Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  Falcone sniffed and stared at Leapman. “Your men left the item behind when they came to collect the body. What were we supposed to do? Chase after them? You can send someone round for it whenever you like.”

  “Dammit, Falcone …” Leapman muttered, then went abruptly quiet, probably realizing the three Italians surrounded him now.

  Peroni began to read the report. “The fabric in question is all one-inch by three-quarter-inch textile webbing. Desert brown and green 483, mildew resistant, type X, class 2B, made in accordance with MIL-W-5665K, whatever the hell that is. Maybe the shape it’s got. The shape all American military webbing’s got. You know that shape, Agent Leapman?”

  “It’s just how it is,” the American replied.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Peroni demanded. “This is the shape of US military webbing. He’s killing them with it. He’s cutting it into their backs when they’re dead. And this is US Army issue. No one else uses it. It never gets near to being sold to the public in any way.”

  “Hey!” Leapman yelled. “What the fuck do you guys know about the US military? Stuff leaks out of the army like candy from a store. Everything’s for sale if you want it.”

  “I’ll take your word on that,” Falcone intervened, before Peroni could reply. “The problem we have, Joel, is this. The forensic evidence is quite clear. It’s not just that the only people who use this material are your military. It’s a new fabric too. It was produced for desert warfare. It only went into production a year ago. From what we can gather, the only place it’s been deployed in the field is covert operations in Iraq.”

  Leapman glowered at him. “You knew about this all along, Falcone. This is just some stupid setup.”

  Costa pulled out Teresa’s evidence bag, with the latest cord noose inside it. “This came from the car here. We never knew about the cord until a few hours ago. It certainly never found its way into the press. So you see, Agent Leapman, this isn’t a copycat at work. This is the same man. It has to be. So we were wondering, is this what you found with the others, too? And, if it is, why didn’t you tell us? Because surely this man’s been near some US military facility. Recently, too.”

  The FBI man was lost, shaking his head.

  “Maybe,” he murmured. “But who the hell is the woman here? It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t …”

  He clammed up, as if he’d said too much already.

  “You know, I’m sorry about that,” Peroni said, brushing some of the burger off the lapels of Leapman’s coat. “I sort of lost my temper. It’s a shame, Leapman. We could all get along really well.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. If it weren’t for one thing.”

  Leapman waited.

  Peroni bent forward and removed a slice of pickle off the American’s collar.

  “You’ve got to start telling us the truth,” he said. “Maybe not me. Maybe not even my partner. But Inspector Falcone here. He’s a good guy. A reliable guy. He deserves your trust, don’t you think?”

  Leapman just glared back at him, glassy-eyed.

  “You need to trust us,” Peroni continued, “because if you don’t we’re just going to keep going round and round in circles, not getting anywhere at all. With this person of yours—of yours—still out there.”

  The FBI man sniffed, then looked down the street and signalled for his driver.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about,” he said and pushed his way between Costa and Falcone, taking the easy route, the one that didn’t go near Gianni Peroni, stomping off down the street towards his car, not bothering to look back.

  Peroni frowned and looked at Falcone. Costa knew what the gesture said: I tried.

  “Am I helping around here?” Peroni enquired. Falcone scowled, not at them, at the chaos around all of them. “Ask me later.”

  “I’d like to go after the girl, sir,” Peroni said quietly. “Just me. You can spare one man. This isn’t a personal thing. I still think she’s got something to tell us.”

  “Do it,” Falcone murmured. “And, Peroni—it was a nice try.”

  “Thanks,” the big man murmured.

  Costa followed his partner back to the jeep and handed over the keys.

  “Where are you going to look, Gianni?”

  “Same places as we did before.”

  He had to ask—Peroni got wrapped up in himself sometimes. “What if this guy’s still after her, too?”

  “Then I guess we might meet. If it happens I’ll call. Besides, I don’t think you’re going to bump into him with Agent Leapman around. Do you?”

