The Turin Shroud Secret

by Sam Christer

  ‘Rapidamente per favore!’

  The old man doling out change and tickets isn’t bothered by the cry of urgency.

  By the time the monk reaches the bottom of the escalator he can hear a train thundering away, eastbound.

  The platform is empty.

  72

  SANTA MONICA, LOS ANGELES

  Mitzi takes a long shower, more painkillers, fresh coffee and a short walk before a queasy cab ride to collect her car. It’ll be a while before she hits the bottle like that again. It was worth it, though. Six hours of glorious sleep and for a brief passage of time no thought of Alfie, the girls or what a mess her life was becoming.

  Was – past tense.

  In the future – starting right now – it’s going to be fine. She’s going to finish this case, book a holiday for her, Jade and Amber, sell the house and start anew. Somewhere with no memories. Everything will be just fine.

  Mitzi is parking in the station house when her cell phone rings. ‘Fallon,’ she answers, closing the car door and walking away.

  ‘Logan Connor, Lieutenant.’ There is a pause on the end of the line, then he adds, ‘Sergeant Sheen gave me your number, said I had to call.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ve just come from the courthouse, ma’am. They processed your husband’s file.’

  The comment stops her in her tracks. She had no idea his case was being heard so quickly. Someone must have pulled strings for her. ‘Appreciate you reaching out. Tell me.’

  ‘He plead to battery and his attorney cut a deal with the DA to avoid a full trial. He got thirty days.’

  Mitzi feels numb. She can’t work out whether it’s good news or bad. Most cases land the minimum thirty. For what he did, he should go to the pokey for a year or more. Despite the lenient sentence, she also knows the die has been cast now. He’s a jailbird. You can never get that particular tattoo lasered off. He’s a convict. ‘So he’s being processed now, already in the system?’ It’s a rhetorical question, she knows what’s going down.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Judge also set release conditions, prohibiting him from coming within a hundred yards of you, the family home or any family member without supervision and spousal consent.’ Connor clears his throat. ‘If you ask me, I think the court should have—’

  ‘I didn’t, Officer, and I really don’t want to know what you think.’ She’s about to cut him off when she remembers her manners. ‘I appreciate your call and how you’ve handled all this. Your discretion is duly noted. You ever need a favour in Homicide, one’s waiting on my desk.’

  ‘No need, ma’am. I’m just glad to have helped.’

  She shuts down the phone. Thirty days. How the hell is she going to tell the girls?

  73

  DOWNTOWN, LOS ANGELES

  JJ spends most of the day closeted in his office. But his mind is elsewhere.

  It’s with Em. She’s all he can think about. He wants to be with her for ever. Even wishes she was still alive. But that was never going to be possible. He’d been sworn to secrecy. And he’s obeyed. Always has. Always will.

  He knows he has to move her. Let her go. But where should she rest? He’s never disposed of a body before. Never done anything so unkind in his life. All those he has helped into the next world he has left in their homes.

  Home. That’s it. He must return Em to her home. It is where she will be at rest. It is the right thing to do. Unconsciously he puts a hand to his stomach and rubs an itch, one caused by the fresh cuts he made before coming to work. He undoes the buttons of his white shirt and looks at the livid criss-cross wounds opened by the razor blade. He lowers his chin to his chest and blows on the skin to soothe it.

  A knock lifts his head. The sound of the door opening makes him close his shirt quickly. Jenny Harrison stares at him. Only she doesn’t look as bold as usual. Hasn’t done since her friend disappeared.

  ‘Can I have a minute?’

  ‘It’s not convenient.’ He finishes straightening his clothes.

  She comes in anyway. ‘It’s Kim. Did she call you today? To say she was sick or anything?’

  He wishes now he’d dealt with them both. If he’d gone back for Harrison after he’d finished Bass, this wouldn’t be happening. ‘I haven’t heard from her. If she’s not in by Monday, I’m giving her job to someone else.’

