“But what about the lady angel? Are we going to just let her flutter from place to place? And murder someone else, maybe?”
“Did they let you read my deposition?”
“They asked me what I thought of it. I told them that as far as I’m concerned, she exists.”
“Good for you.”
“CC, this is no laughing matter. Your superior officers might be too obtuse to get it, or maybe they’re bought and paid for. But you’re not like them.”
“Unfortunately. It would have been better for me if I was.” Colomba shoved him out of her way. “I’m going to get some sleep. We’ll talk about it some other time.”
Colomba vanished down the street, leaving Dante to stand there, seething with compassion and disappointment. Guarneri walked over to him. “Everything all right?”
Dante snapped out of it. “Certainly. Colomba told me to ask you, she said you could easily help me,” he lied.
“What do you want to know?”
“It’s simple. Who’s examining Musta’s corpse?”
18
Dante got out of the taxi on Piazza del Verano, just a short distance from the Verano Cemetery, with its Napoleonic art and its illustrious tombs.
The morgue was an old building, which in the not too distant past had been shut down for health violations because of an excessive number of corpses abandoned in the hallways and a certain number of cadavers dating back to the nineties that had never been retrieved. These days it worked a little more efficiently, but it remained grim and suffocating. Dante called on his cell phone, and a few minutes later, Bart emerged at the front door, dressed in a white lab coat that was, shall we say, less than spotless. “O illustrious luminary!” he said to her.
“Illustrious luminary, my foot,” said Bart. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk to you about the guy you just sliced up. The guy whose head they blew off.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re not a very good liar. It’s a good quality, trust me.”
Bart looked around. “Dante. I like you, but I can’t reveal anything to you concerning an investigation that’s still under way. Especially this investigation, which you’re involved in.”
“Then what if I told you that they still haven’t caught the person who was responsible for the attack?”
“I’d tell you to talk to your psychiatrist.”
Dante rolled his eyes. The day was coming to an end, and dark clouds were swirling overhead. Or maybe that was just him imagining things. “Colomba is in trouble, Bart,” he said.
“And you think that the autopsy findings can help her? How?”
“The more things we know, the better we can prepare her defense. That she was forced to act correctly, for instance . . .”
Dante felt like a miserable worm for using Colomba’s name like that, but he knew Bart was sensitive on the topic. In fact, she looked around and sighed. “Come on in.”
“I can’t. I’m too tired.” It was true, the internal thermometer that registered the symptoms of his phobias was marking a temperature of about seven. Too high to venture into an unknown building.
“Can you at least take a walk?”
“That I can always do.”
“Wait here for me. I’ll go get changed and say goodbye to everyone.”
Bart came back about ten minutes later dressed in jeans and a jacket, and they walked toward the Basilica of San Lorenzo and the bronze statue. They stopped on the steps, and Dante offered Bart a cigarette, holding up his lighter for both of them. “It’s a pleasure to smoke with someone,” he said. “These days it seems like there’s no one around but health nuts.”
“Santini smokes like a chimney, if that’s of any interest to you.”
“He’s the last person on earth I’d share a vice with.”
Bart looked at him in astonishment. “A little rough, maybe, but he strikes me as a good policeman. Why in the world do you have it in for him?”
“Last year he locked me in a restroom stall and threatened to kill me.”
“Ah, well, then I understand. Did you report him for that?”
“No. But Colomba kicked him in the face, so I’m pretty satisfied.”
Bart laughed, then turned serious. “How is she?”
“Worn down.”
“She doesn’t deserve what they’re doing to her.” Bart tossed the cigarette butt in a trash can with an angry gesture. “The man I dissected was under the effect of narcotics. That made his behavior unpredictable, and any action Colomba took to stop him was justified.”
“Which drugs?”
“It would be faster to tell you what drugs he hadn’t taken. I found traces of THC, alcohol, psilocin, and psilocybin. Do you know what those last two are?”
“The active substances of magic mushrooms. So he took drugs before putting on the suicide belt? A real idiot.” Bart appeared uneasy, and Dante of course picked up on that. “What is it?”
“The levels in his blood and his metabolites indicate that the mushrooms were consumed a few hours before death.”
“In what form?”
“You really are a stickler. I don’t know.”
“Excuse me?”
“I didn’t find any traces in his stomach.”
“Maybe he smoked them or made a pot of tea with them,” said Dante, who had tried magic mushrooms when he was young, with interesting results.
“I’d have found residues of the tea, and there was nothing. And I’d have found traces of the smoke in his pharynx. There, too, nothing.”
“Then you’re saying someone drugged him against his will.”
Bart rolled her eyes. “There, I knew it. You tricked me.” She looked hard at him. “You don’t give a damn about Colomba. You have some theory about the attack.”
“Both things, I assure you.”
Bart shook her head. “I’m an idiot. If you go around repeating the things I’ve told you, I swear I’ll tie you down on my autopsy table and dissect you.”
“Cut it out. I never reveal my sources.”
“I’m not one of your sources!”
“But it doesn’t make any sense for you to stop now. Were there traces of anesthetic?”
