Daughter of Ashes, page 25
But Antonio was playing for time. So there was more. Teresa could already hear the deafening roar of the shock wave forming among the unspoken words he kept turning in his mouth.
Albert seemed to sense Antonio’s distress, and so he did something Teresa would never have thought possible.
He kneeled before her.
“Teresa, the victim’s DNA matches one of the entries in our database. The man was a repeat offender. He nearly killed a woman. He served his sentence, but was arrested again a few months later for assault and threats. His sister had taken him in, and it nearly cost her, too.”
The feeling of his hands resting on hers was disorienting, as was the searing surge of compassion she felt rising from her stomach all the way up to her heart.
Another battered woman, she thought to herself. It kept happening every day, over and over again. All the time. When would it end?
“What happened to first woman? The one who almost died. Who was she? I mean . . . the wife. The . . .”
Albert squeezed her fingers.
“It was you, Teresa. The remains belong to Sebastiano.”
46
Twenty-seven years ago
AS SHE WALKED AMONG the tombstones with a baby in her womb, Teresa was beset by an underlying sense of melancholy. She felt as if she had taken him out for a stroll in some strange limbo she should never have brought him to, among stone angels who had descended to earth to tear someone’s love away, rather than announce new life.
She kept stroking her belly, even though she’d read somewhere that it was better not to do so. But it was too soon to start worrying about that kind of thing. Her hands kept finding their way there of their own accord, cupping that new life like a cradle, creating a bridge between two hearts. Teresa could picture it, that baby bird’s heart beating furiously like a pair of tiny fluttering wings.
The encroaching sunset lengthened the shadows cast by the cemetery’s colonnades, stretching their blackness and framing the remaining patches of light on the cobblestones, which seemed desperate to evade the forward march of time.
The ceiling of the pedestrian path was an archway whose colors and decorations changed at almost every step.
Teresa paused underneath a navy blue vault brightened with golden stars. A whole family was buried inside the wall. A full-size sculpture of an angel had been positioned as though it was about to let itself fall off a cliff, swept away by the wind, its massive wings unfurling.
Teresa turned her back to it so as not to let herself be dragged down by the harrowing beauty of that final farewell.
She leaned against a column, out of sight. She had no intention of putting her baby at risk. She’d already come perilously close to crossing the line; she had no intention of going anywhere nearer. She was only there to discover whether the theories she had based her work on would actually apply to real life.
The sun sank lower and the sky flared crimson, bathing the marble all around her in pinkish hues. The cemetery’s votive candles began to flicker in the twilight.
There was beauty in this place, too—an earthbound firmament of fragrant blossoms that could almost make you forget what lay beneath them.
It was nearly closing time, though there were still some visitors lingering and talking in the footpaths between the graves. A mother holding a boisterous little boy by the hand, two old ladies leaning on each other as they changed the water in the vases, a handyman repairing a lamppost.
Maybe Giacomo wasn’t going to come. Maybe she’d gotten it wrong. Maybe dates weren’t as important to him as Teresa had assumed, and he was going to spend this anniversary away from here, far from death. Or perhaps his plan was to go chasing after death again—just not in a cemetery. Teresa’s stomach lurched. If she had made a mistake, if it turned out that his intention was to mark this date not with rituals of remembrance but by pursuing a fresh victim, that would mean Teresa was in the wrong place, and someone else was about to die.
Albert and the rest of the team were keeping watch over Mainardi’s house in case he showed up. Another squad car was waiting for Teresa outside the cemetery; she’d successfully argued for two other officers to be dispatched with her.
She checked the time, then pulled out the suspect’s file from her bag. They’d managed to get in touch with one of his relatives, a second cousin who’d given them what little information she had. Everything else they knew, they had learned from the family doctor who’d known Giacomo since he was a little boy, and from the teachers who’d taught him at school. By now the picture was clear.
Giacomo had been born with a malformation of the sternum. His chest caved in at the center. The deformity had shaped the course of his life, so that he’d ended up feeling—and ultimately being—different from everyone else.
I have a hole in place of a heart.
Teresa couldn’t get those words out of her head, that confession which, until that moment, had been impossible to fully comprehend.
She leafed through the file, as if hoping for a different ending.
His stepfather had repeatedly refused to let Giacomo get the operation he needed. The reason why Giacomo’s mother hadn’t spoken out against this act of sadistic cruelty was simple enough to understand, and utterly banal, just as evil usually is: she did not want to be abandoned again. And so she had offered up her own offspring as sacrifice.
In doing so, she’d effectively told her partner that he was the most important thing in her life—that man she had let into her home, and who would go on to take all his frustrations out on a little boy, forcing him to bare his chest when they went to the beach in the summer and making him take swimming classes in winter. Just as the new dominant male in the pride goes hunting in the high grass for his predecessor’s cubs, this man, too, sought to annihilate what the man before him had left behind—marking his territory at the expense of a boy’s childhood.
Until finally, a little piece of Giacomo—situated right in the middle of his chest—had died forever.