  Harrison flinches. ‘I think I know what’s happened to her.’

  JJ doubts it. ‘What?’

  She hesitates. What she’s about to say could cost her friend her job. ‘A year back Kim got pulled by the cops for making out in a car with a guy. They got it all wrong and charged her with prostitution. She did five days in prison, with a warning that if she got caught again, she’d go down for longer.’

  ‘Prostitution?’ He tries to sound shocked.

  ‘Yeah. Like I say, it was a mistake. A misunderstanding. But Kim’s always got lots of admirers and I figure there might have been another misunderstanding – do you know what I mean?’

  ‘You think she’s been arrested?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Harrison moves to the edge of the desk and puts on a helpless look. ‘Mr James, could you ring the cops and find out if they’ve got her somewhere? I called the local station and they said check with Hollenbeck but they’d never heard of her. Maybe they’d do more if you called.’

  The last people in the world that JJ wants to ring are the police. ‘Leave it with me, Jenny. I’ll see what I can find out.’

  74

  TURIN

  What disturbs Nic almost as much as the fact that Roberto Craxi and his wife have disappeared is that Carlotta and Fredo don’t seem that bothered. Policing in Italy is a whole different ballgame to that in the States. Too laid back and far too sloppy for his liking.

  He’s still biting his tongue as Fredo drives them to Craxi’s bank at the south-eastern end of Via Po, near the giant Piazza Vittorio Veneto. While it’s not that unusual for people to change homes five or ten times in a lifetime, they seldom switch banks on more than a couple of occasions. The manager should be able to give them a new address.

  Carlotta is sat in the back with Nic and can tell that he’s churning things over in his mind. ‘Something is troubling you?’

  ‘Yeah, it is. Don’t you think it strange that none of the neighbours back there saw the Craxis leave and none of them were friendly enough to have a forwarding address?’

  She shrugs. ‘It happens. In apartment blocks like that, you come, you go, you don’t see many people. I live in one very like it.’

  He’s looking out the window as he talks. ‘Those stairs were tight. You couldn’t get furniture out without making a noise, scraping walls, being noticed.’

  ‘The landlord, Signore Llorente, did you ask him about the relocation? Maybe he knows?’

  ‘I asked. He doesn’t.’ He turns to face her. ‘Something is wrong, and I get the impression that because this is an out-of-town case, you and the Carabinieri don’t really care that much.’

  ‘Scusi?’ She reddens a little. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Come on. We get the brush-off from that verger friend of yours, then the Craxis have vanished and their apartment – well, their apartment is the only one to have been freshly painted – and you don’t seem to be the least bit interested in that.’

  She’s offended by his tone. ‘Maybe it was painted to attract new renters.’

  ‘Maybe you’re not trying hard enough. I bet if you sent a forensic team into that apartment back there, you wouldn’t find so much as a fingerprint from Craxi or his wife.’

  ‘He has left,’ she throws up her hands in annoyance, a flash of Latin temper. ‘The landlord says he has paid his rent, so for us there is no crime here in Italy to investigate.’

  ‘Maybe not for you, but in LA we have a mutilated dead woman and she’s directly linked to your missing Italian.’

  ‘He’s not missing. He just left. He just moved house.’

  ‘We are here.’ Fredo pulls the Alfa to the ke
rb.

  ‘Thanks,’ snaps Nic, pushing open the back door and getting out.

  Carlotta stomps past him and into the bank. She walks by a queue of customers and shows her ID at a window. A senior clerk eventually materialises and lets them through an electronically locked door into a passageway and then upstairs to the first floor to an office at the back in the corner. Seems big guys the world over always want the corner space, the one with double windows and the best street views.

  Fabrizio Gatusso comes out and shakes Carlotta’s hand. The silver-haired fifty-year-old looks every inch a bank manager – blue pin-stripe suit, white shirt and tightly knotted blue tie.

  ‘He says to come in,’ explains Carlotta, her voice showing she’s still mad with Nic. ‘He does not speak English but I will translate.’

