Daughter of Ashes, page 23
They moved on to the file belonging to the male nurse. His CV was also impeccable. He had a year left until retirement. Teresa glanced at the photographs that came with his file.
Again, the age wasn’t right. Teresa set the file aside.
“This one’s too good.”
They moved on to the orderlies, younger men whose professional records were equally unblemished.
Teresa turned to the director.
“Is this all? Don’t you have any other matching profiles?”
“We do, but they were all on shift during the dates and times you’ve indicated.”
Albert was getting irritated. He gathered all the papers together and tucked them under his arm.
“What’s your objection this time? They’re the right age, aren’t they? We’ll study their profiles and look into their alibis.”
Teresa did not get up.
“That would be a waste of time.”
Albert sat back down.
“Why?”
She almost felt sorry for him. He looked exhausted.
“Because we’re looking for an individual who is devoted solely to the fulfilment of his twisted fantasies. Devoted to evil, Superintendent Lona. Until the first murder, he might have still managed to pretend otherwise and continue to lead some kind of double life, but by this point, psychosis will have taken hold. He is not interested in showing up for work on time, he is not interested in earning a salary. Work is actually an impediment. Everything is an impediment to his one and only goal: finding new victims to murder. He probably forgets to eat sometimes. He needs time to come up with his plans, he needs time to exercise his imagination. And murder is tiring; it takes up all his energy.” She gestured toward the files. “These service records are impeccable. We won’t find the killer’s name in here.”
Albert gave her a look that seemed almost hateful.
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Actually . . .” began the director, clearing his throat. “Actually there is someone who matches your description. I hadn’t brought his file out for you because he’s been on leave for the past three months, but the first murder was committed just over a month ago. The kid requested some time off after the death of his mother.” He whispered a name to his secretary, who hurried out of the room. “But even before that, his mother’s illness would regularly take him away from work, and he was frequently late and often distracted. He’s been issued with two written warnings due to mistakes he made when treating patients.”
Teresa felt her heart speed up. That was the profile she was looking for.
When the secretary returned with the file, the director made as if to hand it over to Teresa, but Albert was quick to intercept it.
“Twenty-three years old,” he said, reading from the folder. “Lives not too far from here.”
Teresa leaned across the table to see if she could glean any more information, but Albert tilted the folder upward like a screen.
“There isn’t much else in here.”
The director turned to Teresa.
“The personnel office tried to contact him around ten days ago, as there were some forms that needed updating. But they never managed to get through to him.”
Teresa didn’t even need to read the file. If it was true that his mother had died so recently, the premature death of such a fundamental figure in his life could well have been the event that triggered the violence.
She had a sudden thought, which took on immediate urgency.
“We need to contact every patient who has passed through this ward in at least the past six months. They must be tracked down and warned of the danger.”
Albert looked up at the director.
“How many would that be?”
The man threw up his hands.
“At least a hundred.”
Teresa had to act fast. Close the circle around the killer, Robert would have said.
“We can start by filtering for age, gender, and type of operation to identify those whose profile corresponds to the victims so far. We narrow the search. And no one speaks to the press. It would be like warning him that we’re coming.”
The director nodded. His arrogance had vanished.
Albert slid the young man’s photo across the table.
Teresa stopped it with the palm of her hand, then flipped it around.
Her other hand went instinctively to her womb. Her throat filled with bile, scalding her like lava.
“Teresa?”
“I’ve seen him before. He’s the nurse who was helping Parri at the third crime scene. I’ve seen him at the forensics institute, too. I’ve spoken to him.”
“Are you sure it’s the same person?”
“Yes.”
The director picked up the photograph.
“But that’s impossible. Giacomo Mainardi had already requested to go on leave, and as far as I know, he has no connection to the forensics institute at all.”
He had requested the time he needed to kill.
As for his visits to the crime scenes, his presence at the morgue, and his proximity to the investigating officers, Teresa knew exactly what they meant.
“He’s been keeping tabs on us. Gathering information. And now he knows we’ve gotten this far.” She stood up and looked at the park outside the window. He might even be out there. “I want to see where he worked.”
42
Twenty-seven years ago
SO HIS NAME WAS Giacomo. They had never properly introduced themselves, but the killer already knew who she was. He had been watching her as she studied the trail of corpses he left in his wake. He might even have been carrying pieces of those bodies when he approached her. And he had come so close to her baby.
Teresa stifled the urge to vomit, pressing a tissue against her mouth.
She felt a hand on her back—Albert’s hand.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded, but didn’t risk opening her mouth.
The suspect’s locker had been cleaned out weeks ago, but Albert still put a pair of gloves on before opening it.
“There’s no point bringing anyone in to collect fingerprints.”
