Sacred Cut

by David Hewson

  She nodded, surprised perhaps that he got the point so quickly. “Last May. It was the first, as far as we know.”

  “Who?” Falcone asked immediately.

  “A man,” she said. “Just a tourist from D.C. In spite of what we saw today we don’t think this is sexual. We could be wrong …”

  Leapman rocked his chair to and fro in disapproval.

  “We just don’t know,” she continued. “The building is near the Marina. Pretty safe most of the time, but San Francisco’s a city with some rough parts nearby. The cops wrote it off as street crime. Just one thing, though.”

  She pressed the button and ran through a new series of photos. They were of the victim, facedown on the rose-coloured stone floor. He was naked from the waist up. The cord that had been used to strangle him still dug deep into the flesh at the back of his neck. A rough pattern was cut into his lower back in an approximation of the shape they’d seen in the Pantheon that morning.

  Leapman cleared his throat, lit a cigarette and said, “He was still practising then. It took a little while before he got it right. Next.”

  More photos, this time of a stumpy circular tower with two galleries at the summit, pointing up into a clear blue sky.

  “Coit Tower, also San Francisco,” Deacon continued. “Three weeks later they found this when they were opening up for the day. On the floor of the tower too. Our guy’s good with locks.”

  It was another corpse. Totally naked this time. A man, facedown, with grey hair. He was running to fat. Perhaps fifty. The cuts on his back were a little less ragged. The pattern was larger, running out to the folds of flesh at his waist, and more distinct: a geometric dance of angles and curves that made a recognizable image.

  “Who was he?” Falcone demanded.

  “Tourist from New York,” Leapman replied. “Traveling alone. He’d been hanging out in gay bars, which complicated things for a while.”

  They could just about make out the withering glance Leapman was casting them across the room. “That’s the trouble with city cops,” he continued. “Narrow minds. They like to jump to quick conclusions. The San Francisco guys figured they had another dead queer on their books. They didn’t even call us in. We hadn’t a clue any of this was starting to happen. Not for another month.”

  He nodded at Emily Deacon. She cued up a shot of a classical building, with a white colonnaded portico and a rotunda dome, partly in brick. Only the stars-and-stripes flag fluttering from a pole told them this was not in Italy.

  She took up the story. “Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia. End of June now. This was Thomas Jefferson’s home, which may or may not be significant. Jefferson designed it himself. The neoclassical influence probably comes from his time as ambassador in Paris but you don’t need to be an architect to see where the idea originated.”

  “Dead tourist in the hall when they opened up,” Leapman interjected impatiently. The image of a body came up on the screen. “Woman this time, local, from Virginia. You can imagine the picture.”

  “Still nothing sexual?” Falcone asked.

  Leapman shook his head.

  “Can I see the autopsy reports for some of these people?” Teresa Lupo asked.

  “No,” Leapman replied. “We don’t have copies here. Besides, I don’t see the point.”

  “Maybe—” she began.

  “The answer’s no. Next.”

  It could almost have been the same building, except for the window in the portico, which had now changed shape.

  “This is Jefferson too,” Emily Deacon explained. “The University of Virginia just around the corner. The Rotunda is effectively a half-size copy of the Pantheon. Just four days later. A man’s body in the centre of the hall, and this is pretty much what we saw today. The killer’s got the pattern he wants now and he doesn’t shift from it.”

  She keyed up the corpse. The arms and legs were at the selfsame angle as those of the woman in the Pantheon. A second photo showed the cadaver turned onto its front.

  “His scalpel work is improving,” Leapman said.

  “Plus,” Deacon interjected, “he’s getting picky about the way he positions the body. The head faces due south. He kept to that afterwards. From now on, too, he alternates the position of the limbs. Sometimes angled like this. Sometimes with the feet together and the arms at ninety degrees to the torso.

