Kill the King

by Sandrone Dazieri

  “She’s a genuine old-school knucklehead cop.”

  “If the two of you want to be left alone, I’m happy to comply,” Colomba said in an acidic tone.

  Bart dragged her down onto the bed and gave her a hug. “Cut it out, dummy.”

  Dante made himself another espresso. “Speaking of science, I wanted to know what Bart thinks of my theory about Martina. I have to make a confession, ladies: I talked to Lupo today.”

  “Who’s Lupo?” Bart asked.

  “A carabiniere,” Colomba snapped. “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I promised to keep him informed of our progress, and because I wanted to know if he’d give us a hand.”

  “We don’t need him,” said Colomba.

  “That depends … I figured that, seeing as Dr. Bartone was around here, she might be able to help confirm my hypothesis about Martina.”

  “Dante thinks that she was knocked out with an insulin injection,” Colomba explained.

  “How could I confirm that without doing an autopsy?” Bart asked, baffled. “Where’s the body?”

  “Still in the Pesaro morgue, waiting for the completion of the investigation,” said Colomba.

  Dante smiled apologetically. “Not exactly.”

  15

  At two in the morning a butcher’s refrigerator truck parked in the hospital courtyard and two male nurses wearing carabiniere boots eased a gurney out of the back door. Lashed to the gurney was Martina: the male nurses were Lupo and Bruno. They had put a mask over her face and she was swathed in a sheet up to her chin.

  Martina was rolled down various hallways to the diagnostic radiology ward, where they placed her on the bed of the CAT scanner, which continued shuttling back and forth for a full hour, bombarding her with enough radiation to fell an elephant. Controlling the movements of the scanner was Bart, whose eyelids were drooping from lack of sleep, but whose movements were still characterized by her customary diligent precision.

  With her X-ray scalpels, Bart sliced into Martina’s abdomen, digging deeper millimeter by millimeter, creating three-dimensional images thin enough to allow her to search for anomalies. Finally, between one suture and the next in the leg of the Y that had been carved into Martina’s torso by the medical examiner, she identified a subcutaneous hematoma no bigger than the head of a pin. It ran down at a ninety-degree angle into the body, to a depth of 5.6 millimeters: the average length of an insulin hypodermic needle.

  “You nailed it,” she said to Dante. “And I want you to know that I expect a giant pack of coffee to show off to my friends.”

  “You can count on it,” said Dante, leaning forward and elaborately kissing her hand. Lupo pocketed the report, in accordance with the agreement he’d made with Dante to keep his lips zipped until the Bonaccorso investigation had been completed.

  The corpse was starting to stink at room temperature. It was wheeled back out to the refrigerator truck and taken back to the morgue in Pesaro, where the night guardian, an old acquaintance of Bruno’s, given his arrest record as a flasher, had willingly agreed to turn a blind eye to the unorthodox transport of a corpse entrusted to his keeping.

  Colomba, on the other hand, drove Bart back to Rimini. When she got back at daybreak, she rushed into Dante’s room, hoping to wake him up, but he was already doing muscle exercises, stretching an elastic band with his feet, dressed in a mime’s overalls.

  “I’m sleepy as hell, but I’m just too furious with you,” said Colomba. “You busted my chops about how I lied to you, and now you’re pulling stunts like this behind my back. I’m thinking about sending you back to Rome.” Dante put down the elastic band and mopped the sweat off his brow with a terry-cloth towel.

  “You’re right. Want a cup of coffee?” he asked, going over to the espresso machine.

  “My heart is still racing, and I’d like to sleep until noon.”

  “Then how about a Moscow Mule?”

  “Okay, but quit changing the subject! Why did you make a side deal with Lupo without telling me?”

  “Because we would have gone back and forth about whether or not it was a good idea, and I didn’t want to tell you about it unless I was a thousand percent sure that I was right.”

  “You’re always a thousand percent sure that you’re right.”

