“No.”
She wished he wouldn’t treat her like an idiot, just because she hadn’t spent a joyous afternoon inside the pages of Lifestyles of Rich and Famous Worms lately.
“Why not?”
“Where’s the food? Where’s the water? They need water. Without it…”
That ruled out one way Toni LaMarca could have got a slimy white flatworm down his throat.
“How about a slaughterhouse?” she suggested. “That’s full of meat. Water, too. The worms could just come out of the drains at night for a munch on the leftovers.”
Silvio sniffed. “That was a very clean slaughterhouse,” he said. “I took a good look at those drains. They were putting all the right chemicals down them. I doubt anything could live if it got that much disinfectant poured on its head every night. I know I couldn’t.”
She stared at Cristiano, hoping.
“If the drains are disinfected properly,” he said, “you wouldn’t get planarians. Even they have limits.”
And so have I, Teresa thought.
The previous evening, whiling away the hours in the Questura intelligence office, she’d stolen a good look at the papers on LaMarca’s disappearance. It had taken a while to track down the boyfriend who’d been kidnapped by Giorgio Bramante as bait. A while, too, to persuade him to talk. When he did, he told them something interesting. Toni LaMarca had been taken two nights before his body turned up at Santa Maria dell’Assunta, not one night before, as they’d first thought. It was clear from the autopsy that he’d died soon after he was abducted, too, in the slaughterhouse, she supposed. The church had been visited by the woman caretaker the day before she found the body. She’d seen nothing unusual. That meant Bramante had stored LaMarca’s corpse somewhere — out of some unforeseen necessity? — before moving it to the final location. Then, some thirty-six hours after the killing, he’d left the clue to what he had done in Sacro Cuore.
There was dirt under LaMarca’s toenails, traces of earth on his body that forensic were looking at. But the kind of information she’d get from those sources meant something only with corroboration. Dirt wasn’t unique like DNA. If they had a suspect location, they could look for a match. But without a starting point, everything they had was like that stupid white worm. Information that lacked context, data floating on the wind with nothing concrete to make it useful. It could take weeks to track down, if ever.
“So where?” she wondered aloud.
Cristiano shrugged. “Like I told you. Near water. Near a drain maybe. Or a culvert. Underground, overground. You choose.”
“Thanks a bunch,” she grunted. “You can take your pet home. Provided…” — she prodded the worm nerd in the chest — “…you promise to name him Silvio.”
The biologist hesitated and risked a glance at his friend.
“You mean you don’t want me to work on him?” he asked. “Run a few tests? They’re fatal, naturally, but I don’t think the animal liberation people will start squealing. I mean, it’s not like he’s an endangered species.”
Her mind was already elsewhere. She wanted him out of there.
“Worm autopsies are not my field, Cristiano. Talk to Silvio about it.”
“But…”
“But nothing.”
“Tell her,” Silvio ordered his pal.
“Tell me what?”
“It’s the sex thing again,” Cristiano said. “You didn’t hear me out.”
She looked at her watch. “Thirty seconds.”
“It’s a question of allopatry or sympatry, whether they’re sexual or parthenogens…”
“I will, I swear, hit someone soon. Get to the point.”
“OK. Some populations of planarians overlap and mate with each other. Some stay apart and reproduce parthenogenetically. They develop female cells without the need for fertilisation. Some… kind of do a little of both.”
“I will…”
“In Rome we have sexual types and parthenogens, and they’re allopatric. Which means they live in geographically diverse communities and are basically slightly different versions of the same organism. It’s a big deal. We have underground waterways that have been untouched, sometimes unconnected, for two thousand years. What that means is that over the centuries we’ve come to have hundreds of communities of planarians and no two are exactly the same. There’s a team that’s been logging them for over a decade at La Sapienza along with a couple of other universities too. I’m amazed you never heard of it.”
“I never kept up on worms,” Teresa muttered. “One more personal failing. So what you’re saying is that if you dissect his love tackle under a microscope, you can tell me where he came from? Which waterway?”
“Better than that. If he’s in the database, I can tell you even whereabouts. Whether it’s the head of the Cloaca Maxima or the outlet. They’re that distinct.”
She picked up the specimen dish and peered at the creature wriggling inside it.
“I’d like to say this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” she murmured. “But it won’t. Silvio — that’s you, not the worm — kindly find this gentleman a white coat, a microscope, a desk, and anything else he needs. We have human beings who require our attention.”
Judith Turnhouse didn’t have the words academic Bitch stencilled in gold on a sign on her desk. As far as Peroni was concerned, she didn’t need them. Costa watched the body language as he and his partner entered the woman’s office in the outpost of La Sapienza’s archaeology department and felt his heart sink. It was hate at first sight. Tall, excruciatingly thin, with an angular face framed by lifeless brown hair, Judith Turnhouse sat stiff and serious behind a desk where everything — computer, files, papers, keyboard — had been tidied into a neat, symmetrical pattern.
Before Costa could even finish his introduction, she took one look at their cards and said, “Make it quick. I’m busy.”
Peroni breathed a deep sigh and picked up a small stone statue on her desk.
“What’s the hurry?” he said. “Does this stuff go bad or something?”
The woman removed the object from his hands and placed it back where it belonged.
“This is our year-end. I’ve a budget to approve and an annual report to write. You can’t do research without a proper administrative structure to back it up. We tried that once before. It was a disaster.”
Costa glanced at his partner and, uninvited, the two men took a couple of seats opposite the desk. Judith Turnhouse just watched, her sharp pale grey eyes noting every movement.
“Giorgio Bramante’s disaster?” Costa asked.
“I might have guessed. In case you hadn’t noticed, Officer, Giorgio doesn’t work here anymore. They gave me his chair a few years ago. It’s a big job. Especially if you do it properly.”
“I thought Giorgio was a star.” Peroni looked puzzled. “That’s what everyone tells us.”
“Giorgio was an excellent archaeologist. He was my professor. I learnt a lot from him. But he couldn’t handle admin. He couldn’t handle people either. For him, it was all about the research, and nothing about people.”
“Even a painter needs someone to pay for his paint,” Costa suggested.
She nodded, thawing a little. “If you want to put it like that. Giorgio thought everything revolved around the pursuit of some holy grail called academic truth. The result? We discovered one of the greatest undiscovered archaeological treasures in Rome. Now it looks like a bomb site. It’s tragic.”
More tragic for Judith Turnhouse, it seemed to Costa, than the loss of one young boy.
“You were in on the secret?” Peroni asked.