Viper

26

Laboratorio di Scienze Sorrentino, Napoli Forensic anthropologist Bernardo Sorrentino put his freshly manicured hands around the back of his head and shook out his long, black curly hair. The shoulder-length mane was his trademark. That and the black Gucci sunglasses he always wore whenever there was a photographer or TV camera around. The forty-two-year-old double divorcee had recently had one ear pierced, and wore a small thousand-euro diamond in it. Much to his disappointment this hadn't attracted a single column inch of comment.

The man the media called Il Grande Leone stared down at the monstrous mosaic of blackened bones laid out before him. On one brightly lit, large white marble table, lay the partially articulated skeleton of the woman who had been identified as Francesca Di Lauro. On an adjacent worktop were more of her blackened and splintered bones, some as small and fragile as pieces of eggshell. Given that the police had an ID there was now no point in piecing them together, but Sorrentino would do it anyway. To him it was like not completing a five-thousand-piece jigsaw, you didn't give up just because you could see what the picture was halfway through. His personal assistant, Ruben Agut, was already exhausted but was also committed to finishing the job. Sorrentino had picked the twenty-four-year-old straight from university. He was gay and Spanish and the anthropologist considered him to be yet another exotic accessory that would draw attention to himself. 'I'm going to get a lab coat,' he told him. 'Then we'll take those photographs and shoot more video.'

Ruben let out a deep and telling sigh. He was bored rigid with being the Great Lion's not-so-great gofer and was planning to quit and return to his native Barcelona. He and Sorrentino had had sex once. 'Purely an experiment in bisexuality,' his boss had called it. It had left Ruben feeling cheap and worthless. Before getting the camera he opened the recently arrived lab reports. He and Sorrentino had managed to unearth not only bone, but also dried organs and semi-fried muscle. These had been testable, they'd both been certain of that. It was a common mistake to presume that fire was the best means of destroying a body – far from it. The flames never destroyed everything of evidential value. Nothing did.

Ruben flipped open the paperwork. The results lifted his mood. He'd correctly identified pieces of liver, kidney and lower intestine.

But what he saw next almost brought him to his knees.

The young assistant slumped over the documentation and double-checked the summary. His stomach turned. At times like this, he was sure he should be doing something else.

Ruben was still catching his breath when his boss returned. Sorrentino was buttoning up his newly starched and pressed lab coat, watching his own reflection in the window as he walked past. 'What is it? What's wrong?' he asked, almost sensitively.

Ruben moved back from the worktop and pointed towards his discovery. 'You were right. The material you picked out was from a uterus. The extra DNA profiling confirms that Francesca Di Lauro was pregnant.'