recovered from the bodies in the marshes,” Santangelo said. “If you look carefully, you’ll see that they match the fragments shown on the left. These four murders are linked. Find the person or people who committed one of these crimes and most likely you’ve resolved the other case as well.”
For the first time since he had stood in the cluttered apartment on the Via Donorfio, Rizzo began to grasp the possible scope of the various murders before him. Could it be that there were not two sets of two, but rather one set of four?
That, in and of itself, suggested a methodology, as well as motivations that were not easy to explain. The fact that the dead girl at the musician’s apartment had three passports suggested some sort of international spin-dirty international business or espionage of some sort. And then there had been precision execution of two Americans on the streets of Rome the evening before the musician and the girl. Now, this carnage in front of him, plus where their corpses had been dumped, suggested killers who did this for a living, not for amusement or as a hobby.
He lost himself in thought for a moment, trying to tie it together. Gut instincts? His guts were exploding with them.
“How long can you keep these bodies here?” Rizzo finally asked. “I’ll probably require further tests and examinations.”
“Under the law, if they remain unclaimed, and if you get me the proper papers,” Santangelo said, “forty-five days.”
Rizzo then went into an adjoining room and filed the proper warrants.
“Now do me one more favor, if you would,” Rizzo said as he placed his fountain pen back into his pocket.
“What would that be?” Santangelo asked.
“If anyone else expresses any interest in these corpses, if there are any inquiries out of the ordinary, please give me a call immediately.”
THIRTY
Gian Antonio Rizzo sat quietly in his car. His assistant DiPetri drove silently through the cluttered Roman roads back to his office on the via Trafficante.
All right. Bernardo had given him something more that he could work with, although the next part of pulling things together was not yet in sight.
Traffic was jammed. Morning rush hour in Rome. DiPetri was muttering about the truck in front of them. Rizzo had half a mind to tell DiPetri to slap the flashing blue light on top of the car and drive up on the damned sidewalk if necessary, but just get them out of there.
Why didn’t DiPetri think about the blue light and the siren? Because DiPetri didn’t care, that was why.
Increasingly, DiPetri irritated Rizzo. It had been a long time since DiPetri had contributed in any way to a case. DiPetri was burned out worse than he was. He had been a good cop years ago, but few people could remember that. These days, he had two loves: drinking and fishing. Some day, they were going to find DiPetri dead in a bathtub of beer with a drunken tuna fish.
On the other hand, the traffic jam afforded Rizzo time to think outside of the office. At least DiPetri could be counted on to keep his trap shut.
Rizzo pondered a new angle. As far as the ballistic links were concerned, the lieutenant had another idea that might play out. There were a couple of younger people working in the homicide bureau these days, a couple of new hires and a pair of interns from the university. They were amiable kids in his opinion, both the boys and the girls. The boys had funny haircuts that looked like someone had used an electric mixer and whipped up their hair like meringues. But the girls dressed cute and Rizzo liked to flirt with them.
No contact. Just harmless flirting. Nothing wrong with that.
The real value of these kids, however, was their willingness to crunch statistics and poke around various computer systems. They knew all the new computer games and websites and could hack just about anything. Not just in Rome, but for a few Euros on the side they could even hack Interpol across Europe and some of the American sites in Washington and Virginia.
So, good. He would feed this new information to the kids in the office. He would do it individually with each of them, the girls first, so that each would think he or she was working on something special. Then he’d see where that would take them.
Who knew? He might get lucky.
After twenty minutes of sitting in traffic, which seemed like twenty days, DiPetri broke the silence in the car.
“I’ve got an idea,” DiPetri said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He turned on the siren, threw the blue flasher onto the roof, and jumped the car onto the sidewalk. He navigated an armada of frightened pedestrians and within a minute had accessed the main boulevard, pointed back to headquarters.
“Good thinking,” Rizzo said sullenly. “What would I do without you?”
Rizzo, however, was already thinking ahead. He had a plan.
He was going to make a return trip to the
THIRTY-ONE
The air of the hotel room chilled Alex’s face and shoulders. Her eyes opened and her sleepy gaze went to the window.
Morning. February 8.
Outdoors, across Kiev, a heavy snow was falling.
Alex gradually remembered where she was. She rose and went to the window. She watched the flakes, dark and silvery, falling obliquely against the city. Traffic moved, but slowly, leaving tire tracks on the streets and boulevards. The morning was bright gray. The snow was everywhere, across the rooftops, upon the bare trees, on the sidewalks, on the monuments, and upon the crosses that topped the many churches.
She looked at a clock and felt the overwhelming need to talk to Robert, even though it was midnight in Washington.
She phoned and got lucky. She reached him on his cell phone, waking him. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” There was a pause. “You okay?” he asked. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah. Fine. Just wanted to hear your voice.”Her own voice cracked slightly.
She was thrilled to hear his voice, and yet it made her homesick at the same time. He mentioned that he was still assigned to his new partner for the trip but that things were working out better than expected.
“That’s good,” she said. “Yeah. Good. Real good.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing’s wrong.” There was a pause. “I’m just missing you,” she said. “A lot.”
“I’ll be there when?” he asked sleepily. “Three days?”
“Yeah. Three days.”
Three days projected into the future had never seemed so long a prospect. But she felt strengthened by hearing his voice.
“I love you and miss you,” she said. She stood at her window and looked out on the snowy square, which was busy with people. There was also a trio of policemen with automatic weapons. She scanned for the man who had confronted her the previous night, but she saw no one who might be him.
“Same,” he answered. “I love you and miss you. You sure there’s nothing wrong?”
“I’m sure,” she said. And now, hearing him, nothing was wrong. “Travel safe, okay?”
“It’s Air Force One,” he said. “Government of the United States of America. Greatest nation on earth. You know what that means, right? Every inch of the aircraft, construction, maintenance, fuel, hey… it’s all done by the
