The Lizard's Bite Part 23

Randazzo felt his temper begin to flare. "I put down an animal who'd taken a woman hostage and was waving a weapon about. It was prudent. If I'd done nothing, who knows what would have happened?"

Malipiero waved a sweaty palm at him. "Don't want to hear. Don't want to know. This is not for us to judge. We've just been told to stick with you and that's what we do. I can't believe a man of your rank would suggest we disobey orders."

"Incredible," Lavazzi replied, shaking his head. "Makes you wonder what the world's coming to. No discipline. That's the problem."

"This is boring . . ." Randazzo began.

"You're telling me!" Lavazzi yelled. Lavazzi yelled.

The face of a monk, bald, tanned, friendly, with the cowl around his neck, appeared at the open window. The man put a single finger to his lips and hissed, "Ssshhhh . . ."

Lavazzi waited for him to disappear, then swore quietly, stared at Randazzo and said, "We're all all f.u.c.king bored. OK? Saying it just makes things worse. Besides . . ." f.u.c.king bored. OK? Saying it just makes things worse. Besides . . ."

He looked at his watch. It was getting close to midday. Lunchtime. These two never missed the opportunity to stuff their faces, usually for free, Randazzo guessed. Guard duty hadn't stopped them disappearing for an hour around this time every day, coming back with a rosy glow and some pasta sauce on their chops. All Gianfranco Randazzo had to eat was the plain, dull fare of the monks.

"We could go out for lunch," the commissario suggested.

"You paying?" Malipiero asked immediately.

"If you like," Randazzo replied. It would be worth it. Also, if he was picking up the bill, he could order them to sit at another table and get some decent privacy for himself.

The two men glanced at each other. Randazzo's spirits rose. A good meal, a couple of gla.s.ses of wine . . . There was a little restaurant he knew in the Campo a.r.s.enale, home cooking in the shadow of the great golden gateway, close to the four lions every Venetian knew were looted from Athens in one of the republic's raiding adventures way back when. It was hard to walk anywhere in Venice without seeing something that had been purloined over the centuries. The city took what it wanted, when it wanted. Randazzo had learned that lesson as a boy.

He could see the greed glinting in the guards' faces. A part of him wished he could persuade the pair to turn their backs on a visit from Chieko too, though he wondered what the rules of the monastery would be about allowing women into this bright little oasis nestling near the gasworks in Castello. That could be . . . entrancing if it worked.

Then he remembered Ma.s.siter crowing about her in that stupid apartment of his inside the gla.s.s palace and the way he'd ignored her ever since.

"Well?" he growled. "I don't have all day."

"Really?" Lavazzi laughed. "Wait there. I'll go make a call and check. Maybe . . ."-he glanced at his partner, an expression there Randazzo didn't understand-" . . . it's not such a bad idea after all."

Malipiero went quiet when his partner was gone. He was, Randazzo judged, the lesser of the pair.

"Who do you two keep calling all the time?" Randazzo demanded, cross for no real reason, wishing his temper would stay in place for once. "Girlfriends. Boyfriends. Those are Questura phones. I get to see the bills when they come in. If you're running up private business on my account, you'll get to know about it."

The man kept staring at his fat, grubby hands, whistling some stupid pop tune that was on the radio all the time. That was, Randazzo thought, the closest he could get to entertainment.

Then Malipiero stopped, glowered at him, and said, "You know, I wish you'd make up your mind. Are you the upstanding honest guy here? Or just like the rest of us? It gets confusing for simpletons like me."

"Don't be so f.u.c.king impertinent!" Randazzo yelled.

The face came back to the window, offended this time, as close to cross as a monk could get.

"Gentlemen," the man said, "if you don't behave correctly here, I shall have to ask you to leave. We are accommodating. We are, however, only human."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Malipiero grumbled, waving him down. "Go say a prayer or something. We'll leave a little change in the box by the door."

The monk disappeared, a worldly epithet echoing gently in his wake.

"You just leave one long line of satisfied customers everywhere you go," Randazzo observed.

The whistling began again, until Lavazzi returned, grinning, carrying something in a plastic bag.

"You're on," he said. "We're clear to go out for two hours. Then it's back in your cell, Commissario. Hope you brought plenty of money with you."

"Enough," Randazzo murmured, staring at the bag.

"Oh yeah," Lavazzi added, still smirking like a teenager. "That was the condition. You've got to go out in kind of a disguise."

He reached into the bag and took out the contents. It was a brown monk's habit, complete with dressing gownstyle belt.

"With that bald head you're going to look the part," the cop declared.

Maybe it was another of the pair's jokes. Maybe someone back at the Questura really did think he ought to be discreet. Randazzo decided he didn't care. He was going to have an hour in the outside world, with some real wine, not that p.i.s.s the monks drank, some real food, in the dining room, at a quiet, shady table, while Lavazzi and Malipiero sat on the pavement in the sun, sweating.

Randazzo picked up the habit.

"Do I get some privacy?" he asked. "To change?"

