“Do you still have it, the note?”
Kenneth Carson nodded wearily and pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket.
“You’re getting quite a collection of those,” he said, as he watched Pallioti read it. “Do you have any idea where she might be?”
“I’m sure we’ll find her.” Pallioti glanced up. Someone who didn’t know him might have found his smile reassuring.
As Pallioti began asking Kenneth Carson about his wife’s background, trying to feel out what, if anything, he actually knew about the woman he was married to, Enzo stood up and slipped through the double doors into the suite’s bedroom. A bottle of Ativan, the prescription made out to Anna Carson by Dr. K. Carson, sat on the side of the sink in the bathroom beyond. Good, Enzo thought. They’d relax him, but they shouldn’t make him dopey. Or worse, irrational or weepy.
Back in the bedroom, he gathered up Anna Carson’s handbag. Kenneth Carson had opened the safe. He had already told them there was nothing missing from it, and Enzo found nothing in it except their passports and some jewelry—a double string of pearls, a couple of bracelets. The rings he’d noticed—Anna Carson’s wedding band, the diamond, and the large emerald—were nestled in a velvet box. Only the small gold locket she’d been toying with was missing. He’d get a description out on the database, in case it turned up in one of the city’s less reputable antique shops. Or as a marker on a corpse. Enzo took another quick look around, noticing that her running shoes were gone, and decided there was nothing else the room could tell him.
A moment later, as he let himself out of the suite, Enzo heard Kenneth Carson describing his wife. And came to the conclusion that the poor man had no more idea who he was married to than he and Pallioti did. He wondered if the US Federal Marshals, who were notoriously tight, would ever care to share that information with any of them. Or if they’d all die wondering.
* * *
Riding down in the elevator, Enzo was neither surprised nor reassured to see that Anna Carson had left her credit cards and driver’s license in her wallet. Wherever she was, and wherever she was going, she didn’t intend to be Anna Carson. He made a mental note to keep an eye open for the ID wristband, but doubted it would turn up.
On reaching the lobby, he pushed through the revolving door and spoke for a moment with the doorman. Then he set off to the larger banks within a couple of blocks of the hotel. On seeing his identification, the managers, who might otherwise have found it odd that he was carrying a woman’s handbag, thought better of saying anything. At the third bank he visited, Enzo found what he was looking for. Shortly after nine a.m. yesterday morning, Anna Carson had used the card registered to her business to withdraw a total of two thousand euros in cash. There had been no sign of it in the suite. The money and her BlackBerry had gone with her.
The spare keys to Kristin’s apartment, however, had not. When he got to the building in San Frediano, Enzo found them in the mailbox, thoughtfully wrapped in a flyer from the Laundromat across the street.
* * *
Standing in the doorway of Kristin Carson’s room, Enzo Saenz saw immediately what had happened. And knew he was to blame for it. After he had tipped her off, set her running by ham-fistedly sidling up to her in the hotel lobby like some sleazy private eye out of a bad novel, Anna Carson had come here and rifled Kristin’s things. Cherry-picked a disguise so she would not waste precious cash, or leave a credit card trail by buying clothes the way her less-experienced stepdaughter had.
The wardrobe door was still open. There was a hanger on the bed, and an indent on the spread where a bag or small suitcase had obviously been placed. Enzo stepped forward carefully, as if wary of disturbing the chilly, stale air.
A gap in the clothes hanging every which way on the wardrobe rail suggested that something large had been in the space. He closed his eyes, summoning the pictures stored in his head, and thought it might be a jacket, a bulky winter thing in a dark color, possibly blue or green. The missing cowboy boots were easier, he remembered because he’d tipped them up and checked inside them. A quick look through Kristin’s drawers showed gaps there, too. He fished the Alitalia tag that had not been there yesterday morning out of the wastepaper basket. There was a small red duffel bag at the very back of the wardrobe. They knew Kristin had taken the matching suitcase, but there had been something else with it. A backpack, also red, part of a set, now gone.
