Daughter of Ashes, page 28
“You know what’s funny? That whether you live or die, everyone’s going to blame that killer you’re so obsessed with. It’s just you and me in here. And you never told me about this place. If you try to say anything to the contrary, I’ll find a way to destroy your credibility just as I have destroyed your bones. You are nothing. Nothing.”
Teresa’s body was jerked by a series of spasms, then finally fell still.
He held her wrist between his index finger and thumb, and waited. He touched her neck, too, checking her pulse.
He let out a sigh, which could have been one of regret or of relief.
“So you’ve finally given up.”
He walked away, breath still heavy with the feat he’d accomplished, leaving her lying on the floor like a toy broken by a child’s fury.
The sky outside thundered, heralding a storm.
But she was still there. I’m still here. I can hear it.
A door banged against its frame, over and over again. It was the wind.
It’s here to fly us away, she thought to herself. Her and her baby. She knew she was crying tears of blood, and her lungs struggled inside her broken rib cage, grasping for air.
The door slammed again. Someone was running toward her.
Parri.
Parri was coming to save her, but it was too late. Teresa felt herself being torn away, felt the chill that always lingered whenever life slowed to a standstill. She could sense it so clearly, like a vacuum in the middle of her chest. Her heart buckled, and finally stopped beating.
52
Twenty-seven years ago
THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS pressure on her chest. Teresa regained consciousness and returned to the world under the weight of two hands, which seemed intent on crushing her. They kept pressing on her breastbone, all so that they could pull one more breath, one more heartbeat, one last moan out of her. Any sign of life would do. And finally, they managed to bring her back.
Then they stopped, caressing the shapeless mush that seemed to have replaced her face, and rolled her over onto her side. Two fingers cleared the blood and broken teeth out of her mouth, and Teresa finally felt like she could breathe again.
She lay that way, momentarily alone. From the room next door, she heard words she couldn’t comprehend. Snatches of a call to emergency services. The pain had come back and it was unbearable, obscuring everything else.
She felt like she had been smeared onto the floor, her bones scattered like astragali dice.
Parri returned and held her hand. Teresa tried to squeeze it, then he kissed her on the lips—those same lips another man had branded with fire only a few moments prior.
A long kiss, a slow unfurling of his body against hers.
Something her friend would never have done.
Teresa tried to open her eyes, but they were too swollen.
That smell. That savage, feral essence she had smelled on him before, and which was now mixing with the scent of her own blood.
She tried to scream with all the air she had in her lungs, but the only sound that came out was a gasp.
The sirens wailed, closer and closer.
Giacomo reluctantly pulled away.
53
Today
THE HOUSE WHERE GIACOMO had grown up was in a state of neglect. The shutters were faded, and the plaster had started to come off the walls. The whole place was covered in weeds, even along the gutters and between the cracks that many cold winters had made in the tiled terrace floor. Part of the roof looked worryingly concave.
After Giacomo and his mother had been forced to leave, the house had gone through several owners. No one had stayed for very long. At one point the estate agents who had been tasked with selling it had forgotten it even existed. It had remained empty for the following thirty years, until it had finally been bought by a property development company. A billboard on the perimeter fence bore an image of the small block of apartments that would soon take its place.
The owner of the company handed Marini the keys.
“Everyone around here calls it the Haunted House. I used to live at the end of the road, I must have been twenty years old already, but on my way home at night, if I was on my own, I would still avoid driving past on my moped. I’d go the long way round instead.”
He told them that there always seemed to be something that pushed people to leave. The sound of disembodied footsteps on the gravel in the yard, terrified pets scratching at the front door to be let back in after dark, weird symbols on the windows of the children’s bedrooms. The most recent ones to appear were still there, so Teresa asked to see them: wide-open eyes, watching the youngest members of the household and the families that were trespassing on that territory. They seemed to be issuing a warning: leave this place.
They all ran away in the end, some unashamedly open about the reason, others refusing to say why, but all of them wholly convinced that the house was cursed.
They weren’t too far off, though it had nothing to do with dark magic. It was the power of suffering, inflicted and endured, which kept Giacomo tethered to this place, like the fibrous internal scar tissue that forms inside a body in pain.
He was just a boy, a boy who spied on other families, who harassed them, who bothered them until they left. This house belonged to him.
Some creatures can grow fond of certain locations, returning even after they have been driven away either to die there or to give birth to their young. Giacomo was no exception.
Teresa nudged a tuft of grass aside with her foot. There was a FOR SALE sign lying on the ground, its colors long since faded. Perhaps it was Giacomo himself who’d knocked it down, over and over again. Teresa pictured some hapless estate agent refusing to let the matter rest, retrieving the sign and putting it back up after every incident.
Another few months and the house would be demolished to make way for the new building. Teresa hoped she could find what she was looking for before that happened.
The search area was marked out, and a handful of officers dispatched to gather statements from the neighbors. Someone might have spotted Giacomo roaming around recently.
