which to hide. Falcone had his officers running through the usual techniques. But the customary tools — video surveillance cameras most of all — were useless. The scope was too wide, the data too large to absorb. Bramante was a man playing by rules of his own making. That effectively made him invisible.
The TV was running stock photos. The morning papers would repeat the exercise, all with pleas for help and a phone number set up to handle sightings. Costa had no good, clear recollection of Bramante’s appearance from their brief encounter that morning. He’d been too focused on Leo Falcone, too worried that the inspector was in grave danger, to think ahead that much.
Still, the figure he remembered — dressed entirely in black, hat low, scarf around his mouth, scarcely anything visible of his face — provided enough for him to realise that the photos of Giorgio Bramante they had were hopelessly out of date. Fourteen years ago he’d been good-looking, clean-shaven, and sported long dark hair. Most of the photos taken before his arrest made him look like what he was: an intelligent, probably slightly arrogant academic. From what little Costa had glimpsed that morning, he now understood, very clearly, that Bramante didn’t fit that image anymore. Nothing could be taken for granted. They were locked inside a sequence of events Giorgio Bramante could have been planning for years. Unlike them, he was prepared, working on the basis of prior knowledge. It was possible, they all knew, that Bramante had managed to track down the elusive Dino Abati under whatever name he now bore. Abati would be thirty-three now. His parents hadn’t heard from him in years. But eighteen months before, he had been recorded reentering the country from Thailand. Since then there was no record of him departing through any international airport. Given the freedom of movement within Europe available to anyone with an Italian ID card, that could still put him anywhere from Great Britain to the Czech Republic. Costa wasn’t alone in wishing the man were anywhere else on the planet but Rome.
There was a commotion on the far side of the office. Both he and Falcone turned their attention away from the pile of reports on the inspector’s desk and looked out into the pool of busy officers at their desks. Gianni Peroni and Teresa Lupo were marching through the aisles throwing out bags of panini and cans of soft drinks like a couple of Santas turning up at a child’s party.
Leo Falcone laughed. It was an open, honest sound Costa hadn’t heard in a while. That of a man who was back in his element.
“I don’t know why they’re feeding them,” Falcone complained cheerfully. “You’d think we were under siege. Being forced to stay here. It’s ridiculous.”
“Not for you…”
The grey eyebrows rose.
“He could have killed you this morning,” Nic said.
“He could have killed me this morning,” Falcone agreed evenly. “So why didn’t he?”
“Perhaps he thinks this is some kind of a ritual, too. Everything has to be done in the proper way. None of the men he did kill went easily. A water jet through the chest…”
“He hated them more than he hates me.” Falcone said it firmly. “Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do. In fact…” He shook his head, disappointed with his own abilities at that moment. “God. I wish I could think straight. Be honest. How am I doing, Nic? I may be a touch paranoid, but Bruno Messina could have more than one motive for giving me this job. Yes, you could say it’s my responsibility. But if I screw up the way his father screwed up, it won’t take much to put my head on the block, too, will it?”
“I think we’re doing everything we can. You have the manpower. We’ve followed practice. If someone’s seen Bramante…”
“No one really knows what Bramante looks like anymore. Except whoever it is that’s helping him. We have to go through the motions, but I’m not holding out much hope. So how?”
It was the old truism, one that most police officers tried to forget, because it tended to demean all the routine that went with a normal investigation.
“Statistically I’d say… out in the street. When his mind’s on something else. His work. Or…” — he had to add this — “…on the way back.”
Falcone nodded vigorously. His large bald head had lost its customary tan over the winter. He would turn fifty before the year was out, Costa remembered.
“Quite right. But here’s another statistic for you, Nic. Although you’d rarely understand this from reading a newspaper today, a child is many times more likely to be at risk from his immediate family or friends than from a stranger. It’s not someone around the corner they need fear, usually. Or some Internet stalker. It’s those who are close to them.”
Costa nodded. Of course he knew. The assumption, from the outset, was that the Bramantes were a perfect middle-class family, a photogenic one which, in the eyes of some, meant they felt the tragedy more than most.
“There’s never been a suggestion that Bramante or his wife abused the child. Has there?”
“No,” Falcone agreed with a shrug. “The middle classes don’t do that kind of thing, do they? At least, not so others get to know about it.”
He motioned to some folders on his desk, blue ones, a colour the Questura didn’t use.
“I called in the social service reports before you got here. Nothing, of course. We should still have looked more closely than we did. We allowed ourselves to be distracted by the media. The course of action we took was formed by public opinion, not what we should have been pursuing as police officers. Instead of justice, we sought vengeance, which is an ugly thing that respects no one, guilty or innocent. The curious part of all this is that I rather had the impression Giorgio Bramante didn’t mind. He already knew what he was going to do, even before we put him in court.”
He peered out at the room full of officers, a few laughing with Peroni and Teresa, most head down over their computers.
“And here we are almost fifteen years on, hoping that this time round we can pull some answers out of a machine. Progress… What do you think, Nic? How do we break this one?”
Costa had formed firm opinions on that subject already.
“Bramante isn’t an ordinary killer. He probably doesn’t expect to escape us in the end. Perhaps he thinks he’ll become the hero again. The wronged father who came back for justice on the louts who got away in the first place.”
Falcone nodded. “And the police officer he holds responsible too. Don’t forget me.”
“Perhaps,” Costa replied.
“Perhaps?” Falcone asked.
“You said it yourself. I don’t think this is about you. Or Toni LaMarca. Or Dino Abati, or whatever he calls himself these days. Not really. It’s about Giorgio Bramante and what happened to his son. If we could only understand that…”
Leo Falcone laughed again and relaxed in his big black chair, putting his hands behind his head. “You’ve progressed under my tutelage, you know. Where’s that innocent young man I nearly fired a couple of years ago?”