Enzo ducked into the bathroom. The cabinet that was obviously Kristin’s was emptier than before. Sitting on the smeared glass shelf, dead center, was the wristband, its metal bar with her name, age, and telephone number inscribed on it. Anna Carson might as well be standing in the doorway raising her middle finger at him.
“Fuck you, too,” he muttered.
Tamping down a flash of rage, Enzo fished a plastic evidence bag out of his pocket and swept the contents of the shelf into it. Then he returned to the bedroom. Crossing the floor in two quick strides, he slid the desk aside and got out his penknife. The shoe box was exactly where he had left it, which might mean that Anna didn’t know about it, or that she knew about it and didn’t care. Slipping on a pair of gloves, he tagged, dated, and took it, this time not bothering to replace the grate.
Enzo was so angry that it was not until he was leaving the room that he realized what was wrong. The pillow on Kristin’s bed was empty. He stopped and stood staring at the indent where the little white bear had sat.
* * *
The church was dark, lit only by dull electric orbs that were supposed to look like censers and the tall candles that guttered on either side of the altar. Which was why Anna had chosen it. Evening mass could be counted on for shadows. Shadows and women.
She’d lingered outside first, sitting on a bench across the street for the better part of an hour. Forgetting to search for mittens or gloves in Kristin’s apartment had been a mistake. Anna’d kept her hands in her pockets, flexing her fingers back and forth, although it hadn’t done much good, and had been wondering what she would do if her luck failed—how long she could last sleeping rough in this cold—when she saw the woman.
Dark, with shoulder-length hair, athletic, probably in her early forties, she’d walked quickly along the opposite pavement, passing directly under the streetlight opposite Anna’s bench, then hurried up the steps to the church. Like a prayer answered, Anna thought, a kiss blown by her guardian angel. She’d have to ask someone if angels still looked out for you when you no longer believed in heaven.
Light sliced the steps as the woman slipped through the church doors. After they closed, Anna counted three times to sixty with a breath in between—long enough to make sure the woman was not coming out again. Then she stood up and crossed the street.
As soon as she stepped inside, the smell came rushing back, darting up and touching her like a child playing tag. Burnt offerings. Incense and myrrh. Smoke, and the mossy undertone of damp stone. Her eyes were already adjusted to the dark from sitting outside, but even so she blinked, feeling the past shimmer around her. When she finally stepped forward, her feet were hesitant, as if she was testing black ice.
It took her a moment to spot the woman, pick her out from the handful of hunched shoulders and bowed heads. She was in the third pew from the back, which was probably where she always sat. People who came to evening mass rarely came on a whim. Almost all of them would be regulars, professionals, or late-shift workers of some kind or another who, thanks to the demands of kids or husbands, couldn’t get their daily obeisance in in the morning, so stopped on their way home, doing their duty to God along with the evening shopping.
From her bench across the street, Anna had noted that some of them carried grocery bags from the supermarket two blocks away. The dark-haired woman had one, and a white box from the bakery two doors down. She’d been juggling them with her fashionable short-handled purse. Two more kisses from the guardian angel. Anna slipped the backpack off her shoulder, moved quietly up the aisle, and slid into the same pew.
/> Having propped the grocery bag at her feet and placed the purse and the white box beside her, the woman had leaned forward, burying her face in her hands to pray. Anna arranged the pack to take up as much space as possible, discouraging anyone else from joining them. Then she folded her own hands and bent her knees, peering through her laced fingers. The little yellow lights over the confessional boxes were lit up, announcing that the priest behind his curtain was ready and waiting to take away the sins of the world.
Watching them, Anna felt time falling in on itself like a badly built house of cards. Living in the brave new world of New England, where everything began promptly in 1776 and moved forward in relentless and orderly progression, she had forgotten what it was like to feel not just years, but centuries all jumbled up and sideswiping each other like cars in an accident. Supermarkets tucked into palazzos. Sodium lamps burning in brackets made for torches. Time, life, buildings—all slithered together. Years and purposes playing Pig Pile.
