The Seventh Sacrament (27 page)

“No.”

She wished he wouldn’t treat her like an idiot, just because she hadn’t spent a joyous afternoon inside the pages of
Lifestyles of Rich and Famous Worms
lately.

“Why not?”

“Where’s the food? Where’s the water? They need water. Without it…”

That ruled out one way Toni LaMarca could have got a slimy white flatworm down his throat.

“How about a slaughterhouse?” she suggested. “That’s full of meat. Water, too. The worms could just come out of the drains at night for a munch on the leftovers.”

Silvio sniffed. “That was a very clean slaughterhouse,” he said. “I took a good look at those drains. They were putting all the right chemicals down them. I doubt anything could live if it got that much disinfectant poured on its head every night. I know I couldn’t.”

She stared at Cristiano, hoping.

“If the drains are disinfected properly,” he said, “you wouldn’t get planarians. Even they have limits.”

And so have I,
Teresa thought.

THE PREVIOUS EVENING,
whiling away the hours in the Questura intelligence office, she’d stolen a good look at the papers on LaMarca’s disappearance. It had taken a while to track down the boyfriend who’d been kidnapped by Giorgio Bramante as bait. A while, too, to persuade him to talk. When he did, he told them something interesting. Toni LaMarca had been taken two nights before his body turned up at Santa Maria dell’Assunta, not one night before, as they’d first thought. It was clear from the autopsy that he’d died soon after he was abducted, too, in the slaughterhouse, she supposed. The church had been visited by the woman caretaker the day before she found the body. She’d seen nothing unusual. That meant Bramante had stored LaMarca’s corpse somewhere—out of some unforeseen necessity?—before moving it to the final location. Then, some thirty-six hours after the killing, he’d left the clue to what he had done in Sacro Cuore.

There was dirt under LaMarca’s toenails, traces of earth on his body that forensic were looking at. But the kind of information she’d get from those sources meant something only with corroboration. Dirt wasn’t unique like DNA. If they had a suspect location, they could look for a match. But without a starting point, everything they had was like that stupid white worm. Information that lacked context, data floating on the wind with nothing concrete to make it useful. It could take weeks to track down, if ever.

“So where?” she wondered aloud.

Cristiano shrugged. “Like I told you. Near water. Near a drain maybe. Or a culvert. Underground, overground. You choose.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she grunted. “You can take your pet home. Provided…”—she prodded the worm nerd in the chest—“…you promise to name him Silvio.”

The biologist hesitated and risked a glance at his friend.

“You mean you don’t want me to work on him?” he asked. “Run a few tests? They’re fatal, naturally, but I don’t think the animal liberation people will start squealing. I mean, it’s not like he’s an endangered species.”

Her mind was already elsewhere. She wanted him out of there.

“Worm autopsies are not my field, Cristiano. Talk to Silvio about it.”

“But…”

“But nothing.”

“Tell her,” Silvio ordered his pal.

“Tell me what?”

“It’s the sex thing again,” Cristiano said. “You didn’t hear me out.”

She looked at her watch. “Thirty seconds.”

“It’s a question of allopatry or sympatry, whether they’re sexual or parthenogens…”

“I will, I swear, hit someone soon. Get to the point.”

“OK. Some populations of planarians overlap and mate with each other. Some stay apart and reproduce parthenogenetically. They develop female cells without the need for fertilisation. Some…kind of do a little of both.”

“I
will
…”

“In Rome we have sexual types and parthenogens, and they’re allopatric. Which means they live in geographically diverse communities and are basically slightly different versions of the same organism. It’s a big deal. We have underground waterways that have been untouched, sometimes unconnected, for two thousand years. What that means is that over the centuries we’ve come to have hundreds of communities of planarians and no two are exactly the same. There’s a team that’s been logging them for over a decade at La Sapienza along with a couple of other universities too. I’m amazed you never heard of it.”

“I never kept up on worms,” Teresa muttered. “One more personal failing. So what you’re saying is that if you dissect his love tackle under a microscope, you can tell me where he came from? Which waterway?”

“Better than that. If he’s in the database, I can tell you even whereabouts. Whether it’s the head of the Cloaca Maxima or the outlet. They’re that distinct.”

She picked up the specimen dish and peered at the creature wriggling inside it.

“I’d like to say this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” she murmured. “But it won’t. Silvio—that’s you, not the worm—kindly find this gentleman a white coat, a microscope, a desk, and anything else he needs. We have human beings who require our attention.”

J
UDITH TURNHOUSE DIDN’T HAVE THE WORDS
ACADEMIC
Bitch
stencilled in gold on a sign on her desk. As far as Peroni was concerned, she didn’t need them. Costa watched the body language as he and his partner entered the woman’s office in the outpost of La Sapienza’s archaeology department and felt his heart sink. It was hate at first sight. Tall, excruciatingly thin, with an angular face framed by lifeless brown hair, Judith Turnhouse sat stiff and serious behind a desk where everything—computer, files, papers, keyboard—had been tidied into a neat, symmetrical pattern.

Before Costa could even finish his introduction, she took one look at their cards and said, “Make it quick. I’m busy.”

Peroni breathed a deep sigh and picked up a small stone statue on her desk.

“What’s the hurry?” he said. “Does this stuff go bad or something?”

The woman removed the object from his hands and placed it back where it belonged.

