Daughter of Ashes, page 26
The far end of the greenhouse was occupied by fitness equipment: benches, weights, resistance bands, pull-up frames. The walls in that part of the building were covered with posters and calendars showing nude male figures. Teresa’s colleagues interpreted these as a declaration of homosexuality they derided with crude and vulgar innuendo. Teresa whipped them back into line with a barked command none of them dared disobey, and which even Albert didn’t question. The superintendent had joined her in the search now, though he was standing a few steps back and limiting himself to watching her movements.
Teresa strode up to the posters. There were finger marks on their glossy surfaces. Giacomo must have caressed them so many times that his thoughts had left lustrous furrows in their wake.
In those hairless, perfectly sculpted chests, Teresa saw the unattainable ideal that tormented Giacomo. That suggestive display of open nudity signified, perhaps, that he had never had the courage to give himself over to anyone that way, man or woman. And yet he’d always wanted to.
Teresa had sensed as much in the darkness of the cemetery. She’d scented a kind of naivete in him, an animalistic attempt to be in the world, and to be close to her, though he was still experimenting with it. The clumsy overture with his colleague at the hospital was proof of that. He was learning through imitation.
This young man still felt the presence of that hole in his chest, underneath the metal plate which had fixed the quirk of nature he’d been born with; he could feel the void that had replaced his heart, and tried desperately to fill it with flesh and muscle strong enough to reclaim his sunken self-esteem.
Everyone had stepped away from Teresa now, as if her colleagues were waiting for whatever it was that might be simmering inside of her. An idea, a gesture, maybe an indication that she was ready to step out of that place. They would have followed her without batting an eye.
She made a half-turn where she stood. She was looking for a sign, knowing Giacomo must have left one behind. That was how creatures like him always communicated. Yet the sign seemed to be missing this time.
Albert interrupted her musings.
“Well?”
“I don’t have a crystal ball.”
“But so far you’ve always acted as if you did.”
Teresa tried to maintain her focus. One of the other officers tore a few pages of newspaper down from the windows. The floodlights illuminated the greasy panes from the outside. Albert started berating him, shouting something about protocol, but meanwhile, Teresa thought she had glimpsed something reflected in the glass.
“Turn those lights off!”
The greenhouse was plunged back into darkness, pierced here and there by the bright rays of the floodlights outside.
Albert cursed under his breath.
It was an eye. An eye staring at them, drawn straight onto the glass with a finger. Wide open and terrified. Or perhaps mesmerized.
Albert began tearing more pages down, revealing a second eye in the next windowpane.
Everyone seemed to have stopped breathing. Teresa collected herself.
“We need to tear them all down.”
She made them turn the lights back on, and asked for more lamps to be brought in. They set about individually numbering the newspapers so that they could later be restored to their original positions, and thus allow the investigators to search for any hidden messages. Then they put them on the floor, stacked in a corner of the room.
But they did not find any other drawings. Only that pair of enchanted eyes staring at something straight ahead, at something that perhaps existed only in Giacomo’s mind.
Albert dropped the last batch of newspaper pages to the floor for Lorenzi to pick up, then scrubbed his hands on his trousers with such alacrity that it was as if he wanted to get rid of the appendages altogether. Finally he returned to Teresa, ashen-faced.
“Now what?”
She had not stopped looking around her.
“He wants us to see something. Something that matters to him.”
“The wreaths he stole? The half-naked men? What?”
She didn’t know. The message could be hidden anywhere, embedded in any given object—or in nothing at all.
Albert voiced the question she herself had been trying to answer.
“Where do we start digging? We don’t have all night. He may have already chosen his next victim. If we get it wrong and waste more time . . .”
It was only when Teresa stepped up onto a bench that she saw it. A patch of ground just a shade darker than its surroundings, and right in front of the eyes traced on the windowpanes.
Decomposition. The soil there must be teeming with fats and nutrients. It was just a corner of the room, half hidden by a rubber mat on which he had placed a pull-up frame.
Teresa stepped off the bench and found a shovel.
“That’s where we’re digging.”
Albert took the shovel from her and handed it to another officer.
“Dig.”
They rolled up the gym mat and put it to one side. This released a smell which some of them had learned to recognize from past investigations. The grave must be a shallow one. They put on their face masks.
Teresa got down on her haunches.
“Be careful, now.”
She helped them dig with her hands until she felt something through her latex gloves.
The first thing that surfaced was the fabric, a strip of white cotton with a light-blue floral pattern. They removed all the loose soil above and around it until the full outline of a human body was revealed.
They had unearthed a corpse in the advanced stages of decay.
It was wrapped in a sheet from the neck down. The air inside the greenhouse had dried it, darkened it, molded leathery skin onto bone. It looked like a mummy lain to rest in a pagan tomb. Its folded clothes and personal effects had been placed beside its feet and femurs.