Ten minutes before mass was due to begin, the woman lifted herself back onto the pew. Anna waited a moment, then did the same. The woman looked at her, question in her eyes, asking silently if Anna would watch her things while she went and did her bargaining with God. Anna nodded. The woman smiled her appreciation, then slid to the far end of the pew. The high heels of her boots clicked on the ochre tiles as she approached the confessional.
Anna watched her kneel. The yellow light went out. The black beetle toes of the priest’s shoes shifted slightly as the woman began to whisper. Without taking her eyes off them, Anna reached out and folded her fingers over the shiny tortoiseshell handle of the purse.
Expensive leather whispered across the pew. The zip made almost no noise. The woman’s head was bent even closer now to the confessional’s curtain. Anna slid her hand into the purse, groping past the familiar shapes of a lipstick, a compact, a phone, and set of keys. The wallet was at the bottom. She resisted the temptation to look at it as she lifted it out and slipped it into the deep inner pocket of the parka.
Closing the purse Anna stood up, shouldered Kristin’s backpack, and walked quietly to the doors. Outside wind smacked her in the face. Eyes tearing, she picked her way down the church steps, then ducked her head and walked slowly down the pavement, every fiber in her body resisting the temptation to run.
* * *
Now, almost three hours later, she leaned against the padded headboard of the hotel’s double bed and unwrapped a sandwich. Prosciutto and pecorino, the original ham and cheese. Just smelling it made her realize she was hungry. The Catholic Church in Italy might not have moved with the times, but retail had. Both the supermarket and the big drugstore next to it had been open until nine p.m. Anna had bought the sandwich, then gone next door for scissors, comb, tweezers, and hair dye. It wasn’t the woman’s money she’d been after, it was her face.
Graziella Farelli’s identity card lay on the bedside table. Anna had studied the photo carefully, forcing herself to stand in the mouth of an alley under a streetlight before she’d done her shopping. In the ID picture Graziella was a little fairer than she’d looked in the church. It had taken some time, but Anna thought she’d made the color match pretty well. She put the sandwich down, hopped off the bed, scooped up the card, and padded into the bathroom. Several of the hotel towels were ruined, but her eyebrows were about the right shape and color and her hair looked good. She studied the photo for a moment, then indulged in a few more minutes of careful snipping.
When she was done, reddish brown curls lapped her forehead and hung to her shoulders. She’d left the length deliberately because when the police came looking for her they’d look for a woman with short, dark hair. The opposite of long and blond.
Don’t do the opposite, it’s too predictable.
Always sidestep, never turn.
The litany came back, popping into her head as if it had never left. As if thirty years had never happened.
Ciao, Carina. Da quando non ci si vede.
* * *
“Before she was Anna, she was Angela.”
“Angela.” Enzo turned the name over, fingering it like a coin.
Pallioti nodded and glanced up, his eyes uncharacteristically owlish over the tops of his reading glasses. “They keep the names as close as possible,” he said. “Try not to change the initials. Or so I’m told.”
Enzo knew better than to ask how he had come by this information. Rome. A ministry. A friend. Someone who knows someone who knows someone. All reasons why it had been both more efficient and faster to turn the riddle of Anna Carson’s identity—or rather, Enzo thought sourly, the lack of it—over to his boss. Lorenzo had not only been the most elegant of the de’ Medici. He had been the most powerful.
Pallioti laid his hands on the open pages of the thick file that had appeared, as if by magic—not to mention in record time—on his otherwise bare desk.
“Angela Vari,” he said. “Born, Ferrara, May 11, 1958.”
Enzo looked up. Pallioti nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s Italian. Or at least, she was.”
That explained James MacCready’s question, which he’d thought so odd at the time. Enzo wondered again about what lay below the good ole boy manners and silly speech. Pallioti was watching him.
“We need to find her,” he said quietly. “If we find her, the chances are good that we find the girl.”