“No,” Bart grumbled.
“Did the corpse have any lesions, any injection marks?”
“It was covered with lesions and abrasions, but I didn’t see any signs of puncture marks. There was just a large bruise at the back of the head from a trauma dating back to a few hours prior to death.”
“On a line with which vertebra?”
“On the epistrophean vertebra, the second one.”
“Traditional karate calls for a series of blows right there, to paralyze or kill your adversary. Shuto . . . haito . . .” Dante swung his hands through the air, mimicking the moves.
Bart remained impassive in the face of this display of prowess. “Since when have you been an expert in the martial arts?”
“Since never, but I do watch the Discovery Channel.”
“Okay, then, maybe if you watch a different channel, they can explain to you that the same sort of bruise can easily be produced by a fall, a heavy object carried on your back, or even by doing gymnastics.”
“You need to look at it again, Bart. Knowing what to look for, you might find something you missed.”
“I didn’t miss anything,” she said in a hard voice. “They pay me not to miss anything.”
Dante understood that he’d made another false step. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t make myself clear,” he said in a tone that was too chagrined to be believable. “Still, take another look, would you? And perhaps you should take some samples from the wounds. Maybe the psilocybin and the psilocin were introduced into his circulatory system there.”
“I can’t.”
“All you’d have to do is find it in a scratch, and that would prove someone had manipulated him. It would be evidence, you understand that?”
&nbs
p; “I can’t, I told you. I’ve completed the autopsy. Before you got here, I met with the magistrate, to whom I relinquished custody of the corpse. The body was removed and taken to the military morgue for safekeeping.”
“Safekeeping from whom?”
Bart heaved a heartbreaking sigh. “Are we done?”
“Not yet. Did you find more traces of adhesive on his skin?”
“How did you know that?” Bart said in astonishment. “On his hands. If he bound his accomplice with duct tape, that would be normal.”
“Not if he used gloves. Someone bound him, too.”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know that yet.” Dante lit the last cigarette in the pack. “Do you have anything else that could help me? Particulate matter, traces on the clothing . . .”
“That wasn’t my responsibility,” said Bart. “All I know is what they told me to do with the comparisons. The only item that couldn’t be traced to his home or the home of his accomplice is cement powder, in the mix used in city buildings, without traces of waterproofing or paint.”
“So construction work in progress somewhere . . .”
“He could have picked it up anywhere. He even had some in his hair.” Bart looked at her watch. “And now I have to go catch a train. Luckily, they’ve started running again.”
Dante took one of her hands in both of his. “Thank you. And forgive me for having dragged you into this.”
“Don’t make goo-goo eyes at me, you rascal,” she said, placated. She couldn’t really blame Dante for being what he was. “Don’t be a stranger, now. And remember that you have a standing invitation for dinner at my place when you’re up north. Vegetarian lasagna!”
Dante nodded. “For sure. Thanks, Bart.”
“And don’t do anything you might regret.”
“I don’t seem to able to avoid it.”
“Then don’t do anything I might regret.”
Dante waited until Bart was out of earshot, then he called Alberti.
19
Alberti was in the garage of his home, in the corner set aside for art, his art, the only art that mattered: music. With a MIDI keyboard hooked up to his PC, he was composing what he hoped would be his masterpiece; he was planning to dedicate it to victims of the massacre on the train. The piece was called “Ten to Midnight,” which was arrival time at Termini Station, and it started off with a bass riff that, in his intention at least, alluded to the motion of the locomotive. Only it kept sounding more like the Macarena.
The cell phone vibrated and fell on the keyboard. “Is something wrong, Signor Torre?” he answered in a worried voice.
“No, but it’s your lucky day. I’m going to take you out for a spin.”
“Out for a spin where?”
“I’ll bet you can never guess. While you’re on your way over, pick me up a pack of cigarettes.”
Alberti picked him up in the Verano district and didn’t act too surprised when Dante asked to be taken to the Malavoglia neighborhood. Along the way, Dante updated him on what he was looking for. The piazza with the fountain had police barriers and officers standing watch all around it. They parked about a hundred yards away. “Can you get me another quick tour inside the shop?” asked Dante.
“Maybe you overestimate my rank,” said Alberti.
“Okay, we’ll do without that.” Dante imagined two figures emerging from the front entrance and slipping into a car parked on the street outside. One of the two would have been unconscious and unable to fend for himself. What with the darkness and the burnt-out lightbulbs in the courtyard, no one would have seen them, provided that the woman, the angel, had been able to carry Musta. The boy didn’t weigh a pound over 145, but you’d still need some pretty solid muscles. “Let’s imagine that I’d parked where the squad car is right now,” said Dante, pointing a finger. “Which way would you have gone to avoid being seen?”
“Let’s get closer so I can take a look.”
They made their way over to the police barriers and studied the streets running away from there. One of them led to a narrow dead-end alley surrounded by high walls; the other was the broad avenue leading toward the city’s beltway. “I’d have taken the avenue,” said Alberti.
