Daughter of Ashes, page 20
He appeared at the door, beaming and disheveled.
“The dean has given me a new role.”
He threw himself onto the bed, among the pillows. The mattress bounced beneath him.
“A more prestigious position, this time. They all came by my office to offer their congratulations. So many phoney smiles and greasy handshakes. God, what a thrill.”
Teresa was silent.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
She picked her words carefully. She chose the only salve that worked on him—and it was neither the love nor the pride of an admiring wife.
“Your colleagues will be so jealous they won’t be able to sleep tonight. Congratulations.”
Sebastiano burst into laughter and pulled her toward him, slinging his arm around her neck.
“Those fools won’t be sleeping for weeks.”
His grip was tight, robbing her of air. He looked euphoric, but with him it was hard to tell what was genuine and what was feigned, and his euphoria was as frightening to Teresa as his anger.
She tried to get up.
“We should celebrate.”
He held her back.
“Are you in some kind of rush?”
He hadn’t eased his grip, and soon her neck was straining against the muscles of his arm. The pressure reached all the way to her eyes, and as they fell, in that moment, upon the wardrobe door, she realized she must have left it ajar in her haste.
Had he noticed, too, with his predator’s eyes?
“What are you talking about? I’m not in a rush.”
The pressure eased. Teresa lay back and rested her head on his stomach. Sebastiano was taut and lean. Teresa wondered what kind of existence could find refuge there, curled up among the sharp spikes that covered his body inside and out. It wasn’t easy to touch, nor was it easy to inhabit.
Sebastiano had stopped caressing her.
“I noticed yesterday that some of your clothes were missing from the wardrobe.”
Teresa swallowed bile.
“I took them to the dry cleaner’s. I’ll be going up a few sizes soon, and who knows when they’ll fit again. I thought I’d get them washed and ironed before storing them away.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Which dry cleaner’s?”
“The one at the crossroads near the park.”
Teresa made a mental note to take some items there the next day.
A few petrifying moments later, his caresses resumed, though their true nature was clear in her body’s instinctive reactions. Her reptilian brain immediately unleashed the full range of physical responses to an act of aggression. But Teresa remained completely still. She played dead so that she could stay alive.
Sebastiano wasn’t caressing her. He was polishing the invisible chains he’d wrapped around her day after day, and had been tightening with ever-growing relish.
In that moment of outward calm, Teresa knew with absolute certainty that he would never undo those chains, nor would he allow her to break them.
The only suitcase she’d be able to take when she finally walked out of this marriage was going to be her own skin.
34
Today
WHEN TERESA’S DOORBELL RANG, it was Elena who answered. The two women had discovered a broad range of shared interests—including ancient history. Teresa could have listened to Elena’s archaeological disquisitions for hours on end and never get bored. Elena had brought her several new books on ancient Egypt, all full of fascinating photographs. But Teresa suspected Elena was also there to ensure there was always someone by Teresa’s side. Marini had figured out a way to be present even when he was busy elsewhere. When she thought about it, Teresa was quite moved.
Elena came back into the living room, looking concerned.
“There are two policemen here. They’re asking for you.”
Teresa went to the front door. The two officers looked familiar, though they had joined the force not long ago, and she hadn’t had too many chances to work with them. Parked outside the gate with its lights flashing, their patrol car had been noticed by a few passersby, and by Teresa’s neighbors, who were now looking out of their windows and balconies to try and figure out what was happening. Teresa couldn’t find the words to ask the two men what on earth they’d been thinking. She stammered a half-sentence, then realized she’d switched the words around. She might even have thrown a completely unrelated term in there.
The officers exchanged a look, as if they might be wondering whether this woman who looked so lost could really be Superintendent Battaglia.
Teresa felt a growing sense of unease. She heard Elena calling out to ask what was going on, but she had no idea how to respond.
“You need to come with us, Superintendent Battaglia.”
“Where to?”
“We’re here to escort you to headquarters. The appointment with Doctor Gardini has been moved forward.”
With so little warning, and no time to prepare for the prospect of a formal meeting designed to delve into parts of the past she never wanted to relive, Teresa’s mind went blank. Or had the meeting been planned in advance—only for Teresa to forget all about it?
“I don’t remember.”
Elena put her arms around her.
“Is everything okay?”
“No.”
Caught off guard, and pinned to her front door by the staring eyes of a pair of strangers, Teresa felt her agitation intensify. She looked down at her clothes, worrying that she’d worn things in the wrong order, or accidentally styled her hair like a little girl, or done her makeup like a twenty-something preparing for a wild night out.
All of this could certainly happen, and at some point, they probably would. She’d begun to notice that unexpected events could cause her tachycardia and anxiety attacks. Any deviation from her usual routine was irrationally and disproportionately distressful.
Elena nudged her gently aside and planted herself between Teresa and the two officers.