Teresa tried swallowing a few times before she spoke again.
“Let’s give it a go. We might find a trace in a corner somewhere.”
“You’re hoping for a miracle.”
She was well aware of that. Albert took his gloves off and looked around for a bin to throw them in.
“We’ll need a warrant to search his house, and who knows if and when we’ll get that. And before we can even apply for one, we’ll have to find some fingerprints that match those from the crime scene. You can’t have one without the other—it’s like chicken and egg.”
Teresa’s eyes instinctively veered toward her notebook, which was peeking out of her open bag. The disconnected phone number the killer had given her was still in there, written in one of those pages—but she had probably wiped his fingerprints off with her own hands. She pulled the notebook out from one of the bag’s inner pockets.
“The last time I saw him, he gave me a phone number that didn’t work.”
Albert looked at her as if she had gone insane.
“You flirted with him?”
“No! He just grabbed my notebook and wrote it down.”
Albert muttered a half-strangled curse.
“At least we might get some fingerprints from it,” he said.
“I wiped the cover clean when we were visiting the third victim’s widow and all that juice spilled over it. But we could still try.”
“We’d be wasting our time.”
“We have to wait anyway.”
Albert had sent four plainclothes officers to stake out the suspect’s residence, but they hadn’t yet sent any alerts back to headquarters. They had taken a neighbor’s statement, who told them that the shutters had been closed for days. Mainardi must have left to go on that trip he had mentioned. The neighbor had described him as an elusive but polite figure. Not exactly nice—just polite. The neighbor had always sensed that there was some kind of distance separating their respective worlds.
Teresa hadn’t believed the story about the trip, not even for a second.
“Where could he be?” she muttered, eyes fixed on the locker whose metal surface those hands must have touched countless times.
“How should I know?”
“I was talking to myself, Albert.”
A nurse walked in, greeting them with a nod. She opened her locker, unpinned her employee badge, and placed it inside, then took off her cardigan and hung it up. Between every gesture, she turned around to look at them, until finally her eyes crossed with Teresa’s.
“That’s Giacomo’s locker. He doesn’t work here anymore.”
Teresa had been waiting for her to make the first move.
“We’re aware, ma’am. Do you know him well?”
“Not exactly. We were just colleagues who saw each other maybe every other week, when we happened to be on the same shift. Sometimes we’d have a quick coffee together and chat about the weather, or at most about the patients here. Nothing more than that. Did something happen to him?”
It was the way she asked that caught Teresa’s attention. The woman was afraid, either for herself or for him.
Teresa pulled out her badge.
“We’re with the police. When was the last time you saw Giacomo Mainardi?”
“He was here a few weeks ago. I turned around and found him standing right behind me. I hadn’t even heard him come in. He asked me how I was, how work was going. I thought it was strange.”
“Why?”
“He’d never really opened up to me, but there was something different about the way he was looking at me that day. He told me: ‘I’m here for you, because you’ve always been kind to me.’”
“How was he looking at you?”
“This might sound crazy, but there was almost something romantic about it. Of course I’m old enough to be his mother. He’d brought me a gift, too . . . A ring—a wedding band. He told me it had belonged to his grandmother, and he wanted me to have it because I was a special person. I refused to even touch it.”
“How did he react?”
“I got the impression that I’d hurt his feelings, and I did try to clear the air, but he didn’t give me the chance—he just left. I was so scared I didn’t sleep for days. I suppose he hadn’t exactly done anything wrong, but it just seemed like such a crazy gesture.”
“Do you remember when this happened?”
“I could never forget it.”
She pointed at a calendar hanging on the wall. It was the day before the second victim was murdered.
Teresa rummaged through her shoulder bag, extracted the case file, and showed her the photograph of the wedding ring that been taken from Giovanni Bordin. It was a gold torchon band, worn and a little dull. An old-fashioned design.
The woman wrapped her arms around herself, her face taut.
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Giacomo had taken the first victim’s wedding ring and tried to gift it to this woman. But she had rejected his gift. And he’d started killing again.
It was typical of serial killers to present people who mattered to them with objects that had once belonged to their victims, but if that was what had happened here, then Teresa did not understand why the killer would have left the same ring behind in the pond by the nymphaeum.
She stepped away to look for the photograph that showed the ring on the finger of the marble arm they had found among the cerulean water lilies at the foot of the mutilated statue. A shiver coursed through her.
If in the killer’s imagination that ring was meant for a woman, if he had been following the progress of the police investigation, if the contact he’d made with Teresa had not been accidental, then perhaps that ring . . .
She remembered the cerulean petals that the killer had left behind in the third victim’s blood. Gifts and more gifts. All for her.
“Why have you come here? Has Giacomo done something?”
