A Season for the Dead

Twenty-Nine

Nic Costa didn’t know where to begin. Teresa Lupo was on her hands and knees, scrutinizing the sprawling bloodstain which marked a good yard or more of the grubby carpet. Falcone and some detectives he only half recognized were on the far side of the octagonal chamber carefully going through the drawers of a small desk, studying every piece of paper it contained.

On the ceiling and upper walls were scores of black and white photographs, badly developed, roughly cut and taped to the crumbling plasterwork. Whatever other talents Gino Fosse possessed, he was a dedicated and skillful peeping tom. The pictures were taken through half-open curtains, with a long telephoto lens. They were grainy, squalid, intrusive. Most of the people in them were unknown to Nic.

But—Rinaldi was there, in three sets of shots, each with a different, unidentifiable woman. The other cast members were only half-seen: a woman bent over the spread-eagle legs of a bored-looking hooker with blowsy hair; a fat, whalelike man whose mountain of white flesh tumbled onto the skin of the figure slumped beneath him. The pictures could have come from some porn magazine touted in the sex shops around Termini Station. The missionary position was largely absent.

Several photos showed women gagged, hands bound behind their back, eyes staring blankly at the white shape heaving over them. Fosse had taken his time, photographing from every angle he could find.

Then Nic moved along the wall and saw what he knew, with some dread, was bound to be there. She was naked, on her back, legs wide open, waiting for a man who was only just visible, sliding toward her across the floor. It could have been the fat man in the other picture.

The location looked like an expensive apartment. A hotel maybe, since the bed had that just-made look that spoke of housemaids and room service. It was the first in a series. In others she was crouched in a vulgar sexual position, looking over her shoulder as if inviting the unseen viewer. There were grainy close-ups of her breasts and her abdomen: gross, invasive pictures, clinical in their detail.

It was important, Nic thought, to scrutinize these images closely in order to understand what they had to say. There was no question of prurience. He found it impossible to look at them without feeling he was living on the edge of some waking nightmare, a world in which all the normal rules of human behavior counted for nothing. He examined those in which her face was visible. She seemed detached, somehow, perhaps even drugged. Sara may have gone to this place willingly but she did not wish to be a party to these games. Or was he being naïve?

Her life was alien to him. Perhaps he really was, like his father, simply out-of-date. Perhaps it was not so unusual to meet a stranger, decide casually to have sex, and then play these bizarre, dark games in front of the prying camera. Terror and ecstasy sometimes walked hand in hand. Nic Costa was lost for answers. He was still staring at the photographs when a hand touched his arm.

It was Teresa Lupo, who looked a little less crazy each time he saw her. She was tugging off her gloves. She seemed concerned. “What do you say, Nic?”

“Nothing. It’s beyond me. Rinaldi I recognize. The rest…”

She nodded at the body bag. “The woman’s over there. Most of her anyway. You know what I find most interesting? These aren’t pictures of the protagonists. He’s not trying to capture them at all. What he wants is the partner. The hooker. Or whatever they were.”

Teresa threw the gloves into a plastic bag, sniffed, then let down her black hair, which was tied in a rough, childlike pigtail. The act made Luca Rossi glance covetously at her from across the room.

“He kept plenty of souvenirs too.” She pointed at a couple of the photographs which showed Sara’s clothes on the floor beside her naked body: flowered pants, a bra and a loose, flowing dress. “Look.” She pointed to what was an untidy pile of underwear thrown into the corner of the room, so much it must have come from several different sources. “He’s a collector. I just took a quick look but you can match some of those things with the photographs. This is a very tactile man. He needs some physical evidence to remind him of what he’s been up to. Maybe he creeps in and steals them. Maybe he’s best friends with some nut at the laundry.”

Nic couldn’t stop looking at the photographs. “He’s insane.”

“Never mind him. Think of the women. At least the one woman we know. Look at the facts,” Teresa said, pointing at a series of overlapping prints. They showed Sara lying on the floor, neck uncomfortably upright, face to the distant camera, staring toward the lens. The man was scarcely in the frame. “What do you see?”

“A naked woman in an uncomfortable position. I don’t get it. I don’t understand what motivates Fosse.”