The moment had come to look for the thing Teresa most feared she would find, as if the ghosts that had already risen from her past weren’t more than enough to deal with. She was going to see Sebastiano again, but this time as a dead man—years after he had battered her all the way to within an inch of her life, and left her for dead.
Teresa had no idea how she was supposed to feel, and her instincts were refusing to come to her aid. They had taken refuge in some hidden recess, choosing to remain silent.
She called Alice and Smoky over. The pair had been familiarizing themselves with the search perimeter, aided by Parisi and de Carli.
Albert, who was standing beside her, quieter than usual, furrowed his brow.
“Alice? Wasn’t she called . . .”
“You’re misremembering.”
“Is anything you’ve told me about her actually true?”
Teresa fished a sweet out of her pocket. It was the last one. She unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth. She had never tried any other brand.
“Do you have any complaints about their work?”
“No, but the rules ought to be clear from the start, and I don’t know what game we’re playing anymore.”
Teresa would have burst out laughing if she hadn’t been standing on what was probably a tomb, and the body they were searching for did not belong to the man who had killed her baby. “Albert, you’re always changing the rules when you like. Trust me, this time you’re better off making do with what you’ve got.”
He did not seem convinced, but there were more urgent matters to attend to.
The girl and her dog walked over. Inspector Marini joined them, too. He’d been leading the search inside the building.
“Zilch. Looks like there’s nothing of interest in there. However, someone seems to have set fire to one of the rooms. You can still smell the kerosene in the air. There’s a half-burned mattress on the floor.” He looked at Teresa. “Mainardi had mentioned a fire in our first interview with him. He said someone tried to kill him by setting fire to the hut he’d been sleeping in.”
Teresa studied the house. Giacomo may have sought shelter there while he was on the run.
“He told us a half-truth.”
And at least one lie. He had never told her he’d taken one of her teeth. And if they found Sebastiano’s remains in the garden, then there would be two lies, and she would no longer be able to say who Giacomo really was. Maybe she had been crazy all along, but she had always trusted him.
She reached for Alice, guiding her closer.
“Giacomo’s victims always had multiple wounds. If there is a body here, it should be no exception.”
Alice pulled her hair up in a ponytail and patted her hand against her thigh. Smoky immediately came to her.
“We’ll start in the garden.”
They led her to the boundary marked out by police tape. The area had been divided into various sections. Marini grabbed a handful of soil in his fist, then let it trickle back down between his fingers.
He gently spun Alice toward the direction the wind was blowing from. This way it would be easier for Smoky to locate the scent cone.
They began their search.
Smoky was trained to sniff out death, whether whole or in fragments, buried or exposed to the elements. Keeping pace with his human, he scanned the ground and the sky. All the odor molecules he detected formed a web of coordinates that guided him to his goal as clearly as a set of visible signs.
Ever since she had first seen Smoky at work, Teresa had begun to picture smells as if they were filaments floating across the surface of the world. Right now, they were all immersed in a vortex that the human olfactory sense was not capable—or perhaps no longer capable—of catching and identifying. If Teresa’s theory was right, then in that moment a miasma of cadaverine, of blood and broken bones, must be hovering somewhere inside the house or out in that wild, unkempt garden. It was the same smell that clung to Giacomo’s hands. Those airborne compounds floated on currents of air and spiraled toward the ground, swirling around their feet.
Teresa did not stay to watch the pair of trackers at work. She walked away, leaving the others to attend to whatever they might need. She was afraid that the theory that had brought her here would turn out to be true. If there really was a body buried here, she was sure she knew whose it was. But that would also mean that Giacomo had lied to her when he’d said that someone else had hidden the body. She searched her memories for details of that interview, for Giacomo’s expression, the tone of his voice when he’d told her that, the way he’d looked at her. But she couldn’t find anything. It was as if the meeting had never happened, and his remarks had been delivered to her by an intermediary. And if that particular conversation was already shrouded in mist, how many other interactions had she already lost without realizing? What had she and Giacomo said to each other in all those years of encounters in the prison meeting room? She didn’t know anymore.
She shifted her gaze toward the garden. Patches of weavers broom had sprung up among the tall grass and vines. Smoky and Alice appeared and disappeared from view among boxwood hedges and rosebushes. Parisi was following one step behind the girl, making sure she didn’t get any scratches.
There was one last thing to do before Pandora’s box was opened, freeing all the evils—the last ones left—nestled within that story.
Teresa took her phone out of her bag and opened her list of contacts, trying to remember the name of the person she’d been meaning to call. It had been in the back of her mind since the moment Albert and Parri had shown up at her front door to announce that Sebastiano had died. “His sister had taken him in, and it nearly cost her, too,” Albert had said, before Teresa had even realized that he was talking about her ex-husband.
