The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  He glanced at his watch. It was past two o’clock in the afternoon. They’d been at it all day, and were still running Graziella Farelli’s name through the database that covered hotel stays. Now that they’d spotted the figure from the Sunday morning tape, he was sure they’d get a hit, and probably sooner rather than later.

  Probably from somewhere large, business-oriented, and not more than a few blocks from the station. If they could get to the room before the cleaning crews—and let’s face it, probably after them, too—they’d almost definitely pull some fingerprints. Maybe they’d get a visual ID from the desk or a room service guy and could put together a more accurate photo fit. Find out if she was using an accent, or pretending she didn’t speak Italian, or had been overheard talking on the phone. Anything would be helpful. He started the CCTV tape from the station again and watched as the blurry person peeled a wrapper off something, then wandered away and vanished behind a pillar. It was her. He could feel it right down in the bottom of his gut.

  “Gotcha,” he muttered to himself.

  Then he turned around and asked the junior assigned to help him if they could get a team to the station, preferably yesterday. If they could seal the vending machine, see if they could lift a print from a button that matched Angela Vari’s. They should try the garbage, too, if the bins hadn’t been emptied. She’d thrown the wrapper away. If they could pick up Angela Vari’s prints they would know they were following Anna Carson, not just some dark-haired woman carrying a red backpack who might be her. That wasn’t a wild-goose chase he had time to go on.

  Everybody who’d worked at the station yesterday morning would need to be questioned, too. Thanks to Graziella Farelli they had a photo fit and a sketch. Someone—a conductor, a ticket salesman, a platform guard—would remember something. Sunday mornings were quiet, and cherry red was a memorable color.

  The young man was already running out of the room.

  Enzo Saenz shook his head, wondering if she’d ever get smart enough to throw that damn backpack away. Then he wound the tape back, slowed it down, and watched the figure again. The feeling that a block of ice was cracking inside him grew. He held out his hand. Someone slapped a train schedule into his palm. Enzo ran his eye down the lines of tiny print, and resisted the temptation to yip.

  The date/time stamp from the CCTV picture in front of him read “Sunday, February 7, 10:14 AM.” The next train on platform three had been the 10:20 to Ferrara.

  * * *

  Not fifteen miles from where Enzo was sitting, Pallioti slumped in the front seat of an unmarked police car and wondered if he was losing his mind. The thought occurred to him with increasing frequency these days. Sometimes he felt he no longer knew himself. As a rule people got more sensible as they got older. He had the distinct impression that he’d been getting rapidly crazier.

  Right this second, for instance, he was supposed to be having lunch with the mayor, then having yet another meeting with Kenneth Carson, during which he was supposed to reassure the poor man, yet again, that the entire force of the Italian state was working on his behalf, and to hint, without saying anything at all, that there was every reason to expect the happy family would be reunited, possibly within hours. He was supposed, in short, to be doing his job—sitting behind his desk like some po-faced coot, keeping his hand firmly on the tiller. Steering the Good Ship Law Enforcement through waters deep and turbulent.

  Instead he was running around behind Enzo’s back behaving like he was some sort of half-baked psychic receiving messages from old photographs. Next he’d probably start demanding pieces of Kristin Carson’s clothes, closing his eyes and making whirring sounds and talking in broken sentences about auras and bodies of dark water. It was sad, but it couldn’t be helped. Barbara Barelli had stuck to him like a burr.

  He’d put the photographs away finally. Turned his attention to other matters—Kristin Carson wasn’t the only mess they had on their hands. People were still busily stuffing carved giraffes with heroin, laundering money through a chain of hair salons in the Oltrarno, and counterfeiting fashion labels in the basement of a Chinese supermarket out beyond the Fortezza da Basso. In other words, life in Bella Firenze was going on as usual, and all its busy little bees had to be attended to. He had chaired a meeting finalizing the details of a raid on a sweatshop and come back and told Guillermo to get him everything he could find on the Barelli woman. Her name was familiar. He thought it was from something he’d seen recently. He wished to hell he could remember what. He read too much. He was getting old. His brain wasn’t what it used to be. Possibly it never had been.

  An hour later Pallioti had listened in silence to what his secretary had to say. Then he’d ordered a car from the garage and set off for this fancy private neighborhood in a suburb of Bologna, where he now lurked like a deranged stalker outside the office-cum-home of Avvocatessa Barbara Barelli. Any second she would probably call the police and he would get arrested for harassment, or inappropriate parking, or just being a man in a dark overcoat. Because if what Guillermo had told him was remotely accurate—and Guillermo being Guillermo, it inevitably was—Dottoressa Barelli was not shy about asserting her rights, or those of her clients.

  She had begun her career as a lawyer representing sports stars, all women, a number of whom had fought and successfully won the right to be reinstated to National Teams after accusing an extremely prominent track coach of harassment. Pretty much a straight case of Sleep with me and get a berth on the team, or don’t and stay home. Your choice. The settlements had been large, the publicity embarrassing, and the coach in question had left to spend more time with his family before moving on to greener pastures in South Africa when his wife threw him out.

