The Sacred Cut nc-3

by David Hewson

  “ ”Little Em…“ ” she repeated. “But I’m not little anymore, Thornton.”

  “I can see that,” he murmured. “We’ve all grown up a lot over the last few years.”

  “So tell me. What the hell’s going on around here?”

  “Can’t,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I’m not even sure I know myself. I just know this: you steer clear of this shit. Otherwise it will eat you up, like it did…”

  He fell silent and looked at the door. It was different now. He wanted someone to intervene.

  “Like it did my father? And these other people too?”

  “Emily…”

  She was making Thornton Fielding squirm and it felt awful.

  “You know what I think, Thornton? Leapman brought me here as bait of some kind. I’m my father in disguise just to remind this man of something, to throw him off his guard. Joel Leapman thinks I’ll bring out this… monster. Make him crawl out of the woodwork. Is that what Bill Kaspar was like all along? And if he was…”

  He was staring at some papers on the desk, pretending she wasn’t there.

  “Dammit, Thornton! You were my dad’s friend. Are you going to help me find out what happened to him or not?”

  He didn’t say a thing. It was all a waste of time. Maybe he was so scared he’d report it all back to Leapman the moment she was gone.

  “And you’re the guy who nearly resigned over a principle, huh? You expect me to believe that?”

  It didn’t make her feel any better. Thornton Fielding was part of the good Rome she remembered, and here she was beating up on him for no real reason at all.

  “I can’t help what you believe, Emily. But please. Listen to me. Drop this. For your own sake. Just leave the whole thing alone.”

  She stormed through the door and slammed it behind her. Fielding watched her go, miserable. Then he turned round his desk and started typing, very slowly, very deliberately, into his PC.

  Emily Deacon walked back to her seat in Leapman’s office. The place was empty. Leapman hadn’t even left a message.

  You don’t leave messages for bait.

  So what she was supposed to do? Where she was supposed to be? It was an act. Everything was, and there wasn’t a single thing she could do to change matters.

  The icon on her e-mail in-box blinked. She opened the message.

  I am sorry for the problems you have been experiencing with the embassy network. We are currently carrying out some urgent maintenance in order to rectify this. I have set up a temporary network identity which you can use in the meantime. This will expire permanently at 14.00.

  Username: WillFK. Password: BabylonSisters.

  Regards, TF

  Breathless, she typed in the details, logged on. Then she looked at her watch. It was now 13.05. Fielding wasn’t being generous but maybe this was about as much as he could risk.

  Emily Deacon entered keywords she’d tried before, the ones that brought down the security block.

  Then she sat back in her seat and watched the screen begin to fill with text.

  * * *

  Two uniform men found Monica Sawyer. They’d taken a crowbar to the boot of the half-burnt-out Renault at the foot of the Spanish Steps, peered inside, wondered about the smell and the dark liquid leaking from the couple of suitcases in there, then popped the locks on them.

  One was still in the emergency department of San Giovanni puking up diminishing returns from his breakfast. The second, a raw young recruit who looked no more than twenty, now sat between Costa and Peroni in the jeep, leaning back in the rear seat, eyes closed, face the colour of the grey, wan sky still dumping snowflakes down on the city.

  Costa and Peroni had listened in silence to his story. They’d been called in by Falcone as they vainly combed the riverfront for Laila, Peroni complaining loudly that there had to be other cops in town who could handle the call.

  Costa had pointed the car towards the Piazza di Spagna as soon as Falcone called. Peroni openly begged down the phone for more time to look for the girl. It didn’t cut any ice. Falcone wanted them there for some reason of his own, and both men had begun to guess what that was. The inspector was feeling cornered, outnumbered, scared even. Big players were gathering around him, people he refused to trust. Costa and Peroni seemed to be at the top of his very short list of confidants just now.