His sister. Lavinia—that was her name. She’d been the one to report him to the police for a second time, thereby paving the way for her twin brother’s renewed incarceration. She was a psychologist by training, working for the regional government to help coordinate social services between different departments. Teresa had needed her help on a case she had been investigating a few months ago, but the encounter had been a frosty one, and her former friend hadn’t said a word about her brother or the violence she herself had suffered at his hands. Albert had done some research: it seemed Lavinia had cut all ties with Sebastiano years ago, just like the rest of their family.
Teresa stared at her phone screen until it went dark again. She just couldn’t bring herself to make the call.
“How are you feeling?”
It was Marini, who had come to join her where she was standing.
“What about you?”
“A bit weirded out.”
He was looking at her as if wondering how to fix her, how to heal the wounds that still haunted her more melancholy days.
“There isn’t,” she told him.
“What?”
“There’s no way to undo what’s happened, if that’s what you’re obsessing about. Stop worrying about it.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
She took his face in her hands.
“What do you see when you look at me?”
“A lady who’s always pissed off?”
“You might as well have called me an old woman.”
“Calling you a lady doesn’t mean you’re old.”
“Come on, Marini. What do you see? A face disfigured by all those punches?”
“Jesus. Stop doing that.”
“Or by the kicks?”
“Enough.”
She let him go, the palm of her hand holding a caress that never reached his face.
“Well, you’re wrong. The woman standing before you is a woman who managed to get back on her feet and move forward with her life. That’s what you should see.”
He shook his head, a faint smile playing on his lips.
“Do you really think I don’t already see you that way? I’ve always seen you that way, even before . . . even before I knew about all this. But you can’t stop me from feeling compassion for you, not after you taught me what that is.”
De Carli ran toward them, interrupting their brief moment of mutual surrender, the kind that freed the spirit rather than destroying it.
“They’ve found something. We’re still digging, but it looks like it’s quite close to the surface.”
Marini held her elbow.
“Would you like to go closer?”
Teresa nodded, but managed only a few steps forward. Her legs didn’t seem to want to follow her commands. They stopped, observing silently from a distance.
There was a corpse down there, somewhere behind the screen of bodies crowding around the excavation site.
Smoky was never wrong. There was no hope of a false positive to cling on to.
Marini let go of her arm.
“I’m going to go and check.”
Teresa noticed Parri slipping through the throng of officers.
She exhaled, expelling the tension that had been eating away at her.
When Marini returned, Albert was there with him, which was how Teresa knew that the verdict was precisely the horrifying one they’d been expecting.
She caught Marini’s eyes.
“Well?” She wanted him to be the one to tell her.
“Parri has identified him using the photographs we have on file, though he said he would have known even without.”
Sebastiano. The last image Parri had of him was probably of his icy expression at the final court hearing. Teresa leaned even more heavily on her walking stick.
“Is it him?”
“Yes. I won’t ask whether you’d like to see him.”
That would have been too much, even for Teresa.
“I don’t.”
“Is there anyone who could identify his personal effects?”
“His sister, Lavinia Russo. Have we . . .”
“Yes, we reached out to her a few hours ago to tell her about the DNA match.” Teresa didn’t remember. “I’ll deal with it. It won’t take long, and I’ll drop you at home when I’m done.”
“Thank you.”
Marini walked off again. He was trying to relieve her of as many burdens as he could, but all she wanted was to turn back time to a few days, a few weeks ago.
Albert approached her, hands in his pockets. It almost looked like he wanted to give her a hug.
“It’s over.”
“He escaped.”
“We’ll find him. There’s an international warrant out for his arrest. He can’t hide forever.”
“You don’t sound angry.”
“With you? Why would I be? It’s not your fault.”
“Well this is unexpected.”
“Oh come on, Teresa. You’ve always been more prepared to give murderers the benefit of the doubt than show me any kind of understanding.”
It wasn’t a question of being understanding, or of forgiveness.
“I just don’t trust you, Albert.”
He shrugged.
“What’s new? Everyone knows I can’t be trusted.”
Teresa didn’t know whether to laugh or shout at him. She decided to go with the former; she could certainly do with some mirth, even if it tasted a little bitter.
“You’re always so completely yourself, Albert.”
“Surely that’s a good thing. At least you always know what to expect of me.”
“I suppose so.”
“Do you think it was meant as an act of revenge? Giacomo finally found a way to avenge you. It would be the perfect ending to a nearly thirty-year-old story, wouldn’t it?”
“Perfect?”
“You know what I mean. Of course it’s a tragedy.”
But his offhand tone suggested the opposite. None of those who knew could really consider it as such.
Giacomo had sent Sebastiano straight back to hell—that was what Albert was thinking. That was what Teresa herself had thought, before she’d managed to get her emotions back under control. She didn’t want to hate him. It had taken half her life to leave that hatred behind. As for the guilt, she’d held on fast to that—though soon she was bound to forget about that, too, along with everything else, her broken bones, the baby she had lost.