Teresa asked for the file the Swiss gendarmerie had faxed over at her request.
She ran through the list of personal effects belonging to Giacomo’s father, supplied by his partner just an hour ago—particularly a small gold medallion she had gifted him, inscribed with his initials. There it was, still in place around the withered neck.
Teresa handed the fax back to her colleague.
“We’ll run the usual tests, but I don’t think there’s any doubt here. It’s him. Has anyone called Parri?”
“He’s on his way.”
Teresa grabbed a pen and scraped the soil off the skull. It was broken. She carefully lifted the edge of the stained and darkened fabric. The rib cage was shattered, too.
Albert hid his nose under the lapels of his suit. The face mask wasn’t enough.
“He looks like he’s been hit by a train.”
Teresa pointed at the limbs and abdomen.
“Everything else is intact. What we have here is a different kind of fury.”
“You think his son did all this damage?”
“Stepson. I’m sure of it.”
“You’ve probably just made us use the murder weapon as a spade, Inspector. Good job. I’ll be putting that in my report.”
But Teresa was barely listening, too busy trying to catch the lingering echoes of what might have happened.
Where had Giacomo met up with his stepfather? How far had he convinced him to go, and where had he finally struck? How had he managed to get him all the way here? Or had his stepfather come of his own free will? Perhaps Giacomo had carried him—already dead—in the trunk of a car the police had yet to trace, despite the license plate number that the vehicle licensing office had already transmitted to all the units on patrol.
Teresa feared that most of these questions would remain unanswered, like a void that could only be filled with their imagination, with conjecture, and with the shapes and physical contours of their innermost fears.
Albert looked around. He seemed tired but satisfied.
“We need to dig through the whole garden. There might be more.”
Teresa stood up and wiped the dust off her jeans. She decided there and then that she would get rid of them; no amount of washing would ever be able to cleanse them, not after what they had touched.
“There could be, but it’s unlikely. There may be no blood tie, but this is still his father’s grave—Father with a capital F. The Father who inflicts suffering, and then abandons the family. It’s highly symbolic. For Giacomo Mainardi, this wasn’t simply about hiding a corpse, but a way of burying the pain this person had caused him. He left all the others outside of this burial circle, out on the street and or in some field. But not him. He wanted to keep him in sight, every single day. He’s the first victim. Giacomo killed him after the death of his mother—the event that first triggered his destructive spiral—but before all the others.”
“So should I have the garden dug up or not?”
He hadn’t been listening.
“Yes, I suppose so. After the coroner has finished his work.”
“But you just said no!”
“I said we probably won’t find any other bodies there.”
“Then what are we doing?”
Teresa didn’t know, but something told her there must be more.
Once the search zone had been marked out for Parri’s arrival, the officers began to trickle out into the starry night looking for fresh air to breathe.
Teresa was left alone. Albert called after her, but was immediately distracted by other matters, orders to hand out, reports to compile.
That was when Teresa saw it. It was just a plant, but amid all that death, it stood out like an interruption to the normal order of things.
Teresa walked right up to it.
The stand was made of steel, like the kind found in plant nurseries. The earth inside was damp, and home to a family of wild violets. Pale lilac petals, a white bud, heart-shaped leaves. A patch of recently changed soil.
Her thoughts went immediately to the third crime scene, to that thicket of flowering acacias far from the city lights. A mist had been rising from the murky canal bed while frogs croaked all around them. There, too, the soil had been black and rich with humus, thick with bulbs and blood, and covered in violets. Teresa remembered the fragrant rain, her nausea, and the touch of that hand on her back, which seemed to say, You are not alone.
She had wanted to tell him the same, in that cemetery lit with flickering candles.
“I called you,” she’d said, which was tantamount to promising him that a different life was possible.
Those flowers were meant for her. They weren’t dried, they weren’t cut. They were alive.
Teresa sank her hands into the earth to pull the roots from the fresh soil, but she found something else. She brushed the dirt off and wiped the surface clean until it glistened under the floodlights, revealing a magnificent, malevolent object of ivory-hued splendor.
A stab of pain in her abdomen brought her to her knees, her cry for help smothered in her throat.
48
TERESA BATTAGLIA DID RETURN to police headquarters after all, but she did it in the middle of the night, when the hallways were silent and the offices mostly empty. Those who recognized her leapt to their feet as she walked past, while the rest went looking for her later, heads peeking out of doorways as the news traveled inexorably from floor to floor.
She was escorted by Massimo, who did his best to shield her from curious stares—which could easily become a nuisance or even prove hurtful. She had come there that night to look at herself, to look at her face reflected in a portrait and either come out stronger, or utterly defeated.
Massimo was also scrambling to gather the fragments of her failing memory, trying desperately to piece them back together, but they were like hot coals, destined to dissolve into ash and slip through his fingers. He knew he had to come to terms with the decline that her illness inevitably entailed. But although he was willing to let the superintendent go, he was not prepared to give up on the woman Teresa Battaglia still was—not until she’d been fully vindicated.