  “The point about facing south is particularly odd,” Emily continued, “because in most of those buildings there was no obvious reason. They weren’t aligned in any particular direction. We only picked up on this later. In the Pantheon itself the entrance and the high altar do face north-south. You could see why he’d lay the body that way. All these ones before—it’s as if he was planning for what happened last night. As if the Pantheon was some kind of final destination.”

  “How hard is it?” Costa said.

  “What?” Leapman asked.

  “What he’s doing to their back.”

  Leapman looked at his colleague. He seemed out of his depth once he went beyond purely procedural matters.

  “It’s not simple and it’s not that difficult either,” she said. “I can give you the summary of the psychological profiling later. We’re not done here yet.”

  Another photo, a tiny circular building almost hidden in a wood, but still with an obvious ancestry. “We were on the case by this time but he wasn’t making it easy for us. There was another hiatus now, until the middle of July. Perhaps he was worried he was pushing his luck. This is a folly in Chiswick, west London. Again, an American visitor. This time a woman.”

  Now another Pantheon copy, this time by a lake. “Ten days later, Stourhead in Wiltshire, southwest England. By now he’s stretching out the miles. Maybe he knows we’ve seen something. Maybe he wants us to see something.”

  A familiar facade from Venice filled the wall. “End of August. Il Redentore. By Palladio, which has clear echoes of the Pantheon. The killer’s playing games and earning a lot of air miles. The victim’s a man this time.”

  “How many?” Falcone asked. “In all?”

  “Seven that we know of, excluding last night,” she said. “There’s nothing to suggest we have them all, though. This guy’s clever. He hops countries. He kills at unpredictable intervals. It’s only over the last few months that we’ve managed to collate the information to prove there’s a pattern that goes beyond those first killings in the States. All we know for sure is that he’s murdered five men and three women. All American. All Caucasian. All middle class. All unexceptional. For all we know they were picked at random to prove a point.”

  “Which is?” Costa asked.

  She played with the remote and pulled up a composite shot, seven scarred backs, each with the flesh marked in a similar fashion, then moved on to a graphic.

  “This is the pattern from one of the later deaths. Probably the closest he got to what he was trying to achieve.”

  She turned on the room light, picked up a printout of the composite of the wounds, and placed it on Leapman’s desk. Then she reached into a drawer and took out a thick black pencil, a ruler and a compass and drew a square on the sheet, almost to the edges.

  “The pattern’s actually a subset of a more complicated idea.”

  Very quickly, with the kind of skill Costa associated with an architect or an artist, she marked four straight lines inside the square, running from the point where the arms of the cross met the perimeter. Finally, she used the compass to join the points where both the curving lines and the straight ones met at the edge, describing a perfect circle.

  “This is what’s called the sacred cut,” she told them. “With the first couple of victims you can even see the marks he used to align it properly.”

  She pulled up two morgue shots, early versions of the shape. “If you look closely, you can see he drew a couple of lines in felt-tip to help him get the hang of things. The other pointer to suggest a link is the way he alternates the position of the limbs. This is a direct reference to
the Vitruvian Man. A naked man, arms and legs outstretched, vertical and horizontal. Drawn within both a square and a circle. It’s the same concept.”

  She exchanged a brief glance with Costa. He understood the prompt.

  “Like the body in the Pantheon,” he said. “I get it.”

  “Good for you,” Leapman muttered, making a point of looking at his watch. “So, Agent Deacon. You’re the architect here. What does it mean?”

  “I have a degree in architecture,” she replied. “It doesn’t make me an expert.” She struggled to form the right answer, then looked at each of them in turn, as if to make sure they understood: she wasn’t too sure of all this herself. “On one level it’s a construct used to explain the geometry behind ancient architecture. On another it’s a metaphor for perfection, kind of a mystical symbol. It’s supposed to represent a faultless union between the physical world and the spiritual one. Remember the way the body was laid out in the Pantheon?”