  Nic takes a seat beside her on the brown corner sofa, the kind that comes in movable sections. Gatusso settles on another square piece of it opposite them, behind a glass table stacked with paper and leaflets. The banker hands a file to Carlotta and she in turn passes it to Nic with an explanation. ‘These are copies of Craxi’s accounts for all the time he was a customer. Also his wife’s.’

  ‘Was? Was his customer.’

  ‘Si. They closed their accounts a month ago.’

  Nic feels his anger bubbling up again. Precious time is being wasted. ‘So who do they bank with now?’ His tone becomes almost derisory. ‘Usually when customers move banks, the old bank and the new one work together to switch standing orders and exchange debit orders and things. Please don’t tell me it doesn’t work like that in Italy or that I need special permission from the President or the Pope or someone.’

  She stares angrily at him. ‘I ask for you.’

  As she does, Nic opens the file and scans the statements. They show the sequence of payments from Tamara Jacobs – sums of €3600, the equivalent at the time of $5000. He flicks through and sees the bigger amounts as well – two deposits via international bank transfer of €18,179 – twenty-five grand.

  Carlotta turns back to him. ‘Signore Gatusso has no idea what bank the Craxis are now with.’ She reaches across him into the file and searches for a moment. She finds a copy of a final statement. ‘This is the bank’s last link. When the Craxis closed their accounts, they took all their money in cash.’

  75

  77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES

  Sergeant Bobby Sheen has been expecting the call. He just hopes Mitzi isn’t mad at him. He’d prayed Alfie Fallon would get prison time but it was always going to be a long shot. With a spiralling state deficit, first-time offenders are pretty much given a telling off and a free ride home these days. ‘Hiya, Mitzi, how you doin’?’

  She’s stood in the ladies’ restroom at work. ‘I’m holding up, Bobby. Holding up. Connor rang me – said you told him to.’

  ‘I did. Look, I’m sorry they were so chicken-assed. I hoped the judge would have been a bit tougher, you know?’

  She leans in the corner against the cold white tiles near the hand dryers, ‘No need to say sorry. Who was it?’

  ‘Kent. Justice Joe Kent. Should have retired the useless bastard ten years ago.’

  ‘Should have been a woman.’

  ‘Kent is a woman. He certainly doesn’t have any balls.’

  Mitzi smiles. Bobby’s always been a hardliner, ever since she first met him. ‘What was Alfie charged under? Two-seven-three or two-four-three?’

  ‘Seven-three. The photographs we took of you were sufficient to prove physical injury.’

  She has an embarrassing flashback of Bobby leading her down to the doctor after she’d seen her husband in the bullpen and all her injuries being noted and snapped.

  ‘You okay, hon?’

  ‘Not yet, but I will be when all this is over.’

  ‘Soon. At least this is out of the way now.’

  ‘I know. Bobby, thanks for pushing things through. I realise you were looking out for me. Don’t go feeling bad about the sentence.’

  ‘You’re a star, Mitzi. Rise above this crap and shine again. Call me if I can help with anything.’

  ‘Will do.’ She clicks off the phone and glances in the rest-room mirror as she heads to her desk. ‘You’re a star, Mitzi – just you remember that.’

  76

  TURIN

  Confession is good for the soul.

  Admitting your mistakes. Repenting. It’s how Ephrem has been raised. And right now he fully accepts his failings and is trying to make up for them. He was vain and conceited. Thought he had the better of the man he had been following – and he hadn’t.

  Pride before a fall.

  He knows the teachings, the proverbs – when pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.

  Ephrem looks at the empty train platform and mentally chastises himself. When his mission is complete he will inflict agonising pain on his vain body to ensure today’s lesson is learned and never forgotten. The only thing comforting him is the knowledge that no matter how frail and fallible he is, his opponent will have inadequacies at least equal to his own. Right now he is sure the man he is tracking will be feeling confident, safe, sure of his actions.