“Does Inspector Marini know about this?”
“We’re here on the district attorney’s orders.”
“I will call the inspector now. Please wait in the car. You might consider turning those lights off. You’re scaring the neighbors.”
“We don’t have time for that, ma’am. The district attorney . . .”
Elena smiled.
“I’m sorry, but that’s not our problem.”
She was about to close the door on them when another car rounded the turn at the end of the road, coming to a screeching halt next to the squad car. The driver pulled the handbrake with such force that they heard the sound all the way from the house, almost as if he’d wanted to tear it off. It was Massimo—and he wasn’t alone.
Parisi and de Carli stepped out of the car and dealt with the two officers, sending them right back where they’d come from.
Elena walked to Massimo.
“I was just about to call you.”
He took her by the hand, then looked at Teresa and shook his head.
“One of these days I’m going to give that Lona a piece of my mind.”
He ushered them back inside and closed the door behind him, restoring some privacy, and calming Teresa’s mind.
She realized then that she had been shaking.
“They told me about the meeting, but I don’t remember anything about that.”
“Lona decided at the eleventh hour to move it forward and to involve you. You couldn’t have remembered that because it was never the plan.”
“But now I have to attend, and I’m not ready.”
“You can take all the time you need, Superintendent.”
The calmness in his voice, both firm and soothing, seemed to have the power to help her breathe better.
“But you said they moved the meeting forward.”
“They’ll have to wait.”
Teresa looked down again, running a hand over her clothes and smoothing creases that only existed inside of her.
“Am I dressed appropriately?”
Marini gave her one of those mischievous grins that made his eyes sparkle.
“Are you wearing any underwear?”
Teresa felt around with her hands.
“I think so.”
“Me too. So I guess we’re sorted.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Both of them knew they weren’t actually talking about underwear.
Marini gave Elena a kiss and handed Teresa her walking stick.
“Ready?”
“Let’s pretend we are.”
He led her all the way to the car and had her sit in the front passenger seat. Parisi and de Carli were already in the back. She waved goodbye to Elena, who was standing at the door. If she hadn’t been there to help keep her anxiety at bay, Teresa would have been in quite a state by now.
“Another one of the district attorney’s schemes, eh, Superintendent?”
“I’ve stopped trying to keep track, de Carli.”
Teresa placed her walking stick and her bag between her legs.
“Good thing I wasn’t supposed to get involved in this case. Marini, have we said hello already?”
Marini laughed as he reversed the car.
“A couple of times. Hang on . . . was that a rhetorical question, or have you actually forgotten?”
Teresa gave him a gentle thwack. How typical, she thought, that we should both immediately go looking for the tragicomic side of life. It was an activity they were well-versed in, and an approach that had saved them time and time again.
But that day, Marini’s face was flushed and his eyes a little puffy.
Teresa looked away, letting her gaze roam over the city unfurling outside the window like stills from a movie.
“And now my tooth’s popped out all of a sudden. As if we didn’t have enough to deal with.”
De Carli, who was sitting directly behind her, perched his chin on the back of her seat.
“Do you remember how he got it?”
Parisi grabbed his shoulder and put him back in his place with a punch to the ribs.
“Did you seriously just ask her that?”
Teresa turned around. It wasn’t exactly an inappropriate question, in the circumstances, but she wasn’t ready to bare her soul like that, either. In the end, she opted for a half-truth, which would affect neither the investigation nor her feelings.
“There was an . . . altercation.” As she spoke, she glanced at Marini’s face in profile, now a picture of unnatural stillness. He was controlling his emotions, the immobility clearly a strain, but he already knew about the violence she’d suffered and that she’d had a miscarriage, given she was the one who’d told him about it—so what, exactly, was troubling him now?
Teresa’s eyes returned to the road.
“To be honest, it wasn’t until I got to the hospital and they patched me up that I started assessing the damage, and I certainly wasn’t going to go back and look for the missing piece.”
There’d been thousands of pieces to pick up, of course—not just the one. And it hadn’t been as simple a matter as getting herself patched up.
But de Carli seemed satisfied.
“So you do remember.”
This time it was Marini who turned around and whacked him, now in the knee.
“Ouch!”
“Idiot.”
Teresa put her sunglasses on and called them to order.
“Behave yourselves. One case of dementia per team is more than enough. Your heads should be working perfectly fine.”
35
Today
TERESA WAS STILL LEANING on Marini’s arm when she entered the deputy prosecutor’s office. She would have to get used to people’s stares now, and learn to ignore the embarrassment of needing that support, and of struggling to put one foot in front of the other. She wasn’t sure she could ever go back to being the person she had been before, not even physically. And this was only the beginning.
Gardini leapt to his feet and came around the desk to offer her a chair.
“Good afternoon, Teresa. Thank you for coming.”
