Day Of Confession

94

The grotto. Same time.

Roscani stood on the landing, looking into the motorboat. A man and woman lay dead inside it. The woman had been lucky he hadn't used the razor – the way he'd done it on the man with her, the way he'd done it on Edward Mooi, whose nearly headless body had been found floating in the inner channel.

Edward Mooi.

'Dammit!' he said out loud. 'Dammit to hell!' He should have known he was the one who had hidden the priest. Should have gone back and pressured him the moment he'd found the engines on the outboard were still warm. But he hadn't, because the call had come about the dead men in the lake and he'd gone there instead.

Turning from the landing, letting the tech people work, he walked back down the grotto's main corridor past the ancient stone benches toward the room at the end where the priest had been kept, where Scala and Castelletti were now and where the body of a carabiniere had been brought from the maze of back passageways – another of the ice picker's victims, the ice picker who they now knew was blond and had scratches down his cheek.

'Biondo,' the dying carabiniere had managed, his eyes glazed over, one hand grasping Scala's, his other clawing feebly at his own cheek.

''Graffiato,' he'd coughed, his fingers still pulling at his cheek. Graffiato.

'Biondo. Graffiato.'

Blond. And strong. And quick. And, they surmised, the skin on his face scratched as well, most likely by the fingernails of the murdered woman, under which fragments of skin had been found. Fragments that would be sent to the lab for DNA analysis. New technology, Roscani thought. But useful only when they had a suspect, when they could take a blood sample and see if they had a match.

Entering the room, Roscani moved past Scala, and Castelletti went again into the room where the nun's personal belongings had been found.

Nursing sister Elena Voso, age twenty-seven, a member of the Congregation of Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart; home convent, the Hospital of St Bernardine in the Tuscan city of Siena.

Walking back to the main tunnel, Roscani ran a hand through his hair and tried to get some sense of the place itself. Eros Barbu's enormous wealth was everywhere, and yet the people who had hidden here, a nun and a priest, and the dead men who had protected them, were not wealthy. Why had Barbu allowed his property to be used as a hiding place?

It was a question Barbu himself would never answer. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were now investigating his apparent suicide on a mountain trail overlooking Lake Louise in Banff. Death by shotgun in the mouth. Except that Roscani knew it was no suicide, but murder, done, he was certain, by a colleague of the blond ice picker, who knew where Barbu was and how to find him and had killed him either in retaliation for helping Father Daniel escape or in an effort to find out where he was. Perhaps it was even the same colleague who killed Harry Addison's boss in California. If so, the conspiracy was much broader and far-reaching than it first seemed.

In the distance, Roscani could hear the echo of the search dogs and their handlers leading the carabinieri teams probing the maze of tunnels for Elena Voso and the fugitive priest – and Harry Addison. He had no proof. It was a hunch and nothing else. But somehow Roscani sensed the American had been there and helped his brother to escape.

Taking a half-eaten chocolate biscuit from his pocket, the Italian unwrapped the foil and bit into it, looking up as he did.

High above, a helicopter unit was coordinating Gruppo Cardinale teams on the ground combing the cliffs above the grotto. A clear set of footprints had been found outside the elevator shaft. And there were tire tracks of a vehicle driven in, parked, and then driven away. Whether any of it would lead them to the blond man or the fugitives it was too early to tell.

Whatever had happened, or would happen, one thing alone had become chillingly clear – Roscani was no longer dealing simply with a fugitive priest and his brother, but with people internationally connected, highly skilled, and with no reservation at all about killing. And anyone with even the slightest idea where the priest might be, or what he might know, had become a hard target seemingly reachable anywhere.