  “Not really.” All the same, the difficult relationship with the FBI agent had surely been fractured beyond repair now. Was that what they wanted? “When did Leo put you up to this little act?”

  Peroni’s face registered mock shock. “Put me up to what?”

  “You know damn well.”

  He laughed. It was a good sound, one Costa had missed of late. “Look, Leo and I know each other of old. Sometimes you don’t have to put things in words. You just improvise a little. He’s as sick of that asshole as we are. And what I said was true. It’s time for the guy to level with us. Sooner or later he’s going to realize that himself. We’re supposed to be on the same side, aren’t we?”

  Leapman had been shaken by the evidence they’d got on the cord, Costa thought. But there was something else bugging the American too: the latest death. For some reason, he still found it difficult to believe it really was the same killer.

  Peroni’s face was serious again. “Forget Agent Leapman for a moment, Nic. Tell me this. Why did Laila run away? I don’t get it. I thought we were doing really well and normally I don’t read those situations the wrong way.”

  Costa shrugged. “Who knows with a kid like that? Maybe it’s because you were doing so well. Maybe the idea of closeness terrifies her.”

  “Nah,” Peroni murmured and gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “I don’t buy that any more than I buy Leapman playing innocent. You don’t know the first thing about kids, do you, Nic?”

  “As you constantly remind me.”

  He watched Peroni fit his big bulk behind the wheel.

  “Call me if you need me, Gianni,” he said.

  “Yeah,” the big man laughed and gently eased the jeep out into the street.

  Nic Costa hated instincts. They played tricks with your imagination. They lied constantly. He reminded himself of that as Gianni Peroni disappeared down what was once a narrow, medieval lane, now a line of upscale fashion shops running all the way down to the Corso. Some stupid, pointless instinct was nagging at him, raking over the dregs of his memory to find the long-dead face of another partner, Luca Rossi, one who’d wandered off without him in much the same way and never come back.

  Instincts intruded into real life, disturbed what really mattered. Besides, something was happening now. Falcone was listening to the squawk of a voice coming out of the car radio. The tall inspector had a look of intense concentration on his face, one Costa recognized. One he liked.

  Falcone finished the conversation and scanned the square. Then he caught Costa’s eye, clicked his fingers and pointed, with some urgency, to the car.

  JOEL LEAPMAN CAME BACK to the embassy looking uncharacteristically dishevelled, shambling through the door like a bull looking for somewhere to pick a fight. He was in a foul, unpredictable mood. “Sir?” Emily asked.

  “What have you been doing all day? Don’t I get the courtesy of a call from you, girl?”

  “I thought.…”

  She glanced at the computer screen, now back to her customary logon with its round of low-level information. The camera was still in her purse. That was dumb. She should have taken it back to the apartment, got the evidence out of the building.

  “You thought what?”

  “I thought you wanted me to wait until you had something for me to do.”

  “Jesus …”

  Leapman seemed seriously out o
f sorts. Food spattered his coat.

  “Is there something wrong?” she asked.

  “Is there something right?” he complained.

  Leapman looked like someone with doubts and that wasn’t a position he liked or understood very much at all.

  “These cops,” he said. “Falcone. The other guys. Why’d they hate us so much?”

  “I don’t think they do,” she answered promptly. “Not for one moment.”

  “Really? I just had that big ugly bastard stuff a burger into my mouth. What was that all about?”

  She thought about Gianni Peroni. It didn’t add up. “You tell me.”

  “None of your business,” Leapman barked back at her.

  Emily Deacon was getting deeply sick of this man. Maybe Thornton Fielding was right. She should just file a complaint and get out of his presence.

  “Then why ask?”

  “Because, because …” he grumbled. “You don’t need to know the reasons. Sometimes events just run away with you, Agent Deacon, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

  “If that’s an apology, you should direct it at them.”

  Leapman had pissed everyone off. He’d been working on it from the moment they walked into the Pantheon. It had been deliberate, determined.

