The Reincarnationist

Chapter 24

They had walked the general area dozens of times, but Inspector Tatti had asked them to fan out this time and cover a two-mile radius in every direction. The guard who had been on duty yesterday when Professor Rudolfo was shot was still missing. The man’s wife said he’d left for work as usual at 3:00 a.m. His shift was from 4:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. She’d packed his favorite meal-a mortadella hero and a big thermos of coffee-and gone back to bed.

He never came home.

The afternoon sun played games with the clouds, making the search much more complicated. It would be bright for ten minutes, and then shadows would fall over the whole landscape, turning an innocent rock into a man’s head, a clump of tree roots into a hand.

Within the grove it was even more difficult to figure out what one was looking at. The ancient trees were so large and leafy that almost no light penetrated, so although it was only midafternoon it appeared to be late night.

The inspector in charge, Marcello Angelini, told his officers to use their flashlights if they couldn’t see. They walked in formation, swinging the lights back and forth over the terrain, stopping every three or four minutes to check out a suspicious shape.

But so far they still hadn’t found anything. This place was overgrown with bushes and vines. The ground was littered with nuts and seeds and pits and leaf rot from last year. Except somehow, Angelini thought, it was beautiful. It felt similar to how it was in church when there was no service going on and you could sit down by yourself to collect your thoughts and think things through.

He walked on the outer edge of the line, the last policeman in formation, showing his men that he, too, could do the hard work. When his light picked out something shiny in the shrubbery, he broke away and walked over to the spot. When he got there, he couldn’t see anything but dark, glossy leaves. Maybe his flashlight had just caught one a certain way. He stepped back. Once he had some distance, he saw it. Then he advanced, keeping the light trained on that one specific spot. Yes, it was there. Silvery and shimmering.

Bending down, he reached between the leaves of the shrub and felt something cold and metallic, then something colder.

Angelini let go. Stepped back. Stared at the shrub. Let his eyes lose focus. Then he saw the abnormality in the leaf cover. Someone had sawed down the middle of the huge bush and made a hiding place deep inside, where, in the beam of the flashlight, Angelini could see the man’s bloated body. Moving closer, he leaned down and shuddered. The man’s throat had been slashed and his naked torso was painted with his now black, dried blood.

Finally, he thought, this was a bona fide homicide investigation. Angelini knew his boss, Detective Tatti, well enough to know what that meant: none of them would have much time off in the next few days. He was almost sorry he’d seen that damn silver watchband.

Poor man, though, he thought, and made the sign of the cross.

What had he been guarding? What was so precious this time that a man was killed for it? He’d ask Marianna when he got home. She read the newspapers; she’d know what they were digging up at this site and if it had been worth dying for.