“It turns him on, I imagine. But look at the woman. Some answers are there. What message is she sending out?”

“She just seems… passive. As if it’s happening to someone else.”

Crazy Teresa groaned. “You call yourself a detective? Are there any signs of arousal? Are her nipples erect? Is she opening her legs for whoever she’s about to screw?”

He pulled down the clearest of the prints and peered at it. “No. Like I said, she looks passive.”

“You’ve got to extract as much as you can from this. You get erect nipples for a variety of reasons. Arousal’s just one of them. Cold. Fear. Think about it. This woman isn’t feeling any of those. What does that mean?” She waited. He said nothing. “It means she’s naked, possibly with a stranger, and she’s not that bothered. She’s not even half afraid. If I were a detective, what would that make me think? Why would a woman behave like that? She knows this game. Maybe she’s played it before. She’s practiced.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Look at it, Nic. Dispassionately.” She stared at the pictures again. “I could almost convince myself she knows the camera’s there. But I guess that’s going too far.”

It was. It had to be. He was unconvinced by what she said and that was not simply because he didn’t want to believe it.

Teresa Lupo’s big hand patted his good shoulder. “Alternatively, dear boy, she’s just very comfortable with strangers. I give up. Now excuse me. I need to write up some notes.”

Luca Rossi wandered over, discreetly touched her backside, then went to stand by him. “How are you feeling, kid?”

“Fine.”

“I heard the woman’s still going to stay with you. Is that wise?”

“Why should it be unwise?” Costa snapped.

“Hey. Will you stop biting my head off? Someone tried to kill you this morning because of her. In case you forgot.”

Costa cursed himself. It was unlike him to take out his unhappiness on others. “Apologies again. But why shouldn’t Sara stay with me? You people know how to guard the place now. I promise I won’t play hooky anymore. Besides, I think she’s still got things to tell us. In her own time. When she feels she can trust someone.”

The big man grimaced. “I’ll take your word on that.” He nodded at the body bag. “You hear who this is?”

Costa shook his head.

“Semifamous lady. Alicia Vaccarini. Parliamentary deputy for Bologna. She hit the headlines when she turned out to be a dyke and the party bosses disowned her. Remember?”

“Vaguely,” he lied. Reading the papers was never one of his strong points.

Rossi eyed Falcone, who was sifting through a new pile of photographs found under the desk. “And he thinks he’s got an idea why she was on the list too. Come on. Let’s join the fun.”

Falcone shuffled through the set of prints someone had found in a tiny darkroom downstairs, built into an alcove. Unlike the ones in the room above, these weren’t peeping-tom shots. They were taken in the tower, of women who’d received personal attention from Gino Fosse. In the pictures all were bound, exposed for the lens in a variety of sexual positions. Most looked scared, and two showed signs of violence: bruised eyes, cuts on the mouth and nose. None of them, however, was deemed worthy of display in the small octagonal room in the tower above, which seemed odd. As if Fosse drew more inspiration from the stolen images than the ones in which he was directly involved.

“He raped them,” Rossi observed.

“Really?” Falcone wondered. “So why didn’t any of them complain? We don’t have anything on this man.”

“Who is he?” Costa asked.

One of the detectives he didn’t know said, “Gino Fosse. Priest at the hospital up the road for the last month. Before that he worked in the Vatican. This place is a church property. They leased it to him at a peppercorn rent. We’re talking to the Diocese but they say they just got handed him by someone from on high. Got told to put him in here, look after him, get him a nice quiet job, keep him out of trouble.”

Falcone glanced uneasily at the pictures. “He had bad habits. Perhaps they were trying to hide him away for some reason. Perhaps he’d done this before.”

The detective shrugged. “If he did, I doubt we’re going to find out about it. I’ve put in the calls. No one’s ringing back. I’ll tell you one thing, though, this guy likes jazz. The place is full of CDs. He had one track on loop when we turned up. Sense of humor, huh? It must have been on when he did it.”

The man held out the case: a picture of a dapper violinist sitting in a gorilla’s open palm, and the title, King Kong, Jean-Luc Ponty Plays the Music of Frank Zappa.