As they stepped into the office, Massimo pulled the door shut behind them. He’d been working there on his own for the past couple of weeks, and every time he walked in, he would ask himself what was going to become of him, of the team, and of Teresa’s legacy, and whether they were strong enough to gather the ashes and fashion them into something new.
Parisi and de Carli had been waiting for them, and sprung to their feet as soon as they walked in.
“Superint—”
She didn’t even let them finish.
“There’s no superintendent here. Is that it, over there?”
Massimo switched on the desk lamp, illuminating the details of the mosaic that had been sent from the prison. The reason she was so abrupt sometimes was because she was afraid of getting hurt. It had taken Massimo months to understand that.
“Yes, that’s it.”
She kept her distance, as if standing by the doorway could ensure she had an easy way out in case of emergency. But unfortunately there was no way out.
Massimo had put in an urgent request for the portrait to be confiscated and brought to the police headquarters because he knew that eventually, Teresa would have no choice but to confront the feelings that still bound her to the killer—murky, suppressed emotions that had been frayed but never completely severed by the passing decades. He wanted to make sure he was right beside her when that moment came.
Finally, Teresa moved closer, her gaze fixed on the portrait.
“May I touch it?”
“Yes.”
Teresa tried to pull a chair up; Parisi quickly came to her aid. She sank into it with a sigh.
But she still resisted running her fingers over those tiles, which had come together to create an astonishingly accurate portrait of her face—immortalizing her at an age that was nevertheless difficult to determine. Not young, but not exactly old, either. It was unmistakably her, but at the same time, she was eternal, unconstrained by terrestrial coordinates.
Massimo felt a sense of awe every time he looked at it.
This was a Teresa with sparkling eyes, hair rippling in the wind of life, head proudly raised. Her mouth was half-open, and there it was: that gap, that void between her teeth that had all the gravitational pull of a black hole.
Massimo crouched beside her. He wondered how much more this woman could handle before she finally fell apart. As if life hadn’t already taken enough from her, she was now expected to look for the corpse of the husband who’d tormented her, and to do so, she had to inhabit the mind and understand the urges of a killer with whom she shared a pact of reciprocal silence.
Massimo realized his thoughts were heading into dangerous territory, and quickly brushed them away.
He watched as she stretched out a finger—just one—and ran it over the tiles.
“He’s always had an eye for detail.”
Massimo felt the urge to place his hand over hers.
“He’s certainly been very precise,” he agreed, “and true to his fantasies, too, no doubt.”
He saw her shake her head almost imperceptibly.
“This is not his imagination at work, Marini.”
“Then what?”
“It’s simply what happened.”
“And that’s something you’d rather not tell us about.”
“Oh, Massimo. Haven’t I suffered enough?”
He rested his forehead on the desk, heartbroken. He was still tormented by the photographs he had seen. Her devastated face. Her body, violated.
“Forgive me.”
“Come here, all three of you.”
They folded themselves around her, as if in an embrace. De Carli was tearing up; Parisi couldn’t look anyone in the eyes.
“It wasn’t easy admitting to being a serial killer’s favorite. I was meant to be hunting him down. But that’s how it was, and that’s how it still is. Figuring out who you’re supposed to fear is not always obvious, boys. Sometimes we’re so in love we refuse to see it. We run headfirst into tragedy without even realizing what we’re doing.”
Massimo lifted his head.
“Do you think you’re in danger?”
“No. He’s not going to kill me, if that’s what you’re worried about. Giacomo never made portraits of his victims.”
“Then what?”
She pulled her hand away from the tiles, as if the contact had suddenly become unbearable.
“We never did manage to decipher his message. The images in the mosaic we found in the greenhouse back then were all fairly explicit, displayed openly before our eyes . . . and yet impossible to describe. Perhaps it was supposed to be hell.”
“Hell. And what exactly was hell, for Giacomo?”
Teresa’s eyes shone with the spark of someone who’d just been struck by an idea.
“Not what, but where.”
49
Twenty-seven years ago
THE GYNECOLOGIST WHO WAS on night shift at the public hospital was quick to reassure her. The baby was fine, and so was Teresa. There was nothing to worry about.
Teresa’s guilt dissipated. Her baby’s heart was beating.
She had just seen it for the first time on the ultrasound screen. It really did look like a little bird’s heart, perhaps even tinier than that—yet so strong, and so stubborn.
“You should get some rest. Try to avoid stress, and take some more time for yourself. The first three months of a pregnancy are always the most delicate.”
That was the advice the doctor gave her as she left the examination room to continue her rounds, and Teresa decided to take it to heart. It was time to give up the chase, and let someone else catch the prey. She put her clothes back on, finally feeling like she knew what path to take.
Someone knocked on the door.
“May I?”
“Come in.”
