The Lizard's Bite nc-4

by David Hewson

  The man kept staring at his fat, grubby hands, whistling some stupid pop tune that was on the radio all the time. That was, Randazzo thought, the closest he could get to entertainment.

  Then Malipiero stopped, glowered at him, and said, “You know, I wish you’d make up your mind. Are you the upstanding honest guy here? Or just like the rest of us? It gets confusing for simpletons like me.”

  “Don’t be so fucking impertinent!” Randazzo yelled.

  The face came back to the window, offended this time, as close to cross as a monk could get.

  “Gentlemen,” the man said, “if you don’t behave correctly here, I shall have to ask you to leave. We are accommodating. We are, however, only human.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Malipiero grumbled, waving him down. “Go say a prayer or something. We’ll leave a little change in the box by the door.”

  The monk disappeared, a worldly epithet echoing gently in his wake.

  “You just leave one long line of satisfied customers everywhere you go,” Randazzo observed.

  The whistling began again, until Lavazzi returned, grinning, carrying something in a plastic bag.

  “You’re on,” he said. “We’re clear to go out for two hours. Then it’s back in your cell, Commissario. Hope you brought plenty of money with you.”

  “Enough,” Randazzo murmured, staring at the bag.

  “Oh yeah,” Lavazzi added, still smirking like a teenager. “That was the condition. You’ve got to go out in kind of a disguise.”

  He reached into the bag and took out the contents. It was a brown monk’s habit, complete with dressing gown–style belt.

  “With that bald head you’re going to look the part,” the cop declared.

  Maybe it was another of the pair’s jokes. Maybe someone back at the Questura really did think he ought to be discreet. Randazzo decided he didn’t care. He was going to have an hour in the outside world, with some real wine, not that piss the monks drank, some real food, in the dining room, at a quiet, shady table, while Lavazzi and Malipiero sat on the pavement in the sun, sweating.

  Randazzo picked up the habit.

  “Do I get some privacy?” he asked. “To change?”

  “There you go again, Commissario,” Malipiero said. “Asking us to break the rules. It’s OK. Really. We’ll just stay and watch.”

  TERESA LUPO AND SILVIO DI CAPUA MUNCHED ON COLD pizza and looked at their workload: the e-mailed initial reports from the two labs they had chosen for their research in Mestre, one for chemical analysis, one for pathology, and the earliest results from the material sent via Alberto Tosi to Rome. It was now twelve-thirty. From what Nic had said they had no more than a few hours to come up with something the Carabinieri could throw at the Englishman. It wasn’t looking good.

  The most promising route should have been the data files Emily had—one way or another—got out of Massiter’s computer. This was hard evidence, the kind detectives liked because you could pass it round the room and let everyone appreciate its worth without some geek there to translate. Teresa had passed the memory pod on to the plainclothes detective who came to collect it after she’d called, but not before everything it contained was copied to her own machine first.

  Silvio, who knew computers so much better than Teresa did, had tried to open the files in any number of ways she failed to comprehend. The best he got, while mumbling low curses and imprecations full of obscure acronyms, was a screen full of garbage and obscure characters. The files weren’t just protected with a password. They’d been encrypted too. When she asked, more out of desperation than hope, whether it could be cracked, Silvio had muttered something about months of work and vast amounts of some obscure thing called MIPS-years. Which, translated into everyday language, meant, as far as she understood it, someone could crack the files, but it would take a lot of time and more computers than someone like old Alberto Tosi would believe existed on the entire planet. Months down the line, if a formal investigation into Massiter got under way, perhaps it could turn into something useful. For the moment it was worthless. Which meant they were back at the beginning, trying to read the runes of the scraps of material and human evidence they had.

  After failing with the data files, they had turned to the reports on Uriel’s apron and the wood samples. The more she looked at them, the more Teresa felt like screaming.

  She glugged down some mineral water purloined from Nic’s fridge. “You’re the chemist, Silvio. Ketone. What the hell is ketone? Refresh my memory.”

