Flowers over the Inferno, page 7
He felt like a piece of string stretched beyond breaking point.
“What do I have to do to get along with you?” he asked. He didn’t mean it as a provocation; he just wanted to understand.
The superintendent was no longer even looking at him, concentrating instead on the photographs from the crime scene she was scrolling through on her computer screen.
“You have to do your job—that is if you even know how to,” she answered. “I read your report last night.”
“And?”
She looked at him again. “I flushed it down the toilet. You’ll have to start again.”
In that moment, the exhaustion Massimo had accumulated over the past twenty-four hours hit him all at once, as if a solid, shapeless mass had leapt onto his back and were trying to drag him down to the floor and into the ground.
But he realized he wasn’t the only one who felt like hell. He’d thought the superintendent looked strained, but now he could see beyond the mask: stirring beneath its surface was something resembling pain, and perhaps, he was surprised to see, something akin to fear, too.
“I stayed up all night to write it,” he said. He wanted to probe her, to find out more, but at the same time he felt the urge to take the conversation down a different route. For some reason, what he’d just glimpsed in her had unsettled him.
“Then you made a mistake. You should have rested instead, and worked on it when your mind was clearer.”
But her tone was casual now, as if they were talking about the weather.
“I thought I did a good job,” he said.
Teresa Battaglia put down the pen she’d been chewing on.
“Good isn’t enough,” she replied. “I can’t go to the victim’s family and tell them we’re doing a good job. They want us sweating blood. Do you understand? That’s what they need.”
He nodded. He thought he did understand, now.
“What do I have to do?” he asked.
“You have to study. Something they don’t teach you at university: the art of killing.”
The superintendent didn’t wait for him to reply. She stood up and went to the whiteboard in front of her desk.
“Initially I thought he must be quite young, but perhaps we need to revisit our calculations,” she muttered. “I think he might be a few years older.”
Massimo was intrigued. He walked up to her.
“Why?”
“Because there is a significant sadistic element,” she explained, jotting her thoughts down in her unruly handwriting. “He’s had plenty of time, years, to refine his fantasies. I expect he’s somewhere between forty and forty-five years old. Possesses great physical strength. Either a local, or loves the mountains. He knows them well. His tracks stopped at the boulders, and that’s no accident. He’s probably a hunter. Judging by the way he killed, the depth of his psychosis is such that I doubt he drives a car.”
Massimo’s face twisted into a grimace of disbelief he couldn’t hide. The superintendent caught it immediately. “You disagree, then?” she asked.
“Who? Me? I wouldn’t dare.”
“You can speak freely.”
“Yeah, right.”
She took off her glasses and stared at him.
“Don’t waste my time, Marini. If you’ve got something to say, just say it and don’t make me ask again. If not, you can spare me the sarcasm.”
Massimo gestured at the board.
“Don’t you think you’re maybe . . . overdoing it?”
The superintendent followed his gaze, knitting her brow.
“Overdoing it?” he heard her echoing.
Massimo tapped his finger on the points she’d just written down.
“All these details you’re reeling off,” he said, “without even the shadow of a doubt . . . Isn’t that a bit arrogant? How can you possibly tell if he drives a car or not?”
Teresa looked at him askance, a half-smile hovering on her lips.
“Arrogant? Not in the least. As for doubts . . . well, I have plenty of those, but they’re part of the game, they’re in the nature of things. When I stop having doubts, that’s when I’ll start to worry. Don’t you agree?”
Massimo crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t reply.
“Oh, all right then, tough guy!” she teased. But she turned serious again, and came up close to him, close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to look him in the eye. “I’ll tell you something else. He doesn’t even have a driver’s license. He doesn’t drive and he doesn’t have a license because he’s not able to. He’s probably tried, but it’s been one of his many failures. His unstable mind won’t allow it. How can I tell? From what he’s done to the victim and the way he’s done it. A man who can claw another man’s eyes out with his fingernails is bound to be affected by severe psychological disorders that would be impossible to disguise. He is not capable of successfully completing any kind of course of study—not even driving school. He can’t hold down a job. He is unable to commit to anything or to concentrate on anything.”
Massimo realized he’d been holding his breath. She handed him the marker.
“Go on then, write,” she commanded, and went on with her dictation without waiting to see how he would react. “He lives alone, only a few miles from the crime scene. We need to narrow the area down.”
Massimo acquiesced, though he remained doubtful.
“How can you be so sure he lives alone?” he asked.
“No one could bear to live with this type of individual; he will exhibit an alarming lack of personal hygiene and be unfamiliar with the concept of tidiness. The key word here is ‘psychosis,’ and the extent of his tells us a lot about him. What would you deduce from the fact that he killed with his bare hands and without using any means of ligature?”
“That the murder wasn’t premeditated.”