“The track in particular,” he said, “is called 'How Would You Like to Have a Head Like That?’”

The morgue team heaved the body bag onto a gurney and lugged it to the narrow stairs. “Alicia Vaccarini,” Falcone mused. “I met her once. She was on a couple of police committees. Cold bitch.” He looked at Costa. “Why her, do you think?”

It couldn’t be avoided. “Sara Farnese slept with her,” Nic replied.

“A one-night stand just like this Fosse character. Which is why she never mentioned either of them.”

Luca Rossi whistled. “Jesus. How many other things has that woman got hidden inside her?”

“She says there were others like that. No names. She never knew them.”

Falcone put a hand to his silver beard and stared out the slitted window. “At least we know where Fosse is getting some of his information from. Peeping through windows, following the Farnese woman around.”

“Not just her,” Costa objected. “There must be ten, twelve different women in these pictures.”

“Right. Let’s show their pictures to people. Specially to Vice. See if anyone knows them. Let’s see if we can identify any of the men too. They might appreciate the warning. Look for some link between Fosse and Denney too. It has to be there. Vaccarini certainly had one.”

Alicia Vaccarini was, Falcone told them, a player in political circles, with no small amount of influence. Earlier in the year she was on the committee that looked at changing some of the diplomatic immunity rules for the Vatican. The same one that Rinaldi testified before. Interesting or what? If that vote had gone the right way, Cardinal Denney could have walked onto the first plane home unimpeded by the authorities, ready to vanish. Was this coincidence? Or was this the fundamental reason behind the murders? In either case, how was Sara Farnese involved?

The detectives looked at each other. They knew when a case was slipping away from them. There were too many loose ends, too many roads to nowhere.

“This is turning bad,” Falcone said, glowering at Rossi. “We missed our chance this morning. You…” He looked at Costa. “You’re fit to be here?”

“No problem.”

“Go back and see your friend Hanrahan. He’s been on the phone hinting that maybe Cardinal Denney will let you into his apartment for a talk. Could be they have something else to bargain with. And Sara Farnese. You still think she should stay at your father’s house?”

“If that’s what she wants.”

“To hell with what she wants,” Falcone snarled. “Get something out of that woman. She’s running rings around us, you in particular. Find out what the hell she’s been dabbling in because this is more than just some nasty by-product of casual sex. She’s been screwing the wrong people. Maybe someone with a cardinal’s cap, for all I know—”

“She denies knowing Denney,” Costa interjected, weary of the man’s relentless badgering.

Rossi wrinkled his fleshy nose in distaste. “She denied having any other lovers until one turned up without a head.”

“Just talk to her,” Falcone ordered. “Don’t stop until she says something. And here’s a question for all of you: Just where does a runaway priest hide in Rome, for God’s sake?”

“Somewhere we can’t touch him,” Rossi said. “That place.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Falcone sneered. “This Fosse character is just like Denney now. They gave him some kind of chance. He threw it away. They won’t want him near them. He’s not in the Vatican. He’s here. In the city. Someone knows. Someone can tell us. Get the papers on to it. Is there a photograph of him among these?”

“Nothing,” someone said. “We’ve got fingerprints. That’s all.”

“We need more. Costa can give a description to our police artist.”

Rossi scribbled out a note and gave it to one of the junior cops.

Teresa Lupo bumped into the gathering, gave them all a schoolgirl smile, fluttered her copious eyelids and said sweetly, “I’ve got DNA. If anyone’s interested.”

Falcone took one step back from her and said, “What?”

There was one final package that hadn’t gone on the gurney, a black plastic supermarket bag. Teresa had it in her grasp and, with gloved hands, she opened the sealed top for a second look. The men watched as she withdrew the head of Alicia Vaccarini tenderly, held it by the severed neck and turned the dead politician’s features around to face them. Luca Rossi breathed deeply, then moved to the window to stare out at the Clivus Scauri. A couple of the others joined him.

“Sorry, boys,” Teresa said with a grin. “This is all for your benefit, you know.”

She held the short hair, allowing the head to dangle freely, then opened the mouth with a plastic prong, looking inside, peering into the throat. Even Costa, not the most squeamish of men, felt something churn in his stomach. Then she tucked the head back in the bag, called one of the team over and passed it to him.