  He gave her that “I can’t believe you don’t know this” look that she was noticing more and more these days. Silvio had lost some weight recently and had refined his choice in clothes, which now ran to grey corded slacks and a pale lavender polo shirt. If he kept on like this he’d finally get a girl sometime soon, she thought.

  “Industrial solvent. Labs use it all the time. We use it all the time.”

  “You know I leave all that chemical stuff to you. Does it burn?”

  “Er, yes,” he said sarcastically. “Don’t you read the warning labels on all those bottles in the lab?”

  “Don’t have the time. So his apron’s been dipped in some inflammable industrial solvent. That’s a start. At least we know we can rule out the witchcraft now.”

  Silvio was staring at her, a testy, disappointed expression on his face. “Contamination,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The baboons from whatever passes as forensic around here had hold of this stuff before they let us get our hands on it, right? Behold. A classical case of lab contamination. You said yourself these people were amateurs.”

  “I didn’t say that at all! I said the man was old.”

  “Tosi’s old. The lab’s old. Their procedures are old. It’s shoddy work. These things are covered in the stuff. Did Tosi say the original samples were affected by fire foam?”

  “Yes. He said exactly that.”

  “There you go. This is the sort of thing they teach junior lab technicians straight out of college. You never ever try to clean up crap with crap. Some moron’s dumped solvent on this to get rid of the foam, and obliterated anything we might have found underneath.”

  “For good?” She couldn’t believe they were that stupid.

  “Well, no. But it makes it all a lot more difficult. A lot more time-consuming and expensive too. We could try sending the material away to some specialist labs. But with this degree of degradation, I don’t know. And it would take weeks.”

  “You mean Alberto Tosi or his creepy granddaughter, or whatever other of his relatives got in on the act, have screwed up this evidence completely?”

  “Correct first time.”

  “Oh great . . .”

  “They could have done it deliberately,” he suggested, trying to cheer her up.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Tosi’s not the kind of man who’d play stupid games like that. If he was, he wouldn’t have let me have the stuff in the first place.”

  “In that case they’re just plain incompetent. Sorry. That’s all you get.”

  “Well, isn’t that just great?” she barked. “So in that case where the hell are these DNA reports from our people across the water? An hour ago they said an hour.”

  “Don’t take this out on me! I didn’t spill all that junk on your precious evidence. Besides, an hour ago they said two hours, actually. By e-mail.”

  “Screw e-mail,” she fumed, and phoned the company, got straight through to the head of the lab, then performed a brief impersonation of Leo Falcone on a bad day.

  Five minutes later the report, still full of spelling mistakes and bad grammar, came through. Sixteen separate tests. A single specimen of male DNA in each.

  “Thank God for the Y chromosome,” Teresa murmured. “The only worthwhile thing to come out of the everyday penis since the dawn of man.”

  Then she scrolled through the other results, conscious of Silvio leaning in very close to her shoulder. “Eureka.”

  Bella was
there in four of the vaginal secretions. The next twelve were unknown.

  “One day . . .” Silvio murmured, then started his familiar rant. About how the world would be a better and safer place if all of us just got tagged at birth, stored as profiles in some giant computer somewhere, files wheeled out every time a drop of blood or a trace of semen puzzled some slothful police officer who was too idle to engage his brain and go looking for evidence—

  “I’ve told you before,” she interrupted, “I’ll tell you again. It’s wrong. You have to leave people a little privacy, otherwise they don’t stay human at all.”

  She thought about the wad of tissue that still lay in her handbag, and would soon go where it belonged, into the bin in the street outside. She hadn’t even considered mentioning it to Nic, though a part of her wondered if that was what Emily really wanted: to break the news through another. Even so, he had heard something wrong in her voice. She knew that. Nic didn’t miss a thing.

  “No one wants to know everything about everyone. It’s unnatural. It’s . . .”

  . . . asking for trouble, Teresa thought. You had to concentrate on what mattered and leave the trivial details to one side.

