Day Of Confession

62

Lake Como, Italy. Monday, July 13, 4:30 p.m.

Roscani turned to look at Scala and Castelletti in the seats behind him, then with a glance at the jet-helicopter's pilot, turned to stare back out the window. They had been flying for nearly three hours, north along the Adriatic coast, over the cities of Ancona, Rimini, and Ravenna, then inland toward Milan, and finally north again to drop down over the high hills and sweep across Lake Como toward the town of Bellagio.

Below, he could see the tiny white wakes of pleasure boats cutting the deep blue of the lake's surface like decorations on a cake. To his left, a dozen opulent villas surrounded by manicured gardens dotted the shoreline, and to his right, the steep hillsides dropped sharply to the lake itself.

They'd been still in Pescara at the scene of the apartment house fire when he'd taken an urgent call from Taglia. A man thought to be Father Daniel Addison had been brought to a private villa on Lake Como by chartered hydrofoil the night before, Gruppo Cardinale's chief had said. The hydrofoil captain had seen the broadcast of the continuing public appeal messages on television and was all but certain who his passenger was. Yet he'd been reluctant to say anything because the villa was very exclusive and he was afraid he might lose his job if he was wrong and accidentally exposed a celebrity of some kind. But then sometime this morning his wife had convinced him he should notify the authorities and let them make the decision.

Celebrity, Roscani thought as the pilot banked sharply left and dropped lower over the water; who the hell cared who got exposed if they were on the right track? Time was more critical than ever.

The body found in the rubble had been that of Giulia Fanari, the wife of Luca Fanari, the man who, records had shown, had rented an ambulance from the slain proprietors of the ambulance company in Pescara. Signora Fanari had been dead before the fire began. Killed by a sharp instrument, probably an ice pick, inserted into the skull at the base of the brain. For all intents she was 'pithed', the way a biologist might dispatch a frog he was about to dissect. Cold-blooded wasn't a description. From the way it had been done, it appeared to Roscani to have been an act performed almost passionately, as if, with each involuntary squirm and muscular jolt the victim gave as her brain was slowly and deliberately crushed inside her skull, the killer was enjoying it. Maybe even sexually. If nothing else, the sheer inventiveness of the act told him the perpetrator was a person with absolutely no concept of conscience. A true sociopath who had complete indifference to the feelings, pain, or well-being of other people. A human being truly evil from birth. And if this sociopath was their illusory third person, Roscani could eliminate the 'they' of it, because everything told him the murder had been done by one person alone, and he could eliminate the 'she' as well, because it would have taken enormous strength to kill Giulia Fanari the way it had been done, meaning, almost without doubt, the creature who did it was a man. And if he had been in Pescara on the trail of Father Daniel and, through his doings there, had learned where he had been taken, it would mean he was a great deal closer to finding Father Daniel than they were.

Which was why, as Roscani watched the ground come up quickly, abruptly becoming obscured in a cloud of dust as the helicopter set down at the edge of thick woods near the lake, he prayed to God that the injured man delivered to the villa was indeed the priest, and that they would get there first – before the man with the ice pick.