The Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  “What is it?” Falcone interrupted.

  “My guess? It’s the scar from a bullet wound. Nasty one too. Judging by the size of the affected area, she got shot close up. She was probably lucky to live through it.”

  Falcone’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “A bullet wound? How old?”

  She traced her finger over the photo. “Can’t be exact. More than three years. It happened to her as an adult. After she’d stopped growing. Beyond that I don’t know. Of course it would be easy to clear this up if we could get the woman’s medical history. What was she called?”

  “Margaret Kearney,” he replied. “We won’t get any medical records out of the Americans. You saw what they’re like.”

  “This happened in Rome, Leo!” Her voice had risen a couple of decibels. “Why the hell are we being pushed around as if we’re disinterested bystanders or something?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because of who his last victim was. A diplomat. What’s the point in asking? We just have to learn to live with what we have. You think I should walk back into Moretti’s office and ask him to change things around? Do you really believe this kind of decision’s coming from his desk? And that’s all you’ve got?” he added. “That she had a bullet wound? Even if it’s true, so what? It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

  “I guess not.”

  She looked at Silvio Di Capua, who was quaking in his small, very clean Chelsea boots. “Get the cord, Silvio. And the hair.”

  He went away making a soft, squeaking noise of terror, and came back with a couple of sample bags.

  Teresa Lupo picked up the first. “In order to stop you screeching the place down, let me say I removed this entirely innocently from the woman’s neck. They only said they wanted the body. I didn’t think they’d miss it.”

  The fabric lay coiled like a tiny serpent inside the evidence bag.

  “That’s the thing he used?” Falcone asked. “It’s a cord?”

  “It looks like a cord,” Teresa replied, then took out the fabric and, with two sets of tweezers, carefully unrolled it. “Until you take it apart a little.”

  Falcone blinked at the object unfurling under her precise fingers.

  It was dark grey and green, an odd patchwork that had been tightly rolled into the ligature which had killed the woman.

  “Recognize the shape?” Teresa pulled the fabric tightly to make her point.

  It was the Maltese cross pattern from Emily Deacon’s sacred cut. As near as dammit.

  “He cut it out of a piece of fabric and then used it to kill her?” Falcone asked, bewildered.

  “That’s one explanation. This is very tough fabric, though, and it seems manufactured to me. I’ve asked forensic to take a look.”

  Falcone scowled. “I don’t see where that gets us.”

  “Patience, Leo. So what about this?”

  Falcone looked at a familiar sight: a sample of hair in a transparent morgue bag.

  “This is from Margaret Kearney’s head,” she explained. “Black as coal, as you can see.”

  He nodded, not understanding the point.

  “You’re a gentleman, Leo. I’ll say that for you. The poor cow was stone dead on the floor there and you didn’t even take a good look down below, did you? This is not her natural hair colour. This”—she held up the second slide. A hank of light brown hair lay trapped between the pieces of glass—“is what her head’s supposed to look like. We took out the dye just to make sure. You can’t rely on what the pubic zone tells you. This is a general observation that goes beyond the matter of body hair, by the way. I trust you and Silvio will take it to heart.”

  Falcone sighed and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now nearly nine. “So you think she had a bullet wound. He killed her with some crazy piece of cloth. And you know she dyed her hair.”

  “Oh, Leo, Leo,” she protested, “you really know nothing about women, do you? Naturally, her hair was a pleasant brown. Personally, I would have been quite happy with it. See?”

  She waved her own lank crop at him. “What colour’s this?”

  “Black,” he replied.

  “No, no, no! How can a man like you, someone who’s usually so observant, be so blind? It’s really a very dark brown. Genuine black, the colour you have here”—she held up the second slide—“that’s quite rare naturally.”

  He opened his hands in an expression of bafflement.

  “Look,” she continued, “a woman who had black hair to begin with and went grey might dye it black. The rest of us? Check out the statistics with the hair-dye manufacturers. I have. A lot of women dye their hair blonde because that’s what gentlemen prefer, right? A good number like something chestnut or so, too. Think about it. Have you ever met a woman with nice chestnut hair who had an urge to dye it jet black? OK. You’re struggling to find the experience to answer that question. Let me do it for you. No. It doesn’t happen. It’s weird. It doesn’t compute. Black, real black like this, is something you get handed down in the genes. You learn to live with it. Maybe you learn to get rid of it. What you don’t do is make it happen if it wasn’t there in the first place.”

  “That’s it?” he asked. “Maybe a bullet wound? Maybe an inexplicable use of hair dye?”

  Silvio groaned. They both knew what Falcone was doing. Daring her to come up with something else. However she happened to have acquired it.

  “No. That isn’t it. Silvio?”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Di Capua walked towards the deep cabinet drawers where they stored everything that came attached to a death, however ordinary, however apparently meaningless. “Jesus, sweet Jesus. Here comes the shit again, here come the written warnings. Why can I not work with normal people? Why can I not—”

  “Shut up!” she yelled.

