Piras coughed lightly and went on talking as if nothing at all had happened.
“Lojacono, as I was saying, seems to have a different view of what has emerged from the investigations. Could you tell us more, please?”
Lojacono was slightly sprawled out in his chair, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, which he had not removed, unlike the others. It was as if he were emphasizing the temporary nature of his presence in that room.
“Well, to my mind, dottoressa, these killings don’t share any of the typical traits of Mafia murders. I’m referring to the technique. I’d posit that we could probably extend that to include the motive.”
Di Vincenzo snorted and muttered venomously, “Sure, Lojacono. After all, you do know a thing or two about the Mafia.”
Lojacono gave no sign of having heard. But Piras snapped around and glared at the station captain.
“Another line like that, Di Vincenzo, and as God is my witness, I’ll have you suspended from active duty. Don’t test me, I urge you. You’d learn to your bitter regret how serious I am. Lojacono, you’ve already expressed these doubts to me before, and for that matter we’ve also had occasion to note the differences in style and method. It’s also true that organized crime families have shown a willingness to turn to outside professionals, to outsource, so to speak, certain kinds of operations. That aside, do you have anything else to tell us?”
There was a moment of silence. Everyone was looking at Piras, and she in turn was looking at Lojacono, who was staring at the tabletop.
At last the inspector glanced up and said, “Has it occurred to anyone here that the intended victims might be the parents, not the children?”
CHAPTER 40
She’d knitted the little pink cap herself, and she’d knitted the outfit too. She buttoned the outfit to the neck before sheathing the baby girl in her padded overalls and then strapping her into the stroller.
In a way, Roberta misses the time she had spent waiting for the blessed event. Hours and hours spent poring over patterns, knitting, embroidering. And smiling, imagining. Understandable, she muses, after all those years. An endless series of days spent pursuing a single goal: to have a child. To hold a little piece of yourself in your arms, an independent life, possessed of its own breath and heartbeat. She enjoyed every second of her pregnancy, every tiny kick, every instant of nausea; she took it all as a blessing.
There are women who aren’t cut out for motherhood. Roberta had known plenty of them: highly trained professionals devoted to their careers, athletic types, women in love with the nocturnal lifestyle, or adventuresome collectors of experiences—none of them willing to trade their personal freedom for a weak and needy creature demanding constant care.
But there are also women like her—women born to be mothers—though fewer and fewer in number in this world where selfishness and individualism triumph over all.
Not that Roberta ever gave up her profession or her career. She made her way in the world, working hard as an architect, at first in a larger firm and then as a freelance professional. She had her dalliances, a couple of relationships and one great passionate love affair, but the whole time she felt as if she were edging around a crater, an empty space at the center of her life.
Roberta takes a look around outside. The temperature seems mild enough, and there’s no sign of rain; in fact, a shaft of sunlight angles through the clouds and lights up the street outside her front door. Stella can go outside and get a breath of the fresh air wafting up from the waterfront.
Stella. So sweet and small. The destination and objective of an entire lifetime. Roberta remembers when the doctor told her she was sterile, ten years ago. She hadn’t believed him at first. She hadn’t wept, she hadn’t slid into a slough of depression; she’d put on a smile and girded for battle.
The old man emerges from the shadows and starts walking, on the far side of the street. He’s careful because there aren’t a lot of people out and about so he’s more visible than usual today.
A woman doesn’t spend her entire youth waiting for Mr. Right, the great love of her life, the man with whom she can finally start a family of her own, only to give up passively when faced with a sentence printed on a sheet of paper. Not on your life.
And Roberta hadn’t given up, not in the slightest. She had recruited Orlando to fight the battle alongside her; her husband had followed her willingly, but more than once she had been forced to rekindle his determination. Everybody knows it’s different for men. For men, a child becomes important once it’s there, but not before; women, in contrast, are born with the maternal instinct. That’s nature’s way.
The old man stops suddenly, because the woman is tucking a blanket in the stroller. Twenty-five feet from the other side of the street: not an inch less. Invisible. He must remain invisible.
Orlando. She’d met him at work. A smile, a lingering gaze, and the magic spell had been cast.
He was older than her, by a good fifteen years: reassuring, strong, sensitive. The right man, the right husband—the right father. When it comes to the idea of a family, the concrete reality of the thing, it’s a matter of degrees, a gradual thing, Roberta thinks. You might yearn for it as an abstraction, but when the time comes to build it, actually create a family, that’s quite another matter. Orlando clearly had a long history of relationships. He didn’t talk much about them, but the scars were unmistakable. And a man still alone at his age suggested a troubled past. His father’s long drawn-out illness—a father to whom Orlando had always been very close, a father whom she’d never met—had left its mark on him too.
Still, they were a perfect couple, bound together by a powerful force from the very beginning. Maybe they’d been looking for each other all their lives. Maybe that whole time they’d been waiting for each other.
There was no way they’d stop at the first diagnosis. Roberta had always known that she’d be a mother someday—a mother of her own biological child, not an adopted child. She wouldn’t turn to those horrifying baby markets. She would have a child of her own.
