“I appreciate that, Tim. I think any one of you guys would have gotten out of the situation without a scratch.” He painfully raised his arm. “As you can see, I didn’t.”
“Nah, you’re a warrior, sir.”
His shoulder throbbed and his head was still pounding. If he was a warrior, he felt like one with one foot in the grave.
*
Major Lumaga summoned Fabiana Odorico to his office to report on progress in the murder investigation of Ferruccio Gressani and Cinzia Rondinelli. However, she turned the tables on him, and grilled him about the hospital attack that was on front pages across Italy.
“Who would have thought that Marcus had it in him to fight like that?” Odorico said.
“Don’t underestimate him,” he said. “That man can drink you under the table at night then beat the stuffing out of you in the morning. Now, let’s talk about your case, if you please.”
“I’ve been working on Ferruccio’s web of relationships when he lived in Italy, particularly on the ’Ndrangheta angle. Do you remember that Ferruccio’s mother told me about his friendship with Marco Zuliani?”
“Sure, sure,” Lumaga said.
“Marco moved to Toronto with his immediate family about ten years ago, but some of the Zuliani clan stayed in Calabria.”
“Did you interview them?”
“Of course, but here’s a shock for you. They refused to cooperate. They wouldn’t answer one question and told me to piss off. Even the little children were abusive.”
Lumaga gave her one of his deep shrugs. “Disrespect for the law starts young in these families.”
“I didn’t stop there,” she said. “I went through the police files going back a decade, searching for any past incidents involving Ferruccio or any of the Zulianis.”
“And?” Lumaga said. “With this slow build-up of yours, you’d better have something to say.”
She opened a folder with a flourish. “I do. Maybe you remember this because you were at this station back then, but four years ago, a couple of bodies washed up in Algeria. They were young men from this area. One of them was Matteo Zuliani who went by Teo. The other was his brother-in-law, Gianluca Rizzo, known as Lu.”
Lumaga reached for the folder. “Let me see that.” He read through the file and said, “I do remember this. The bodies were decomposed and devoured by marine life, but the Algerian authorities found this gold bracelet with Matteo’s name and they traced him here to Oppido Mamertina. The other boy was from the next village. Both of them had gunshot wounds to the head. We thought that this was some kind of execution carried out by rival drug gangs, but we never made any progress. We were up against the same omertà you experienced. Why do you think this has anything to do with Ferruccio?”
“Matteo was Marco Zuliani’s first cousin; Marco was Ferruccio’s childhood friend,” she said.
“Okay, but still, this doesn’t help us at all with Ferruccio’s murder, does it?”
She responded with a question. “Back then, did you ever wonder how the bodies got to Algeria?”
The question sent him back to the folder. He ruffled through the rest of the investigative notes.
“Okay, I see we checked on whether they took any ferries or if they flew to Algeria. They didn’t. So, they must have been thrown into the sea and floated there. We found Zuliani’s car near the beach in Porto di Bagnara. What’s the big deal?”
Odorico said, “I asked myself, is this possible? To float from Calabria to Algeria? Of course, I didn’t know the answer, so I called a marine scientist at the Mediterranea University. He told me that if bodies were dropped into the sea off the west coast of Italy, the Mediterranean currents would carry them north then west toward Spain before they circled back toward the south and east. Eventually, a floating object could get to Algeria that way, but it would take a very long time and a body wouldn’t survive the circuit without completely disintegrating.”
“So, where were they dumped?”
“The professor said that based on what I told him about the state of the bodies, they must have been put into the sea off the southern coast of Spain.”
“Spain,” Lumaga said. “Ferruccio was in Spain four years ago. I don’t know what this means, Fabiana, but I have a feeling it’s important. Did anyone ever tell you that you were clever?”
She puckered her mouth knowingly. “Only my mother, my father, all my teachers, and all my superiors. You’re only just noticing?”
*
Villa Shibui was tranquil on the inside, but beyond the gates, it was a madhouse. The media had discovered that the girls and their heroic savior, Marcus Handler, had returned from Rome and they stretched along the road for a kilometer in both directions. Carabinieri officers from Lumaga’s unit stood guard at the gate, and the private CSS operatives patrolled the grounds. They piggybacked off the firearms license of a sister Italian security company, enabling the men to carry assault rifles and side-arms.
It was hot and clear and Marcus sat on the back patio with Mickey drinking morning coffee. The girls were just waking up in their beds and their grandmother, Leonora, was fussing over them. Giuseppe and Noemi Pennestrì were cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry, tending to a full house for the first time in years.
Marcus heard it before Mickey.
It was a whining noise, octaves higher than the waves. He stood and shielded his eyes.
“What?” Mickey asked.
There were two CSS men in the back garden on the morning shift. One of them was Tim Wheelock who alerted to the sound when Marcus did.
Wheelock pointed toward the bright sky, barked orders to his men via his headset, and shouted for Marcus and Mickey to get inside.
Marcus saw what Wheelock pointed at, the small drone that had climbed