  Something mattered deeply here. Bella had slept with Hugo Massiter. The Englishman was, perhaps, the father of the dead woman’s unborn child. In any normal police investigation these were starting points, pieces of information someone like Leo Falcone could pick up, mull over, then use as a lever to extract other, more damning nuggets of evidence. And, in the end, with some luck, try to put together a picture of what happened. But they hadn’t the resources or the time.

  “Try and think like a cop, Silvio,” she ordered. “A woman’s been incinerated in a furnace. What are the key facts you want to know?”

  He shrugged. This wasn’t his kind of game. “Temperature. Can we get some more physical evidence from the remains?”

  “No, no, NO!” she screamed, and wondered briefly if it would be out of place to slap him on his pale and flabby cheeks. “That’s us thinking. Not them.”

  “In that case, I’ve no idea,” he confessed. “How she got there maybe. They always ask that.”

  No, they didn’t. Not always. With Falcone out of action, the official version was that Uriel put Bella in the furnace somehow, and since he was dead too the whys and wherefores were unimportant, redundant.

  Two violent deaths had occurred without the police ever seeking answers to one of the most fundamental aspects of any murder inquiry. How exactly?

  And she’d been around long enough to understand what, in the case of Bella, those answers were likely to be. No one could be forced into a searing furnace against her will. It was simply inconceivable, however strong the assailant, however feeble the victim. To put her into the furnace, Bella had to be rendered unconscious first, and Teresa Lupo’s instincts told her the most likely way that would happen. Not with alchemy but with the oldest killing tool in the book, raw violence that always, always left such familiar stains in its wake.

  “Jesus Christ,” she murmured. “I must be losing my mind. We’ve two murders here and no one—not even old Alberto Tosi—has even seen so much as a bloodstain. How often does that happen?”

  She glanced at her watch, phoned Raffaella Arcangelo’s number and prayed the woman had abandoned the Ospedale Civile for a while. When she’d called that morning they’d been planning to wheel the unconscious Falcone into an MRI scanner for an hour or so, hoping all those deafening magnets whirring round his damaged head would see something that indicated he’d return to the living world someday soon. Teresa had dealt with MRI units as a doctor. She wasn’t full of optimism. More often than not the best thing they told you was nothing, and the only news was bad.

  “Have you heard something?” Raffaella asked immediately. “They said they were doing some test. I couldn’t be there all the time. I couldn’t bear it.”

  “It usually takes some hours, perhaps a day, for the results to reach the consultant. Nothing’s changed. I’m sorry. It’s not bad news, though. I was wondering . . .”

  She could almost feel the woman’s tension down the line.

  “I was wondering if you’d found anything.”

  “Sorry, I forgot,” Raffaella confessed.

  Teresa wasn’t giving up. “Is there anyone on the island now, apart from you?”

  “No. My brothers are with the lawyers. I think they’ll be there a long time. It seems Signor Massiter is changing the terms of the contract. Quite drastically too. Not that we’re in a position to refuse anymore.”

  “Would you mind if we came and took a look around? I want to see Bella’s bedroom. Perhaps take away some more samples.”

  The bed trick worked for Emily. It was worth trying again, though it still didn’t put Massiter there on the night of the murder.

  “Of course.”

  “And one more thing. I need you to think hard about this, Raffaella. Did you see anything after they were killed—anything at all—that showed traces of blood? Marks on paintwork or the floor. Spots on a cloth. Something out of place. Anything.”

  The other woman was silent. Teresa’s heart skipped a beat.

  “Raffaella?”

  Teresa could picture her, hand to her mouth, thinking, trying to work out what was wrong.

  “You’d best come now,” Raffaella said at last. “I think I’ve been a fool.”

  THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD CESSNA 180 PERFORMED A TIGHT forty-degree right-hand turn low over the shining, mackerel-skin waters of the lagoon, an ungainly red and white bird with high wings and a couple of gigantic Edo amphibious floats jutting out where the undercarriage should have been. Andrea Correr, who owned a couple of hotels on the Lido, two restaurants in San Marco, and one of the biggest tour agencies in town, took the cigarette from his fingers, stuffed it in between his lips, then fought the wheel, trying to remember the water-landing lessons he’d had nine years before on an alligator-infested lake a few miles outside Orlando. Correr liked to think of himself as a good pilot, an amateur, but one who’d built up almost a thousand hours in a decade of flying from the little airfield hidden away at the tip of the Lido. When some young cop came out to the aircraft stand, waving his badge, demanding to be picked up on official business, and offering to pay for the gas too, Correr didn’t have too many hesitations. He didn’t own a professional licence. He’d have to take the money as a contribution towards costs, and wouldn’t, for a moment, dream of giving the cop a receipt in return, not that Correr had mentioned this small catch on the airfield pavement.

  There was just one problem, and it was both the prize and the potential pitfall in the present proceedings. The young cop seemed to think that, if he found what he wanted, Correr would simply land his plane on the water, taxi into the shore, leave him there, and then zoom back home. Given those big Edo floats visible to all, it was an understandable mistake. But his Cessna had been flown with the internal carriage wheels extended for as long as Correr could remember. He’d been talked into buying the expensive old floatplane by a flying-club regular who’d omitted to mention one salient point: The law forbade him to land it anywhere in the lagoon. Only sea use was allowed, and the choppy waters of the Adriatic were deemed too difficult for all but the most experienced of pilots. The only aircraft Correr had ever landed on water was a Piper Cub at the school in Florida, and that was a small, ancient, two-seater tandem contraption of canvas and wood, one that was started by standing on the float and hand swinging the prop. It was more like a toy than a real aircraft, a plaything that flitted in and out of stretches of water rarely troubled by more than a passing breeze.

  The 180 was a complex machine, with a variable-pitch prop, more controls than he could handle sometimes, even after a decade of ownership, and the awkward retractable undercarriage that would have to be wound up into the floats before the plane so much as touched a single wave. And the lagoon was no still patch of Everglades lake, more the sea in miniature, with a dappled surface that was unreadable from ab
ove, riddled with invisible currents, under constant barrage from random blasts of gusting chop rolling all the way down from the Dolomite Mountains. A part of him told Andrea Correr he’d be insane to do as the young cop insisted. A part of him said he’d never get this opportunity again in his life, and he could always blame the police if it all turned horribly wrong.

  They’d been round and round most of the obscure islands of the lagoon, twice, all at the same barely legal height, all with the Cessna just hanging in the air, bumping above its stall speed, so that the young cop got the best view from the right-hand passenger seat in the turns. Correr had lost count of how many cigarettes he’d smoked, despatching the butts through the open side window. He knew a few of these places: San Francesco del Deserto, with its Franciscan monastery. Lazzaretto Nuovo, the former leper colony that now housed a scattering of disused military buildings. Santa Cristina, with its tiny brick church. Others just came from the cop’s tourist map, a litany of unknown names, La Salina, La Cura, Campana, Sant’ Ariano . . . just hunks of grassy rock deserted over the centuries, with, at best, a few derelict buildings to indicate people had once lived there.

  The cop was starting to look desperate. Correr couldn’t work out whether to feel disappointed or relieved. The thought of putting the plane’s fat feet down on the lagoon still sent a tingle of anticipation and dread down his spine.

  They were now over Mazzorbo, the long, barely inhabited island next to Burano, to which it was connected by a bridge. Correr hunted ducks hereabouts in winter, and liked to eat at the restaurant by the vaporetto stop where, in season, the local wildfowl regularly found their way onto the plate, and at prices that were a fraction of those in the city.

  He glanced at the fuel gauge: good for another hour. Oil pressure and temperatures looked steady. The old Cessna was a reliable beast. Pretty soon, though, they’d run out of places to look. The lagoon wasn’t so large from the air. They’d been low enough to see into people’s gardens and swimming pools, low enough to get him a ticking off once he got back to the Lido. No one liked intrusive flying. It just brought in more complaints.