  Peroni was right, though. There were plenty of other cops around, all of them on the job already. Plainclothes officers and SOCOs milled around the wrecked vehicle, a tide of white bunny suits and dark winter coats. There were men and women working the nearby shops and offices too. This was a big operation. Falcone wouldn’t commit this kind of resource without good reason. Either he felt that things were coming to a head. Or that they were falling apart.

  “Best you go home,” Peroni said to the uniform. The man’s face was utterly bloodless. He’d be seeing the department shrink before long.

  “I go off shift at five,” the young officer said curtly. “That’s when I go home.”

  Peroni nodded. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Sacco.”

  “I’ll remember that. You look like a sound guy. This your first?”

  Sacco closed his eyes. “The first time I found a body in a suitcase?”

  “No,” Peroni replied patiently. “The first murder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK.” Peroni slapped his shoulder and started climbing out of the car. “Take care.”

  The two of them walked towards the crime scene, Peroni shaking his head.

  “Rookies,” he muttered. “What is it with this macho thing?”

  “He’s just doing what he thinks is expected of him, Gianni.”

  “Aren’t we all? And what about Laila?”

  Peroni’s insistence on treating everyone under the age of twenty-five as somehow not quite fully formed never ceased to astonish Costa.

  “Laila’s been living on the streets for months, Gianni. She’s as tough as they come. Didn’t you notice? Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of the situation, I don’t think there’s any doubt about her coping.”

  Peroni favoured him with an icy stare. “Coping. That’s what life’s about, is it?”

  “Sometimes,” Costa offered lamely. “It’s what you do in between figuring out what you really want to do with your time. I seem to recall getting this lecture from you once.”

  “OK, smart guy,” Peroni conceded. “Throw my own bullshit back at me if you like.”

  “Look. When we’ve got the opportunity I’ll help you find Laila.”

  His partner nodded at the wrecked Renault. “If he doesn’t get there first.”

  That sparked something in Costa’s head. “He’s got bigger things on his plate, don’t you think? Besides…” He wished there was more time to mull over what they knew and less spent chasing phantoms. “He could have killed her last night if he’d wanted, surely? Emily Deacon’s not that great a deterrent. But he didn’t. Have you worked that one out yet?”

  “No,” Peroni confessed. “Unless the Deacon woman broke his stride somehow. Not that that makes much sense. What the hell. Let’s put it to one side for now.”

  He walked towards the back of the car. A lone idiot in a Santa Claus uniform stood on the corner forlornly shaking a bell. The city never had this particular American import until recently. This Christmas they seemed to be springing up everywhere.

  The fake Santa shook his bell, held out a candy stick, looked Peroni in the eye and nodded at the bucket that stood between them on the snow.

  “Have you been a good boy, Officer?” the man asked.

  “Define ”good,“ ” Peroni snapped and brushed past him.

  Nic Costa looked at the sign round the man’s neck: a charity for foreign kids. He threw a couple of notes in the bucket, then shook his head at the candy stick.

  “Give it to your friend,” Santa suggested. “Might sweeten him up a bit.”

  “I doubt that somehow,” Costa mur
mured and joined the team by the car.

  Falcone was off to one side, just outside the deserted McDonald’s, talking solemnly with a couple of plainclothes cops, watched by the bored-looking Joel Leapman. Teresa Lupo and Silvio Di Capua were working steadily on something in the boot of the car, half-concealed by badly placed screens, one of which Peroni was moving to get access to the vehicle.

  Peroni took one glance at the mess in the boot, one at Teresa Lupo, then turned away and asked sharply, “Anything we should know?”

  The pathologist moved her head out from under the shadow of the car, nodded at Di Capua to keep going, then walked over to them. “Did you find her?”

  “Not yet,” Costa said quickly. “We got called here instead. She didn’t say anything…?”

  “No,” Teresa began. “I’m sorry, Gianni…”

  “Me too,” Peroni mumbled. “It’s just so… inadequate.”

  There were tears starting to work their way into Teresa Lupo’s eyes, something Nic Costa realized he’d never witnessed before.