The old man starts moving again, his feet dragging, his gaze low, clinging to the sides of the buildings. No one knows him. No one sees him. Twenty-five feet, not a foot more, not a foot less.
Roberta had always loved to sketch; that’s why she became an architect in the first place. And she’d always sketched the face of her future daughter. She hadn’t stopped even when a second and then a third doctor confirmed the first doctor’s diagnosis.
She listened, smiled politely, and then went out to find another doctor. And meanwhile, she went on sketching. The loveliest portraits—the ones that vaguely resembled the wonderful features of her daughter as if they were intimations of some future beauty, some foreshadowing of grace—Orlando had had framed and now they hung on the walls of the little pink nursery where they safeguarded the most loved of all Roberta’s and Orlando’s treasures.
The old man stops when he sees her step into a shop. He backs away a short distance until he finds a bench, pulls his newspaper out of his pocket, and pretends to read. But all the time he’s watching and waiting.
In the end, they found the right doctor. Not that they’d have ever stopped looking, of course. But this one had smiled and explained exactly how to go about it. With a minor operation and a course of pharmaceuticals it might be possible to achieve their goal—those had been his exact words. And Roberta remembered the sound of his voice as if it were a chorus of angels.
The old man breaks his self-imposed rule and draws closer. The woman stands in the shelter of a doorway to protect the baby girl from the wind and so she won’t see him. Twenty-five feet, fifteen feet, ten feet. He leans against the wall, as if catching his breath after a long walk. He pulls out his tissue, dries a tear from his cheek, and then rubs his eye. He looks closer.
The baby girl opens her eyes and smiles at her mamma. Stella. The most magnificent spectacle in the universe.
Roberta immediately accepted Orlando’s suggestion;
she knew she could never have come up with anything better than that. Stella. Star: beautiful, luminous. A light in the darkness, the strongest light of all. Her North Star, her Stella Polare, the star that would guide her footsteps for the rest of her life. The daughter she’d hoped for, wanted, searched for. Her dream come true.
The woman can’t resist. She gives in, planting a kiss on the baby’s face before laying her down on her back in the stroller again. The girl cheeps like a chick and smiles once again.
The old man looks at the baby girl. This is the first time that he’s had a chance to see her up close like this. The risk was worth it. She’s lovely: a button nose, chubby cheeks. The old man searches for a feeling, any tinge of emotion, and comes up with nothing. His eyes remain expressionless, the hand holding the tissue steady. He looks at Roberta’s smile and decides that this woman must truly be a fine person. Someone who wishes the whole world well. And therefore trusts the world to feel the same way towards her.
The old man retraces his steps. Thirty feet back, at least, he decides.
CHAPTER 41
Lojacono’s words had landed in the middle of the conference table like a hand grenade.
Everyone stared at him as if he’d cut loose with a stream of profanity. The first to regain his composure was Scognamiglio.
“What the devil did you just say, Mr. What’s-your-name-again?” he barked. “What do the parents have to do with it?”
Di Vincenzo snorted again, rolling his eyes skyward. Palma, the Vomero station captain, lunged forward:
“But why would he do that? Sorry, but wouldn’t the Crocodile have gone after them directly?”
Scognamiglio turned to glower at him, practically foaming at the mouth. “Palma, don’t tell me you’ve decided to start calling him the Crocodile too? What, are we going to let the press influence the way we think now?”
Piras hadn’t taken her eyes off Lojacono’s face for a second; in turn, he’d gone back to staring at the tabletop, like a student in the principal’s office.
“What do you mean, Lojacono? In what sense could the parents be the victims?”
Lojacono looked up and met the prosecutor’s gaze.
“I think that there could only be one thing worse than dying, and that’s losing a child. It’s a blow, a crushing grief from which you can never recover.”
Di Vincenzo muttered through clenched teeth, “What are we doing now, philosophizing?”
Piras shot him an eloquent glare and the station captain lowered his eyes. Unexpectedly, Lojacono started talking again.
“Three kids, each of them an only child. Three single parents. Lorusso, a young unmarried mother. De Matteis, a divorced woman with her ex-husband on another continent. The father of this boy murdered yesterday: I hear he’s a widower.”
Piras turned to Palma. “Can you confirm that? Is this true about Rinaldi’s father?”
Palma nodded, rapt in thought. “Yes, I think that’s right. The two of them definitely lived alone. To tell the truth, we were focusing on the technique of the killing. Excuse me, Lojacono, but how did you find that out?”
Lojacono shrugged. “A journalist, a young woman who was in the crowd outside the police station this morning. I bought her an espresso.”
Piras’s jaw muscle twitched. “That’s a nice way to get information, taking people to a café and buying them coffee. I’ll keep that in mind for future reference. What else did you learn from this woman journalist?”
The edge in Piras’s tone was not lost on those present, and they exchanged disconcerted glances.
Lojacono replied nonchalantly, “That this Dr. Rinaldi was distraught, at his wits’ end, devoid of any interest in life, and practically on the verge of insanity. Just like the two mothers, Lorusso and De Matteis.”
