Daughter of Ashes, page 9
Teresa looked at the evidence laid out on the autopsy table. The bone fragments, which had been immersed in a solution of ethanol and sodium chloride, were pale, pinkish grains lying at the bottom of a sealed glass container.
“Most people think of Giacomo as a sadist, but I never got that impression.” She hadn’t spoken at all for the last two hours, not since her blunder at the crypt—a moment which, like all decisive acts, had proven to be revelatory. Her voice sounded hoarse, and guilty. She cleared her throat. “The amputations always occurred after the victim’s death; the aim was never to cause suffering, but to take the life of those who were deemed—symbolically—not to deserve life at all.”
Marini stood up.
“Except for this case. This time, he was instructed to commit the murder. Or at least that’s what he claims. We mustn’t forget that, even though the modus operandi is the same and the approach identical.”
Teresa repeated the statement, absorbed in her thoughts.
“Except for this case.”
A brief and seemingly banal statement, which nevertheless opened a chasm before their feet. Following the usual trails wouldn’t take them far.
She felt for her walking stick and grabbed it as she got to her feet, helped on by Parri. How she had almost managed to climb over the walkway railing earlier would forever remain a mystery. Right now she could hardly move, despite being pumped full of painkillers.
“I’ve got a book at home that might help, Marini.” She brushed her hand against her forehead, swiping at the hair that had fallen over her eyes. “I really can’t remember the title, though.”
“A book?”
He looked bewildered. Parri helped Teresa with her cardigan. Before they stepped out, she turned around to look at Marini again.
“Serial Killers by Proxy—that’s the title.”
Marini seemed wary, now.
“I don’t understand, Superintendent.”
He didn’t want to understand, but soon he would have no choice. Teresa handed her bag to Parri, feeling depleted. She took one step toward Marini—just the one. With great effort, she stopped herself from going any closer. “Serial killers by proxy don’t kill their victims, Inspector, but wield their influence to make others kill for them.”
“A murderer using another murderer to kill on his behalf?”
“I’ll make sure you get the book.”
Marini leapt to his feet.
“You’ll make sure I get the book? Do you mean when I come round to pick you up tomorrow? Because I can’t see what the alternative would be.”
He kept asking questions, but they were always the wrong ones. Teresa gave him the one answer he didn’t want to hear.
“I’m not coming back from sick leave, Inspector Marini. Lona will soon assign a new superintendent to take charge of the team, though I’m sure that by the time they arrive, you’ll have made good progress with the investigation. Actually, when do you plan on taking that superintendents’ exam?”
She turned around; he forced her to look at him.
There was panic in his eyes, and not because he’d just lost his boss. Until a few months ago, Teresa could never have imagined that the thing that would hurt most about her farewell to arms was not what she was saying goodbye to—her vocation—but who.
“Are you ready, Teresa?” said Parri, coming to her rescue. He approached with a wheelchair he had procured from one of the departments he liked to refer to as “the world above.” “Hospital procedure, I’m afraid—at least until you’re out the front door.”
“You’ve got nothing but corpses down here, Antonio.”
“And a lady who thought she’d give hurdling a try.”
Teresa gave the contraption a dirty look, but if she wanted Marini to get the message, she might as well give him an unequivocal signal.
“Will you give me a hand, Antonio?”
Her friend helped her up and patiently lowered her into the chair, crouching down to place her feet on the footrests. Teresa let him do it, too exhausted to resist. She heard Parri exchange a few remarks with Marini—words of reassurance that would be of no comfort to the young man, but only served to cut him out. She opted for brevity.
“Give my best to Elena.”
The blue resin floor of the hallway rolled away beneath the wheels, but it was the fibers of her own heart that Teresa could feel unspooling. One end of the thread that had held it all together was now caught inside that room where Marini had stood and watched her leave with an expression on his face that even Alzheimer’s disease would never be able to wipe from her memories.
A sharp bend, then another. Parri was pushing fast, as eager as she was to leave behind the anguish he had just witnessed. He placed one hand on her shoulder, and Teresa gave it a grateful squeeze. At least she wasn’t doing this alone.
All of a sudden, the wheelchair reared up, pushed forward with excessive vigor. Parri’s curse was drowned out by Teresa’s surprised shriek. She soon realized that the sound of her friend’s voice was getting farther and farther away.
She turned around, gripping the armrests.
“Marini! What the fuck are you doing?”
“I won’t allow this, Superintendent. You can’t drop me like this.”
“Don’t be an idiot! Stop!”
“Did you really think you could just dump me like that?”
“Yes!”
“Is that so? Then safe travels to you, Superintendent Battaglia.”
He let go of the handles and launched the wheelchair down the hallway, grabbing hold of it again just in time to avoid a collision with the wall.
When the world finally stopped moving, Teresa cradled her forehead in her hands. She was shaking.
“You’re an imbecile, did you know that?”
He went down on one knee in front of her.