  “True, but in this case I was hoping I was wrong.” Dante made a couple of cocktails in the copper mugs that had come in the survival kit, after filling them with crushed ice. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” He turned on the MP3 player and started a compilation of Asha Bhosle songs, turning up the volume until it provided an irritating background soundtrack. “I was hoping to avoid that.”

  “Now you’re just pulling my leg. Spit it out.”

  “Why did Leo kill Martina the way he did? He could have murdered her in a thousand different ways, in any of a thousand different places, but he killed her right there, near Melas’s hideout, which was the riskiest thing he could have done.”

  “Maybe he just planned to imprison her in the hayloft, and then something else happened we don’t know about yet.”

  Dante shook his head. “I looked on the map, there are crevasses and isolated clearings the whole way between here and where she was killed. Even if he’d drugged her there and not a stone’s throw from your house, he could have gotten away and tossed her body practically anywhere. Same thing applies if she’d been following him, which I don’t think happened.”

  “I don’t believe it, either. She wouldn’t have abandoned her assigned post. She was on a stakeout.”

  “Exactly. Which means Leo wanted her to die there. Because he wanted someone to find Melas’s hideout and rescue me. You were just the first one to get there.”

  16

  Colomba sucked on her cocktail, stalling for time. She was too tired to think fast. “So you’re saying Leo killed Martina as a way of making sure someone found you,” she said.

  “Yes. You weren’t moving fast enough, and I was dying, tied to a bed.”

  “Come on, that doesn’t hold together,” said Colomba, doing her best to keep her anxiety at bay. “All Leo would have had to do is make an anonymous phone call to the police or to me. Why would he have done it in such a contorted manner?”

  “So he could stay in the shadows. He sent Tommy to your house, he got Martina to plant the hammer. What other reason would he have had, except to get you to take the bait? He knew that they’d never prosecute you for it.”

  “Really?”

  “And the phone call in Milan … You told me that you never could figure out why he called you, right? Here’s the answer. He wanted to get you to guess that he knew where you lived, without telling you directly. I’m running away, but in the meantime I’m warning you … Do you believe that?”

  “And do you believe that I’m an idiot?” Colomba shouted at him.

  Dante started polishing the espresso machine. “I knew you’d lose your temper.”

  “Leave that thing alone. It’s already gleaming,” said Colomba, getting to her feet while her anger changed to shame. She forced herself to speak in a calmer tone. “If Leo abandoned you, it’s because he had to burn his bridges after they found the Chourmo. He knew from Romero that the DCT would trace it back to him unless he did.”

  “That’s something that only those idiots in intelligence could come up with. He had a reason for abandoning me. He had a reason for getting you involved. Just like he had a reason for killing Martina the way he did.”

  “What reason?”

  “I haven’t connected all the dots yet. But just think of my brother as a spider tucked away in its hidey-hole, tugging on its web”—and here he waved his hand in a circular gesture to take in the surrounding hills—“in all directions. And if you jostle his web, he won’t come out again. Martina, Loris, the Melases, his neighbors in the apartment building in Milan. They all jostled his web, and they all died. It’s no accident.” Dante took one of Colomba’s hands in his. “You saved my life, and who k
nows how many others. The blood of these victims falls on my brother and on all those people who chose to do nothing to stop him. Not on you.”

  Colomba’s eyes were glistening. “I’m sick of it, Dante. I feel as if I reek of death.”

  “Let’s get out of here. I mean, like right now. Let’s just dump those two dumb cops and run away.”

  Colomba shook her head. “No, no. I can’t. There’s Tommy. Leo may have just used him to get me out of hiding, but I don’t want him to wind up like all the others … I don’t want to get a phone call one of these mornings so I can go down and view his corpse, too.”

  “Then get ready for some more surprises, CC. None of them good.”

  17

  Colomba slept until one in the afternoon, and when she finally woke up she found a text on her phone from D’Amore, asking her to join him in Rimini, where he was supervising Bart’s work. So Colomba had to go the whole way back a second time, though this time she left the driving to Esposito.

