The Garden of Evil (9 page)

“Why is it wrong?” Rosa asked him, taking her hand away, almost smiling. “There are plenty of officers on this force who’ve been robbed sometime, or beaten up in the street. Does that mean they can’t arrest a thief or a thug? Is innocence of a crime now a prerequisite for being able to investigate it?”

“That’s just clever talk,” Peroni snapped. “Everyone here knows what I mean.”

The room was silent. Then Leo Falcone folded his arms, looked at Peroni, and said, “We do. And in normal circumstances you would be absolutely right. But these circumstances are anything but, I’m afraid.”

“You bet this isn’t normal,” Teresa agreed. “
Normally
I’m fighting to find material to work with. We’re positively dripping in the stuff here. I’ve got blood and semen. DNA aplenty. Silvio? Fetch, boy . . .”

Di Capua went to the rear door, where a pile of transparent plastic evidence bags had grown waist high. He came back with a swift selection. They looked at what lay inside.

“We haven’t had time to take it all away yet,” Teresa continued. “We’ve been too busy digging. There are whips. Flails. Knives. Masks. Some leather items that are a little beyond my imagination. We have a wealth of physical evidence here the likes of which I have never seen in my entire career. We could nail the bastards who killed these women with one-tenth of this evidence. Just point us at a suspect and we’ll tell you yes or no in the blink of an eye. This is the mother lode of all crime scenes. All we need from you is someone to test it against.”

The room was again silent.

“
Well?
” Teresa asked again, somewhat more loudly.

“Let’s take this outside,” Falcone murmured.

Two

I
T WAS FREEZING COLD IN THE CONTROL VAN PARKED AT
the head of the street, by the Piazza Borghese. The interior stank of stale tobacco smoke. The smoke came from a large middle-aged man in a brown overcoat who sat on one of the metal chairs in the van, awaiting their arrival. He introduced himself as Grimaldi from the legal department, then lit another cigarette.

Peroni was the last to sit down at the plain metal table in the centre of the cabin. He took a long, frank look at Falcone, who wasn’t meeting his gaze, then at Susanna Placidi, who’d placed a large notebook computer in front of her and was now staring at the screen, tapping the keyboard with a frantic, uncomfortable nervousness.

“Shouldn’t we have a few more people in on this conversation?” Peroni asked. “Six people murdered. The press going crazy. Is this really just down to us?”

“What you’re about to learn is strictly down to us,” Falcone replied, and cast the woman inspector a savage look. “Tell them.”

Placidi stopped typing and said, “We know who they are.”

The utter lack of enthusiasm and conviction with which she spoke made Costa’s heart sink.

“You know who killed my wife?” he asked quietly.

“We think we can narrow it down to one of four men,” Placidi replied, staring hard at the computer screen.

“And they’re just walking around out there?” Peroni asked, instantly furious, with Teresa beginning to make equally incensed noises by his side.

“For the time being,” Falcone replied, and nodded at Rosa Prabakaran.

Without a word she reached over, took the computer from the uncomplaining Placidi, and began hitting the keys. She found what she wanted, then turned the screen round for them all to see.

It was a photo taken at the Caravaggio exhibition Costa had worked the previous winter, organising security. In it, four men stood in front of the grey, sensual figure of
The Sick Bacchus,
which had been temporarily moved from the Villa Borghese for the event. This, too, was a self-portrait, a younger Caravaggio than that seen in the religious paintings and the
Venus
now undergoing scrutiny under the expert eye of Agata Graziano. Dissolute, saturnine, clutching a bunch of old grapes the same hue as his sallow skin, staring at the viewer, like a whore displaying her wares showing a naked shoulder; despite this, the only focus of hope and light in the entire canvas.

The men in front of the painting looked equally debauched. One, vaguely familiar, seemed more than a little drunk. He stood on the left of the line, with his arm around the shoulders of the man next to him in a tight proprietorial fashion. The other two stood slightly apart, looking like friends in the process of turning into enemies for some reason.

“They call themselves the Ekstasists.”

Costa couldn’t take his eyes off them. He gazed at the blank, cruel masculine faces on the screen, trying to imagine what each would look like inside a black military hood.

“Him,” Costa said eventually, indicating the one on the far left, the man with his arm around the shoulders of his companion.

The two women officers exchanged glances and said nothing.

Grimaldi, the lawyer, finally shuffled his chair up to the table and took some interest.

“The man wore a mask,” he pointed out. “How can you be sure?”

“I’m not. I’m guessing. You can still bring him in on that.”