  Peroni spotted them, put his hand on her arm, briefly kissed her cheek and mouthed, “It’s OK.” He cast a vicious glance at the buzzards leering at them from behind the crime scene tape: photographers, reporters and a whole bunch of spectators with nothing better to do.

  “I guess you’ve been asked this a million times,” Peroni said when she’d got her act together again, “but how’d this one die?”

  Teresa shrugged, regaining her old self. “This is all preliminary, understood? I’m just telling you what I told your boss, with the same reservations. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, not out here. Also, unless someone tells me otherwise, I get to take this lady home. That American bastard isn’t playing body snatchers this time around. Even if she is one of his, there’s no way of knowing yet.”

  “How?” Peroni asked again.

  “Still working on the method. Let me put this delicately. She’s not exactly complete.”

  There was something she didn’t want to say, probably for Peroni’s sake. “She’s naked. Not a scrap of clothing on her. The tags have been taken off the suitcases. I’ll hand them over to forensic once we’re done here. They don’t look like a common make to me. Expensive too. Maybe…”

  They looked at each other and knew what each of them was thinking. Work of that nature took a long, long time.

  “You haven’t asked me yet,” she said. “That question.”

  “He’d marked the skin?” Costa asked.

  “Kind of.” She shrugged again. “It’s the same man. But it’s not like the others, though. If you want to look, I can…”

  Both men had their hands up before she’d finished the sentence.

  “Understood,” she continued. “The honest answer is I don’t know if the cuts were made by the same instrument. Ask me when I’ve cleaned her up a little back in the morgue. There are a lot of cuts on this woman. But there are marks on her back that aren’t just… practical, if I can put it that way. They could be made by a scalpel. Maybe.”

  Costa thought of Emily Deacon drawing the pattern, so easily, so naturally, in the American embassy the previous day. “And the shape?”

  “I’m sorry. But if you want something concrete, look at this.”

  She reached round into the depths of the boot and came back with a hank of bloodstained material encased inside an evidence bag like a dead insect.

  “It’s the cord,” she told them. “He’d removed it from the neck this time. It was in one of the suitcases. This is the same material that he used on the woman in the Pantheon. Not a scintilla of doubt.”

  Costa didn’t know what to make of the thing. “But it’s not a cord.”

  Teresa frowned. “Leo didn’t tell you, huh? I guess he’s had other things on his mind. No, it isn’t a cord. It’s a piece of very tough fabric cut in that exact same shape we all know so well, then wrapped tightly to make a cord. At first I thought he must have done it himself, though it would have taken a hell of a long time. Still, he’s a gentleman with an obsession, no?”

  Peroni was getting interested. “But?”

  She handed the bag to Costa, then picked up her briefcase and shuffled through the mess of papers in it until she found what she wanted.

  “Silvio had this report waiting for me from forensic when I got here. Fastest piece of work those people have ever done.”

  Costa took the single page. Peroni joined him and read it simultaneously.

  “Has Falcone seen this?” Nic asked.

  “Oh yes,” Teresa continued. “I didn’t dare hold back on that one, not that he seems to know what to do with it right now. Your American friend over there doesn’t have a clue, though. Or an inkling that I still have the original cord from that poor cow in the Pantheon. In fact, from what I’ve heard of his bullshit already, if you were to talk to him you would find he doesn’t think this is part of the same game at all. Not directly, anyway. He’s got a theory.”

  Peroni blinked, bewildered. “A theory?”

  “Oh yes,” Teresa added. “And guess what? It’s one that lays all the crap at our door.”

  “ ”Our door“?” Costa repeated.

  “You bet,” she said with a smile. “Now would you boys like to borrow that report for a little while? Maybe you can give Leo some ideas.”

  “Yes,” Gianni Peroni replied, and began walking towards Leo Falcone and Joel Leapman with a look of pure fury on his face.

