“So, you’re saying she was the one who called Mr. Calvani that night forcing him to reach the garage. There, she waited for him and killed him with the pistol of her father,” Leonardo suggested, rubbing his chin.
“Precisely,” Maurizio turned, pointing a finger against him. “This justifies the presence of the pistol still in the house. She wanted us to find it, so we would have thought he was the killer.”
“That would also explain the weakness of the touch DNA on the pistol. If she cleaned it of all the traces, before making sure he would have touched it, even for a few seconds, the amount of DNA material would be consistent with the small amount we’ve found...” Leonardo muttered with a lower tone of voice as if talking to himself.
“You know what?” Senior officer Milani rubbed her hands together as a grin brightened her face. “This would also bring to light the strange behavior of the captain of the— what was the name of the ship—right! The Sea Rider. They might have had a part in the fleeing and perhaps murder of Igor!”
“Ten points to Milani!” Maurizio cheered. “That’s a brilliant observation, but who was the trafficker who smuggled her to the French coast? You know what we can do? We’ll bring her here and ask her a few questions about her father. Then, we might bring in the captain and see the reaction of both of them when brought together in the same room. I don’t expect a Greek tragedy, but neither a complete indifferent behavior. One of them has to be weaker and crack.”
“So, now all that we need is having Irina here,” Officer Silvani considered.
“Chief Commissioner Angelini has forwarded a European arrest warrant to the Judiciary; they will start the process immediately. The only thing I’m afraid of is the timeframe. The Hungarian Magistrate will have a time limit of 60 days to get consideration and eventually accept or reject our request,” he grinned, glancing at the calendar. “This means that at the latest in June, we will have the chance to have Irina as a guest here. In this case, we need to have all the recording of her telephone calls, either to Luciano or her mother—at least one of the two. I’m expecting her to get in touch, either for help or for advice.”
Turning to Officer Silvani and Senior officer Milani, he continued. “Make sure that the surveillance on these two people is intensified; we don’t want to lose one single word between them.”
“Yes, sir!” they replied in chorus, before leaving the room together with Romizi.
Alone in the room, silence overwhelmed him. The muffled noise coming from outside his door, the movement on the corridor he could see from the window resembled the memory of a dream, seen through the fog of his own thoughts.
This wasn’t the first murder he had to solve in his career; there had been, sadly, many others, which, although they found justice, didn’t come back to life. The grief they caused to loved ones wasn’t solved with justice, and nothing would have given any sort of comfort.
His mind returned to his family, and particularly to his wife and daughter as he wondered whether something like that could ever happen to him.
I’m sure Mr. Calvani didn’t for a second conceive the idea of being murdered; this is not something people figure out as possible. Although we all know it might happen, we still discard it when there isn’t any reasonable hint of any such possibility.
He grabbed the dossier once again in his hands and visually went through the entire documentation.
He wasn’t a politician; he wasn’t a magistrate investigating on the high ranks of the organized criminality’s business. He was a successful businessman like there are many others. He didn’t have enemies, or at least so he thought. An unpredictable enemy like a jealous ex-husband can be very dangerous, but I’m afraid there are far darker details than simply jealousy in this murder.
He smoothed his hair back with his hands, holding his head as if to keep it from exploding. The case could have been almost closed in virtue of the fact that the assassin seemed to be clear.
Igor Leonov killed Claudio Calvani; the motive was jealousy.
He wrote on a piece of paper.
“But was this all? We can’t say much of anything until Interpol can give us a hint of this man’s location,” he said aloud, grabbing a pen and spinning it around his finger. “The last location we can pinpoint the man is the Civitavecchia Harbor, where he left the car. There, he was traveling with Irina, but as she reached Paris a few days after, he simply disappeared.”
“They both had been smuggled through the borders, and I’m wondering whether it’s so and the captain of the Sea Rider, has something to do with it. Some fishermen had been caught by the coastal guards smuggling goods, overfishing, polluting or other similar crimes. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were Irina’s contact to enter the Italian territory illegally.”
He slammed the pen on the table and stood up, losing his temper. He knew there was something right there in front of his eyes. The elephant in the room was laughing at him, and yet, he couldn’t see it.
For the umpteenth time, he grabbed the dossier and turned the pages to the forensic report. “Those traces of DNA seem... Hold on!” Struck
