Spider

22

Florence, Tuscany Jack waited until the train guard had checked his ticket and left the carriage before he settled down to work on Massimo Albonetti's file.

One glance at the documents was enough to put him on edge.

There were two thick documents, the first in Italian, the second, he presumed, its English translation. He put the Italian version to one side and focused on the English one. It kicked off with a well-written executive summary, which he suspected had been penned by Massimo himself. It stated what Orsetta had already told him, that the Italian police believed they were investigating a serial killer who posed a seriously high risk to the public.

Jack scanned back to the top of the document and saw it was dated the last week of June; the case was certainly a live one. He realized he was reading a translation of a confidential memo that had been sent to the Italian Prime Minister's private office. From this first page, Jack was aware that he was probably one of maybe only half a dozen people privileged enough to see the report.

A photograph of a victim was paper-clipped to the file. She was a beautiful young woman in her twenties with long, dark brown hair and even darker eyes. She was wearing inexpensive, slightly owlish glasses, but they suited her. The text named her as Cristina Barbuggiani, a 26-year-old librarian from Livorno, who kept herself to herself and was described as bright, shy and academic. Her age fitted BRK's profile to a T. Cristina had been a history graduate and had spent much of her spare time travelling to Montelupo Fiorentino just outside Florence, to help on the archaeological excavation of some Roman ruins. Farms, villas and even early factories set up to produce wine, olive oil and corn had been unearthed in the area.

Jack wondered why serial killers always seemed randomly to select the most undeserving of victims. Why were international drug-runners, paedophiles and rapists never their victims?

The report's top-line executive summary described another of the similarities with the BRK case that Orsetta had outlined to him over breakfast. Dismembered pieces of Cristina's body had been found spread across kilometres of the western coastline. Each piece, and apparently there had been thirteen in total, had been found wrapped in black plastic bags and weighted down. This too fitted with BRK's chosen method of disposal. Jack read on and learned that from where the body parts were recovered, it was deduced that they had been thrown in from the shore – from a beach, cliff or nearby rocks. No boat had been used. The feet, shins, thighs, trunk, lower and upper arms of the victim had been disposed of and found in entirely different places. Jack turned a page and the air in his lungs froze. All the body parts had been recovered, bagged and tagged, and had autopsy reference numbers. All, that is, except for the left hand. Jack understood the significance immediately. In his entire career, he'd only ever come across one offender who'd kept such a trophy. The Black River Killer. After four years, the silence was over, and BRK had returned.