  The case had made Barbara Barelli’s name, but she hadn’t rested on her laurels. According to Guillermo, she developed a specialty in women’s rights. Female factory workers whose overtime pay was half of men’s, a consortium of prostitutes challenging the law that insisted brothels were illegal and thus forced them onto the streets, a lesbian couple who wanted to adopt. All of them and more had found their way to Avvocatessa Barelli’s office. Over the course of the last two decades she’d won some cases, and lost some, and become something of an icon in the process. So, given her long history of challenging the paternalistic establishment, it might not have been much of a surprise that she had acted on behalf of one of the more notorious members of the BR.

  Except that it was. Because not only did Barbara Barelli not deal with criminal cases—much less terrorism charges, which were a specialty in themselves—she didn’t represent men.

  Guillermo had pulled a long interview off the Internet in which she expounded at some length on the thesis that men had more than enough representation in society and that she therefore felt it her duty to devote what small talent she had to equalizing the balance on behalf of the repressed, that is, the millions of women who labored daily under an iron fist. A footnote said the talk had been given at a number of professional women’s associations across Europe, where it was invariably met with thunderous applause. Which had left Pallioti both disturbed—the idea of wittingly, or arguably worse, unwittingly, being an iron-fisted oppressor, didn’t sit that well—and puzzled. Because whatever else Antonio Tomaselli might or might not be, he was definitely a man.

  Barbara Barelli had first begun representing him shortly after she qualified to practice law, some few years after the photographs had been taken at Angela Vari’s funeral, and had stuck with him ever since. He was not only one of her very rare male clients—if not her only one—his was her only criminal case. It didn’t make sense. Tomaselli would almost certainly have been far better off with one of the handful of lawyers who represented the other Brigate Rosse members. Who, indeed, had made careers out of it. But he had apparently chosen, and stayed with, Barbara Barelli, right up to last year, when she had handled the final negotiations for his release.

  Pallioti wanted to know why.

  And preferably sooner rather
than later. He had initially thought Anna Carson was their best lead when it came to finding Kristin. Now he realized that surely, if anyone knew where Tomaselli was, or how to contact him, it would be his lawyer? A woman who, if the pictures were anything to go by, had known him for a good three decades and must therefore also be a close friend.

  Impatience prickled him. Pallioti glanced at his watch. It had taken just over an hour to drive up from Florence. Guillermo had checked and found that Barbara was not due to be appearing in court in either Milan or Bologna today. Of course she might be in Rome, or Naples, or anywhere else where the sisterhood was being oppressed by iron fists like his, but Pallioti didn’t think so. There were two identical dark blue Mercedes parked on the paved forecourt. One was registered to a Hedwige Aarlheissen, who was listed as living at the same address as Dottoressa Barelli. The other was registered to the avvocatessa herself.

  Pallioti knew this because Guillermo had told him, and because he had seen her drive in thirty minutes ago, get out of it, and walk into the house. Being a great believer in the advantage of surprise, he hadn’t called ahead, but had stayed in the highly recognizable unmarked police car for the last half hour in the hope that Hedwige would decide to go shopping, or to the gym, or somewhere. He didn’t know what the relationship between the two women was, but he thought Dottoressa Barelli might be more forthcoming if he spoke to her alone.

  * * *

  “Bar, he’s still there.”

  Hedwige stood by the window, far enough back so she couldn’t be seen, and pointed across the street. Barbara looked up from the kitchen island where she was chopping cherry tomatoes. As usual the blade was flashing so fast Hedwige was convinced Barbara would, one of these days, amputate at least one, if not several, of her own fingers. Still she watched, fascinated. When she was a child her parents had taken her to a Japanese steak house in New York where everything flamed, sizzled, and was slashed. It had been every bit as good as a horror movie and was one of her favorite memories. Her parents, on either side of her, had drunk mai tais and laughed and caught bits of steak thrown through the air, snapping at them like circus dogs. Perhaps Barbara could have a new career as a chef in a place like that, if she ever gave up being a lawyer. Which she wouldn’t.

  “What man?” Barbara said, without looking up.

  “The one in the car who’s been sitting across the street for the last hour.”

  “What?” Barbara frowned.

  They were having guests for dinner, some magistrate and a singer she’d taken up with who, for whatever reason, Barbara was hell-bent on impressing. Hedwige had no idea why, and she wasn’t jealous—they’d been living together for fifteen years, the green goddess had gone to ground long ago—but she was annoyed. Because when Bar got like this she was like a terrier after a rat. This particular rat was some kind of fancy marinated concoction involving many small vegetables and things in shells. Obsessive Behavior 101. It made Barbara a demon on a case, but it was a pain in the ass to live with. Multitasking was not, on the other hand, a mystery to Hedwige. Back in the day, she’d been a heptathlete. Barbara had been a sprinter. Big surprise.

  “The man,” she said. “Who I told you about when you came in. He’s been sitting across the street, in a car, for the last hour.”

  “What does he look like?”

  Hedwige shrugged.

  “He’s in a car. I don’t know. Dark hair. Dark coat.”

  Barbara finally put the knife down and walked to the window. Unlike Hedwige, she went straight up to the glass.

  “Son of a bitch!” she swore, turning toward the front hall.

