Death in a Strange Country (28 page)

‘They certainly didn’t
leave any doubt, did they?’ Brunetti asked.

‘There’s no sign that she
was forced to take the injection.’

‘Those bruises?’ Brunetti
asked.

‘She fell.’

‘So it looks like she did
it?’

‘Yes.’ Neither of them
spoke for a while, then Ambrogiani asked, ‘Are you going to come out here?’

‘I’ve been told not to
bother the Americans.’

‘Who told you?’

‘The Vice-Questore here
in Venice.’

‘What are you going to
do?’

‘I’ll wait a few days, a
week, then I’d like to come out there and speak to you. Do your men have
contact with the Americans?’

‘Not much. We each keep
to ourselves. But I’ll see what I can find out about her.’
     
                     

‘Did any Italians work
with them?’

‘I don’t think so. Why?’

‘I’m not sure. But both
of them, especially Foster, had to travel for his job, going back and forth to
places like Egypt.’

‘Drugs?’ Ambrogiani
asked.

‘Could be. Or it could be
something else.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Drugs don’t
feel right, somehow.’

‘What does feel right?’

‘I don’t know.’ He looked
up and saw Vianello at the door to his office. ‘Look, Maggiore, I’ve got
someone here now. I’ll call you in a few days. We can decide then when I can go
out there.’

‘All right. I’ll see what
I can find out here.’

Brunetti hung up and
waved Vianello into the office. ‘Anything on Ruffolo?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. Those people
who live below his girlfriend said he was there last week. They saw him a few
times on the steps, but they haven’t seen him for three or four days. Do you
want me to speak to her, sir?’

‘Yes, maybe you’d better.
Tell her that it’s different from the other times. Viscardi has been assaulted,
so that changes everything, especially for her if she’s hiding him or knows
where he is.’

‘You think it will work?’

‘On Ivana?’ Brunetti
asked sarcastically.

‘Well, no, I suppose it won’t,’
Vianello agreed. ‘But I’ll try it anyway. Besides, I’d rather talk to her than
to the mother. At least I can understand what she says, even though every word
of it is a lie.’

When Vianello had left to
go and try to interview Ivana, Brunetti went back to the window, but after a
few minutes he found that unsatisfactory and went to sit at his desk. Ignoring
the files that had been placed there during the morning, he sat and considered
the various possibilities. The first one, that it had been an overdose, he
dismissed out of hand. Suicide, too, was impossible. In the past, he had seen
distraught lovers who saw no possibility of a future life without the other
person, but she was not one of them. Those two possibilities excluded, the only
one that remained was murder.

To accomplish it,
however, would have taken some planning, for he ruled out luck in these things.
There were those bruises - not for a second did he believe in a fall - someone
could have held her while she was given the injection. The autopsy showed that
she had been drinking; how much did a person have to drink to be so deeply
asleep as not to feel a needle or to be so fuddled as not to be able to resist
it? More importantly, who would she have drunk with, who would she have felt so
comfortable with? Not a lover; hers had just been killed. A friend, then, and
who were the friends of Americans abroad? Who did they trust if not other
Americans? And all of that pointed back to the base and her job, for Brunetti
was certain that the answer, whatever it was, lay there.

* *
* *

17

Three days passed during which Brunetti did almost
nothing. At the Questura, he went through the motions of his job: looking at
papers, signing them, filling out a staffing projection for the next year
without giving a thought to the fact that Patta was supposed to do it. At home,
he talked to Paola and the children, who were all too busy with the start of
the new school year to realize how inattentive he was. Even the search for
Ruffolo didn’t interest him much at all, certain as he was that someone so
foolish and rash was sure soon to make a mistake that would put him in the
hands of the police yet again.

He did not call
Ambrogiani, and in his meetings with Patta, he made no mention of the murders,
one that had so quickly been forgotten by the Press, and one that had never
been called a murder, or of the base in Vicenza. So frequently as to be almost
obsessive, he played over scenes with the young doctor, caught flashes of her
in his memory: stepping up out of the boat and giving him her hand; arms braced
against the sink in the morgue, body racked by the spasms of her shock; smiling
when she told him that, in six months, she would begin her life.

It was the nature of
police work that he never knew the victims whose deaths he investigated. Much
as he came to know them intimately, to know about them in work, in bed, and in
death, he had never known any of them in this life, and so he felt a special
link to Doctor Peters and, because of that link, a special responsibility to
find her murderer.

On Thursday morning, he
checked with Vianello and Rossi when he got to the Questura, but there had
still been no sign of Ruffolo. Viscardi had gone back to Milan, after giving
written descriptions of the two men, one very tall and one with a beard, to
both the insurance company and the police. It appeared that they had forced
their way into the
palazzo
, for the locks on the side door had been
picked, the padlock that held a metal grating in place filed through. Though
Brunetti had not spoken to Viscardi, his talks with Vianello and Fosco had been
enough to persuade him that there had been no robbery, well, not a robbery of
anything other than the insurance company’s money.

A little after ten, one
of the secretaries from downstairs brought the mail around to the offices on
the top floor and placed a few letters and a magazine-sized manila envelope on
his desk.

