Spider

40

Rome The Cristina Barbuggiani case conference was due to start at two p.m., but Massimo had insisted they took a leisurely 'catch-up' lunch at a restaurant around the corner, explaining that in Italy two p.m. meant any time before four.

The conference was being staged in a dedicated Incident Room and people were chattering loudly and pointing at whiteboards as Jack and Massimo entered. The Direttore introduced Benito, Roberto and the pathologist, Dottoressa Annelies van der Splunder. 'Orsetta Portinari I think you already know,' he said, suppressing the start of a smile.

'Very pleased to see you again, Mr King,' said Orsetta warmly.

'And you, Inspector,' said Jack, a little less enthusiastically. 'Forgive me,' he went on, turning to the pathologist, a tall, plumpish woman in her late thirties with straw-like short blonde hair. 'Your name doesn't sound particularly Italian.'

'You really are a detective,' joked the Dottoressa. 'I'm Dutch. Had the good fortune to fall in love with an Italian and moved here about seven years ago. I worship Rome; this is home for me now.'

'Jack and his wife are also Italophiles,' added Massimo. 'They have a small, but I'm told very exclusive, hotel in Tuscany.'

'Sounds gorgeous,' said the pathologist. 'You must give me details. My partner Lunetta and I are always looking for places for a long weekend away.'

'Lunetta?' interjected Orsetta. 'Lunetta della Rossellina, the fashion model?'

'Yes,' said the pathologist, pleased the name had been recognized. 'Lunetta's love is clothes, and mine is food and wine – as I think you can see.'

'Then Italy is perfect for both of you,' said Massimo diplomatically. 'Dottoressa, Jack has read your report, but I'm wondering if you'd be kind enough to update him on the conversation you and I had last night about Cristina's blood type.'

'Of course,' the pathologist said. 'Do you mind if we sit down? I need to get my glasses to go through some notes.'

The team gathered around a long, plain conference table made of beech and Annelies van der Splunder put on some round wire-framed glasses that Orsetta thought made her look half-headmistress, half-owl.

'The examinations I carried out were on the dismembered limbs, torso, stomach contents and head of a young white, Italian woman in her mid-twenties, who I now know was Cristina Barbuggiani, a citizen of Livorno. The dismembered body parts were delivered to me over a period of about a week, the poor woman's head being the last to arrive for my attention. The decapitated head gave me the most information, and from this I was able to ascertain that Cristina was AB Rhesus negative.'

'That's quite rare, isn't it?' asked Jack.

'Yes, it is. And even though blood typing is my pet subject, I'm afraid it's hard to say exactly how rare in Italy; probably less than nine per cent of the population are of the AB grouping. AB is the rarest and incidentally the newest of discovered blood groups. O is the oldest, it goes back to the Stone Age. A is the next oldest, and has its roots in the farming settlements of Norway, Denmark, Austria, Armenia and Japan. AB, however, dates back less than a thousand years and came about as all the blood groups began to mix in Europe.'

'And the Rhesus factoring?' asked Jack.

Annelies removed her glasses for a moment. 'As I'm sure you know, the D antigen is the most common. If it is present, we describe the grouping as positive. In Cristina, it was missing, therefore she is Rhesus negative. Probably only about three per cent of the population share her blood type.'

'This really helps us,' said Jack, turning to Massimo, 'but only if you can find it on him, or find the scene where BRK cut up Cristina's body. Evidentially, tying her blood to a suspect would be a very powerful argument in court.'

'Yes, but finding the scene?' said Benito, shrugging his shoulders. 'So far it has not been possible.'

'Where have you tried?' asked Jack, non-judgementally.

'We've had to focus mainly on Livorno and the big cities that have strong links with the town and province,' said Benito, 'so we're working out towards Pisa, which is twenty kilometres away, Lucca, forty kilometres, Florence, about eighty and finally Siena, which is about a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty kilometres away. We're looking at hire car businesses, hotels and guesthouses and even longdistance trucking companies. We are asking them all if they have had to clean any blood from any of the vehicles or property used by recent clients. So far nothing.'

Jack doubted the search would provide anything to build a case on but he understood that they had to go through the motions. Often it was the routine checks, rather than brilliant detective work, that provided critical breakthroughs.

'Let me get this right,' he said, addressing the pathologist again. 'According to your report, you believe the killer kept the head for maybe up to two weeks before he sent it here?'

