“We need to call the forensics. We need...” he said opening another door to another bedroom. “...Hmmm.”
“Sir,” officer Silvani piped in, as he stepped into the other bedroom, interrupting his thoughts. “I think I found the weapon that killed Mr. Calvani. It was a Beretta APX, wasn’t it?” he said, holding the pistol in his hand.
An ear-to-ear grin opened up on Maurizio’s face. “Brilliant, officer, simply brilliant! Yet, he might have had a guest, and perhaps they left together. Perhaps it was more than a guest; it was the partner in crime, or the assassin himself.”
Maurizio grabbed the pistol and, opening a clear zip-lock bag, he sealed it in. “Someone placed a suitcase on the bed, its clear shape can still be recognized there.” He went to open the wardrobe, but it was empty, likewise all the drawers and other chests in the room.
Narrowing his eyes, Maurizio slipped the notebook from his jacket, and started to scribble some notes. “Whoever was here, didn’t mean to leave any trace, he or she, was supposed to leave permanently or perhaps was here only for a visit. This brings to my mind the possibility that this one could have been no less other than his daughter Irina,” Placing the small notebook in his pocket, he rubbed his hands together, pursing his lips at the knowledge that all the missing pieces were probably coming together.
“Sir, could it be so, and she was also involved in the assassination of Mr. Calvani? But why?” Officer Silvani wondered.
“Interesting point, but still not sustained by any proof.” He paused, roaming around the room. “We need to understand the location of this girl day by day since last October. That was the last time Luciano said she was here. But this is contradictory with what Ms. Fazekas claimed. According to her version, Irina was here in October for the last time, and they spent all the time together.” He grabbed the notebook once again, and tapping the pen against it, Maurizio looked to Officer Silvani as if to ask him his opinion.
“We need another person to tell us what’s going on, and that is the sister of Ms. Fazekas, the woman who hosted Irina like her own daughter. She might give us better information.” He wrote a note on the paper. “Then we need an accurate status of her passport. Somewhere it must have been recorded. If it hadn’t, but she’s been here, we can consider her one of the major players in Mr. Calvani’s murder.”
A twitch moved officer Silvani’s lip as he dared to speak his own opinion about the case. “But, sir, why would she be involved in the murder of the father of her boyfriend? Why do something that would have given such a grief to the man she supposedly loved?”
His voice trembled with uncertainty, and regretted having asked something like that. He was expecting Detective Scala to burst into laughter at his stupid remark, but instead, Maurizio didn’t find it funny at all.
As if he was transformed into a salt statue, he remained frozen in a single moment and slowly, after a bunch of endless seconds, he turned his head toward officer Silvani. “Unless he was the one who ordered the assassination of his own father.”
Open-mouthed, eyes wide opened as if someone just shot at him, officer Silvani remained speechless. “Sir, this is more than a conjecture,” he objected as there weren’t any leads to the reason why Luciano would have had any interest in killing his own father.
“We’re all making conjectures here, officer; the only certain thing we have is that a man has been killed. All the rest are hypotheses, theories, and nothing else. Indeed, we have the weapon, but was this the one that fired the deadly shot? Conjectures, once again. Only the forensics can answer this question, and that’s the reason why we are calling them now.” He grabbed his telephone and entered Leonardo’s number.
“Darling, were you missing me?” Leonardo replied, chuckling.
“I’ll never miss your ugly face, but we have a situation here, and your team is required to do their job.” Maurizio nagged back. “We are at Leonov’s apartment, and we’ve found a weapon similar to the one that shot Mr. Calvani. We also found traces of a guest he had, so we need to understand who his guest was, and whether there were more than one.”
“We’re coming right away,” Leonardo replied, ending the communication immediately.
A stern glance was offered to officer Silvani by Maurizio, “Show me where you found the weapon.”
With a fast nod, Officer Silvani turned on his heels and paced toward another bedroom. Despite the afternoon sun filtered through the blinds, Maurizio walked to the window and opened them in order to see even the smallest of the details in better light.
The officer paced toward the wardrobe and opened it. “Here it was, sir,” he pointed at a small opening of a secret compartment at its bottom.
“Hmmm, if this was the murder weapon, a few questions come to my mind: Did he act alone? Was this a way to get rid of a man who was around the woman he was still jealous of? How did he enter the parking lot of the building where Mr. Calvani kept his car? Was it him who called that night? How did he elude the surveillance guard and how could he know there was a lapse in their recording?”
Officer Silvani didn’t reply, he observed in awe at his supervisor trying to find answers to questions he didn’t think about.
After a moment of hesitation, Maurizio decided to question the people who were living on the same floor. He hoped to be lucky enough to find