Grimaldi sighed and said, “Ah. Guesses.”

“He has the same build,” Costa insisted. “The same stiff posture. As if he used to be a soldier. This—”

“This,” Grimaldi cut in, “is Count Franco Malaspina. Who was a soldier once, an officer during military service, for which he was decorated several times. He is also one of the richest and most powerful individuals in Rome, a patron of the arts and of charity, an eligible bachelor, a face from the social magazines, a fine man, or so a casual scan of the press cuttings might have one think.” Grimaldi hesitated and cast his sharp dark eyes at each of them.

Costa knew the name. As far as he was aware, Malaspina continued to own the vast private palace which bore his family name, which sprawled through Ortaccio, embracing both the Vicolo del Divino Amore and the Barberini’s studio. He’d surely seen the man’s picture in the newspapers. Could it be simple chance recognition that made him point the finger of blame?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Perhaps I was just remembering the wrong thing.”

“Perhaps,” Grimaldi agreed. “All the same, let me tell you a little about Franco Malaspina.”

THE LAWYER DIDN’T EVEN NEED TO REFER TO NOTES. HE SIMPLY
spoke from memory as Costa stared at the photo on Rosa’s screen, an image of a tall, athletic twenty-eight-year-old merchant banker with an eponymous family palace in Rome, homes in Milan and New York, and, said Grimaldi, enough files in the Questura to fill an entire lifetime for most criminals, every last one still open. Malaspina was heir to a fortune that had been built up by his clan over more than three centuries, one that began with the bankrolling of a Pope. He was a true Roman aristocrat of a dying breed, and came from a family with unusual antecedents. Unlike most of the city’s nobility, the Malaspinas had embraced the era of Mussolini, seeing in the dictator opportunity, and not the coarse, proletarian Fascism most other ancient families detected and instantly despised. His grandfather had served as a minister for Il Duce. His own father had been a rabble-rouser on the fringes of right-wing politics, and consequently had been loathed in Rome, a city that was temperamentally left-leaning, until his death in a plane crash five years ago.

Costa had no recollection of Franco Malaspina being involved in machinations around the parties that formed the continuing, argumentative coalitions at the heart of the Italian state; only the vague memory that he was a notorious player in the money world, one who sailed so close to the wind that the financial authorities had investigated him more than once. Not that these probes had resulted in any form of action, which meant that Malaspina was either innocent or so deeply powerful no one dared yet take him on. There were good reasons for caution. Men of his sort liked to build up fortunes before turning to the Senate and Parliament to lay wider, deeper foundations for their power.

Rosa identified the others in the photograph; all the men were strangers to Costa, though two names were familiar. Giorgio Castagna was the son of the head of a notorious porn empire, a Roman playboy rarely out of the showbiz magazines. Emilio Buccafusca was the owner of an art gallery that specialised in some of the more controversial areas of sculpture and painting. He had frequently clashed with the law over the public display of work that bordered on the extreme. The previous winter his gallery had provoked public outrage for exhibiting several “death sculptures” by a Scandinavian artist supposedly consisting of genuine human body parts encased in clear plastic.

After a field day in the media, a worried Questura
commissario
had dispatched Teresa Lupo to the gallery to investigate. She’d denounced the organs as demonstrably animal in origin, probably from slaughtered pigs. Buccafusca had laughed out loud at the time; now he didn’t seem in the mood. Both men appeared somewhat inconsequential next to the aristocratic Malaspina, though they were all of similar stature, dressed in black, Castagna and Buccafusca with similar pinched and bitter faces.

There were more photographs, too, from other arts events. Malaspina’s expression—self-satisfied, confident, powerful—was constant throughout. In the early photos the others looked much the same way. Something had happened over the previous few months to change that. There, Costa knew, Falcone would see his opportunity.

The fourth figure, a man completely unknown to Costa, usually skulked close to the background, and seemed somewhat out of place in such company. He was short, sandy-haired, and chubby, about thirty, with a florid, slack face and an expression that veered, in these photos, from boredom to a visible, subservient fear.

“Being an avid reader of junk magazines,” Teresa Lupo said, staring at the same image, “I feel I’ve met most of this Eurotrash already. But who’s fat boy?”

“Nino Tomassoni,” Rosa Prabakaran answered. “He’s the only one here who doesn’t have much money, as far as we can figure out.

He’s an assistant curator at the Villa Borghese.”

Tomassoni
. The name sparked a memory for Costa, one he couldn’t place.

“The man is probably on the periphery of all this,” Placidi added. “Perhaps he’s barely involved at all.”