Perhaps it was the influence of her own unborn child speaking to her through the force of life, nurture, and connection, but in any event, Teresa felt a growing affinity for the unloved son that Giacomo had been. And yet Giacomo, like every other child in the world, had never stopped loving his mother.
A tear fell from her eyes onto the case file, but it wasn’t enough to dissolve the toxic ink with which this story had been written.
Compassion. Teresa wondered if she’d be cursed with that feeling forever, all the way into the future that awaited her.
When Giacomo’s stepfather had walked out on the family, mother and son had lost everything they’d ever had, including their home, but the woman had finally felt free to get Giacomo treated. By then he’d grown into a teenager. It took numerous operations and a metal plate to lift up the sunken bone and cartilage, as well as an orthopedic corset he’d had to wear day and night for seven long years. Seven—like the phalanges he’d removed from his victims. He’d probably divided the rib into pieces, too. Teresa understood now: in the hospital, this young man had found a family. It was there that, in spite of everything he had been through, and with his mind already crawling with violent fantasies, Giacomo had found the strength to make a fresh start and become a nurse, working in precisely the same department that had repaired his own life.
But though his body had been fixed, his mind and his emotional universe would never be the same again.
By the time Teresa had finished reading the report, twilight had already taken over, and the last traces of gold had fleeted from the faces of the statues and the crosses perched atop private chapels.
She looked up and realized she was alone. There was a quarter of an hour left until the gates would close.
She put the file back in her bag, picked up her walkie-talkie, and tried to contact the officers stationed outside the cemetery gates. No reply. They hadn’t even turned theirs on.
She glanced at her watch again, deciding she might as well head out.
She started walking at a brisk stride. At the end of the footpath, the caretaker was moving the ladder he’d used to climb up to the lamppost. He leaned it against the dovecote and headed straight for Teresa.
She quickened her pace. Was he going to tell her off?
“I was just leaving!”
But the man walked right past her without saying a word, his face hidden by the brim of his hat. The smell of his body clawed at her stomach, and she pulled away instinctively. It wasn’t unpleasant in the ordinary sense of the word; rather, it was feral.
Teresa turned around to look, and realized that the man wasn’t wearing a blue work uniform, as she had originally assumed, but gym clothes.
She turned around again and fought the urge to start sprinting away, her arms cradling her belly protectively.
It was him. Teresa could feel it on her skin. Her subconscious was screaming at her to run.
She hid behind a row of cypress trees to look for him.
Giacomo had headed in the direction of the newer graves, and was now standing before a tombstone with his back to Teresa, though she could see that his face was in fact turned toward the grave right next to it—where the first victim was buried. He was studying the freshly dug earth, and the temporary wooden cross with the name tag.
He showed no signs of movement. He appeared to be absorbed in prayer, but in fact, he was allowing himself to be watched. He had recognized her. He must have been feasting his eyes on her, and filling his thoughts, for a very long time.
Teresa couldn’t breathe. He was communicating with her through the stillness of his body, through his profile exposed to her gaze, but she couldn’t understand what he was trying to say, didn’t have the tools she needed to decipher the message he was sending her.
Giacomo bent down toward the tombstone.
The sudden movement alarmed Teresa, who ducked behind a nearby chapel. She rummaged through her bag, grabbed her walkie-talkie, and tried again to reach her colleagues.
“Do you copy? He’s here.”
She was whispering, but she would have liked to shout.
“Do you copy? He is here!”
She looked up again, but Giacomo had vanished. The walkie-talkie slipped from her grasp and fell to the ground. A rustling sound from among the graves, frighteningly close, made her skin crawl.
Teresa started running, though she had no idea where she was going. All she could see were black crosses silhouetted in the blue night, tombstones, and funeral candles. There were no lights on. He hadn’t been pretending to repair the lampposts; he’d unscrewed the bulb from every single light in that section of the cemetery. The marble angels seemed to be commiserating with her, not falling from the sky but rising from the earth to announce her death.
Teresa thought of her unborn child, of the danger she’d put her baby in. She started crying, looking for an exit she couldn’t find, oblivious to the noise she was making and how exposed she was to anyone’s sight. Panic had turned her into easy prey, and now she kept knocking against the sharp edges of a trap she herself had walked right into.
Somewhere on the cypress-scented gravel, her walkie-talkie began to crackle. Teresa could hear her colleagues laughing. They had been playing a prank on her while she was attempting to flee from a killer.
All the footpaths looked identical, like a maze without walls, but Teresa finally spotted a gate. She sprinted toward it and started pulling, but it was locked.
That was when she felt his presence.
A few steps away, close by, and right behind her.
Teresa turned around, her face wet with tears. She thrust her hand underneath her parka to take her gun out its holster, but he was quicker than she was; he grabbed the weapon and threw it into a flowerbed.
Now that he was standing so close, Teresa recognized the face beneath the hat as belonging to the young man who had been so kind to her, who had helped her in her time of need.
She also recognized the animal whose presence she’d detected in his scent. It glittered in the blackness of his pupils.
Giacomo brought his face right up to hers, so close that they were breathing the same air.