Enzo nodded. It still was possible, of course—there was a minute outside chance—that either Anna Carson’s disappearance had nothing to do with her stepdaughter running off with a member of the Red Brigades, or that in some bizarre way this was all benignly connected. But neither he nor Pallioti believed it. They were dealing with a kidnapping. Kristin had been lured, and taken, and with every hour that passed, her chances of survival lessened—it was the golden rule in abduction cases. The one that came right after the golden rule that said family members were number one suspects.
“So,” Pallioti asked, “do we have any idea where Anna Carson is?”
It was just after nine p.m. Looking out at the city lights, Enzo realized that since returning from Kristin’s apartment he had all but lost track of time. Most of the rooms in the new police building had no windows. This was supposedly a gesture toward security—designed to thwart snipers and bomb throwers, and, more commonly, the more ambitious members of the press who had actually been known to perch on rooftops brandishing binoculars and telephoto lenses in order to get a look at evidence and suspects. It sounded good, but Enzo suspected the lack of windows really had more to do with the Black Arts. Architectural design in the service of police efficiency. Deprived of dawn and dusk, humans could stay awake and immersed in whatever they were doing for days. You could work an investigative team to death and they wouldn’t even be aware of it.
He, for instance, had no idea how long he had spent with the photo technician. They had agreed about the clothes Anna Carson was likely to be wearing, and thanks to the samples from Kristin’s bathroom, how she might have made herself up. But they had argued about her hair, the tech insisting that Anna’s hair would now be short and black. Enzo had given in at first, then realized it was a mistake and made her change it. In the end they had compromised and produced several composites, all different.
Enzo had them dispatched to the bus station, and the train stations, and at the same time had requested the tapes from all of their CCTV cameras. He’d done the same at the airport and car rental companies, but with considerably less optimism since using them required photo ID. The tech could think what she liked, but he’d learned his lesson. Instinct told him that unless Anna Carson already had one ready and waiting for her somewhere—in which case they were screwed—she’d get well clear of the city before dealing with the problem of a new identity.
With that in mind, he’d posted an urgent notice concerning pickpocketing and purse snatching on the nationwide database. The victim would be between thirty and sixty, likely female, but possibly a clean-shaven male, and wo
uld definitely be Caucasian, no more than five feet seven inches tall, and probably of lithe, athletic build. He or she might or might not be Italian, would probably not be blond, and would have had identity documents stolen within the last twenty-eight hours while in a public space where he or she might have noticed someone carrying a red backpack.
Like the description of Antonio Tomaselli’s car, it was vague, and broad enough to be essentially useless. But combined with the composites, it might be enough for them to get lucky. Not that Enzo was optimistic. He had a bad feeling about Anna Carson. Or Angela Vari. Or whoever the hell she was now. Maybe, he thought ruefully, that was what had alerted him, what he had recognized in her. The chameleon gene. The blank space of a fellow shape-changer.
“No.” He leaned back on the appallingly uncomfortable but very stylish black leather sofa that had come as part of Pallioti’s new office. “No,” he said again. “We have no idea where she is.” Enzo felt his sneakered foot begin to tap, and looked out of the window. “She could be anywhere.”
Pallioti watched him. “Well,” he said finally, “you’re right, of course. She could be. Angela Vari could indeed, be anywhere. But officially she’s dead.”
Pallioti leafed through several of the file’s pages until he found the one he wanted. He held it up. “She died in an accident. In prison. A fall down stairs, I believe. In December 1980.” He peered at the paper. “Yes, that’s right. While being escorted from the physical recreation area in the isolation block on Tuesday, December the ninth. It says here that she slipped.”
“How very convenient.”
Pallioti smiled. The expression was not full of warmth. “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “Very. So much so, in fact, that other than the guard who was with her, there were no witnesses.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. And by that time Angela Vari had no family either. Her mother died when she was born. Her father, who raised her, was gone. No aunts, uncles, and cousins to speak of. So there wasn’t exactly an outcry. A brief piece appeared in the papers and the body was cremated.”
The Lost Daughter Page 14