'Approximately,' said van der Splunder, cautiously. 'Please be careful not to mix up death and decapitation. Death was on, or about, the fourteenth; decapitation and dismemberment were most likely on or around the twentieth.'

'You mean death wasn't through decapitation – he killed her, kept her corpse, then beheaded her?'

'Exactly.'

'How did she die?' asked Jack.

The pathologist flinched. 'I found some evidence of pre-mortem focal bruising on the larynx.'

'She was strangled, or choked somehow?' asked Jack.

'I believe so,' said van der Splunder. 'There was no evidence of ligature strangulation, so I imagine it was done manually. Indeed, some of the marks on the throat are consistent with continuous deep pressure, possibly from a man's knuckles.'

Jack knew what it meant, and why she had flinched. It would have taken about four minutes to strangle Cristina in this way. He hoped that she'd blacked out after about thirty seconds when her brain became starved of oxygen, but he was sure it would still have been a horribly slow death. Perhaps the most horrible imaginable, with the killer using his hands to choke her to the point of death, then easing up and letting her recover, before choking her again. Jack knew many stranglers who had turned the act of murder into a sexual marathon, indulging their violence in small ebbs and flows, before brutally climaxing with the final fatal pressure of their fingers.

'Care to share your thoughts with us?' said Massimo casually.

Jack shook himself out of the death scene, and returned to the more functional business of the timeline. 'Let's presume BRK was responsible for Cristina's murder and also for the desecration of Sarah Kearney's grave in Georgetown. Given the approximate time of Cristina's death and the recorded time that some kids discovered Sarah's disturbed grave, we should be able to work out the window when he had to fly out of Italy and into America.'

Massimo nodded. 'We are already doing border patrol passport checks on all male US citizens over thirty years of age who entered and left Italy in the last three months. You will be amazed at how many come and go!'

Jack ploughed on. 'Well, if we get this timeline right, we should be able to narrow the focus considerably.' He moved to a whiteboard, picked up a black marker and wrote the key points as he talked. 'Cristina is last seen alive by friends on the night of June the ninth. The day after, the tenth, she's reported missing. She's killed around the fourteenth, but he hangs on to the corpse, keeping it intact for six days, which takes us to the twentieth.' He glanced over to the pathologist and she signalled her agreement with his account. 'On the twentieth he started disposing of the limbs. We have our first public finding of remains two days later, on the twenty-second, and the next significant date is the arrival of Cristina's head at police HQ in Rome on the twenty-fifth, which is examined by the good professor here on the twenty-sixth.' Jack paused to make sure he hadn't made any mistakes. No one corrected him, so he slotted in the last pieces of the jigsaw. 'The FBI thinks he was in the cemetery at Georgetown, South Carolina on the night of June the thirtieth, morning of July the first, so it's reasonable to presume that he may have left Italy on the evening of June the twenty-fifth, or morning of the twenty-sixth, which would have got him into America on the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh, just a couple of days before the desecration of Sarah's grave.'

'Is there a direct flight from Italy to Georgetown?' asked Massimo.

Jack frowned. 'Don't know. Myrtle is quite a big international airport, maybe there are flights from Rome or Milan.'

'We'll re-focus on these tighter dates,' promised Benito, adding to his ever-lengthening list.

They stared at the board again, then Massimo asked, 'Why do you think he picked Livorno?'

'Good question,' replied Jack. 'In the past, BRK has always killed near a major coastline. A tidal sea is a very handy way to dispose of a body, so it might be as simple as that. Or there may be a bigger significance that we are yet to discover. We can't rule out a connection to a port – it could be that he is a sailor of some kind – although I have to say that we've done extensive checks with the American navy and haven't come up with any possible suspects.'

'Livorno has a very active port,' said Orsetta. 'Unless I'm mistaken, I think there's a naval academy there.'

'There is,' said Benito, 'it's the training school for officers. The Italian navy has been in Livorno since the late eighteen hundreds.'

'How do you know that?' asked Orsetta with a wry smile.

Benito held up his hands in mock surrender. 'Okay, so I once dreamt of being a sailor, and ended up as a policeman instead. It's nothing to be ashamed of.'

Once the laughter had died down Jack picked up the thread. 'We don't really know why BRK was in Livorno, but we're going to presume that he was there and that somehow he singled out Cristina. Were there any witness reports of her being seen with any strangers over the last few days before she disappeared?'

Massimo shook his head.