The letters were the
usual things: invitations to conferences, attempts to sell him special life
insurance, responses to questions he had sent to various police departments in
other parts of the country. After he read them, he picked up the envelope and
examined it. A narrow band of stamps ran across the top of the envelope; there
must have been twenty of them. All the same, they carried a small American flag
and were marked with the denomination of twenty-nine cents. The envelope was
addressed to him, by his name, but the only address was ‘Questura, Venice,
Italy’. He could think of no one in America who would be writing to him. There
was no return address.

He tore the envelope
open, reached in, and pulled out a magazine. He glanced at the cover and
recognized the medical review Doctor Peters had pulled from his hands when she
found him reading it in her office. He leafed through it, paused for a moment
at those grotesque photos, then continued through the magazine. Towards the
end, he found three sheets of paper, obviously a Xerox copy of some other
original, slipped between the pages of the magazine. He took them out and placed
them on his desk.

At the top, he read ‘Medical
Report’ and then, below it, saw the boxes meant to hold information about the
name, age, and rank of the patient. This one carried the name of Daniel Kayman,
whose year of birth was given as 1984. There followed three pages of
information about his medical history, starting with measles in 1989, a series
of bloody noses in the winter of 1990, a broken finger in 1991, and, on the
last two pages, a series of visits, starting two months ago, for a skin rash on
his left arm. As Brunetti read, he watched the rash grow larger, deeper, and
more confusing to the three doctors who had attempted to deal with it.

On 8 July, the boy had
been seen for the first time by Doctor Peters. Her neat, slanted handwriting
said that the rash was ‘of unknown origin’ but had broken out after the boy got
home from a picnic with his parents. It covered the underside of his arm from
wrist to elbow, was dark purple, but did not itch. The prescribed treatment was
a medicated skin cream.

Three days later, the boy
was back, the rash worse. It was now oozing a yellow liquid and had grown
painful, and the boy was running a high fever. Doctor Peters suggested a
consultation with a dermatologist at the local Vicenza hospital, but the
parents refused to let the child see an Italian doctor. She prescribed a new
cream, this one with cortisone, and an antibiotic to bring the fever down.

After only two days, the
boy was brought back to the hospital and seen by a different doctor, Girrard,
who noted in the record that the boy was in considerable pain. The rash now
seemed to be a burn and had moved up his arm, spreading towards his shoulder.
His hand was swollen and painful. The fever was unchanged.

A Doctor Grancheck,
apparently a dermatologist, had looked at the boy and suggested he be
immediately transferred to the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

The day after this visit,
the boy was sent to Germany on a medical evacuation flights Nothing else was
written in the body of the report, but Doctor Peters’ neat script had pencilled
a single notation in the margin, next to the remark that the boy’s rash now
appeared to be a burn. It read ‘PCB’ and carried after it
‘FPJ,
March.’

He checked the date, but
he knew what it would be even before he looked at it.
Family Practice
Journal,
the March issue. He opened the magazine and began to read. He
noticed that the editorial board was almost all men, that men had written most
of the articles, and that the articles listed in the Table of Contents dealt
with everything from the article about feet that had so horrified him to one
that dealt with the increase in the incidence of tuberculosis as a result of
the AIDS epidemic. There was even an article about the transmission of
parasites from domestic pets to children.

Seeing no help in the
Table of Contents, he began to read from the first page, including all the ads
and the letters to the editors. It was on page 62, a brief reference to a case
that had been reported in Newark, New Jersey, of a young child, a girl, who had
been playing in an empty car park and had stepped into what she thought was a
puddle of oil leaked from an abandoned car. The liquid had spilled over the top
of her shoe and soaked through her sock. The next day, she developed a rash on
the foot, which soon changed into something that had every appearance of a burn
and which gradually spread up her leg to her knee. The child had a high fever.
All treatment proved futile until a public health official went to the car park
and took a sample of the liquid, which proved to be heavy in PCBs, which had
leaked there from barrels of toxic waste dumped there. Though the burns
eventually healed, the child’s doctors were fearful for her future because of
the neurological and genetic damage that had often been noted in animal
experimentation with substances containing PCBs.

He set the magazine aside
and went back to the medical record, reading it through a second time. The
symptoms were identical, though no mention was made of where or how the child
had made the original contact with the substance that must have produced the
rash. ‘While on a picnic with his family,’ was the only thing the record said.
Nor did the record carry any report of the treatment given to the child in
Germany.

He picked up the envelope
and examined it. The stamps were cancelled by a circular imprint that bore,
within it, the words ‘Army Postal System’ and Saturday’s date. So, sometime on
Friday or Saturday, she had put this in the mail for him, then tried to call
him. It hadn’t been
‘Basta’
or
‘Pasta’,
but
‘Posta’,
to
alert him to its arrival in the mail. What had happened to warn her? To make
her send these papers off to him?

He remembered something
Butterworth had said about Foster; it was his job to see that used X-rays were
taken away from the hospital. He had said something about other objects and
substances, but he had said nothing about what they were or where they were
dumped. Surely, the Americans would have to know.