  She sketched out a copy of the familiar da Vinci sketch, rapidly and with some skill. “The Greeks were the first to set down in writing the idea that great buildings depended upon precise geometric proportions, though they probably stole it from Asia and the Middle East because you see the same theory in earlier buildings there. The Romans picked up the belief that those proportions came directly from the Gods through the shape of a human being. Vitruvius was a soldier under Julius Caesar before he became an architect. He wrote ten books that became the bible on the subject. They got lost for some centuries, until the Renaissance, when Vitruvius again became the primary source for most of the architects we respect today. Michelangelo drew Vitruvian bodies constantly, with limbs in both positions along the perimeter, trying to get inside the idea, and he wasn’t the only one.”

  Emily Deacon placed both drawings side by side on the desk. “Vitruvius used the human body—a holy vessel as far as he was concerned—as the starting point for the proportions needed to create the perfect building.”

  Her slim fingers traced the outlines of the shapes. “The Vitruvian Man squares the circle, just as the making of the sacred cut does. This had a religious importance. It symbolized the marriage of the earthly, the physical fact of the square, with the ineffable perfection of the celestial, the circle. It was about …” She looked across at Leapman, who was beginning to get restless with the explanations. “Finding some kind of truth, God even, inside a shape. The shape of a human body. The shape of a building. The proportions are the same. Look at these.”

  She indicated the outlines of the sacred cut. “There you have just about every shape and proportion you are going to find in a great building. Even the rectangles the cut creates fit a classically correct, arithmetic rule an architect calls the golden mean. It’s the way things are meant to be.”

  Costa tried to remember some of his old art lessons. They’d talked about the golden mean. It permeated everything: architecture, sculpture, painting, mathematics, even music.

  Deacon wasn’t done. “When this man, whoever he is, places a body in the centre of the Pantheon, or a place like it, what he’s doing is making some kind of statement. Laying down a piece in a puzzle, trying to complete the picture. The Pantheon is simply a larger version of the geometric pattern he’s describing with those dead limbs. A circle cut by a square. The woman lay where Hadrian must have once stood himself, looking out from the focus of an artificial cosmos, through the eye of the oculus, out to what he regarded as heaven. She was at the epicentre of this structured view of the universe he created. Equally, the real universe was looking back at her. Whoever this man is, he knows all this. He’s not just some … nut.”

  “Really?” Leapman sighed. “So where does this get us? Profiling has got us nowhere so far.”

  “I don’t know yet,” she half snapped in reply. “Maybe it makes him feel he’s holy somehow. Maybe he’s looking for something, trying to get order back into his world. But we’ve no data, so it’s just guesswork. There’s a missing piece here. This man is smart, educated and very, very capable. Something started him on this path. If we could find out what that is—”

  “But we haven’t,” Leapman interruped. “And the odds are we won’t. Why do we keep going over this? I don’t want to understand the bastard. I want to catch him. This guy’s killed at least eight people now, maybe more. All Americans. If we get the chance to ask him why once he’s in jail, fine. But I’m not going to lose any sleep if he’s just plain dead either. We’re not going to nail down this animal by profiling or mumbo jumbo. We get him through work.”

  He glared across the desk at Falcone. “If we’re lucky, we get him through you.”

  A hint of a smile crossed the inspector’s face. “I’m not a great believer in luck, Agent Leapman. And by the way, it’s nine victims. We lost a photographer last night, if you recall. He was Italian, but all the same.”

  Leapman cursed under his breath, then glowered at the images of the dead, scarred backs.

  “I do believe in detail, though,” Falcone continued. “Why don’t you just turn over everything you have and let us go through the material to see if there’s anything you’ve missed?”

  “We don’t miss things,” Leapman snarled.

  “Let me rephrase,” Falcone said, correcting himself carefully. “Perhaps there’s a fact, an event in there that means something to us and nothing to you.”

  To Costa’s surprise, Leapman didn’t throw the idea straight out of the window into the snow. “It’s got to work both ways,” he said eventually.