Scognamiglio blurted out, “Dottoressa, seriously, do we have to sit here and listen to this utter nonsense? We’ve had three young people murdered here, probably selected at random, or maybe because they were easy targets, or else because they were somehow involved in the same drug deal. We need to take the time to investigate this thing, go into it in depth; maybe this Rinaldi had some contact that could be traced back to the other two. But we’re wasting our time here.”
Lojacono spoke to him directly. “True enough, this might not be the right lead. But nothing says we can’t consider a theory, explore a hypothesis, does it? I’m not saying we should stop investigating, that’s the furthest thing from my mind. Still, if I wanted to inflict a fate worse than death on someone, I’d murder their child.”
Palma scraped his chin. A five o’clock shadow was beginning to show on his face.
“True, this latest murder seems to have no connection to the first two. It wouldn’t be easy or fast, but we could start digging into the parents’ past. It wouldn’t cost us a thing, really.”
Di Vincenzo shot back with a cold retort. “Speak for yourself, if you have extra men to assign to your case. In my department we have the whole staff working full-time on the first boy’s case. The boy’s mother? She’s nothing but a home-care nurse, just a poor woman. She can’t have ever done anything to make anyone want to take revenge.”
Piras felt obliged to break in.
“There’s something that still baffles me. The way these murders have been carried out is strange, there are odd details. I’ve studied the modus operandi, the process, the routine, and the third case only reinforces my impression. On the one hand, they all point to careful study, patient preparation, an attention to detail that would have to be the product of a lengthy and painstaking organizational effort. It can’t be pure chance that no one has ever seen him; it can’t be dumb luck that he’s struck repeatedly without encountering resistance, getting away with it three times. But on the other hand, there are aspects that cry out that this is the work of an amateur: like the tissues, or the weapon he used. The two sides of the equation don’t add up.”
Lojacono sat up straight in his chair.
“That’s exactly right. The overall picture points to someone who’s had a long time to prepare, but who’s still no professional killer. A blackmailer, perhaps. Or someone out for revenge. But not a professional criminal.”
They all thought over what Lojacono and Piras had just said, trying to modify their points of view after spending days on the theory that there was a Camorra connection between the first two murders. At this point Savarese broke in, with the scowling expression of someone who’d been insulted.
“All right then, let’s say that the Camorra has nothing to do with it. How on earth can one person move undisturbed through three isolated locations, two of which are low-traffic areas where the inhabitants all know each other? How can he kill three kids and then fold his tent and silently steal away without being seen? Riddle me that.”
Lojacono gave him a melancholy smile. “Trust me, Savare’, it’s much easier than you think to move around in this city without anyone noticing you. If anything, that’s helpful. We’re looking for someone nondescript, an ordinary man in every sense of the word.”
Piras nodded. “And what should we do now, Lojacono, in your opinion? What’s our next move?”
Lojacono seemed completely unaware of the irritation of Scognamiglio and Di Vincenzo. He looked Piras in the face.
“In my opinion, the first thing we should do is bring the three parents together and arrange a face-to-face confrontation. Let’s try to find out what they have in common, or what they might have had in common in the past.”
Scognamiglio spread his arms out wide.
“Absurd. It’s flat-out absurd. You’re suggesting we take three people who have suffered a calamity of this magnitude and subject them to questioning as if they were three criminals. Moreover, you’re suggesting a confrontation, all three of them face-to-face! If we’re going to question them, let’s talk to them one at a time, at least. Let’s not bandy names around; let’s move cautiously. The De Matteis woman has friends in high places, and so does Doctor Rinaldi. We cou
ld be asking for serious fallout, take it from me.”
Palma agreed. “He’s right. I’ve already received a number of phone calls to my police station, and one of them even came from here, from police headquarters. I can’t imagine it would be a straightforward matter to question the doctor about his past even on his own; it would become impossible if we put him in the same room with other people. There’s also the question of whether he’s in any kind of shape to put up with questioning at all. This morning the man looked like he was dead himself: staring eyes, a face I couldn’t really describe.”
Scognamiglio couldn’t believe that someone was actually throwing him a lifeline in his quandary.
“I won’t even try to describe the De Matteis woman. If you ask me, her testimony would be unreliable; in fact, I’m not sure she hasn’t lost her mind.”
Lojacono nodded in agreement. “I can well imagine. And I understand perfectly, you both have a point. But it’s absolutely necessary, and we’ll need to move fast too.”
“Why on earth should we move fast?” asked Di Vincenzo. “They’re certainly not going to run away. We can give them a little time to recover. Try to show a little consideration.”
“Simple. Because the Crocodile, or whatever we choose to call him, might not be done yet.”
This time the silence around the table was tinged with fear. Finally, Piras spoke softly.
“Here’s what we’ll do: you go on investigating, but on a broad basis. Don’t neglect any clues, even if it takes you off the Camorra trail. It’s what we would have done in any case after this third murder. None of you will be involved in questioning the three parents: I’ll take care of that myself. I’ll summon them all in here, and there will be no pressure on any of you. Lojacono and I will handle the confrontation ourselves, and from this point on he’s assigned full-time to this investigation.”
The Crocodile (World Noir) Page 13