“Wrong. The murder wasn’t organized. There’s a difference. And yet there are a number of clues that would suggest the opposite. There are some inexplicable singularities. Contradictions. Something’s not quite right.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the staging. I mean the way he laid out the body—he didn’t just toss it away, he made a display of it—and the traps . . . So, Inspector Marini, equipped as you are with your degree in . . . ?”
“Law.”
“Christ . . . and with your experience of life in the big city, you tell us, you lift the veil: is our killer organized or disorganized?”
Silence.
The superintendent’s expression flattened into a line of commiseration.
“Just as I thought. You’ll have to start from zero—which is exactly where you are right now.”
-14-
Lucia woke up to a scrabbling noise above her head, the sound of claws scraping and scratching insistently at the flagstone roof until the tiles shook and clanged against each other.
It was the crows; they liked to fly up there to devour their latest prey or to crack acorns open by gripping them in their powerful beaks and smashing them against the tiles. That was what Mathias and Diego had said when she’d told them about those mysterious, frightening noises she heard in the early hours of the morning—a time when, even during the summer, both air and light were dead cold.
Over the last few months Mathias, Diego and Oliver had become the center of her universe. Lucia knew she could trust them. That was why recent events had upset her so much. Diego’s father was dead. They’d found him in the woods, two days after he’d gone missing.
Her father had shared the news while they were having dinner, and Lucia had found herself unable to move, her food sticking in her throat. She hadn’t had a chance to speak to her friend yet, but she’d written him a note that she planned to deliver through their usual secret method of communication: by squeezing it through the shutters on his bedroom window, in the gap behind the hawthorn vase. On a page torn out from one of her school notebooks, she had written just two words: blood oath.
Diego would understand. His family—the one he’d chosen—was by his side and ready to share the burden of his grief, just like Jesus had carried the cross. These were the stories Lucia learned from Father Leandro at Sunday school, tales of forgiveness and paradise that pleased her because they made everyday life and its sacrifices seem more bearable. Even hers.
She brought her lips to the skin on the inside of her wrist; the scar was fading, but the memory of their oath remained vivid.
She rubbed at her eyes, still in the throes of sleep. Her room seemed brighter that morning. She pulled the covers over her face until the tip of her frozen nose met the warmth of her breath. The school was closed for a day of mourning, so she knew she could doze in bed for as long as she wanted. All night she’d been tormented by horrific nightmares. She kept seeing Diego’s father, his eyes gone, ripped out—just as they had done with Saint Lucia, her holy namesake. She’d found out about that gruesome detail from her father, who had mentioned it at dinner while chewing on a mouthful of rare steak. Lucia had watched its reddish juices dribbling onto the plate and felt sick.
The scrabbling intensified, as if the birds had been gripped by some sort of savage euphoria. Lucia rolled over in bed and saw where the light was coming from: the shutters were wide open, though she was sure she’d closed them before going to bed. She drew the covers aside and put her feet on the cold floor. She quickly pulled on her wool socks and covered herself up as best she could with her flannel undershirt which always bunched up around her waist while she slept.
The crows were engaged in an aerial dance of twirls and nosedives over the snow-capped lawn, letting out shrill, hoarse squawks as they flew. Lucia moved closer to the window. There were dozens of them, she’d never seen so many, and they seemed to be drawn to the house. One of the birds made straight for her and crashed into the windowpane, making her jump. She watched the bird writhing on the ground, its wings ruffled, until it regained its balance and took flight once more. It had left a smear of blood on the window and a smattering of barbules that swayed in the wind.
Lucia brought her face to the glass to look at the world through that crimson stain; the snow looked like a carpet of pink sugar paste. A dark, uneven smear cut through it. A thin trail of blood. She followed it with her eyes. It stretched all the way to the foot of her window, where the bowl of milk stood empty. Something was dangling from the corner of one of her shutters.
When she realized what it was, Lucia screamed.
-15-
The archives at the police headquarters were kept in a cellar of reinforced concrete on the lower ground floor, illuminated by neon lights and populated by dust and endless parallel rows of steel shelves.
Even the elevator didn’t quite reach all the way down there, as if the basement were a world apart and didn’t belong with the rest of the building. You had to go down a flight of stairs where the lights never worked properly; sometimes they flickered like strobe beams, but most of the time they were black fissures that served no purpose whatsoever. The handyman blamed it on humidity; he said it spoiled the light bulbs. But others went as far as to suggest, seemingly without a trace of self-consciousness, that it was all down to some kind of supernatural presence that was evidently averse to the notion of archives.
The place was also known as Purgatory, for it was there that you were usually dispatched to when you’d done something you needed to atone for.
And it was there that Teresa had sent Massimo Marini, instructing him to look through the physical records and the digital archives for comparable murder cases.