Teresa couldn’t help but lower her eyes to his chest, where his clothes covered up the scar that had cut right through to his soul.
He followed her gaze. Perhaps he understood that Teresa knew.
He looked up toward the sky, and she saw anguish on his face, a glimpse of his shattered but enduring humanity. Giacomo let her go, turned around, and walked back into the night.
Teresa sank to her knees.
“I called you. I dialed that number.”
She spoke this into the darkness, after she had managed to still her chattering teeth, hurling the words out from her heart. They came out a mere whisper, but she knew, beyond any doubt, that he had heard.
47
Twenty-seven years ago
GIACOMO’S HOUSE SMELLED LIKE a coffin. Teresa recognized the scent the moment she stepped foot inside. It reeked of wilting petals and rot, of ribbons soiled with grief-colored earth.
The latest developments in the case had finally persuaded the judge to issue a search warrant for his home. The fingerprints from the third victim’s hat, which Giacomo had returned to the widow, matched the prints found on the crime scene as well as the prints taken from Teresa’s service weapon, and Teresa had also confirmed that the man who’d grabbed her gun at the cemetery was indeed Giacomo Mainardi.
Albert chose to interpret these events as proof of his own supremacy.
“He’s lost his head. He no longer has control of the situation.”
Teresa took them as a sign of what they really meant: the whirlwind of death and ruin was beginning to implode, spiraling into a self-destructive epilogue.
Some of the other officers had just completed the various formalities that preceded every search, presenting the search warrant to a terrified neighbor. The court-appointed lawyer had just arrived. Teresa let him enter first. None of the relatives they had tracked down had wanted to attend. As an orphan, and an only child whose mother had also been an only child, Giacomo was alone in the world. Any remaining ties had been severed by the news that he was being investigated for murder.
Teresa had come this far by following the trail the killer had made with his victims’ bones. She pictured them spinning around her like cogs in a mechanism whose workings remained obscure. Teresa was aware that every step she took was one the killer wanted her to take, so she considered every detail and every possible scenario before her with the knowledge that things were exactly where and how he had intended.
Your mind must be a clean slate, Robert had urged her. She went further than that. She turned herself into an empty chalice, so that she could receive whatever morbid gift might be awaiting her.
That scent she had smelled came from dried flower petals strewn across the floor. Black, shriveled, and malodorous, they spoke of abandonment and of lives disfigured.
His apartment was tidy, the neatness covered in a layer of dust. Its owner had clearly been busy attending to other matters over the past few weeks.
Every room was photographed, and every object closely examined. In a wardrobe, taped inside one of the doors, they found newspaper cuttings relating to the murders, the passport photos he’d removed from the drivers’ licenses, and an assortment of women’s costume jewelry hanging from a nail.
Albert called Teresa over.
“What do you think these mean?”
Teresa brushed a gloved hand against the necklaces and bracelets, making them jingle.
“Perhaps they belonged to his mother. Or perhaps he stole them. These types of killers are usually voyeurs, too. They watch other people’s lives and steal the occasional object to put their skills to the test. They don’t necessarily intend to kill—not always.”
Albert studied the glittering trinkets as if they were voodoo fetishes.
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
Teresa stepped away from him in irritation.
“Log them as evidence, and see if you can find their owners among his neighbors and colleagues.”
“Will you take care of the annex?” said Albert, gesturing toward a door that opened into the backyard. “There’s a greenhouse in the garden.”
Teresa walked up to the window. The branch of a desiccated tree grated against the glass with every gust of wind. That little patch of soil had become stuck in a perennial winter. Unlike the triangle of green that greeted visitors at the entrance, back here the grass appeared not to have been mown in months, perhaps even years. It looked like hay folding back in on itself in heavy tufts, smothering any new growth until it all turned to rot.
There are some places in this world that seem to be seeped in mephitic vapors, and such was the case with the iron and glass edifice, which towered over that backyard moor.
The portable floodlights were positioned and lit. A flock of crows took flight with a series of shrill caws.
The windows had been taped up from the inside with old newspaper pages, yellowed by their exposure to the sun until the ink had been all but erased. Some were stained with moisture, thickened by leaks. Others were home to the downy nests of large spiders retreating from the glare of the officers’ flashlights.
Ever since an incident in her childhood, Teresa had been terrified of spiders. She had accidentally knocked a nest over while playing one day, and found herself covered in spider-lings—dozens and dozens of them. She swept the memory away now, and brushed her hands over her arms and face to get rid of the physical sensation she could still feel there.
The moment her fellow officers opened the door, the choreography of evidence gathering commenced around her. Someone found a switch and turned it on. A lone light bulb dangled from an exposed cable that hung from the ceiling.
Teresa could not sense any imminent danger, other than that which faced her psyche.
The greenhouse was pervaded by the same smell as inside the apartment, only more intensely. On the clay floor, next to vases full of shriveled plants and rusty gardening tools, they found the funeral wreaths sent by the first victim’s friends and family to mark his burial. The victim’s name spelled out in gold left no room for doubt. Here was yet another collection of totems, romantic reminders of a love affair with death.