“Yes, an imbecile who happens to be desperate. And angry, too. I’m going to take you home now, and tomorrow I’ll come by to see how you’re doing.”
Teresa barely registered Parri’s reappearance.
“No, Marini.”
“Superintendent, please let me—”
Teresa placed her hand over his. She couldn’t recall having ever done that before—not like this, not the way she meant it now. They had always been so close, and yet so careful never to touch.
“Are you sure you want to know what’s going on?”
Her eyes were staring right into his. See me, really see me, let your bloodshot eyes bore through me.
“No, you don’t; I can tell from the way you’re looking at me.” She let go of his hand. “You know that nothing would ever be the same again. And you’re right, Massimo. You’re absolutely right.”
14
Twenty-seven years ago
ON THE NIGHT OF June 3, he killed again, keeping the appointment Teresa felt they had made ever since he’d first drawn blood.
The second murder surprised her colleagues and disoriented Albert, but to Teresa, it was nothing more than a confirmation of her theories.
The body had been spotted by the lens of a helicopter which had been collecting orthophotographs of the area, for use in a study of urban sprawl. The flight’s low altitude had allowed the camera to immortalize the pallid X-shaped form silhouetted in a patch of grass just outside the city, where ancient stone-hewn towns remained perfectly preserved, and old villas rose well-hidden behind crumbling walls.
Teresa pushed aside the water-soaked branches of a weeping cedar, causing dewdrops and accumulated rainwater to splash onto her neck. The garden was sweating into the early morning air saturated with verdant moisture, the ground sticking to the soles of their feet and making a sucking noise at every step. A jasmine plant in bloom sprawled over the steps that led up to the entrance of the building, still emitting its nocturnal fragrance.
The villa was an abandoned treasure from the early 1800s, and an open grave. It had gone to auction several times and was now under the ownership of the municipal government, awaiting the start of repair and restoration works that would probably come too late to save it.
There was an enormous entrance gate, corroded with rust and sealed with a lock and chain, but with a gap just wide enough to allow them to slip through.
They had already found the tire tracks. They ran along the uphill driveway edged by two rows of linden trees, and reached all the way to the clearing in front of the gate, where the killer and his victim must have gotten out of the car. There were two sets of footprints, but only one of those two people had walked back out.
While her colleagues took photographs and measurements, Teresa scrutinized the footprints, reenacting the long strides that matched the larger prints, taking notes, and trying to estimate the height of the strong young man they must have belonged to—if her theory was right. The second set of footprints, on the other hand, had forced her to narrow her stride. Here were the hesitant steps of an older, frailer man, but also the trusting gait of a person who had unwittingly handed himself over to his executioner. In the first set, the typical pattern of rubber soles; in the second, the smooth imprint of leather. Sneakers versus traditional shoes. No signs of dragging. They must have walked side by side up to the metal gate, where the more imposing of the two men had stepped aside to let the second through.
There was a story here, etched in the mud. Teresa kept letting her gaze run over it, caught unwillingly in its spell.
He had not erased it. The killer had not erased it.
Teresa began to follow the trail of interrupted footsteps. She walked along the inside of the perimeter wall, whose faded frescoes enclosed the mansion like a treasure chest. The paintings showed scenes from Greek mythology, all veiled with flowing curtains of thick, fleshy ivy, so dense in parts that it completely obscured the images underneath. In mythology, ivy crowned Dionysius’s head and encircled immortal lovers as they embraced; here, it was the embodiment of neglect.
The garden was just over one hectare in size, and dotted with purplish clusters of surviving gladiolas. Freed of its human yoke, untamed nature still displayed traces of the sober beauty of organized cultivation, but it had also reclaimed spaces that had previously been forbidden, slithering to encroach on gravel paths, and generating adventitious roots that ate away at mold-blackened statues.
At the western edge of the perimeter wall, a decaying nymphaeum caught by the first light of day showed reflections of the sky in the gaps among the heart-shaped leaves and indigo-hued corollas of its water lilies. The pool had survived through years of neglect, feeding off rainwater and dew. Rippling under the wings of low-flying dragonflies, its surface shivered with the evanescent blues, greens, and pinks favored by Monet. Ensconced in a vaulted alcove flanked with crumbling columns, and missing one of her arms, was a statue of the pond’s resident nymph. Her marble surface was beginning to gleam in the morning sun, the light climbing over her thighs and already reaching up toward her navel.
Teresa looked away, turning toward the scene opposite.
The place where the body had been found had been marked off in the early hours of the night, as soon as the people who had been developing the aerial photographs of the area had raised the alarm.
The forensics team was already at work, Parri crouching over the body. The victim had already been identified thanks to his ID, which had been left in his clothes. He was a seventy-two-year-old man who lived across the city from the first victim. His name was Alberto Rupil. His daughter had reported him missing when he had failed to return from an afternoon spent at the bocce club.