Teresa greeted him by lifting two fingers from the handle of her walking stick, then sank into the chair. Her sciatica had begun to bother her again. Marini sat behind her.
“I suppose it was inevitable, given we found a piece of me embedded in a crime scene. Greetings to you, too, Doctor Lona.”
Albert responded with a nod.
“Are you feeling better?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you plan on extending your sick leave?”
“I don’t think I have a choice, unfortunately.”
Antonio Parri arrived, out of breath.
“Sorry I’m late.”
Gardini returned to his desk.
“We hadn’t started yet.”
The coroner took a seat, an assortment of folders and papers strewn haphazardly across his lap.
“You’ll have to excuse the awkward question, but at my age I think I can afford to ask one of those every now and then. Whose idea was it to move the meeting forward? It takes time to incorporate all the latest updates into an official report.”
Everyone looked at Lona, but no one spoke.
“Right. I see. A pointless question.”
Gardini opened the case file on his computer. There were slides for the overhead projector, too. It was a lot of information to summarize and sift through, and Teresa was already exhausted. One of the aspects of her illness was that it affected her endurance, both physical and mental. Irritation, impatience, and distress became harder to control. So essentially, Teresa was at an inherent disadvantage.
Gardini asked his assistant to dim the lights.
“Let’s begin, then.”
The first bit of news was that Giacomo had been truthful on at least one count: he hadn’t been the one to murder his cellmate. The killer had yet to be identified, but it couldn’t be Giacomo. The DNA retrieved from beneath the victim’s fingernails did not correspond to his.
Albert was less than pleased.
“That doesn’t let him off the hook,” he noted.
Teresa’s response was prompt.
“But it doesn’t incriminate him, either. Such a pity, right?”
The deputy prosecutor proceeded to reel off the facts—old and new—of the Mainardi case, detailing all the latest findings, too. They began to discuss Teresa’s tooth as if she weren’t its owner, taking great care not to dredge up her past unless it was strictly necessary, and to refer to her personal involvement in only the vaguest of terms, making no explicit reference to the actors responsible for any given incident. It was a conversation in allusions.
“That was when the assault on Superintendent Battaglia occurred.”
That was the precise formulation Gardini used. He also chose the word item to refer to Teresa’s tooth.
It was the only time Giacomo could have taken it. Nobody said anything about when and where the attack had happened. And no one even dared speak of who had committed the act in the first place.
This was all that Gardini was willing to put on the table; the rest didn’t matter anyway. Everything else was irrelevant, and beyond the scope of the meeting. Teresa was grateful to him.
Parri gathered up the expert reports he had just finished telling them about.
“It was obviously some kind of trophy.”
Teresa hadn’t said a word until that moment.
“That would be atypical, though not impossible,” she remarked.
Everyone stared at her.
“Why would it be atypical?”
The question had come from Marini, who was still sitting behind her—not to distance himself from the proceedings, but to support her through them. This was his first contribution, too. He hadn’t asked for a single clarification, not even when the exchanges had become too nebulous for someone who didn’t know the full story.
Teresa turned her head a little, though not far enough to meet his eyes.
“Because a serial killer takes trophies from his victims, Inspector. But I was the one hunting him down.”
Marini refrained from pointing out that she must have been a victim, too, given her tooth had fallen into the killer’s hands. He did not take the step Teresa had led him to—her way of putting him to the test. He hadn’t betrayed himself.
Albert used the projector to show them the recording that a bank’s security camera had captured the night before the latest killing, whose victim was still unknown.
“We checked the plate. The car appears to have been stolen.”
He replayed the magnified footage in slow motion.
“There he is.”
Giacomo Mainardi was staring right into the camera. He knew it was there, filming him. Beside him was a seated figure. It was only a shadow, but it was clearly a person.
Giardini put his glasses on and leaned closer so as not to miss a single detail.
“Was the victim alive?”
Teresa replied without a moment’s hesitation.
“No. Already dead.”
Albert immediately questioned her assertion. “How can you be so sure?”
“You know how. He’s done it before. You were there. He has a history of driving around with a fresh corpse in the passenger seat. He’s also driven past a police checkpoint before. It’s his modus operandi, the only way he knows how to experience the emotions he longs for. He’s done all of this before.”
Gardini called for a break.
“Right. We all need a coffee. Let’s reconvene in half an hour.”
The lights came back on. Teresa was the only one who didn’t get up.
“If that’s all you need from me, I think I’d prefer to go home.”
The deputy prosecutor had no objections, and agreed that she could be dismissed.
“We’ll keep you posted. You just concentrate on getting better.”
If only he knew that she was never going to come back . . . Teresa watched them walk out, shaking Parri’s hand when he nudged hers in farewell, and only then did she laboriously get to her feet, her jaw clenching with the effort. Marini helped her find her most comfortable position, which was more and more hunched, and less and less effective in keeping the pain at bay.