  He picked out a green plastic box, brought it over and placed the thing on the table. The name “Margaret Kearney” was handwritten on a label stuck to the front. Inside were a pile of neatly stashed clothing, a bag and several plastic folders full of personal belongings.

  Falcone did a double take looking at it. Finally he said, “The cord I can go along with. Now tell me this isn’t what I think.”

  “It’s her stuff, Leo. Hell, if I can’t have her surely I can have her stuff, can’t I?”

  “I made it absolutely plain. Leapman had that piece of paper that gave him full authority—”

  She was quick to interrupt. “Just a minute. You weren’t there when that team of dumbos he’d hired turned up with the hearse. ”We’re here for the body,“ they said. Well, that’s what they got. I even let them take our gurney. Do you have any idea what those things cost? I’ll be billing the White House personally if we don’t get it back.”

  He put a hand on the green box. “This…”

  “This is something they never asked for. Will they? Sure, once someone realizes what a stupid mistake they made. And they can have it. I won’t stand in their way. But tell me, Leo. What was I supposed to do? Run after them and say, ”I think you forgot something?“ Or leave it there in the Pantheon, for God’s sake?”

  Something extraordinary happened then. Leo Falcone’s shoulders heaved an inch or two. Teresa Lupo realized she was witnessing him laugh, an event which was entirely new to her.

  “I’m just a bystander in all this, aren’t I?” he asked finally, then fixed her with a hungry stare. “So?”

  “So this.”

  She pulled out Margaret Kearney’s US passport and showed him the photo. “Notice how very black her hair is there? How stiff the pose? She didn’t get this done in some supermarket booth, now, did she? I hate passport photos where people are actually thinking about what they look like. It’s so unnatural.”

  “And?”

  She pointed to the picture. “Note the glasses.” Then she picked up a plastic bag containing a pair of spectacles and began opening it. “These. Don’t worry. We’ve checked for prints. Nothing. No prints anywhere, as far as we can tell. Like the Americans said, this creep is good. H
ere—try them. Tell me what you see.”

  Falcone glowered at the spectacles in her hand. “I don’t wear glasses.”

  “Try them, Leo!” she ordered.

  He did as he was told and put on the plain black-plastic glasses.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Not fuzzy? No different from normal?”

  Falcone removed them and she could see he was starting to get interested now.

  “Exactly.”

  “No reason it should be. Those are plain glass. They’re not corrective at all.”

  And she wondered: would he run straight back to the Americans with this information? Or would he mull it over first? She couldn’t take the risk, even if it did mean he just might go ballistic when he discovered what else she had done. There was an easy way to find out, too.

  “One final thing,” she added. “ ”Margaret Kearney.“ There’s an address on her driver’s licence. Leapman and his friends said they’d be contacting relatives, right?”

  “They said that,” Falcone agreed.

  “The Internet’s a wonderful thing, you know. Tell him, Silvio.”

  Di Capua stared at his shiny boots and said in a very low, timorous voice, “There’s no Margaret Kearney in the Manhattan phone book.”

  “What?” Falcone yelled.

  “There’s no phone number listed,” Di Capua continued. “She could be ex-directory, of course. Except the residential address isn’t an apartment either. It’s just a forwarding service.”

  “You’ve been looking up this woman on the Internet?” Falcone bellowed. “This is a morgue. We get paid to do that kind of thing. What the hell gives you the right to interfere with our work like this? Again?”

  Gingerly Teresa put a hand on his arm. “But you didn’t do it, Leo. They told you not to, remember? Nobody placed a gagging order like that on us. So, when I noticed the hair, when I looked at that passport, those glasses—please, don’t blame Silvio, if you’re going to blame anyone, blame me—I just kept looking at this woman and I couldn’t stop thinking, ”Something is wrong here.“ ”

  He didn’t know whether to shout and scream or thank them, she guessed. It was hard being Leo Falcone much of the time.

  “This doesn’t go any further than here,” he told her. “Agreed?”

  “Sure,” she said. “And maybe now I should make a call to them explaining they left a few things behind. What do you think? I don’t want them to feel we’re being uncooperative. I don’t want them to get…”

  She left it at that. The “suspicious” word could have been pushing things a little too far.

  “Do it,” he agreed.

  “You see what this means, Leo? We don’t know who Margaret Kearney is. But the hair, the glasses, that stupid fake passport photo, the phone number, the address… we sure as hell know who she isn’t.”

  Falcone scowled at the items in the green box, as if a set of inanimate objects could somehow be to blame.

  “Still, I guess we don’t need to tell Agent Leapman that,” Teresa added. “Do we?”

  She watched the inspector turn this information over in his head. Falcone was one smart man. He was surely there already. All the same, it had had to be said, just to lock the three of them together, deep in all this potential shit.

