Day Of Confession

55

Castelletti took a cigarette from a pack on the table in front of him and started to light it. Then he saw Roscani staring at him.

'You want me to go outside?'

'No.'

Abruptly Roscani took a bite out of a carrot stick. 'Finish what you were saying,' he said, then, glancing at Scala, turned to stare at the bulletin board on the wall next to the window.

They were in Roscani's office, their jackets off, sleeves rolled up, talking over the din of the air conditioner. The detectives bringing Roscani current on their separate investigations.

Castelletti had traced the numbers on the Harry Addison videocassette and found it had been bought at a store on Via Frattina, which was little more than a five-minute walk from the Hotel Hassler and the American's room.

Scala, looking for the source of the bandage seen on Addison's forehead in the video, had canvassed every street within a half-mile circumference of the site where Pio had been slain. In that area were twenty-seven physicians and three clinics. None had treated anyone matching Harry Addison's description the afternoon or evening of the murder. Furthermore, Roscani's request to have the video's image computer enhanced to get a more detailed look at the wallpaper behind Addison had proved a failure. There was simply not enough detail to find a clear pattern for a manufacturing source.

Crunching on his carrot, trying to ignore the sweet nicotine smell of Castelletti's cigarette, Roscani listened to it all. They had done their work and found nothing they could use; it was part of the game. Of far more interest was the bulletin board and the 3 x 5 cards listing the names of twenty-three of the twenty-four victims of the bombing of the Assisi bus. Beside them were photographs, some recent, some old, collected from family archives, mostly of the mutilated dead.

Roscani, like Scala and Castelletti, had looked at the photos a hundred times. Saw them while falling asleep, while shaving, while driving. If Father Daniel was alive, whom had he replaced? Which one of the twenty-three others?

Of the eight who had survived and the sixteen dead, all but one – the remains originally thought to be Father Daniel Addison – had been positively identified; even those five burned beyond recognition had had their identities confirmed through dental and medical records.

The one missing, victim number 24 – with no card or name or photograph – was the charred body in the box, the one originally thought to be that of Father Daniel Addison. So far he was without identity. Tests had shown no scars or other visible means of identification. A dental chart had been made from what little was left of the mouth, but as yet there was nothing with which to compare it. And files of missing persons had turned up nothing. And yet someone obviously was missing. A Caucasian male, probably in his late thirties or early forties. Five foot nine to six feet and weighing somewhere between-

Suddenly Roscani turned to look at his detectives.

'What if there were twenty-five people on the bus, not twenty-four? In the mass of confusion afterward, who could know exactly how many there were? The living and dead are taken to two different hospitals. Extra doctors and nurses are called in. Ambulances are banging around like rush-hour traffic. There are people terribly burned, some without arms or legs. We've got gurneys piling up in hallways. People are running. Yelling. Trying to keep some kind of order and the victims alive at the same time. Add that to whatever else was going on in those emergency rooms at the time. Who the hell sits there keeping track? There isn't enough help to begin with.

'And what did it take afterward? Almost a full day of talking to rescuers, looking at hospital records, talking to bus company people trying to tally up tickets sold. Another day after that working through the identities of the people we had. And in the end, everyone – us included – simply accepted the total count as twenty-four.

'It's not impossible at all to think one person could have been overlooked in that chaos. Someone who was never even formally admitted. Somebody who, if he was ambulatory enough, might have simply wandered off, walked away in the middle of everything. Or, maybe even had help getting the hell out of there.

'Damn it!' Roscani slammed his hand down on his desk. All the while they had been looking at what they had, not at what they didn't have. What they had to do now was go back to the hospitals. Check every record of every admittance that day. Talk to anyone who had been on duty. Find out what had happened to that one victim. Where he might have gone by himself or been taken.

Forty minutes later Roscani was on the Autostrada, driving north toward Fiano Romano and the hospital there, a juggler with too many balls in the air, a jigsaw man confounded by the sheer number of pieces. His mind swam and tried to push them away. For a while to think of nothing at all, let his subconscious work. Use the soft hum of the tires over the road as background to his splendid silence, his assoluta tranquillita.

Reaching up, he lowered the visor against the glare of the setting sun. God, he wanted a cigarette, and there was a pack still in the glove box. He started to reach for it, then caught himself and instead opened a brown bag on the seat next to him and took out not one of the carrot sticks his wife had cut for him but a large biscotto, one of a half dozen he had bought himself. He was about to bite into it when everything came full circle.

He had said nothing to the others about his idea that the Spanish Llama pistol found at the site of the bus explosion might not have belonged to Father Daniel but to someone on the bus who was there to kill him – Why? because there were no facts to back it up, and without some kind of evidence, thinking in that direction was a waste of time and energy. But, fuse that concept with the idea of a twenty-fifth man, and you had your uncounted passenger, perhaps one who bought a ticket at the last minute as he got on, a ticket the driver had not had time to tally before the bus blew up. If that were so, and it was he who was in the box, it would certainly explain why no one had come forward to identify him.

Still, he argued, it was conjecture. On the other hand, it was a feeling that kept coming back, more now than ever. It was a hunch, something all his years of experience told him – there had been a twenty-fifth passenger, and he had been onboard to kill Father Daniel. And if he was the assassin – Roscani stared at the horizon – then who blew up the bus? And why?