He was lying on his back, his naked arms and legs spread out over the ground to form the X which had been spotted from the skies, like a fallen, wilted Vitruvian Man. The pallor of human corpses was a color Teresa had never been able to describe. It had a physical consistency, belonging to the realms of fear and mystery.
No funeral dirge for him that morning—only the chirping of sparrows in the dissolving mist.
Teresa zigzagged her way through her fellow officers, some busy taking measurements and looking for stray items that might turn out to be evidence, others standing around and chatting in small groups. She studiously avoided Albert and squatted on the other side of the security tape, getting as close as she could to Parri.
The coroner acknowledged her presence with a sidelong glance.
“Are you ready, Inspector?” he said.
Teresa turned to a fresh page in her notebook, misshapen from use.
“I’m ready.”
“The victim was not tied up. I haven’t found any ligature marks.”
This was not good news. It meant the killer hadn’t felt the need to restrain his prey, unlike in the first murder. He must have felt more confident in his abilities. The fact that they had walked in there together suggested that the killer had used other methods to subdue his mark—words, perhaps, or even just his physical presence. He had established a personal rapport with the victim.
“He killed with a clean cut across the neck this time, from one ear to the other.” Parri indicated the nymphaeum. “He did it over there, then brought the body here, stripped him naked, and laid him out like this, folding the clothes in a neat pile at the corpse’s feet. Then, he opened his chest up.”
The gash was right there in front of Teresa’s eyes—an obscene crimson chasm, a gaping hole in the body. She felt at once repulsed and attracted by it. She knew she had to look at it if she wanted to understand.
“Did he drag him across?”
“No. He carried him over and placed him down exactly as you see here.”
Teresa felt her insides churning.
“He carried him?”
“Among all the other things Lona is trying to keep from reaching your ears, there is a single set of footprints between the pond and here, and they are deeper because of the weight being carried.” Teresa searched for Albert in the crowd. He hadn’t spotted her yet. She turned again toward the victim, resting her chin on her knees.
“It feels almost like a compassionate act. Same goes for the way he folded the clothes up so carefully. As if to make amends for what he’d done. We haven’t found the weapon yet.”
The coroner pointed at the cut on the neck, just above the Adam’s apple.
“You’re looking for two again, just like last time. The murder weapon is not the same as the one he used for the ritual amputation. My guess is that for the actual killing, he employed a double-edged blade at least fifteen centimeters in length. Definitely not an ordinary kitchen knife, but something more professional.”
“He brought it with him. He chose it especially.”
“You seem shaken.”
“I am. It seems to me his modus operandi is evolving rapidly, and we’re struggling to keep up. It’s been eighteen days since the first murder, a very brief cooling-off period, and we’ve achieved nothing, while he’s been doing all this,” she said, gesturing at the scene before them, the placement of the victim’s naked body, the way his clothes had been folded up rather than simply tossed away. “If the weapon he used was not an improvised one, that means he must have chosen it, mulled it over, fantasized about it. The level of violence has intensified; he feels more assured, and takes greater pleasure from the act. At this point his fantasies have taken center stage, and from now on, everything, absolutely everything in his life, will revolve around this.”
“There are seven phalanges missing, naturally, though this time he’s taken them from the feet. The amputation is much cleaner, almost flawless. He took all the time he needed to execute it to perfection.”
“Could he have used a knife?”
“A butcher’s knife, perhaps, maybe a scalpel, or a fine surgical saw. It’s an instrument similar to a scalpel, small and easy to handle.”
“Fuck. Sorry.”
It was clear by now that removal of the phalanges was the killer’s signature, but the fact that the bones had been taken from a different part of the body this time was a troubling detail. Why not always the hands?
For the killer, these were symbols steeped in meaning, but Teresa was perturbed. Why the phalanx specifically—a bone devoid of iconography, absent from the literature of semiotics, and without any veiled cultural or historical connotations? Why had he carved the victims’ chests open but left their hearts completely untouched—even when they were right there at his disposal, still warm, powerful symbols of life, and a ubiquitous presence in the cosmology of humanity’s collective imagination?
But of course this was no ordinary criminal. His choice of signature indicated a link to some deeply personal experience.
The enigma Teresa was trying to solve was like a thread knotted around those few grams of missing bone, a thread the killer had pulled until he had released the bones from the life they had belonged to and delivered them to a realm of potent symbolism. That same thread, once unraveled, would lead her right to the hidden meaning of these human sacrifices.
Parri continued to list some basic facts the team had discovered, lowering his voice as two officers walked past.
“The wallet was in the pocket of his trousers. The photo from his driver’s license is missing.”
Teresa pretended to look for something in the grass.
“I’m sure we will find it when we catch him, as well as the wedding ring he took from the first victim, and a collection of newspaper cuttings about the case.”
“Once again, there are no apparent signs of sexual violence.”
“This is not a sexually motivated crime. We’re not looking for a pervert.”
Parri planted his hands on his knees, then stood up straight.
“So who are we looking for? Exactly which horrifying variety of human is it?”