  “So now they’re the good guys, huh? I should go running to them?”

  “I think they’re doing their best in difficult circumstances.”

  His voice rose. “It’s difficult for all of us, girl!”

  Enough was enough. “It’s more difficult for them, Leapman. They think they’re being kept in the dark. They’re right. And one more thing.” She pointed a slender finger at his chest. “Don’t call me ‘girl.’ Not ever again.”

  Or “Little Em.”

  He laughed and Emily Deacon was surprised to find herself thinking that this was, perhaps, what he wanted to hear.

  “So you can answer back,” Leapman said. “Who’d have believed it?”

  He leaned over to his PC, keyed in a few words, then turned the screen to face her. It was the RAI news website. The lead story was about another murder in the city, with a photo of a burnt-out car by the Spanish Steps.

  “We’re losing this, Emily,” he said in a flat, miserable voice. “And I don’t know why. He’s killed someone else and I’ve got to tell you that’s the last thing I expected. This isn’t part of any pattern I can figure out. He’s killed some poor, helpless bitch who got in the way somehow. I never …”

  Leapman fell silent and stared at the monitor.

  “You never what?”

  “I never thought he’d stoop to that.”

  He picked up the phone and hit a speed-dial button.

  “Viale?” he asked, and there was a different tone to his voice now, a resigned, almost scared resonance she scarcely recognized. “We’ve got to talk … Just a minute.”

  Leapman cupped the mouthpiece and stared at her.

  “I’d like a coffee, Agent Deacon,” he said. “Cappuccino. The good stuff, from that place over the road. And take your time. I’ve got work to do.”

  NIC COSTA TOOK a deep breath and found it amazing that, only an hour earlier, he’d been worried about Gianni Peroni. Wherever the big man was in the white, frozen world that was Rome, it had to be better than this: clinging to a narrow, icy fire-escape ladder a dizzying height above the cobbled streets in the labyrinthine quarter north of the Pantheon, trying to peer through the billowing blizzard that was sweeping all around him.

  Another time, in different weather, when the wind wasn’t trying to peel him off the roof and dash him to the ground below, it would have been quite a view. The Palazzo Borghese should have been somewhere ahead. On a good day the great dome of St. Peter’s would have shone from across the river. Now all he could see was the blinding cloud of ice swirling painfully around his face, threatening to confuse his senses.

  Falcone had made it plain: it was his choice. The sly old bastard knew all along what Costa would say too. Nic was the youngest there and the most suited for the job. He’d done some mountaineering once, solitary trips into the Dolomites and the Alps as a teenager. They could have waited until a specialist was brought in, but that meant time, in this weather perhaps a long time. The problem was simple. A woman in the block had reported that an American tourist living on the top floor had, unusually, been absent all day. The previous evening she’d been seen entering the building with a stranger. The same stranger had walked out that morning carrying a couple of big, expensive-looking suitcases. They’d got a description of the man. It could be the same person Costa and Peroni had seen twice now, outside the Pantheon and by the Tiber the previous night.

  So should they pile through the door with an entry team, blundering into the place, hoping he was still hiding there? Or did they check it out first to see whether it was occupied or not? And if it was empty, wait a while outside to see if anyone happened to call back?

  For Costa the decision was clear-cut. The killer was human, not a monster. It was important not to let go of that fact. The man needed somewhere warm and private to retreat to in weather like this. This could be the first real chance they had of trapping him.

  Ordinarily there were easier ways to find out if someone was inside. They could spy from neighbouring blocks. They could use listening equipment through the walls. Not this time. The place was a tiny, probably illegal cabin perched high above street level like a giant toy box flung onto the big, flat roof of the nineteenth-century apartment block. The windows were higher than any of the buildings around. This must be the only home in the area with a scenic outlook, which also meant it was impregnable, impossible to watch. The only way to find out what lay inside was to try to get close somehow, and not through the front door either, which lay up a narrow covered staircase leading from the top floor, giving no visual access into the cabin whatsoever. The fire escape was the only option. If the man was at home, Costa would, the plan said, see so through the outside window and call in the forced entry team. If the place was empty, he’d just take a quick look around, get the hell out of there, then wait with the rest of them until someone came home.