“Wrong answer: there’s a surveillance camera at the intersection.” Dante pointed at the stoplight about three hundred yards from the shop.
“Ah, I see.” Alberti rubbed his chin, studying the area. “Over there is an ATM, which has a video camera, too, and there’s a dead-end alley. It’s impossible to get out of here without leaving tracks of some kind, even if your mysterious angel might not have realized it.”
“I doubt that.” Dante was certain that whoever had put together that complicated mechanism wouldn’t have made such a rookie mistake.
“Then maybe she didn’t take him anywhere. The woman drugged him and left him there, and then Musta went away on his own two legs to blow himself up.”
Dante shook his head. “From when we left his apartment to when we arrived here, not much more than an hour elapsed. There wasn’t the physical time to drug him and prep him for his suicide mission. No, she took him somewhere to work on him without haste.” They walked together toward the stoplight. Roughly two hundred yards from the shop, the wall of buildings broke off, with a sidewalk that ran around the perimeter of a weed-infested field. “What do you say about this passageway?”
Alberti studied the sidewalk with a critical eye. “It’s a little high, but you could get through in a four-by-four.”
Dante turned on the flashlight on his cell phone. “Let’s see where this takes us.”
“I’ll get the flashlight from the car,” said Alberti, thinking back to the last time he’d done that: it hadn’t ended well.
With the Maglite casting a shaft of light that dissolved into the horizon, Dante and Alberti ventured into the field. The soil was soft and slippery from the recent rains, and they had to take care to avoid ditches and thornbushes. After five minutes, lights and sounds faded away behind them, and the walk became almost relaxing. Along the way, they found plenty of tire tracks and condom wrappers, a clear sign that they were hardly the first ones to come out in this direction. After fifteen minutes or so, their shoes caked with mud, they emerged onto the provincial road, facing the fencing around a building site where two apartment houses were under construction. The gate was rusted, and from the number of empty bottles and the expanse of trash on the other side of the fence, they figured out that the construction site had long since been abandoned.
“They call them the Dinosaurs,” said Alberti. “The contractor who was building them went bankrupt and just left them like this.”
“How do you happen to know that?”
“My aunt lives right around here.”
“How sweet. I bet she bakes you lots of cakes.” Dante leaned over to examine the padlock that held together the heavy chain fastening the gate. It looked as old as the rest of the place, but the keyhole was a little too clean. Dante pulled a length of wire out of his pocket, twisted it, and stuck it into the lock.
Alberti stopped him immediately. “Signor Torre. You know perfectly well that I’m always happy to lend a hand, but this is breaking and entering.”
Dante smiled at him. “You know why you’re here tonight?”
“Because you needed an armed accomplice.”
Touché, thought Dante. “Sure, but why you? I’ll explain. Because you want to make a good impression on Colomba. You hope that she understands how competent you are. Now you have a chance to show her.”
Alberti bowed his head in defeat. “You’re the devil in person, Signor Torre, you know that, don’t you?”
“I have a little contract for you to sign, but we’ll get to that later.” Dante grinned. And he picked open the lock.
20
The gate easily slid open just far enough to let Dante and Alberti through. The two buildings still under construction stood at the center of a hard dirt clearing littered with bags of ce
ment and abandoned equipment, including a wheelbarrow without wheels.
One of the Dinosaurs had its front door wide open, and a flight of stairs with no railing was visible just inside. The other entrance was blocked shut, nailed over with wooden planks. “You’re definitely not going to find any meaningful fingerprints, but if the woman cleaned up in there, you will find traces of the cleanup. Follow them and see where they take you,” Dante said.
“Wait a minute, me?”
Dante pulled the cell phone out of Alberti’s jacket pocket and found to his relief that it was a recent model. He downloaded Snapchat and installed it while he was talking. “If I go in there in the dark, I won’t get out alive. And after all, you have a handgun and I don’t.”
“Do you think there’s anyone still in there?”
“No. But you never know.” He started a video call with Alberti’s cell phone, then placed it in Alberti’s shirt pocket so that the lens peeked over the top. He looked at his own phone to make sure he had a good view. “I’ll follow you from right here. Make sure you don’t cover the lens.”
“I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“You’ll find out if you see it. Careful where you put your feet.”
Alberti donned a pair of latex gloves, then pulled out his gun and held it straight ahead, training a beam of light with the flashlight to go with it, the way he’d been trained to do. He went through the front door, certain that what he was doing was very stupid. The Dinosaur reeked of dust and a general state of rot, and the flashlight cast long shadows.
Dante’s voice emerged from his breast pocket: “ ‘Ground Control to Major Tom.’ Reply, please.”
“Here I am,” said Alberti as he climbed the first flight of steps. “For now I don’t see anything suspicious.”
“Any signs of anyone having come through there?”
Alberti bent down, holding the light so it cast the beam horizontally. The footprints in the dust were countless. “All the signs you want.”
“If our unknown friend was dragging someone, the footprints will be different. For instance, she would have set the body down as soon as she got to the top of the stairs.”
Kill the Angel Page 17