The young detective needed to learn the meaning of discipline, but mostly Teresa had wanted to get him out of her sight for a few hours. She’d seen something flash across his face, something that had alarmed her: he had looked at her as if he could sense her fear.
It was just an isolated episode, she kept telling herself. It didn’t mean anything.
But for a moment the night before she hadn’t been able to recall the names of everyday objects, and even though she’d recovered soon enough, she had still felt lost for several hours afterwards, as if she’d just emerged from inside a tornado. It had never happened to her before, and now she worried that it might be the first of many episodes to come.
She hadn’t told anyone. Confiding in other people was just not something she did, but now she found herself wondering how much longer she would be able to provide for herself. It was her worst nightmare, the idea that she might become dependent on somebody else.
Banishing those ominous thoughts from her head, she took the last few steps in the dark and found herself in Purgatory. Its sole other occupant was at the opposite end of the room, sitting at a desk worn with use. His face was lit only by the bluish light of a computer screen.
“You’ll ruin your eyes,” she told him.
Marini didn’t look up. On the desk in front of him, Teresa placed the report he’d sent her just before dawn, and which she’d printed out and covered in corrections.
The inspector gave it a brief glance. “I thought you’d flushed it down the toilet?” he said.
Teresa lowered herself into a chair across from him.
“You didn’t do a very good job with it. It would have been a lie to tell you otherwise.”
He grimaced.
“I’m not looking for empty praise.”
“Then what have you come looking for, all the way here?”
Marini didn’t respond.
Teresa didn’t stop.
“At first I thought you must have run away from some kind of romantic debacle,” she said. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Your perfectionism, and how desperately you seem to crave my approval, make me think there is a parent involved—too interfering, too demanding, even now that you’re a grown man. An overbearing presence. Your father, perhaps?”
“I didn’t know you had studied psychology.”
“No need for any of that to work you out.”
He finally looked at her. There was a flush of anger on his cheeks, but also a trace of resignation, which mollified her.
“Come on, it’s not the end of the world,” she said encouragingly.
“Don’t tell me it could be worse. That would be so predictable. I’d have to revise my opinion of you.”
“Of course it could be worse, but who gives a damn? You did the right thing to seek out your destiny elsewhere.”
“Are you expecting me to thank you?”
“You’re welcome,” she shot back.
Massimo gestured at a stack of files. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I’ve found?”
“Nothing, I presume.”
“But you knew that already.”
Teresa shrugged.
“I would have remembered if there had been a similar case before.”
She had already known he wouldn’t find anything. She was as familiar with the contents of the archive as her grandfather had been with the writing in the little notebook where he kept score for all his rounds of Morra, that ancient card game of chance. Hundreds of dates and numbers. When she was a little girl, she used to sit on his lap and test him; Grandpa Pietro had never made a single mistake. Teresa had relied on the archive on a daily basis for almost forty years now. Religiously. There wasn’t a page among those thousands from which she hadn’t learned something.
One of Marini’s eyebrows shot up.
“I wasn’t expecting to have to work with a profiler,” he said.
She burst out laughing.
“I sense a hint of irony in your tone, though to be honest, I’m the only one who’s actually working here,” she replied, winking at him. “All you do is sit around and look confused.”
Marini turned his face back to the monitor and resumed rolling the wheel of the mouse. Files pertaining to a number of violent deaths scrolled before his eyes. Teresa could see them reflected in his dark irises.
“I still think the best way to solve a murder is to search for clues and evidence, not try and guess what the killer might look like,” he said after a time.
Teresa was beginning to find him funny.
“Based on what I’ve read on your report, you’re the one who’s been doing all the guesswork,” she replied. She leaned closer. “It’s true that criminology is not an exact science. Nothing about it is certain, and every case is different. Criminology is an art. The art of learning to observe and to see things someone like you could never even glimpse. It’s not magic; it’s interpretation. Probability, statistics. Never certainty.”
Marini stared at her for several moments.
“You really believe all that,” he murmured.
Teresa let out an involuntary sigh.
“Do you think we’re playing some kind of game, here? Cops and robbers?” she asked.
“I think . . .”
“No, you don’t think. That much is clear. Let me tell you a story.”
“Is it really necessary?”
“Yes, yes it is.”
He stretched his arms out and let them fall down on either side of his chair.
Teresa didn’t allow his lack of enthusiasm to discourage her. She was used to seeing this kind of attitude in new recruits who found themselves facing, for the first time in their lives, a number of unpalatable truths.
“Our hero lives in a small, remote village,” she began. “No more than a few hundred souls in all. He begins his life of crime as a grave robber. He is obsessed with the feet of corpses, he collects them. Some people dream of having a walk-in closet full of shoes; his is full of feet. I know it sounds funny now, but that’s not what you would think if you’d seen it.”