  Plans.

  Costa shivered on the shaky ladder and wondered what plans were worth now. He hadn’t thought too hard about the weather after he’d talked to the woman who first made the call. He’d just cleared his ideas with Falcone, then walked up three flights of stairs in the building, found the ancient fire escape and started climbing through the swirling snowflakes. He hadn’t thought much about the odd geography of the building either. Falcone and his men were parked discreetly outside, sufficiently close to stop anyone getting away, anonymous enough not to be noticed by someone walking in through the entrance. Or so they hoped.

  Still, it didn’t give Costa much room for manoeuvre. They’d agreed it was too risky to post a second person outside the apartment, even one posing as a cleaner or a deliveryman. The individual they were after seemed too smart for tricks like that. Any intruder would stick out like a sore thumb if the man came back in the meantime. So if something went wrong Falcone and his team would have to make an entrance from outside.

  Now that he’d climbed those steep, steep stairs Costa appreciated how long that would take. His instinct couldn’t tell him whether someone was at home, but if someone was, it was going to be vital not to alert him.

  On this side of the cabin was a blind ledge just a metre wide, pointing back towards the hill where Trinità dei Monti lay, now hidden by the blizzard. Around the corner was a private terrace made for another climate. A pair of small palm trees cut incongruous shapes in their giant terra-cotta pots there, ice fringing their dead leaves, making them look like fantastic Christmas trees. The snow was so deep Nic could only guess at what occupied the other areas of the roof from the rounded white outlines they made: a barbecue, an outside sink with a single, swan-necked tap, a collection of brushes and brooms carelessly left to rot in the open air.

  He took one final, ca
reful step up the treacherous ladder, reached the wall and pulled himself upright onto the constricted strip of the ledge, teeth chattering, shivering uncontrollably, feet almost off the building’s edge.

  Falcone had ordered him to keep the ring tone on his phone turned off until they knew the state of the cabin. No one wanted the risk of an unwanted call. But in the freezing cold Costa found it difficult to think straight. His brain felt numb. Had he remembered to turn it off or not? And if so when?

  With numb fingers he struggled to pull the handset out of his pocket, fumbling it in his hands. The thing was off. He still couldn’t remember doing that. Then he tried to put the phone away, found it slipping in his frozen fingers, knew what would happen next, how the ineluctable laws of gravity and stupidity could collide at times like this.

  The handset turned in his dead, icy grip, revolved slowly through the snow-flecked air, bounced off the ledge and tumbled down into the street below.

  Costa closed his eyes, felt the flakes begin to fall on them instantly and cursed his luck. He couldn’t go back down the ladder. He was too weary, too cold. The icy rungs were perilous enough when he was climbing, with the odds and gravity in his favour. Nothing could persuade him to risk a descent.

  He took out his gun, checked the safety was on, the magazine loaded. He was a lousy shot at the best of times. Now, with unsteady fingers and a head that felt like a block of ice, he’d be as much of a danger to himself as anyone else.

  Trying to clear an open space in his mind, he pushed the weapon into the side pocket of his jacket and hoped some warmth and blood would come back to his hand, and with them some semblance of control.

  Costa edged carefully along the narrow ledge, spent one dizzying, terrifying moment negotiating the corner, then rolled onto the deep snow of the terrace, glad that he finally had some railings between him and the precipice down to the street. When he got back his breath, when his head told him to keep moving or he’d just curl up in a tight, shivering ball, freeze and die on the spot, he stood up, clung to the wall and edged along it. There was just one small window here. A bedroom in all probability. He neared the glass. The curtain was closed. There was no light inside, not a sign of life.