but he held her coat, his grip tight as a vice, an iron fist in a leather glove.
A moment passed. She was a heartbeat away from attempting to kick free and reaching for her weapon at the same time.
Then his grip eased. He laughed. She steadied herself. He released her.
“A monument to ‘friendship,’ yes?” he said, now switching into Russian, indicating the monument: “A?o?aa.”
She couldn’t help herself in replying. “Friendship enforced by the tanks of the Soviet Red Army,” she said, throwing the same language back at him.
His dark eyes took on a deep burn. Her remark had touched something.
He nodded toward the statue of the workers. “Soviet Order of Friendship,” he said. “In Ukraine, we call that the ‘Yoke of Oppression.’ ”
Another moment passed. He looked both ways, dropped his hands into his pocket, and laughed. Then he slowly turned and walked away into the night. Despite the bright lights illuminating the monuments, her visitor knew where the shadows were. He did not look back as he walked away. Then he was gone, as quietly as he had arrived.
TWENTY-NINE
Rome. Quarter to seven in the morning under a cold gray drizzle. A police car bearing Lt. Gian Antonio Rizzo and his assistant, Stephano DiPetri, drew up outside an inauspicious steel door on the via LoBrutti. The building was set among two warehouses and a closed factory.
The two policemen jumped out. Rizzo walked at a quick pace. He knew this place too well. DiPetri followed close behind, pulling his coat close against the elements.
Miserable weather. A miserable place. There was a sign beside the door. It read, “L’Obitorio Municipale-Citta di Roma.”
Rizzo pulled the door open. He barged purposefully into the municipal morgue. For the next half hour, he and his assistant stood in a basement chamber that was barely warmer than the outside air. Noxious fumes assaulted their nostrils, the scent of death and chemicals everywhere. They eventually stood over two marble slabs where a pair of decomposing bodies in yellow canvas bags were set forth for their examination.
An emissary of the mortuary’s office presided. He was a chubby bearded man named Bernardo Santangelo, pleasant and jovial, considering his line of work, well known for his unending courtesy and attention to detail. A meticulous well-groomed man, he looked more like a jolly chef than a technician of mortality. In his handsome pudginess, he moved like a big pampered cat.
Nearby, with her arms folded behind her back, stood a young assistant, Neomie, a woman with dark hair, thick glasses, and a complexion as pale as the resident cadavers. Rizzo gave her a quick glance and a nod. Neomie couldn’t hold a candle to Sophie, so Rizzo’s attention bounced back to the business at hand.
Like the corpses, Neomie remained silent.
Lt. Rizzo had worked with Bernardo Santangelo previously and knew him to be an intelligent man who did his wretched job with an air of earnestness. Santangelo adjusted the thermostat in the room to below freezing before he began to talk.
“We may now proceed,” Santangelo said. “Please open the bags.” Neomie unzipped first one bag and then the other.
Rizzo winced. DiPetri retched. Neomie ignored them and the dead folks.
Rizzo had seen many corpses in his career, including those of people he had known personally. But these were particularly horrendous. There had been just enough time since death-perhaps a couple of weeks, he assessed-for advanced discoloration and decomposition to set in. Death had been caused by gunshot, and the gunshots had raked the heads, necks, and upper chests, and caused particularly horrific effects.
The bodies were those of a man and a woman. Half of the woman’s face had been hammered away by bullets and the remaining eye socket was filled with brains and blood. The man’s face had been smashed in by gunfire so brutally that the features almost looked as if they had been turned inside out.
Gravely, his voice muted to low tones, Santangelo explained how the man and woman came to lie in his place of business.
A band of children had been playing near some old Roman ruins in the campground at Villa di Plinio. Rizzo knew the area. It was a sandy swampy region twenty kilometers east of Rome and two kilometers south of the massive airport at Fiumicino. It was a place where unusual things were known to surface.
The
The children pushed away the wet dirt and dead grass. They discovered that the “something unusual” was the arm of a human being. The arm was attached to the rest of a decomposing body, that of a man. The body had been stripped of clothing, jewelry, or any other pieces of identification.
The children ran off and told their parents. One of the fathers phoned his brother, who was a policeman in Castel Fusano on the Mediterranean coast. The brother drove to the area, saw the body with his own eyes, and used his cell phone to file a report.
The local police discovered that the dead man had been buried with a female companion, one body stacked up on top of the other. It was as if those getting rid of the bodies had been too lazy-or in too much of a hurry-to dig two graves and weigh them down with stones, the normal procedure in the area.
Not long afterward, federal police were called, notably the anti Mafia brigade. The Castel Fusano police were happy to get rid of the remains.
The bodies were shipped to Rome where they were stored here in the central obitorio where more experienced technicians could examine them. They were also frozen at a temperature of thirteen degrees below zero centigrade to arrest the decomposition and assist the forensics units.
Lt. Rizzo listened to all this very thoughtfully, saying nothing until Santangelo had finished. Then, “Have these victims been identified yet?” Rizzo asked.
“No,” Santangelo answered. “We received them here only two days ago. We have some leads that may help us soon, however. Perhaps within the next day or two.”
“Then why did you phone me?” Rizzo asked.
“Please follow me, if you would,” Santangelo said.
Neomie rezipped the bags and summoned more help from the next room. The team at the morgue would return the bodies back to their own deep freeze.
Santangelo walked his visitors to a computer at a desk in an adjoining office. He sat his guests down at chairs which afforded a view of the screen. A few entries on the keyboard and Santangelo brought up the information that he wanted.
On a split screen, there were photographs of bullet fragments, courtesy of the central Roman police CSI records. Thumbnails first, then enlarged images.
A CSI techie who had been working on recent crimes had been looking for links among several shootings in the central and southern parts of Italy. The techie had grouped the homicides in the area in the last month by weapons and then, among the gun crimes, matched the subgroups by caliber. He had struck gold.
“The ammunition on the left,” Santangelo explained, “are the bullets that were used in the shooting in Rome,” he said. “The musician and a young woman. I believe you were the ranking investigating officer at that scene.”
“Yes, I was,” Rizzo said. “The musician was a local guitarist with links to local drug traffickers. The young woman had three passports. We’ve determined that she was a Canadian named Lana Bissoni from Toronto. She was the signatory on the apartment. How and why she had three passports is a question as yet unanswered.”
Santangelo nodded.
“But here is what should interest you, Gian Antonio,” Santangelo said. “The fragments on the right were