  STEFAN RAJACIC didn’t look like a pimp, Nic Costa thought. He was about sixty years old, squat in an old tweed suit and brown overcoat, with a swarthy, expressive face and dark, miserable eyes. The moustache—heavy and greying, like that of an old walrus—gave him away. It belonged to a world that had vanished, that of Eastern Europe before the end of the Cold War. The man could have been a portlier version of Stalin, trying to fade into old age with plenty of memories and what remained of his dignity. He was the seventh pimp they’d seen that night and the only one Gianni Peroni, who seemed to know every last man of his ilk in Rome, treated with a measure of respect.

  Rajacic stared at the photograph of the girl through the fumes of his Turkish cigarette and shook his head. “Officer Peroni,” he said in a heavily accented voice cracked by years of tobacco, “what do you want of me? This girl is what? Thirteen? Fourteen? No more surely?”

  “I don’t know,” Peroni admitted.

  The Serb waved his hand at the photo. “What kind of a man do you think I am?” He looked at Emily Deacon. “Has he told you I deal with children? Because, if he has, it’s a lie. Judge me for what I am but I don’t have to take that.”

  “Officer Peroni said nothing of the sort, sir,” she replied evenly. “He told me you were a good man. You were last on our list. We’d hoped we’d never need to come this far. That tells you something, surely?”

  “ ”A good man,“ ” Rajacic repeated. He stared at Peroni. “You’re a fool if you said that. And I don’t think you’re a fool.”

  “I know what you are,” Peroni told him. “There’s a lot worse out there. That’s all I said. And, yes, I know you wouldn’t deal with a girl this age. I just thought maybe you’d heard something. Or could suggest who we might ask next.”

  Rajacic downed his beer and ordered another. The barman wandered over with a bottle and placed it on the table with an undue amount of respect. He knew who Rajacic was. There were just two other customers in the place. Outside, the street was deep in filthy slush. Business went on as usual, though. Costa knew that, if he looked, there would be pushers sheltering in the doorways, and a handful of hopeful hookers too, hunting business with haunted, hungry eyes. There were places nearby that Costa counted among his favourites in Rome. Just a short walk away were Diocletian’s baths and the church created by Michelangelo from the original frigidarium. In the Palazzo Massimo around the corner was an entire room from a private villa of Livia, the empress of Augustus, decorated to resemble a charming, rural garden, with songbirds, flowers and fruit trees. But they were rare oases of delight in an area that seemed to become more tawdry each year. Costa couldn’t wait to be on the move again.

  “We’re struggling here, Mr. Rajacic,” he said. “We need to find this girl. She could be in danger. We know how the system works. Girls come here when they’re young. If they’re lucky, the welfare people pick them up, put them in a home. If they’re not, they fall through the net and something else happens. First they learn to beg. Then they learn to steal. Then, when they’re old enough, they become the goods themselves. And maybe sell some dope on the side. That’s how it is. Somewhere along the way they must go to someone, a person like you, and see what the options are.”

  “Not if she knows me,” Rajacic insisted, waving a big cracked open palm in their faces. “Not if she asks. These people who deal in children… they’re scum. I handle no one who isn’t old enough to know what she’s doing. And no drugs either.”

  “I know,” Costa insisted. “As I said, we’re desperate.”

  “Who isn’t?” the Serb wondered. “These are desperate times. You never noticed?”

  He swigged some beer from the bottle, stubbed out the cigarette and looked at them. Maybe there was something there, Costa thought. Maybe…

  “You know what?” Rajacic grumbled. “When I came here fifteen years ago I used to have to call home and beg for girls. Most wouldn’t even phone me back. They had dignity then. They didn’t need the likes of me. Now? This is a world in motion, my friends. I got the United Nations working for me, and more women calling pleading for work than I can handle. Kosovans. Croats. Russians. Turks. Kurds. All those people who watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, the old world rolling over and dying, and they thought: ”Now the good times begin, now everyone gets free and rich like all those big shots in the West promised.“ Some joke, huh? You guys never told them it didn’t really work like that, did you? You left it to pimps like me. I’m the one who gets to say it to some pretty little seventeen-year-old straight off the boat, no papers, no money, nothing going for her except what she’s got between her legs. And now you’re coming asking for help—”

  “We don’t have time to apolog
ize, Stefan,” Peroni grumbled.

  “No.” The dark eyes flashed at him. “You don’t.” He picked up the photo. “What is she? Kosovan? Albanian?”

  Peroni grimaced. “We just don’t know.”

  “From the looks of her she could be anything. Turk or Kurd even. Jesus…”

  “But she can’t just walk into a city like this without knowing someone, surely?” Emily objected. “She must have a name. A phone number. Something.”

  “That’s where you’ve been, isn’t it?” Rajacic asked. “Who?”

  Peroni reeled off the names. The Serb scowled as he heard each one.

  “My,” he said at the end. “I wouldn’t want to meet even one of them in a day. Six…”