  Pride before destruction. The monk abandons the chase and returns to the target’s car. There’s a chance that his enemy has abandoned it but that would be a big sacrifice for someone in his position, especially as this man has others to protect. No, Ephrem feels sure he’ll come back here. All he has to do is wait.

  Before his downfall a man’s heart is proud.

  77

  CORONER’S OFFICE, LOS ANGELES

  Amy Chang spends the morning working a routine overdose case. A seventy-five-year-old woman living on her own decided to take a month’s worth of anti-depressants and check out of Hotel California once and for all. Who can blame her? The City of Angels is hell on earth for anyone who isn’t young, beautiful and hooked up with someone who loves them.

  She scrubs her hands and arms, changes from morgue greens into a brown Peter Pan tunic top over comfortable black Jersey skinny trousers. Back at her office desk she opens up mail from Mitzi containing high-def pics of the Shroud of Turin. She’s seen some of the photographs before but never really paid much attention to them. The big close-up of the face is the most recognisable of all. Even through the grey-black haze it’s unmistakably an image of Christ that people recognise the world over – beard, long hair and the crown of thorns. She flicks through them until she finds a larger and more interesting body shot.

  There’s something about the image that instinctively feels wrong to the ME. Her eyes are drawn to the hands, especially the right one and its fingers. In proportion to the rest of the body they just seem too big. She types out a memo, attaches the print and sends it to Gunter Quentell at the FBI. He’s a world expert in photogrammetry – the forensic practice of determining the geometric properties of objects from photographic images.

  Before Amy makes her own scientific evaluations she seeks some artful insight into the mysteries. She searches the online databases and the best she can come up with is the sixteenth-century oil by Giovanni Battista depicting how the body could have been wrapped. It shows the linen loosely looped over the head with the open end at the feet.

  She glances again at the body print made on the Shroud and the two don’t seem to tally. To leave such definite marks around all areas on the corpse would be impossible unless it had been bound tightly, not covered flimsily as painted by Battista.

  Amy hits zoom on her monitor and examines the Shroud section by section, top to bottom. It takes an hour. Her findings are fascinating and frustrating. The body parts seem out of proportion to each other. They seem more like they’ve been drawn than traced. And the more she stares at the face the more she is both enchanted and confused.

  The forehead looks too short for the rest of the skull. Remembering that the victim was supposed to be lying on his back, his hair should also be hanging away from, not over his head and face. She looks again a
t the full-length shot of the corpse. The man has no neck. At least she can’t see one in the print. She searches for signs of the cloth having been cut and reattached, so possibly excluding part of the neck, but can’t find any.

  Another aspect of the Shroud worries her. Wrap linen around a corpse and it gets creased – deeply creased. But not in this case. There’s no evidence of any twists in the cloth, only the lines where it’s been folded for storage.

  Amy searches police files and forensic image banks on wounds and torture marks. There’s nothing comparable. A case in Canada in which a serial killer crucified his victims looks promising but it turns out he used execution methods totally unlike those performed by the ancient Romans. She turns her attention once again to the Shroud’s positive and negative plates. The difference between the two is astonishing. In the positive plate the body image is virtually invisible. In the negative one, it jumps right out at you. It’s like spraying Luminol at a scene that looks wiped clean only to see blood appear in all its glorious chemiluminescence.

  The phone rings and makes her jump. ‘Doctor Chang.’

  ‘Guten tag, schöner mediziner.’

  ‘Gunter!’ She’s genuinely delighted he’s called her. ‘Fantastic to hear your voice. How are you?’

  ‘Me? I am very happy because you send me a note. Even if it is only to pick my giant German brain.’

  She laughs. ‘If I picked anything else, your giant German wife would have me roasted for dinner in her very fine restaurant.’

  He sighs. ‘She would indeed. But in another life we will be lovers, of this I am sure. Now why are you looking at the Turin Shroud and asking crazy questions?’