Zen smiled sourly. It was rare for him to get an opportunity to put one over on Vincenzo Fabri. What the hell had the man been up to, he wondered, floating this kind of wild and unsubstantiated rumour?
The next candidate on Zen's list came into the category of light relief.
'Furio Pizzoni was detained on his return to the villa about two hours after the killings had taken place. When questioned as to his earlier whereabouts, he claimed to have spent the evening in a bar in the local village. This alibi was subsequently confirmed by the owner of the bar and several customers. Pizzoni undoubtedly had access to the remote control device mentioned below (see Favelloni, Renato), but given his alibi and the absence of any evident motive, interest in him soon faded, although it was briefly revived by the discovery of video tapes showing amorous encounters between him and Rita Burolo.'
Zen drew the last fragrant wisps of smoke from his cigarette and crushed it out. After a moment's thought, he decided against going into any more details. Even the magazine which had paid so dearly for the photographs made from one of those ~ideo tapes had drawn a discreet veil of verbiage over the exact nature of this little love triangle. It was difficult to offer a tasteful account of the fact that the murdered woman had been in the habit of meeting Pizzoni by moonlight in the hut which the lions used during the day and rolling nude on the straw bedaubed with their sweat and excrement while the young man pleasured her in a variety of ways undreamt of in the animal kingdom. For some people it was still more difficul". to accept that Oscar Burolo had known about these orgies and had done nothing whatever about them apart from rigging up a small video camera in the rafters of the hut to record the scene for his future delectation.
Suddenly Zen caught the sound of Tania's voice behind the screens.
'You promise?'
She sounded anxious.
'But of course!'
The heavy, monotonous voice was that of an official called Romizi.
'Otherwise it'll mean a lot of trouble for me,' Tania stressed.
'Don't worry! I'll take care of it.'
Zen slumped forward until his forehead touched the cool metal casing of the typewriter. So she had found someone else to ask her favour of, after he had scared her away with his tactless impetuosity. He took a deep breath, expelled it as a long sigh, and began to pound the Olivetti's stubborn keys again.
'Given the killer's need of specialized knowledge to overcome the villa's security defences, it was inevitable that the only surviving member of Oscar Burolo's imme tiate family, his son Enzo, should come under suspicion. Relations between Enzo and his father had reportedly been strained for some time, largely owing to the young man's refusal to agree to give up his attempt to become a professional violinist in favour of a career in law or medicine. That August, Enzo Burolo was attending a music school in America, and inquiries by the FBI confirmed that he had been in the Boston area during the period immediately preceding and following the murders. This line of investigation was therefore also dropped. '
Zen flexed his fingers, making the joints creak like old wood. He had now disposed of the suspects the judiciary had ad rejected. It only remained to discuss their eventual choice, currently awaiting trial in Nuoro prison. And here he had to tread very carefully indeed.
'The remaining possibility centred on Renato Favelloni,' he wrote. 'Favelloni had visited the Burolo property on many previous occasions, and had been staying there during the period immediately prior to the murders. Early that evening he and his wife were flown by Oscar Burolo to Olbia airport to catch Alisarda flight IGxzg to Rome.
According to Nadia Favelloni, shortly before the flight was cailed her husband told her that he had forgotten a very !mportant document at the villa and had to return to g t it.
She was to go on to Rome while he would take a later tlight. Nadia Favelloni duly left on IGxx3, but an examination of passenger lists revealed that Favelloni had made no booking for a later flight. Under questioning, Favelloni first claimed that he had flown to Milan instead. When it was pointed out to him that his name did not appear ov. the passenger list of the Milan fiight either, he stated that the purpose of his trip had been to visit his mistress. This was why he had told his wife the false story about leaving a document at the Villa Burolo, and why he had booked under a false name. His wife was jealous, and had once hired a private detective to check on his movements. However, none of the staff or passengers on the Milan fiight was able to identify Favelloni, and since his mistress's testimony is suspect, there is no proof that he ever left Sardinia on the night of the murders.
'The key to the Burolo case throughout has been the question of access. Oscar Burolo had paid an enormou.' sum of money to turn his property into a fortress, yet th.:murderer was able to enter and leave the property without setting off any of the alarms, all within a few minutes.
How was this possible'? 'The most likely explanation requires some consideration of the provision made to enable the inhabitants of the villa themselves to come and go. Since Burolo refused to employ security guards to man the gates or the control room, thii had to be done automatically, by means of a remote control or 'proximity' device similar to those used for opening garage doors. But while most commercially available models are of little value in security terms, since their codes can easily be duplicated, the system at the Villa Burolo was virtually unbreakable, because the code changed every time it was used. Along with the existing code, causing the gates to open, the remote cuntrol unit transmitted a new randomly-generated cluster, replacing the previous code, which would serve to operate the mechanism at the next occasion. Since each signal was uni.~ue, it was impossible for a would-be intruder to duplicate it. But anyone who had been admitted to the Vilia could easily remove the device and use it to re-enter the perimeter without triggering the alarms.'
So far, so good, thought Zen. Technical jargon about remoute control devices was no problem. Where the Favelloni angle got sticky was when it came to dealing not with means and opportunity but with motive. It was widely assumed that the reason Renato Favelloni had paid so many visits to the Villa Burolo that summer was that he was involved in negotiations between Oscar Burolo and the politician referred to as 1'onorevole, whose influence had allegedly been instrumental in getting Burolo Construction its lucrative public-sector contracts. According to the rumours circulating in the press and elsewhere, the two men had recently fallen out, and Oscar had threatened to make public the records he kept detailing their mutually rewarding transactions over the years. Before he could carry out this threat, however, he and his guests had been gunned down, his documentary collection of video tapes and fioppy discs ransacked, and I'onorevole spared any possible future embarrassment.
This was the aspect of the case which was presumably occupying the attention of the investigating magistrate, but Aurelio Zen, unprotected by the might and majesty of the judiciary, wanted to give the subject the widest possible berth. Fortunately, he had a convenient excuse for doing so. Although these theories had been widely touted, because of the secrecy in which the prosecutiori case was prepared they remained mere theories, lacking any substantive backing whatsoever. Once Renato Favelloni was brought to trial – in a few weeks, perhaps – all this would very rapidly change, but until then no one could know the extent or gravity of the evidence against him.
Thus all Zen needed to do was to plead ignorance.
'As already stressed, the details for the case remain sub judice,' Zen concluded, 'but the fact that the charge is one of conspiracy to murder indicates that another person or persons are thought to be implicated. This might indeed have been inferred from the fact that Dottor Vianello's pistol shot apparently wounded the assassin, probably in the leg, while a medical examination of the accused revealed no recent lesions. 1n this hypothesis, Renato Favelloni would have removed the remote-control devicc from the villa and passed it on to an accomplice, probabl~a professional gunman, who used it to enter Villa Burol~› and leave again, having carried out the murders. One would of course expect a professional killer to use his ow;weapon, probably with a silencer. It can be argued that this anomaly merely strengthens the case against Favelloni, indicating that an attempt was made to disguise the fact that the crime was a premeditated conspiracy against the life of Oscar Burolo.'