"There you go again, Commissario," Malipiero said. "Asking us to break the rules. It's OK. Really. We'll just stay and watch."

TERESA LUPO AND SILVIO DI CAPUA MUNCHED ON COLD pizza and looked at their workload: the e-mailed initial reports from the two labs they had chosen for their research in Mestre, one for chemical a.n.a.lysis, one for pathology, and the earliest results from the material sent via Alberto Tosi to Rome. It was now twelve-thirty. From what Nic had said they had no more than a few hours to come up with something the Carabinieri could throw at the Englishman. It wasn't looking good. pizza and looked at their workload: the e-mailed initial reports from the two labs they had chosen for their research in Mestre, one for chemical a.n.a.lysis, one for pathology, and the earliest results from the material sent via Alberto Tosi to Rome. It was now twelve-thirty. From what Nic had said they had no more than a few hours to come up with something the Carabinieri could throw at the Englishman. It wasn't looking good.

The most promising route should have been the data files Emily had-one way or another-got out of Ma.s.siter's computer. This was hard evidence, the kind detectives liked because you could pa.s.s it round the room and let everyone appreciate its worth without some geek there to translate. Teresa had pa.s.sed the memory pod on to the plainclothes detective who came to collect it after she'd called, but not before everything it contained was copied to her own machine first.

Silvio, who knew computers so much better than Teresa did, had tried to open the files in any number of ways she failed to comprehend. The best he got, while mumbling low curses and imprecations full of obscure acronyms, was a screen full of garbage and obscure characters. The files weren't just protected with a pa.s.sword. They'd been encrypted too. When she asked, more out of desperation than hope, whether it could be cracked, Silvio had muttered something about months of work and vast amounts of some obscure thing called MIPS-years. Which, translated into everyday language, meant, as far as she understood it, someone could crack the files, but it would take a lot of time and more computers than someone like old Alberto Tosi would believe existed on the entire planet. Months down the line, if a formal investigation into Ma.s.siter got under way, perhaps it could turn into something useful. For the moment it was worthless. Which meant they were back at the beginning, trying to read the runes of the sc.r.a.ps of material and human evidence they had.

After failing with the data files, they had turned to the reports on Uriel's ap.r.o.n and the wood samples. The more she looked at them, the more Teresa felt like screaming.

She glugged down some mineral water purloined from Nic's fridge. "You're the chemist, Silvio. Ketone. What the h.e.l.l is is ketone? Refresh my memory." ketone? Refresh my memory."

He gave her that "I can't believe you don't know this" look that she was noticing more and more these days. Silvio had lost some weight recently and had refined his choice in clothes, which now ran to grey corded slacks and a pale lavender polo shirt. If he kept on like this he'd finally get a girl sometime soon, she thought.

"Industrial solvent. Labs use it all the time. We We use it all the time." use it all the time."

"You know I leave all that chemical stuff to you. Does it burn?"

"Er, yes," he said sarcastically. "Don't you read the warning labels on all those bottles in the lab?"

"Don't have the time. So his ap.r.o.n's been dipped in some inflammable industrial solvent. That's a start. At least we know we can rule out the witchcraft now."

Silvio was staring at her, a testy, disappointed expression on his face. "Contamination," he said.

"What?"

"The baboons from whatever pa.s.ses as forensic around here had hold of this stuff before they let us get our hands on it, right? Behold. A cla.s.sical case of lab contamination. You said yourself these people were amateurs."

"I didn't say that at all! I said the man was old."

"Tosi's old. The lab's old. Their procedures are old. It's shoddy work. These things are covered in the stuff. Did Tosi say the original samples were affected by fire foam?"

"Yes. He said exactly that."

"There you go. This is the sort of thing they teach junior lab technicians straight out of college. You never ever try to clean up c.r.a.p with c.r.a.p. Some moron's dumped solvent on this to get rid of the foam, and obliterated anything we might have found underneath."

"For good?" She couldn't believe they were that stupid.

"Well, no. But it makes it all a lot more difficult. A lot more time-consuming and expensive too. We could try sending the material away to some specialist labs. But with this degree of degradation, I don't know. And it would take weeks."

"You mean Alberto Tosi or his creepy granddaughter, or whatever other of his relatives got in on the act, have screwed up this evidence completely?"

"Correct first time."

"Oh great . . ."

"They could have done it deliberately," he suggested, trying to cheer her up.

"Don't be ridiculous. Tosi's not the kind of man who'd play stupid games like that. If he was, he wouldn't have let me have the stuff in the first place."

"In that case they're just plain incompetent. Sorry. That's all you get."

"Well, isn't that just great?" she barked. "So in that case where the h.e.l.l are these DNA reports from our people across the water? An hour ago they said an hour."

"Don't take this out on me! I didn't spill all that junk on your precious evidence. Besides, an hour ago they said two hours, actually. By e-mail."

"Screw e-mail," she fumed, and phoned the company, got straight through to the head of the lab, then performed a brief impersonation of Leo Falcone on a bad day.