“Well?” She beamed at the cops. “Just making sure I don’t say anything premature. Does anyone here want to know exactly how she died? Or am I just along for the ride and your charming company?”

Falcone lit a cigarette. The men were grateful, even Nic Costa. The head stank of meat and blood and the smell seemed amplified in the cramped, overheated room. “We’re listening,” Falcone said.

“Listen well because there may be questions after,” she said, walking to the wooden pillar in the center of the tower. “You boys are causing so much work for me right now I’m going to have to call in extra budget. If I have to go through the inquisition to explain that, you can too.”

She stood at the window side of the beam, smiling as the men scuttled out of the way. “You’ve seen the sword.”

“Oh yes,” Rossi agreed, his back still turned but intent on every word.

“Interesting weapon. Slim. Medium length. Not a stabbing sword. More the kind of thing used on horseback. Not what the hoi polloi would think of when it comes to decapitation, but then, what do they know? They just think: Head needs to come off, call for the axe. Stupid. Messy. Inefficient. You know how many times they get the whole thing off in one go? One out of ten maybe. Usually they’re hacking at it like some dumb peasant trying to get a chicken ready for dinner.”

Without a word Rossi crossed the room and started to march down the stairs, fumbling at his cigarette pack all the time.

“A sword is the smart executioner’s weapon,” she continued, undeterred by the big man’s exit. “This man knows his stuff. He’s done his research. There’s a picture in the cathedral in Valetta, The Beheading of John the Baptist. Our young athletic friend Costa will know it, I guess. The work of Caravaggio on his travels, when he was avoiding the law. I’ll be surprised if your killer hasn’t seen it too. You’ve got the Baptist on the floor already dead. His neck’s almost entirely severed by a sword not dissimilar to this one. And over him stands the executioner, hiding, for some reason, a dagger behind his back. Which he needs for the final cut. The blade gets through the spinal cord, you see, but tends to leave behind a flap of skin that you have to snip through to get the whole thing off. Look…”

She pulled out a small package from the bags of evidence and opened it. There was a tagged knife: a kitchen implement with a broad sharp blade, stained black with dry blood.

“Exactly the same thing,” Teresa said with an undisguised note of triumph.

Even Falcone was lost for a suitable remark.

“The question is,” she continued, “which saint is it that our guy is trying to emulate here? I mean, so many died by losing their heads. Is this really like the perp we have come to know and love? Is this what he intended all along? Surely not. Otherwise why go to the trouble of San Clemente and skinning that poor bastard on Tiber Island? This destroys his pattern somehow. And here’s one more thing.”

She’s mocking us, Costa thought. She’s relishing every moment of this.

“Isn’t anyone going to ask me the time?”

“Well?” Falcone demanded.

“Three, four hours ago. Couldn’t be more. He did this after he tried to take out our friend Costa. And he did it in a hurry. Conclusion? Boys, boys! You’re the detectives here. I’m just a butcher’s girl with a postgrad degree. But to me that says: Someone rang him. Someone said, do your worst then get your crazy butt out of there before the cops come down.”

They watched her stroll happily down the stairs. There was a look on Falcone’s face that Costa recognized. He was thinking on his feet.

Falcone turned to one of Teresa’s assistants, Di Capua, a tubby, shapeless student-type face with long, lank hair. “How many possible DNA samples do you have in all?”

“Here? You want me to count them?”

“And the rest?”

“Skin. Blood. Bone. We could keep the lab going for a week.”

“So what are you doing with them?”

“Right now? Keeping them cool. We just haven’t had time.”

“Make time. Get samples from every one of those people we’re guarding, too. The ones the Farnese woman named. Understood?”

“You’re the boss,” Di Capua said.

Falcone crossed the room and pointed at the pile of discarded women’s clothes. “Put these in too. Just for luck. I want to know who’s been doing what with who here.”

Finally, he returned and took Costa to one side. “When you meet Denney,” he said, “there’s something I need you to do. It may sound odd but just do as I say.”

“Sure,” Nic agreed. And it was odd, very odd indeed.