Falcone scowled at her. It was exactly this kind of imprecision in detail that he despised in an officer.

“His name is on the list,” Falcone pointed out. “If that means nothing, it means nothing for the rest of them.”

“The list?” Peroni wondered. “You’re accusing these men of some pretty nasty stuff. They are people who like to wear nice suits. And all you have against them is a list?”

Placidi sighed, then pulled a sheaf of printed papers out of the folder in front of her and stacked them on the table. “They’re more . . . messages really,” she said. “We got another this morning.”

“You did?” Falcone was clearly unaware of this latest missive and displeased by that fact.

“It arrived just before I left for this meeting,” she answered with a sudden burst of temper. “I can’t be held responsible for keeping everyone informed about every damned thing. This is the same as the others. An untraceable email from a fake address. Nothing the computer people can work with.”

She placed the sheet of paper on the table in front of them, not looking at the words. It was a standard office printout.

“That’s it?” Costa asked. “That’s your case?”

“No!” It was Rosa Prabakaran, angry. “That’s not it. We have messages just like this one detailing a string of vicious attacks on black prostitutes, throughout the city, covering a period of almost four months. Where and when and how. We’ve tracked down some of the victims. The poor women are so terrified they won’t tell us a thing. And now”—she nodded back down the alley, towards the studio—“we know why. Those women are the ones who survived.”

“Let me get this straight,” Peroni cut in. “You have a string of sexual attacks? And not one of these women will sign a witness statement?”

“I had one,” Rosa answered. “She described everything. The men. Four of them. What they did.” She paused. “They took turns. The point . . .” She stopped again, embarrassed. “They wanted to see her in the throes of an orgasm. Not faked, the way hookers do. The real thing.”

Costa thought about the photographs they had found in the studio: shots of women in the throes of either agony or ecstasy.

“And if they didn’t get what they wanted?” he asked quietly.

“Then things turned violent. Very violent. These people weren’t paying for sex. Not in the way we know it. They wanted to see something on the faces of these women. They wanted to know they put it there, and capture the moment somehow.” She paused. This was difficult. “The one woman who would talk to us said the men had a camera. That they filmed everything. Her cries most of all. When they felt she was faking . . . they beat her.”

“All hookers fake it,” Peroni pointed out with vehemence. “What kind of lunatics would do something like that? What do they expect?”

Costa looked at his friend. Peroni had spent years in vice. In that time, he must have seen some dreadful cases. The expression of shock and distaste on his battered face now told Costa he’d never heard of anything quite like this.

“Obviously they don’t know hookers,” Costa suggested.

“They’ve known plenty of late,” Rosa continued. “These are sick bastards. Clever bastards too. I thought I had that girl. Two days later, she walked out of the hospital and vanished. Maybe back home with money. Maybe dead. There’s no way of telling.”

Falcone couldn’t take his eyes off Susanna Placidi. Costa knew why. A witness in a case like that should never have been allowed to flee, whatever the circumstances.

“Who do you think the messages are from?” Teresa asked.

The two female officers glanced at each other. The lawyer, Grimaldi, was silent, staring at the photos on the screen.

“We don’t know,” Placidi admitted. “Probably someone we don’t know about. Someone on the periphery who thinks it’s gone too far. Or Tomassoni . . .”

“It sounds like a woman, don’t you think?” Teresa asked. “Listen to the words: ‘Placidi, you cow!’ I’ve been called a bitch a million times by some jerk male. But never a cow. They don’t talk to you like that.”

“A woman, then!” Placidi screamed back. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

Teresa leaned over, impatient, close to anger. “I said it
sounds
like a woman. Perhaps it’s meant to. In which case they are clearly overestimating our abilities somewhat. What does it matter? We’ve got DNA. We’ve got forensic coming out of our ears from that mucky room of theirs. Just go and arrest them and leave the rest to me.”

Falcone sat back, folded his arms, and waited for Placidi to respond. Grimaldi had adopted precisely the same position.

“We’ve tried to arrest them,” the woman inspector admitted. “We’ve been to the lawyers more than once. The trouble is . . .” She scattered the emails over the table. “This is all we have. The women won’t talk. We can’t . . . The evidence we have is all so vague.”

Her miserable eyes fell to the table again.

Teresa turned her attention to Falcone. “Leo, give me an hour with these creeps and a bag of cotton swabs and I’ll put them in a cell before bedtime. There’s a bunch of dead bodies here and they’re itching to talk.”

He looked at her, then shook his bald, aquiline head.

“Why not?” asked Peroni.