  D’Amore was waiting for her in front of Villa Quiete, leaning against one of those delivery vans that the intelligence agencies used for surveillance and stakeouts. Written on the side was the name of a nonexistent construction company, along with phone numbers that connected to an answering machine, to avoid arousing unnecessary suspicions.

  “Would you care to say hello to the doctor?” D’Amore asked as he walked toward her.

  “I’d just as soon let her work undisturbed,” Colomba replied. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep a straight face if she saw Bart again. They walked down to the water, talking as they went. The seashore was a little over a half mile away, and a pair of plainclothes NOA officers trailed along behind them at a discreet distance. They were the two nonbrothers.

  D’Amore put an oversize e-cigarette up to his lips. “We understand how Bonaccorso blew up the apartment building in Milan. He sabotaged the electronic control panel of the heating system. It was connected to the internet, and he just sent a command to turn off the burner and bypass the thermocouple and safety valve. The room filled up with gas and then …”

  “Boom,” said Colomba. “No explosives?”

  “None at all. That’s the reason the bomb-disposal technicians weren’t able to do anything to stop him. A couple of them were still inside when it happened,” said D’Amore, with a veil of sadness in his eyes.

  Colomba understood that there was something personal at play here, but she didn’t ask about it.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “Did you find anything useful in the rubble?”

  “No. The only good news is that the woman who lived next door is out of danger now, and soon she’ll be able to start talking to us. You never know.”

  They reached the waterfront esplanade known as the Lungomare Fellini and leaned against the parapets that separated the sidewalk from the beach. Beneath them, the sand and the breakwaters were immersed in the greenish glow of the late-winter sun. The smell of brine was overwhelming.

  “Do you think that Leo brought Dante here in the sailboat, and then went back and sank it?” Colomba asked.

  “It’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have been noticed by the coast guard. Still, it’s a remarkable coincidence you should have asked me that, because we’ve finally turned up something on the Chourmo. It used to be called the Solea II, and it was the property of a Greek shipowner who died later in a shipwreck near the island of Zakynthos.”

  A lightbulb lit up in Colomba’s head. “Isn’t he one of the people that Giltine killed before coming to Italy?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the Melases were connected to Belyy …” Colomba said in surprise.

  “The late Signor Melas’s father certainly was,” said D’Amore. “He had a lot more money than the inheritance he left his son. At least ten times as much. And nearly all of that money was sent abroad. We’ve lost track of it, after Hong Kong.” He blew out a cloud of vanilla-scented vapor into the chilly air, and then waved it away with his hands.

  “What was the shipyard good for?”

  “Considering that many of the boats they repaired wound up being sent to African countries and then were frequently sent back for ‘special maintenance work,’ we can theorize any number of things, ranging from arms trafficking to blood diamonds, but we’ve only started investigating in that direction.”

  “But the son sold it all.”

  “Maybe he just didn’t want to be involved. Or else he figured he already had enough money. But there’s something even more important. We’ve always wondered how Bonaccorso knew that Giltine was about to unleash a bloodbath in Italy,” said D’Amore. “Now we think that he just followed her yacht. And that means that Bonaccorso knew where to look.”

  “Because he knew the Greek shipowner,” said Colomba, suddenly short of breath. This was the first piece of information about Leo she’d been presented with that had even an inkling of a chance of being true. “So he was a part of the magic circle.”

  “That would explain a lot of things, wouldn’t it?” D’Amore asked. “Except for one: Why did he let his boss be killed? If he knew that Giltine was planning the massacre in Venice, he could have alerted Belyy and saved his skin.”

  D’Amore spewed out another cloud of vanilla-scented smoke. “Belyy had set up a small empire of his own in the private security business and COW was a useful screen organization. But there has never been an empire in the history of the world that someone hasn’t tried to overthrow. Maybe Bonaccorso was working for the revolution.”

