Viper

89

Parco Nazionale del Vesuvio It was no longer a colourful clearing in the woods. No longer a wildlife habitat overgrown with trees, bushes and endangered plants.

It was a graveyard.

And it was as silent as a graveyard too.

Exhumations were underway and on the rare occasions when people did speak, they did so in depressingly quiet and reverential tones.

Luella showed Jack and Sylvia where the male graves had been found. They were exactly as shown on the photographs, radar printouts and sketches, but somehow the real thing seemed different. Bleaker. Even more out-of-pattern. The partial circle of female graves was orderly and deliberate. No doubt about that. This had been done with thought. But the other two, the male graves, well, they looked like bodies had simply been dropped out of a helicopter and had landed randomly. Jack mentally completed the circle. One of the men would be inside the female victim circle, the other would be outside. That made even less sense.

Small portable bridges between the graves had been built, with boardwalks carrying excavation and forensic teams from one grave to another. The walks spread outwardly towards the mobile Incident Room vans that stood near the circumference of the circle. Sylvia sloped off and slipped inside the main control van to see some of her team. Luella tagged behind Jack, guessing his thoughts. She'd never worked murders before. Maybe never would again. She wondered how the hell he'd done it all his life and how it hadn't screwed him up.

The whole taped-off area was now about fifty metres in radius, a hundred in diameter. Jack took it all in as he walked to a spot near the centre of the circle. It was about fifteen metres away from one male victim and forty metres away from the other. 'Luella, can you explain the geology for me? What went on with the lava flow around here?'

The question surprised her, but she did her best. 'We're on lower ground, nestled between two small hills. The summit of Vesuvius is north and above us.' She picked areas out with her hands. 'This part here wasn't where the densest flow or fall of lava was. That hillside and this part of the park won't have caught nearly as much of the main pyroclastic flow as Herculaneum and Pompeii did, but you can still see some dense settlements of lava.' She moved closer to where Jack was. 'Remember that when Vesuvius erupted, the air was filled with lava. The spattering was like a huge arterial blood spurt. Some flows were formed when the spatters landed, others came in rivers that oozed in cascades from the brim of the volcano.'

'So you think these were from the spatters?'

'Yes, I think so. Why do you ask?'

Jack put his foot up on the bottom of a mound of volcanic rock. It was virtually at the centre of their gridded-off area. 'This big hill of rocks, for example, was formed by spattering?'

Luella sized it up. 'Not all of it. Some of that lava will have been there since seconds after the eruption. Other lumps, the smaller ones, have come later. I suspect they probably rolled off the eroding hillside to the side of us. No doubt came down as the ground shifted and subsided over the centuries.'

Jack felt drawn to the rocky area and he couldn't quite work out why. Maybe it was because it was the closest to the male bodies? He forced himself to forget the female sites. Imagine he was dealing only with the two male deaths. Now the rock mound started to make sense. One male body was east of it, one west of it. Not quite equidistant, but it certainly looked as though the killer may have used it to get his bearings. A male graveyard and a female one? Could be. Especially if the male graves were older. If he'd made his bones killing men, then later on found his fun in killing women. That would make some kind of sense. It would also explain why the female burials were special and the male ones just functional. He hadn't cared much about where he'd concealed the first corpses, but the others – well, the others meant something to him.

'Jack!' The look on Sylvia's face said she'd been talking to him and he'd been ignoring her. In fact, he hadn't even noticed that she'd rejoined them.

'I'm sorry. Give me a minute.'

'Sure.' She fingered her wind-blown fringe from her face and waited patiently. She could see him working out all the pieces of the puzzle, wondering which fitted where.

'Okay,' he said. 'I think I've been too obsessed with thinking about what's beneath the ground and haven't given enough attention to what's above it.' He crouched down so he could put both his hands around one of the big chunks of lava. 'This is the only place where several big, broken pieces of the lava are gathered together. All around us we see patches of the stuff, but they are singular patches, with perhaps a crack or two in them. But these little beauties here, well they've been put here. Someone's gathered them from around this clearing and deliberately put them here.'

Luella joined him in a crouch and examined the chunks of rock. 'Looking at this, yes, I would say you're right. These pieces of lava don't come from the same single piece, they are all jagged, and different shapes.'

Sylvia sized up the position of the rocky mound in relation to the circle of female graves. 'This is the centre of his circle of death, isn't it? The middle of his burial clock, maybe even his starting point.'

Jack nodded. 'Yes, I think it is. This is the point that he got all his bearings from. Every time he returned he would look for this centre and then work out his burial lines. The position of the trees – his marks around the circle – I think they only relate to the female victims. Again, it was his way of differentiating.'

Sylvia pointed outside the arc to the other male grave. 'But what about that other male body? Why is it over there?'

Jack looked at her – he knew that if he gave her a second she'd come up with the answer herself.

'Because it didn't matter?' she suggested. 'Because it meant nothing to him. It was just something he had to do, rather than something of any significance.'

'You've got it.' He turned now to Luella and pointed again at the rocky mound. 'Have your people dig beneath here. If what comes up is a male body, then I'm right and we'll discover a crucial link between our killer and his first victim, Numero Uno, his earliest kill.'

'And if you're wrong?' asked Sylvia.

Jack smiled. 'Well, if there's nothing there – or if it's a female body – then theory-wise, I'm blown, and everything I've just said is bullshit.'