The woman had sensed Teresa’s panic, glimpsed in it a reflection of her own, and asked whether the fear they both felt was justified.
Teresa turned around and smiled at her.
“Nothing you need to worry about.”
And she meant it, too. Perhaps the killer had identified her with his late mother, or with a girlfriend he’d never had. Love and romantic relationships were confusing to him, but he did not take his frustration out on female victims. In his mind, women represented detachment and rejection—not anger and revenge.
But if she was to truly understand him, Teresa had to discover the full story of Giacomo Mainardi.
She gave the woman her card.
“Should he reach out to you, buy yourself some time, arrange to meet him in a public place, and call us immediately. Do not meet him alone.”
The woman took the card, her hand shaking.
“You said I had nothing to worry about.”
“That’s right. We’re looking for him in connection with an investigation into a gambling ring, but even so, you shouldn’t meet him alone.”
The woman placed a hand over her heart.
“I definitely won’t. Not a chance.”
They were about to walk out of the room when she called out to them again.
“Giacomo told me something strange when he tried to give me the ring. He told me he carries his mother’s surname, Mainardi, because his biological father never accepted him. And when she got married again to an older man, her new husband refused to give Giacomo his surname, even though Giacomo was only two at the time. He told me he would never be able to give his future wife a normal family surname. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Maybe what he meant is that he feels different from everyone else—because of that double rejection. At least I think that might be the case.”
“I think so, too.”
It was as if the surname on all his personal documents certified that he was only half a son—a woman’s child alone.
“He also told me he has a hole in place of a heart, and asked if I would be able to accept him anyway. I felt sorry for him, and I was scared of him.”
Teresa was gripped by the same sensations. She felt pity, and she felt fear.
43
Today
IT WAS MARINI WHO escorted Teresa home after she had gone to visit Giacomo. He turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open, then stepped aside to let her through.
She limped inside and didn’t even turn the lights on. The sunset was filtering through the curtains, casting melancholy shadows. She threw herself onto the sofa.
“There’s definitely nothing poetic about old age.”
He picked her bag up from the floor and hung it on one of the hooks by the front door.
“You’re not old, you’re just a little worse for wear.”
“I can feel every single one of my years. In fact, I think I can feel at least twice as many.”
“It’ll be three times the amount soon, if you’re not careful. Are you sure you want to do this?”
Teresa let her head drop back among the cushions.
“The alternative would be to pretend, and I don’t want to do that anymore.”
But before she could forget about the world, there was one final thing she had to attend to: the small matter of the girl who’d entered her life under another name. She had turned to Teresa under false pretenses, precisely at a time when Teresa simply couldn’t afford to leave anything to be dealt with in the future.
Marini turned the table lamps on (he’d learned by now that she detested the aggressive glow of ceiling lights) and sat in front of her, his hands intertwined and elbows resting on his knees.
“So, are you going to tell me the truth about Alice now?”
“I suppose the second part of her life, the one that comes after the carefree childhood, must have begun ten years ago. There was a flood somewhere in the north, close to the Austrian border. The river swelled during a torrential downpour, destroying a bridge that connected a village to the state highway and causing part of a hill to collapse. In that chaos of mud and water, a woman disappeared. Alice’s mother.”
“My God.”
“A few witnesses had spotted her walking along the river path, but no one could say for sure that they had seen her carried away by the currents.”
“Why is that significant?”
“Because the body was never found. The local search and rescue teams and the police were both called to the scene, as per normal procedure.”
“Wait—is this going where I think it’s going?”
“I was the officer who led the police investigation.”
Marini swore.
“And now that little girl has grown up and decided to come back into your life to torment you.”
“Everything’s always a tragedy with you, Marini. I don’t think her objective is to torment me.”
He stood up and walked to the window. A bolt of lightning framed his dark silhouette against the half sapphire, half ash-gray sky. The sunset had faded. A storm was coming.
“So what is it that she wants?”
“To solve a mystery that’s become an obsession. That night ten years ago, we found two packed suitcases and a large sum of cash inside her mother’s wardrobe. Where was she planning to go? Who was she going with, and why? We never found out the truth about what happened to her. Did she run away? Was it a freak accident? Or something worse? There was one little girl left behind who just couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was Alice.”
“Could the father have been involved?”
“We investigated the woman’s husband, too, as you’d expect, but quickly ruled him out as a suspect. If I’d had even the slightest doubt about him, I would have left no stone unturned. I would never have left that little girl in his care. None of the witnesses we interviewed—including his daughter—mentioned any incidents of domestic violence in their statements. By all accounts it was a harmonious family, and yet the hours leading up to the incident were and will always remain a mystery. Alice wants to know why her mother was preparing to abandon her, and that’s a question I will never be able to answer for her.”