  “What?”

  “It’s a cop, for Christ’s sake. In an unmarked car. You can tell those things a mile away.”

  A blast of cold air hit Hedwige in the face as Barbara yanked the door open. Whoever the policeman was, Hedwige felt sorry for him.

  “Dottoressa.”

  Pallioti had gotten out of the car as soon as he saw the front door open. In her early fifties, Barbara Barelli was, if anything, more impressive in person now than the photographs suggested she had been thirty years ago. He had been right. She did look like Pallas Athena. A very angry Pallas Athena in designer jeans and a red silk blouse.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, and he found himself putting his hands up, like a cow rustler in an old western.

  “I have told you,” Barbara Barelli said. “I have told you, and I have told them. I will not put up with this kind of shit. And I mean it. If you think you can intimidate me just because—”

  “Dottoressa, please.”

  Pallioti began to reach into the inside pocket of his overcoat, then paused, wondering if he should tell her what he was doing in case she shot him. Then he realized she didn’t have anywhere to hide a gun and proceeded gingerly. He held out his credentials, hoping his hand wasn’t shaking. Barbara Barelli took them. Her hands, he noticed, were long fingered and fine, tipped with perfectly manicured pink nails. She frowned, lines almost as deep as his own cutting under her dark, swept-back hair.

  “Florence?” She looked at him as if she thought he might disagree. “What are you doing here? Who are you?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

  Pallioti refrained from pointing out that that might be because she hadn’t asked.

  “Alessandro Pallioti.” He extended his hand, and was a little surprised when she took it.

  Her grip was as firm as his own.

  “So I see.” She dropped his hand and returned his credentials. Then she cocked her head and asked, “So what can I do for you, dottore?”

  “I have to ask, you are Avvocatessa Barbara Barelli?”

  She smiled, either at the idiocy of the question or because he obviously felt so stupid asking it, and for a split second Pallioti saw a very different woman. Then the avenging goddess was back. She folded her arms and nodded.

  “I am,” she replied. “Should I say it out loud? The whole title? Are we being taped?”

  Pallioti smiled and put his credentials away. He liked Barbara Barelli.

  “No.” He shook his head, then looked toward the house. “I just didn’t want to make more of an ass of myself than I already have.”

  “I’ll forgive you,” she said. “I still don’t understand what you want.”

  “I want to talk to you about Antonio Tomaselli.”

  Looking back on it later, Pallioti thought he might as well have said, “I want you to have wild sex with me in the back of the car.” Or “I want your help kidnapping eight-year-olds and starting a prostitution ring.” Either would have evoked the same distaste. And swift but clear judgment that he was out of his mind.

  Avvocatessa Barelli’s face closed as if a steel shutter had been pulled over it. Her black eyes turned as hard and cold as ice on stones. Without another word, she turned on her heel and began to walk back to the house.

  “Dottoressa!” Pallioti called. “He’s missing. He has a seventeen-year-old girl with him. We believe he’s abducted her.”

  She stopped dead, standing in the middle of the road. The heavy silk of her shirt rippled across her back, caught in the breeze that huffed off the mountains he had just driven through. It occurred to him that she must be cold.

  “She’s seventeen,” he said again. “Well, actually eighteen, just. Her birthday was on Friday. She’s a student. An American. Her name is Kristin Carson.”

  Barbara Barelli shivered. She turned around.

  “What did you say?”

  “The girl is a student. In Florence. An American. Her name is Kristin Carson.”

  Pallioti stepped forward. He pulled a copy of the photograph of Kristin from his coat pocket and held it out. “She’s from a town called Concord,” he said. “In Massachusetts. She’s taking a year on a program with an American school. To study art history. Then she wants to go to college.”

  Barbara Barelli reached out and took the photo. She studied it, frowning.

  “We think he con
tacted her first on Facebook.”

  The frown deepened.

  “When?” she asked finally.

  “As far as we know, for the first time, about nine months ago.”

  She glanced up. “Just after he was released.”

  “Yes.” Pallioti nodded. “As far as we know. It might have begun even earlier. He suggested that she come to Florence, for the year abroad. He even did the research. Sent her the information. Said it was a way for them to be together.”

  “You’re saying he stalked her on the Internet, groomed her, lured her here—and now he’s abducted her?”

  Pallioti nodded.

  “She was last seen ten days ago, getting into his car.”

  At that Barbara Barelli closed her eyes. Then she opened them and asked, “Her parents?”

  “They’re here. They came over from the States, for her eighteenth birthday. Last week. They were throwing a party for her. Fancy. A lot of her friends. That’s what makes us think she may be being held against her will. Otherwise we might be inclined to think she was just off on a lost weekend. She was seeing Tomaselli. Going out with him. Apparently she was smitten.”

  Barbara smiled. There was no warmth in it at all.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “She would be. He can be very charming.”

  “Apparently. But Kristin was looking forward to her party. She was, by all accounts, excited about it. Had bought a dress. Been fussy about the food. The cake. She’d invited Tomaselli as her date. As I said, we know she went off with him on Wednesday the twenty-seventh. She hasn’t come back. Do you have any idea at all where he might be? Or how we could contact him?”