  “Meaning?” Falcone wondered.

  “Meaning a quid pro quo. Deacon works with you from now on. She reports back to me on what you find. In return, you get some files and she fills me in on anything you discover.”

  The woman looked up from the desk, her face suffused with sudden anger. “Sir—”

  Leapman interrupted, waving a dismissive hand in her direction. “I can spare you. Saves me hearing all this shit about profiling and numbers and stuff.”

  Falcone nodded and smiled at her. “Agreed,” he said. “Welcome on board.”

  Leapman dragged the keyboard of his PC towards him. “I’ll e-mail you some documents. Let me say this again: these are confidential. If you copy them outside the loop to anyone else, we’ll know and I will personally drag your ass to the Palazzo Chigi for a serious kicking. If I see them reported in the press you’ll be writing parking tickets in Naples before the week’s out.”

  “You seem to have such influence,” Falcone said with a faint smile.

  “If you like,” Leapman replied, “you can test me.”

  “No,” Falcone demurred. “But you could tell me one more thing.”

  “What’s that?” Leapman answered without looking up.

  “How long you’ve been here in Rome, waiting for this man to turn up. How he sent you here in the first place. And—”

  Falcone reached over and pushed the keyboard out of Leapman’s reach, making sure the American had to look him in the face.

  “—why the hell we had to wait for two people to die before you got around to telling us we had this monster on our streets.”

  Leapman glowered at him. “Deacon?”

  She blinked, hesitating, then punched the remote. Costa could feel the hatred rolling off her. A new photo came on the screen: an oriental temple, red-walled with three roofs, set behind rows of white marble steps.

  “The Temple of Heaven, Beijing,” she explained. “A Chinese Pantheon, if you like. The cosmology, the proportions, are virtually identical. It was a sacrificial altar once too.”

  “Still is for the man out there,” Leapman said quietly, almost to himself.

  Emily Deacon was struggling to keep her composure. “This is the last we know of before Rome. In September another body was found there. It took us a little while to get on the case. We never expected to see him outside North America or Europe. And”—she flicked the remote and pulled up more tourist shots of the temple—“there were other reasons
.”

  “Show the good people,” Leapman ordered.

  She pulled up another shot. The man was on his back, naked, face contorted in death, a noose of cord biting cruelly into his neck.

  “Excuse me,” she said and walked briskly out of the door.

  Leapman sighed and picked up the remote, keying up the next picture: the victim turned facedown, with the now-familiar horned shape carved into his skin.

  “After this,” he continued, “we had some intelligence. It pointed us to Rome.”

  “Intelligence?” Falcone asked.

  “Intelligence. Don’t ask because I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted. Just take my word for it. We had some idea that he was on his way here. So”—Leapman closed his eyes for a moment as if this were boring him—“here I am, eating shit food, living in a service apartment, biding my time. Because my masters in Washington decide we should set up an office over here, wait around a little while and see what happens. Why didn’t we tell you? Well, what do you think, Inspector? We didn’t have any proof he was here. We didn’t have a single clue when or where he might do anything if he did turn up. What, exactly, would you have said if I’d walked in and dumped this bunch of half-guesses and supposition on your desk?”

  Leapman waited for an answer. It didn’t come. “I’ll take that as a sign you see my point. We had to come. We had to wait. Now we know this animal’s loose we’ve got to track him down once and for all. He’s fucked around with us too much already. Besides …”

  He keyed up shots of the corpse on the floor of the temple in Beijing.

  “It wasn’t some poor stupid tourist he killed this time. This guy was someone important. The military attaché at the US embassy in Beijing. Career diplomat. Talented guy. Came from one of those old New England families that put their offspring into public service just to prove what wonderful citizens they are, never once asking themselves whether it’s the right job for the spoiled little brats in the first place.”

  Leapman looked at the picture of the dead diplomat again and sighed. “That’s what class is about, don’t you think? Being able to make choices?”