  Colomba suddenly glimpsed the image of Tommy’s playing card in her mind’s eye, and understood. “Or else he was working for the new king. And still is. Which is why he’s still out there sowing pain and death.”

  18

  Dante looked at Loris’s little single-family house, leaning on a tree on the other side of the street. He was wearing a studded leather jacket over a Metal Gear Solid T-shirt.

  “There’s no security,” he said to Alberti, who was looking at him through the window of the parked car.

  “Weren’t you already convinced that Loris was Bonaccorso’s involuntary accomplice?”

  “Yes. But that’s not enough for me. Come on, get out of the car.” Dante waited for Alberti to turn off the engine and lock the car. “You may have seen Leo twice, but to me he’s the man who inserted a fucking valve in my gut.”

  “I understand that, Signor Torre. But still …”

  Dante interrupted him. “My brother knows me down to the last pore in my skin. But I don’t know a damned thing about him. I don’t know why he followed me for two years before kidnapping me, I don’t know what he was doing here, and most of all, why he put me here. So now I want to know things that, in another situation, I would have just taken for granted. Is that clear?”

  “You’re afraid that he’s smarter than you,” Alberti said with a smile.

  Dante sighed. “Exactly.” He put his weight on the walker and pointed at the front door bedecked with the judicial seals of the criminal court. “Open the door with your universal cop passkey.”

  “No way.”

  Dante made his unsteady way over to the front door. “No problem, I brought my kit. Help me stand up, if you wouldn’t mind.” Dante pushed the walker aside and crouched down in front of the lock, while Alberti steadied him with a hand on each shoulder. It was a pretty ordinary kind of lock, and Dante opened it in a matter of seconds with a set of fine metal hooks, and then put them away in their leather case. When he pushed the front door open, though, the dark lobby closed in around him. “You go in first, while I smoke a cigarette outside.”

  “I can do it for you, if you want.”

  “No. Thanks. Just roll up all the shutters and open all the windows.” Dante leaned against the outside wall and looked up at the sky, seeing nothing but a giant cage. He mopped the icy sweat off his brow.

  Alberti put on a pair of gloves and a pair of shoe covers and entered Loris’s home for the second time. The place stank pretty ba
d, but there was no garbage in sight and all traces of drugs had disappeared, including the cigarette butts. He opened the place up wide as had been requested, and looked out onto Portico from above. It had been a nice bright day and the setting sun was turning the roofs red.

  “Are you enjoying the panorama?” Dante asked as he came up from behind. He’d recovered, but his breathing was still labored.

  “It’s not bad here,” said Alberti.

  “Sure, if you’re a cow. There must be a base for a cordless phone around here somewhere,” he said. “Do you remember that he was holding the receiver when he died?”

  “Maybe it’s down in the repair shop.”

  “No. The number of Loris’s landline matches up with his home address. There is no phone service in the repair shop.”

  “Isn’t it kind of too far for it to work?”

  “Exactly,” said Dante, still standing at the window. “And there’s another strange thing. The mechanic’s dad told you that he was always on the other line. The only other line is his home number, but in the last year he’s received practically no phone calls at all.”

  Alberti finally found the cordless phone base under a pillow. It was disconnected from both the phone jack and the plug. “It looks like it wasn’t being used, Signor Torre. Maybe it really was just a prop.”

  “Open it up, if you don’t mind.”

  Alberti did as asked, unscrewing the cover on the base with a scorched pocketknife he’d found in the sink. Inside he found a battery wrapped in duct tape and a SIM card connected to a chip the size of a postage stamp. Alberti composed music, so he knew a little something about electronics, and he could see that the transmitter that sent the signal to the cordless receiver had been disconnected from the phone circuit and rerouted to the chip. “There’s something odd about this. I don’t think it’s a phone tap,” he said.

  “I think it’s the exact opposite,” said Dante, and plugged the base in, making a contact with one of his lock-picking tools. Sparks showered in all directions.