Five minutes later the report, still full of spelling mistakes and bad grammar, came through. Sixteen separate tests. A single specimen of male DNA in each.

"Thank G.o.d for the Y chromosome," Teresa murmured. "The only worthwhile thing to come out of the everyday p.e.n.i.s since the dawn of man."

Then she scrolled through the other results, conscious of Silvio leaning in very close to her shoulder. "Eureka."

Bella was there in four of the v.a.g.i.n.al secretions. The next twelve were unknown.

"One day . . ." Silvio murmured, then started his familiar rant. About how the world would be a better and safer place if all of us just got tagged at birth, stored as profiles in some giant computer somewhere, files wheeled out every time a drop of blood or a trace of s.e.m.e.n puzzled some slothful police officer who was too idle to engage his brain and go looking for evidence- "I've told you before," she interrupted, "I'll tell you again. It's wrong. You have to leave people a little privacy, otherwise they don't stay human at all."

She thought about the wad of tissue that still lay in her handbag, and would soon go where it belonged, into the bin in the street outside. She hadn't even considered mentioning it to Nic, though a part of her wondered if that was what Emily really wanted: to break the news through another. Even so, he had heard something wrong in her voice. She knew that. Nic didn't miss a thing.

"No one wants to know everything about everyone. It's unnatural. It's . . ."

. . . asking for trouble, Teresa thought. You had to concentrate on what mattered and leave the trivial details to one side.

Something mattered deeply here. Bella had slept with Hugo Ma.s.siter. The Englishman was, perhaps, the father of the dead woman's unborn child. In any normal police investigation these were starting points, pieces of information someone like Leo Falcone could pick up, mull over, then use as a lever to extract other, more d.a.m.ning nuggets of evidence. And, in the end, with some luck, try to put together a picture of what happened. But they hadn't the resources or the time.

"Try and think like a cop, Silvio," she ordered. "A woman's been incinerated in a furnace. What are the key facts you want to know?"

He shrugged. This wasn't his kind of game. "Temperature. Can we get some more physical evidence from the remains?"

"No, no, NO! no, NO!" she screamed, and wondered briefly if it would be out of place to slap him on his pale and flabby cheeks. "That's us us thinking. Not them." thinking. Not them."

"In that case, I've no idea," he confessed. "How she got there maybe. They always ask that."

No, they didn't. Not always. With Falcone out of action, the official version was that Uriel put Bella in the furnace somehow, and since he was dead too the whys and wherefores were unimportant, redundant.

Two violent deaths had occurred without the police ever seeking answers to one of the most fundamental aspects of any murder inquiry. How exactly? How exactly?

And she'd been around long enough to understand what, in the case of Bella, those answers were likely to be. No one could be forced into a searing furnace against her will. It was simply inconceivable, however strong the a.s.sailant, however feeble the victim. To put her into the furnace, Bella had to be rendered unconscious first, and Teresa Lupo's instincts told her the most likely way that would happen. Not with alchemy but with the oldest killing tool in the book, raw violence that always, always left such familiar stains in its wake.

"Jesus Christ," she murmured. "I must be losing my mind. We've two murders here and no one-not even old Alberto Tosi-has even seen so much as a bloodstain. How often does that that happen?" happen?"

She glanced at her watch, phoned Raffaella Arcangelo's number and prayed the woman had abandoned the Ospedale Civile for a while. When she'd called that morning they'd been planning to wheel the unconscious Falcone into an MRI scanner for an hour or so, hoping all those deafening magnets whirring round his damaged head would see something that indicated he'd return to the living world someday soon. Teresa had dealt with MRI units as a doctor. She wasn't full of optimism. More often than not the best thing they told you was nothing, and the only news was bad.

"Have you heard something?" Raffaella asked immediately. "They said they were doing some test. I couldn't be there all the time. I couldn't bear it."

"It usually takes some hours, perhaps a day, for the results to reach the consultant. Nothing's changed. I'm sorry. It's not bad news, though. I was wondering . . ."

She could almost feel the woman's tension down the line.

"I was wondering if you'd found anything."

"Sorry, I forgot," Raffaella confessed.

Teresa wasn't giving up. "Is there anyone on the island now, apart from you?"

"No. My brothers are with the lawyers. I think they'll be there a long time. It seems Signor Ma.s.siter is changing the terms of the contract. Quite drastically too. Not that we're in a position to refuse anymore."

"Would you mind if we came and took a look around? I want to see Bella's bedroom. Perhaps take away some more samples."

The bed trick worked for Emily. It was worth trying again, though it still didn't put Ma.s.siter there on the night of the murder.

"Of course."

"And one more thing. I need you to think hard about this, Raffaella. Did you see anything after they were killed-anything at all-that showed traces of blood? Marks on paintwork or the floor. Spots on a cloth. Something out of place. Anything."

The other woman was silent. Teresa's heart skipped a beat.

"Raffaella?"

Teresa could picture her, hand to her mouth, thinking, trying to work out what was wrong.

"You'd best come now," Raffaella said at last. "I think I've been a fool."