'Didn't think so,' continued Jack, 'so it's possible that BRK persuaded her to get into a vehicle and travel voluntarily with him to a secluded place that he'd set up beforehand.'

'Hang on,' said Massimo. 'Orsetta, wasn't Cristina into helping out at some architectural dig near Florence?'

'Yes, she was,' confirmed Orsetta. 'Friends said she was regularly at Montelupo Fiorentino; there was some talk about uncovering a frescoed burial chamber.'

'Our girl was a tomb raider?' asked Jack.

Orsetta corrected him. 'Not at all. In fact, just the opposite. She was very much on the official side of archaeology, she was said to be extremely community-minded and passionate about preserving Italian culture.'

'A sad loss,' said Massimo, considering for a second what kind of woman Cristina had been and how she no doubt would have had the makings of a good mother as well as a good citizen, if only she'd had the chance to realize her potential. He scratched his chin, then went on, 'Let's concentrate on that route from Livorno to Montelupo Fiorentino. Maybe BRK met her on the way there, or on the way back. Remember a few years ago we had an offender who used to target women he saw pictured in newspapers? Well, let's see if Cristina was recently in any papers, magazines, tourist handouts or even on any Internet sites.'

'Will do,' confirmed Benito.

Jack abandoned his whiteboard and turned once more to the pathologist. 'Dottoressa, I know from your report that there were no traces of the offender's flesh, blood or semen on any of Cristina's limbs. But did toxicology test for any traces of lubrication or prophylactics, especially in the orifices of the skull?'

Annelies screwed up her face, not at the thought of how disgusting such an act was, but at recalling how badly decomposed the head had been. 'They haven't, but I wouldn't hold out much hope of success. Most tissue and organs had liquefied. There were some tiny markings in the mouth, but these were consistent with the plastic bag that held the note being jammed in there. Why do you ask?'

Jack slowly rubbed his face with his hands, as if washing off his tiredness. 'We know from case studies that killers who amputate heads very often use those skulls for sexual purposes, either penetrating the oral or ocular cavities or ejaculating over the skull itself. Similarly, we've had some success tracing forensically aware sexual offenders from the type of lubrication used on the condom they wore in the hope they wouldn't leave any tell-tale DNA at the scene.'

'I'll ask the lab to do their best,' said the pathologist, 'but as I said, I wouldn't hold out too much hope.'

'Thank you,' said Jack.

'I have a question,' said Massimo, Cristina's photograph neon-bright in his mind. 'This doesn't seem to be a killing purely for sexual gratification. So, why did he do it? Why did he take the life of this young woman?'

The question hung in a cloud of thoughtful silence, before Jack finally spoke. 'He desired her. The length of time that he spent with her before he killed her, and with her corpse afterwards, indicates that he was somehow attracted to her. Whatever the purpose of his kill, whether it was to relieve a violent tension inside him, to satisfy a deep sexual fantasy or to feed some dark psychological need, he was attracted to her. And once he had her, he wanted to keep her. You know as well as I do that maybe he was just trawling for a victim and her physical appearance was enough to set off some subliminal trigger in him that focused on her as a victim. Or it could be that there's a more substantial link, a previous meeting at which he became attracted to her. Somehow I don't think so. BRK stalks, kills and then -' Jack's voice trailed off as he tried to imagine what inner cravings drove the killer. 'Bearing in mind how long he seems to have kept her body post mortem, it seems an extra wave of desire came crashing in on him once she was dead. It's as though death feeds some psychological and possibly sexual need, fills some primal absence in his life.' Jack looked off into the distance, remembering the past cases, more than a dozen women who'd met their end in similar circumstances to Cristina. He turned back to Massimo. 'I guess we won't really be able to answer your question on why he kills until we actually catch him, and even then we might never find out the true reasons.'

'I agree,' said Massimo. 'In which case, the next big question we have to answer is: where will he kill again? Will it be here, in Italy, or back in the United States, where we believe he has returned to?'

Jack grimaced; not because of the seriousness of the questions, but because of a sharp pain inside his head, flying fast and low like a tornado and then fireballing to an explosive stop in his right temple. He felt a twitch erupt in the corner of his right eye, the same twitch he'd developed just weeks before collapsing at JFK.

'I don't know where,' said Jack, catching his breath and rubbing his face, hoping to massage away the twitch. Oldwounds hadreopened andthementalscars he hoped had healed were gaping painfully again.