“This is our year-end. I’ve a budget to approve and an annual report to write. You can’t do research without a proper administrative structure to back it up. We tried that once before. It was a disaster.”

Costa glanced at his partner and, uninvited, the two men took a couple of seats opposite the desk. Judith Turnhouse just watched, her sharp pale grey eyes noting every movement.

“Giorgio Bramante’s disaster?” Costa asked.

“I might have guessed. In case you hadn’t noticed, Officer, Giorgio doesn’t work here anymore. They gave me his chair a few years ago. It’s a big job. Especially if you do it properly.”

“I thought Giorgio was a star.” Peroni looked puzzled. “That’s what everyone tells us.”

“Giorgio was an excellent archaeologist. He was my professor. I learnt a lot from him. But he couldn’t handle admin. He couldn’t handle people either. For him, it was all about the research, and nothing about people.”

“Even a painter needs someone to pay for his paint,” Costa suggested.

She nodded, thawing a little. “If you want to put it like that. Giorgio thought everything revolved around the pursuit of some holy grail called academic truth. The result? We discovered one of the greatest undiscovered archaeological treasures in Rome. Now it looks like a bomb site. It’s tragic.”

More tragic for Judith Turnhouse, it seemed to Costa, than the loss of one young boy.

“You were in on the secret?” Peroni asked.

“Of course. You can’t work a site of that size on your own. Giorgio took five of his best postgrad students into his confidence and told us what was going on. We laboured down there for a year. Another three months and we could have been in a position to tell people what we had.”

“Which was?” Costa asked.

“The largest and most important mithraeum anyone’s ever found in Rome. Probably the best source of information we were ever going to have on the Mithraic cult.”

“And now it’s all gone.”

“No,” she snapped. “It’s all in little pieces. In fifty years’ time, perhaps, when everyone’s forgotten about Giorgio’s mess, maybe they’ll come up with the budget to try to put it all back together. Maybe. Not that it will matter to me by then. Just because what I work with is timeless doesn’t mean I’m that way myself.”

Peroni took out a pad. “The other students. We’d like their names.”

She thought about arguing for a moment, then reeled off what he wanted. One now worked in Oxford, two in the States. The last was a professor in Palermo. She hadn’t seen any of them in years.

“Is that it?” she demanded.

“We’re trying to find out where Giorgio might be now,” Costa replied. “We’re trying to understand what happened back then. Whether that can help us today.”

“I don’t—”

“We’re trying, Professor Turnhouse,” Peroni interjected, “to understand what happened to Alessio, too. Doesn’t that make you curious in the slightest?”

She hesitated, gave Peroni a dark look, then said, “If you really want my help, you can cut out that kind of bullshit. I didn’t have anything to do with Alessio getting lost. I haven’t the faintest idea what happened to him. You’re the police, aren’t you? Isn’t that your job?”

Costa slid a hand across to Peroni’s arm and stopped the big man reacting.

“Agreed,” he said evenly. “Which is why we’re here, Professor Turnhouse. What was Giorgio like back then?”

She said something curt and monosyllabic under her breath, then stared deliberately at her watch.

“Also,” Costa persisted, “what’s he like now? Changed or what?”

She stopped looking at her wrist and gazed straight into his face. Judith Turnhouse wasn’t a woman who felt frightened of anything, he realised. She was a senior academic, an important cog in an important wheel, at least inside her own head. She wasn’t much interested in anything else.

“Now?” she repeated icily.

“Giorgio Bramante came here. A week ago. He had an argument with someone. So loud even the Carabinieri outside heard it. Then he stormed off. My guess is he had that argument with you.”

She toyed with the pen on the desk. “Really?”

“You know,” Costa continued, “on that basis alone I could go to a magistrate. Giorgio is a convicted killer who’s picked up his old bad habits. He’s a threat to the community. I could ask for papers that would let me go through everything here. Your computers. Your files. Every last site you’re working on inside that hill…”

“We’re working on nothing,” she grumbled. “Everything is elsewhere these days.”

Peroni smiled and folded his very large arms over his chest. “We could sit here looking at you for so long, that year-end report will be about next year. If you’re lucky.”

Her pale, anxious face was taut with some inner, constrained fury.

“Or,” Costa suggested, “we could just have a friendly chat, a look around that site, and be out of here by noon. It’s up to you.”

Judith Turnhouse picked up the phone, then said, in an accent still marked by her native American, “Chiara? Cancel all my appointments.” She glared at them. “Persuasive pair, aren’t you?”

“Rumour has it,” Peroni concurred.

“You.” She pointed at Costa. “The polite one. Start taking notes. I’ll tell you everything I know about dear, sweet Giorgio, past and present.”

She rose and went to a floor-length cupboard by the window. From it, she removed a bright orange jumpsuit, stepping into it in an easy, familiar fashion.

“After that,” Judith Turnhouse added, “I’ll show you what was once a miracle.”

B
Y SEVEN O’CLOCK THEY STILL HAD ONLY THE ONE STUDENT,
the one suspect: Ludo Torchia. The others would, Falcone suspected, be found soon. They weren’t the kind to stay invisible for long. They dabbled in drugs and took a close, almost unhealthy, interest in Giorgio Bramante’s theories about Mithraism, Ludo Torchia most of all. But nothing Falcone had seen made him suspect these six were capable of cooking up the conspiracy the media were looking for.