  * * *

  There was too little time and too much information. It was like being lost in a forest of unreadable signs and signals. She’d typed in the name Nic had mentioned, “Henry Anderton,” and got a brief uninformative report on the attack that had triggered the alert over security for American visitors. It seemed routine, unconnected to the present case. The dead man was simply an academic who’d been the victim of unprovoked street violence in a small square in the ghetto, the Piazza Mattei. The name rang a bell. It had a tortoise fountain in the centre. Her father had shown it to her a couple of times, taken her picture standing beside it on one of their many walks around Rome. However, nothing connected that assault with the current investigation. The victim had been badly beaten. According to the records, he’d been flown back to America by his health insurer and hospitalized in Boston. A short search on the Internet proved that Costa’s suspicions were unfounded. Henry Anderton was a famous professor, now retired. There was only one item of minor interest in what she could glean of his background from the Net. One academic paper he’d published, on the structure and funding of Islamic terrorist groups, acknowledged the assistance of several FBI officers in the provision of advice and information. It was a tenuous link, but hardly earth-shattering.

  Then she tried “Bill Kaspar” and got nothing, not a damn thing, which was surely odd. Grateful as she was for Fielding’s covert help, she understood it had its limitations. Fielding hadn’t taken her into the very heart of the FBI’s internal network, its mother lode of precious intelligence, brought up to date each minute of every day, collated from around the world by systems that never went anywhere close to a piece of public cable. She guessed he’d set some parameters himself, a cutoff date of some fifteen years earlier, judging by the dates on the material her searches found. Other parameters had been set for him. There was another raft of security clearances still above her that brought down the shutters the moment she went near them. That made sense. Fielding was senior, but he was only an embassy official working in the field. There were many doors he couldn’t open.

  Yet there was a mine of precious intelligence here, if only she could find the right way to track down what she wanted. That required hitting the correct keywords-the terms that would take her straight to the relevant material. Without them, it was impossible to hope to read more than a fraction of what lay on the network. Instead, she had to prioritize. And if she did find anything, there was the problem, too, of what to do with it. Ordinarily she could have marked the documents she wanted and set them up as
a set of reference points for future retrieval. Ordinarily, however, she wouldn’t be using a phoney identity to hack the Bureau’s database in a way that doubtless broke the terms of her contract and probably put her in jeopardy of criminal action to boot.

  It was impossible to print a thing without leaving a record. She couldn’t e-mail material out of the system either. There were bars in place to prevent that. She couldn’t even cut and paste items into another document and get them out that way, or, because the hardware prevented it, copy a thing to a floppy or pen drive. It was simply too dangerous to take notes, written or dictated. All she could hope to do was track down some key documents and, as best she could, memorize as much of the broad content as possible. Or… take a bigger risk.

  “Find something first,” she reminded herself, and typed another phrase.

  Babylon Sisters.

  Thornton had surely given her the password for a reason. The words meant something too. It was another memory from her childhood, more voices from the airy, bright apartment on the Aventine hill. Of some old rock number getting played over and over again by a band her father and his friends all adored.

  The band was Steely Dan. “Babylon Sisters” was the long, jazzy number he loved so much that someone-but who? — had called him “Steely Dan Deacon” once and it stuck.

  With good reason too. It wasn’t just that, back in Rome before the sourness and the divorce consumed him, Dan Deacon loved that kind of music: cool, jazz-tinged rock, stuff Emily could never quite pin down, with weird, only half-comprehensible lyrics. It was because he was a tough guy too. The last few years he’d been alive he was so damn tough she scarcely dared go near him.

  She glanced at her watch-just fifteen minutes left on the system and nothing to show so far-and cursed herself, racked her brain for more of the numbers he and his buddies loved, listening to them over and over on the Bose hi-fi in the living room. They still sat in her head, dim stains on her consciousness from a time when music, for her, meant weekly piano lessons struggling with Hindemith under the sour gaze of a stuck-up old woman smelling of lavender in an apartment in the neighbouring block.